tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-59375161558647597782024-03-26T23:37:09.347-07:00Figment ZenguitarFigment Zenguitarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04516554947889012627noreply@blogger.comBlogger34125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5937516155864759778.post-80079568651225718822023-10-29T07:18:00.002-07:002023-10-29T07:18:58.853-07:00Love Song to the Plains -- song annotation<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgSX3vQFBd2X9x8WyyUZDjw/about" target="_blank"> Figment's album</a>, informally known as "Love Song to the Plains" -- song descriptions:</p><p><i><a href="https://youtu.be/RwqFTmHIQpM?si=bnSfNcEXIN_qhWWl" target="_blank">Kathy's Song</a></i> -- for my wife, of course, who has taught me so much, including the joy of sitting quietly in bliss with love. This song was also inspired by her art -- beautiful landscape pastels that are mesmerizing. Music, Art, and Nature with a loved one -- nothing is better. Lots of metaphors for me in this one.</p><p><i><a href="https://youtu.be/9FDQ3y3eMgY?si=9W6hH-ZdSw8aYFF4" target="_blank">Buffalo Prayer</a> -- </i>written in the 1990s when I was studying indigenous Americans' history in depth for the first time. It registered at a very deep level what the "white man" had done to the Great Plains: destroyed a vast and rich ecosystem for the sake of greed -- possession and control.</p><p><i><a href="https://youtu.be/XcXIpK3SGu0?si=JCz6IX_Acu4dtXGJ" target="_blank">Hymn to a Ghost Town</a></i> -- I grew up in a small town in western Kansas and found it nearly bereft of anything positive that I could latch onto. But I was not alone and many friends died in tragic ways, often from some form of addiction. This song was motivated by that, but also by the realization that people who die premature deaths in this way are just as precious as anyone else.</p><p><i><a href="https://youtu.be/0rF8B2xgjwg?si=fIDnxDhDlH3cgS1y" target="_blank">Dust Devils</a></i> -- Obvious inspiration from indigenous cultures, but I think Johnny Cash is an influence here, as well. Heavily metaphorical and a sort of love song to the Great Plains.</p><p><a href="https://youtu.be/oKwyyZX7SdY?si=q6bmnCKiX50rV8pT" target="_blank"><i>Dust Down a Country Road</i> </a>-- I've loved this song by John Hiatt since it came out. I've been playing it ever since and had to record my version of it. Humans and Memory -- it fills the juke boxes -- and internet playlists.</p><p><i><a href="https://youtu.be/BMBBF31grkw?si=o7isaKsA8rpDoz2O" target="_blank">Touch the Heart </a></i>-- studying history is nightmare inducing -- this was written before I had the outlet of history lecturing, but I'm constantly reminded of the chaos and corruption aspects of existence that we move in -- and yet, we must remember that we can all rally around the focal point of Love in each one of us.</p><p><a href="https://youtu.be/xmLPlnQy2lY?si=at81OXbQgdGSdoVA" target="_blank"><i>Les Voyageurs </i>(Ritornelle)</a> -- par Jean-Philippe Rameau -- a favorite piece by a favorite composer. I've been reading about the French-Canadian <i>Voyageurs</i> in my historian life. They were prolific in western North America -- this is a recognition of their independent and freedom-loving ways. Baroque music on first mandolin family instruments, then with five (count 'em), five (Taylor) twelve-string guitars (sixty strings!).</p><p><i><a href="https://youtu.be/GD6o6AMrUH8?si=h7GrNbtWzQTgSysu" target="_blank">Buffalo Jump</a></i> -- originally composed when I was in a music composition program at University, I had the pleasure of having this performed for our guest composer, John Corigliano. Logan Skelton, pianist at the University of Michigan now, helped keep this alive with a (non-commercial) live recording. The inspiration, again, was indigenous culture, particular the Arapaho people of the High Plains.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Figment Zenguitarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04516554947889012627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5937516155864759778.post-63683351667005300082023-08-09T06:24:00.000-07:002023-08-09T06:24:46.635-07:00Student "Loans": A Subjective Experience<p>This is the short version of this story:</p><p>I started college in January of 1990 at the age of 32. I was a little over a year in recovery, having damn near drank myself to death running an itinerant construction crew that ran a route from Arkansas to Wyoming. Fortunately, I had bought forty acres in the Arkansas Ozarks adjoining the newly-created Buffalo National River federal park. That had become my refuge and first place of healing after seventeen years of self-medication and fleeing inner realities -- which is another story told elsewhere. In January of 1990, I took out my first student loan to attend College of the Ozarks, a conservative private school established by the Presbyterians across the White River from Branson, MO. </p><p>I had no idea how I would fare in college, or what I would do. I just knew what I didn't want to do: work construction. I assuredly qualified for social work counseling as I had lived on the fringes of society for ten years at that point. I got none from the college or student loan people, so I was on my own except for my recovery groups, upon whom I leaned heavily. </p><p>This story of this turn is extensive, but regarding the loans, I had been injured in a fall at work and my income was down, allowing me to qualify for student aid (Stafford Loans and Pell Grants). I had no savings, other than my forty acres, and while gassing up the truck at a Rapid Roberts (AKA "Fast Bob's") Convenience Store in Hollister, MO, I talked to the clerk about going to college. He said something like, "Oh, just get the loans and grants and go full-time. Throw yourself into it." I was so utterly burned out on my job, I decided to go for it. I got high scores on my ACT, and entered college in the spring semester of 1990. </p><p>Once begun, it had to be seen through. I was clean and sober and my new addiction was college. I couldn't get enough of it -- I was like a sponge. After being refused enrollment after three semesters because of the length of my hair, AND receiving the Valedictorian Award, I transferred to Southwest Missouri State University, now Missouri State U. in Springfield. After dabbling in diverse potentialities, I settled in as a History and Music double major, graduating in 1995 with a BA and 199 credit hours. As I say, a functional advisor would have whittled that number down, but I have never had any regrets about it. </p><p>I knew I didn't want to pursue an academic music career -- didn't fit in -- too late of a start -- so I started grad school in the Folklore Department at Memorial University of Newfoundland, who had offered me a job and money to attend. After one semester of intense personal growth at MUN and St. John's, I decided to focus on history while performing music at coffeeshops, pubs, festivals, etc. I came back to Kansas, where I had grown up, first attending Fort Hays State University while helping my dad, whose health was beginning to fail, then moving on to Wichita State University for my MA. All of this was supported in large part by loans, grants, working as a TA or paid internships as well as playing music. At Wichita, I formed a Celtic music band that caught the "Riverdance" wave and became regionally successful over the next fifteen years. So I was a rare bird that was able to support my history studies through playing music, at least in large part. I also met my wife, Kathleen, who played a huge role in helping support the now joint endeavor.</p><p>I got my MA in history and entered the University of Kansas in 2000 to study with the eminent Donald Worster -- another growth experience. It was a circle of hell. I taught at KU, then Washburn, then at Johnson County Community College -- all three at once for awhile. By 2002, I had maxed out the student loan game at $135,000. The thing is, if you want a career in history, you need a doctoral degree. Again, there was no turning back. Fortunately, teaching and playing music along with my wife's income, we were able to get by. </p><p>So the student loans stopped in 2002; I got my doctorate in 2008, but no full-time job was forthcoming. Actually, between my various teaching gigs, I HAD a full-time job, or rather, three part-time jobs, which is how this capitalist juggernaut rolls now. By 2012, I was teaching more than a full-time load, and by 2016, I routinely taught between eight and twelve classes per semester at three, sometimes four schools. </p><p>The $135K I had borrowed, thanks to compound interest, was soon over $250K and by 2020 had broken $300K -- an unpayable debt. Bear in mind that my "adjunct" teaching (I prefer the more apropos term "contractor") was done at a pay less than half of what "full-timers" are paid, especially when you count benefits. And, incidentally, my CV is absolutely comparable to many full-timers in terms of publications and teaching experience. So, I believe the term for this situation is "wage theft," although it is "legal." </p><p>I managed to tread water on the loans through various programs available to minimize what would have otherwise been an unsustainable monthly payment. I was advised by my student loan servicer to have my two loans consolidated under a federal servicer so that they could be discharged. (!!!!) Apparently, the Biden administration had enacted a plan whereby if you had student loans outstanding for over 240 months, they could be discharged as long as they were "federalized," i.e., not managed by a private company. So, I consolidated my loans with MOHELA and awaited news.</p><p>Then, one fine day after a deeply satisfying trip to the Colorado High Country, on August 7, 2023, I checked balance of my student loans on the government website. The number that had been hovering around $315,000 was now $0. I stared in disbelief. I printed the screen. I showed my wife -- all in a state of disbelief -- I couldn't grasp it. I still can't two days later. I'm writing this essay to try and "grok" the situation. I have always "known" at some level that the Great Benevolence would take care of this, but I didn't know how. Now, it is done. My life, which I thought over at the age of 30, has been brought back to the light of day. The student loan issue was the last step in that emergence. I am so grateful, I can't express it in words. But I'm trying.</p><p>So, what began as a somewhat desperate act to salvage my life has become a kind of self-actualization with a highly-rewarding "career." After fifteen years of itinerant construction work and utter burnout, severe alcoholism, and general crazy shit, my life turned around although with the cloud of student loans hanging over my head (but I kept the faith!). Two days ago, the cloud was lifted.</p>Figment Zenguitarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04516554947889012627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5937516155864759778.post-33518197849743416632023-07-30T20:01:00.002-07:002023-07-30T20:01:47.087-07:00Buffalo Prayer<p>Up on the High Road, above all this noise</p><p>From Texas to the Great North</p><p>Lives the song of the endless plains</p><p>And the great winds that always hold forth</p><p>Down in the cities, I've seen your broken dreams</p><p>Heard the grinding wheels of fear</p><p>But up on that road there's a high lonesome sound</p><p>And a dream in your heart you can hear:</p><p><i>Chorus</i></p><p>Bring back the buffalo </p><p>On the Ghost Dancing winds of change</p><p>Hear the cries in the windswept skies and</p><p>With the gods ride the wide open range.</p><p><br /></p><p>When I was a child running free and wild</p><p>I was one with the grass, wind, and sky</p><p>But something was missing, you could almost hear</p><p>I didn't what had happened or why</p><p>The buffalo fell to the white man's greed</p><p>Shot down in the hot summer sun</p><p>The song of the native, the song of the free</p><p>Was silenced by the buffalo gun</p><p><i>Chorus</i></p><p>The wind it blows, the dust rises up</p><p>The legacy of plunder is waste</p><p>And miles of fence around an empty house</p><p>Is a story of a desperate haste</p><p>The Indian and buffalo were taken away</p><p>So the white man could have all the land</p><p>To use and abuse and wash it away</p><p>To build up his mansions so grand</p><p><i>Chorus 2x</i></p>Figment Zenguitarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04516554947889012627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5937516155864759778.post-28580907414389480052023-07-30T19:34:00.001-07:002023-07-30T19:44:17.940-07:00Figment's YouTube Topic Channel<p>As ever, we're flying by the seat of our pants. We know there are methodologies to which most adhere and, while we do sometimes adhere to these methodologies, we don't strictly abide by them except in survival situations. This is not that. Nevertheless, we are sharing a link to our music in the hopes of drawing interest to these songs we made at home with help from Harrison Lake at <a href="https://www.offtrailstudios.com/">Off Trail Studios</a>. We don't expect to make more than fifty cents in real American dollars off of this, but if we do, we'll take it -- maybe buy a stick of gum or something or, more likely, give it to the less fortunate. </p><p>Distrokid and YouTube created a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgSX3vQFBd2X9x8WyyUZDjw/featured">"topic" channel</a> for us, because that's how they do it. We haven't yet figured out how to edit it although we know that surely there is a way. The real point of this blog entry is to connect Figment's blog with Figment's music because the blog has lyrics to Figment's songs. Go Figment, go! </p><p>Thanks for your time -- feel free to provide feedback here, since you can't on the YouTube channel and we tried and failed (so far) to make comments possible. </p><p>Peace and Love, Figment Zenguitar</p><p><br /></p>Figment Zenguitarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04516554947889012627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5937516155864759778.post-38019339636316481472023-07-16T06:16:00.001-07:002023-07-16T06:16:59.719-07:00Dust Devils<p> Across the High Prairie a young squire rode his bay</p><p>When an ominous storm rose up in the West.</p><p>Admiring his new vestments no heed did he pay</p><p>As he lumbered along on his unstated quest.</p><p>The clouds slid over the bright High Plains sun</p><p>Raven crowed a warning as overhead he flew</p><p>Faced into the wind, the buffalo did run</p><p>And the air became as still as a bobcat stalking food.</p><p>Hey hey heya hey hey hey heya</p><p>Hey hey heya hey hey hey heya</p><p>"Oh what is this little change in the breeze?"</p><p>He spoke as he labored his horse up the hill</p><p>Whistling he tried hard to sway his unease</p><p>As he forced the mares head down against her own will</p><p>A lightning bolt cracked on a distant cottonwood tree</p><p>Thunder decried upon his hubris revenge</p><p>The first droplets brought forth the smell of the sea</p><p>And a spinning black cloud as round as Stonehenge.</p><p>Hey hey heya hey hey hey heya</p><p>Hey hey heya hey hey hey heya</p><p>The rider her trembled feeling like a young boy</p><p>Left alone in the Wilderness by his family to die</p><p>His mind flashed back to his so recent joy</p><p>But with his money and his frippery the storm he could not buy</p><p>Full force came the twister three hundred yards wide</p><p>He rode like the wind for his home in the dale</p><p>But the storm it bore down, there was nowhere to hide</p><p>And he caused his old mother for to moan and to wail.</p><p>Hey hey heya hey hey hey heya</p><p>Hey hey heya hey hey hey heya</p><p>Like General Custer he made his last stand</p><p>Bemoaning the trick on himself he had played</p><p>While the bones of the Indians spun 'round in the sand</p><p>O'er destiny's shoulders his body it was laid.</p><p>He'd been told of courage and of valor so true</p><p>Of glory in battle his high place in the world</p><p>But he had not been told when a storm was abrew</p><p>O'er the Indian prairie where the dust devils swirl.</p><p>Hey hey heya hey hey hey heya</p><p>Hey hey heya hey hey hey heya</p><p>Hey hey heya hey hey hey heya</p><p>Hey hey heya hey hey hey heya.</p>Figment Zenguitarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04516554947889012627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5937516155864759778.post-7959365338329363562023-07-15T15:54:00.000-07:002023-07-15T15:54:28.166-07:00Touch the Heart<p>I ran to the window, she ran to the door</p><p>Everyone was screamin', screamin' for more</p><p>Tyranny and misery, Abel and Cain</p><p>Attracting distractions, laying down the game.</p><p>So it's up to the treetops swayin' in the breeze</p><p>I seen our spirits . . . Seen our spirits . . . </p><p>Seen our spirits . . . Seen our spirits . . . Seen our spirits . . .</p><p>Seen our spirits had wounded knees.</p><p><br /></p><p>My people came from across the sea</p><p>Draggin' our tormented history</p><p>Runnin' from those age old bloody wars</p><p>Lickin' our wounds and hidin' our scars</p><p>We made up stories 'bout the promised land</p><p>While we killed the children . . . killed the children</p><p>Killed the children . . . Killed the children . . . Killed the children . . .</p><p>Killed the children in the new-found land</p><p><br /></p><p>When I was a child I was told many lies</p><p>About our people who claimed to be wise</p><p>When I grew up they said, "Believe!"</p><p>And they told me to live in this trance of thieves.</p><p>Then I met a child who knew the truth</p><p>And he showed me the way . . . Showed me the way</p><p>Showed me the way . . . Showed me the way . . . Showed me the way . . .</p><p>Showed me the way to the Fountain of Youth.</p><p>So let me touch your spirit let me touch your soul</p><p>Let's touch the heart . . . Touch the Heart</p><p>Touch the Heart . . . Touch the Heart . . . Touch the Heart</p><p>Touch the Heart of our rock and roll.</p><p>Copyright 1993 Douglas Harvey</p>Figment Zenguitarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04516554947889012627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5937516155864759778.post-47629168375187250862023-07-14T10:50:00.005-07:002023-10-07T07:51:23.183-07:00Kathy's Song (The Darkness Is Done)<p>The morning light brings the shining sun</p><p>Reminding us that the darkness is done</p><p>The morning dew shines in the trees</p><p>The mockingbirds call in the breeze.</p><p>Call in the breeze</p><p>CHORUS:</p><p>Our love is new / Our love is old</p><p>It lives way down / Deep in our soul</p><p>Deep in our soul</p><p><br /></p><p>The clouds float by like a painting alive</p><p>And bring the rain that makes us thrive</p><p>The sun shines high in the sky today</p><p>And like my love for you will never fade</p><p>Never fade</p><p>CHORUS</p><p><br /></p><p>The stars come out sprayed across the sky</p><p>A living light like the shine in your eyes</p><p>The nightbird sings while we sip our tea</p><p>Hand-in-hand our hearts are free</p><p>Hearts are free</p><p>CHORUS</p><p><br /></p><p>The morning light brings the shining sun</p><p>Reminding us that the darkness is done</p><p>Darkness is done</p><p>Darkness is done.</p><p><br /></p><p>Copyright Doug Harvey 2022</p>Figment Zenguitarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04516554947889012627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5937516155864759778.post-6629918605214501062023-01-26T18:31:00.000-08:002023-01-26T18:31:31.252-08:00Pinhook Hollow / Schoolhouse Spring, by Charles Malcolm McAlister -- a Review<p> <span> </span>It's an unassuming title for a book that packs a punch and ultimately takes on the reckless power junkies currently driving the bus of human civilization. There is a lot in its 242 pages, all very readable and accessible to the average citizen and engaging to more scholarly types. It recounts a significant swath of the life of a thoughtful, educated man, now in his 80s, whose story reveals the under-appreciated complexity not so unusual for one who has passed nearly all his days in the heartland of North America. </p><p><span> </span>The title is a reference to the place in Newton County, Arkansas where the author, (AKA "Mac"), constructed a work of art in the form of a log cabin and its environs. Built in the Scandinavian style, once seen, it is a dwelling that will not soon be forgotten. The odyssey that brought Mac to this region and this work is the subject of the first half of the book.</p><p><span> </span>The second half of the book deals with the author's journey through an educational path that included a mixture of philosophy and history that serendipitously segued into a career in social work. It is a narrative that Mac describes, quoting early twentieth-century pundit Stephen Leacock, as one who "jumps on his fantasy horse and rides off in all directions." Yet, the author stays on the horse, makes good progress in a definite if unpredictable direction, and keeps the reader onboard with him. </p><p><span> Commentary from Plato to H.L. Mencken; U.S. history from Lincoln to Trump; culminating in a wrestling match with the reigning Dragons of Doom at the Gates of Armageddon and how this struggle might be won takes up much of the later chapters. This part of the book is, assuredly, an important thought project with which we all would do well to engage. But most importantly, as the reader is drawn into a fairly intimate intellectual encounter with the author, one is forced to encounter oneself. This alone makes the book well worth reading. The story of the cabin and its process could stand alone; But the inner life of its author is the treasure in this work. </span><br /></p>Figment Zenguitarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04516554947889012627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5937516155864759778.post-52644234318991595262023-01-14T05:27:00.005-08:002023-02-05T06:37:31.600-08:00Hymn to a Ghost Town <p style="text-align: center;">Janey had been drinkin' / Down at the local bar</p><p style="text-align: center;">Tryin' to get some insight on / Just which way and just how far</p><p style="text-align: center;">I rented me a hotel room / It felt like a dried up well</p><p style="text-align: center;">And that's when I met Janey / In our parallel private hells.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><h4 style="text-align: center;">Chorus</h4><p style="text-align: center;">It was a tragic fait accompli / A down-and-out circus clown</p><p style="text-align: center;">When I roamed the streets and alleys / Of our spirit-less Ghost Town.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">Well I loaned her a quarter / Then I gave her my last dime</p><p style="text-align: center;">I woke up singin' cowboy songs / You know the ones that don't even rhyme</p><p style="text-align: center;">Ya see Janey was tryin' to get out of this race / But all she found was a one-way door</p><p style="text-align: center;">And I wondered if there was any Grace / Left in this world anymore.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><h4 style="text-align: center;">Chorus</h4><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">Then I met some folks back up in the hills / They had a heart as big as a house</p><p style="text-align: center;">And I had walked back into the woods / Still searchin' for some way out</p><p style="text-align: center;">Ya see I didn't believe that all of this hard work / Was gonna heal the hole in my heart</p><p style="text-align: center;">And I didn't want what and who I loved / And me to be torn apart.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">But I didn't know my own boundaries / I was a prisoner in my own skin</p><p style="text-align: center;">And doin' what they told me / Had been keepin' me locked in</p><p style="text-align: center;">But back up in my hotel room / My guitar had a dream</p><p style="text-align: center;">It dreamed of dancing in the light / When we are all redeemed</p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>(a capella)</i> </p><p style="text-align: center;">And it told me that the Universe / Had some Master Plan</p><p style="text-align: center;">And it whispered that the Infinite / Dwells in the Heart of Man.</p><h4 style="text-align: center;"><br /></h4><h4 style="text-align: center;">Chorus 2x</h4><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">When I roamed the streets and alleys / Of our spirit-less Ghost Town.</div><p> </p>Figment Zenguitarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04516554947889012627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5937516155864759778.post-16703115788729287682023-01-08T07:11:00.000-08:002023-01-08T07:11:21.300-08:00The Mystic RiverFlowing under, over, and through all. <div>It never began. It will not end. Beyond understanding. </div><div>Whispering in the grass. </div><div>Conversing in the wind. </div><div>Shouting in the storm. </div><div>Erupting. Flowing. Flying. Swimming. </div><div>The center is in you. In me. The Center. Just is. </div><div>How many times has it been said? </div><div>We try to describe that which can only be felt.
