Tag Archives: Richard Wagner

“Der Anarch”—Asserting our Sovereign Individuality and Sovereign Citizenship as not only “Anarchen” but also “Ubermenschen” is the only path to resist Totalitarianism in the United States and around the World

Posted on April 13, 2013 by Charles Edward Lincoln III | Leave a comment

You see a lot of insults being heaped these days at the core Constitutional concept of “the sovereign citizen” as a political or philosophical movement these days, as if it were conjured up by a bunch of illiterate hillbillies who just want to hide their moonshine & pot-liquor from “the feds” and the “revenuers.” Credible reports from all over the United States suggest that local police are everywhere being taught to watch out for the dangerous “sovereign citizens” who assert their constitutional rights “too often or too loudly” as subversive terrorists. My perspective on such matters is: MAY THE LORD OUR GOD BLESS, KEEP, AND PROTECT ALL SUBVERSIVE TERRORISTS WHO FIGHT FOR THEIR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS, JUST AS HE KEPT AND PROTECTED PATRICK HENRY, GEORGE WASHINGTON, THOMAS JEFFERSON, JAMES MADISON, BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, and ANDREW JACKSON BEFORE….

And ever since Liza Mundy published my identity as an “Anarchist” (she left out the “Traditional, Jeffersonian, Southern Constitutionalist” modifiers to that label) in the Washington Post on October 6, 2009, I have repeatedly been asked to explain myself—how can I be an “anarchist?” Doesn’t that mean I just want “chaos?” Well, up to a point, I will admit that “chaos” to me seems preferable to computer driven and enforced high-tech “order.” I would rather live in Early Anglo-Saxon or Norse Viking Society or at the edge of the Western Frontier in 18th Century Virginia than in any of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s 1984, or Jerry Brown’s Barbara Boxer’s & Dianne Feinstein’s California 2013.

But it happens that living in a “leaderless” society and accepting no man as an arbiter of YOUR OWN DEFINITION of “good and evil” (or going beyond such things) has a very respectable historical pedigree…. Today I just want to celebrate Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and Ernst Jünger— http://www.ernst-juenger.org.

Ernst Jünger was an anti-Nazi German Conservative and Intellectual of the highest calibre and standing. He lived until the age of 102, from 1895-1998, beating even my grandmother Helen for longevity (she only made it to 101).

My political philosophy is fundamentally anti-modern and therefore truly “conservative” whereas Naziism, like George H.W. Bush’s & George W. Bush’s Socialist-Corporatism (which includes Obama and the Clintons, by the way), is fundamentally modernist—embracing technology as a means of oppression and control by monitoring.

No “Traditional, Jeffersonian, Southern Constitutionalist” could possibly tolerate the Department of Homeland Security, the National Defense Authorization Act, or any of the now thousands of related executive orders. GHW Bush, GW Bush, WJ Clinton, HR Clinton, and BH Obama are all fundamentally students and followers of Stalin, Mao, and perhaps even Hitler. (1)

I am much more a student and follower of Ernst Jünger.

Jünger was among the forerunners of magical realism—a very broad topic into which I think you could integrate everything from Joss Whedon’s Buffy-the-Vampire Slayer TV Series to Terrance Malick’s films (include “To the Wonder” and “Tree of Life”). A friend of mine from the Ukraine recently commented that Jünger’s view of life and the current historical trajectory involves the “re-mythologization of the world,” the protection, preservation, and restoration of individual imagination, instinct, intuition as major factors in world politics and society.

My supplement to this is that all historical interpretations and political philosophies are essentially mythologies informed by more-or-less gross reorderings of the events of individual, local, regional, national, continental, and global existence. The mythology of American Constitutional Law depends entirely (these days) on the so-called “Civil War” of 1861-1865, except to the degree that it is supplemented by the post-1945 One World Religion of the Taboo Holocaust and the Credal virtues of the United Nations.

Jünger’s vision in The Glass Bees (1957, German title: Gläserne Bienen), of a future in which an overmechanized world threatens individualism, could be seen as a direct critique of Artificial (robotic) Intelligence and even this “Aryan Traditionalism” you’re looking at (which reminds me so much of “The Santa Fe Plateau and New Age Alchemy” of Yosi Taitz, Daylight Chemical, and similar companies….)

Jünger was an entomologist as well as a soldier and writer, a “manly man” but sensitive poet with training in botany and zoology, as well as a soldier, his works in general are infused with tremendous details of the natural world.

One of Jünger’s most important literary contributions was the metahistoric figure of Der Anarch (“the sovereign person”), which evolved from his earlier conception of the Waldgänger, or “Forest Goer”. Der anarch is Jünger’s answer to the question of survival of individual freedom in a totalitarian world, and it is ten thousand times more relevant today than it was 57 years ago as he was writing. It is developed primarily through the character of Martin Venator in his novel Eumeswil. Der Anarch IS not only the original “Sovereign Citizen”, at least the original “post Hitlerian” sovereign citizen, he is also a Nietzschean Ubermensch, with the capacity to retake his sovereignty from tyrants and maintain it, like the Superman, even in the forest, even in the Mountains, even in the Desert.

I totally believe in the sovereignty of each person and I hate the notion that the sovereign citizen has become the object of such ridicule in our society—a terrorist profile in the target of DHS. What is clear is that we need to reassert our freedom in more articulate and fluent ways. Fluency is required and intellectual heritage must be asserted because of the intellectual snobbery bred into us and our by the 20th century. This snobbery led to such atrocious and fraudulent (incomprehensible) disasters as George W. Bush having degrees from both Harvard and Yale (it’s amazing what money can buy) and Obama attending Columbia, Harvard, and (worst of all) actually teaching at the University of Chicago—teaching constitutional law, no less, at MY alma mater as a successor to Michael W. McConnell—a concept which simply shocks and derails me.

Academic snobbery, which L. Frank Baum once ridiculed as a “Wogglebug Education” even after the Wizard’s dispensation of Brains to the Scarecrow was not a factor in the foundation of America, by men whose minds and mental capacities are simply beyond equal anywhere. No, lack of degrees and academic affiliation quite simply didn’t bother the extremely well-educated under-institutionalized Founding Fathers of the USA such as Patrick Henry and Benjamin Franklin one little bit….and didn’t actually have much of an impact on intellectual or philosophical careers in the 19th century either—consider that Richard Wagner never went to a music conservatory, Charles Darwin dropped out of Medical School and only grudgingly completed a degree in divinity at Cambridge, which he, oddly enough, never really used….and the lack of formal education completed by such legendary U.S. Presidents as Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln is a part of every schoolboy’s and schoolgirl’s learning—or at least it used to be before modern education norms set in.

In this same spirit, Ernst Jünger rejected all the titles and honors offered him by Hitler’s Third-Reich, and when assigned as a cultural attachee during the occupation of Paris, chose to hang out with subversive and degenerate artists… This is the true legacy of a genuine Anarchist, and the world would do well to remember how important the “leaderless” spirit can be when “Obama’s going to change things….Obama’s going to make it happen” as some of the children’s school songs now go….

(a) Unlike so many modern critics of 20th-21st century totalitarianism, I cannot automatically group Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco in the same list as Stalin and his Soviet successors, or Roosevelt and his Keynsian modern American Successors. I think Hitler was in fact much more of an ordinary person than any of these others, but at the same time he had higher and more “humane” [i.e. romantic, not necessarily rational or sensible] ideals than either of the Bushes, the Clintons or Obamas, however grotesquely inept he may have been in achieving, implementing, or realizing those ideals.

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The Democratic Republican Impulse to Individual Freedom, Liberty, and Responsibility is in our Blood—A Christian Conservative’s Answer to the Question, “Can Fascism be Critiqued from the Right?”

Posted on March 29, 2013 by Charles Edward Lincoln III | Leave a comment

Response to Question: Can Fascism be Critiqued from the Right, published March 29, 2013, on American Renaissance at: http://www.amren.com/features/2013/03/can-fascism-be-critiqued-from-the-right/

I am a lifelong student of Ancient Greek and Roman Civilization and History, as well as a passionate admirer of the music, poetry, and prose philosophical writings of Richard Wagner, as well as a student of Anthropology, Biological and Cultural Evolution. I have also studied Fascism and its relationship to Communism all my life, and I frankly conclude that there is no such thing as “Fascism”, really, as a political ideology, for the single reason stated above under “Orientations,” to wit: “Fascism did not have a formally elucidated doctrine.”

In Italy, in Germany, in France, in Spain, and even under the most noble of all Fascist leaders, Oswald Moseley in the United Kingdom, “Fascism” was never more than a poorly formulated reaction to Communism, and yet in all its manifestations, it was too much like, had too much in common with Soviet Communism ever really to succeed as a distinct and successful movement. The anti-Democratic impulse was fatal to Fascism. The strength of Fascism arose from pure nostalgic romanticism—only this and nothing more.

At the root of all Indo-European Civilizations is a strong tendency towards forms of limited Republican Democracy, of Parliamentary Government. This is obvious in the histories of Athens, the Roman Republic, and in all the Germanic and Celtic tribes, though it may be strongest (ironically enough) among the Germans and Anglo-Saxons, whose whole social organization was based upon the “Thinga” (although this may be just “Indo-European” preserved most perfectly in later history among the Norse and Vikings.

The rejection of the French Revolution (never mind the American Revolution) ignores the cultural imperative towards Freedom and Individual achievement, individual heroism, and individual responsibility apparent and inherent in all Indo-European myths. If we compare Odysseus, for example, with his Eastern Semitic Epic Counterpart in Gilgamesh (King of Uruk), we see that from the earliest times, the Indo-European people rejected dictatorship and absolute monarchies as ways of governance.

To the ancient Germans, Celts, Greeks, Italians, and even the Ancient Indians, it was what a ruler DID or DID NOT DO that made him a great hero. Gilgamesh’s status as a King made him important, but it was his “savage” friend Enkidu was much more like an individualist Indo-European Hero—and he was struck down by the Innana-Ishtar, the Semitic Goddess of Love, for failure to worship her and Obey…. Failure of Obedience to Divine Commandments is perhaps a key to understanding the divergence between Indo-European and Semitic Gods—and this is the skin of our teeth, the marrow of our bones—the origin of our Civilization. Christianity became acceptable to (and definitive of) the Western two thirds of the Indo-European world PRECISELY because Christ preached liberation from law, liberation from obedience, and recognized Individual Freedom of Will and Freedom of Choice, as the paths to Righteousness.

This is our heritage, and it is why the Fascist Experiment Failed.

One thing we learn in anthropological study of cultural evolution and historical political process is that rebellions and revolutions are often Nativistic regenerations of past glory, even to the point of being quests to restore former orders based on lost freedoms and rights, rather than expressions of desire for something never before known (like communism and fascism).

The American Revolution of 1775-1783 was particularly expressly articulated as a demand to restore the ancient rights and Freedoms of Englishment. It was (from the perspective of an historical process of longue durée) postively (and marvelously) atavistic in that it restored the three-part (Dumezilian) foundations of Indo-European Government between the Magical-Juridical Law (the Courts, Georges Dumézil’s First Function), the Physical force of Command (the Executive/Military Enforcers of the law, Dumézil’s Second Function), but empowered above all the Third Archaic Indo-European Segment of Society—the power of the food producers and the people who reproduce the human wealth of each polity (Dumézil’s Fonction Productrice—Fecondité et Abondance).

The French Revolution started with the reassertion of the Three Estates, but was rapidly overtaken by a radical minority who were forerunners of of Communism (led by the horribly ironically and prophetically named “Committee on Public Security”—the direct onomastic and terroristic ancestor of the Department of Homeland Security).

Napoleon essentially restored the religious authority of the Church and the Parliamentary function as adjuncts his military might in the short-lived (because of excessive and premature ambition for world conquest), but otherwise essentially brilliant, Bonapartist Empire. I would suggest that any fans of Monarchy should look to Napoleon rather than the Bourbons as models of “how to organize and run an Empire.”

I see no point whatsoever in trying to rescue the early 20th Century Fascist movements from their abject failure.

Mussolini romantically (but impractically and perhaps rather ignorantly) looked and reached back to the Glories of Imperial Rome, but he had none of the practical sense that it was the Roman Republic which created the Empire, and the decline of the power of the (originally) Republican Senate, the abdication of parliamentary power to the Emperor’s “imperium”, which foreshadowed (and essentially caused) the fall of that same Empire.

Hitler claimed that to understand the Third Reich, one had to understand the music and philosophy of Richard Wagner. I have devoted a large part of my life to listening to and reading Richard Wagner’s works, and I have concluded that Hitler’s Reich failed to understand that Love, almost a completely Christian notion of sacrificial love, underlay all of Wagner’s music, poetry, and prose, albeit that Wagner was heavily influenced by Buddhism which, aside from the adoption of the Swastika, hardly influenced the day-to-day policies of the Third Reich at all.

Hitler would have erased all of traditional Germany, it’s architecture and its institutions, in constructing his thousand year Reich. This was not the Wagnerian way—this was pretty much the same plan as the Communists, except the Communists were much better organized and much more practical.

True Conservative Romanticism for resuscitation of dying or even dead traditions and values requires the democratic process of argument, persuasion, and acceptance.

It is that process on which we, if we are to be the truest conservatives of our time, should focus rather than falling for the false lure of the romanticist failures of Fascism.

God Save the Indo-European People and their Traditions of individual freedom and collective parliamentary debate and decision-making, by through the Gospel and Love of Jesus Christ. That is what I would advocate.

Fascism Failed because of its Kinship with Communism, and that’s why all the original American fans of Fascism (the Bushes and the Kennedys, for example) ultimately turned to World Communism, disguised as Corporate Socialism….

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March 23—THE DATE to Remember Patrick Henry in 1775, but today ( March 23 2013) it’s been 30 Years Since Ronald W. Reagan’s Star Wars, 15 Years since James Cameron “I’m King of the World” announcement after winning Oscar for Titanic…in 1945 the British “Black Watch” Crossed the Rhein….in 1925 Tennessee outlawed the teaching of Evolution

Posted on March 23, 2013 by Charles Edward Lincoln III | Leave a comment

Of all these events in the 20th Century, I remember the last two most clearly. While Ronald Reagan’s “StarWars” Speech in 1983 was inspiring and uplifting (even as I listened to it over the one and only well-functioning TV then extant in the general neighborhood of Chichén Itzá, Yucatán in the lobby of the Hotel Mayaland, though I was living across the street at Edward H. Thompson’s old Hacienda….), James Cameron’s “I’m King of the World” arrogance has always stuck in my mind as the single most obnoxious Academy Award acceptance speech I ever was sufficiently unfortunate as to have listened to (and I listened to that one from Casa del Mar on Seawall & 60th in Galveston, Texas). Now, fortunately, Cameron’s obnoxious speech never really hurt anybody, no matter how much of an anal orifice he proved himself to be.

