The Surveillance State: Some Books and Other Media, Precursors, Re-Taking Stock

There's a textbook titled Surveillance and Democracy, edited by Haggerty and Samatas. It came out in 2010 and I got it via Berkeley's wonderfully extensive "Link Plus" system. Even though it was only about 220 pages, much of it was too theoretical for what I was looking for, but I did "enjoy" - if that's the word - a chapter by Ben Hayes: "'Full Spectrum Dominance' As European Union Security Policy: On the Trail of the NeoConOpticon.'" I think at the time I was interested in stories about how the NeoCons (or the NeoCon Mind At Large, mostly in media and banking and the Pentagon; Obama played Occupy for his own ends) wanted to isolate and contain or crush Occupy, but this all seems so long ago now. I had no idea that Constitutional Law professor Obama would continue in the Cheney mode. Humility is endless, someone once said...Suffice to say that the next edition of this text - read in Political Science classes? - could easily jump the record by going from 270 pages to 2700 pages.

                                     Marshall McLuhan seems to have foreseen our 
                                     Patriot Act/Snowden Era

In light of what's been revealed and will continue to pour out in this, the Snowden Era, as some of us now call this Epoch (9/11 is so...like...yesterday, man), I'd like to point out that it's still not too late to get filled-in by what Dana Priest and William Arkin of the Washington Post accomplished in their stellar research and collating and just overall journalist mega-due diligence in Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State. Dig how Bush/Cheney privatized surveillance on such a massive scale that Priest and Arkin found nondescript snoop centers in industrial parks all over Unistat. And I mean all over. And they're not government agencies! It's privatized now. It pays better than the low-mid-level gummint spook gig, so why not defect to the private sector, get paid more, and have absolutely zero ideas about democratic principles? No more of that nagging, cognitive-dissonance-y pangs that you may not be serving the people of Unistat, but only the servicing the needs of the 1%.

Of course, we still have  ye olde fashioned spooks, like the alphabet soup of NSA/CIA/FBI, et.al...that we're paying with out tax dollars to listen in on...well, just about everything, really.

Here's Richard Rhodes's review of Priest and Arkin. A passage:

“A culture of fear,” write journalists Dana Priest and William Arkin, “had created a culture of spending to control it, which, in turn, had led to a belief that the government had to be able to stop every single plot before it took place, regardless of whether it involved one network of twenty terrorists or one single deranged person.” The resulting “security spending spree,” they report, “exceeded $2 trillion.”

But let's not worry too much. The number of people who have Top Secret Security Clearance is only at least 854,000. 

A few years ago a film about life in East Germany under the Stasi came out: The Lives of Others. The Hollywood elite voters gave it the Oscar for Best Foreign Movie of 2006. Way back in 2006! I remember seeing the film and wondering how close we in Unistat were to this situation, and thinking: probably closer than most Unistatians would want to know. At the same time, another part of my brain told me, Stop being such a paranoiac...
Here's the trailer.

James Bamford's Puzzle Palace came out in 1982. Around 1995 I bought a battered paperback copy at a used bookstore and read it all, riveted. The few people I knew who were fascinated by this stuff agreed: how come the CIA are the rock star spooks, while you mention "the NSA" and the common response is, "Who?" Bamford deserves credit for doing the first extended book-job on Snowden's former employer.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the last book I read about the NSA - how evil they could be - before the Snowden stuff hit. It was Dan Brown's Digital Fortress. Yes, I admit it. I had gone through a point where I felt like I had to read DaVinci Code, if only to see what all the fuss was about. When that book sold 10 million (or however many), his previous potboilers got popular again. So I read those too. Here's someone from Democratic Underground, writing this past Bloomsday, on how oddly prescient the novel now seems. I admit I hadn't thought much about the NSA (except they were probably doing something nefarious with regards to the 4th Amendment in addition to maybe getting a line or three on possible terrorists) when I read Brown's book. 

A question after all these books and films and now the Snowden Era: what are we supposed to do this all this information that They have about us? And what do They plan to do with their information about us? And a third question, if I may: must we replay something like East Germany, or is there some saner way out of this madness? What part of the 4th Amendment don't They get? (I know, I know: they get it all, but they're just obeying orders; it's nothing personal, yadda blah yadda blah meh meh meh.) 

It's far too easy for paranoids like me to see a President Palin and local cops having ultra-fast digital info, based on my license plate whizzing by, that I'm an "America-Hater" and it's best for True Americans to get rid of people like me...who read Chomsky, have been involved with Occupy, support the ACLU, and are clearly guilty via documentation of hundreds of thousands of Thought Crimes...

Going Back
In 1967, when Allen Ginsberg visited Ezra Pound in Rapallo, they talked about the craziness of Vietnam and how the Unistat government seemed to see the "peaceniks" as troublemakers. And they agreed: Make everything open. End the State secrets game. The artist Bobby Campbell has remarked on Timothy Leary's very similar vision, which emanates from that era. (For Ginsberg/Pound: see What Thou Lovest Well Remains, pp.36-37)

Poets as Distant Early Warning signalers...

In Only Apparently Real, a collection of interviews with Philip K. Dick with Paul Williams, the ever-present topic of PKD paranoia comes up, and PKD has ideas about the end of privacy...in 1974! (see pp.154-164)

In Thomas Pynchon's novel Inherent Vice, in 1970 the ARPANET is suspected as a future Panopticon. (see pp.364-366)

In his book of poetry, Coming To Jakarta: A Poem About Terror, Canadian-raised and later Berkeley English Professor and chronicler and theorist of "Deep Politics," Peter Dale Scott, recalls that, in the 1930s, when his father was away on conferences about economic democracy or world peace, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police tapped their phone. (see p.30)

In Laurel Canyon, a history of late 1960s/early 1970s rock and folk musicians who lived in that area of LA, information about the LA County Sheriffs harassing hippies, wiretapping, surveillance. Sure, the Manson stuff could bring that on, but...

Marshall McLuhan, dying sometime in the early hours of the last day of 1980, had been wondering where the new tribalized electronic human was going, with the evident omnipresence of electronic and digital technologies, which were extensions of our own nervous systems and which changed us in ways we could not know about unless we constantly investigated and "probed" how they were working in feedback loops with our own nervous systems. Add synergetically to that: the-non-wired environment, and our conscious sensibilities. In his Catholic, quasi-anachist mind, he worried about the elimination of  what he thought of as "natural law," mostly in the Catholic Church, Aquinas-on sense. The trouble with all this new tech: it seemed to render ourselves evermore "discarnate." He thought this discarnate-ness would lead to a new religious age, which could be an occult-like thing. It might be a diabolical or destructive age that was upon us. McLuhan biographer Philip Marchand takes it from here:

"There was yet another twist to the phenomenon of discarnate man, as McLuhan saw it. In an age when people were translated into images and information, the chief human activity became surveillance and espionage (recall: McLuhan died in 1980!- OG). Everything from spy satellites to Nielsen ratings to marketing surveys to credit bureau investigations was part of this intelligence-gathering, man-hunting syndrome. So pervasive was the syndrome that discarnate man worried whether he existed as nothing more than an entry in a databank somewhere." (see Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger, p.250)

Do the (very) few OG readers suspect the OG could go on and on with these classic "counterculture" figures and their musings on the "Surv State" (as poet Ed Sanders often writes it)? Aye. I could. I will. But to end this blahg, let me go WAY back:

Do not revile the king even in your 
          thoughts,
  or curse the rich in your bedroom,
because a bird of the air may carry
          your words,
  and a bird on the wing may report
         what you say.
-Ecclesiastes 10:20

PS: Bertold Brecht:

Some party hack decreed that the people
had lost the government's confidence
and could only regain it with redoubled effort.
If that is the case, would it not be be simpler,
If the government simply dissolved the people
And elected another?