<br />Experienced. Lived. Embraced. Loved. </div><div>Horrific to the unprepared (that was me). </div><div>Imperturbable peace behind the Mask. </div><div>The ten thousand masks. Millions. Billions. Beyond count. </div><div>As the Smoky Hill flows down from the High Plains, </div><div>Or the Platte, the Arkansas, the Missouri, the Rio Grande -- </div><div>Flow from Old Grandfather's white hair. </div><div>The ten thousand turns, shallows, depths, sandbars. </div><div>Underground, still seeping. </div><div>Where I live, what I see, what I sense. </div><div>Beyond me, the briefly flashing point of perception. </div><div>Bliss is a constant release. </div><div>The constant, reliable Mystic River. </div><div>Thank you.</div>Figment Zenguitarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04516554947889012627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5937516155864759778.post-8424043955431489192022-05-31T10:18:00.003-07:002022-06-01T11:57:50.262-07:00Intro to The Adventures of Figment ZenguitarACTING AS IF IT MATTERS<p>
We are living the consequences of having rejected the living connection between the human and other-than-human. This is paralleled by the split between mind (psyche) and body. The power of dreams and visions – of the inner life in general, which is our connection to all of creation – is seemingly lost on a world that has forgotten. Comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell made well the point that in the industrialized, modernized world beyond the experience of traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions, one must work out one’s own “salvation.” For many people, the religious tendencies in the “West” of the last two or three thousand years no longer explain life as it is lived. For many others, the Greek concept of epistemé – knowledge, science, understanding, has been abandoned completely for the concept of doxa – common belief, received opinion, dogma. As a result, those us for whom these religions – as they are proselytized – are not working, must work out our own psycho-spiritual understanding, or personal mythology, of this veil of tears for themselves. Others simply believe what their peer group believes, locking themselves into the dogmatic tendencies of that group. <p>
The background for this and the following observations is the realization that the human race is committing suicide and that it probably can’t stop even if it wanted to. Observing the public sphere in the early twenty-first century, one must seriously consider the declensionist school of evolutionary theory. It is possible that we humans hit our peak some ten thousand years ago, right before we started building cities and taking the trip down Civilization Road, which of course has nothing to do with what is generally meant by the term “civilized.” By the time the European Civilization Entourage hit North America, the path to self-destruction was laid out, although few realized it at the time and the ones who suspected were ignored. This “settler-colonial” branch of Leviathan, as it has played out, turns out to be the same disease as in the Old Countries that just keeps getting worse. <p>
Toward arriving at my own in-flux religious tendencies, I have put some effort into learning how people lived on the earth for so long without mucking it up; i.e., hunter-gatherer culture. Part of this process has been to grasp the true nature of the term “indigenous.” While we bandy words about like “sustainability” and “ecology,” actually being one with the great Mother Earth has long since gone by the boards in the grand settler-colonial project on Civilization Road. Working out my own acceptable worldview involves trying to regain a sense of indigeneity, at the very least, and hopefully some sort of lifestyle that begins to approach an indigenous habitation of the planet. The Civilization Entourage arrived plundering, raping, and enslaving as well as spreading their ubiquitous diseases to the Americans, who had little resistance to them in their biological make-up. Until then, the diffuse hunter-gatherers and part-time agriculturalists of North America were doing pretty well, all things considered -- not unlike indigenous people everywhere. Anthropologists and historians have had to abandon the old “Whig History” dogma that indigenous people lived on the verge of starvation and spent all their waking hours in a constant search for food. In reality, they lived in a time-rich world of plenty and were living in a kind of luxury. Settler-colonial offspring who have chosen epistemé over doxa have acknowledged this. Rituals existed that kept people renewed and aligned with the forces of nature, the process that is today left up to individuals to work out on their own. <p>
My own complicated story has not emerged from a state of repose. It was birthed through untold trials and tribulations; from a struggle that included twenty or so years of hard-scrabble working class survival with few psychological tools for coping. It emerges from having lived out-of-doors for three years (intentionally), where I came to know a bit about what it means to live close to our Mother and learned what it means to be “time-rich.” It emerges from a lack of coping skills shored up by self-medication habits that eventually and fortuitously landed me in addiction and recovery. It emerges from beginning college at age thirty-two, pursuing and obtain a Ph.D. (history), and over twenty-five years in the workforce as a college professor. In the course of these events, I learned that there are an infinite number of ways to tell the story of one’s life, or of someone else’s life, or of both, and they can all be true. This story emerges from a place of realization that the only way forward is to know that not knowing is knowing. <p>
When I was a non-traditional undergrad living in the Missouri Ozarks, I and a couple of friends embarked on the indigenous practice of “crying for a vision” – spending several days on a mountaintop fasting and asking the Universal Mind for guidance. As a history (and music) major, I was on a path that Clio (and Euterpe) seemed to lay before me, but I was unsure as well as curious. There’s a reason the Greeks held the Muses to be instrumental in life events great and small, and Clio and Euterpe, the Muses of History and Music, respectively, had been in my life for some time. It’s been over a quarter-century now since that Vision Quest. Three of us embarked together to separately sit on a mountaintop in a spirit of Seeking the Way Forward. It was raining when we went up on an evening in May, 1994. Each of us had our own reasons for going and up the mountain we went in the rain. <p>
In the morning, we arrived at the ridgetop and walked around for awhile trying to decide how to split up and how to deal with what might be wet three days. We finally decided to spend our time in the dry rain shadow of the sixty-foot tall rimrock, about a quarter mile apart from each other. I was on the south end of the east face overlooking the Buffalo River valley, with my friends to my left (north). We agreed that in the morning, one of us would build a rockpile sculpture roughly halfway between himself and the other guy. Then, in the evening the other guy would alter the sculpture in some way to make it clear that all was well.
For me, extremely powerful dreams and visions were a precursor to this Vision Quest rather than the result of it. Those events were in the past at this point (more on this later). For three days I implored the Universe to tell me if following Clio and Euterpe was the right course. Not hearing “No,” and not knowing what else to do, I have continued on this path. I became radicalized in a political sense and, upon reflection, Clio’s influence can be seen in at least three parts. I came to realize that some of us are in the revolutionary business of remembering the horrific crimes committed against humanity and the Earth by humans with Power. That’s one part. Another part is we are remembering the dreams of those who dared to dream what freedom from these crimes might be like and how we might get there. That’s another part. The most important part is that we are engaged in GETTING THERE. <p>
So, I wrote a book on Herman Husband, a middling yeoman farmer and activist in the eighteenth century, raised in the system, benefitting from the system – I should say Empire – and yet, because of a conscience that manifested throughout his life in a Christian-based mythology, he is very much interested in “getting there,” i.e., he dreamt of what freedom and I daresay “bliss” would mean in his world of Christian metaphors. His dream is part of what we are engaged in understanding. <p>
We must do this while inhabiting a world of Christian Americanisms, keeping the senses tuned for the diamonds in this veil of tears while looking for them within. This project engages a personal effort to provide an indigenous perspective. I am not Native American, but I am an earthling descended from the indigenous people of northwest Europe. Native American scholar Vine Deloria, Jr. noted that we have reached a point where indigeneity is more a matter of attitude than of bloodlines, it’s just that Native Americans and other non-settler-colonial peoples are more likely to still be in touch with a worldview that was fairly universal thousands of years ago – that Mother Earth is the final arbiter and our task is to nurture and attune ourselves to an inner guidance system rooted in the Mother. This inner guidance can be thought of as the ground from which individual life forms emerge. We are the eyes and ears of the Mother, but we have evolved these brains who have developed a hubris telling us that The Brain, not the Earth, is the Master. This is how we’ve gotten into this mess – we must re-access the inner guidance on a massive scale and put down the tools of hubris: Power and its monster, War. This is the worldview this book embraces. <p>
As far as Herman Husband is concerned, he lived from 1724 to 1795. The historical literature on this period is fraught with reflections of one American mythology or another largely written by careerist historians who are otherwise able scholars but who must (as they were trained to do) inhabit their career track. In other words, don’t rock the boat in ways that call into question the U.S. power structure or the basic assumptions of capitalism, although there is a remnant of “radical” history in the “canon” to which a handful of brave souls contribute. The history discipline’s orthodoxy runs counter to an honest search for the truth, thus purging the life from what could be a very engaging endeavour. This is a major block in the search for truth. Nothing new about this – pandering to power has always watered down “professional” discourse. This is an institutionalized cowardice that we can ill-afford in these dark days. <p>
Clio knows that if history doesn’t engage the soul of storytelling, i.e., convey some deep message that reveals truth, it’s dead. The problem with writing a biography is that a human life doesn’t fit into a book. Humans tell stories, but accurately describing a life that has an infinite number of perspectives, all of them subjective, all of them true, cannot be done. Approaching these stories with the realization that whatever objectivity there might be, it is rooted in subjectivity. This is an aspect of indigeneity that I was pleased to discover. Indeed, the subjectivity of any intellectual process permeates this work. Twentieth-century Moravian philosopher Edmund Husserl has done us the favour of explicating the nature of phenomenology, the acknowledgement of this subjectivity and its attachment to the lifeworld as opposed to the positivists’ strictly mental world, which, phenomenologists correctly argue, isn’t real. This is what Husserl called “the crisis of the sciences,” and it turns out that Husserl’s phenomenology strongly resembles an indigenous worldview, or what some Native American scholars call Native Science. <p>
What’s missing from historical orthodoxy is a connection to the world as it is lived. It is institutionalized, so anyone on a career track may not notice much less point it out. The crisis Husserl pointed out he sums up with this question: Can reason and that-which-is be separated, where reason, as knowing, determines what is? The human has been isolated from the other-than-human in “modern” and “postmodern” consciousness as the mind has been isolated from the body. “Objectivity,” like “positivism,” is a useful fiction but should not be confused with the lifeworld; the subjective reality we all experience in our own way. At the heart of our own subjectivity is a paradox – always a sign that reality is nearby: objectivity is supposed to bring us above subjectivity and toward reality. But by separating interpretation and analysis from the lifeworld, i.e., the subjectivity we all share, what might be real is left in the dust. The stories, art, songs, dances, and other art forms that unite the human with the other-than-human represent the vitality that is like the air we must breathe and water we must drink. To tap into this creative inner universe is to tap into the creative centre from whence all creation comes. That’s what has been left behind by positivism and the careerist approach to history. I don’t know if this book would be considered a “monograph” or not and I don’t care. I’m telling a story.
* * *
Figment Zenguitarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04516554947889012627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5937516155864759778.post-84539221651655428362021-09-27T17:41:00.002-07:002021-09-27T18:08:39.518-07:00Conscience as a Historical Force: The Liberation Theology of Herman Husband -- a previewFrom the book that is, for all practical purposes, finished -- copyright Douglas Harvey, 2021.
<p>Table of Contents
<p>Introduction …………………………………………………………………….. 1
<b><p>PART 1: AGRARIANISM, CAPITALISM, ANTINOMIANISM</b>
<p>Chapter 1: Early Modern Context ……………………….……………………... 8
<p>Wherein there is an exploration of five main analytical points regarding the eighteenth century: 1) The Indigenous World; 2) Enclosure; 3) The Rise of Capitalism; 4) The consequences of the “Glorious” Revolution; 5) Antinomianism (radical Christianity). The discourse within these five categories is largely informed by elements of the “transition debate,” especially Rodney Hilton and Ellen Meiksins Wood.
<p>Chapter 2: The Making of an Eighteenth-Century Antinomian ……………….. 36
<p>This is an analysis and contextualization of Herman Husband’s first (self)-published writing: Some Remarks on Religion, which is a “conversion narrative” in the Quaker tradition. There is a psychoanalytical element to this chapter, mainly tapping this vein going back to William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience. The psychological transformation called by many religious people the “second birth” is explored in the case study of Herman Husband.
<p>Chapter 3: The Desperation of Accumulation …………………………………. 65
<p>North Carolina had a reputation as the most corrupt and “backward” of Britain’s North American colonies. This chapter combines a survey of land accumulation and enclosure with an introduction of the institutionalized abuses of the “courthouse rings” that led to the well-known “Regulation” of the 1760s. This story has its parallels in every colony and state in U.S. history.
<p>Chapter 4: Regulating the Narrative …………………………………………… 91
<p>Because there are some thirty histories of the North Carolina Regulation (1765-1771) dating back to the first one written by Herman Husband in 1770, this chapter is an analysis of some of those early histories and their authors. A study of them provides insight into nineteenth-century American (U.S.) discourse and the political economics of those who weighed in on this topic. A brief summary of the Regulation is included, as well as an analysis of Herman Husband’s first pamphlets and sermons.
<b><p>PART 2: THE BOOK OF HERMAN</b>
<p>Chapter 5: Tuscape Death ………………………………………………………126
<p>Herman Husband was a marked man after the Battle of Alamance in May of 1771. He fled to the Pennsylvania mountains, leaving his family in the care of relatives in Hagerstown, Maryland. His grandson, David Husband, wrote a history of early Somerset County, Pennsylvania in a series first published in 1870. David was the last person to write from Herman Husband’s own journal, lost in a fire around 1880. Local historian Ronald Bruner rescued these articles from crumbling pages of the Somerset newspaper and published them in 2005. This chapter includes an exegesis on Herman’s Proposal to Amend pamphlet of 1782, as well as his “vision” he had near the Allegheny Front on the Pennsylvania-Maryland border in 1779. This chapter combines this remnant of Husband’s Journal with an analysis of his pamphlet Proposal to Amend the Constitution of the United States. This is also an exegesis of his metaphorical interpretation of relevant biblical passages.
<p>Chapter 6: Return of the Beast ………………………………………………… 161
<p>Husband was convinced that the merchant-banker-planter coup of 1787 (AKA the Constitution Convention) was a step backwards. The new government’s 1791 “Tax on Spirits” triggered resistance known as “The Whiskey Rebellion,” (some of us prefer the term “Pennsylvania Regulation” and that is the term I use). Husband wrote two pamphlets with the goal of alerting the public to the dangers of this reactionary coup: Sermon to the Bucks and Hinds of America and 14 Sermons on Jacob’s 14 Sons. He outlined a draft of an alternative Constitution and laid out other aspects of a government that he perceived were laid down in the Bible for that purpose.
<p>Chapter 7: The End of the World ……………………………………………… 201
<p>Husband left behind a booklet of unpublished, handwritten, handbound sermons based on the Book of Daniel. These represent his “Fifth Monarchist” beliefs. Fifth Monarchists argue that there have been four great monarchies in the world since the Creation, but the fifth will be the New Jerusalem (Paradise) brought about by the return of the Messiah. In most versions of the myth, this is preceded by armed conflict. Husband’s Fifth Monarchism is non-violent, and the “Messiah” is a metaphor for people who live by listening to the “Christ within”; i.e., their own consciences. This “exegesis” is underlain by the reactionary coup of 1787 and subsequent Pennsylvania Regulation of the early 1790s. Herman Husband was arrested and charged with sedition, spent the winter in a Philadelphia jail, was pardoned in the spring, but had contracted pneumonia and died on the way home in June, 1795.
<p>Conclusion …………………………………………………………………….. 221
<p>Endnotes ………………………………………………………………………. 223
<p>Works Cited …………………………………………………………………… 241
<p>
<p><b>Introduction</b>
<p>“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Alice Walker brought these words from June Jordan’s 1978 poem to the attention of the American public in 2006 with her book by that name. Commemorating a protest by South African women against the brutal apartheid system of that country in 1956, it was popularized in song by “Sweet Honey in the Rock” in 1998. It is an old message and a spiritual sibling of “We Shall Overcome.” This was, at base, the eighteenth-century message of Herman Husband, a backcountry farmer, preacher, and activist. But the message is much older still. Antinomian radicals – religious revolutionaries who denied the right of anyone to hold power over them – argued that their connection to the divine in their own hearts was the only legitimate authority and if everyone heeded that inner voice it would midwife a paradise on earth. Anne Hutchinson was one of these, as was Herman Husband (1724-1795).
