The contested passage:
“While movies weren’t as magical to her as they had been, back in her late teens and twenties, she still wanted to be able to suspend belief, not think about all the ways she was being fooled.”

The problem:
No no no! It is DISbelief that must be suspended. “Willing suspension of disbelief” is what Coleridge suggested that a reader bring to a work of fiction.

The novel: Where the Dead Lay
The author: David Levien

The contested passage:
“Lake Monroe glittered like a handful of uncut diamonds had been thrown down on its surface.”

The problem: Wasn’t there a news story, a few years back, about how one of the world’s biggest diamonds was found by the side of a road, looking like a regular old rock? Diamonds have to be cut and polished, don’t they? Do uncut diamonds glitter? Really?

The website: Broowaha

The author: don’t care

The contested passage:
“Making way through the more desirably labeled, Central City East neighborhood isn’t an easy task. Each step brings a distinctive experience, ranging from open sexual activity to public deification and urination.”

The problem:
Yes, there is such a thing as “public deification.” Someone, or some thing, can be made a god of, in public. But the phrase is not generally paired with “public urination.” For those of you who haven’t had your coffee yet, the word this writer was groping for is “defecation” which means taking a dump.

The novel: The Third Secret
The author: Steve Berry

The contested passage:
“Passion, Tom. That’s what moves revolt. Deep, unabiding passion.”

The problem:
To abide is to stay. Unabiding = not staying. Unabiding is passing, transitory, ephemeral, temporary, impermanent… got it? I am 100% certain that what the author, or the author’s character, meant to say was “Deep, abiding passion.” Or perhaps, “Deep, unabating passion.” Why didn’t somebody catch this?

The novel: forgot to note the title
The author: likewise

The contested passage:
“To him, he was fulfilling a need desperate people could not find anywhere else.”

The problem:
Yeah, I get what the sentence is trying to say, but it really could use a do-over. The way this thing is constructed, what it’s really saying is that desperate people could not find the NEED anywhere else. Which is nonsense.

The interview: at the end of the audio book version of a Harlan Coben novel, someone named Denise whose last name I can’t find, interviews the author.

The contested passage:
She asks whether the character Eric Wu will appear in another novel, and I didn’t write it all down, but one of her comments was, “something… something… unless he comes back in the guise of a masseuse.”

The problem:
Eric Wu is a professional assassin with multiple tattoos and piercings, who can paralyze or kill with his bare hands. In one of the novels, a cop says of Wu, “If ten per cent of the rumors about this guy are true, I’m sleeping with my Barney the Dinosaur night-light on.” The author was polite enough to not make an issue of this with the interviewer. But could Eric Wu possibly assume the guise of a masseuse, which is a woman who gives massages? Granted, he is described as having bleached blond hair. But still. I’m afraid this interviewer is one of the many people who are not aware that “masseuse” is feminine and “masseur” is the masculine form. In fact, I have heard the term “male masseuse” which has to be one of the stupidest things…. Google gives 63,000 instances of it. Sigh.

Carlos Castaneda has been called the most controversial figure in the history of anthropology. In some circles, he’s regarded as an academic who stepped over the line and “went native.” (Which is not a bad thing in itself.) Others regard him neutrally. One of Castaneda’s most quoted sayings:

We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.

Castaneda has also been called the Godfather of the New Age. Undoubtedly, his books inspired millions of people to claim the spiritual dimension that had been missing from their lives. Perhaps the most important thing he did was to open people’s minds to the potential for transformation and the idea of seeking out a teacher. His works did shape the culture to a very great extent. What alienated people, in the latter part of his career, was his inner circle of devotees. Much of the evidence for this comes from a memoir written by Amy Wallace, who spent many years as a member of the select group. In Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Wallace says,

Although Carlos had begun as a genuine seeker, a true philosopher, he had ended as a tyrant watching over a cult of terrified followers… I do not believe that Carlos was a con man who callously sought money and women. He made terrible mistakes as the years went by, due to poor judgment, narcissism, and illness; and in his last decade he did create an abusive cult… Carlos was not a shifty huckster but a misguided philosopher whose experience of power was corrupting.

Wallace describes the nerve-wracking techniques by which Castaneda kept a tight rein on his followers. He played them off against each other by creating jealousy; encouraged them to rat on each other for minor behavioral infractions; alternated love-bombs with rejection and banishment to create an atmosphere of psychological and emotional terrorism; and demanded that they cut ties with their families. These alarming machinations were laced with the hypocrisy of pretending in public to adhere to standards that he flouted in private.

The weight of opinion seems to be that he got off to a good start. Even Wallace says that nothing can diminish the beauty of his early works. But something went wrong, and Castaneda jumped the track. It happens.