• "The Solution" ["Die Lösung"] (c. 1953), as translated in Brecht on Brecht : An Improvisation (1967) by George Tabori, p. 17

Digital Mindfulness and the Availability Heuristic

What the eff am I trying to get at? For one thing, I'm trying to remind myself...

Ezra Pound said that poetry was "news that STAYS news." And his friend William Carlos Williams said:

It is difficult
to get news from poems
But men and women die every day
for lack
Of what is found there

So, in a way, I'm talking about...poetry? (Huh?)

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky labeled one of our cognitive biases in making decisions about what to pay attention to or how we make decisions under uncertainty "the availability heuristic." Heuristics are methods of discovering or learning, by rules that are often not consciously known all that well. The availability heuristic has to do with how many instances you can come up with and how easily you come up with them. One study asked people about their own assertiveness. You think you're "assertive" to some degree. Okay, now you are asked to list six instances of your own assertiveness.

                                            Amos Tversky, who would have shared 
                                            the Nobel with Kahneman, if Amos
                                            hadn't died at 59

You may have done some thinking of your own assertiveness just now. But what if you were asked to list 12 instances of assertiveness on your part? Many people have a tough time with this. It was found that the difficulties of listing 12 made these people less likely to say they were an "assertive" person than the people who were only asked to list six. The people who listed six were more likely to call themselves "assertive." Why? Because of the relative ease of recall. The fluency of memory retrieval of only six items bested the difficulty of listing 12 items. When you're charged with recalling 12 instances in which you were assertive it's taxing, and you begin to assert that maybe you're not all that assertive. The examples weren't easily available - not 12! - and so your impression of some "fact" about "reality" has been altered. Weird...

We are wired with so much olde cognitive machinery that once served us well...and the most astonishing fact, and (maybe) the most amazing thing we've learned in psychology in the last 40 years is how those old "programs" are there, working marvelously, and yet they're unconscious...

Kahneman was always testing his own intuitive sense of what was likely, statistically. He writes in his magnum opus Thinking, Fast and Slow that "I recently came to doubt my long-held impression that adultery is more common among politicians than among physicians or lawyers. I had even come up with explanations for that 'fact,' including the aphrodisiac effect of power and the temptations of life away from home. I eventually realized that the transgressions among politicians are much more likely to be reported than the transgressions of lawyers or doctors. My intuitive impressions could be due entirely to journalists' choice of topics and to my reliance on the availability heuristic." (pp.7-8)

Call this a conspiracy theory, but the corporate media like to make money. They will report what they think we want to hear/read/think about. When I say "they" I largely mean the Editorial Mind At Large in the corporate media. Watch the local ABC/CBS/NBC/FOX "news." Keep a stopwatch and log all the minutes in one hour devoted to 1.) commercials, and for what sorts of products; 2.) sports; 3.) weather; 4.) celebrity scandals and marriages; 5.) "happy" talk among the broadcasters themselves, and 6.) some sort of random violence or robbery that occurred in the greater metropolitan area. You'll find it's almost the entire show, but you'll learn more if you try this for yourself for five to 10 hour-long "news" broadcasts.

If national or world events of significance are covered, they seem to receive a very superficial treatment and they NEVER deliver multiple viewpoints within a larger context of conflict. Why? Is it a conspiracy? I don't think so. I think they think they'll lose viewers (and revenue) if they make the news too pertinent, with too much depth, and with any sort of detail that would cause the sponsors to stop buying airtime.

But somehow, whether we try to avoid it or not, we still know who Paris Hilton is. We still find we've heard about that "senseless" shooting in the bad part of town. We know how beautiful the weather girl is on channel 7. We've heard that so-and-so has come out gay. That celebrity X has a drug problem, politician Y said something inflammatory and stupid, and what teams look to be in the Super Bowl or World Series or World Cup final. It's how we're wired. Read Robert Sapolsky on the sociality of baboons. Primates are like that. The old joke about the true intellectual? The one who hears the Overture to William Tell and never once thinks of the Lone Ranger? That person may be an intellectual, but he may also be autistic. It's quite normal to know what's going on in the larger tribe, no matter how petty the story. Intellectuals only pretend  they don't know who Kim Kardashian is. But let's not forget what our own values are.

I write this a day and a half after a plane crashed at San Francisco's main airport, and yes, it was really scary to think of myself or a loved one on that plane - terrorism seemed to get ruled out fairly quickly - but at the risk of sounding heartless, why was this covered so extensively? Freak stuff like that happens;  it really doesn't seem as pressing as about 85 other issues I could think of. You're far, far, far more likely to die in an accident at home or driving to the supermarket than when you take a flight. (There's another cognitive bias at work there, but then I run the risk of spending my digression too early in the blog.)

But I'm talking about my own values. I think the NSA case and the way some in the media have treated Snowden deserves the same wall-to-wall coverage a jet crash did.

                                                    Thomas Frank, co-founder of 
                                                    "The Baffler"

That's the idea behind this piece from R.J. Eskow. (I highly recommend it.) And I think he makes a compelling point. Thomas Frank's What's The Matter With Kansas? very persuasively (speaking for myself) made the point that the Republican Party influenced voters in that state to vote against their own interests because of the relentless playing off of deeply conservative social values in the electorate, while all those "social" conservatives being elected helped implement economic ideas that hurt the people who elected them. It's easier for most voters to think about stopping abortion than it is to understand international trade agreements that will ultimately send their job overseas.

Eskow here cites the unbelievably high approval of Obama among "liberals" even though Obama's policies look to the Right of Nixon's. And why? Because of same-sex marriage? That Democrats still think women should have access to reproductive rights? Eskow writes, "Democrats campaigned on populist themes in 2012, but as soon as the election was over the party's leaders returned to what Frank described in 2004 as 'endless concessions on economic issues, on welfare, NAFTA, social security, labor law, privatization, deregulation, and the rest of it.'" Eskow turns Thomas Frank's query to liberals and asks, "What's the matter with Liberal Land?" Indeed...

Hillary Clinton's economic policies are the same as Obama's, basically. A shorter way to put this is: we're totally fucked unless we can come up with someone who's truly an economic progressive. (Would Elizabeth Warren stand a chance? I admit I'm in love with her. There. I've said it, with my blog hanging out in front for everyone to see.)

Meanwhile, at least 20 million working-age adults in Unistat are unemployed or under-employed under Obama's "recovery." Why? Because fairly affluent liberals can get so worked up over morality issues like reproductive rights and gay marriage? And his very very George W. Bush-ist policies are okay because he seems like a good liberal guy, and he has a "D" after his name? It does indeed look like the Democrats have taken a page from the Republicans and what they were able to do to, as Thomas Frank so ably explained, in Kansas.

I find it difficult to disagree with Eskow when he argues there ought be no artificial divide between economic and social issues. Fairness, equal opportunity and justice before the law, the social contract, and that "people continue to suffer from rising poverty and the death of the middle class, regardless of sexual orientation" all seem to all be quite pressing "values" to me.

So: unless we take periodic time outs to tune out the noise of popular culture and the infotainment that passes as "news" (Nuzak?), and meditate on what really matters to us - the "news that STAYS news" to us - we can easily get derailed.

Notice how the "Fiscal Cliff" was covered wall-to-wall a few months ago? It was a manufactured disaster show for the proles and other workers and consumer-types - whether they were from Kansas or San Francisco. We let it happen. I found it embarrassing. Politics as cliff-hangers and dramatic "show-downs" is just too fascistic to me; I agree with Walter Benjamin on this. But if you asked anyone about the Fiscal Cliff, they had something to say. It had been made quite available to the public. Meanwhile, the urban police are becoming more and more militarized, the NSA stuff finally made everyone pay attention to the Panopticon, no significant banking reform has occurred, Obama has a private "kill list" - apparently - and our prisons are becoming evermore privatized, with investors seeking assurance they will be kept at 90% capacity. And our financial system has become Vegas without the glitz. Isn't that enough to keep Pretty Actress's "baby bump" out of the news, for, say...two days? Please?