But, by contrast, Ronald W. Reagan’s Star Wars (aka “Strategic Defense Initiative”) could be called the end of even the MYTH of limited constitutional government in the United States. Reagan on this date announced, authorized, initiated, and launched the most TRULY offensive program of Corporate Welfare in World History, without real immediate consequence but VERY intimidating to the rest of the world. The Strategic Defense Initiative gave Reagan the excuse all neocons wanted to turn his platform of fiscal responsibility and limited government on its head. The greatest irony of Star Wars was that it was such an impractical, impossibly theoretical plan for military development, that the primary beneficiaries were University Communities—where billions and billions in research money were poured into the neighborhoods of places like Harvard University, University of California at Berkeley, the University of Texas, and Stanford, so that (in effect) Reagan bribed all the academics who normally and nominally would have opposed him to support his excesses of spending and enlarging the U.S. Government through the most reckless economic programs ever in World History…. Star Wars, gave a huge boost to the “peri-academic” research communities around Boston Loop 128, Silicon Valley, and along the unimaginatively renamed “Research Boulevard” (Highway 183) in Austin, all of which might have remained stunted or even stillborn without Reagan (the great enemy of Welfare for the Poor) granting open ended credit as welfare to the Rich….

On March 23 in 1919—two major events took place which would shape the 20th Century: the Bolshevik (Soviet Communist) Central Committee or Politburo formed in Moscow, while on the same day Benito Mussolini organized the Fascist Party in Milan, Italy and took the reigns as its leader.

As the memorial of “days that will live in infamy” goes, those were petty benign compared with 30 years earlier when U.S. President Benjamin Harrison opened up Oklahoma to the “Sooners” who lined up at the state borders and raced to stake their claims, thereby closing “the last frontier” in the lower 48 states anyhow (and obliterating the last of even the very modest concessions to the dispossessed Five Civilized Tribes of the American South, 55 years after the Trail of Tears from Georgia & Alabama through Mississippi and Arkansas…. or 1868 when the University of California at Berkeley was founded…. (ok, maybe that date wasn’t all THAT infamous…. but Berkeley for a while was certainly the center of that great Countercultural movement which took place in the 1960s…. from which America and the World have never really recovered….).

March 23 was a great day in Streetcar history (I’m writing this while seated by the window at the Trolley Stop Café at 1923 St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans 70130). In 1937 the Los Angeles Railway Co. started using PCC Streetcars (Presidents’ Conference Committee, replacing the famous old “Red and Yellow Cars” which once defined the Southern California landscape, from the time of Henry E. Huntingdon in 1901—-the LA Railway Co. finally went out of existence in 1958….in the wake of the ecologically and socially disastrous triumph of General Motors and the “car culture”).

But forty years before Huntingdon’s trains started running in Los Angeles, in 1861, London began running its legendary tramcars, designed by the appropriately named “Mr. Train” of New York…. by some transportation history coincidence in 1922 the first airplane landed at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., while the streetcar itself was patented on this date in 1858 by E.A. Gardner of Philadelphia—the first U.S. Patent ever was issued was granted on this date to Joseph G. Pierson for a Riveting Machine….

In 1806 March 23 was the date when Lewis & Clark arrived on the Pacific Coast, the final goal of their epic voyage which began two years earlier in Saint Louis….

On March 23, 1808, Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, became King of Spain—the Bonapartist dynasty just didn’t last very long, especially in Spain….it was a dud….for better or for worst…

But from the standpoint of this Blog, of Deo Vindice and Tierra Limpia, the most important March 23 in world history was surely 1775, when Patrick Henry declared “Give me Liberty or Give me Death” at Saint John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia.

In terms of musical culture, the highlight of this date was in 1743 when Georg Friedrich Handel’s Messiah premiered in London (a second “premier”—the original performance having been in Dublin, Ireland….). Handel is an inspiration to those of us who aspire to be “late bloomers” in life. In 1743 Handel was 58, five years older than I am now, having been born on 23 February 1685, with only 16 years left to his life (he died on 14 April 1759). To me, Handel’s Messiah is the most inspiring major “operatic” kunstwerk/work of music prior to Wagner’s first “Wagnerian” opera Der Fliegende Hollander which premiered a century later (in Dresden in 1843), even if Handel’s was not “gesammt”. As magnificent, innovative, and stirring as Mozart’s Magic Flute and Don Giovanni surely are, or Beethoven’s symphonies, I think that a real connexion can be made between the compositionally epic scale of the Messiah and Der Ring des Niebelungen, for example, or Wagner’s Grail operas…(Lohengrin, Tannhauser, Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal).

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Has the Winter of our Discontent given way to the Flowers that bloom in the Spring, tra la?

Posted on March 21, 2013 by Charles Edward Lincoln III | Leave a comment

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/19/march-20-first-day-of-spring_n_2906921.html#slide=2225685

I for one don’t really care whether the vernal equinox happens on March 20, 21, or 22, I always celebrate it on March 21, just as I always celebrate the solstices on December 21 and June 21. What’s more, I treat all the seasons as having exactly 91.25 days except during leap year because that way four seasons make a year. However, the exposition of facts suggesting the contrary in the above article forwarded to me by Barbartzin Cihuacuamomohtli in the former CSA capital of Montgomery is quite erudite and interesting and attributed to someone from the Hayden Planetarium who ought to know.

Although I do celebrate the Spring Equinox and the Solstices, I find the Autumnal Equinox less stirring, although I don’t go as far as my former House Elf Antonio Rodriguez who once opined that “Otoño es la epoca del año más triste.” Still, from a historical standpoint, it’s hard to celebrate the Fall Equinox unless you’re a descendent of Robespierre and really long for the good old days when the original French “Department of Homeland Security” (aka “Committee on Public Safety”) instituted and promulgated the original Reign of Terror starting with the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. As an aside, Queen Marie Antoinette has risen considerably in my estimation since I read that she apologized to her executioner for stepping on his foot on the way to the guillotine on a crowded executioner’s platform. I anticipate that the Reign of Terror over which the Department of Homeland Security has been designed to preside will make the French episode of the 1790s look like the amateur small time affair or rehearsal which it really was….

Yes, by contrast and without doubt, Spring is traditionally the happiest time of year, when new growth and flowers and the birds and the bees all seem to conspire to compose a poetic statement of the natural order which…. sometimes just make a 53rd year old curmudgeon with a serious toothache want to regurgitate all over someone’s beautiful flower bed. And there are indeed an abundance of beautiful flower beds in New Orleans 70130, 70115, and 70118 (which is the extent of my wanderings most days—the French Quarter 70112, except for Place St. Louis aka Jackson Square, is not known for its flowers).

Ah, Springtime: Young lovers, even brothers and sisters like Siegmund and Sieglinde, notice that wintersturme wichen dem wonnemonde, and for once I find myself in a bad enough mood to sympathize with Fricka’s anger over the whole business: “Who’s ever heard of such a thing, a brother and sister as lovers?” She asks her husband Wotan in Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre. Sympathetic with his wife’s concerns always and so the model of a good husband, Wotan responds, “Well, as of today, you have heard of it.” I have spent my life changing the characters with whom I most identify in Wagner’s Ring. When I was young I wanted to be Siegried, but then I kind of realized that Siegfried was a bit of an idiot who would take a drink from anybody and really never did anything right or substantial after he killed that rather harmless house- (or cave-) bound Dragon Fafnir who never really bothered anybody but just liked sleeping aid all his treasure. Then I started identifying with Siegmund, slightly more mature but no luckier. Finally I have come to identify with Wotan “the saddest of all”. What I’m worried about is that I may yet live long enough to identify with Alberich the Dwarf, the final survivor of the epic of the Ring….. and that just wouldn’t be very poetic at all…. but the danger is there….

I came of age as a teenager in New Orleans, first felt the pangs of (post-secondary) young love here and all that rot. And now as a (soon to be) 53 year old curmudgeon I am back in this wonderful town, reflecting on the essential lack of difference and distinction between the institutions of marriage and prostitution, despite my lifelong fondness for the Sumerian and Akkadian love poetry of Inanna and Dumuzi (which of course was all about Dumuzi rising from the dead in the Spring—after Inanna killed him, but let’s not quibble here, she mourned and cried copious tears AFTER she killed him—just as Brunnhilde did after she arranged Siegfried’s Death in Gtterdaemerung…). New Orleans has forced me to come to grips with the notion that, as doggedly libertarian as I sometimes try to be, I really don’t like prostitution or prostitutes. But (even worse) I like women who pretend to be something else when they’re even less honest and (hence) less moral by virtue of their pretense to be something else. (Only tangentially, see footnote* regarding one rather New Orlenean girl by the name of Lila H.—this particular epistle was most unequivocally NOT written by me, but I came upon it as part of a collection of similar letters).

Two years ago I was obsessed with another rather extraordinary “courtesan” I had met in New Orleans at the same time as Lila H. and Sylvia F. named Tiffany H. (TCH moved to ABQ where she became “La Bruja de Algodones” in a beautiful desert corner of New Mexico off I-25). Now Tiffany was indeed quite beautiful, not at all “cheap” and certainly not tawdry. She was talented in several musical instruments, song, song painting, weaving, astrology, magic, and deadlier arts as well, but had that strange kiss of the spider woman which made for short-lived relationships…. And what really bothers me is that prostitutes are “cheap” girls….and wives like Elena, the mother of my son Charlie, who at her sole behest no longer speaks to me are just really really really expensive…. And so in general, there are times I wish I had been born gay so that I wouldn’t have had to deal with the whole situation…. But as Happy as I have been for most of my life, I have never been gay…..

And the reality is, right now, that the Winter of our Discontent (about the Islamic Communist Party Chairman Barack Hussein Obama’s second anti-constitutional inauguration as de facto President and Dictator, the acknowledgment by his simply appalling Attorney General Holder that Drone’s deadly force may be [and that means certainly will be---if they haven't already been] used to eliminate undesirable American citizens someday, and all the other developments of the past 91 days really just don’t inspire one to think happy thoughts.

Re-elected California Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer continue with their crusade to disarm ordinary Americans while buying otherwise illegal hollow-point bullets to arm the domestic police as minions of the Department of Homeland Security. It’s all enough to make one sing, with Lord High Executioner Koko from G & S’ Mikado, “The flowers that bloom in the spring “tra la” have nothing to do with the case.”

In general, it seems to me that Western civilization, American Political Society as it once existed, and the magnificent American economy are all going to hell in a hand basket, so why and how can we celebrate Spring—“Winter kept us warm covering earth in forgetful snow” or in the case of New Orleans and most of the deep South, forgetful brown (dead) leaves…. Wintersturme wichen dem wonnemonde — my ass!

Speaking of asses, now that Barack Obama has turned the Democratic Party so radically against America and the American dream, I think that all Patriotic Americans who, with me, might like to either call themselves Jeffersonian and/or Jacksonian Democrats ought to work with me to resurrect the Crowing Red Rooster as the Symbol of the Democratic Party—if anyone has examples of old Southern Democratic Posters or political advertisements of any kind with Red Rooster symbols—please get in touch with me…. I would like to start a large collection…. I suppose that will be my Spring 2013 Project to Dishonor Obama and all that he stands for….

*I swear under penalty of perjury that I did not write the following text nor was it written about anything I personally experienced, but I have seen and experienced a sufficient number of similar events with one of the parties involved that I believe that this does pretty well summarize the life of a certain New Orleans “Failed Debutante” well-on her way at age 23, soon to be 24, to becoming a “Delta Dawn” of the next generation:

Lila: I just don’t ever want to see you drunk again.
I can’t recall exactly how many times you’ve completely fucked me over. Of course, none of this was your fault. It’s not your fault that you’re a sloppy drunk incapable of taking credit for your actions. I mean, trying to kill a guy on the back of his motorcycle, pissing yourself on the sidewalk and cursing the man who kept you alive. That’s not your fault. No, that’s perfectly acceptable behavior.

If you still do have my phone number, if by some miracle it hasn’t fallen into the vodka and bourbon fueld vortex that is your mind, and you give it to some man and he calls me and says that you’re passed out in his hotel room I am going to tell him that I’m your psychiatrist and that you need to be restrained, gagged, and to call the police immediately. Don’t trust a word you say, you’ve escaped from the mental hospital, you’re a homicidal nymphomaniac. Or maybe I’ll say that I am your pimp and that he can have [edited: you anyway] he wants, free.

What I’m trying to say, Lila, is that you are possibly the worst friend a man could have. A user, an abusive drunk that no one should ever have to tolerate. I know you won’t even accept this judment, and yeah, I’m judging you, I feel I have the right after watching you screaming cuntcuntcunt, tears streaming down your face, because I wouldn’t let you go and fight a girl. I know you can’t accept this judgement. And I do feel bad for you. I really do. But this is the last time you treat me this way. Not that you give a fuck, there are plenty of other men to use, aren’t there? Plenty of other guys.

Anyway, enjoy. This time tomorrow you’ll probably be ass-up in an alleyway getting train-fucked by the boyfriend of some girl you picked a fight with and his friends, or blowing some guy in a suit in a bathroom because he was nice enough to give you a shiny piece of plastic.

Remember this, if nothing else: You had a horrible time last night. I know you don’t care that you ruined my evening, but you ruined your own. Your insistence on trying to assault that girl had you crying and screaming for around a half hour, then angry all night. You stupid bitch. And, by the way, it was PURE paranoia. I noticed you had lost one of the wings off that stupid headband that made you ‘feel special and pretty’ at least ten or twenty minutes before you were anywhere near that girl. I didn’t say anything in order to avoid a scene.

So yeah. You’re paranoid. Have you been diagnosed?