In Awakening to the Spirit World, Sandra Ingerman, Hank Wesselman, and several others explore various aspects of shamanism. The book is subtitled, “the Shamanic path of direct revelation.” And that’s the crux of the matter. In other words, we need teachers, but then we graduate. There is always more to learn, but a point comes where we rely on our own spiritual resources. The book says,

There is a pervasive tendency for people to give their power away to others. Such seekers often desire to find a teacher who will act as an intermediary between themselves and the helping spirits—

Which is where the trouble starts. Amy Wallace, reflecting on the reasons why she wrote Sorcerer’s Apprentice, said,

If some reader, somewhere, takes a moment’s pause and halts before handing over his or her free will to another, it will all have counted for something.

Strangely, what bothers many people about Castaneda’s books is the very thing he disavowed. People tend to associate his name with hallucinogenics, but during the time when Amy Wallace knew him, she says he “despised” being associated with drug use, and that don Juan had only introduced him to psychedelics because his thought patterns were so rigid they needed to be “blasted with dynamite.”

In his Los Angeles workshops, Castaneda taught a method of energy redistribution he called Tensegrity, a modified version of the magical passes he had been taught as an apprentice. As reported by Castaneda, his teacher don Juan said this practice “starts with an initial act, which by the fact of being sustained breeds unbending intent.” Someone with the pseudonym “el arte de ensonar” has contributed a fascinating piece called “On the relationship between Tensegrity and the Art of Dreaming,” The instructors were a team of three women called the Chacmools, and there are plenty of videos on YouTube where they demonstrate Tensegrity moves. Also worth checking out is a televised interview with the Chacmools in three parts, found on YouTube.

Speaking of online resources, did you know there’s a rock musical about Castaneda? It’s described as “music from the past for the future.” The story behind Diablero and the participation of rock impresario Bill Graham and counterculture figure Ken Kesey, it’s all fascinating. (go to the History page.) And for a really comprehensive video treatment of the saga, see Tales from the Jungle, a BBC production that debuted in 2006.

This quotation isn’t online, it comes from one of Michael Ventura’s books or possibly one of his newspaper columns. After a personal encounter with the sorcerer’s apprentice, Ventura had the prescience to write a line that could have served as Castaneda’s epitaph:

His presence was an admission that every truth is fragile, that every knowledge must be learned over and over again, every night, that we grow not in a straight line but in ascending and descending and tilting circles, and that what gives us power one year robs us of power the next, for nothing is settled, ever, for anyone.

Image courtesy of adKinn via Creative Commons license

Photo by Dan the Webmaster (Daniel Tobias) 1995

The mental health profession recognizes a thing called an “anniversary reaction”. When a loved one dies, or some other traumatic event happens, the subconscious mind may commemorate the anniversary, even if the conscious mind isn’t paying attention. The mind or the body will mark the stressful date with a migraine, an attack of hives, suicidal fantasies, or one of any number of other responses.

Every year on April 19, I get a severe anniversary reaction: intense anger. Yeah, I’m still royally pissed off about something that happened in 1993: the sequence of events whose mass media code name is “Waco,” though some think of it as the Mount Carmel Massacre.

This isn’t the venue for an exhaustive summary of all the details of the 50-day siege, or even of the final day. So let me just mention a few high points. It will be my reward if even one reader’s interest is tweaked enough to look up some stuff. Even those of us who obsess on the “Waco” saga can still find surprises. For instance, one site lists all the mysterious and untimely deaths of witnesses and others connected with the case.

There are hundreds of loose threads, and following any one of them can turn you into a different person overnight. For instance, look up Dr. Charles T. Sell, a military reservist who was ordered to Waco during the siege. His field of expertise? Forensic dentistry: the identification of corpses by their teeth. For talking out of turn, Dr. Sell was imprisoned without a trial for eight years

The Annual Government Employees Picnic

with Texas-Style Barbecue

Months before the first paperwork had been drawn up, the full-scale hostile invasion of Mount Carmel was mapped out and Special Response Teams from three cities were already practicing. The besiegers were ready with a large stock of body bags, and a medical man trained to identify “burned beyond recognition” human remains. On the day before the final attack, Dallas’s Parkland Hospital was warned to expect a whole lot of seriously charred patients. But the well-prepared, think-of-everything authorities somehow omitted to order up any fire-fighting equipment. Because it would be irresponsible and wrong to ask the firefighters to expose themselves to Branch Davidian bullets, don’t you know. Except, they also refused the loan of armored fire-fighting vehicles offered by another jurisdiction. And refused to let the fire trucks that eventually did show up get near the conflagration. Right from the start, they planned to kill everyone and incinerate everything: this conclusion is inescapable.

Officially called Operation Showtime or Operation Trojan Horse (and wouldn’t you like to know why?) the murder by government agents of 80-some people should be called Operation Burn & Bulldoze. But evidence of an atrocity on this scale is difficult to erase.