<p>This book is a study of the antinomian Husband and his “liberation theology.” Theologians and historians use the term “antinomian” to refer to those radical sects or independent followers of Christianity who deny ecclesiastical or secular authority, which usually means a repudiation of transubstantiation, child baptism, marriage rites, swearing of oaths, and other institutions of established religion. This anarchist tendency is often accompanied by political radicalism, as well, such as a demand for universal suffrage and democratic control of economic affairs. As for “liberation theology,” this appellation is usually applied to the followers of Father Gustavo Gutièrrez of twentieth-century Peru and, as with many socialist tendencies it also has a rich history over the last few centuries.
<p>Herman Husband was deeply involved in two major revolutionary movements in North America: the North Carolina Regulation of 1765-1771 and the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791-1795. In both cases, Herman Husband’s antinomian radicalism was considered by the authorities to be one of the biggest threats to their power and control. While these topics are well-covered (if not well-understood), no historians have undertaken to analyze his liberation theology. This includes his numerous sermons and pamphlets that he left behind, rich with metaphorical language. It remains unanswered why he, specifically, as a pacifist was considered such a threat by the authorities. This book addresses that question.
His metaphorical reading of the Bible is powerful but not easy for the modern reader to digest. Once this is brought into focus, Herman Husband can be seen as a poet; an artist who used the language of the Bible to express what he felt would liberate the common people and create a democratic society of “peace, justice, and order.” Adhering to one’s own conscience was the path forward for all, and until a critical mass of people did that, arbitrary rule, tyranny, and slavery will prevail. This was common in the antinomian world of the early modern period, although usually quickly suppressed by the established power structure.
<p>The central problems Husband and his cohort faced are still with us. In the 1780s, the “Critical Period” of American history, aptly named by nineteenth-century historian John Fiske, it did not seem inevitable that the new republic would become a heavy-handed global empire. The idea that an informed commoner class would have a significant say in governmental policies was still on the table. The merchant-banker-planter elite did not yet have a lock on power in the new republic. That group met to design a document that consolidated their power in Philadelphia in June of 1787. Charles Beard’s famous 1913 book on this topic, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, merely reminded people of the debate that gripped the new republic before and after that convention – debate over whether the conventioneers were elites trying to wrest control of the new republic from the sovereign states. This debate is a non sequitur; of course they were. They said so. Whether that was a good thing, an assumption in U.S. history classes since then, is arguable given the state of affairs as of this writing. In any case, I sometimes refer to the Philadelphia convention of 1787 and subsequent ratification of the document produced there (under the condition of adding a Bill of Rights, forced on them to obtain adequate votes for ratification, mind) as the Reaction of 1788. It is a handy heuristic device to present it as a kind of parallel to the bourgeois coup in England known as the “Glorious” Revolution of 1688. They are similar insofar as they both resulted in a seizure of control by the bourgeoisie and led to the creation of what historian John Brewer dubbed a “fiscal-military state.”
<p>But there are multiple levels of empire happening here that I try to keep in view. In the indigenous world, there is the dominance of the Iroquois Confederacy in eastern Great Lakes region well into the eighteenth century. There are entities such as the Ohio Land Company of Virginia trying hard to wrest control of the land from the indigenous peoples west of the Alleghenies that led to the French-Indian War. This aspect includes the exploitation of unsuspecting colonists who were led to believe they are buying into a land of peace and plenty only to find themselves in the midst of a bloody and brutal frontier war. There are the bourgeois elites in the North American colonies who want to have their cake and eat it, too – meaning they want independence from the London bourgeoisie operating the levers of mercantile power, but they also want control of a new fiscal-military state in North America that provides significant checks on democracy. There are the micro versions of this where the local “courthouse rings” operating in the backcountry – sheriffs, lawyers, judges, and other well-placed local officials who use their power to rule over petty tyrannies again, victimizing vulnerable colonists who are simply looking for a place to live in peace and freedom. And let us not forget the plantation complex, that horrific nazi-esque method of stealing labor that produced most of the new nation’s wealth well into the nineteenth century. All of this is a far cry from peace, freedom, and that elusive concept: cooperation, which was much closer to Herman Husband’s vision.
The colonial period in the Atlantic World was a time when the “Mercantile Code” was a dominant force in the halls of power. Defined further in the main body of this text, it is a term I borrowed from independent scholar William Hogeland. He defines it most succinctly in writing that it “was not a code of ethics but a collection of sharp practices, including self-dealing, hidden networks, side bets, and mutual patronage” – to say nothing of manipulating governments and their militaries for private gain. I employ this broader definition that includes these additional aspects that the twentieth century brought to the fore, although in hindsight it was plainly there all along. Herman Husband referred to its practitioners as “The Beast” in reference to one of the biblical “beasts” in the Book of Daniel. This is developed and explained below.
<p>Herman Husband has been the subject of three biographies, two published, one recently. Many journal articles and book chapters have treated or at least mentioned Herman Husband. None of them address Husband’s metaphorically constructed liberation theology, preferring instead to follow the lead of Hugh Henry Brackenridge and Johann David Schoepf, eighteenth-century visitors to Herman’s abode who refer to him in condescending tones. That is a mistake, and utterly misses Husband’s significance, this book argues.
Herman Husband’s liberation theology laid out specifics regarding governmental structure down to the local level and that the “designing men” of political parties with money and influence should be prevented from seizing control of electoral processes. He had a plan to finance government that left the merchant-banker-planter bourgeoisie out of the process. Gold and silver currency, like the bourgeoisie, should not be permitted as it was not needed – currency could be worked out among common working people who produced and retained their own wealth. Those who were entrusted with decision-making in public affairs would be required to live a monk-like existence during their terms, with no nepotism and no pay other than maintenance. Husband was no anti-intellectual – he preferred Voltaire and Montesquieu over established church dogmas.
<p>Nevertheless, this is a spiritual biography. It begins with four chapters of Herman Husband’s development as an unwitting radical revolutionary. This includes the political-economic milieu of his era and an exploration of antinomian radicalism (Chapter 1). He left behind a “conversion narrative” that he published as a “New Light” Quaker where he begins to emphasize the importance of following the “Christ within” over church doctrines or the written word (Chapter 2). The level of corruption inherent in the “Mercantile Code” was on full display in colonial North Carolina, although it was widespread through the Atlantic world and beyond. This book explores the North Carolina microcosm of the abuses of power that first sent Herman Husband into radical politics (Chapter 3). The resulting North Carolina Regulation has been thoroughly worked over, including Herman Husband’s role in it. In the interest of finding new insight into that role, as well as what the early historiography may reveal, I have delved into those early works, of which Herman Husband’s own account is the first. In doing so, the roots of the lines of debate may be gleaned, helping to connect the 1760s to the present. This includes the first exegeses of Husband’s printed sermons which were included at the end of his history (Chapter 4).
<p>The second part of the book is a continuation of these exegeses, focused almost exclusively on Herman Husband’s writings from the American Revolution period to his death in 1795. North Carolina Governor William Tryon and the colonial militia brutally but down the backcountry farmers’ resistance at the Battle of Alamance in 1771. Herman Husband, although a pacifist, would certainly have been hanged had he not fled to the Allegheny Mountains. His powerful vision in the Alleghenies in 1779 led him to publish his proposals for how the new republic could establish “justice, peace, and order” (Chapter 5). Husband was convinced that what Americans remember as the “Constitutional Convention” was an assertion of power by “The Beast,” from the biblical books of Daniel and Revelations. He pamphleteered his sermons on this topic (Chapter 6). There is a collection of his sermons that remained unpublished. This handwritten copy was an exegesis on the Book of Daniel that follows along “Fifth Monarchist” lines. Related to antinomianism, Fifth Monarchists believed that there had been four great kingdoms or monarchies in world history today. The fifth monarchy would usher in the New Jerusalem and a righteous leadership that, in Herman Husband’s reckoning, would come from the truth found in the human heart (Chapter 7). All of this is an attempt to see the world as Husband saw it in sympathy and solidarity with his vision and dreams.
<p>As for terminology, I try to keep it simple, particularly regarding the transition from feudalism to capitalism, a process incomplete yet well underway in Herman Husband’s milieu. For example, I resist the temptation to use the term “working class” in an environment that is clearly agrarian, yet not exactly a peasantry. Instead, I use the word “commoners” or the “commoner class” or perhaps “agrarian commoner class” for this element of society. There were, nevertheless, many who would fit into a proletarian working class category, as the enclosure of lands and the deracination of the traditional peasantry was at its height. This includes both sides of the Atlantic – lands were being enclosed and engrossed by an economic elite to which I refer as the “merchant-banker” class, or the “merchant-banker-planter” class, or simply the bourgeoisie. Part of Herman Husband’s uniqueness is that he might have been a part of this bourgeoisie, but his antinomianism, i.e., his attention to the “Christ within” would not permit it. He chose to advocate for a liberation theology instead.
<p>While I do pull in similar movements and beliefs present in the Atlantic world, this book is primarily about Herman Husband’s liberation theology. Revolutionary movements in the Atlantic world have been getting a steady treatment at least since Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh’s Many-Headed Hydra came out in 2000. This book is part of that trend insofar as it presents a North American backcountry version of it. Husband has been mistreated and it is time to see what he saw from his perspective as much as one can accomplish that task. In engaging with Herman’s spirit as much as possible, I have felt like a musician trying to interpret the centuries-old works of a composer deeply engaged in his own inner world. Herman Husband was a poet who worked in the metaphorical realm of the Christian Bible. His interpretation was unique and creative. This book unpacks Herman Husband’s metaphorical language for the first time, revealing that Husband’s liberation theology was well-informed, radically democratic, socialistic, and liberating. Most importantly, his message is relevant today – bracketing June Jordan and Alice Walker and as Husband himself said, we are the ones for whom he was writing.
Figment Zenguitarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04516554947889012627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5937516155864759778.post-45660705012090588742021-06-16T13:39:00.013-07:002021-06-16T18:18:15.510-07:00A Portrait of the Reaction of a Young White Man from the Middle of North America to the Discovery of James Baldwin(Apologies for the lack of a bibliography -- this was a bit of scribbling from undergrad days and thought I'd share.)
<p>
I never related to the society I grew up in, and I finally walked away from so-called "civilization" -- at least as much as I could with the skillset I had -- in November of 1980 at the age of 23, although I had been practicing such a departure off and on since puberty. I remained on the fringes of society until I walked into Recovery in April of 1988 after numerous brushes with our mortality from multiple directions. I had tried to find some other way to be on the Earth -- through nature, through self-medication, through hiding in workaholism, through all three at once. Anyway, one fine day I came across James Baldwin and wrote an essay in response to a prompt in an American short story class. That is what follows.<br/><p>
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I love what James Baldwin had to say even though he grew up in Harlem during the twenties and thirties and I grew up in a small town in western Kansas in the sixties and seventies. His voice has a resonance for me. He devoted a great deal of energy to letting his wounds -- acquired by growing up in yet another paternalistic, authoritarian household -- get some air so that they could begin to heal. This sets a powerful example for the rest of us.<br />
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James Baldwin had a willingness and a drive to expose the deepest wounds in our culture. As Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, the psychiatrist whose studies were used in the Supreme Court's <i>Brown v. Board</i> decision, stated, "He demands of anybody who comes in contact with him a look at some aspect of truth . . . Jimmy confronts you, not just racially, but with the <i>human predicament</i> (italics mine). (Eckman 26)<br />
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The human predicament, particularly in our society, is primarily caused by the fact that we are afraid of facing these wounds and thus we avoid ourselves and the reality of who we are capable of becoming. Our society is literally packed full of ways to avoid the legitimate suffering of growth and consequently, we suffer the endless misery of spiritual stagnation. You can <i>smell</i> it. It smells like <i>hell</i>.<br />
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James Baldwin could smell it, and more importantly, he could relate it to others. He said that it is really frightening to comprehend the effort people make to avoid the truth. The worst things happen when one tries to convince oneself of the truth of a falsehood. In his own words: I'm suggesting that one try to listen to one's heart, and tell the truth." (quoted in Eckman, 26)<br />
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This can be quite a tall order when one has been trained to ignore anything that happens <i>within</i> oneself. This is taught in childhood. Many people don't seem to realize the power they have to influence their children. If they did, maybe they would take the job of raising them more seriously. One of the things that Baldwin said was that we carry with us all of our parents' unresolved pain. James Baldwin's step-father, David, was a Baptist fire-breather who did his best to try and make a "common darkie" out of his step-son, Jimmy. He frowned on Jimmy's going to school. He expected him to do as he was told and be a fry-cook or a dock worker like good "boy." David Baldwin indicted the white world for oppressing the black, but he himself became an unwitting believer in the theory of racial superiority. This rage was passed on to Jimmy, who became the unwitting "guardian of David Baldwin's anger." (Eckman 26)<br />
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If is a matter of record that the African American population of this country has been saddled with hundreds of years of pain and oppression, to say nothing of torture and murder. But no one has a monopoly on pain. When one looks at the drunken bloodbath that is European history, it becomes much easier for me, as an American of English and Scots-Irish descent, to see that my father, (a decorated WWII veteran), and I have also been victims of the spiritual wasteland of Western Society. It is also makes it easier to see why my father considered his children to be potential cannon fodder and fresh sinew for the meat-grinder of the Accumulation Machine. Not only did he seem afraid of becoming too attached to us, but he <i>did not know how</i> to become attached to us if he had wanted to. This negativity was profoundly supplemented by the fact that he was treated in this same manner by his father, and he by his, etc. The oppressors are not without their own private hells. The American white man, though historically guilty of incredible atrocities, particularly against Africans, African Americans, and Native Americans (and we could put women, gays, trans, etc. in this category, as well), is his own worst enemy. As James Baldwin understood, oppressing people is as damaging to the human psyche as is being the oppressed, because sooner or later, you have to repress yourself and worse yet, your children, in order to oppress someone else.<br />
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The fact that the young child soaks up his parent's emotional pain has been widely acknowledged, although it's largely subsumed under the massive dysfunction of a system that has facilitated this collective Ozymandias. In "Sonny's Blues," Baldwin acknowledges this when he describes a living room scene in which the children are just lying around, being comfortable and quiet. The grownups are talking; the children don't know what about, but they hope that this comfortable, relaxed feeling will never end. The conversation ambles around what they've seen and where they've come from. Then, the adults remember the children and "they won't talk anymore that day . . . The child knows that they won't talk anymore because if he knows too much about what's happened to <i>them</i>, he'll know too much too soon, about what's going to happen to <i>him</i>." (Baldwin 72-73)<br />
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Many are also realizing that unless there is someone in the child's life who essentially rescues him from this hereditary oppression, the child is doomed to repeat the life of his parents or worse. "Children can survive without money or security or things, but they are lost if they cannot find a loving example, for only this example can give them a touchstone for their lives." (Eckman 36-37) Mrs. Baldwin taught her children to follow her own policy of submission to David. And yet, "She functioned as a kind of underground," James remembered. As happens within nations, the family became united against the step-father's tyranny, allying with each other as shelter from the oppressor. (40)<br />
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When James was allowed to be himself around his mother and younger siblings, his natural compassion was nurtured. He had little difficulty forgiving David after he died for the oppressive and violent childhood he had experienced. "When he died, I realized what I really wanted was for him to <i>love</i> me. For me to be able to <i>prove</i> myself to him." (Eckman 37) This normal desire is mocked by many parents, forcing children to turn their rage inward. As Baldwin said, "It's horrible to be a child! Because you know more as a child than you do as a grown-up and you can't . . . cope with it." (34)<br />
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Through his mother, James had received some degree of support for being himself, but it was in school where he began to get a chance to express himself. He began to realize that he had thought his pain was unprecedented, but he now learned "that his lacerations were the stigmata of mankind." And, equally as profound, Jimmy Baldwin found out in school that he was smart. (Eckman 42) He had a black principal in school who liked and supported him. A young substitute teacher who had come to New York from the midwest "rejoiced in the talent she discerned in her young, diffident pupil." It was her influence that helped him to see a way out. He later said, "The world she showed me seemed very far away, but it was real. It was there." (43)<br />
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Baldwin had to go to Paris to get away from people telling him what to be in order to get some idea of who he really was. In Paris, he wasn't constantly reminded of his blackness. Certain areas were not off limits to him because of his color. He was simply a poor person, a starving artist if you will, lost in a cosmopolitan crowd that cared little about the color of one's skin. In this atmosphere, he began to become reconciled with the universe, a process that is extremely difficult in the atmosphere of oppression and repression so common in America. <i>I could </i>write<i>, </i>I could <i>think</i>, I could <i>feel</i>, I could <i>walk</i>, I could <i>eat</i>, I could <i>breathe</i>. There were no penalties attached to these simple human endeavors. Y'know? Even when I was starving, it was <i>me</i> starving. It was not a <i>black man</i> starving." (Eckman 118) And understandably, as a friend confides, "He thought seriously of never being a Negro again -- certainly never a Negro in America." (119)<br />
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An interesting parallel comes in to play here. One that, if embraced and institutionalized, could emancipate the "western," and especially the white American psyche from its blindly self-imposed prison sentence. Baldwin makes a statement (one of many) that can serve as a mirror for White America:<br />
"What was most difficult was the fact that I was forced to admit something I had always hidden from myself, which the American Negro [the American White] has had to hide from himself<br /> as the price of his public progress: that I hated and feared white people [black people]. This did not mean that I loved black [white] people; on the contrary, I despised them, possibly because they failed to produce a Rembrandt. In effect, I hated and feared the world."<br /> (Eckman 119)<br />
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Many American whites have expressed fear and hatred of black people, generated by the guilt we have obtained, not necessarily from our own actions, but from the atrociities committed by our ancestors that we are taught from Day One not to question, but to <i>revere</i>? I believe that the white American male has had to hide from <i>himself</i> as the price for his public progress. Baldwin was angry and afraid, he speculated, in part because blacks hadn't produced a Rembrandt (a highly arguable assertion). Aren't a large percentage of whites angry and afraid because we have destroyed so many? Furthermore, aren't we all told, in many cases from a very early age, not what we <i>can</i> do, but what we <i>can't</i> do? Aren't we forced to be like everyone else if we are going to be accepted into the workplace? Isn't this the equivalent of condemning the miraculous and championing the mediocre? Don't those of us of European ancestry do to ourselves the very same thing that James Baldwin lamented that African Americans do to themselves? Isn't what we all do to ourselves called "self-denial?" As Joseph Campbell liked to say, "Demons are just angels who have been denied."<br />
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Journalist Jake Lamar described this revisited "white man's burden" in a way that Badwin would likely appreciate:<br />
"The desperate yearning to be considered normal, part of some standard Disneyfied American citizenry, runs deep in white consciousness. I've witnessed the poignant efforts of young whites striving to conform to the vague tenets of the mainstream, taking crushingly dull jobs, settling down with the least challenging of spouses, dreaming of the perfect family, groping<br />
for an illusory sense of security. The quest for conformity can be fraught with doubt, doubt is anathema to the mainstream. To reaffirm your conventionality, you must constantly tell yourself what you are not. (Lamar 83)<br />
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I submit that all the material riches that are available in Western society are a monument to mediocrity, and now a sort of banal nihilism. The real challenge of life has nothing to do with material wealth and security. What the hell is security when you live in a world in which you <i>have to die</i>? James Baldwin was aware of this. In "Sonny's Blues," there is a moment where the narrator, Sonny's older brother, is talking to him about his future. Sonny wants to play the piano. He's making the point that it's the only thing he wants to do. His brother responds, "Well, Sonny, you know people can't always do exactly what they want to do." To which Sonny answers, "No, I don't know that, I think people <i>ought</i> to do what they want to do, what else are they alive for?" (Baldwin 76)<br />
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There are consequences to doing what you want, namely the legitimate suffering of following your own path, (which is the main cause of personal growth), made more difficult by the established notion that this should not, and indeed cannot, be done. James Baldwin: "There is something very impressive about being able to get through the world and still be able to be hurt. Because most people seem to give up so soon." He goes on to say that if you make a real connection with yourself, it is <i>always</i> a connection with everyone [and everything] else. (Eckman 30)<br />
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Baldwin said that when you have to confront someone on a one-on-one basis, like in a relationship, the truth comes out because the masks cannot survive the experience for very long. "But everyone's afraid of that, afraid of being seen as he or she is. But that's the price, you know." The price of <i>being alive</i>. We are not taught how to <i>be alive</i>, we are taught how to <i>fit in</i>, and if we do it well, without creating any problems, we get to have a manicured prison in suburbia and 2.3 children. Acceptance into this ship of fools only comes with acceptance of this lie that authenticity is a <i>faux pas</i> and God forbid your children should take up the cause of authenticity and saying what they <i>really</i> see and think and feel. Baldwin again:<br />
"You have to come down front and be whoever you are. And you don't know who you are, you discover that . . . through somebody else. And everybody's afraid of this revelation. You know it isn't done in a day. Once you've done it, it isn't so terrifying. Once you've made some crucial turning point . . . you can handle it. Because you <i>know</i> you <i>can</i>. (Eckman 29)<br />
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And you find your niche in the world, not because of the acceptance of the status quo, but because you have made a commitment to the part of you that <i>is</i> the Universe, not a collection of fear-based defenses, and the conforming masses don't have the power to stop you, short of killing you, which some would be glad to do.<br />
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What does all of this amount to in the end? In "Sonny's Blues," near the end of the story, Sonny is onstage jamming with his musician friends. Creole is the name of the bass player:
<p>"Then Creole stepped forward to remind them that what they were playing was the blues. He hit something in all of them, he hit something in me, myself, and the music tightened and deepened, apprehension began to beat the air. Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell. It's the only light we've got in all this darkness." (Baldwin 86)Figment Zenguitarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04516554947889012627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5937516155864759778.post-69913584416453130832021-05-14T18:14:00.419-07:002021-07-02T12:36:41.444-07:00The "Second Birth"; or, Never Mind John Galt, Who Is Figment Zenguitar? I grew up in a libertarian household, although no one really talked about it for the longest time. However, much remained unexplained to me as a 14-year-old, and I didn't adapt well to the social pecking order in school. I wanted to play basketball and baseball and was pretty good, but I clashed with coaches and the social "elites," thus making me problematic. I couldn't acknowledge what they seemed to want me to acknowledge: that they were my superiors. I discovered the counterculture, such as it existed in a small-town in the High Plains in 1972, and fell in with that lot. I was at least accepted. And the drugs were amazing, particularly Orange Sunshine, Window Pane, Purple Haze, and other similar psychotropics, coming mainly from Boulder, Colorado, I was told, and much more interesting to me than anything going on in school. The next year, my girlfriend got pregnant, and the situation was handled badly by everyone involved. Shit hit the fan, and the possibility of a "normal" life was put on hold for some decades. The upside is that a beautiful person came into the world, another story for another time.