And yes, a new season of American Idol will soon be upon us. Or: we can turn off the TV and read poetry instead?

If, as an ancient tradition holds, there's some infinite spark of something divine that's unique to our individuality and all that, your deeply felt and thought values are worth meditating upon more often, aye? Are they deserved of articulation?

To note the normal bias of the availability heuristic, just keep testing yourself. I'm astonished at how often I'm guessing based upon a few things easily available to my memory. Am I gambling? Yes, and so are you. Why do I assume this or that is true? Do I have enough data? No matter how educated, you'll find yourself having made assumptions that were quite wrong, often due to the availability heuristic. (Kahneman and Tversky were amused by how wrong their "intuitions" were when they tested them, and they were truly Nobel-worthies.)

What if I look at the studies and stats? When I find out I was wrong, I learn something. I like how Kahneman, when writing about the media and issues and values and the availability heuristic, says that when Michael Jackson died you couldn't find any other issue covered in the news for a week, when less exciting but more impacting issues such as declining educational standards or over-investment of medical resources in the last year of life were surely worthy of public discussion...then he admits he used those two examples because they were the ones available to his mind at the time, and that "equally important issues that are less available didn't come to mind." He noted that medical resources and declining standards had been mentioned often.

What is it that isn't being mentioned but is very important to you? And how will this situation be ameliorated? Have I made the availability heuristic more available to you?

I end by asserting that the more famous and beloved a just-dead celebrity, the less available urgent information becomes, and so formulate an OG maxim:

A newly dead beloved celebrity is a national nuisance.

The Cello Suites, by Eric Siblin (2009)

If you only read one book on Bach the rest of the year, give this one a try. I missed it when it came out four years ago and serendipitously found it in a library search for something else, checked it out, and couldn't put it down.

Subtitled, "J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece," The Cello Suites carries off well what's famously difficult to do: write 300-plus pages about music, engagingly, for an intelligent lay audience. Check it out!

Siblin wrote rock concert reviews for the Montreal Gazette and happened to catch the cellist Laurence Lesser play Bach cello suites in 2000, 250 years after Bach's death. Siblin said he was listening to someone he'd never heard of play music he "knew nothing about." But he was tremendously moved by the music, did plenty of top-notch research and wrote this, his first book. I found it a refreshing middle ground between gushing Bach-worship writing and overly musicological and technical Bach writing, of which there is no end. Siblin incorporates Bach's history, the mysteries of his archives, scattered among his surviving sons, the original manuscript of the profound six Cello Suites in Bach's hand still missing and probably lost forever due to the ink he used; there's also a parallel history of Pablo Casals, who resurrected the Suites and lived 96 years, through exile from Franco's Spain. Prior to Casals's championing the Suites, they were thought of as overly-mathematical "exercises" for the cello, which, I confess, I still find difficult to understand.

I probably heard someone playing the Prelude from the G major Suite on radio KUSC in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, and thought it transcendent. I bought the music and read the bass clef as if it was written in treble and worked out, measure by measure, the fingerings for my Stratocaster. To this day I am stunned by every single measure in all 36 sections of the six Suites: given the economy of the cello, the voice-leading, melodic invention, thematic development, range of emotional register, and sheer bravura in even the slow movements - I make hundreds of mistakes; these pieces are deceptively difficult and yet a source of never-ending joy to even attempt to play! - seems like a miracle to me. Siblin, who plays guitar, writes about learning the G major Prelude with a tone of wonderment that hits home with me, and resonates with the experiences of my fellow rock guitarists who've tried to take on Bach.

Siblin does something I never tried: he takes cello lessons! For awhile. Hat's off to him for even trying!

What a delightful book; his love for the Cello Suites is infectious and the reader will probably feel a strong need to watch some of the Suites played live on You Tube, or even go out and buy one of the very many versions. I own Yo Yo Ma's version, but have listened to many from the library, and Rostropovich really floored me, I recall. Siblin tells us that Janos Starker probably holds the record with five different recordings of the Suites. Because the source was Anna Magdalena's copy and she didn't know bowing techniques or dynamics for the cello (or an arcane five-string cello-like thing that Bach may have written the Suites for, just one of many  Siblin relates), so, as Siblin writes, "The Cello Suites are a blank slate, a Rorschach test that allow cellists to put their own stamp on Bach and interpret the music as they see fit - or as they think Bach would have wanted his music played."

I felt a twinge of vindication when Siblin noted how, early in the Gigue from the 3rd Suite, there's a section that could've been written by Jimmy Page: "It is a bold, churning phrase that would not be out of place on a Gibson Les Paul wielded by, say, Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin. Bach's audience, two centuries before the electric guitar was invented, could not have heard the notes in remotely the same way. Historical faithfulness has its limits."

In this, Siblin makes the case that those who insist Bach only be played on "period" instruments to ensure "authenticity" have their place, but their viewpoint is by no means the "one true correct one." On the contrary, Siblin seems the ecumenical Bach listener, and enjoys (or notes with amusement) versions of Bach played on xylophone, or African salsa-style Bach. He mentions Procul Harem and Walter/Wendy Carlos....and Glenn Gould, who actually liked the Swingle Sisters' early 1960s 8-voice chorus, and who had two best-sellers, singing Bach (Bach's Greatest Hits and Going Baroque), swinging the 8th notes. Siblin tells us the Swingle Singers covered some of the cello Suites, which I really must go out of my way to hear now. Glenn Gould is quoted about the Swingles, "When I first heard them I felt like lying on the floor and kicking my heels, that's how good I thought they were."

In addition to Zeppelinesque metal, Siblin hears in Bach's solo Cello Suites: jazz-funk riffs, a country fiddler in a beer hall cranking out tunes, sudden explosions of seemingly impossible polyphony on a four-stringed instrument in which chords must be arpeggiated, sections of almost Philip Glass-ian proto-minimalism, and the doleful expression of deep sorrow of death, probably of his first wife Maria Barbara. There are wonderful stretches of phenomenological-impressionistic observations about the listening of music that I found impressive in Siblin's writing, amid the discussions of Bach's lifelong quest to find a better-paying job, Casals rising to become a world leader in the peace movement in the 20th century, and the peccadilloes of backwater German royalty, among other things.

The ecumenical Siblin: "When I hear violinist Lara St. John play the solo violin works to the rhythms of the tabla, I can't help but want to hear the Cello Suites in a similar setting. 'MarimBach,' Bach To Africa, and Jacques Loussier all turn my crank a great deal."

A formal device that Siblin used I found delightful: he writes six basic chapters, one for each Suite, and divides those chapters up by starting with an epigraph of quotes about each of the formal dance-movements Bach used, for example: Prelude, Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, Minuet, Gavotte, and Gigue. Examples: for the Sarabande section of Suite number four, we get a quote from James Talbot in 1690 regarding the character of a Sarabande: "Apt to move the Passions and to disturb the tranquility of the Mind." Jules Ecorcheville on a Courante: "The transformations of the courante might be compared to the frolicking of a fish who plunges, disappears, and returns again to the surface of the water." Dimitri Markevitch says of the Gigue: "Produces an almost satanic effect with its repetitions of similar motifs." (And yet I see no parental warning stickers on the CD for Matt Haimovitz's version of the six solo Cello Suites. Did the God Squad mess up?)