Long before the final attack, a noise barrage was set up, the latest thing in psychological torture and sleep deprivation, supposedly to drive the Branch Davidians from their home. One theory says that under cover of this noise, some inhabitants were shot, and not by each other. One theory says paralyzing nerve gas was used to immobilize the inhabitants, so that no one could give up even if they’d wanted to. And the coroner wasn’t shown the results of ballistics tests.

At the end, even the pitiful remnants of humanity were further damaged (and efforts to properly examine them thwarted) when the morgue’s cooling system experienced a convenient power failure. Everything had to be utterly destroyed, in order to hide the evidence of premeditated mass murder.

The obliteration efforts worked well enough so that nobody seems to know for sure how many corpses were removed from the smoldering wreckage, and a glance at the autopsy photos suggests why. Check out the hideous lump of melded-together matter labeled as the partial remains of 11 individuals.

Government Paperwork

Warrants were obtained on the strength of a document prepared by an agent from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. It was full of third-hand hearsay “evidence” and flat-out lies. Its freshest information concerning possible illegal weapons was eight months old. It quoted a social worker, who said that David Koresh told her he’d show the world something that would make the riots in Los Angeles look rinky-dink. Only problem is, this woman’s last visit to Mount Carmel had been three weeks before the L.A. riots, making either Koresh a true prophet, or the social worker a true bullshit artist.

Jack Harwell, Sheriff of McLennan County, has gone on record describing Koresh as a man who had several times willingly complied with the requests of law enforcement personnel, and who had never been convicted of any type of crime. On one occasion, when the legality of a modified weapon was questioned by a neighbor, Koresh had even brought it in to the Sheriff’s office for an opinion. But none of this found its way into the affadavit.

Don’t Know Much About a Science Book

Koresh was said to have been asking around for where to get a copy of The Anarchist’s Cookbook. (This was pre-Amazon) Hell, even I knew three or four different sources for that book. If Koresh couldn’t figure out how to lay hands on a copy, he certainly was not the terrifying criminal mastermind the government portrays him as.

Desperado, You Better Come to Your Senses

Federal spokesmen have tried to excuse the original raid by claiming that Koresh was holed up like a rat, hadn’t shown his face in weeks, so needed to be cornered and captured on his home ground. “Wrong,” say the citizens of Waco. Koresh was away from the ranch frequently. He could have been apprehended while out jogging. In town he could have been picked up at a gun show or the auto parts store. He stopped in at Lone Star Music once or twice a week. Even if there were justifiable reasons to arrest Koresh, everybody except the government agrees that he could have been collared any day of the week with no muss, no fuss.

Going to the Chapel

The government has tried to justify the massive attack on a religious community by claiming it was a hostage situation. Oh, really? Some Mount Carmel members had willingly traveled hundreds or thousands of miles to join. And the children were no more hostages than the children of Catholics or Presbyterians. In this country, religious adults control hundreds of thousands of children, most of whom manage to grow up and recover. If you could ask the Mount Carmel kids, I bet they would say religious instruction, even on a daily basis, is preferable to being roasted alive.

Children are the Last Refuge of Scoundrels

Practically everyone believes that Mount Carmel was a nest of untrammeled child abuse. They know it. How? The newspapers said so. Who told the newspapers? The government. Who told the government? A disgruntled parent involved in a custody case, and we all know how reliable they are.
The affidavit mentioned a child abuse investigation, but did not mention that the investigation was closed due to lack of evidence. Later, interviews with children who left during the 51-day siege failed to turn up any evidence of abuse.

Far from being a neglectful parent, Koresh took care of not only his own children but everybody at the settlement. A Waco musician who knew some of the residents said, “It’s a free ride. Koresh feeds and clothes you. …. You’re free to play guitar 24 hours a day.”

Get a Job

When a law-enforcement agency blows a wad of cash on tons of fancy, pricey gear, the expense has to be justified. The February 28 raid was supposed to result in a glorious victory over a crew of backwoods Bible-thumpers, a spectacle of military prowess whose memory would be quite fresh for the BATF’s annual budget review hearing on March 10. Plus, the TV show 60 Minutes had recently aired an expose’ of the Bureau’s incompetence and corruption. The surrender of a wacky cult leader and his followers would be the media event to take everybody’s minds off all that loose talk. David Koresh was elected scapegoat.

Sex, Drugs, & Rock’n'Roll

In the government’s mind, Koresh represented the entire unholy trinity of the Sixties. First, drugs: a story about a suspected meth lab was released. It was a lie, but the National Guard would not bring their helicopters to the party unless dope was involved. So the G-men said what they needed to say.
Rock’n'roll: Occupationally, the Mount Carmel community was musician-heavy, with all the equipment set up in the main parlor including David Koresh’s 30 guitars. The jazz-rock fusion band played out sometimes, and invited their audiences home for Bible study.
Sex: Koresh appears to have managed a feat that most men would love to get away with: simultaneous affairs with women who knew about each other and were okay with it. What the general public really can’t forgive him for is being a successful seducer.