Because of that you missed out on a great night. I treat.. excuse me, treatED you well. That’s done with. And I genuinely feel like a load has been taken off my back. I gave you the benefit of the doubt three times now. That’s twice too many. We’re done, bitch. If you want my friendship and you decide to beg for it back and I can understand what you’re saying you’re doing it wrong [edited for younger audience...]

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A Prayer for True Memory and History on the 206th Anniversary of the Birth of Robert Edward Lee, Commanding General of the Army of Northern Virginia, President of Washington & Lee University

Posted on January 19, 2013 by Charles Edward Lincoln III | Leave a comment

Since December 9, 2012, I have been staying in the French Quarter, about a 20 minutes to half an hour leisurely walk to Lee Circle where a high pedestal support’s a statute of one of Virginia’s most famous sons, forever looking north because “you never turn your back on the enemy.” My grandparents raised me to celebrate Marse’ Robert’s birthday and remember and study his life and heroism, both before, during and after the War Between the States. I have never had any problem keeping his memory because I think he represents all the good values that were and ever could be called “American”—he was an exceedingly intelligent man of principles including loyalty and devotion, hard work, individual responsibility, skill and excellence.

This year I have not yet visited Confederate Memorial Hall, just south of Lee Circle. It is probably the longest I have ever been in New Orleans without paying at least a quick visit, and there are many reasons for this but one is that it is no longer officially called “Confederate Memorial Hall” but has been recently rechristened “Louisiana’s Civil War Museum at Confederate Memorial Hall.”

Nothing is more insulting to Lee’s Memory or to the Heritage of the South in general and the Confederate States of America in particular than to refer to the War of 1861-1865 as “the Civil War.” From the Southern adn Confederate standpoints, that War was as much the “American Civil War” as World Wars I and II were the “European Civil Wars.” The analogy is fair enough only to the degree that after World War II, first the European Economic Community (E.E.C.) and then the European Union both sought to transform Europe into a new, single Continental Nation.

The first movie ever filmed to be seen commercially by more than a million people was D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation”, released in 1915, based on a historical novel entitled “the Klansman.” The new nation born during and after the War Between the States was a centralized Republic with a top-heavy Federal Bureaucracy modeled very generally on the economic controls imposed top down from the Imperial Central in the later Roman Empire in a manner which has come to be known as “Byzantine.”

On this 206th Anniversary of the Birth of Robert Edward Lee, son of Governor Light Horse “Harry” Lee of Virginia, I pray that the honour and integrity of the South will be properly remembered, along with Lee’s individual, unique and irreplaceable, un-reproducable honour and integrity.

I pray that people will start learning history more fully and accurately, and above all critically, with the understanding that the victors always write history, but that victory in war is not in fact justice in the eyes of God, despite what many of us, including many of us Southerners, believe about the value of “trial-by-battle” in the Mediaeval sense of “Justice by Duel.”

Even in Mediaeval legal theory, Duels were ONLY fairly calculated to result in a decision by God when the two parties to the duel are equally equipped, armed, trained and skillful. The armor and the horses had to be comparable and equivalent, and a weaker person had the right to appoint a “champion” to fight in his or her place, as Ilsa von Brabant famously did in Richard Wagner’s opera “Lohengrin” which even preserved the notion of combat only coming “at high noon” so that the sun would be in neither combatant’s eyes at the outset. The title of one of the finest Western movies about a duel, Gary Cooper’s “High Noon” (1950) also retains this reference to the equality of the Sun God (Shamash) who presided over such duels (judicially approved and jury-supervised “trials-by-combat”) even in Ancient Akkad, Asshur (Assyria), and Babylon.

I pray that even under the Dark Skies of the Obama Presidency and all the propaganda coming out in this day and age, that a more just and inquiring notion of history will prevail in the collective, cultural memory of America, and that the virtue and dignity of the Southern and Confederate Constitutional position be realized and recognized, and the glory given to the Victorious Yankee North be tempered by the reality that northern industrialism produced the same identical level of misery and deprivation among white workers as was chronicled by Charles Dickens in England and Victor Hugo in France.

I pray that people will understand that if we weep for Fantine and her plight in Les Miserables (published precisely in 1862, during the first full year of the War Between the States), we must also recognize the condition of “Free” labor in the North and Europe was in a hundred ways worse and more depraved than the plight of black slaves in the South. If in no other, this is true in one major regard: only an insane slaveholder would really work his slaves to death, without caring for them as human beings, in that slaves were wealth and capital, and senselessly to destroy the life or health of a slave was like throwing gold into the sea or burning paper money backed by real gold (unlike the trash Federal Reserve Notes we use today).

By contrast, as shown in Dickens’ writings and Hugo’s, and as analyzed by Karl Marx and Frederich Engels and their followers, “free” laborers in the mid-19th Century in the North had no life-long security whatsoever.

As soon as the “free laborer’s” strength or health should start to fail, that free laborer’s productivity declined or perhaps he was eaten up by the very machines he tended due to “assumption of the risk” by accepting employment. The “Free Labor” capitalist therefore had a strong motivation to dismiss his worn out workers and throw them into the streets, a version of the “hellish life” captured in Les Miserables was worse than death itself. This reality was revisited (1998) by Joss Whedon in an Episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer called “Anne” in which the residents of Hell work in a 19th Century style factory until they are exhausted and old (in just a short time as it turns out) and thrown back out on the streets of modern Los Angeles to live as homeless derelicts.

All these realities need to be weighed against the supposed virtuous abolition of slavery. And accordingly, I pray that people will begin to think and remember and reflect not only about the history of the 19th century, but of the 20th and even our own times. Were we the victors REALLY the more virtuous parties in World Wars I and II, for example? In World War I, the answer is a fairly certain absolute NO. In World War II, the mythology has grown into a reality and even a political constitution and ecumenical social theory so thick that it is almost impenetrable.

But if we look, again, at the details, and if we dare to compare the early German rockets or “Buzz Bombs” sent by Wernher von Braun against London in 1944-45 with the American A-Bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I think we will see that the American weapons were a far more sinister manifestation of technology. What about the senseless fire-bombing of Dresden in 1945 when the war was almost over?

Then if we look at the Soviets, whom we supported, and what they did to their own populations (Stalin’s purge of “the Kulaks” for instance, beginning in 1928), was our side as a whole really better than the Germans?

Even if the worst stories are true about German antisemitism, “ethnic cleansing”, and other population reorganizations and purges, no one can state that the Germans actually moved or relocated anywhere nearly as many millions of people as the Soviets and their allies forcibly relocated from the German sectors of East and West Prussia, Silesia, Posen, Danzig, and Eastern Pomerania, even as millions of Poles were uprooted and moved East to replace the Eastern quarter of Germany, after 1945-46.

The Germans of the Sudetenland were also expelled from their homes of time immemorial. The thousand year old Eastern boundary of the German people was moved back across Poland and Czechoslovakia to fit Stalin’s plans. Again, who was guilty of greater genocidal crimes? Or did Stalin’s relocations of the Poles, the Belarus, the Ukrainians, and the Germans count for nothing?

An since the war, have not the Allied Powers faithfully reenacted the predictions of perpetual war as framed by George Orwell in “1984“? Have not the Communists become indistinguishable from the Corporate leaders they supposedly fought to overthrow as Orwell similarly predicted in “Animal Farm“? Is there not evidence that, at least since Pearl Harbor and possibly since the explosion of the Battleship Maine, the United States Government has staged more than a hundred years of False Flag attacks against its own people to make certain that this condition of perpetual warfare exists and that there are more and more justifications (like the Sandy Hook shootings in Connecticut most recently) to curtail the fundamental freedoms and liberties for which George Washington, and Robert E. Lee, spent their lives fighting?

I pray that Americans will start waking up and thinking about reality, and observe the contradictions inherent in all things, but especially in our official versions of history, and that we will work to examine our past, our present, and our futures to discover and establish deeper and more meaningful truths about the sad story which is the epic of human history.

May everyone in the World in fact look to Robert Edward Lee and the Confederate States of America as emblematic of justice defeated, of liberty lost, and of the dangers of using imbalanced thinking and propaganda as tools of social change.

As I have written a thousand times if I’ve written it once: Chattel Human Slavery was abolished everywhere in the world (as an openly and officially legal institution, anyhow….) between 1790 and 1930. ONLY in the United States of America did the abolition of legal chattel slavery result in war, and what a coincidence that this happened 13 years after the Communist Manifesto, in a Republican Administration with so many German Communist refugees from Europe in charge, and with Karl Marx’ official blessings and endorsements—none of facts which are EVER taught in American Middle or High School history classes…

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St. Stephen, the First Martyr, and my own personal favorite Carol….about the Martyred Saint Wenceslaus of Bohemia

Posted on December 26, 2011 by Charles Edward Lincoln III | 1 Comment

LIFE OF ST. STEPHEN THE PROTOMARTYR OF ALL CHRISTENDOM

St. Stephen was martyred in Jerusalem about the year 35. Tradition calls him both the first Christian martyr (or “protomartyr”) and the first “deacon” of the Christian Church.

All that we know of the life, trial, and death of St. Stephen, derives from the Book of Acts, Chapters 6 and 7. In the long chronicle of Christian martyrs, the story of Stephen stands out as one of the most moving and memorable.

Although his name is Greek (from Stephanos, meaning crown), Stephen was a Jew, probably among those who had been born or who had lived beyond the borders of Palestine, and therefore had come under the influence of the prevailing Hellenistic culture. The New Testament does not give us the circumstances of his conversion. It would seem, however, that soon after the death of the Messiah he rose to a position of prominence among the Christians of Jerusalem and used his talents especially to win over the Greek-speaking residents of the city.

The earliest mention of Stephen is when he is listed among the seven men chosen to supervise the public tables. We recall that these first Christians held their property in common, the well-to-do sharing what they possessed with the poor; and at this time, as always in the wake of war, there were many “displaced persons” in need of charity. We read in Acts that the Hellenists, as the Greek-speaking Christians were called, thought that they, particularly the widows among them, were being discriminated against at the public tables. The Apostles were informed of these complaints, but they were too busy to deal with the problem. Therefore seven good and prudent men were selected to administer and supervise the tables. The seven, on being presented to the Apostles, were prayed over and ordained by the imposition of hands. Associated in these charitable tasks with Stephen, whose name heads the list as “a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit,” were Philip, known as “the Evangelist,” Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicholas-all Greek names. The title of deacon, which came to be linked with their function, derives from the Greek verb meaning “to minister.” These men served the Christian community in temporal and charitable affairs; later on they were to assume minor religious offices.

Stephen, already a leader, now began to speak in public with more vigor and, “full of grace and power, was working great wonders and signs among the people.” By this time a number of Jewish priests had been converted to the new faith, but they still held to the old traditions and rules as laid down in Mosaic law. Stephen was prepared to engage in controversy with them, eager to point out that, according to the Master, the old law had been superseded. He was continually quoting Jesus and the prophets to the effect that external usages and all the ancient holy rites were of less importance than the spirit; that even the Temple might be destroyed, as it had been in the past, without damage to the true and eternal religion. It was talk of this sort, carried by hearsay and rumor about the city, and often misquoted, intentionally or not, that was to draw down upon Stephen the wrath of the Jewish priestly class.

It was in a certain synagogue of Jews “called that of the Freedmen, and of the Cyrenians and of the Alexandrians and of those from Cilicia and the province of Asia” that Stephen chiefly disputed. Perhaps they did not understand him; at all events, they could not make effective answer, and so fell to abusing him. They bribed men to say that Stephen was speaking blasphemous words against Moses and against God. The elders and the scribes were stirred up and brought him before the Sanhedrin, the supreme Jewish tribunal, which had authority in both civil and religious matters. False witnesses made their accusations; Stephen defended himself ably, reviewing the long spiritual history of his people; finally his defense turned into a bitter accusation. He concluded thus:

“Yet not in houses made by hands does the Most High dwell, even as the prophet says…. Stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ear, you always oppose the Holy Spirit; as your father did, so do you also. Which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted? And they killed those who foretold the coming of the Just One, of whom you have now been the betrayers and murderers, you who received the Law as an ordinance of angels and did not keep it.”

Thus castigated, the account is that the crowd could contain their anger no longer. They rushed upon Stephen, drove him outside the city to the place appointed, and stoned him. At this time Jewish law permitted the death penalty by stoning for blasphemy. Stephen, full of “grace and fortitude” to the very end, met the great test without flinching, praying the Lord to receive his spirit and not to lay this sin against the people. So perished the first martyr, his dying breath spent in prayer for those who killed him. Among those present at the scene and approving of the penalty meted out to Stephen was a young Jew named Saul, the future Paul, Apostle to the Gentiles: his own conversion to Christianity was to take place within a few short months.

The celebration of the Feast Day of St. Stephen is December 26, the day after Christmas, aka “Boxing Day” “Two Turtle Doves” in “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” Despite the close association between Saint Stephen and Saint Wenceslaus of Bohemia in the Anglo-American mind, owing to a 19th century hymn, Saint Stephen the Protomartyr is NOT the Patron Saint of Hungary, who was in fact another King/Martyr who lived in the eleventh century after Saint Wenceslaus of Bohemia died in the tenth.

GOOD KING WENCESLAS (King/Duke “Herzog” of Bohemia, reigned 924-935) To the tune of the well-known 19th Century Carol, it is possible to sing an older verse:

“Christian friends, your voices raise.

Wake the day with gladness.

God Himself to joy and praise

turns our human sadness:

Joy that martyrs won their crown,

opened heaven’s bright portal,

when they laid the mortal down

for the life immortal.”

[Words: Saint Joseph the Hymnographer, 9th Century, translated from the Greek. Music: "Tempus Adest Floridum" ("Spring has unwrapped her flowers"), a 13th Century spring carol; first published in the Swedish Piae Cantiones, 1582.]

Saint Wenceslaus’ Day: September 28, Patron Saint of Bohemia, Czech Republic, Prague, lived approximately 907-935, canonized around 985.