Going back to the Prelude of the first Suite, Siblin gives his impression of the feeling of movement at the beginning, then notes that Robert Johnson, the seminal blues guitarist, seems to share something with the beginning of this Prelude, and that Bach's broken chords could power a rock anthem, and once again he cites Led Zeppelin. I wish I could have explained to Siblin that, indeed: those first chords that Bach uses (you've all heard them: see/hear below) ARE the basis of blues and rock: they're the I-IV-V progression that forms almost all blues tunes and exerted a tremendous influence on rock and roll. Here: this progression seems to be in the musical DNA of every Western listener; we get it like mother's milk.  Pause the recording after the third broken chord, then notice that you expect a return to the main chord, and indeed, Bach provides it before going off in a long strandentwining unfurling of seemingly foreordained and perpetually mobile pumping out of 16ths notes, before finally ending with an incredible build-up, climax, and gesticulated G major chord. (Bach had 20 children.)

                                      Nova Scotian Denise Djokic elegantly playing 
                                      through the G major Prelude
                                         

Yes, there is the occult-mathematical kabbalistic Bach in Siblin's book too, but not too much. (Those of who who geeked out on this aspect of Bach as related in Douglas Hofstadter's Godel Escher Bach won't find the same buzz here.) In kabbalah his name, J. S. Bach, adds up to 41, and there are 41 measures in this first Prelude; he was known to encode his last name in sequences. In German the B stands for B-flat, while the H represents B. Out of this quasi-chromatic sequence he spun motifs and combinations that flowed like a brook on the first days of a German Spring.

All in all, Siblin's book has a catchy melody and a rhythm I can dance to - like a Gigue that "ends in an atmosphere of optimism and cheerfulness," as Dimitri Markevitch said - and I give it a ten...or a 14, which is "Bach"'s value in gematria, and 14 was the number of fugues based on a single theme that Bach was writing when he died.

The Cello Suites seems an underrated book to me.

From Living in a Dystopian Science Fiction Novel to Living in a Watergate-Era Paranoid Thriller in One Week

Those of my fellow intellectual paranoids with a taste for great mid-to-late 1970s Hollywood thrillers like 1975's Three Days of the Condor to Alan J. Pakula's rousing 1974 Parallax View to Pakula's 1976 All The President's Men...and from there my consciousness mind-melds with all the times I spent viewing and re-re-re-viewing, late at night, alone in the dark, The Conversation, Chinatown, Cutter's Way, 1940s films noir, later-than 1979 stuff like Silkwood and Blow Up...and combined with my readings of 20th century history, books on the CIA, Robert Anton Wilson and Philip K. Dick and Thomas Pynchon, JFK...I could go on ad nauseum. Anyway: if this tableau resonates, read on.

Okay, so the NSA is watching you read this right now. Let's try to forget that for a moment and go back to a simpler time, a time that the summer of 2013 is trying to rival but just can't. Not yet, at least. The summer of 1975? Let's go back there. I was too young to "get it" but years later I derived numerous garish intellectual paranoia-amphetamine-like thrills from reading about the almost daily national dispatches of what were then new(!) discoveries by the Church Committee (Sen. Frank Church of Idaho), about the history of the CIA, FBI, NSA, etc. Try to imagine a time when we thought the CIA only gathered "intelligence" and no one knew what "covert operations" were, and the long-hairs who had been telling us and writing about the CIA overthrowing democratically elected leaders and installing fascist dictators friendly to Yale Men and Wall Street were "fringe" or "lunatics." It all seems so quaint now, but remember: we're in the Summer of '75.

                                         see http://www.privacysos.org/church

Revelations about Hoover and the FBI's antidemocratic maneuvers appeared almost daily in things called "newspapers," which were actually made of paper, and people actually read them. Research tells us that it was quite common to have the "news" delivered via car, truck, or bicycling youngster, to one's own driveway, or even doorstep. Think of it like this: newspapers were like Internet, only you got ink stains on your fingers, and the national security apparatus only noted that you subscribed.

Nixon's resignation and Ford's pardon of Nixon were fresh in Unistatian minds. So was Vietnam, just ending. So were the SLA, the Weather Underground, a new consciousness about oil-rich Sheiks, and...

Everything was topsy-turvy and not like the America you were taught about in your compulsory schooling, and if you were somewhat educated and had a sense of justice, you realized the cops were on the side of The Man, and even if you were a cop (Serpico) or a CIA analyst (Three Days of the Condor), there were murderous, corrupt, unsavory characters you worked side-by-side with.

The Illuminatus! appeared and spread among the underground cognoscenti. It was the perfect thing to chase Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow with; it had more laffs.

The world was rapidly being taken over by the Military-Industrial-Entertainment-Banking-Organized Crime-Complex, and only intrepid seekers/reporters/wizened citizens could do anything about it. How to regain your wits in the face of it all - the news and the films - in 1975? How to retain some semblance of sanity?

Richard Hofstadter, a brilliant academic, had written the seminal rationalist's text on "the paranoid style" in Unistatian history. But the news seemed to be overtaking his thesis. Or maybe it was the drugs. Or maybe the news, the drugs, the films, the novels, and talking to your friends about all those things.

                                            Carl Oglesby, SDS spokesman and later
                                            professor of political science at MIT and 
                                            Dartmouth. A writer/musician/academic.
                                            His book The Yankee and Cowboy War
                                            is one of the great works in what Peter 
                                            Dale Scott calls "deep politics"

Then one of SDS's braintrustees, Carl Oglesby wrote an article for Ramparts in 1974, after Nixon resigned. Titled "In Defense of Paranoia," Oglesby argued, as Francis Wheen wrote in his difficult-to-set-down history of this period, Strange Days Indeed: The 1970s: The Golden Age of Paranoia:

"Instead of leading to political madness, the paranoid style might be the necessary prerequisite for retaining one's political sanity - an echo of the 'anti-psychiatry' popularised at the time by R.D. Laing, who held that schizophrenics and paranoids were the only people sane enough to see that the world is deranged. The Hofstadter paradigm was shattered, and has been irreparable ever since. 'Since the assassination of John F. Kennedy,' Norman Mailer wrote in 1992, 'we have been marooned in one of two equally intolerable spiritual states, apathy or paranoia.' The Illuminatus! Trilogy, that key to all mythologies of the early Seventies, features an anarchist sect called the Crazies whose political position is deliberately unintelligible but seems to encompass the worship of Bugs Bunny and study of the Tarot as well as 'mass orgies of pot smoking  and fucking on every street corner.' One of the Crazies explains: 'What the world calls sanity has led us to the present planetary crisis and insanity is the only viable alternative.'" (pp.16-17)

Violent Death of a Great Journalist
Which brings me to the death of Michael Hastings, a couple of days ago. Local Los Angeles TV news's coverage is HERE. David Sirota's obit at Salon. David Weigel, on Hastings, at Slate. Rachel Maddow, from her MSNBC show, HERE. 7 1/2 minutes from the Current TV show The Young Turks, where I felt like I got to "know" Hastings, HERE. Rolling Stone's obit, HERE.

Reading about his death jolted me back into the idiosyncrasies of watching something like Parallax View yet again, late at night, all's quiet, everyone asleep but me, looking for a paranoid fix. Warren Beatty is a radical reporter who only cares about getting to the truth.  It's Clinton or Bush43 or Obama in the White House, but I'm suddenly in the weltanschauung of artistic paranoid intellectuals circa late 1974. Why? Imprinting?

And then back again to my imagination of the crazy summer of 1975 (when, in truth, I was almost totally oblivious of all this ideation, being far too young to yet be warped by all this).

Hastings seemed to have been working on raising awareness of what he saw as the violation of free speech and persecution of another Enemy of the State, Barrett Brown, who was/is a spokesman for the Hacktivist group Anonymous. Here's Glenn Greenwald on the Brown situation. Here's a "Free Barrett Brown" site that includes Michael Hastings as a supporter.