<p>In my own family, my mom was the dominant force. My dad seemed, and had pretty much always seemed, to be gladly taking a backseat in family affairs. He seemed to want to escape from any inter- or intra-family social obligations, and he largely succeeded. I think my older brother and sister grew up in a different dynamic, although I wasn't there, of course, coming along nine years after my sister. At age six, my dad taught me how to ride a bike. We were riding down the street and I was talking to him when I realized that he wasn't listening. And the thought popped into my head -- and has not left -- that something is wrong with my dad. Well, turns out he grew up in a dysfunctional environment, judging from the few stories I coaxed out of him later. Plus, he spent nine months or so being shelled by the Nazis as a Warrant Officer in the Quartermaster Corps attached to Patton's Third Army in World War II. This is generally described now as "untreated post-traumatic stress syndrome." The symptoms are classic -- workaholism, alcoholism, agoraphobia. He didn't know what the hell to make of me, but I think he got around to caring at some point. We had something of a relationship near the end of his life. I think my mom talked him into me more or less against his true wishes. The whole operation was poisoned by Ayn Rand's snake oil, for which "John Galt" stands as a metaphor. My mom embraced this pseudo-philosophy, and when I was lying in a hospital bed in February 1975, nearly dead from hepatitis (too many drugs, not enough food, bad company), she dumped a pile of Ayn Rand books on me, which I read. Since I didn't want to die, I got off drugs, off the street, and into the "workforce." by February of 1976, I was well on my way to becoming a "concrete man" in the construction business. This was after a stint in the carnival and a very positive and life-changing experience at a commune outside of Ithaca, NY. Now, at age 63, I can see that this "Summer of '75," and my experiences in the carnival and the commune were life-saving events, not the Ayn Rand books. Those merely raised many questions that, in Rand's own work, remained unanswered. (Example? What about the fucking environment -- the other-than-human world that we cannot live without, the most important question of our time? Rand's answer: Crickets.)
<p>I was a precocious kid who grew up to be a construction worker who was also an alchoholic (I ultimately switched addictions from hard drugs to alcohol in the interest of staying out of jail and staying alive), that "died" at age 30 and was reborn courtesy of Alcoholics Anonymous and a few benevolent strangers who took me under their wing. I'll name the most influential of them: Bob C., Mac, Barbara, and Greg, in reverse order of their influence probably. My wife is in a category of her own over and above these, and she came along later, after I had been clean and sober for ten years or so.
<p>I met Greg in Harrison, Arkansas in 1979. We both had caught the back-to-the-land fever popularized by the counterculture and by publications like "The Mother Earth News," to which I remain a subscriber to this day. I caught it at the commune in upstate New York. Greg possessed a unique and rather extreme genius and had dropped out of society, for the most part. During a short career as a chemist, which followed his stints at Tulane and MIT, he invented the material that filters blood in kidney dialysis machines (Dow got the credit, the patent and the money). After a still shorter career as a truckdriver in Houston, Texas, he fled to Harrison and rented a room, at $2 a night, at the Rush Hotel, owned by the Kirby family. He, like me, had moved to Harrison to buy some land, which he did -- sixty-five acres in Carroll County near Osage -- in the middle of fucking nowhere. It was/is beautiful, although Greg died of leukemia in April of 2012 and I haven't seen it since probably 2006 or thereabouts. His brother Tom, a New Orleans attorney and landlord, owns it last I heard. Greg and I became fast friends and worked together off and on for years. Many Scrabble games were played, much beer was drunk, and we often worked on our respective places in the woods together. We once bought a case of dynamite (all you needed was an Arkansas driver's license) and blew up the road at my place near the Buffalo River to lay a water line from the spring. It was awesome. There are pictures.
<p>Barbara was my AA buddy in the Branson, Missouri area, where I lived when I died and was reborn. We were two weeks apart in age and wisely maintained a platonic relationship for some years until she got married to some guy from New York and I moved to Newfoundland. We were pretty much joined at the hip for a couple of years, going to AA meetings and hanging out, drinking lots of coffee and helping other AAs. She was an ornery one with a great sense of humor and a subtle intelligence. She would fit the category of "hillbilly" for some. She grew up in a small town in the Arkansas Ozarks called Marshall. She had some African American blood in her, I think, and she took crap for it as a girl in Marshall and became something of a bully to survive. She had been a Air Force lifer brat up to that point, living in many places -- but she was very much a product of the Ozarks in her personality. She was in a failed marriage with three kids and was one of those "drunks" whose family was something she did when she was drinking. It's common in AA -- seeing people realize that their family was a product of their drinking and now that they're sober they question the whole arrangement. But she became reconciled to it and loved her grandchildren. She died in May of 2017, which I did not know until a year or so after the fact.
<p>Mac remains my closest friend outside of my wife, and still lives in the Ozarks. He built a log cabin in Newton County, Arkansas in the 1980s-'90s. I helped with some of it. It is an amazing work of art at Pinhook Hollow, and I think will be long remembered and, I hope, treasured. Mac sold his place and moved to Holiday Island outside of Eureka Springs in the fall of 2019. He is writing a memoir and has shared it with me as he works through the draft stage. It's been a pleasure to get to know him better as a result. I met Mac in Greg's room at the Rush Hotel (#42) in Harrison in 1987 near the end of my drinking days. I knew right away that this was someone who had something to teach me. Mac had joined the Army in 1956 and was parachuted into Vietnam as an "advisor." He was wounded and came home and was honorably discharged. This gave him access to the GI Bill, and he studied philosophy at the University of Southern Illinois in Carbondale and got a degree in Social Work from Washington University in St. Louis. He spent the rest of his working career as a counselor, mainly working with Vietnam veterans. Mac was never paid to be my counselor, but he was and is an informal counselor as well as a friend to me. We visit him every few months but, at age 85, I doubt he'll be driving up here anymore -- he has visited us a few times. I think it's accurate to say that Mac has been a surrogate father to me, hence his inclusion in the list of those who were instrumental in pulling my chestnuts out of the fire.
<p>Bob C. (as he is known amongst his recovery friends), and I hit it off at first encounter at an AA banquet in Branson, Missouri. We bonded over the fact that we had both spent many happy hours "knockin' 'em down" at the Bucksnort Saloon in Conifer, Colorado. Bob was also a social worker, but had retired from that work and owned a resort on Lake Taneycomo in Branson. Like Barbara, Bob C. and I became fast friends over recovery. Unlike Barbara, Bob was into Joseph Campbell, as was I. Bob had actually met Campbell at some event, probably in Denver, and had asked him a question at the end of his talk. Bob, being wealthy, helped me out on a number of occasions -- he loaned me his van to commute to Springfield to college for a semester. He once bought my used astronomy book from me for $200. We passed many hours talking about spiritual matters and especially recovery. He was what we call in AA my Sponsor, although it was pretty informal. When I woke up in Intensive Care in Springfield during my meltdown (described below), he was there, as was Barbara. He now lives in Inglewood, Florida now and I see occasional comments from him on Facebook.
<p>So, just for fun, I adopted the "hippie name" of Figment Zenguitar sometime around the millenial turn. I had read a book that had to do with Zen practice and guitar practice. And, I think the "Figment" handle came from the experience I had in a drug and alcohol addiction treatment center in Springfield, Missouri in 1989. I have described this elsewhere, and may describe it here at some point, but it's the story of a complete personality breakdown that the term "psychic emergency" or "second birth" aptly describes. While I was in the treatment center, called "Sigma House," I began writing out my life story as per the counselors' recommendation. During this process, the false selves created by my survival adaptations began to unpeel themselves. I would look in the mirror in my room and see someone different every few hours. It came to be expected that whoever I was looking at in the mirror was a mere "figment," and would soon change into someone else. It was like an intense LSD experience without the LSD and it was terrifying. When one passes from the Negative to the Positive, one must pass through Zero. At one point, I decided it would be good to run and to keep running until I passed out of Hell. This was in response to a dream I had had. That's when I ended up in Intensive Care with Rhabdomyosis. They found me unconscious on a baseball diamond, overheated with a body temperature of 107. Long story short, that's when it became apparent to me (with no assistance from psychotropic drugs) that we're all mere "figments" briefly manifested as whatever form we're in, be it an ant, an aardvark, a tree, or a human. We are all One Thing: The Universe, whatever that might mean. One thing I'm certain of: the human brain cannot grasp it, but the psyche as a whole can experience it, both negatively and positively. Once at an AA meeting in Branson, a newcomer who was clearly psychically distressed, once asked me, "How can you tell the difference between God and the Devil." Wow, did I understand that dilemma! I simply said, "It's all the same thing," meaning two sides of the same coin, so to speak. She left and I never saw her again. Given that we were in the buckle of the Bible Belt, I'm guessing she went to church. Hopefully, she didn't start drinking again.
<p>My own meltdown in Springfield was followed by a slow-burn kind of meltdown that lasted all summer until, as my birthday of September 19 approached, it began to reach a critical stage and a sort of denouement. I had read enough of Campbell and eastern religions to understand that the answer to this problem might well lay in entering into my own Hell to face whatever demons remained, or at least the next layer of them. So I consciously said to myself, in my little cabin in the woods that had once been a post office and a gas station at Ridgedale, Missouri near the Arkansas line, that I must consciously and willingly walk into Hell. There are many micro-tangents to this story, like the "vision" (one of many) I had of the well-known drawing of Jesus knocking on the door and there's no outside doorknob -- the message being YOU have to open it from inside. Remember, I was in the buckle of the Bible Belt. Well, Jesus, as a metaphor for the true self that is a creation of the Universe and not a collection of defense mechanisms created by the mind and by Fear, in my case, kicked the fucking door down, grabbed me by the scruff of the neck, and said, "Enough of this bullshit, son. It's time for you to wake the fuck up and love yourself and honor who you truly are." Yessir. That's pretty much what happened. It happened on my 32nd birthday, September 19, 1989, and on my one-year sober birthday. Friend Barbara was sitting at the kitchen table in my cabin bearing witness to most of it and providing a benevolent presence. In the midst of all this, I went to my work hanging house siding and fell out of the scaffold and broke my foot, etc., landing on a '56 Plymouth exactly like the one Uncle George (my dad's brother) had when I was a little kid. The car, parked in the Mockingbird neighborhood of Harrison, Arkansas off of Hester Drive, even had Sedgwick County, Kansas plates, where my Uncle had lived. If I hadn't landed on it, I would have landed on concrete and may well have broken my neck. Again, the full story of this is full of weird little details like Uncle George's Plymouth. Like, when I was at Sigma House three months earlier, my transformation began when I was sitting in the cafeteria, on a Saturday, on visitation day. A lot of Branson AA and Alanons were up to visit those of us in treatment, and as I sat there, a thunderstorm blew in -- it was June, just after the Tianenman Square incident, which we had watched on TV -- and suddenly I watched speechless as everyone's face began melting, just like in <i>Raider's of the Lost Ark</i>, when they open the Holy Grail. Now that I think about it, it was on my dad's birthday, June 13. There was a loud crack in the Universe, beyond the realm of conscious perception, and the world I had known slipped away, and I entered Hell, thus beginning the slow burn of what I believe is often referred to in Christian mythology as Purgatory. The last bit of work I had done before I checked into treatment with nine months of sobriety was putting siding on a cabin out in the woods in the Buffalo National River reserve in Arkansas. It was a National Park-owned cabin, and the Ranger was a Native American named Milt Sittingdown. Seriously. But I wasn't going to tell all of that here. Too late.
<p>So this process really began . . . I remember being fourteen years old, when I was put off by the social pecking order that accompanied school sports, and I started hanging out with the "hippies," who accepted me, at least more than the "rich kids" whose parents were doctors or stock-brokers or whatever. I discovered drugs and alcohol, which made me feel much better or, as I was to learn some sixteen years later, much less. I found school both uncomfortable and boring, so at the age of fifteen, I pretty much quit going. I got a girlfriend. After two or three months of dating, she got pregnant. The pregnancy wasn't necessarily an accident, she wanted out of her parents house and I wanted out of high school. The situation was handled badly by all, I tried to maintain a relationship secretly (my parents forbid me to see her when they learned of the pregnancy -- like I said, badly). I quit school and got a job cooking chickens for the Colonel. I hung out at her parent's house as much as I could. The pathos of this situation can be summed up by the following anecdote: when Nicole was born, her mother's mother called the house and I just happened to answer the phone. "You have a beautiful daughter named Nicole," she reported. My parents were in the living room watching TV, and since I was forbidden to see the mother, I said nothing. That still has a sting to it, forty-seven years later. A few weeks later, the mother's mother took the phone away from the daughter during one of our conversations and informed me that if I didn't marry the daughter, they would have me sent to the Boys Industrial School or, as it was generally understood, prison for juveniles, or "juvie." I had friends who had been. That ended the relationship two days before Christmas, 1973 -- one year to the day from when the relationship had begun.
<p>I went off the deep end. I moved in with some friends in a duplex apartment in Newton, Kansas and got a job at the tractor cab factory in the Mennonite community of Hesston, Kansas. I hated the job -- spot welding -- it was very "un-me." Drug consumption increased. I had my first profound revelation on LSD, at age seventeen. I lost my job. I got into dealing drugs to support my drug habit. I contracted hepatitis. I went to the hospital where I was told my liver panel said I should be dead. Our apartment was robbed, possibly by one of the residents, and my Fender Mustang bass (I had been in a band before the shit hit the fan), my Plush amplifier, and my homemade speaker cabinets along with my awesome album collection were all stolen. My roommates informed me of this while I was in the hospital with yellow skin, pissing orange and shitting white. This is when my mother dumped a pile of Ayn Rand books on me, thinking it would help. She didn't know what else to do. My dad, a decorated WWII vet, did his best to emulate an authoritarian, but that ship had sailed long before. The biggest impact on me while in the hospital, in addition to having my beloved musical equipmennt and collection stolen, was having the doctor say, in essence, "I don't understand why you're not dead." I knew I had to find some other path than my drug consumption.
<p>Amphetamines were the potential killer. Known as "whites" or "double crosses" to us good little consumers, they killed a number of people in our neck of the woods, both through their toxicity and through the black market craziness associated with it. I had started in with them after the break-up. I went through an intense year of criminal activity that culminated in me moving to Newton and taking the job at the tractor factory. My dad had a heart attack that same year -- 1974 was a bad year in our world.
<p>So after the hepatitis experience, I knew I had to stay off hard drugs and I had never been much of an alcohol drinker. I went to work for my brother, who had moved to town and started up a handyman business: painting, building fences, doing concrete work, roofing, etc. I had tried working for him before, but I was too strung out to make a go of it. In the spring of 1975, facing the street and death on one hand, the other hand looked better. We built fences; we painted houses; we shingled roofs; we installed guttering; we poured concrete. It seemed like we did this for a long time at the time, but upon reflection it was only a couple of months.