Patron saint of Bohemia, parts of Czech Republic, and duke of Bohemia frorn 924-929. Also called Wenceslas, he was born near Prague and raised by his grandmother, St. Ludmilla, until her murder by his mother, the pagan Drahomira. Wenceslaus’s mother assumed the regency over Bohemia about 920 after her husband’s death, but her rule was so arbitrary and cruel in Wenceslaus’ name that he was compelled on behalf of his subjects to overthrow her and assume power for himself in 924 or 925. A devout Christian, he proved a gifted ruler and a genuine friend of the Church. German missionaries were encouraged, churches were built, and Wenceslaus perhaps took a personal vow of poverty Unfortunately, domestic events proved fatal, for in 929 the German king Heinrich I the Fowler (Heinrich der Voegler, reigned 919-936, immortalized as Der Deutschen Konig, the just king who sets the trial-by-combat over accusations against Duchess Ilsa von Brabant in Richard Wagner’s opera “Lohengrin”, tomb recently archaeologically discovered) invaded Bohemia and forced Wenceslaus to make an act of submission.

This defeat, combined with his pro-Christian policies, led a group of non-Christian nobles to conspire against him. On September 28, 935, a group of knights under the leadership of Wenceslaus’ brother Boreslav assassinated the saint on the doorstep of a church. Virtually from the moment of his death, Wenceslaus was considered a martyr and venerated as a saint. Miracles were reported at his tomb, and his remains were translated to the church of St. Vitus in Prague which became a major pilgrimage site. The feast has been celebrated at least since 985 in Bohemia, and he is best known from the Christmas carol “Good King Wenceslas” (Anglicized spelling of Wenceslaus).

Though it was an Anglican priest, scholar, and hymnist John Mason Neale (24 January 1818 – 6 August 1866), chaplain of Downing College, Cambridge, and member of the Anglo-Catholic “Oxford Movement” and “Society of Saint Margaret” (to both of which both my parents were great adherents) wrote the words to the carol “Good King Wenceslas” which he published published in 1853, the music published in Sweden at least 300 years earlier (and possibly, as noted above, much more ancient still, dating back perhaps to the 13th century).

This unique “Christmas carol” makes no reference in the lyrics to the nativity or, really, to Christ or Christmas at all in its modern, popular form. ”Good King” (i.s. Saint) Wenceslas reigned as King of Bohemia in the 10th century, long before Prague became the second or third city of the Habsburg-Austrian Empire. Good King Wenceslas was a Catholic and was martyred following his assassination by his brother Boleslaw and his supporters, his Saint’s Day is September 28th, and he is the Patron Saint of the Czech Republic. St. Stephen’s feast day was celebrated on 26th December which is why this song is sung as a Christmas carol.

The carol, and legacy of Saint Wenceslaus, owes its popularity to the concept of giving in meaningful ways at Christmastime, especially to the poor, especially by the rich. Whether its mid-Nineteenth Century composition is in any way related to the movement sometimes called “Christian Socialism” is a different topic.

1. Good King Wenceslas look’d out,
On the Feast of Stephen;
When the snow lay round about,
Deep, and crisp, and even:
Brightly shone the moon that night,
Though the frost was cruel,
When a poor man came in sight,
Gath’ring winter fuel.

2. “Hither page and stand by me,
If thou know’st it, telling,
Yonder peasant, who is he?
Where and what his dwelling?”
“Sire, he lives a good league hence.
Underneath the mountain;
Right against the forest fence,
By Saint Agnes’ fountain.”

3. “Bring me flesh, and bring me wine,
Bring me pine-logs hither:
Thou and I will see him dine,
When we bear them thither.”
Page and monarch forth they went,
Forth they went together;
Through the rude winds wild lament,
And the bitter weather.

4. “Sire, the night is darker now,
And the wind blows stronger;
Fails my heart, I know now how,
I can go no longer.”
“Mark my footsteps, good my page;
Tread thou in them boldly;
Thou shalt find the winter’s rage
Freeze thy blood less coldly.”

5. In his master’s steps he trod,
Where the snow lay dinted;
Heat was in the very sod
Which the saint had printed.
Therefore, Christian men, be sure,
Wealth or rank possessing,
Ye who now will bless the poor,
Shall yourselves find blessing.

Alternative last four lines supposedly by author Neale. although I have never heard it sung this way .

Therefore, Christian men rejoice,
Who my lay are hearing,
He who cheers another’s woe
Shall himself find cheering.

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My Mother’s Birthday, October 29: In Thanks for Everything She Taught Me and All She Inspired in Me

Posted on October 29, 2011 by Charles Edward Lincoln III | Leave a comment

What can one say about a birthday that coincides with a day of National Disaster? There were surely children born on Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 1941, and I know of children born on September 11, 2001 (and people who got married that day also). But my mother Alice Eugenie was born in Dallas, Texas, on October 29, which in 1929 was known as “Black Tuesday”. Oddly enough, through the vicissitudes of the family trust funds, stocks and their value have played a large role in her life ever after, but I’m sure that was only coincidence. Because parenthood and family are complex issues in the modern world, I just want to thank my mother for the good things I associate with her in my life, to wish her a Happy Birthday, on the 82nd Anniversary of the Stock Market Crash, and her life:

(1) My mother taught me to pray, and to be proud of doing so. The earliest religious lesson I can recall, other than showing me how to pray at night before bed, was that she taught me to recite the Magnificat, the Song of Mary, Le Chanson de Marie, in both English and French. She taught me that the Magnificat was the essential story of motherhood and its importance in the world. ”My soul doth Magnify the Lord, and my Spirit hath Rejoiced in the Strength of My Salvation. And behold from henceforth, all generations shall call me Blessed.” My mother gave me the 1662 English Book of Common Prayer and made sure I studied it from earliest age onwards. She told me that ours was “the one true Church.” (Her mother, my grandmother Helen, accused my mother of being something of a “Pharisee”—”Churchy”, she said, but today is a day to celebrate the fact that, unlike most people in the modern world, my mother made sure that I had only one religious affiliation in my life and that I stuck to it, and I think of her every time I go to Church, and during at least half the hymns and prayers of every Eucharist, Morning, and Evening Prayer, and Compline whenever they have it—although in my recent life that would be only at the Christ Church Cathedral on Burrard Street in Vancouver in the Archdiocese of the New Westminster). My mother also introduced me to the Prophecies of Isaiah, and taught me the importance of that greatest of all the teachers of the Hebrew Bible, foretelling of the coming of the Messiah.

(2) My mother taught me cultural heritage, especially music, starting with songs about Robin Hood, and an old book with line drawings in which the Ballads of Robin Hood were collected. In regard to Robin Hood, she taught me at a very early age to look to distinguish history from mythology. She also taught me the importance of cultural memory, although she called it “the racial subconscious.” She taught me about Jungian Archetypes and Musical Leitmotives. She encouraged me to sing, and started me on the piano and violin, but sadly I did inherited neither her perfect pitch nor her long and nimble fingers (instead I got my father’s stubby and rather crooked fingers). I am fairly musically talented and aware compared to most, but I was tone-deaf compared to my mother. She tried to teach me to sight sing from sheet music, but this I was never able to do.

(3) In connexion with music, she taught me a love of Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Henry Purcell, Madrigals, Motets, and Richard Wagner, although not necessarily in that order. Now everyone in my family loved Wagner, especially my Aunt Mildred whose old house with high ceilings, chandeliers, and plaster moldings always seemed to echo with old mono-recordings of Lauritz Melchior and Kirsten Flagstad, but my mother and Mildred were extremely close. My mother’s devotion to all things musical was much more intense and academic.

(4) My mother taught me to love books and all things academic, especially maps and poetry (I realize that’s an odd pairing). After the Book of Common Prayer and the Ballads of Robin Hood, the next most important book or series of books I remember her giving me were the Shepherd’s Historical Atlas, the Oxford World Atlas, and several other map collections. In the same vein she introduced me to Ptolemy’s Geography, to ancient Maps and Memories both of Atlantis and of Primordial Chaos, and to Aristotle’s and Plato’s view of the world, and how Saint Augustine of Hippo and Saint Thomas Aquinas helped merged Pagan Philosophy and Christian Faith.

(5) And then she made sure I learned our mythic history, King Arthur and Boadicea, and Caractacus, and made sure that I learned the more conventional Kings of England and to “quote the Fights Historical, from Marathon to Waterloo in order categorical.” I loved to study English history and literature with my mother. It seems our time together on such things was mostly limited to her telling me what to read and giving me books, but she did a lot of that: I had read all of T.S. Eliot from Murder in the Cathedral to J. Alfred Prufrock, the Four Quartets, and the Wasteland by the time I was 11, plus the Cantos of Ezra Pound. My mother took particular care that I know the story of St. Thomas a Becket and why his Martyrdom at Canterbury was so important to the English people. And yes, my mother, together with her father my grandfather, who was normally a fairly distant figure, made sure that I knew all the operettas of Gilbert & Sullivan by memory, pretty much also by the time I was 11 or 12.

(6) I wish I could say that my mother and I had had a great many good times together, but I will just say that one of the best times we had in my life was when she was criticizing and editing my doctoral dissertation: I would send her draft chapters and she would read them and severely comment on my semantics and grammar. She was much harder on me than any member of my actual dissertation committee at Harvard, and for that I will always be eternally grateful. I also remember fondly the beautiful green dress she wore to my graduation—she looked like Queen Elizabeth II, only better.

(7) So on her birthday, I celebrate and give thanks to my mother for all she gave me. I know I am only listing a few of the intellectual things I took from her, my first and greatest teacher. In this little birthday essay I will dwell on nothing but the positive, except to say that many things have intervened, and not all of family life is harmonious. My mother has great faith in the large corporate banking institutions which I have come to despise, and this has been a source of some significant tension between us over the years. Could her love of banks and “corporate trusts” have anything to do with her birthdate? The relationship between character and astrology is in my view pretty much totally mythical, but it is hard to say that the influence of the historical context of our births is not real.

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Posted in History and Civilization, Isaiah, Jungian Archetypes, Plato, Plato's Republic, Uncategorized

Tagged Aristotle, Carl Gustav Jung, Henry Purcell, Madrigals, Motets, Plato, Richard Wagner, Saint Augustine of Hippo, Saint Thomas Aquinas

Somewhere over the Rainbow….

Posted on May 7, 2011 by Charles Edward Lincoln III | Leave a comment

A is for Asgard, B is for Branagh, C is for Completely Cool Multipurpose Modern Myth-remaking Movie!

[and WS is for "Warning---this essay may contain mild-to-serious Spoilers for those who have not yet seen the movie....read at your own risk!"]

Kenneth Branagh, Natalie Portman, and Anthony Hopkins are names I have frankly never associated with Richard Wagner, Dorothy Gale, and James Morris, much less with Snorri Sturluson, Isolde, and Wotan or Odin, but the movie “Thor” brings them all together in my mind and life experience at least. I confess I had read some bad pre-release critiques of “Thor” based on charges of infidelity to myth, but they were all wrong, ALL totally wrong, and I haven’t been so completely taken by any other movie this year. In fact, this may well be the best myth-recasting movie in a very long time, although I was a great fan of Tim Burton’s “Alice” last year. I can hardly express my enthusiasm, having just returned from the 10:10 AMC showing on Third & Arizona in Santa Monica, 90401, except to say that I was just as pleased, satisfied, and generally exhilerated by this production as I was maddened and infuriated by “Red Riding Hood” when it was released on March 11 of this year. THAT movie was a poorly acted, poorly scripted modernistic pseudo-psychobabbling disgrace and insult to Die Bruder Grimm and Charles Perrault as anything could possibly be.

It is actually just possible that Kenneth Branagh’s movie will in fact endure alongside Sturluson and Wagner in preserving the eternal memory of the Old Norse and High Germanic Pagan religious iconic traditions, ihrer Gotter und Gesetz, but there are many more comparisons to be made.

Natalie Portman’s character (Jane Foster) is quite a unique young lady: a brave sexy scientist who really does get it all pretty much right, but doesn’t get her man. (Reviewers have already compared “Thor” to “Spiderman“.) Perhaps Jane’s a bit of projection of Natalie’s own self-image—crossed with her Dad maybe?—but I see a much more important comparison to be made between Jane Foster and Dorothy Gale—in that they both dreamt of crossing over the rainbow. Dorothy Gale made the trip for the first time by accident in The Wizard of Oz though in later books by L. Frank Baum she managed to make the trip pretty directly and intentionally. Jane Foster doesn’t make the trip at all although the man of her dreams does, in the form of Thor (Chris Hemsworth—whose character is comparable to no other superhero so much as Superman—especially since he can magically fly without gadgetry of any kind—and the Asgard scenes all have a certain Planet Krypton feel to them). But Jane Foster, like Dorothy Gale, is brave, honorable, loyal and unafraid, and her job is to bridge worlds which otherwise have but scant awareness of each other’s existence.

Dorothy Gale herself was not, of course, the first heroic female transdimensional traveler—appearing for her first edition in 1900, she came 35 years after her British Counterpart Alice made her debut in London on July 4, 1865, otherwise for the most part a sad ex-Colonial Independence day for British sympathizers of the Confederacy including HM Queen Victoria and the then Lord Chancellor & Later PM Benjamin Disraeli.