Goddamn. This is all so...garish. To my nervous system...I don't like living in a dystopian science fiction novel. Nor do I enjoy living in a Watergate-era paranoid thriller-world. Or if I have to live in one of those, it feels like it's only fair for me to be able to shelve the book or stop the DVD, go outside and get some fresh air and sunshine, water the plants and exchange jokes with my neighbor, and I dunno...skip along whistling "Beth You Is My Woman Now"...?

I'm not saying rogue LAPD or some of Stanley McChrystal's men or some brutish operatives from the Republicans or Democrats (Hastings, being a rare True Journalist, had enemies in both parties) conspired to kill Hastings. His body was burned beyond recognition. Who knows what happened? Alcohol? Sleep-deprivation? It's probably Just One Of Those Things. (Yea...)

What I will admit is that I'm one of those who has meditated and analyzed and cogitated and fed my poetic faculty such a gawdawful amount of suspicion and paranoia about "official" stories, that it's only natural for me to suspect that just maybe...

And any of you who've been through a similar upbringing, are of a similar caste of mind, and possibly, of a similar mental age...will know exactly what I mean here. I will not spell it out. Just watch Parallax View after immersing yourself in "the news" for three hours a day for a week, reading Robert Anton Wilson in your "spare" time.

With Hastings's death, I experienced a "flashback" to a time I didn't experience when it occurred. It's my "historical imagination." I force-fed myself this stuff at a later date - of my own volition, I remind myself - when I had become "of age." By "stuff" I mean: probably the historical truth that most Unistatians can't face up to, or refuse to acknowledge. And, concomitant to all of this is the present-day world backdrop of confirmation of all the worst things we could have imagined from our own State, with its historically unprecedented technical apparatus to...well, know that you're reading this right where you are sitting now. And maybe you feel, lately, that you live in a particularly byzantine spy novel, given the knowledge. Or a Watergate-era Hollywood thriller. Or maybe you've read this far and you think this OG person is a loon and if so, bless you, blissful person...

I really don't mean to be glib or flippant about Hastings's death; I admired the guy. It's a huge loss for what I call the "truth."

 But maybe I'm so...damaged (?) that I noticed, in the hour or so after I began reading of his 4AM crash near Highland and Melrose...that somehow 1970s-era Robert Redford or Al Pacino or Warren Beatty might have known who was behind it. There are circuits in the brain that, if not paid attention to, can not distinguish between "reality" and "fiction." Or collective hallucination...Do I need to get back into therapy?

And...

Will the Summer of 2013 keep its momentum going and give the Summer of 1975 a run for its money? Stay tuned. (There is no one with even half the guts of Frank Church in congress today, except maybe...Ron Wyden?)

A friend asked me the other day, re: the NSA/Snowden fallout:
-Are you keeping up?

-(Me): Yea, but I'm not sure how much more I can hack for now; I'm reaching critical mass. Maybe I'm gettin' old, man. I need a break. Let's hike the redwoods all day, STAT!

The key, as I see it, is to find a ground between Mailer's apathy and paranoia, to be creative, have a good time, get high, do good for someone else, get paid, and get home in time for dinner.

Trailer for 1974's Parallax View:

NSA Revelations and Edward Snowden: Some of What Froths For Me, Now

I don't know what part of me remained surprised, or even why, after Snowden outed the NSA. Because the topic has been a leitmotif in conversations with all of my friends, since at least the too-Orwellianishly-named Patriot Act passed. But I guess there were a few clusters of neural circuits that were in denial: maybe no one's really spying on me. And you know: that would be just...grand.

[But: in 2011, hadn't Dana Priest's and William Arkin's "Top Secret America" articles in the Washington Post annihilated any last vestige of that neurally stubborn naivete? Apparently not...]

Now: the more "adult" clusters of neurons, the ones that neurobiologists implicate in learning, which have been actively buzzing each others' synapses, exchanging glutamate and acetylcholine, strengthening each other's connections, building on other circuits, merging different circuits, looking for patterns...that part of me was not surprised. Because I've been following the topic of "surveillance" and "privacy" and "the corporate state" and the Panopticon ever since that summer after I graduated from high school, when, just for "fun" I read Brave New World, then immediately: 1984. As soon as Winston Smith learned to love Big Brother and that whole boot stomping on the face of humanity forever thing, I chased those two novels with Fahrenheit 451. I was naive. I was a budding conspiracy theorist. I was an adrenaline junkie. I didn't know what to make of these three books, which acted synergistically in my nervous system...and well, frankly, they fucked me up one side and down the next pretty good. And yet: I "enjoyed" them.

Since then, I like to think my thinking/feeling in those areas has become far more nuanced. I mean: that poor 18 year old gangly naif! All hair and fear and testosterone and yea, verily: idealism.

Other times I seem to have not changed much, only lost a lot of that hair. (And I was all hair, really. I played guitar in metal bands and it was sorta like Marty Friedman's, only dyed with Miss Clairol Number 52 Blue/Black...and I was 6 feet tall and weighed about 135. Yes: a freak. Like Cousin It, only with a well-used library card.)

So what to make of Snowden coming out and confirming what intellectual paranoids like myself already suspected?

Well: I was pleased to see that sales of 1984 jumped 5000%, but was equally disappointed by my fellow Unistatians that they weren't already on board with Orwell's ideas. I mean: you'd think the Patriot Act would've done it fer ya, eh? Also: I suspect only about 15% of those who ordered it from Amazon will actually read it all the way through. Also: I remembered the story of Amazon's Kindle owners having their Orwell (and other books) erased. Remotely.  Because they could. Hey, they apologized and gave your money back. And said they wouldn't do that again under "those circumstances." But they can do that. Just another reason why I love the dead-tree book.

No need to point out irony. I hope...

As far as Ray Bradbury's book: no one is burning libraries. Not yet. Oh, you have your Christian fascists getting together for a good ol' Two Minutes Hate and burning, say, Harry Potter books. And there are always classic Murrrkin a-holes harassing librarians and school boards for teaching from commies like John Steinbeck or Mark Twain. Get a load of it HERE.

I think Aldous Huxley's 1932 book cements him as a seer. Just that book alone. The ideas about an entire society made drug-dependent and infantilized, with the overwhelming assumption that some people are "naturally" better than others so there ought to be a way to keep the lessers away from the betters...all with an overarching ethic of consumption, of buying things and consuming them as a way to obtain a self-identity? Aldous was legally blind, a modern Tiresias. Aldous's World Anti-Sex League is far too...2013 Kansas for me. It's spooky.

Orwell. Let's see. For his dystopian state to meet ours we need, indefinite detention just because the State says so (check!). We need the State to be able to torture people for any reason they want and get away with it. (We have lift-off on that. Roger!) The State can decree that it can kill anyone they want, anywhere, and they're supposed to have a reason for this but they can choose to not tell anyone what those reasons are, and no one can compel them to tell why they're assassinating people. (We have this, now, under a "liberal" President in Unistat, June, 2013.)

And of course, the State can have surveillance over all communications. (Edward Snowden on Line 1.)

Hmmm...

What about..."Justice"? Presumably there's a Justice system. I mean, there's a Justice Department, just as there was a Ministry of Truth, that put out non-stop propaganda. One of my favorites from 2013 - so far, and there's a cornucopia of this crap to choose from - was the President of Unistat coming in, assuring us that his would be the most "transparent" administration we'd seen. In "reality" as I see it, his Admin has been one of the most opaque when it comes to..."extrajudicial" (Orwell!) matters. (My blogspew on "neomedievalism" might be a germane link here?) And other matters. Liberals have been taken for a ride with this guy.