<p>There were two endings to this scenario. The first was when the carnival came to town. Ottaway Amusements -- "Everyday's a holiday with Ottaway." I had been selling a little weed to supplement the $1.50 an hour my brother was paying me to make the money to replace my stolen Fender Mustang bass, and I got enough to buy a Fender Precision bass guitar. So, at age 17, it was kind of a watershed moment. A couple of buddies and myself raised the question of whether the carnival might be hiring. We asked and they were. Bob Ottaway hired all three of us, and we went on the road. An amusing anecdote from my first day on the job: I smoked Belair cigarettes, but I usually kept a few joints in my cigarette pack. Well, I was running my ride (it's not hard), and Bob Ottaway came by to relieve me. "Take a little break," he said, "I'll run the ride for a bit." So I headed to the Johnny-on-the-Spot and realized too late that I had left my Belairs sitting on the console of the ride. After relieving myself, I returned to the ride and resumed my job. A few days later, in another town, we had discovered pot plants growing along the railroad right-of-way and decided to check it out. So we cut a few plants and spread them on the roofs of the carnival's box trucks to dry. We thought ourselves clever. Then, in the morning meeting, which happened every morning at 10:00, Bob announced what the day's assignments were as per usual. Then, at the end, he said, "And get those pot plants off the roofs of my trucks before we all end up in jail. And if you have to take a 'Belair break,' do it on your own time." Busted. Two-for-one.
<p>We were all "ride boys" -- tear down and set up and run the rides when the Midway was open. I was on the Sizzler. It was great and lasted for about a month until I realized that the boss was ripping me off. We were paid $15 a day; you could take it all or let it build up. I let it build up, which was a mistake. Ottaway denied that I had let it build up and cheated me out of $50 or more, which was a lot of money to a 17-year-old in 1975. So Smitty and I split -- hitchhiked back to Hays. We were in eastern Kansas outside of Lawrence at that time. In Pomona, come to think of it, which is in the outside arc of Lawrence / Kansas City / Topeka. As I recall, we had encountered a couple of guys selling heroin. It was a rip-off. There was one notable thing about this ending of this first ending of the Harvey Brothers Home Improvement contingency that did not come to fruition. We got a ride on I-70 at Topeka in a box truck that was transporting a car across the country, and there were I think three guys in the back on lawn chairs with a cooler of beer riding with the car. We jumped in with them and headed west. Shortly after, they picked up two more hitchhikers -- these were from Kentucky and it was their first trip west. If you know I-70 in Kansas, you know that about fifty miles west of Salina the country levels out, becomes almost treeless, and is flatter (there have been studies) than a pancake. The jaws of these "K-Y boys" dropped when they saw this, and one asked, "You guys actually grew up out here?" Of course, we thought it normal and thought their response amusing. The carnival was a good experience, and I'm glad I did it. Randy, the third member of our trio, stayed on with the carnival for the rest of the season -- he and Ottaway got along pretty well, apparently. Randy had a great dog named "Sambo," and it made him a fixture at the controls of the Ferris Wheel. Randy and Sambo and the Ferris Wheel; what's not to love about that.
<p>So Smitty and I both went to work for my brother. It was not exactly fun working for my brother. He was pretty stressed out with three kids and another on the way and was, frankly, an angry man. One fine day in the heat of the summer -- probably 105 degrees or so -- we were putting masonite siding on a shed in the backyard of another angry man (they were and still are common in this quarter). Smitty and I were, by the lights of the time and place, "hippies," which put us in conflict with the mainstream culture of western Kansas. Getting beat up for having long hair had been routine until I started wearing a knife on my belt. Bullies are scared shitless, down deep. So Smitty and I were getting bullied by both my brother and the homeowner. Clearly they didn't approve of something, though it was unclear what that was, it <I>was</I> clear that whatever it was it was our fault. Smitty had been talking about how he had visited his sister in Ithaca, New York and how awesome it was; forests, waterfalls, people like us. He had been talking about it for several days. On this hot, miserable day with rednecks yelling at us routinely, I said, "Fuck it, I'm going to Ithaca." Smitty said, "Well, I guess we could take my car." He had a '66 Chevelle with a 283 motor and "three on the tree." We had $110 between us, four bald tires and no spare. We dropped our nail bags at lunchtime, packed our bags and took off for Ithaca, NY. One of the best things I ever did. That was the second of two endings to working for my brother in Hays, Kansas.
<p>We left in mid-afternoon, picked up a couple of hitchhikers right away who had some uppers. We took them to their doorstep in Edwardsville, Illinois, and drove on. I had driven to Edwardsville where Smitty took the wheel. I went to sleep for a few hours and woke up in downtown Columbus, Ohio. We definitely weren't in Kansas anymore and I felt free in ways I had never known. This was especially true as we drove into the Appalachian Mountains. I love mountains -- any mountains -- and the drive from Wheeling to Scranton, when the sun went down, was one I'll never forget. Seventeen years old, having escaped what to me was a prison sentence (working for rednecks who despise you until you drop dead), now flying down the Pennsylvania Turnpike through the Alleghenies -- it was a moment I could carry with me forever as an ally. In Scranton, we stopped at a bar to replenish the cooler, and I walked into my first drag-queen experience. Everyone in the bar was dressed as a woman, and as my eyes adjusted and I ordered two sixpacks to go, I realized all these women were men, or at least most of them. My only experience with anything like this had been being picked up hitchhiking by a gay man in Dallas who put the moves on me. I got out of there fast, although the passenger side door was locked and there was a moment of panic -- I was a sixteen-year-old boy with long hair, and he was obviously attracted to me. He unlocked the door and apologized. And I had inadvertently walked into a gay bar on "the Strip" in Dallas (Lemon Ave.). This Scranton thing was new, however, and my horizons were broadened.
<p>So the sun went down and we meandered down Highway 81, I think it was, through forested hills, curves, fog banks -- things stranged to someone from western Kansas where the trees could be named. We arrived at Ithaca in the middle of the night, parked by Cayuga Lake and went to sleep listening to the Ozark Mountain Daredevlis on our eight-track tape machine. We woke up with the light and drove into town and walked around both the open-air mall downtown and walked up the waterfall trail to Cornell and the university town. I was in heaven, it seemed. People were friendly to a couple of seventeen-year-old longhairs who were disoriented but grateful, all of which were new in our experience. We decided to go for a drive around the countryside, which I don't remember much about, except that on our way back into town there were two girls hitchhiking and we picked them up. "Where you from"? One asked. "Kansas," we replied. "Where are you staying?" "Nowhere." "Well, if you give us a ride home you could probably stay with us." Done and done, as it were. Sadly, I've forgotten their names, but one was fourteen and one was thirteen and the fourteen-year-old's mother was a stripper who was working down in the city. They lived in an A-frame out in the hills with a big garden, three ponds that lay in a series down the mountainside. We ate, because we hadn't eaten since we left Hays, I don't think. We had carrot greens, corn-on-the-cob, and catfish out of the pond. Didn't cost a dime. Another revelation, although we were not new to fishing. We WERE new to the idea that you could live like this. There was an adult present, a step-father sort of figure who was the significant other of the "stripper," and who was a kind fellow who had many projects underway and in the planning stage.
<p>Some readers might be tempted to strike a negative stance toward this situation -- four minors left alone in a cabin in the woods with one older man who didn't seem to be too worried about us. So a little cultural context seems in order. This place was, more or less, just down the road from the Hitchcock Estate at Millbrook, the LSD mecca of the '60s. We were immersed in a culture that was a mixture of hippiedom and the intelligentsia from Cornell. The hippie culture was HUGE at this place. There were several communes; the Hare Krishnas had a mini-festival every afternoon at 5:00 to feed the homeless; lots of buskers; a nudist colony; in other words, it was a world apart from the one we had known. Where we stayed at the little A-frame out in the hills was nice. Smitty and the older girl commenced a sexual relationship. The other girl, who was purported to be Ken Kesey's daughter, and I did not.
<p>The point here is that this threw me out of my old prison mindset that I did not know I was in. I met fourteen-year-olds who had more maturity than we did. It was glaringly obvious that our upbringing had been severely lacking in important details -- most importantly the fact that we were human beings worthy of respect and support in our endeavors. In New York, we visited a commune that was paradisical to me. Situated somewhere near West Danby, one had to walk through the woods for a few hundred yards to reach the farmstead, which was a log cabin, a barn, a chicken coop, a goat shed, big gardens, and about ten to fifteen humans, maybe more because I'm not sure they were all present at our visit. They had a bluegrass band that was rehearsing and was pretty good. It was a functional farm -- we stayed for a big farm-style noontime meal, made up of all home-grown, homemade food. The entree was something they called "Rat-rat-rat Stew." It wasn't "rats," it was some kind of casserole and it was delicious. It was then and there I knew I had to nurture a connection with the earth for the rest of my life. This, I have done.
<p>Sadly, this paradise came to an end. We got paranoid about social workers; Smitty said we could go to Colorado, and that sounded good to me -- I was tired of being broke and there were no work prospects that I could percieve. There probably were, but with only one car, and a dicey one at that, it seemed unworkable. So we left and came back to Kansas with the prospect of leaving for Colorado within a couple of days. A couple of days after our return, Smitty showed up in his brother's Corvette, his brother was driving, and he said, "Sorry, we're taking off and we don't have any room for you." That was heartbreaking. I should have stayed in New York, was my first thought. This was the beginning of an expression I adopted that applied to my interactions with the Schmidt family: I had been "Schmidted," which is to say, screwed.
<p>But the impact had been made, and I was changed. I had seen too much, and I was never going to fit into Hays, Kansas again; not that I ever did. Nothing against the place, I had good times there; but for much of my life I imagined a scenario like the Clint Eastwood flick, <i>High Plains Drifter</i>, where his character shows up in this little town that's scared to death of a guy that's going to get out of prison and come back with has gang to seek revenge. The town hires the "Drifter" to protect them. They give him absolute power. Long story short, he makes the local and thoroughly-bullied midget the Mayor, orders the town painted red and renamed "Hell." Then in the confrontation with the outlaw gang, it burns to the ground. That was a fantasy I had of Hays, Kansas for much of my life: paint it red, rename it "Hell," and burn it to the ground. I don't feel that way anymore. I like the place okay; I work at the university as an online professor; and I don't have to live there. But I don't even mind visiting anymore. But it was literally a "Hell" for me, especially after New York.
<p>I was done working for my brother. So I went back into the dope business, selling pot and LSD to make ends meet. It turned out that Smitty made a good connection in Denver, and I'd go out there and by pounds of pot and bring them back and sell ounces and make a little money. That fall, I moved into a basement apartment with Randy from the carnival days, who had returned, and we spent three months or so as a local LSD headquarters in our little town. Pretty weird times, to say the least. The person who lived upstairs was into barbituates and she had two young children. She was separated from their dad who was mean and crazy and who took a dislike to me -- he thought I was screwing his estranged wife, which I wasn't, although I liked her and we were friends. He ended up smashing out the windshield of the old '57 GMC pickup I had bought from Smitty's dad, although I couldn't prove it, much less do anything about it. This guy was an ex-con and a Vietnam vet who exuded negativity in a major way. He, as they say, harshed my buzz, and was the progenitor of a bad acid trip that was also a life-changing experience. I was sitting in our basement apartment and Stanley J., as he was known, walked into our living room and sat down on the couch. No one ever knocked, people just came and went as the wanted. He was drunk and he sat across the room giving me the evil eye, as if he wanted to kill me. I has seventeen, he was probably twenty-five and twice my size. After a few minutes of that, I literally thought I was in hell. I left pretty shaken up by Stan and the bad acid trip. I went across town to my parents house and woke them up and told them I was having a bad trip and that I was sorry. My dad turned his back on me and went back to bed. My mom stayed up and talked me down. I hallucinated that I was on the inside of a ball at the center of the universe that was lined with faces that had been condemned to hell. I was just another face. It was a drug-induced "psychic emergency" and a fairly mild version compared to the one I experienced at age thirty without drugs. So the acid wore off, of course, but I was rattled. The end result of this three-month excursion through the LSD world was that I decided I needed to find another way to support myself.
<p>In January of 1976, I went to work with Tom and Rex (Rex was the older brother of a friend) pouring concrete. Since these were the western Kansas version of "heads" (people who smoked weed and were pretty mellow, generally, as opposed to redneck "juicers" who were into fighting and bullying). So I commenced to learn a trade -- the concrete business. The best part of that year and a half that I worked with those guys was that we spent a lot of time in the High Plains in what most people would call "the middle of nowhere." But to me, I was one with the sun, wind, and sky and it was great, most of the time. We frequently built foundations for houses and grain silos miles from any significant settlement. Look at a map of western Kansas -- there ain't much out there. On the other hand, that makes it a beautiful place to see the wonders of the other-than-human world.
<p>So this was the beginning of the summer of slow-burn, where something that had come to be called "D___ H_____," raised in an environment where discovering the genuine within was not encouraged or even understood, who had been poisoned by the poison pen of Ayn Rand, and had come to a habitual self-medication with alcohol, melted down to a more genuine piece of the Universe, who I eventually named "Figment Zenguitar." Voila, the "Second Birth."
Figment Zenguitarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04516554947889012627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5937516155864759778.post-15422236703551783072020-12-30T19:22:00.000-08:002020-12-30T19:22:55.317-08:00Greek Chorus IIThere are those who would have us work<br />
More than we need to, day in, day out<br />
At joyless tasks, producing surplus value<br />
For them<br />
Because they succeeded in creating a system<br>
Through centuries of struggle<br>
That runs on deceit and avarice and accumulation<br>
They wanted it O! so badly
And they got it<br>
Work child – work harder<br>
Longer, faster<br>
Surplus value is their God<br>
To whom the tortured bodies<br>
Of the exploited are offered up<br>
Save the expense of burnt offerings<br>
Let them lie where they fell<br>
Or shove the cadavers into a pit<br>
And burn them there<br>
The putrid smokes of Hell<br>
Ascending to the God of Surplus Value<br>
Pound of flesh?<br>
Nay, they want it all<br>
Burned, unburned, it matters not<br>
As long as IT produced Surplus Value<br>
So get out there and Get a Job<br>
Sonny boy, girlie girl<br>
OR, come to our inner sanctum<br>
And learn the holiest of holies:<br>
How to accumulate the Surplus Value yourself<br>
Then you’ll be a Success<br>
They’ll write books about you<br>
Make movies, comic books, commercials<br>
Starring YOU<br>
Your developing skills of deceit<br>
Are the ones to be rewarded<br>
Clever girl, cunning fellow<br>
O! So clever, so cunning<br>
Accumulate and buy, Buy, BUY<br>
Buy your security in the Halls of Power<br>
Call these Halls “democracy” if need be<br>
Use your cleverness to paint it so<br>
So . . . democratic<br>
But you know better<br>
Because you’re clever, O! so clever<br>
But beware the “Baby Jesus” living<br>
The living spirit that is within<br>
And without<br>
And moves through all things<br>
The spirit knows your falseness<br>
And you can kill and oppress and imprison<br>
But the Life Force will still be there<br>
Knowing who you are and what you do<br>
Reaching beyond names<br>
EVERYWHERE.