The degree to which science fiction presaged physics in speculations about inter-dimensional travel is to me one of the extraordinary features of 19th century writing and imagination. Even in Richard Wagner’s “Der Ring des Niebelungen” the portrayal of jouneys between the middle of the Rhein and Niebelheim, Valhalla and Niebelheim in Das Rheingold and Brunhilde’s appearance to Siegmund in Die Walkure are eerily like wormholes in the space-time continuum of 20th century (and current) science fiction. In fact, once in Seattle and on another occasion in Bayreuth, stage construction provided that Brunhilde actually peered at Siegmund through a portal and obviously shimmers from another dimension as she grimly but solemnly announces to him, “Nur Todgeweihten taugt mein angblick. Wer mich erchaut scheidet von Lebens-Licht. ” The use of the Rainbow Bridge as Thor’s primary means of interdimensional travel is celebrated in Wagner’s Das Rheingold when Donner (“Thunder”—the Old High Germanic name for Norse Thor/Anglo-Saxon Thur) calls forth the Rainbow Bridge so that the Gods can enter Valhalla at last. This in turn rests largely on the description of the Bifrost/Rainbow Bridge in Sturluson (12th-13th Century Lawspeaker and historian of the Icelandic Althing/Parliament), but the connection with Donner/Thor appears to be Wagner’s invention and Branagh’s conscious continuation, because the only ancient connection between the Bridge and the God of Thunder appears in the Grimnismal (Poetic Edda), where it is specified that Thor specifically wades through the river waters because he cannot take the dryer path. (One of the historical quibbles widely circulated pre-release was that Heimdall in the movie is played by an elegant British-born fellow of African descent, Idris Elba, while in all Norse and Germanic illustrations Heimdall or Heidallr is pictured as typical blonde of identical ethnicity to Thor in the movie—while I thought it sounded like amusing modernist “affirmative action” type tokenism before I saw Branagh’s production—in the context of this movie it works out perfectly, because Heimdall, as a guardian, belongs neither to the race of the Gods nor to the Frost Giants, but is a gatekeepr between worlds—I can only applaud the dramatic effect of “Schwarz Heimdall”. Truthfully—black and white color symbolism play a major role in Norse Sagas—”black”, “swarz” or “kol” all being slave names—reminding me always of the inverse irony that the Gods of Subsaharan Africa are always White-skinned—possibly more like “Ghostly White” than Caucasian White, but the parallel structural use of terms is nonetheless significant in comparative mythological terms—and, quite as a legal and jurisprudential side-bar, totally discredits and disproves the Kenneth B. & Mamie Clark “black-white” doll preferences ignorantly cited by Supreme Court Justices in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) as a reason for forcing school desegregation—a policy which arguably did more to destroy the legitimate ways, means, and purposes of education in the United States than any other single policy in history, and in the process probably destroyed the self-esteem of millions of children, black-and-white, as schools used for a quarter century as political footballs and little else rather than, well, for example, education.*

But to return to Thor, the plainest reason Heimdall can be dramatically effective because rather than in spite of the fact that he is played by a stern and very well-spoken Anglo-African actor is because Branagh has taken Ancient Myth and recast it—and done so brilliantly, even down to the level of selecting Galisteo New Mexico as the site for some of the wonderful desert scenes—just a half an hour south of Santa Fe and an hour east of Algodones where I had some fairly mystical experiences of my own just month before last as noted elsewhere on this blog. New Mexico, “Land of Enchantment”, U.S. home address for D.H. Lawrence, legends of Roswell, the birthplace of the Atom Bomb, home of the Spanish Penitentes as well as large populations of Pueblo, Apache, and Navaho nations of Native Americans, and many of the finest Ancient Ruins north of Mexico, is just an inherently magical, mystical place, which just naturally attracts women like Jane Foster. These**** are people who, as much as Aldous Huxley (New Mexico was a “Savage Preserve” in Brave New World where people still worshipped both Jesus and Buddha and read both the Bible and Shakespeare) Fox William Mulder, Dana Katherine Scully, and myself are intrigued by the borderlines and gradations between science, religion, science-fiction, and mythology. There is in fact no setting in the United States better for such cross-fertilization—New Orleans may be great for primitive culture, religion, magic, and romance, while Berkeley, Cambridge, and Chicago may be better for the science-magic interface, but nowhere in the world combines all three together with multiculturalism with a 400-1000 year pedigree (a thousand years ago the “Athabaskan Bastards caused the Great Pueblo Fall” introducing New Mexico’s first level of multicultural complexity with the arrival of the Apache and Navaho, then came the Spanish, isolated even from Mexico by distance, then the Americans from St. Louis on the Santa Fe Trail, John C. Fremont, Stephen W. Kearny, then Jean-Baptiste Lamy, Willa Cather, Mabel Dodge, D.H. Lawrence, Georgia O’Keefe….and now pretty much everybody from everywhere….there is even a school in Las Vegas, New Mexico, with the [to me quite totally horrifying] name “Armand Hammar-Global World College, USA” which my son Charlie visited in 2008 and narrowly avoided attending—it had posters of communist heroes all over the walls of every room and I got the feeling school song was the Internationale).

I keep digressing, but to return again to Thor, as a recasting, restatement of myth, I have come to think that such recasting in modern culture is the principal importance of my own education in Anthropology—Anthropology is a large part of modern mythology and religion—and oddly enough it has been ever since the mid-19th century. Evolution and Darwinism started reshaping socio-cultrual thinking even before evolution or Darwinism were common words, because Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote of the moral superiority of Noble Savages (nearly two hundred years before Margaret Meade even visited Samoa) and Thomas Hobbes of Malmsbury wrote about the “state of nature” and other stages of what we would now call cultural or political evolution over a hundred and twenty years before Thomas Malthus wrote his Essay on Population in 1798 (although the “State of Nature” as a phrase relating to legal evolution can be traced even another five hundred years back to St. Thomas Aquinas De Veritate in 1256-59).

I first became fascinated with the modern process of recasting ancient mythology in connection with the Disney movie The Lion King and then with several Television series the X-Files and Buffy-the-Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly/Serenity and Charmed, all of which were 1990s phenemona spilling over past Y2K…and now the direct antecedents and ancestors of Lost, True Blood among other TV series and now, I think it is safe to say, Thor. The X-Files had several episodes which drew on recent archaeological discoveries about cannibalism at Chaco Canyon, and others which drew on Nazi-racial “scientific” mythology***, but there was little if any plot continuity between the paranormal phenomena covered in the X-Files, whereas Thor really only drew on two strands: Ancient Norse/Germanic Myth and Modern Science (with a few marvelous hat tips to “Men-in-Black” and other partly comical sci-fi movies).

In 2004 I gave a paper at the First Slayage Conference on Buffy-the-Vampire Slayer in Nashville entitled, “Buffy’s Golden Bough.” In that lecture/essay I focused on the use of anthropological sources in each series, Buffy, Angel and the X-Files. At later Slayage and related conferences I compared Whedon’s use, rearrangement, and restructuring of mythological elements and motifs with Richard Wagner’s. The tradition of reinventing Classical or Ancient mythology with quasi-modern mystery and musical theatre really develops in a continuous line from Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte to Wagnerian operas to the (movie) Wizard of Oz on to Buffy and especially “Once More with Feeling” (the musical episode from BtVS season six). In common with Oz and Buffy, The Magic Flute has a “lite” storyline and script with fairly hilarious and unique characters—I played Papageno, Der Vogelfänger, more than once in College—mixed with some pop-culture appreciation of mystery in the service of a good and ethically wholesome life—wonderfully memorable music. By mere coincidence I have been relistening to Mozart’s Zauberflöte on my card CD recently, and at each first appearance of Die Königin der Nacht, I picture Glenda the Good Witch of the North, played by Mary William “Billie” Burke in the 1939 production. Glenda and the Queen of the Night are in fact almost entirely interchangeable, structurally identical roles and parts—they are essentially free radicals or “catalysts” for other action on the part of the main characters. Thor’s Goddess Fricka (or Frigga) is quite as beautiful as Bille Burke, but nowhere nearly as well developed as Wagner’s Fricka in Rheingold and Die Walkure, nor is her relationship with the King of the Gods anywhere nearly so complex or important in the story line—this is too bad… but

Wagnerian operas are by no means “lite” by storyline or mood, and the “moral” or ethical points are sufficiently complex as to have been the subject of continuous popular and academic debate and scholarly writings from W. Friedrich Nietzsche to George Bernard Shaw to Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Adolph Hitler to the dozens of modern authors including dilettantes and university specialists up through present time. Wagnerian Opera and the movie Thor have in common focus on Wotan/Odin and those deities most closely associated with him in the Nordic/Germanic Pagan oikumene—”uns ist in alten mären, wunders viel gezeit….“. Thor lacks any memorable or particularly unique music, but as a journey of exploration and discovery by moderns in a mysterious world, it is much closer to Magic Flute, the Wizard of Oz, and Buffy/Angel than it is to Wagner. Oddly enough—the Wagnerian Ring des Niebelungen, Buffy/Angel, and the Lion King can be grouped together as creating entirely new mythological universes, as could Clive Staples’ Narnia. But the Oz story underwent one major and radical transformation between Frank Baum’s 1900 book and the 1939 movie with Judy Garland: In the book, and all of Frank Baum’s later Oz books—the reader was demanded to suspend disbelief completely and enter into the Magical Land of Oz as a real universe parallel to our own—but in the movie—fearing (in 1939) the cultural threat and geopolitical consequences of ”sermons from mystical Germans who preach from ten til four”, all mystery was cut out by the Kansas framing story: Dorothy Gale just dreamt it all owing to a head injury based on her own life. Joss Whedon experimented with this “world of illusion” trope in one episode only, Buffy sixth season “Normal Again.” The movie Thor handles the problem by allowing Thor himself to sever the ties between earth and Asgard when he destroys the Rainbow Bridge to prevent Loki from initiating Ragnarok, but Jane Foster keeps on with her research, searching for her man….

But unlike Richard Wagner and Kenneth Branagh in Thor, Joss Whedon was culturally ecclectic. Much in the manner of Sir James G. Frazer’s original 12 volume Golden Bough, Joss Whedon, the creator/director/producer/ sometime writer of Buffy, Angel, and Firefly/Serenity goes around the world collecting stories which fit into a single pattern. For Frazer, it was the pattern of the dying king, murdered in his full youthful vigor to preserve or “save” the life of the whole world. In other words, Frazer set out to show, and he fairly effectively showed, that the story of Jesus of Nazareth was just the most developed and successfully “marketed” story of its kind in the world, and by no means a unique revelation. (Whether universal recurrence in different guises makes a religion more or less valid is a different story).

As weekly settings for his universe filled with “AntiChrist” Vampires, Joss Whedon was a master of incorporating and restating whole traditions of myth and religious symbolism/ethical thought into his work. Almost totally contrary to Frazer’s somewhat anti-Christian emphasis on ritual and mythic elements of narrative, however, Whedon’s effort is to compare ancient or “non-Western” religions to Christianity favorably on grounds of ethics and morality.

The nature of the “Vampire” mythology as a kind of inverse Christianity has been apparent since the 18th century—Vampires are inverse Christians (a Los Angeles Jewish Monthly Magazine for December of 2009 included a cover article “Why Jews aren’t Vampires” even though they shun the cross and have been libeled as child-murderers and practitioners of sacrifice generally). The core “Maundy Thursday” ritual of Christianity is the Great Thanksgiving, the Holy Eucharist by which Christians drink the blood and eat the flesh of Jesus Christ—albeit most modern believers would say this is a memorial, rather than an actual magical transubstantiation. According to Christ’s words at the last supper, this ritual is part of keeping Jesus himself alive in all his followers. Vampirism is exactly the opposite—Vampire suck on human blood and flesh to destroy human life and make themselves (the vampires) more Godlike—they are “antiChrists” in the truest senses of the word—they do the opposite of give their own life and flesh to save the rest of the world. Some writers, such as Elizabeth Miller, have posited that Vampiristic mythology became popular contemporaneously with Darwinism in the 19th century. The feasting in Thor is all quite normal (lol!) if the Gods are sometimes portrayed as rather voracious and insatiable. But there are no direct traces of Christian ritual in Thor, while there were many in both Buffy and Angel. (Not so much in Firefly/Serenity where salvation is mostly a matter of self-help, preferably with guns and knives skillfully used by both men and women—which is another common theme with Thor to be sure).

Whedon’s works focus on the importance of the clear-thinking conscience, redemption generally, the redemptive power of family and love in particular, the salvation of sinners, the need for forgiveness of all sins and crimes, no matter how grave, and the definition of the soul as the key to all life and immortality, and he does all this despite his self-proclaimed status as an atheist. There are many strong sub-themes including the soul-endangering evils of mind-altering drugs and social engineering, the importance of individual freedom, and the oppressive corruption of government and the complicity of the all-but-blind middle class in its maintenance.**

Whedon has through all these themes made his productions among the most deeply Christian/spiritual productions ever to appear on television—albeit his Christianity was about as orthodox as Richard Wagner’s, and similarly mixed with Buddhism and Pagan animism. Like the Golden Bough, to learn and dissect Whedon’s corpus of sources is to learn comparative mythology from specific references to the Prophecies of Isaiah concerning the coming of Christ (“the annointed one”) as a child to lead to the peaceable kingdom, this starting in BtVS Season One along with a multifaceted and series-long treatment of modern and ancient witchcraft, to Grimms’ Hansel & Gretel, back to the Biblical Demon Moloch, and then to the Egyptian resurrection cult of Osiris and even then to Temple Prostitution in Mesopotamia (Inanna = Inara Serra, a beautiful companion/courtesan played by Morena Bacarin in the Firefly Serenity Series—Inara is portrayed as significantly more honorable, educated, and dignified than ALMOST anyone else in the series), and even then to the more recent mythology of Dracula and Vampires (Vrykolakia) in Eastern Europe. While earlier series such as Dr. Who made occasional use of mythology, Whedon’s series used more anthropological sources than any other single corpus except the X-Files. What unites Whedon’s work with, for example, The Lion King more than the X-Files is the internal continuity of the storyline and the presence of very strong structural organizing principles (e.g. Dumezilian trifunctionalism and Levi-Straussian dualism). X-Files was more ecclectic, much less focused on developing season-long story lines, and utterly untroubled by structural consistency between episodes and series (except that Mulder always “wanted to believe”, more mystical, and basically right, while Scully was always skeptical, more cautiously scientific, and more often than not, dead wrong—but she never learned her lessons from episode to episode…some sort of short or long term memory loss or stubborn willfulness was utterly inconsistent with her vast store of medical and scientific knowledge….). Jane Foster in Thor is more of an “I want to believe” fusion of Mulder and Scully, pretty much unparalleled in the Buffyverse or “Whedonian World.”

Much like the Whedonian World, especially as analyzed Rhonda Wilcox’ masterful treatment of Whedon’s productions in her book Why Buffy Matters: the art of BtVS (October 13, 2005), Thor has a strong undertone of Christian values—self-sacrifice and forgiveness, fatherly redemption, even as it revitalizes the Gods of the Norse who, frankly, had few or none of these values (at least Thor didn’t—Wotan/Odin in fact once “hanged himself for nine days on a windy tree, a sacrifice of himself to himself”…..but it’s not clear that he did so to save the rest of the world from sin or anything like that). Anthony Hopkins was in fact utterly unrecognizable as Anthony Hopkins with his beard and eye patch—he looked more like the Metropolitan Opera’s perennial Wotan James Morris than anyone else, but his performance and delivery were flawless (no actual Wagnerian music was used in the movie—I think this is slightly unfortunate, but possibly essential to sell to a mass culture audience, sadly, these days).