Time to re-think. What? Hillary Clinton will clear it all up and make it better in 2016? If you believe that and you're reading this blog, you're in the wrong place. Hillary is set as a Neoliberal thinker...better than NeoCon, but really: she's an embodiment of the very outmoded way of thinking about economics and foreign and domestic policy that led us into this morass: a new sort of Failed State, where the government can't even get background checks on gun sales despite about 90% of the public wanting them, us Idiot Citizens thinking it's about time we take even the most trivial steps towards trying to keep from getting accidentally slaughtered by a "lone nut" when we go the goddamned mall. This new sort of Failed State spends as much on military matters as the rest of the world, combined, while the infrastructure crumbles, the actual unemployment level is closer to 20%, and there's a welter of staggering statistics that show how the 1% have run away from the 99%. This government can't even insure its citizens health care, but it can kill any one of its citizens, for any reason.

Justice? Who goes to prison? The poor. And any insider who blows the whistle on the rampant theft in banking, or the gross injustices in the military policies overseas. And let's just wait to see what happens to Snowden.

One thing that many smart writers have missed: even if the NSA can decide to hone in on a domestic citizen with potentially "subversive" ideas, they probably are really only after communications from abroad, looking for "real" terrorists: the infrastructure for a future President Brownback/Palin/Ted Cruz/Newt Gingrich is in place, and it's not going anywhere. If Wall Street or the college loan debt bubble or a combination of both plus something else (another terrorist attack?) happens, this is a real threat to make Orwell's Oceania look like Sesame Street.

We now know that young well-educated people in Unistat who became politically active in order to avert more economic or environmental disasters were heavily surveilled by the State apparatus. As Chomsky has been telling us for at least 15 years: the internal dialogue of the Military/State/Corporate complex refers to the citizenry as "enemy territory."

"The U.S. is the greatest, best country God has ever given man on the face of the Earth." - Sean Hannity, "Hannity's America," June 6th, 2008.

                                  Seth Rosenfeld, author of the stunning Subversives

Seth Rosenfeld Hasn't Had A Proper Hearing Yet:
Another thing a lot of smart, perspicacious writers are missing surrounding the NSA/Snowden clusterfuck: there seems an assumption of linearity in history: we're getting dangerously out of hand, and we need to dial it back. But it's not that simple. Look at what turned up in 30 years of Freedom of Information Act requests in Seth Rosenfeld's 734 page book about Ronald Reagan's and J. Edgar Hoover's wildly paranoid hatred of the University of Berkeley, Subversives, which came out last year. The FBI fought Rosenfeld tooth and nail, but ultimately, the 9th Circuit sided with him. What did we find? A dizzying number of new things that haven't yet filtered into our discourse. Among them:

That Reagan was a snitch for the FBI since 1947. That the FBI sent poison-pen letters (where they make up stuff about someone they don't like) to officials in order to get people fired...that the FBI helped Reagan get elected Governor or California. That the FBI broke into offices, stole and copied and planted information, falsified documents and planted false news stories, assumed both Mario Savio (a brilliant but disturbed Philosophy student and architect of the Free Speech Movement) and UC Berkeley President Clark Kerr (a Quaker and pacifist) were both "communists." The FBI did everything they could to ruin both of their lives, and they succeeded fairly well. (Kerr and Savio were, in actuality, opposed to each other politically regarding the policy of Berkeley.)

To those students of COINTELPRO: yes, it seems like you've seen this; it's not "new" to you. But the depth of Rosenfeld's research ought be considered a series of at least "major" important footnotes to "all that." To those of you who have not been students of COINTELPRO, or only have a cursory knowledge of it: Rosenfeld's book is a perfect place to start, if only because he's so wonderful at narrative using his research. It's a thick book but I found it hard to put down. (Get it from your library as some sort of ethereal shout-out to Ray Bradbury?)

Above all, for our purposes here: the FBI created massive secret lists of "subversives" who should be rounded up "in case of emergency." This included students who were interested in alternative points of view about political and social ideas. If you were an 18 year old English major who signed a petition agreeing that the HUAC should be disbanded, you got on the Hoover/Reagan shitlist. And if your friends or family members subscribed to (or especially: wrote for) publications they thought were "UnAmerican" you were suspect. The brightest young people at the best public university (where much of our actual wealth originates: in new ideas) were enemies to Hoover and Reagan.

This is a hell of a book, so far criminally overlooked. Just because it's about one university, albeit maybe the top public university in Unistat, always productive of Nobel Prize winners, in one small area of Unistat, doesn't mean it's not germane to you who live in some other part of the country...or the rest of the <cough> "free world."

So - and sorry I've gone on far too long once again here - it has already happened here. But a digital infrastructure just makes it possible to do again, but about a million times more - and here's a favorite fascist's word - efficiently. Or, as Edward Snowden put it, we have extended the "architecture of oppression."

Oh, and the "subversives" in Rosenfeld's book?: they're not Savio or the SDS or professors who ordered books on communism. Guess who they are.

Art and DNA: Careening All Over Da Place

Friends: Let us take a moment...let us all bow our heads and take a few deep breaths and...WILL YOU TURN THAT SHIT DOWN? WE'RE TRYNA GET IN TOUCH...with something profound. Sorry. I lost my head for a moment. Exhale loooong, slow, deep...seven...eight...that's good enough. Now: check out the pic an atheist took of Jesus in mold behind his refrigerator: HERE. (I thought it looked more like proto-neo-classical shred guitarist Uli Jon Roth, but what do I know?) I love how dad says he took the pic with his phone, then wiped it up and aye, it may be Jesus, but he's got three kids and he can't allow mold. For some reason this made me think of Robert Anton Wilson. RAW may have also liked this other little bit from the artworld's museum without walls:

A pubic hair on a urinal shaped perfectly like a treble clef. The comments on this I've seen fall into two basic camps: a one-in-a-million shot. Or: someone - some freak - spent way too much time before resuming time with friends or acquaintances in the bar. I thought, Hey, maybe he practiced this a lot and just got really good at it? He may have been able to pull it off in a few seconds.

Isn't the Art World wonderful?

Check out a photo of an interesting artist. I'll tell you why I think she's interesting, but first get a good gander at her:

                                                     Heather Dewey-Hagborg

Heather's one of those artists that would make C.P. Snow have a coronary if he had a time machine and  we could show him what Heather's been up to: she's a PhD candidate who combines: found detritus on the streets of New York, DNA sequencing, 3-D printing, forensic biology, algorithms, and art, all in a guerrilla ontological way.

Here's how she does it: she finds someone's used coffee cup or chewing gum or fingernail or cigarette butt (or maybe a pubic hair from a urinal?) and extracts enough DNA from the trash discarded by a stranger to sequence it. We have accelerated our abilities to do this so quickly that it's become cheap enough that a biologist-art student, working out of Genspace in Brooklyn, can afford the equipment to do this! Heather then feeds the information from the sequenced DNA into a computer, which has such fancy algorithms available to her that it quickly churns out a 2-D model of the face of the person who threw away the trash.

But wait, there's more: Dewey-Hagborg then uses the 3-D printer and creates a life-sized mask of the person...turning it into "art" and...well, just really making us think a whole hell of a lot about the implications of this. I think it's astounding stuff. Get a load of these "masks." Note the inclusion of the "self-portrait." She calls herself an information artist who's interested in art as research. Just imagine: you throw away a coffee cup in NY; you just had to have your latte, being from out of town and jet-lagged to boot. You walk on and don't give it the slightest thought. Heather finds it and ends up making a replica mask of your face, and hangs it on a wall. She's trying to make us think. It works for me: I've been thinking a lot about her work...

The DIY-Biology movement is shaping up to bring us all sorts of surprises, no doubt.

For more on her, Slate did a piece not long ago. (NB the title?)