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; color: #4e2800; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">©2020 Douglas Harvey (nom de
plume: Figment Zenguitar)</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><br /><p></p>Figment Zenguitarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04516554947889012627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5937516155864759778.post-69523659715616546892020-12-29T18:30:00.006-08:002022-01-03T04:50:21.343-08:00Greek ChorusBorn into a world of strangers <br>
Do they want YOU or a fantasy in their mind?<br>
And if you're not the latter, which you're not<br>
You try to make yourself into that<br>
Because you know that's what they want<br>
And they are shopworn and cynical and<br>
Are themselves representing a falseness<br>
That is institutionalized<br>
Protected by cultural flotsam that accrues<br>
To hide the Truth<br>
And you try to understand<br>
Thinking that everyone wants the best for you<br>
And you are rewarded when<br>
The false self begins to accrue and conceal<br>
Or punished for your authenticity<br>
Self-medication or idle distraction or both<br>
Become what seem to be survival skills<br>
That are killing you<br>
Maybe you are four years old<br>
Or maybe you are eight years old<br>
Or maybe you are twelve years old<br>
But there are moments of clarity<br>
That are also hidden because<br>
If seen they are attacked<br>
THAT will not be permitted<br>
So you will have to choose<br>
What seems like a choice between<br>
Yourself or your family<br>
But you don't know that's the choice<br>
You're too young to know<br>
And so, like the white man in blackface<br>
Who uses the mask to be authentic<br>
But it isn't, but it is<br>
And confused you try again<br>
This authenticity or acceptance<br>
No, THAT'S the choice<br>
BUT you have no tools, no role model<br>
To learn self-esteem, self-support<br>
Self-nurturing, self-acceptance<br>
So now you've split in two<br>
The child, frozen in time, ignored, left behind<br>
The child is the "Baby Jesus," the Buddha, your Chi<br>
But then -- one fine day . . .<br>
So this is the story<br>
THE STORY<br>
To be or not to be<br>
Slings and arrows, indeed.Figment Zenguitarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04516554947889012627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5937516155864759778.post-65047908880486105522020-04-19T07:39:00.002-07:002020-04-19T07:41:16.039-07:00Augustus and King Donald of Orange<div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="e78q" data-offset-key="fklge-0-0" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
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<span data-offset-key="fklge-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">Observation: Supporters of the U.S. Constitution of 1787 (ratified 1788) were a group of economic elites (bourgeoisie / merchant-bankers, 1%, choose your term), offered no guarantee of rights in the proposed governing document. It was only when they realized they would have to accede to demands for a list of guaranteed rights to get adequate votes for ratification that they agreed to a "Bill of Rights." So, the "Bill of Rights" was a concession that allowed fairly narrow approval of the document.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">By contrast, the "radical" Constitution of Pennsylvania of 1776 was drawn up by working class delegates to replace the proprietary rule of the Penn family. A "Declaration of Rights" was the first thing after the Preamble. This document served until it was overthrown by a merchant-banker coup in 1790, </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Historians refer to this era as "the Critical Period" and usually sing the praises of the bourgeoisie who pulled us through. This bourgeois document also contains the seeds of its own destruction, perceived and predicted by some observers at the time (Herman Husband, for instance). What we are witnessing now, with the rise of King Donald of Orange, is the natural fruits of putting the levers of power in the hands of an economic elite. This is analogous to the rise of Caesar Augustus in the 1st century CE. The consequences are much more dire now, however.</span></div>
</div>
Figment Zenguitarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04516554947889012627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5937516155864759778.post-36103797353153847032020-04-06T04:29:00.000-07:002020-04-06T04:32:47.876-07:00History under the History<br />
There is a train of thought here that's plausible: The right-wing obsession with taking power from the liberals (i.e., FDR and the "New Dealers") and consolidating it beginning with the post-war period (much more can be said about all this, obviously): 1) Murder liberals with power and popularity to intimidate the others (note the slave-owner methodology here); 2) Murder civil rights reformers with power and popularity (even more apt analogy with slavery enforcement); 3) Escalate the "war" on left-leaning governments globally (beginning especially with the Dulles-led CIA in the early 1950s) ; 4) Escalating the war in Vietnam (bad move -- a set back with the public, although good for war profiteers); 4) Overcoming the "Vietnam Syndrome" (i.e., the anti-war movement), beginning with the invasion of Granada by Cowboy Raygun -- a fictional character cynically designed to pacify the American public); 5) Criminalization / financialization of the economy (didn't have far to go on that one); 6) Deploy a "new Pearl Harbor" to institute draconian responses and raise national fear levels ("we'll protect you"); 5) A global pandemic to further muddy the waters, consolidate wealth, property, and power, which plays into #3 where right-wing governments have been installed and supported militarily through the "power of the purse" of the US population and in the EU.<br />
<br />
Just a very rough sketch -- and can actually be traced back much further -- A HuffPo piece on Fauci predicting the pandemic in 2017 inspired this (all-too-brief) commentary --<br />
<br />
In researching my biography of Herman Husband, an 18th-century agrarian "liberation theology" kind of radical -- I've found that he would not be surprised by this kind of chain of events coming out of the consolidation of power represented by the merchant-banker coup of 1787 (we've been trained to call it the "Constitutional Convention") -- indeed, he predicted it.Figment Zenguitarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04516554947889012627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5937516155864759778.post-53553570543649201242020-03-22T04:03:00.000-07:002020-03-23T04:26:31.720-07:00The Mother3/22/20<br />
I'm writing a biography of Herman Husband, a mystic and radical that lived in the hills of the eastern woodlands in the eighteenth century. He had a vision of the New Jerusalem being west of the Alleghenies and that it would be ruled by the Divine as found within the hearts of the residents therein. This was the only way humans could survive -- by relying on this connection to the eternal within -- and by being honest with oneself and tuning into that inner voice, justice, peace, and plenty could indeed happen here.<br />
<br />
Listening to some music of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis -- <a href="https://youtu.be/ZLQIIi5qUHA">"The Mother"</a> -- from the movie "The Road" -- evoked some feelings about North America that took me a bit by surprise as I sit on my perch reading Covid-19 news. I've been reading up on the history of Quebec and Nouvelle France, mainly in French, and this author, Laurier Turgeon, was talking about how the colonists made the environment their own through food, especially the codfish. And "Terre Neuve," AKA "Newfoundland," which encompassed more than what is referred to today by that term, was a new universe to the French fishermen, traders, and explorers. It was capitalism from the git-go with the investments in the tools to extract the fish and the competition to get the best price.<br />
<br />
Anyway, I lived in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._John%27s,_Newfoundland_and_Labrador#/media/File:St._John's,_Newfoundland_and_Labrador,_Canada.jpg">St. John's, Newfoundland</a> for a few months once upon a time when a moratorium on the fishery had just been declared because of centuries of overfishing. I was on foot, so I didn't get out of town really at all, but I pounded the turf pretty steadily during that time. I walked all over town, along the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._John%27s,_Newfoundland_and_Labrador#/media/File:The_Battery,_St._John's_Nfld._-_panoramio.jpg">Battery Trail</a> many times, up to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Hill,_St._John%27s#/media/File:Cabot_Tower,_St._John's,_Newfoundland,_South_facing_side.jpg">Signal Hill,</a> around to the lighthouse on the south side of the harbor. I never made it over to <a href="https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/cape-spear">Cape Spear</a>, but you can easily see it from the Battery Trail and Signal Hill.<br />
<br />
So I'm thinking about all these things while Cave and Ellis invoke "The Mother," and I do not remember the context of that piece in the movie, but it brought up that sense of oneness with the other-than-human world. It's beautiful -- transcendent -- beyond the daily sillinesses of life in USA USA USA. I saw the main artery of the St. Lawrence River as seen from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cap_Diamant#/media/File:79_-_Qu%C3%A9bec_-_Juin_2009.jpg">Cap Diamant</a> in Quebec, near the old fortress, where Champlain, des Monts, Roberval, and probably Cartier stood in awe of the place. It's the upper reach of the tide -- Kebec is Iroquois for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Lawrence_River#/media/File:Pont_de_l'ile_2.JPG">"where the river narrows,"</a> so that is laid out at one's feet. A three-hour train ride upstream - don't know how long by boat -- brings one to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Lawrence_River">Montreal</a>, la belle isle, where the Iroquois had a village called Hochelaga and the sand bars represent the fall line of the river. There, one finds <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Royal#/media/File:Montreal_from_above_Mont_Royal.jpg">Mount Royal</a> and its sister mountains overlooking the St. Lawrence valley. Incredible beauty and a joie de vivre hard to find in the U.S.<br />
`<br />
Looking north from Cap Diamante, one sees the beginning of the <a href="https://www.outdoorphotographer.com/gallery/submission/2765081-laurentian-mountains/">Laurentian Mountains</a> -- geologically tied to the Appalachians but I can't remember the difference just now. Going north through that land of boreal forest, bogs, lakes, ponds, moose, bear, caribou -- you feel The Mother, for sure. After a couple of hours, one drives into the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguenay_Fjord_National_Park#/media/File:Vue_du_Cap_trinit%C3%A9_pr%C3%A8s_de_la_Statue.jpg">Saguenay fiord</a> in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicoutimi#/media/File:Chicoutimi_-_Centre-ville_Est.jpg">Chicoutimi</a> area just below <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=lac+st.+jean&rlz=1CAHXUG_enCA860&sxsrf=ALeKk02azcUyOLc8v7qAJRyGeTTFUyu63g:1584884189148&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwizqerYma7oAhWUB80KHXFbBbMQ_AUoAnoECCQQBA&biw=1366&bih=609#imgrc=rT-9tbHgUNzwtM">Lac St. Jean</a>. A town is named after the French fur trader Roberval at that lake, perhaps the first European to set foot there. Again, I'm feeling a deep well of peace and love and calm that is beyond words -- experiential only -- that is The Mother.<br />
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I never know when The Mother . . . this Comforter . . . is going to emerge from the realm beyond logic, the senses, the quotidien, the cacophony of the monkey chatter. But I remember once on a Sunday morning when we lived on the outskirts of Lawrence, KS near the confluence of the Wakarusa and Kaw Rivers. It was the Wakarusa flood plain that I was admiring when The Mother -- The Comforter -- emerged. My psyche was suddenly opened up and I could sense the wonder if that valley extending to the <a href="https://backwoods.com/blog/an-insiders-guide-to-the-flint-hills-of-kansas-the-densest-tallgrass-prairie-in-north-america">Flint Hills</a> and the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_River">Kaw Valley</a> that extended via the Smoky Hill arm up into the <a href="https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/62974108?image=2">High Plains</a> to about the point where you just make out the highest peaks of the Front Range. <a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/db/Mountains_from_westlands.jpg">Grandfather's Lap</a>, I call it. Downstream, the Wakarusa flows into the Kaw which soon flows into the Missouri River at <a href="https://www.facebook.com/Kawsmouth/">Kawsmouth,</a> an old meeting spot from when the French had come this far south and west from Quebec. But because I'm a sucker for hills and mountains, my life journey has taken me to the south of Kawsmouth by quite a bit, although I live within ten miles or so of it today. On that Sunday morning when my thoughts turned to the east, I was thinking of my old home, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Mountains#/media/File:Buffalo_national_river_steel_creek_overlook.jpg">Ozark Mountains of Arkansas</a> and Missouri. That's where The Mother saved me from the False Self (The Mother becomes a male war god in her/his malevolent form, whom I call "Murgatroid") -- and left a <a href="http://bransontrilakesnews.com/news_free/article_e70faa98-00c0-11e5-8393-1f5024309333.html">sinkhole</a> as a calling card -- on Johnny Morris's new golf course, The Top o' the Rock. But that's another story.<br />
<br />
So when Herman Husband says he had a vision -- a way back in 1779 -- of the New Jerusalem in North America and the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegheny_Mountains#/media/File:View_from_the_observation_tower_atop_of_Spruce_Knob_WV.jpg">Allegheny Mountains</a> represented the eastern wall, I take him seriously. I suspect he was touched by The Mother / Comforter, mystic that he was, and my brother.Figment Zenguitarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04516554947889012627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5937516155864759778.post-33283216639771088762019-06-18T11:42:00.001-07:002019-06-18T11:51:08.930-07:00The Last "Great Awakening"<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
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<span lang="EN-GB">Fifty
years ago, historian Richard Bushman wrote that twentieth-century inhabitants,
if they ever even heard about it, misunderstood the nature of what historians
call, “The Great Awakening.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This was a
period of religious “revival” that ran through the middle third or so of the
eighteenth century.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Lennon and McCartney
of the Great Awakening were Jonathan Edwards of Connecticut and George
Whitefield of England.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The fervour of
the original sixteenth and seventeenth century Puritans – the ones who had made
their way to Massachusetts aboard the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mayflower</i>
– believed themselves to be creating a “City on the Hill” to welcome the
imminent return of Christ the Messiah, ushering in a thousand-year reign known
as the Millennium.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These colonists were
Calvinists, meaning that they embraced not only millennialism, but a doctrine
known as “pre-destination” – it had already been determined who was going to
Heaven and who was going to Hell in the eternal realm of the Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But how could one know if one
was pre-destined for Heaven or not?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One
could know by having a “second birth” of the spirit – a profound psychological
experience that would leave a lasting mark on one’s psyche making it quite
clear that one had been “Chosen.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
relief from the experience or dread from not having it could, and usually was,
profound.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Today, we hear of people being
“Born Again” in charismatic Christian churches (and elsewhere), but most people
consider this to be either fake or the ramblings of the mildly insane.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So, when one mentions this business of a “second
birth” now, most people simply ignore it and carry on with their lives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They don’t understand the implications for
those having the experience during the eighteenth century’s Great
Awakening.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is what Bushman was
saying.<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/beaa2b08b0a541f3/Documents/Blog%20Entries/Last%20Great%20Awakening.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>As they established themselves in
the New World, rescued by the Native Americans and with additional aid and warm
bodies from the Old Country, the Puritans’ religious fervour became somewhat
subdued.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They retained strict obedience to
the Sabbath and condemned their Native American rescuers for licentiousness and
over-indulgence in “frolicks.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As English
power waxed in this region, they even condemned to death those who resisted
conversion and acculturation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indeed, war
was made against the natives by the followers of the so-called “Prince of Peace,”
and successfully, with the might of the burgeoning British Empire behind
them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But as the church hierarchy became
the political hierarchy, these Puritans strayed away from the whole business of
the “second birth,” creating what amounted to Protestant socio-religious clubs
not unlike the Anglicans or the Freemasons or of your typical Sunday service
today.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>A century or so after the landing at
Plymouth Rock, this situation began to rub some members the wrong way, leaving them
with an uneasy feeling that they had all strayed from the path of righteousness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The “primitivist” return to the early church,
the rock upon which their forefathers had attempted to “purify” their Christian
beliefs, was forgotten, it seemed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>GewGaws
and Baubles (accumulation of wealth) had become the order of the day and the
inner life was neglected.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Young people
were resembling the natives in their “frolicksome” ways and there was a clear
need, some felt, to reverse this course which surely led to HELL.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Jonathan Edwards was one of the
early proponents of formulating sermons pointing this out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His famous “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry
God” has often been put forward as an example of this kind of jeremiad.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Subtitled “Sermon on the Danger of the Unconverted”
and delivered at Enfield, CT in July of 1741, it represents a well-refined
example of the condemnatory sermon which Edwards and others had been practicing
for some years at this point.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
function of the sermon was to induce a sublime terror that would propel the
reprobate (one who had not experienced the second birth) into a cataclysmic
psychological transformation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Think of it, modern reader.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Your world has informed you that the only way
to avoid HELL, which is to say being condemned to burn in a lake of fire for
all eternity – what could possibly be worse!!! – is to have this second birth, for
which you’ve been hoping and praying, indeed, begging the Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then, you find your way to one
of these meetings where a revivalist preacher will deliver his sermon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The fall into damnation, Edwards’s
well-rehearsed sermon tells us, could come literally at any time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both Deuteronomy and Psalms say that no push
is needed to fall into everlasting flames, the accidental slip of one’s foot could
initiate the Final Descent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indeed, the
only reason one has not fallen yet is due to the Mercy and Grace of the Divine
Creator.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The all-powerful God the
Creator can let the slip happen – He did not stop it from happening because
YOU, SINNER, DESERVE condemnation and punishment. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, you know well that your slip and fall
into HELL is inevitable and may have already begun!.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Think of the things that have brought you to
this realization – all the slights, the petty lies, the misdeeds, and maybe
even some sins of the flesh and other major missteps.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You DESERVE HELL, and God the All-Seeing
KNOWS IT.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>So, there you are, your life has not
gone as you had hoped, or perhaps you’re too young to have had much experience
one way or another.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The shame-based
culture that relies on making you feel bad about yourself in order to control
you has set you up for vulnerability to this message.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That you have failed to follow the path God
set you on has brought you to the precipice of eternal suffering beyond belief
with NO HOPE of escape.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>NO HOPE of
averting the flames that will keep you in agony without end.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The bottomless pit of hopelessness and agony
looms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Your fate is far worse than death
– O! come sweet Death if it means averting this horrid fate!!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But no, your luck, like your hope, has flown,
forever.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>You remain in this state of despair
for . . . minutes?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hours?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Days?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Who can tell with certainty and, anyway, what does it matter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And yet, here you sit, not in flames, still
breathing the clear air of earth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Your
heart is beating; your loved ones are still with you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Could it be . . . COULD IT BE??? that you,
dare you even think it??? that you are NOT going to HELL.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What is this?!?! – a light appears in your
consciousness – a bright, white, pure light.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>You feel as though water is being poured over you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s as if you’ve entered – Praise God it’s
the Second Birth!!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’M NOT GOING TO HELL!!!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The relief is beyond description.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A cool wind blows through your soul expelling
all impurities and revealing to you your own immortality – the world of the
atoms and of deathless energy swirls through you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is YOU and you will live with this
blissful state FOREVER – IF you don’t stray from the path God has laid out for
you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You now know that horrible fate
that awaits if you don’t seek out God’s will for you on a daily basis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is what you will do – no more taking
chances, rolling the dice with your eternal soul as a bargaining chip.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You have become, and will remain, one of the
Chosen. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This is not an unusual psychological
journey for humans on Planet Earth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
context can vary; the agency can vary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Bushman implies it in his essay when he compares the Great Awakening to
the ‘60s Civil Rights and anti-war movements.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Such experiences can be induced almost routinely by psychotropic
substances like LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, peyote cactus buttons, etc.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Getting one’s life back on track, getting
society back on track, having a sense of mission for changing the world – these
are the results of such profound psychological experiences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It doesn’t happen for everyone, but it happened
to a significant percentage – Bushman estimated up to twenty or thirty percent
of a town could be converted to the “New Lights” in one pass by George
Whitefield.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the 1960s, the Vietnam
War was the largest source of discontent, along with civil rights for
minorities and women.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the 1740s, it
was the coercive religious policies of the Crown as well as the profound enigma
of what was generally viewed as the American Wilderness and its “savage” inhabitants
whose worldview was beyond the ken of nearly all Anglo-Americans.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both of these represented psychological
problems for inhabitants of the colonies – and some in Britain, as well – and the
Great Awakening provided solid footing and direction in a world that was
difficult to understand, much less navigate.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Now, in the twenty-first century, we
have the reality of Climate Disruption and cataclysmic change staring us in the
face.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We have been denying this for
decades if not generations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The “slippery
slope” that Jonathan Edwards used to induce the transformative “second birth”
is no longer metaphorical.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We are
sliding.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“God,” i.e., “Reality” cannot
be denied.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He/It is all-powerful and the
only one who can “save” us – from ourselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This awakening will likely be the last unless profound change is undertaken
as soon as possible.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We’re too late to
prevent much of the cataclysmic disruptions to come which we have done to our
Mother in the name of profit and convenience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But we can still mitigate some of it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We still have some agency, but it is slipping away daily.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is the Last Great Awakening.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Its beginning can be traced back generations,
but its appearance into the public consciousness still hasn’t even happened in
some quarters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Let us hope that we can
retain some of our agency and turn things around or at least slow the slide
down the slope.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s not just humanity
that is sliding, it’s the entire planetary ecological network as well as future
generations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is the REAL DEAL, and
everyone is responsible now.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: right;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">©</span><span lang="EN-GB">Douglas
Harvey 2019<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
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<div style="mso-element: footnote-list;">
<!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