When discussing the interface between Christianity and science-fiction, especially interdimensional travel, it is necessary at least to mention C.S. Lewis’ Seven Book Narnia collection—”doors to the world of men, I have heard of such things”, said Jadis, the White Queen of Narnia, on hearing about the Pevensie boys and girls coming in through the wardrobe made of the tree that grew from the Sorcerers’ rings that led once Molly and Digory past the world between worlds through one particularly ill-fated puddle to the dead world of Charn…..from which Jadis came with Digory to Narnia….in the beginning. The Christian metaphors in Lewis’ Narnia seem clunky and heavy-handed to me, not that they aren’t sometimes wonderful—like Aslan’s self-sacrifice to save Edmund and his subsequent resurrection by way of “a deeper magic than even the White witch knows”—but in Whedon, and in Thor, the subtlety and personal connections inherent in the various self-sacrificial decisions make the episodes of redemption or forgiveness and reconciliation meaningful—Thor is about a prodigal son who comes back to his father (cf. Gospel of Luke)…..and loses the mortal love of his life in the process…. but there is nothing forced or strained about it—it’s woven deftly into the plot and seems only right and good—except for the treatment of the Thunder God’s darker brother Loki….. and in fact

If I were to have any gripe with the movie at all it would be the character and treatment of Loki—never ever before identified as one of Wotan’s children in any source, adoptive or otherwise (but generally known as the son of the Giant Farbauti and Giantess Laufe, even to the point of being called Loki Laufeyarson in some sources). Wagner portrayed Loki/Loge as a close and necessary companion and ally of Odin/Wotan and the Old English three-part incantation about offerings recorded in rural East Anglia as late as the early 19th century, “One for God and One for Wod’ and One for Lok‘” (quoted by Sir James G. Frazer, Georges Dumezil, Alfred Hocart, and so many others) also shows a special association between these divine names. The movie shows nothing of Loki’s identity as Altdeutsche Feuergott Agnisbruder (the German Fire God and brother of [Hindu] Agni = [Italic/Latin] Ignis), and only very briefly makes reference to his identity as a master of magic.

In suggesting that there is something odd about Loki’s “giant” ancestry, the movie ignores the direct parallel between the heritage of the Germanic Gods as children of Giants and the Greek God’s status as children of the Titans. This makes the racially significant emphasis of Loki’s identity in the movie Thor all the more critical to analyze. Because Thor is Odin’s blonde true son—and boy do they EVER look alike (right down to their beards and hair style), while Loki turns out to be an “adopted” brown haired son. It is not that the Frost Giants are uniformly portrayed as brunette so much as Green*****. No, it is more because the two “children” of Odin are paired and opposed both as children and adults on the basis of their hair color and complexion—Light and Dark. The movie’s pairing of “Fair Haired” Jane Foster and Dark Darcy (my longest-term college girlfriend was a “Black Irish” brunette named D’Arcy) in New Mexico cannot be coincidental to the opposed pairing of Dark Loki and Blond Thor. Joss Whedon’s series Buffy the Vampire Slayer also featured a “light dark” pair of slayers in the form of Buffy Summers, the eponymous heroine, who first (in a couple of episodes in Season II) faces a Creole Jamaican slayer named Kendra (called a “Tragic Mulatta” by at least one reviewer, namely Lynne Edwards, who also presented this concept at the First Slayage Conference in Nashville, 2004). After Kendra’s truly tragic and untimely death, Whedon brought forth the unforgettable character Faith Lahane, a simply smolderingly sexy brunette who was “bad girl” to all of Buffy’s somewhat priggish/prudish traits of inherited “Middle Class Morality.” Faith hailed from (one assumes) some lower class Irish sector of South Boston—but the correlation between class and color is utterly unmistakable in both Thor and BtVS: Blondes don’t just have more fun (Jane Foster and Thor fell in love—Darcy and Loki remain single), they are actually better, indeed substantially people or Gods—I should not that so much of my hair as has neither fallen out nor turned grey, which isn’t all that much—is and has been since I was 7- or 8 moderate mousy brown—neither distinctively light nor dark)….

If there were ever any objections to the character of Heimdall because he was a black and Anglo-African of subsaharan negroid origins, there could be even more serious objections to the character-identity and story of Loki as a warning about the failure of interracial adoptions. Loki is the only character in this movie with self-esteem problems and they all relate to his origins, and relatively dark complexion compared to the majority of the Asgard deities. He is maladjusted and insecure but not nearly so sympathetic as, for example, Othello the Moor. It doesn’t ruin the plot by a long shot, but it’s the weakest link in the whole scheme I would say. The original Norse God Loki, and even Richard Wagner’s Loki, as God of Fire, was a trickster, a shape-shifter, a transexual (no, not a trannie, just a shape shifter who could even give birth to eight legged horses while shape-shifting as a mare) and on the whole much more interesting than Thor‘s Loki—who’s a bit one dimensional—or at least I didn’t pick up more than one dimension, but I’ve already determined I’ll go see the movie several times.

I think it was a marvelous touch that several Norse Icons like the World Tree Yigdrassil and I believe even (originally) Loki’s offspring the eight legged horse Sleipnir who was to bring on Ragnarok (Armageddon, the last battle, aka Gotterdaemerung), as well as Thor’s hammar and Wotan/Odin’s law spear, were all very subtly slipped in.

Overall, like Buffy, Angel, Firefly/Serenity and Charmed (and even like Dr. Who, the Wizard of Oz and Alice), Thor mixes fairly outstanding verbal humor with intense and fast-paced action and a well-edited script (unlike this totally unedited stream-of-consciousness review essay).

*Black Children, White Preference: Brown v. Board, the Doll Tests, and the Politics of Self-Esteem American Quarterly – Volume 61, Number 2, June 2009, pp. 299-332 The Johns Hopkins University Press ABSTRACT: In Brown v. Board of Education the Supreme Court cited psychologist Kenneth B. Clark for evidence that segregation damaged black children’s self-esteem and hampered their ability to learn. Clark and his wife Mamie had tested black children’s “racial preference” by asking them to choose between black dolls and white dolls, interpreting the choice of white dolls as evidence of damaged self-esteem. After Brown, the Clarks’ studies set the parameters for research on racial identity, self-esteem, and child development—even though they were discredited on methodological and statistical grounds in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Subsequent research showed that the doll tests do not measure self-esteem and, further, that African American children do not have low self-esteem. Nonetheless, social science remains invested in the conception of proper racial identification. The doll tests’ contested history suggests that we need to replace this conception with a model of adaptive, negotiated, and hybrid racial identification.

**: Interestingly, in ancient Norse Mythology, as an aside—Heimdall was said to be the creator of social classes—but in Whedon, it is all a matter of freedom of thought and the dangers of selling one’s soul in exchange therefor)

***: Despite several potential racial themes, there were no overt or even covert or indirect references to Naziism in Thor at all, except for possibly two “twisted crosses”—these were soft-s-shaped serpents crossing and so perhaps not even intended as such, but the architectural layout of the SHIELD (SHIELD = “Men in Black”) field laboratory built around Thor’s hammer (misidentified by SHIELD scientists as a satellite but sent to earth by All Father Odin/Wotan as an afterthought to banishing his son Thor Odinsson). The compound looked to me from a brief side aerial view to have the elements of a two intertwined s-shaped snakes, possibly a circumscribed twisted cross. But then at the very end, in a plug for some of Thor’s coming reappearance in the Avengers, there was a box which contained what was described as a place of confluence of myth, legend, and history—an great power source—in fact a source of “UNLIMITED POWER”, and it clearly appears to be electricity charging in a very distinctly double interlocking S-shaped hackenkreuz. I really don’t think there’s any mistaking the serpentine Swastika as this source of “Unlimited Power”—and apparently Loki is going to play a major role in the next movie in trying to exploit this source. Infinite, unlimited power described by or emanating from a Twisted Cross—what a concept! I had had doubts when I first saw this last scene on opening night but sure to my prediction/threat in the first edition of this review essay, I did in fact follow up on all of this by seeing this movie four times on its first four days in Santa Monica.

**** exemplum gratia: Shelley Sue Thomson (see e.g. elsewhere on this blog: http://charleslincoln3.wordpress.com/2008/08/23/for-jon-roland-you-hypocrite-lecteur-mon-semblable-mon-frere-and-for-shelley-sue-thomson-for-whom-i-won-a-fast-and-speedy-victory-taking-her-from-near-homeless-slums-to-a-nearly-palatial/#comments. But this is just to name a one out of thousands of New Age/NeoPagan types, who congregate all over North Central New Mexico especially around Albuquerque, Los Alamos, Galisteo, Roswell, Santa Fe, Las Vegas, and Pecos).

{*****For whatever mysterious reason, the Frost Giants in fact look rather like Greenskinned Lorne/Krevlornswath of the Deathwok Clan in Joss Whedon’s “Angel” (Loki’s Green-skinned “Father” Laufe (a purposeful sexual misidentification?) even resembles the late Andy Hallett (1975-2009) in facial features and speech.}

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Posted in Freudian Dream Analysis, Gospel of Luke, Isaiah, Movies & Philosophy, Psychology and Manipulation, Uncategorized

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Lenten Reflections on Deception or Murder: which is the Highest (most heinous, offensive, injurious) Crime known to Man?

Posted on April 3, 2011 by Charles Edward Lincoln III | 4 Comments

If the primary focus of my legal and political life concerns the enhancement and preservation individual freedom from governmental control and the norms of technocratic/corporate society, my primary philosophical concern is to expand and deepen my own understanding, and I would hope, the understanding of others, of the nature and dimensions of truth*.

Did anyone else ever try to give up lying or “judging unfairly” for Lent? (Most people might call the latter “being mean” or “bullying”). It’s so much easier to give up coffee or tea or lemonade. Most ordinary humans, if we can “to our own selves be true”, would find it difficult to go through a single day without abstracting, oversimplifying, recharacterizing, or otherwise restructuring the truth—in other words, without lying about anything.

Back during the middle-to-last years of the George W. Bush Administration, a fairly popular bumper-sticker read, “Nobody died when Clinton lied.” Whether you believe George W. lied only about “Weapons of Mass Destruction” as chief among the reasons for invading Iraq, or whether you believe he lied about 9/11 and everything from the counting of the Florida ballots in 2000 through his initiation of the Bank Bailout after the election in 2008, George W. Bush undoubtedly told some devastatingly fatal lies. In that regard, Bush stands in fairly good company. Deception and trickery of various sorts lay at the roots of the Franco-Prussian War, the Spanish American War, the U.S. entry into World War I, and the U.S. entry into World War II. Hitlers’ preposterous lies concerning “Polish aggression” as a cause for the Nazi invasion in September 1939 are legendary, as was the peculiarly deceptive nature of the Von Ribbentrop-Molotov (aka “Stalin-Hitler”) pact partitioning Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union. These were lies that killed millions. By contrast the uncountable deaths of Afghan and Iraqi civilians are by no one estimated to exceed one single million (by very much) since 2003. So lies lead to death, but war and murder and the “sacrifice” of young healthy men and women as warriors constitutes a huge part of human history. The meaning of death is fairly obvious, except of course in extraordinary cases like Karen Ann Quinlan and Terry Schiavo, where the correlation between physical health and brain death has created a modern moral crisis in rare instances with population-wide implications (especially for the ever increasing population of elderly citizens). The meaning of “truth” is much murkier, and much harder to tie down, or make clear to anyone. In the courtroom context, “truth” is whatever a skillful lawyer can use rhetoric to convince 12 jurors to believe and vote for. In the scientific realm, “peer review” of articles largely determines truth and credibility—and under “Daubert” this same standard invades and has vast consequences in the legal context in an era where no serious litigation takes place without expert witnesses. In the early 17th century a “peer review” panel of scholars belonging to the Office of the Holy Inquisition in Rome threatened Galileo with the most severe of penalties if he did not recant, and yet he is reputed to have muttered under his breath “e pur si muove.” We now believe we know that Galileo had the higher claim to truth, even though he was forced to recant or suffer the same penalty that met a young maiden named Jean d’Arc when she refused to deny that her visions were true, and refused to affirm that they were the product of the Devil.

Revealing the truth, or stating an unpopular truth, then, can lead to death as certainly as lying or dissembling. John Brown believed he waged a private war for the truth when he set Kansas on fire and then tried to seize the U.S. Armory at Harper’s Ferry. Once John Brown’s body was a-moulding in the grave, his dream of a bloody civil war which would free the slaves was realized, and his role in starting that war is not to be underestimated. But is it historically true that the war of 1861-65 freed the slaves? Or did the majority of the Black African population of America remain in de facto slavery through 1917 and the American entry into World War I? Or even until 1942 and the American entry into World War II? Or even until the Civil Rights Acts of 1948-1964 outlawed, successively, lynchings (1948) and discrimination in the facilities of interstate commerce (1964)? What is the truth about the wars that redefined America and the world while slaughtering millions? Was World War II really (in Studs Turkel’s words) the one really “Good War?”

As Japan smolders today in radioactive fallout and the threat of nuclear holocaust due to its dependence on nuclear power, one has to wonder how the Japanese people did not learn the “truth” about the destructive nature of the split atom from their uniquely fatal “true” experiences in August 1945. I would have imagined that Japan would have been the least enthusiastic consumer of nuclear energy. But oblivion born of political memory and economic prosperity change the perception of “truth” almost as much as intentional lies and misrepresentations.

What really happened on 9/11/01 between Boston Logan, Lower Manhattan, the Pentagon, and Pennsylvania? How many skyscraper-towers fell in New York City due to airplane crashes and associated fires on that day of infamy? 3? 2? none? There are those alive today who believe each of those answers. I happen to be one who believes the latter. But that is because I so firmly agree with the motto, “When Clinton lied, no one died.” (But when Bush lied, the world fried.) Socrates is said to have corrupted the youth of Greece by advocating his own peculiar dissection of the truth. Was he killed by fear of the truth or by a genuine belief that his methods and works were dangerous? Or was he just killed by the Beastly Babbity Bourgeois Bores of post-Periclean Athens?