That reminds me: have you heard of 23 And Me? Here's a video:

Now: genetics is NOT destiny (except in a few relatively rare cases), but this is cheap and promises all sorts of information about your risk factors (so you and your doctors can possibly avert unpleasantness), and your ancestors, which is, I think the thing that will begin to make this more and more popular. It also opens up a Pandora's Box: now that you know you have a substantial risk of getting a disease of which there is no known cure on the horizon, are you still glad you know? Do you have some sort of moral obligation to find out about what's lurking inside you, including who your relatives are? Etcetera! Whoa...(Already there are many stories of people who found out that the sibling they grew up with was really their cousin or uncle, or they aren't related, or mom probably had a tryst with the FedEx guy while dad was at work, etc.)

Returning to Heather Dewey-Hagborg, the Supreme Court, this week voted 5-4 that police can take a cheek swab/extract your DNA even if you've only been suspected of a crime! In other words, says the Court, no, that is not a violation of the 4th Amendment's protection against unreasonable search and seizure and personal privacy. What world do the five Judges live in? This was astonishing to me, but on another level, it figures. This is a court that also ruled, again 5-4, that cops can strip search anyone, even for minor offenses like traffic stops or failure to leash a dog. In the you-haven't-been convicted-but-we're-taking-your-DNA-anyway case, Sotomayor worried that the State was overextending itself, and Scalia - who I find extremely offensive, personally - basically agreed with Sotomayor. Vociferously. But Alito saw DNA as the "fingerprints of the 21st century," and didn't have a problem. Notably, Scalia voted against the cops strip-searching for trivial offenses. He does seem to be for some personal privacy, but especially the personal privacy of corporations to do what they want.

I plan to write Heather Dewey-Hagborg and ask her if she can see if she can get hold of Alito's DNA and make a mask of him so I can throw darts at it, while sipping double IPAs, in time for next Halloween.

Meanwhile, sorry for ruining anyone's buzz, but the very real and growing danger of not only identity theft, but genome theft, is a thing now.

To recap our Top Story tonight: an atheist father sees Jesus in mold behind his fridge, then wipes it out with some disinfectant, while another guy either found or made a perfect treble clef from a pubic hair on a urinal. This led to a brilliant artist-scientist who really makes us think about what can be done with our own discarded waste, little intimate shards of our unique informational makeups we haphazardly leave all over the world, which led us to ponder whether we should spend $100 to find out detailed information about what diseases we might get and where our ancestors actually came from. This logically led to The State being able to strip search us and take our DNA for any reason, really. And we  learned that our genomes can be stolen by others, besides the cops.

Beautiful weather here in the Bay Area with a hot weekend up ahead. You literally have 17 billion blogs to choose from, so thanks for making the OG one of your sources for the latest-breaking weirdo news.

Good night, and good luck because we're all gonna need it.

The Drug Report: June, 2013: Beer, Glorious Beer, But Especially Hops

I realize I'm horribly delinquent on what was projected to be one-blog-per-month on something drug-related; I'm not sure if anyone noticed or cares. But maybe I'll chip away and "catch up" when my life gets a tad more..."normalized"?

Short Primer: Getting Up To Speed on Lousy Beer, Worldwide
Where to start? Hmmm...Okay, if you're reading this in some area of the world other than Unistat, and you're over, say, 35, you grew up knowing (and it was all-too-true) that Unistat beer was "yellow fizzy water." Beer aficionados in Unistat now often use the shorthand "BMC", meaning "Budweiser/Miller/Coors." Before the "progressive" idea of Prohibition, there were 1500 breweries in Unistat; the 18th Amendment (Jan.17, 1920, a day that will live in infamy) killed all of them overnight.

[Everything Hitler did was legal: you just pass a law.]

The 21st Amendment - getting rid of the 18th - was ratified Dec. 5th, 1933, a day that we celebrate...every day, come to think of it! But it was Depression times (gosh, I wonder what that was like?), and then after what's commonly called the "Second World War," only a few but large corporations had enough capital to brew for the thirsty masses. And they brewed really terrible stuff (I'm biased, I know, I know).

Perhaps the major brewer in Unistat was Anheuser-Busch, and I heartily recommend reading William Knoedelseder's recent Bitter Brew: Anheuser-Busch and the Rise and Fall of America's Kings of Beer. If you'd rather practice Bayard's art here, see Tom Dibblee's terrific review of the book, "Even Anheuser-Busch Hates Bud Light." Don't miss the very George W. Bush 43-ish personality of August Busch IV; the downfall of competitor Schlitz, which tried to speed up fermentation to produce more beer, but this caused a yucky mucous-like substance to accumulate once the beer got old enough; how the good ol' boys running Anheuser-Busch were dismayed - ironically so like me and my beer snob friends - when Bud Light outsold their beloved Budweiser, which to me is a horrible beer: they thought Bud Light had no soul, and I think everything Anheuser-Busch has brewed has no soul and aye: 'tis "yellow fizzy water." They began to lose market share (much of it via mismanagement) and tried all sorts of ridiculous gimmicks, one of which the reviewer Dibblee unashamedly loves: Bud Light With Lime. (And I admire his defense of it, by the way. See Dibblee's paragraph near the end that starts, "I wrote earlier about...")

A right-goodlie portion of Knoedelseder's book was a revelation to me; I have been a ruthless opponent of Unistatian Bad Beer for many years now (25?); and I love the new craft beers and micro- and nano-brewing experiments, and I'm a confessed huge Hop Head, but I'll get to that in a bit.

The most poignant part of the book, which informs what I call The Big Divide, is how Anheuser-Busch was taken over, hostile-fashion, by Belgium-based InBev. Like all giant sociopathic corporations, it laid off thousands of workers and cut benefits. It also cheapened their production processes to make even shittier beer (hard to imagine!), and the upper brass and CEOs gave themselves humongous bonuses. But the worst: they feel a threat from actual BEER: craft beers, innovators, the little guys who actually care about beer. So they buy up as many of the other larger worldwide breweries and distributors, spend enormously on marketing, and take up the precious "eye-level" space in markets. And they have enforced laws that basically only allow their own beer to be shipped across state lines. It's complex, chock-full of mendacity, galling stuff.

In late January of 2013, driven by the New America Foundation, the "Justice" Department in Unistat actually began antitrust (!) proceedings against Anheuser-Busch/InBev (ABI), because ABI had announced they wanted to buy Grupo Modelo, the largest beer distributor based in Mexico. ABI saw Corona beer as a threat.

Oh, wow: I realize I've gone on far too long on the lousy beer stuff, and I could write off the top of my head another 5000 words on this shit, but suffice: ABI, together with another monster crap-beer conglomerate, SABMiller (So. African Brewers who bought Miller in 2002, then later Coors and Foster's, blah blah blah) control at least 80% of the market in Unistat. ABI's buying of Grupo Modelo would make this even worse; hence, the antitrust stuff going on now. They say they have their eyes on the world beer market and mean no artistes any harm, but make no mistake: they want to crush the craft beer industry - the only beer worth drinking, something that makes my life immeasurably more worth living - in Unistat.

There's a lot of Good News on this front, and maybe if anyone asks me in the comments I'll go into it, but right now I need to go into hops.

Finally:Get a load of this world beer map of brews made by just "Two Giant Brewers, 210 Brands." (If you personally like any one of these, good for you! I want people to enjoy what they enjoy. But know who's controlling what you're drinking. It may give you pause...)

Hops
Oh, there's so much of surpassing fascination to say, talk, write and talk again about: malts, malting processes, and the miracle of yeast. To say the least. But I'd like to talk hops, which are very closely related to Cannabis. (Full disclosure: as I write this blogspewage, I'm languidly lavishing in a bomber of Coronado Brewing's Idiot IPA: an India Pale Ale, "Imperial"- style, which means it's hopped-up big-time, basically a double IPA: very bitter and delicious.)

The story goes that extra hops were used in beer shipped to British troops maintaining the Empire in India: hops act as a preservative in addition to adding a fine bitter taste to ale. When Unistat made homebrewing legal in 1979, those garage-scientist-brewing-tinkerers were influenced by the good beer they'd had on their trips to Europe, and especially England and Scotland, but also: Germany, Ireland, Czechoslovakia...(Now many brewers in those countries are being inspired by Unistatian craft-brews. Do you see what I mean by the The Big Divide?)