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<div id="ftn1" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/beaa2b08b0a541f3/Documents/Blog%20Entries/Last%20Great%20Awakening.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> </span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Richard Bushman, ed., <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Great Awakening: Documents on the
Revival of Religion, 1740-1745</i> (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1989; originally published New York: Athenaeum, 1970), xiv.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
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Figment Zenguitarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04516554947889012627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5937516155864759778.post-4005710005180583462019-02-13T08:14:00.001-08:002019-02-13T08:14:54.953-08:00Tyranny Baked into the CakeThe United States has become a full-blown tyranny. This was built-in from the creation of the Constitution. When the battle for economic democracy was lost in the 1780s, the die was cast for a bourgeois oligarchy that has run the power structure ever since.<br />
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This bourgeois oligarchy (or, if you prefer, the merchant-banker class) existed before the American Revolution, as well, when their practices were known as the "Mercantile Code." Looting the public purse through various tax schemes that amounted to subsidies for imperial expansion (more looting elsewhere) was the heart of the bourgeois project. In this way, they could establish control over numerous wealth-producing projects. The Atlantic slave trade, for example -- both the trade in human livestock and the "staple crops" they produced were quite lucrative. Opulent neighborhoods were built up in many cities around the perimeter of the Atlantic Ocean by this trade. The wealth thus produced financed the Industrial Revolution, although imperial apologists remain largely in denial of this well-documented point.<br />
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Even after emancipation, bourgeois investments in Brazil, the legal slavery of prison labor in the U.S., and the wage slavery of textile mills, steel mills, railroad construction, and food processing -- all financed by the wealth originally produced by slaves -- meant a continuation of the ruling class's lock on power.<br />
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But back to the eighteenth century. Enter the young George Washington -- errand boy, surveyor, and land agent for the consortium known as the Ohio Land Company -- who saw an opportunity to fulfill his desires of becoming a Great Planter and Land Speculator Extraordinaire in the years after King George's War (one cannot resist mentioning the ironic twist in that name). When Washington hoofed it over the mountains in the employ of the Ohio Company with guide Christopher Gist, his path to "greatness" unfolded before him in the form of the Ohio Country -- the fertile land west of the Alleghenies that the French were in the process of claiming with their native trading partners in the "pays d'en haut," or "high country" above the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Valley. In short order, Washington was sent to the recently constructed Ft. LeBoeuf on the Allegheny River north of the forks of the Ohio River with a warning to the French to vacate that country being claimed by the Virginia consortium. The French laughed and sent him home with a counter warning. The end result was the outbreak of the French-Indian War, which was the culmination of a string of imperial wars dating to 1689 and the start of King William's War.<br />
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At this point, it is useful to recognize whose ends are served by war. One of the characteristics of the bourgeoisie is, of course, the accumulation of fluid wealth -- money and goods -- a process dating back to the twelfth century or so. This accumulation of money by this rising merchant-banker class allowed for the opportunity to sell loans and insurance to European aristocrats and monarchs who were perennially needed to finance their extravagant lifestyle. But the most pressing need, especially for monarchs, was financing for war. The bourgeoisie were happy to assist, and at low interest as well as the prospect of increased access to power. By the late seventeenth century in the English-speaking world, the bourgeoisie had grown frustrated at their lack of control over the London government. With the useful rationale provided by the unpopularity and religious preferences of King James II (a conservative Catholic king), a coup was fomented. The plan centered on bringing James's daughter Mary and her merchant-banker prince of a husband, William of Orange, to the throne. The new monarchs, however, would have to agree to sharing power with Parliament where the House of Commons was under the control of the bourgeoisie. Now, with control of the levers of power and access to the public purse, the military could be used to both run up the government's debt to the bourgeoisie, and to pursue their own ends: opening up new resources and markets. This was the essence of the "Glorious" Revolution of 1688, so named, and understandably so, by the bourgeoisie. The first in this series of imperial wars broke out the following year.<br />
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Meanwhile, back in Virginia some seventy years later, after several "wars of empire" involving primarily the English, French, and Spanish, the well-connected Ohio Company started a war with France and their Indian allies. Aided by messenger boy, agent, and emerging militia officer George Washington, this war would culminate in the French being ousted from North America in 1763.<br />
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How was this done? The answer is: war debt. Prime Minister William Pitt made the war so expensive for the French by opening up multiple fronts that the French government, still steeped in the <i>ancien regime</i> of absolute monarchy and not up to speed with bourgeois high finance, had to surrender its holdings in North America. The war was expensive for the British as well, and the bourgeois creditors demanded that the debt be "serviced." This would be done through taxes and tariffs that would fall heavily on the colonists who had fought much of this war. Basic American history tells us how that turned out. In an act that would lead to a protracted civil war, the thirteen colonies, led by now-General Washington and financed by the Master of the "Mercantile Code," Robert Morris of Philadelphia, started their own country.<br />
<br />
After this successful revolution, a struggle for power ensued that goes on to this day: who will rule -- the people or the bourgeoisie? Until the Constitution emerged in 1787 and ratified the following year, this was a genuine question that remained undecided. But the Constitution was a cake baked by the bourgeoisie. Leave economic decisions beyond the reach of voters. Let the property-owning white males have the franchise, and don't disrupt the gravy train of slavery and the Mercantile Code -- the maintenance of permanent government debt, control of a standing army to be used for pursuing resources and markets funded by the "power of the purse," i.e., taxpayers. Tell them it's all on the side of the angels -- whisper sweet nothings about freedom and democracy into their ears -- they'll eat it up. And they did. Washington's project was so successful that upon his death he rose to his seat next to the Divine Throne itself, opposite his predecessor, Jesus. The bourgeois project in the New World was now beyond serious question, and so it more or less remains 230 years later. And yet, there are those who question the divinity of this project . . . it's almost as if they don't believe it. Their predecessors -- the true democrats (small "d") who envisioned a people's republic, weren't in the kitchen when the cake was baked -- they weren't invited.Figment Zenguitarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04516554947889012627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5937516155864759778.post-60784427820008479272019-02-08T18:25:00.000-08:002019-02-09T07:36:14.611-08:00The Inner Language of the "Eternal Now" I saw a Facebook meme today where a professor at the University of Calcutta estimated a tree to be worth $193,250. This was broken down into the various values stemming from various uses by various species. This is the calculus of capitalism -- everything can be translated into a monetary value, even a robin building a nest and laying her eggs. Contrarily, I submit that a life is priceless, regardless of what form it takes. One squashes a bug is if it is of no consequence, but it's nevertheless a life like any other. The human brain will not like this formulation and will race to provide a justification as to why the human is worth more than the bug; indeed, why some humans are worth more than others. This is the path to the capitalist calculus. From the perspective of All Creation, there is no difference between the life of a water beetle and that of a human being or of a tree -- all represent a brief span of consciousness that is quickly extinguished in one way or another. From this perspective, Earth can be seen as billions of life forms opening (birth) and closing (death) their eyes over the course, from the human perspective, of eons.<br />
<br />
We have lost the sense that what we eat -- animal or plant -- is a life that has been taken (with exceptions that the reader can work out) and is an act of profound significance that needs to be acknowledged as such. Not to do so seems, well, to be living in a circle of hell. Indigenous peoples typically acknowledged the profound act of taking a life for survival, whether it was killing a deer or harvesting the corn. "Other-than-human persons" were equals to be respected and honored. Modernity has jettisoned this as wasteful sentiment, with a correlating decline in awareness.<br />
<br />
The fact that lives are a commodity makes this society one bereft of meaningful connection to what I like to call the "Eternal Now." One cannot put values on things in the totality of the Eternal Now, the reality underneath the temporal rounds of life and death. Society concerns itself with the ever-fleeting linear equation of time; indeed, we keep track of it and fill our libraries with this keeping track. The Eternal Now just is. Always and constantly.<br />
<br />
Placing the temporal in the foreground while ignoring or denying the Eternal Now is, for me, a completely unacceptable way of traveling through the brief span of time with which we have been gifted. To think the realization of the timelessness of the winds pushing the clouds across the sky through the force of the earth's rotation -- in itself a cosmic story of incredible orders of magnitude -- should be outside one's basic awareness . . . again, it seems a circle of hell. To drive past a rock outcrop or bluff without a sense of wonder about the eons represented by this phenomenon, and that one might go through life without a sense of such wonder . . . also a circle of hell. Awareness of the Eternal Now and finding the wonder in what this society calls "mundane" seems the proper way of being in one's skin for as many seconds per day as possible.<br />
<br />
To be fully human is to nurture the inner language of the timeless Eternal Now and bring it into the temporal realm. But, as the comparative mythologist and all 'round wise man Joseph Campbell used to say, "The function of society is to confound the mystic." To be thus confounded is to find oneself in . . . a circle of hell.<br />
<br />
Putting a monetary figure on a life is what capitalist economics is. Lives that don't produce a surplus value to be harvested like the Grim Reaper are worthless. Roadkill -- non-surplus-value-producing lives -- are irrelevant and to be ignored (unless, of course, they serve some use-value). Nevertheless, there lies the remains of a life -- the "final track," as tracker Tom Brown, Jr. would say. Another window into the Eternal Now that has closed and will not open again. And the human realm cares not a wit other than to clear the remains out of the way and forget it as soon as possible. Because we have things to do, places to go, people to see, paychecks to garner, profits to take; all the while missing the Eternal Now that gives life its magic.<br />
<br />
Life is art -- incorporating the Eternal Now into this fleeting life so that our awareness, our compassion, and our joy might be maximized. This can be found under such headings as "social welfare" or "quality of life," although capitalism isn't, as a rule, interested in these things insofar as they can't be bought. Society is not particularly interested in your life art unless your incorporation is salable and, through "marketing," profitable. To pursue this art for its own sake is, in capitalist society's eyes, a fool's errand.<br />
<br />
So -- fool that I am, I shall carry on as best as I can from day-to-day, hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute, second-to-second trying to appreciate this fleeting gift of being awake in the world. Not easy given the potentially derailing distractions of society, but possible. Getting knocked off the tracks is normal, as is getting back on. And I may be a fool to find quality of life somewhere besides the size of my portfolio or paycheck, and society may consider my life to be some kind of joke. But I think, in the end, as the song by Blue Oyster Cult, "Flaming Telepaths" says: "the joke's on you." Too bad it's not funny. And, to return to our tree, does the calculus include what it might be worth to climb to the top of said tree, swaying in a gentle breeze in the night, watching the stars glowing in the Eternal Now?Figment Zenguitarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04516554947889012627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5937516155864759778.post-74117420731421026862017-11-11T14:00:00.000-08:002019-01-09T08:03:22.902-08:00Connecting the Dots: William Hogeland and the Roots of American Empire<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
Connecting the Dots:
The Foundation of American Empire<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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A Review by <o:p></o:p></div>
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Douglas S. Harvey,
Ph.D.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<i>The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the
Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America’s Newfound Sovereignty.</i> New York:
Scribner, 2006. 302 pp. with biblographical essay and index<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<i>Declaration: The Nine Tumultuous Weeks When America Became Independent,
May – July 4, 1776.</i> New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010. 273 pp. <o:p></o:p>with biblographical essay and index</div>
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<br />
<i>Founding Finance: How Debt, Speculation,
Foreclosures, Protests, and Crackdowns Made Us a Nation</i>, <i>Discovering America</i> <i>Series</i> 5. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012. 274 pp. <o:p></o:p>with biblographical essay and index</div>
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<i>Autumn of the Black Snake: The Creation of the U.S. Army and the
Invasion That Opened the West.</i> New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giraux, 2017. 447 pp. <o:p></o:p>with biblographical essay and index</div>
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Abstract<o:p></o:p></div>
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Contrary to popular political
pundit monkey chatter, the current political economy of the U.S. is not the
result of the Bush Republicans, the Obama/Clinton Democrats, or even the
Liberal/Conservative schism stemming from the New Deal era. The creation of the
early American republic left numerous issues unresolved and set in motion
machinery that has manifested itself in government by Wall Street bankers and
war profiteers; a foreign policy dominated by militarism; and an economy hooked
on war. By employing a potent combination of a close reading of the sources,
good writing, and intellectual honesty, author William Hogeland connects the
dots on the origins of corporate American hegemony. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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William Hogeland is not a
professional historian as defined by the discipline – no history Ph.D., no Ivy
League pedigree, no professional association credentials, etc. He nevertheless
demonstrates a deep knowledge of the literature on the American founding period
and a commitment to a close reading of it, both primary and secondary. Hogeland
does what many historians of the early republic have failed to do: he “connects
the dots” from 1754 to 1795. The result has the effect of bringing this history
out of the Ivory Tower, cutting through the mythical cloud of the “Founding
Fathers,” and making it relevant to today.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The
Forks of the Ohio in southwest Pennsylvania was a crucial point in American
history. The Allegheny River flows down from the snow-laden, lake-effected
forests south of Lake Erie and joins the Monongahela flowing up from the
Virginia highlands to create the Ohio River. At this confluence today, the city
of Pittsburgh looms over a space that witnessed the birth of the American
Empire. This region was isolated from the Atlantic world – several daunting mountain
ridges removed from the eastern seaboard. It was the southwestern territory of
the Iroquois Confederacy, the major power of the region, until the late eighteenth
century. The French, whose presence was felt for upwards of two centuries in
North America, established themselves at the Forks by 1754. The Ohio Company, a
real estate project launched by Virginia speculators, sent twenty-two-year-old George
Washington to the Forks and beyond.
Washington, realizing the immense value of the “Ohio Country,” dreamt of
the wealth and status to be gained from speculation here. The Ohio Company
objected to the French presence and Washington led a perfunctory effort to
eject them. This clash triggered the French-Indian War, one of the largest wars
in history at that time. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The debt created
by this war, and the British attempt to have the colonists share in its
maintenance, led to another conflict: a civil war in the British Empire that
birthed the United States of America. This war was also expensive, and the new
republic found itself in debt to an international array of merchant-bankers,
including and especially American bankers led by the corpulent Robert Morris of
Philadelphia.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In
<i>The Whiskey Rebellion</i>, a story that
covers the years from the end of the Revolution to 1795, Hogeland describes the
result of the hegemonic dreams of the early republic’s economic elites. For his
part, Washington had dreamt not of independence from Britain, but of rising in
colonial society and becoming one of the planter elite, complete with a high officer’s
commission. These imperial wars of the late eighteenth century were a vehicle
for his rise. By the time he was an iconic general and President of the United
States, the struggle for power in this quarter of North America was not only a
struggle for imperial expansion, but a class struggle within the fledgling
nation-state. An elite class of merchant-bankers had dominated British society
since at least the Glorious Revolution of 1688. For those elites on the near
shore – the bondholders of the new republic’s debt – the American Revolution had
been about seizing control of the colonial economy and American expansion.
There were those in the white working class, however, who dissented from this
view. They felt that the Revolution had been about <i>their</i> right to rule the political economics of the new republic. Their idea of public finance – land banks,
local currency, and the like – as opposed to banker financing, was anathema to the
elites. <o:p></o:p></div>
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This
rebellion, which encompassed most of the western country, had more to do with
control of the public purse than it did with whiskey. It was a rebellion
against the taxing power in the new U.S. Constitution, which was not an expression
of a democratic republic led by “We the People,” but an instrument legalizing
the dominance of the merchant-banker class. The growth of this class over the
previous eight hundred years is overlooked by Hogeland, and it would have been
helpful to at least given it a nod.<a href="file:///C:/Users/kdhof/Documents/Book%20Reviews/Hogeland%20Review.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
Nevertheless, Hogeland thoroughly explores the mechanisms whereby the
merchant-bankers seized control of the Revolution. Robert Morris, (equivalent
of the modern-day Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein, and Lawrence Summers rolled
into one), and his wunderkind Alexander Hamilton, with the aid of the
military’s loyalty to their fellow traveler Washington, were the central
players. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The
crux of <i>The Whiskey Rebellion</i> is complicated
but critical to understanding the power and motivation of the merchant-bankers.
To wit: bankers make money on interest from their loans as creditors;
governments are the biggest debtors; the quickest way to send a government deep
into debt is war. When war between the colonies and the Mother Country seemed
inevitable, Morris and fellow financiers saw an opportunity for profit-taking. The
Continental Congress, the quasi-government of the fledgling United States,
tried to get financiers to assist their cause.
They were unsuccessful until they offered six percent interest on bonds,
the interest on which would be paid in Bills of Exchange. These Bills of
Exchange were based on the accumulated wealth of established European
merchant-bankers and could be exchanged for specie, i.e., gold and silver coin.
Morris had secured a loan from France that facilitated the move. This was as
secure as any form of exchange could be. Furthermore, these government bonds
(the receipt of the loan to the government) could be purchased with paper money,
known as “continentals,” that had been issued to the soldiers. This paper had
quickly lost its value but much of it had been snatched up, often at a
miniscule percentage of its face-value, by speculators, many of whom were
friends of Morris. Regardless of how cheaply the continentals had been
obtained, their full face-value was honored when purchasing government bonds. Eventually,
the Continental Congress also allowed pieces of paper known as “chits” – IOUs
for war requisitions in the field – to be used for bond purchasing. The chits
were originally held by farmers or their families and had become commodified,
like the continentals, and were often subsequently purchased by speculators at
a small percentage of their face-value. That this paper could be used at full
face value was all insider information, not that any rank-and-file holder of
continentals and chits could have afforded the bonds. Hogeland identifies this
practice as a part of the “Mercantile Code,” the long-established practice in
the Atlantic and even global economy of ruthless profiteering. Instead of being
arrested for insider trading, Morris was made Superintendent of Finance,
supported by Washington’s personal secretary, Alexander Hamilton. Morris was
then able to use public funds for his own investment schemes ranging from
international trade to land speculation. For Morris and his cronies, the war was
to generate debt that would pay interest to the bondholding class, who would then
control national finance.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The
working class generally understood that there was a form of “people’s finance”
that did not involve the merchant-banker class.
Land banks and paper money could finance both agricultural and artisan
endeavors at little or no cost, a horrifying scenario to Robert Morris and his
circle. What Morris and company truly needed was the power to prohibit this
type of financing, and get access to the “purse” of the wealth-producing
working class, i.e., a tax enforced by a national authority. This tax, to be
used to pay interest to the bondholders, would be paid by those who had had to
sell their continentals and chits for pennies on the dollar out of a desperate
need for hard cash. They would finance their own indebtedness and subjugation,
in essence – hence the rebellion.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The
author elaborates on the nature of the resistance to this tax placed on
whiskey. Not only could the tax be
presented to eastern voters as a luxury tax, but it was set up to drive out
small producers on behalf of large producers. Small business was not welcome in
the merchant-banker faction, and the 1791 “Tax on Spirits” illustrated this. To
westerners, a region where the lack of cash meant that whiskey was often the
local form of exchange, the tax was a monstrosity. Radical preacher and political activist
Herman Husband of Bedford County, Pennsylvania, veteran of the North Carolina
“Regulation” of the late colonial period, referred to the whole merchant-banker
faction as “The Beast.” He had his own ideas about public finance and
governmental structure, all of which deprived the economic elites of their
power. At its height, the Whiskey Rebellion, or as some prefer, the Pennsylvania
Regulation, mustered a militia of some seven thousand westerners. Opponents to
the whiskey tax ranged from marginally employed landless farm workers to the
future Jeffersonian Secretary of the Treasury and Swiss immigrant Albert
Gallatin.<o:p></o:p></div>
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At
the height of the rebellion, a legitimate unit of the state militia based at
Mingo Creek destroyed the plantation of the region’s superintendent of tax
collection (and largest distiller), John Neville, a friend and ally of Morris
and Hamilton. Many tax collectors and their supporters were threatened,
cajoled, tarred-and-feathered, and/or had their property destroyed or damaged. While
Hogeland is not the first to tell the story, his is the most class-conscious
and the first to aim his narrative at a general audience. <o:p></o:p></div>
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In <i>Declaration</i>, Hogeland zeroes in on the
three-month period from April to June, 1776 when the Second Continental Congress
went from voting against independence to voting for it. This included a radical coup of the
Pennsylvania legislature that threw the balance of colonial assemblies to the
independence faction. Hogeland delves deeply into the sources to reveal a complex
set of political alliances orchestrated by Samuel Adams. “Liberals” (i.e.
merchant/bankers) like Samuel and his cousin John Adams joined with “radicals”
like Thomas Young, James Cannon, and Christopher Marshall who then used each
other to usurp the proprietary government of Pennsylvania and get a “yes” vote
for independence. This is Hogeland’s thesis. His class interpretation of the
event is refreshingly clear-headed in a period so often immersed in
triumphalist mythology. Once independence was achieved, the struggle between
these two classes would re-emerge stronger than ever.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The term “Whig” is
frequently used as a label for the “Founding Fathers.” Hogeland accentuates the
fact that these Whigs were of the merchant-banker class and desired to escape the
fetters of British hegemony so they would then be positioned to control the
economy of the fledgling republic. Working class advocates wanted the democratic
republic that had been proposed over a century earlier at the end of the
English Civil War by soldiers in the New Model Army. Thomas Young, the radical
doctor from New York was one of these advocates. Young learned from Samuel
Adams how the Committees of Correspondence could be turned into town meetings
and then into shadow legislatures. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Another of the
“democratical” faction – to employ the word used at the time for “radical” –
was James Cannon. Cannon promoted an alternative for poor relief in
Philadelphia. Named the United Company of Philadelphia for Promoting American
Manufactures, or simply the American Manufactory, Cannon organized those left unemployed
by the boycott of British goods to make domestic cloth. Poverty haunted the
backcountry as well, and Cannon began linking the two. In Philadelphia, the
result was the City Committee, which entwined artisans from across the area
with members of the American Manufactory.