Philosophy fairly clearly teaches us that on one level, at least, we all have to recognize that any absolute definition of truth is destined to be a lie, or at the very least to generate lies and deception. One on optimistic level, as I look at the hills around Santa Fe from my fifth floor balcony at La Fonda, the blue sky is only slightly hazy at the horizon and the hills or low mountains to the northeast, behind St. Francis’ Cathedral, have residual patches of snow, while those to the southwest of town do not. It is a beautiful Spring day in one of the best and finest spots in North America. What is “true” about this statement? What is true about what I see? The sun is not in my eye but clearly illuminates a town which has grown at least 300% since I first visited here here as a child. There is not a cloud in the sky above, and only a few very low clouds hovering above the sky up and around. The leaves on the trees are either just nascent buds or not out at all. Most tree branches are barren, although again even from this low altitude (5th Floor) vantage point there is a difference between the north and the south looking views (more barren branches in the north, more just barely growing leaves on the south.

Is any of this true? Is any of this real? It so seems to me, and I doubt that many people (if any) would argue with my general characterization of the sky. But then I look at St. Francis’ Cathedral, and the rather grotesquely purple-draped crucifix planted in front of it (purple for Lent). I am not R.C. but have a great appreciation for the majesty and role of the Christian Church in the West. I grew up an Episcopalian—basically of an “Anglo-Catholic lite” variety. In my Sunday school days we argued over such things as why glaciers and the ice ages weren’t mentioned in the Bible while “Noah’s Flood” was, and what would happen to the English Church if England (all or part) were ever again covered with glacial ice as it most certainly was less than 15,000 years ago, and what would happen to the Freedom Trail in Boston if New England were glaciated again? In short, my religious upbringing did not disallow the scientific view of the world, of evolution, and of man’s animal origins and nature.

I look at St. Francis’ Cathedral and the purple draped crucifix standing out in front again. What is true and what is false? What is real and what is fantasy? And above all, which is the greater crime: deception or murder?

In the United States today, no one is ever executed for fraud, although life sentences are routinely meted out—(I for one have never understood why life in prison is an improvement over death; I have spent a lifetime total of 60 days in Federal Custody and rather than stay longer I would choose death any day). In a German movie from the early 1990s, Schrechklische Maedschen, (“Nasty girl”) an ironic twist was when a distinguished citizen of the town, reputed to have been in the underground resistance during World War II, was revealed to have been not only not a resister but an enthusiastic Nazi who arranged to have an itinerant Jewish salesman tried and hanged as a swindler; in the context of the movie, this was portrayed as one of the great abuses of Nazi sympathizers on the less than epic, mundane, local level. The Common Law of England, and the Civil Law of Europe, did not always forbid execution for swindling or ordinary commercial fraud (in fact most “felonies” were originally hanging offenses, including for example horse thievery). Note at sidebar: if capital punishment were allowed for fraud today it seems certain that the entire executive corps of Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, would all be eligible to be twisting slowly in the breeze, and most mortgage-lending banks, investment, financial service companies would be entirely without upper level employees of any kind and very few middle level employees.

And yet I digress. There was a time in England, in the 18th Century, when pickpockets were hanged when caught picking pockets. And where in all of England were there ever more pickpockets in operations than at public hangings by Newgate prison, including the public hangings of pickpockets. So stealing was bad and justified state-sanctioned murder. Hmmm….

Today, possibly under the influence of of Karl Marx, added to a substrate laid by Jesus Christ, we do not think that theft is as bad as murder, and crimes such as led to stonings in Jesus’ time (such as adultery), are now capital only in Iran and a few adjacent countries depending on how the wind is blowing, apparently, although Saudi Arabia has executed its own princesses for sexual crimes in the modern (even the Reagan) era.

The crucifix draped in translucent purple in fron of St. Francis’ Cathedral is haunting me still. Royal purple is not translucent. The purple of mourning is not translucent. A crucifix draped in translucent purple gauze is almost as tacky as the plastic BVMs (“Blessed Virgin Mary”s) that were once all so common on the lawns in LMC immigrant neighborhoods back East.

And yet the reality of the purple crucifix is that we are in Lent, one week past the Annunciation of the Coming of Christ by the Angel Gabriel to a certain unwed (and probably rather ethnic-looking) mother named Mary took place (the Annunciation, celebrated on March 25 or the nearest Sunday of each year, also serves to warn the world that only 9 months (270 days, of shopping time remain until Christmas….). Lent is the time (40 days and 40 nights) in which we are instructed to remember that Christ died for our sins…. One perfect and complete sacrifice for the sins of the Whole World…..

Lent in relation to Easter appears to have originated in Egypt sometime in the late 3rd or early 4th centuries A.D., but it is clearly conceptually connected to the many 40 day periods of retreat or fasting mentioned in the Old Testament/ Hebrew Bible.

One possibility is that Lent originated in a 40 day period in which the women of Israel wept for Tammuz…. This event, commemorated in one of the most enigmatic lines in the entire Hebrew Bible, is recorded in Ezekiel 8:14: “Then he brought me to the door of the gate of the LORD’S house which was toward the north; and, behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz.”

The author of Ezekiel refers to this sight as an “abomination” but Tammuz (Sumerian Dumuzi), was the lover of Ishtar/Inanna, the “Adonis” of the Fertile Crescent, who died each year and was reborn…. It is hard to know just how “deep” into the Cult of the Sacred Marriage of Inanna and Dumuzi the women of Israel described by Ezekiel might have been. The “ordinary” priestesses of Inanna were in fact Temple “prostitutes”, a topic of greatest interest to modern scholarship, as well as to the Greek Historian Herodotus in describing the farthest “West” of the Near Eastern Temples ever recorded, found in Cypress. The Sumerian word Dumu from which Dumuzi is derived may have meant something about the regenerative vegetative turgidity—Dumu—the sap which flows in the reeds that grow beside the life-giving Euphrates. (The sap in the reeds gives rise to another farther flung comparison—of the Mesoamerican Tollan and the exile of “le Roi Ivre” (the Drunken King) aka the God Quetzalcoatl from the “Land of Reeds” after sexually incestuous indiscretion with the God’s sister were punished by rival deity Tezcatlipoca… but that is another essay for another day). The Bible contains more evidence of Temple prostitution associated with either of the Goddesses Asherah or Astarte in Ancient Israel, mainly Asherah (Dumezilian Third Function Goddess whose name means, alternatively “Wealth” or “Poles”—as in wooden poles, not residents of that certain flatland country east of the Oder-Niese line, north of Czechoslovakia, and West of Belarus (Byelorussia). The word “qedeshah” (“consecrated harlot”) occurs in Genesis 38: 21-22, Deuteronomy 23:18, and Hosea 4:14. While Ahab’s Queen Jezebel, then, was no prostitute herself, insofar as the Bible reveals, her devotion to the goddess Asherah could possibly have made her the “madam” of many consecrated prostitutes, as the word qedeshah (root Q-D-S) is etymologically parsed and compared to Sumerian Quadishtu.

As a pause within any Lenten dissertation on high crimes, it is to be noted that in Biblical times and ever since, sexual crimes seem to be the most troublesome. The Prophet Elijah dedicated his life and prophetic works to the destruction of Jezebel and her fertility-oriented worship of Asherah. I have never been fond of Elijah—his very name is an argument “El is [the same as] Yahweh”, but I think his attack on Hebrew polytheism is at least as strange and incongruous, perhaps even moreso, than Akhenaten’s attack on Egyptian Polytheism as much as 600-800 years earlier.

The truth is that nothing binds human beings together more tightly than their interest in/obsession with sex. Today, the most heinous crimes are sexual crimes—there is no register of released killers, bankrobbers, or fraudulent tortfeasors identifying which released ex-cons live in which neighborhoods, but by Federal Law, sex offenders must be registered everywhere. Convicted sex-offenders are stained with their stigmata for life, worse even than Jews in Nazi Germany (or the real or imagined Nazi-sympathizers in post-WWII France or other occupied countries).

Prostitution is, one supposes, the complete and total negation of traditional family life and marriage—yet if dedicated by and to the Priestesses of Inanna or Ishtar it was called “Sacred” among the Sumerians, Akkadians, Old through Neo-Babylonians, Assyrians, Kassites, Eblaites, Cannanites, and Cypriots of the Ancient Fertile Crescent.

I myself have often confronted the question: what is the difference between modern marriage and prostitution, and have concluded that the primary difference is in time of payment: prostitutes are paid “up front” while wives are paid (through the divorce and alimony system) post-facto, even (especially) if and when they enjoyed the full fruits of married life with their husbands. Wives in a modern “Brave New World” Divorce of the type that Kathy Ann Garcia-Lawson has so completely eschewed, can typically collect much more for their sexual and child bearing services than even the most highly paid prostitutes ever stand to earn. I suppose that is why the condescending Pharisees and Sadducees of our time (like Jesus’) called women who belong to the profession of which Mary Madeleine might have been a member, “Cheap”. Yet Mary Madeleine, at the end of this Lenten Drama, is remembered as she who was the first to see the empty tomb and be greeted by the Risen Christ. So who’s life and work was more precious to the Lord?

Prostitution and marriage—categorical opposites or merely points along a single continuum. Which lifestyle represents greater freedom? Which lifestyle represents greater honesty? In Lent, when we reflect on our sins, mortal and venal, should we not reflect on such questions.

Are we today free from the hypocritical values which cast some as saints and some as sinners for very similar behaviors?

But leaving for a moment sex, lies and videotape, and returning to murder vs. lies, we go back to the foundation of modern Anthropology. In The Golden Bough, published originally in 1890, but published in its more famous 12 volume 3rd edition contemporaneously with the Great European War, 1915-1918, Sir James G. Frazer focused on one single interrelated web of questions and problems relating to human religion worldwide: why is ritual murder or human sacrifice so common and why does it always focus on a dying King—a dying young man at the height of his masculine strength and life.

Dumuzi-Tammuz in Mesopotamia and Syro-Palestine (and Cyprus), the lover of Inanna-Ishtar; the model couple for the Sacred Marriage Rite of Ancient Sumer-Akkad-Babylon. Osiris in Egypt, brother and lover of Isis, the model for Pharaonic resurrection and ultimately for all Egyptian resurrection (through the rites of mummification). Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, begotten of his Father before all worlds, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, who for us and our Salvation came down from heaven, was made incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and made man.

Clive Staples Lewis once wrote an inquiry into the question of whether Jesus was “just another corn God” and concluded that he was not. But the manifestations and apparent roots of Kingship and Sacrifice stretch from sub-Saharan Africa across Europe and Asia to the Americas. The story of Quetzalcoatl-Kukulcan on the one hand, and the ritual sacrifice and corn-bread communion of Tezcatlipoca among the Aztec, certainly looks suspiciously like the rites of Christendom. The early Spanish Conquistadors noted, as did their accompanying clergy, mostly “Franciscans” including but not limited to those who founded Santa Fe and the church here which ultimately evolved into the Cathedral of St. Francis, that the Aztec especially but to a lesser degree the Maya showed ritual parallels to all of the Seven Sacraments in their autochthonous theology, aboriginal ceremonies and indigenous beliefs. For Sir James G. Frazer, as for Frays Bernaldino de Sahagun and Bartolome de las Casas, Aztec Religion was the nearest ritual approximate to Christianity outside of the Christian world itself.

What does this kind of similarity mean? On Good Friday we “celebrate” the death of the Son of God. In the rites of Toxcatl, the Aztec of Mexico celebrated the death of the human incarnation of Tezcatlipoca by human sacrifice. Among the “Penitentes” of New Mexico, it was long rumored that actual human sacrifices took place on Good Friday to commemorate the original death. The lines between cultures and religious ideology grows slim indeed.

For the Spanish, the Aztec Religion was a deceptive mockery of Christianity, going back to our original question of whether murder or deception is the highest crime known to Man. For their sins of heresy and failure to adopt or comprehend Christianity, the Native American peoples were alternatively enslaved, burned at the stake, slaughtered in brutal war, or simply denied the right to serve as priests (despite decades of work, in the sixteenth century, of the bilingual Nahuatl & Spanish Colegio de Tlatelolco established by Sahagun) because they were doctrinally deemed to be soulless creatures easily deceived by the Devil and incapable of understanding or implementing the one “True” Christian faith.

So notions of fraud and murder converge in Christianity specifically, in world religions generally, and throughout the study of Divine Kingship, by Sir James G. Frazer and his followers, who constitute the core of Anglophone Anthropology from E.E. Evans-Pritchardt, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, and Alfred M. Hocart, of an older generation, to Marshall Sahlins, Valerio Valeri, and Gillian Feeley-Harnik of the more recent and modern era.

Is murder truth or deception? Joss Whedon is one of the most talented writers ever to approach television, and has put many amazing words into the mouths of his characters in several different series. In the fourth season of Whedon’s series Angel, the eponymous character’s son, a human offspring of vampire parents (Angel and Darla) named “Connor”, tells his father, ”There’s only one thing that ever changes anything and that’s death. Everything else is a lie. You can’t be saved by a lie. You can’t be saved at all.” (Episode 4.22 “Home”)

This pretty much sums up the Wagnerian-Schopenhauerian-Nietzschean dilemma: DEATH IS THE ONLY THING THAT EVER CHANGES ANYTHING. Is everything else really a lie though? Can we be saved by the death of Divine Kings? Tezcatlipoca in the rites of Toxcatl? Dumuzi-Tammuz? Osiris? One-Eyed Wotan’s self-willed immolation in Walhalla at the Twilight of the Gods after the Murder of his grandson Siegfried by the treacherous half-breed Hagen? or Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews?

Deception and Murder, from an Anthropological perspective, are fairly unique aspects of the human condition. Male animals kill each other over mates. Animals compete for food. Animals know the law of the jungle: kill to eat, or to prevent oneself from being eaten. But most animals do not set elaborate mechanical traps (that’s why a Spider’s web is so intriguing and powerful a symbol to the human mind) or drive entire herds over cliffs merely to eat and skin a few of the animals who die in the stampede (Native American Archaeological Kill sites are common from New Mexico to Alberta and elsewhere in the Americas, with prehistoric documentation going back at least to Torralba-Ambrona in the late Acheulean, Lower Palaeolithic, of Spain), but such behavior is routine among humans. We do not think of this, perhaps, so routinely as “deception” because we do not imagine that the animals would understand the fraud if it were explained to them: “if you step on this spot, you will be caught in a trap and eaten; if you stampede over a cliff with the rest of the herd, while being chased by humans, you will all die but only a few of you will be eaten and the rest will simply rot.” So death can be the result of deception—death can be the result of lies, even though, as Connor believes, there is something satisfyingly clear and absolute about death that makes it “truer than life,” perhaps.