What else do hops do? Well, they're linked to controlling respiratory infections in children. Maybe isolates of humulone will one day fight pneumonia and bronchitis in kids? (This reminds me of Pliny the Elder, the Roman naturalist, 23-79CE, who died after inhaling smoke and ash after the Mt. Vesuvius eruption: a craft brew from near-to-me Santa Rosa, a hop bomb called Pliny the Elder, has won multiple awards and is much celebrated and sought-after among hop-heads in Unistat. It's maybe my favorite beer right now...)

So hops are anti-viral and related intimately to Cannabis and their oily terpenoids contribute overwhelmingly to the character of a particular beer, "So fucking what?," as the Anti-Nowhere League once said. (Check out Metallica's cover - NSFW! probably? - of that very Libertarian song HERE. There are many sources for the lyrics, one of which HERE. But clearly: when Hetfield of Metallica sings it, instead of "I've sucked sweets/I've sucked rock," he's singing "I've fucked the Queen/I fucked Bach..." This needed to be cleared up.)

I like very bitter, hoppy beer. That's what. "Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do," as Ruth Brown and B.B. King once sang, in a very Libertarian song. (You know this one, but in case not, it's HERE. Great Mother of All Hops!: I love BB's vibrato! It's like a trill, it's so even and quick. Inimitable! And I've tried to imitate it. And I dig how he just decided, long ago, to not play chords, and just...sing with his "Lucille" and Lucille's interlopers. The only vibrato that made a deeper impression on me is Eric Clapton's, 1967-74, but clearly, that's for some other time.)

Am I addicted? I don't think so. Although "addiction" has become far better understood and hence much more complicated over the past six years. Russian River Brewing's Vinnie Cilurzo and another brewer named Matt Brynildson coined the phrase, in 2005, "lupulin threshold shift," which means "when a double IPA just isn't enough." Vinnie brews Pliny the Elder, and I once wrote him a fan letter because of it. Yea, I got it bad. I consider Vinnie an Artist.

Briefly, I have gained some insight into why I push the envelope for hoppiness (some people can't stand the bitterness of some "hoppy" beer that to me, is only a jump, step and hop from Budweiser), and it's from the literature of addiction. Briefly: there's adaptation to a stimulus, when the perception, in this case taste/smell, dissipates over the course of an exposure. I try a hop-bomb beer and go wow! You try it and think whatever, you like it or not or something in between, you've got your own complex neurochemistry-set that's unique based on your DNA, experience, aesthetics, etc.

Within an hour, your sensorium is back to "normal." Me? Habituation has taken place. What's going on is that, for a long time after the initial exposure to some overweeningly bitter hopped-up beer, my sensitivity remains diminished. In other words, the impression of the hops on my nervous system was pleasurable, and I sorta...want more. Hence, we hop-heads push the hop-envelope and now there are Triple IPAs. At this point the way we measure this - so far, in IBUs, or International Bitterness Units - is off the charts. There's no "official line" for what makes an IPA a single, double, or even triple. (I recently had a quadruple IPA called Moylan's Hop Craic - pronounced "crack" and Gaelic for "conversation" but the brewer knows what the pun's about, I assure you.)

A Novel Hypothesis?

Now, I don't know if the following observation has been made, but here goes:

Experimental psychologist Linda Bartoshuk has done studies and noted that about 25% of the population are "non-tasters." About 50% are "tasters" and 25% are "supertasters." This has to do with administering a chemical, which interacts with the either very low, medium, or high number of fungiform papillae on your tongue. This chemical, yoked to your overall sensoria, will have you reacting (or not or to some degree) that it's very bitter and unpleasant, or maybe you barely notice it at all. Supertasters taste this chemical and it's horribly bitter to them; they find cruciferous vegetables very strong and unpleasant, so they may get more cancers because they can't handle, say, broccoli. It's far more complex than I will make it out, so look into this stuff for yourself. [See links HERE, HERE, and HERE, for example.] Ya gots yer fungiform papillae, ya gots yer reactions to foods or drinks, ya gots yer olfactory bulb and genes and all that stuff. Supertasters may be thinner: less to eat, everything's really intense for them. The wine expert Robert Parker is probably one of these people. The late Aaron Swartz described himself as a supertaster.

"Non-tasters" like their coffee black. (Supertasters often can't drink coffee at all, or if they do, they cut it with all kinds of gawdawful stuff like cream or milk or sugar.) Non-tasters dig really hot peppers. They generally eat anything. Many of them are overweight, because they can eat anything, and they like everything, and especially extreme tastes. Because of what I'll call my genetic profile, I am not overweight, but I am a non-taster. Give me the hottest salsa you can find. Make my coffee black, no cream or sugar, and so thick you can stand a fork in it. I'll eat anything and I generally like it, even if I think it's not exactly the best version of taco/cheese/tomato/yogurt/pickles/chocolate/steak/turnips, whatever. Throw just about anything at me and I'll like it. Hey gals? I'm EASY!

Okay, so this is my best explanation so far for my extreme hop-love: the more bitter and extreme the hops, the more stimulating the experience, then the habituation, followed by escalation. The evolutionary psychology explanation: the supertasters could tell the rest of the wandering-through-the-forest tribe which plants might be dangerous, extreme bitterness and strong tastes in general being suspected poisons. My people were the ones who maybe died because they ate something anyway, never getting the verbal memo. But I'm here, my lineage remains. They got the memo, and maybe even said "the hell with it: I want something interesting..." I have survived. (I'll spare the Donna Summer link.)

And you know what? The bulk of non-tasters are caucasian, white, and male.

Where are the most gargantuanly hoppy beers being quaffed? In California, Oregon, Washington, in areas that are crammed with slightly overweight, educated, caucasian males. Interesting. They're often the hop-bomb brewers, too.

Now: the old statistical saw: Correlation Does Not Imply Causation. I'm merely suggesting it.

So, an article by a self-described beer writer and admitted hop-head (and female), Adrienne So (sounds non-caucasian), was published by Slate recently. She says enough with the over-the-top hops, craft beer freaks! I like 'em too, but we're alienating the people who are willing to jump from the Dark Side of The Great Divide's ABI/SABMiller beers to the Good Stuff, and you're clobbering them with extremes! I see her point. The commenters seem sorta unfair to her. But I think Adrienne So is not paying attention to 1.) the market will say who wants extremely hoppy beer; 2.) there is no end of really delicious non-extreme hoppy craft beer out there, and 3.) her friend from Tennessee is a weasel.

So let me reiterate my (?) hypothesis: the genes that migrated to the Left Coast contained a lot of non-tasters, folks who like extreme tastes and will try anything, as long as it's interesting. While there are tremendously hopped-up hyper-bitter beers brewed in areas not on the Left Coast, this is where it's really hot. (I love Avery Maharaja Double IPA out of Boulder, Colorado and the day I tasted Three Floyd's Dreadnaught Imperial IPA out of Munster, Indiana was a very good day indeed!) Adrienne So has not taken into account non-tasters and their genetic drift to the Left Coast of Unistat.

I'll be paying attention to see how my Hypothesis falls apart upon further evidence. Until then: Cheers!

Some Beers I Regret I Didn't Get To Mention That Have Taken Me To Hop Heaven:

• Green Flash Imperial IPA
• Pliny The Younger 
• Moylan's Hopsickle
• Marin Brewing White Knuckle
• Stone Ruination 10th Anniversary
• Lagunitas Hop Stoopid
• your massively hopped beer here

uber-wonkiness on hops:

Dr. Charles Bamforth - the Pope of Foam - on hops and bitterness.