<o:p></o:p></div>
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After Lexington
and Concord, militias, generally known as “Associators,” boomed. Both official
and unofficial, there were thirty-one companies in Philadelphia alone plus fifty-three
in rural Pennsylvania. These militias were largely democratic, often electing
their own officers. Pennsylvania was not the only colony dependent on them for
protection, thus imbuing them with a good deal of significance. By the end of
1775, Pennsylvania militias were electing representatives to a “Committee of
Privates,” again modeled on the New Model Army. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Add to this
radical lineup <i>Declaration</i>’s version
of Herman Husband, radical evangelical Christopher Marshall. Marshall was a
Quaker and an apothecary (he owned one of the largest pharmacies in the
colonies). Marshall believed that true Christianity would be best represented by
a democratic system whose <i>raison d’</i><i>être</i>
was <i>not </i>to protect the interests of
the propertied, but serve the working classes. As Hogeland notes, the Whigs had
Magna Carta, Harrington, Sidney, and Milton while the artisan class had the New
Model Army, the Putney Debates, and the Levellers of the 1640s for inspiration.
The producing classes had failed to gain power after the English Civil War; they
hoped to succeed in the new American republic. <o:p></o:p></div>
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With the colonists
and Mother Country engaged in war and independence still undeclared, the
liberals and radicals joined to push for forming colonial governments unencumbered
by London oversight. The target of this, of course, was Pennsylvania, whose
proprietary government assembly, led by Edmund Randolph, was at odds with
King-in-Parliament to be sure, but was nevertheless opposed to independence. As
went Pennsylvania, this coalition understood, so would go the mid-Atlantic
region. Hogeland closely outlines this coup of the proprietary government and
the successful “declaration” of independence.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>Founding Finance</i> has replaced <i>The Whiskey Rebellion</i> as one of the books
I use to teach U.S. history. The main reason is because the early chapters of <i>Founding</i> are, in part, a recap of <i>The Whiskey Rebellion</i> and <i>Declaration</i>. In addition to recapping,
Hogeland, writing during the 2011-2012 face-off between the Tea Party and Occupy
Wall Street movements, explores the extent to which the dissent on both left
and right get their history wrong. Both movements dropped names, quotes, and
paraphrasings from the founding period; but both take this history out of its
context and try to use it for contemporary political ends without knowing the
original circumstances. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The subtext to all
of Hogeland’s work, but to <i>Founding
Finance</i> in particular, is not only do we get our history wrong, our historians
often get it wrong. Chapter Five, “History on the Verge of a Nervous
Breakdown,” is devoted to a review of the institutionalized misreading of
founding history. In 1913, Charles Beard rekindled the founding-era issue of
Big Capital usurping the halls of power in his <i>An Economic History of the Constitution of the United States</i>. Subsumed
under nineteenth-century triumphalist Whig history, Beard brought back to light
the prospect that the conveners at the Philadelphia convention were protecting
their own interests. Much ink was subsequently spilled trying to re-bury this
narrative, and Hogeland reviews the more influential historians in this effort.
Richard Hofstadter, Gordon Wood, and Edmund Morgan, for example, are taken to
task for basing their arguments on something called the “Brown Study,” a denial
of elitist motivation behind the U.S. Constitution, which has since been proven
to have been a tissue of lies. Nevertheless, the damage was done, and the core
of the “founding finance” story, which explains much about how the U.S. government
and the monied elite worked hand-in-glove in the early republic, was lost. Playing
egregiously fast and loose with history is also true when it comes to Alexander
Hamilton’s biographers, many of whom simply ignore the rumblings of the working
class who were trying to disrupt the whiz kid’s financial plans. These
histories become increasingly “more about less” and approach, in some cases,
the level of triumphalist pablum. This is the contribution of the independent
Hogeland – he need not answer to the careerist pecking order, and there is no
need to guard the institutionally accepted historical narrative. Today’s
history spends more time striving to maintain an “American heritage” than it
does providing cogent explanations of the history itself. Hogeland writes that
it “fails to benefit from what’s especially illuminating about the popular and
narrative modes. I don’t think English heritage is what Shakespeare was after
in <i>King Lear</i>. I miss the terror and
pity.” (101) The “terror and pity,” i.e., the elements that allow us all to
connect with the story, are precisely what is missing from the histories of the
early republic. In its place, in extreme cases, is a fictional “Kumbaya”
sing-along.<o:p></o:p></div>
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So went the
struggle for power after the Revolution, and so goes the struggle for control
of the narrative today. And speaking of today, the U.S. military has a
presence, according to Armed Forces radio, in some 170 countries around the
world. How came this to be? When did it begin
and why? That beginning is the topic of <i>Autumn
of the Black Snake</i>, the fourth book in Hogeland’s oeuvre. <o:p></o:p></div>
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At this point in
this narrative, the reader may have grasped that while setting up feudal
kingdoms in the New World did not work for English aristocrats, a colonial
elite emerged that took on the project for themselves. Land speculation and debt
were their primary vehicles. Once centralized control was established with the
ratification of the Constitution in 1788, the only thing lacking was a standing
army to carry out and enforce their will. Virginia planters had been the first
to make a serious effort at expanding their interests beyond the Appalachian
Mountains. Given that they were a type of feudal master of their own kingdom –
the plantation – this is quite logical. Hogeland revisits the aforementioned Virginia
consortium known as the Ohio Company and its utilization of the ambitions of a
plantation family’s younger son in this expansion. The son’s name, of course,
was George Washington.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Washington looms
large in each of these works, but it is in <i>Black
Snake</i> where the culmination of his life’s ambitions is made manifest. From
his earliest western travels as an errand-boy for the Ohio Company to his role
as general and President, Hogeland reviews and accentuates certain aspects of
Washington’s life pertinent to the thesis of the book: the first war for
American expansion was contrived and carried out at the behest of land
speculators, Washington chief among them. Hogeland strays close to the mythical
narrative of Washington at times, referring to him as “the greatest man in the
world.” Thankfully for those of us weary of the mythical Washington, Hogeland’s
close reading of the sources brings him back to evidentiary history. Washington
was a ruthless land speculator – that was how he made his fortune, with help
from his slaves at Mount Vernon, of course. He epitomized American mythology: a
military man ambitiously accumulating wealth, status, glory, and a legacy. The
fact that Washington had rejected a Cromwellian “Lord Protector” office as head
of the army has dominated this legacy. Hogeland looks at the under-remembered,
all-too-human Washington revealing that the man’s ambition set the pattern for
American military and economic expansion.
Then, as now, this expansion comes at the expense of others.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In Hogeland’s
treatment of this first American war of expansion, he gives nearly equal time to
those upon whom it fell hard. Little Turtle, the Delaware leader, and Blue
Jacket, the Shawnee war chief, are made human and given source-generated character.
Their foe in this war of expansion, General “Mad” Anthony Wayne is also given a
full-spectrum type of treatment, from his early successes in the French-Indian
War, to his failures in the Revolution and as a peacetime planter and merchant.
Blue Jacket was influenced by the post-French and Indian War resistance
movement led by Ottawa leader Pontiac and his spiritual advisor Neolin. He
nevertheless rejected Neolin’s call for austerity and cultural revival – as
much as anyone, the Shawnee leader enjoyed accumulating wealth made possible by
trading in the Atlantic economy. Intelligent, but not deeply so, Blue Jacket
gave in to superficial strategies against Wayne’s professionally-trained army,
the third American army to go against the “Ohio Country Indians.” Little Turtle,
seen as the more insightful of the two, understood why the Ohio Country natives
had been able to resist the earlier invasions of their country: the Indians did
not let those armies resupply themselves. The difference between these two
leaders would prove decisive.<o:p></o:p></div>
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But why did
Washington (and Hamilton, et al.) organize a standing army when so many opposed
such armies in favor of state militias? The answer is simple, Hogeland argues:
real estate. Not only did the economic elites want to buy speculative paper and
have it honored at full face value plus interest, the expense of which would be
covered by taxes on those who had been forced, by impoverishment, to sell that
speculative paper in the first place. They also wanted the “power of the purse”
(taxing power) and a standing army to enhance their land speculation efforts in
the West. And they would buy the bonds (loan the money at interest) to make it
happen. In other words, the purpose of the first war for American expansion,
like the French-Indian War before it, and American militarism today, was to
make the rich richer at the expense of others – expense in blood, treasure,
land, and resources. As Hogeland states quite clearly, Washington’s crackdown
on the so-called “whiskey rebels” made “military adventure, wealth
concentration, and great nationhood an integrated whole” (<i>Black Snake</i>, 215).<o:p></o:p></div>
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Some historians will
take exception to Hogeland’s popular history approach to topics more
complicated and nuanced than the standard popular fare. Hogeland’s effort to
include nuanced historiography can work against his efforts to reach a
wider-than-usual audience for historical monographs. The layperson may find the
historiography tiresome, while historians may grow frustrated with his
rhetorical devices keyed on maintaining the public’s attention. The author’s
idiosyncratic way of citing sources, slightly varied in each of the four books,
are the most disconcerting for professional historians. But if one follows the
source threads from secondary through to primary this methodology, while
perhaps not ideal, maintains his credibility. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Hogeland’s
perspective on what might be termed the historical “catechism” of revolutionary
America is quite refreshing. His literary background means his close-reading
skills are well-developed – even more so than the average historian. This close
reading of the sources and his detachment from disciplinary careerist concerns
may be the strongest attributes in the creation of this oeuvre. His historiographical
research is a shot of clarity for the discipline’s insiders should they choose
to incorporate it, which they should. <o:p></o:p></div>
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There are other
things to criticize, and readers will no doubt find their own issues. But
this work is too important to let a few quibbles keep it down. These are useful
books for teaching the early American republic, and they are useful in
understanding the origins, at least in the English-speaking New World, of
American hegemony. That they connect the dots between the strivings of the
merchant-banker class, the role of radicals in achieving independence from
Britain, the control of the national debt by financial elites, and the rise of
the American military to serve expansionist ends, make them indispensable for a
clear-eyed study of the early American republic.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The iconic work in this regard is Michael Tigar’s <i>Law and the Rise of Capitalism</i>, Revised Edition, (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 2000; originally published with co-author Madeleine R. Levy,
1977).<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
</div>
Figment Zenguitarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04516554947889012627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5937516155864759778.post-22958944262536811992017-11-11T10:19:00.004-08:002017-11-11T14:01:23.254-08:00Review of Marcus Rediker, The Fearless Benjamin Lay<div class="MsoNormal">
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Marcus Rediker, <i>The
Fearless Benjamin Law: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary
Abolitionist</i> (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017).
212 pp. with endnotes and index. Review
by Douglas S. Harvey, Ph.D.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
Marcus
Rediker, (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, 1982) Professor of History at the
University of Pittsburgh, has an extensive background in the history of the
Atlantic World, particularly regarding the history of the slave trade and
piracy. He has written, co-written, and
edited ten books, including two that will likely remain relevant for
generations, <i>The Slave Ship: A Human
History</i> (New York: Viking-Penguin, 2007); and with Peter Linebaugh, <i>The Many-Headed Hydra:</i> <i>Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and The Hidden
History of the Revolutionary Atlantic</i> (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000). More can be found at <a href="http://www.marcusrediker.com/">www.marcusrediker.com</a> <o:p></o:p></div>
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This
is history “from the bottom-up,” bringing Benjamin Lay’s unique and amazing
story as a hunchbacked, dwarf abolitionist from Essex County in England out of
obscurity. Rediker shows that not only
was Lay in the vanguard of the abolitionist movement, but as a compassionate
humanist, a man for our own times. In
addition to being a strident abolitionist, Lay was a vegetarian, an animal
rights advocate, and an opponent of the death penalty. After the death of his wife Sarah in 1735, he
moved into a cave near Abington, Pennsylvania, where he produced most of his own
food and made his own clothing. He was well-known
in the Philadelphia area – Benjamin Franklin published his book in 1738, and he
was notorious among those who were the object of his wrath (namely slave-owners)
at Quaker meeting houses. Lay does not
seem to have been overly concerned about being a “little person,” although it
seems he had to endure some mockery because of it. Nevertheless, it certainly did not curtail
his radical activism.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The
thesis of the book is straightforward: Benjamin Lay brought together numerous
strands of radicalism in his effort to condemn as the devil’s own device the
institution of slavery. Lay brought religious,
philosophical, working-class, abolitionist, and commoner perspectives to the
table. The fact that these are all
present and expressed through a single individual demonstrates, Rediker notes,
that they can all be part of the same consciousness. The evidence the author presents for this is
abundant.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Benjamin
Lay was born into the radical Quaker tradition, a third generation Quaker born
in 1682 in Copford, Essex. By the time
Benjamin reached adulthood, Quaker practices had toned down considerably from
their early “inner light” visionary practices.
Lay gave this practice new life, especially after he married Sarah
Smith, who was also a hunchbacked dwarf. The spark that lit Lay’s (and Sarah’s) abolitionist
fervor was a sojourn to Barbados in 1718.
Two years on that hellish sugar island in the Caribbean set the couple,
especially Benjamin, on his lifelong abolitionist path. The atrocities they witnessed defy description. To help alleviate the suffering, the Lays
started a meeting for the enslaved, eventually calling down the wrath of the
planter elite. Their subsequent campaign
against slavery embraced Quaker practices from the early days of the
religion. The author elaborates on three
of these practices: 1) Public rants against ministers; 2) The refusal of “Hat
Honor” (i.e., not removing one’s hat during the Quaker meeting); and, 3) The
use of provocative street theater (Rediker opens the book with a stunning
example of this). <o:p></o:p></div>
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The
author also shows how Lay’s working-class background allowed him to connect
with enslaved people who were routinely worked to death. Lay’s work-life began as a shepherd, where he
found peace in nature and the herding of sheep, no doubt a nurturing influence. He then trained as a glover, difficult and
monotonous work that would have helped him identify with enslaved people who
were forced to perform endless rote tasks throughout their short lives. He maintained some proficiency in this trade
all of his life; Rediker notes that glover’s tools and supplies were in
significant number in his will.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
Eventually, Lay
made his way to London. There, the
monotony of gloving led him to take up the life of a sailor, which brought him
into contact with the diverse “motley crew” of that profession. Experiences in the world of sailors, along
with his later trip to Barbados led him to de-racialize humanity. In his writing, Lay referenced the <i>Bible</i>, specifically <i>Acts 17:26,</i> which proclaims that all people are “made of one
Blood.” In his 1738 book, <i>All Slave-Keepers That Keep the Innocents in
Bondage, Apostates</i>, Lay did not use the word “race,” instead he used the
less divisive word “color.” This reflected
his experience with the motley crew of the eighteenth-century sailing ship.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
After immigrating
to Philadelphia in 1732, Lay continued his abolitionist activism. Religion and
politics merged with philosophy in his life-long self-education. Learning Lay’s
worldview is an education not only in Quaker antinomianism, but Greek
asceticism, particularly that of the Cynic philosophers. Most influential of the former was William
Dell, a radical Chaplain in the New Model Army during the English Civil War. In Philadelphia, Lay had dabbled in
bookselling, and Dell’s works were one of Lay’s chief offerings. In his books, which Lay highly praised, Dell
advocated antinomianism – the notion that no authority is higher than that of
one’s own “inner light” or inner voice.
Dell also encouraged civic education for the masses in order that they,
rather than a socio-economic elite, would and could wield power. These points would have been profoundly
upsetting to the elites of seventeenth-century England. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The library in
Benjamin Lay’s cave also contained works of Greek philosophers, particularly those
of the founder of Cynic thought, Diogenes, and his protegés Pythagoras, Crates,
and Lucian. Rediker provides a thumbnail
sketch of this worldview by defining a handful of crucial practices. These included <i>parrhesia</i>, the practice of speaking one’s mind regardless of how it
will impact those in power. <i>Autarkeia</i> meant self-sufficiency without
the baubles of material gain; <i>askesis</i>
and <i>karteria </i>meant training in
self-discipline and endurance, both mental and physical; and finally <i>tuphos</i>, where one severely challenged
the notions of luxury, prestige, and wealth, considering them flaws in human
character to be overcome. All of this,
from antinomianism to Cynic philosophy was built on a commitment to treat others
with love, which was to be given to all.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
Predictably,
Marcus Rediker delved deep into the Quaker archives in both England and the
U.S. He also made himself familiar with
the historical literature on Quakers from this period, much of which was old ground
for him. The book is written for the
general public, but is erudite enough to appease the specialist. I personally loved both the book and getting
to know Benjamin Lay three hundred years after his righteous fight for justice shook
the Quaker world and, as Rediker argues, kick-started a Quaker abolitionist
movement that, in turn, was the foundation of nineteenth-century abolitionism. During his lifetime, the Quaker dwarf was a
giant in his way. His antinomianism, Cynic
philosophy, and raw courage will be inspiring to those pursuing egalitarian
justice today. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
Figment Zenguitarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04516554947889012627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5937516155864759778.post-58615379618645874462016-09-27T16:59:00.002-07:002016-09-27T16:59:11.649-07:00Music on a Sleepless Night<div style="text-align: center;">
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
Music on a Sleepless Night</div>
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And in the
sleepless night came a flash – a glimpse
of Elsewhen;<o:p></o:p></div>
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A mighty chorus,
a symphony, heralding the Unblemished;<o:p></o:p></div>
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Allied to the
windswept eternal night;<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 1.0in;">
Beckoning the
vanguard of the King of Light;<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 1.0in;">
Unheeding of the
temporal cacophony of the striving;<o:p></o:p></div>
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A song unfolding,
revealing a profound debt <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 1.0in;">
To Compassion, to
the depths of feminine nurture,<o:p></o:p></div>
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To the eschewment
of the demon Denial who unlocks the door for <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 1.0in;">
Brutal Fear, slinking
under moonless dark, usurping.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 1.0in;">
How came this to
pass in the o’er long adolescence of humanity?<o:p></o:p></div>
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Trees bent to the
ground in acknowledgment of the End and<o:p></o:p></div>
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The Beginning,
while the orchestra plays on before<o:p></o:p></div>
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Finally-understanding
ears:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 1.0in;">
“Know thyself,
speaking clay, hearing dust, seeing stones;<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 1.0in;">
“Know thyself,
feeling water, caressing air, pulsing flame;<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Unto the Great
Moment we are beholden;<o:p></o:p></div>
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The eternal
moment of the ten thousand worlds;<o:p></o:p></div>
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High and low; <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 1.0in;">
Far and near; <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 1.0in;">
Inner and outer; <o:p></o:p></div>
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</div>
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Blossom, life.<o:p></o:p></div>
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©
2006<o:p></o:p></div>
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</div>
<div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in; text-align: right;">
Doug
Harvey<o:p></o:p></div>
Figment Zenguitarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04516554947889012627noreply@blogger.com0