Propaganda (Advertising) and Technologically Advanced Warfare write deception and murder large across the tableau of modern history. As Winston Churchill once observed, man is the only creature who periodically goes out to slaughter large numbers of individuals of the same species, and the invitation, the incentive to such officially sanctioned, corporate, mass murder is what we call political or….other kinds of….propaganda or advertising. Only a few well-selected deceptive words like “weapons of mass destruction” are all it takes to rally the American population to warfare, it seems. Yet there have been schools of thought in the not so distant past which believed and argued that truth and the maximum expression of human nobility resided in warfare, like death itself, or murder.

One of the principal reasons I have chosen to be a civil rights activist is that I have seen American Judges (both State and Federal), supposedly the ultimate arbiters of “truth” in society, so corruptly twist the truth or even the facts as presented to them, that I have little or no lingering confidence in the judicial system, anywhere, as a means of ascertaining the truth. Quite the opposite: in mortgage finance, family, domestic relations, & “child welfare” law, the government (including the judges) more often than not come down on the side of the liars and the corrupt, and against those trying to ferret out the truth. Doctrines such as “parental alienation” and “best interests of the child” combine to give judges and social welfare workers the power to wreak such havoc on home and family life that, frankly, it is amazing today that any traces of home or family life exist in America today. What is the truth we are fighting for here? I think that the real, not-so-hidden agenda behind the iron curtail of Family Law and Domestic Relations in the United States, coupled with the mortgage finance/credit-based monetary system, consists of one single goal: the abolition of the family and private property in America and the rest of the developed world, thereby realizing two of Karl Marx’s key dreams articulated in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, or in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World nightmare of 1931.

*My son Charlie, a Freshman at St. John’s College in Annapolis, regularly tortures me with impossible philosophical questions about classification, perception, and reality and all I can say is: Good for Him! I wish I had had that kind of training, but I am deficient at the dissection of philosophical questions. His perception and understanding of Aristotle, Parmenides, Plato, and Socrates already far exceeds my own. As my late aunt Mildred would have said, “he is well-schooled and so acquainted with all the Gone Greeks.” St. John’s curriculum is apparently as amazing and true to the mediaeval and renaissance traditions as I had always heard—and as difficult.

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Tagged 18th Century England, 40 days and 40 nights, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, Akkad, Akkadian, Alfred M. Hocart, Angel, Annapolis, Aristotle, Arthur Schopenhauer, Astarte, Aztec, Babylon, Babylonian, Bastet-Sekhmet, Braun Heinrich, Buffy-the-Vampire-Slayer, capital punishment, Christmas, Comparative Religion, Connor, Crime & Punishment, deception, Dinka, Divine Kingship, Dumuzi, E.E. Evans-Pritchardt, Egypt, Ezekiel 8:14, Feast of the Annunciation, fraud, fraud by deception, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Goetterdaemerung, Gone Greeks, Hagen, Inanna, Inara, Investment banking, Ishtar, Isis, Jesus Christ, Joss Whedon, JP Morgan Chase, La Fonda, Lent, March 25, Maya, mechanical traps, Mildred, murder, Nasty Girl, Nazi, Naziism, New Mexico, Nietzche, Origins of Lent, Osiris, Parmenides, pickpockets, Plato, Quetzalcoatl-Kukulcan, Richard Wagner, Santa Fe, Schoepenhauer, Schrecklische Madchen, Siegfried, Sir James G. Frazer, Socrates, St. John's College, stampede, stampede kill-sites, Sumer, Sumerian, Syro-Palestine, Tammuz, Tezcatlipoca, Toxcatl, traps, Twilight of the Gods, Walhalla, Weeping for Tammuz, wells fargo, Wicca, Witchcraft

The French Opera at Bourbon and Toulouse, New Orleans, Louisiana 70112 (or “dialectic process engendered by the contradictions inherent in all things is the prime mover of cultural and political change and evolution”)

Posted on December 31, 2010 by Charles Edward Lincoln III | Leave a comment

For one who was raised on heavy doses of opera, and with a great reverence for the heritage, history, and traditions of the American South, Louisiana, and in particular of New Orleans, I do not know how it never registered with me before last week that the first opera house in the United States opened in New Orleans on December 1, 1859, in an impressive neo-Classical structure which stood for exactly sixty years at the corner of Bourbon and Toulouse in the Vieux Carre (French Quarter) of New Orleans, Louisiana 70112 (http://www.neworleansonline.com/neworleans/arts/operano.html)

The site is now occupied by the Ramada Inn on Bourbon, Ramada being a distinctly “LMC” hotel chain, and this particular Ramada caters to the alcohol-soused and unwashed masses who parade up and down Bourbon Street in a nearly continuous year round nightly ritual re-enactment of the ancient and Mediaeval “Wild Hunt” of Northern, Western and Central Europe.

Opera is, or at least Opera was for about 250-300 years, an elite marker of the very height of European artistic achievement in music and theatre. From the time of Henry Purcell to Giaccomo Puccini, it was the standard to which all other art forms aspired—or which comedians ridiculed as symbolic of what was wrong with the elite (e.g. W.S. Gilbert).

As an art form Opera is now semi-fossilized—for my part I cannot accept the legitimacy of contemporary works such as the “Ghosts of Versailles” or “Nixon in China” as “real” opera, nor do I see these efforts as having much longevity or legitimacy—and so the mainstay of the Metropolitan Opera in New York and Covent Garden in London remains the repertoire of 18th, 19th, and very early 20th century opera by Mozart, Donizetti, Meyerbeer, Verdi, Bizet, and Puccini, with the ten gesamtkunstwerken of Richard Wagner enjoying a perpetual “special status”, the elite of operas even among opera-goers.

Bourbon Street today is….a hedonistic extravaganza of booze and sex at its most vulgar. The gangs there during this Christmas-to-New Years’ Holiday are mostly white, aged 16-40 (I’m definitely one of the older codgers on the scene). The men are dressed moderate casually while the women tend do be casually to-only slightly sexy, better-dressed in a kind of trashy, “party” sense. Young girls are the center of attention. Just as if it were Mardi Gras people stand on balconies and toss beads. And on New Year’s Eve and the night before, the feeling has been very raucous. Across the street from the site of the French Opera House of 1859-1919, the bar opposite the Ramada Inn on Bourbon was playing, at 3:45 am—cranked up to highest volume—”Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga. Many operas were in fact really bad romances, but the connection and parallel pretty much ends there. The claim of sex-traders everywhere is that their work is Erotic Art, but Bourbon Street’s domination by the purest pornography is epitomized by the several “Larry Flynt/Hustler/Barely Legal” clubs in a three block stretch. Yankee lumpenproletariats from Portland to Peoria to Pittsburgh, Poughkeepsie, and Providence converge on Bourbon Street attracting just a sufficient number of really attractive girls to make the place an enjoyable walk for people-watching. Southern rednecks of the recovering Southern Baptist variety keep alive the twisted memory of the South with Confederate Battle Flag bandanas, grossly juxtaposed to the large minority of African-American performers and tourists (who come from both the North and South in neither greater or lesser style and “class” than their white counterparts).

In short, Bourbon Street today, and so far as my memory of it goes back (early 1970s), has been a nightmare of the worst of modern thoughtless self-indulgent LMC America. While the small space permits the “Wild Hunt” Ritual—(hunt for beer and flashing….flesh I guess)—in a manner unparalleled anywhere, Bourbon Street’s complete moral corruption at leasts equals Las Vegas and Atlantic City. The drunkenness, debauchery, and generally lecherous is economically parasitic and exploitative in the extreme, but it is cheaper than Las Vegas or Atlantic City. The nature of discounted debauchery reminds me of Richard Blaine’s comment in Casablanca that he had no problem with parasites, what he objected to was a cut rate one.

In short, and my own mild hypocrisy here can only shine forth as clearly as it is true—Bourbon Street offers lowbrow people a lot of genuinely lowbrow fun—at least if you can tolerate a lot of gross behavior framed by beautiful old wrought iron balconies and Spanish, French, and 19th Century American architecture.

Despite Bourbon Street, New Orleans remains one of the cultural centers of the world for at least one very active and vital art form and that is cooking and cuisine. The food of New Orleans is incomparable: Antoine’s, Court of Two Sister’s, Tujague’s, Emeril’s Delmonico and Commander’s Palace are only among the oldest and most recognizable names in restaurants in the United States. At least some of the lumpenproletariats who enjoy Bourbon Street at its worst apparently also can appreciate really good food. ”Oysters Rockefeller” was a dish specially prepared at Antoine’s originally for the richest man in the world, but $12-$18 will get you a dozen and that’s roughly the same as lunch at Denny’s….

But this was the site of the first opera house in the United States, apparently without any dispute (the oldest opera house in continuous operation may well be be the Bardavon 1869 Opera house in, of all places, Poughkeepsie, New York, but it doesn’t save Poughkeepsie from inclusion in the “sources of great unwashed Americans” list above. (see, e.g., http://hauntedneworleanstours.com/frenchoperahouse/).

The real purpose of this essay is to ask a single question: what caused the transformation of the corner of Bourbon and Toulouse from one of the centers of elite-European culture in the Americas, in 1859, to something akin to the sewer of the American soul in 2010?

My answer is that the transformation was wrought by the War of 1861-1865, known to partisans of the winning side as the “American Civil War” (although there are no analogies whatsoever to the English Civil War of the Roundheads vs. Cavaliers, aside from the explicit stylistic comparisons of the two sides), and to traditional partisans of the losing side as “the War Between the States.” Just technically, I think the “War Between the States” is more historically descriptive of what happened, and also of the Constitutional Consequences which followed, which were of the triumph of the National Federal government over the individual states.

What was the real purpose of this War of 1861-1865? Up to a point I think the purpose, as well as the result, as precisely the transformation of Bourbon Street. New Orleans in 1860 was poised to become one of the great cultural centers of the world, comparable to Paris or Vienna in every sense, including the existence of an hereditary aristocracy.

As the opening bars of Gone with the Wind play, the textual narrative Title Reads: “There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind.”

The puritans of the North could not tolerate a peaceful co-existence with the civilization they saw emerging in the deep Southern States, from at least New Orleans to Charleston, South Carolina. They were envious, and I remain of the opinion that the war of 1861-1865 was the single most direct and enduring American outgrowths of the transformations of public consciousness engendered by the publication of Marx & Engels “Communist Manifesto” in 1848.

The principal demands of the Manifesto have all been met although some are only now in our time being perfected. As accurately summarized in Wikipedia, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Communist_Manifesto) the Manifesto Demanded:

Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
Abolition of all right of inheritance.
Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of the population over the country.
Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production.

To a greater-or-lesser degree, we live in the world shaped and created by the Communist Manifesto. The American South, in particular New Orleans, reflected a completely alternative path in which private property, inheritance, and decentralized credit would have dominated.

The final abolition of private property and inheritance in America is now taking place with governmental support in the current mortgage foreclosure crisis. It is against that national policy of finally implementing the first demand of the communist manifesto that I have dedicated my life.

I have spent the Christmas and New Years’ Holiday in New Orleans this year at an historic hotel one half-block “Lakeside” of Bourbon Street (driving directions in New Orleans, a crescent-shaped city which curves along a major bend in the Mississippi River are traditionally not given as “north-south-east-west” but as “Riverside, Lakeside, Uptown and Downtown” with the Mississippi River, Lake Pontchartrain, Audubon Park-Tulane University, and the French Quarter and/or Faubourg Marigny beyond Esplanade as the defining “cardinal points” of the city). I love New Orleans—I love the humid air, the sensuous (Francophile?) appreciation of life, and the beauty and unique style of the old quarter. But I hate what Americans have done with Bourbon Street. I hate the class-flattening approach to sex and booze and money.

I now know also that what I love most in music was born in America on Bourbon Street, which now resounds with the trashiest of the trashy repertoires of degenerate popular music. Even real Jazz, the only completely home-grown, indigenous “American” musical genre, is rarely heard above the din on Bourbon Street, which is ironic because, in 1919 when the original French Opera House burned, Jazz was being born on Bourbon Street and its French-Quarter environs, soon to explode into the American mainstream during the “roaring 20s”.

George Washington died in 1799. According to the sources cited, the first performance of an opera in the Americas took place in New Orleans two years before that. Sixty years later, the French Opera House was erected in New Orleans, destined to last exactly 60 years. 1859 was the end of an amazing decade in history unlike any other when (as Jacques Barzun pointed out in his marvelous historical essay “Darwin, Marx, and Wagner“ published in 1941 and in print ever since) the concepts of history, evolution, economics, and art were rapidly being transformed. 1919 was the year of the treaty of Versailles after World War I. These 60 years in which the New Orleans Opera house stood at Bourbon and Toulouse were the years in which Marx’ ideas took the world in one direction while Wagner’s ideas took the world in the completely opposite direction, with Darwin planted squarely in the middle. I was originally due to graduate Tulane University sixty years later in 1979 (but because I took off a year to work in Honduras at the ancient Maya ruins of Copan, I ended up graduating in 1980). Those sixty years (1919-1979) saw the final eradication of all vestiges of the Old South which had survived the war, and the transformation of Bourbon Street into the Sex and Booze pot it is today.

As astounding as it seems to me, more than 30 years (half another cycle of 60 years) have now passed since my graduation from college, and to the degree that there is any change, it is only in the further degradation of Bourbon Street by the invasion of Larry Flynt and Hustler into the “Brave New World” mentality of modern America—Pornography and trumped Eros, classless communism has all-but-completely replaced stratification based on education and cultural awareness, and private property is now all-but-a-thing of the past.

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Posted in History and Civilization

Tagged 1859, abolition of inheritance, abolition of private property, Bourbon Street, Communist Manifesto, Erotic Art, Hustler, Larry Flynt, lumpenproletariat, Marx & Engels, Pornography, Puccini, Richard Wagner, the French Opera, Toulouse, Verdi

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Foreclosure

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Health

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robert ponte

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Follow “TIERRA LIMPIA by Charles Lincoln”