David Died for Somebody’s Sins, But Not Mine

The embarrassing 60 Minutes show had revealed the unacceptable behavior of male federal agents to their female colleagues. To divert attention from its own culture of sexual abusiveness, the BATF arranged to turn the spotlight on the much more colorful story of a preacher who got too much nookie.
Let’s face it, Koresh was attractive and charismatic and never had trouble finding somebody to slide between the sheets with. He must have reminded hundreds of dorky federal agents of that guy back in Junior High who stole their first girlfriend. That cool, sexy dude they envisioned every time they went for target practice at the shooting range, the one they’d been waiting for years to train their sights on. At one of the later hearings, a BATF agent named Cavanaugh even admitted to resenting the “unlimited sexual favors” enjoyed by Koresh.

Freud said it first: sexuality must be repressed for civilization to exist. “For one man to act as though he has sexual access to all women without fear of challenge is to threaten the very foundation of public order.” In this quote, David Friedman refers to the downfall of President Clinton, but it applies to Koresh too. Psychologist Jonathan Lear said another thing of Clinton that also fits Koresh: that his real crime was thinking himself literally omni-potent, in other words entitled to have sex with anyone. “Only a god can get away with that.”
So David Koresh was indeed the sacrificial lamb: sacrificed to the long-smoldering resentments of unpopular adolescents, the victim of their atavistic, primal hatred for the alpha male.

Like a Burning Ring of Fire

Due to the efforts of many journalists, lawyers, filmmakers and other people of conscience, the Mount Carmel story has not been forgotten.
Mike McNulty was responsible for Waco: The Rules of Engagement, which was nominated for an Academy Award, captured an Emmy in the investigative journalism category, and won a major international prize. He later joined with the Van Vleets and their company MGA to create Waco: A New Revelation. Their research into the documents and especially their scrutiny of the physical evidence stirred things up enough to result in government investigations. Confronted by Lee Hancock of the Dallas Morning News, an FBI official admitted to the use of pyrotechnic devices during the Mt. Carmel siege. This, of course, was one of the allegations denied by the government for six and a half years. Civil lawsuits for wrongful-death were launched. We started hearing about FLIR technology, “overlooked” and mishandled evidence, missing pages, military secretiveness, delays in carrying out orders, lies about use of tear gas and snipers, a heinously altered crime scene, and on and on

Inquiring Minds Want to Know

Why didn’t the BATF accept Koresh’s freely extended invitation to inspect his group’s weapons? Why couldn’t the local 911 dispatcher communicate with the troops at Mount Carmel? Why did the FBI lie to the Attorney General? Why didn’t they let Koresh’s grandmother try to talk him out? As the place burned, why did two machine-guns fire continuously at the only escape route? Who made the command-level decisions? These questions and hundreds more have been asked by obsessed people who just won’t leave it alone. They’ve done and are still doing brilliant work. But amongst all the thousands of evidence items and the meanings assigned to them by various parties, I want to keep hold of the big picture. In the heat of debate over the later complications, we need to recall:
There was never any justification for governmental interference with the Branch Davidian community, or any excuse for a federal presence there, in the first place.

The arms charges were very probably bullshit. However the children of Mount Carmel were treated (and the likelihood of ever knowing the truth grows fainter with each passing year), child welfare is definitely not under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, nor of the FBI. No matter what real or imaginary peril the minor children might have faced previously, the actions of these two federal agencies put them at infinitely greater risk and of course ultimately killed many of them. And no branch of government is supposed to be in the business of protecting people from false messiahs. Of the whole shameful mess, the biggest atrocity of all is that those people were not simply left the hell alone.

Photo by Dan the Webmaster (Daniel Tobias) 1995

Photos via Creative Commons license

Mt. Carmel Pool
Mt. Carmel Sign 3

But here is the amazing part. Compared with this other thing, to imagine Jesus in the role of helper and healer is easy. But he didn’t stop there. He forged ahead into the territory of real weirdness, asking the faithful to perform a leap of imagination–What if Jesus were not the helper and healer, but the beggar? Throughout human history, gods were conceived as big, huge, powerful, rich, awesome; they were visualized as covered with gold and jewels, wielding thunderbolts. And here was a god asking to be imagined as a street person. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

That’s the audacious idea he planted in people’s heads and hearts. If you do something for the most wretched flotsam of humanity, it’s the same as doing it for him. Now, the challenge is enormous. Could that really be Jesus, disguised as a stinking derelict? You never know, but what you do know is, he wants you to act like it’s him.

Even an atheist can adapt this method, by imagining the beggar as one’s own most dearly-loved human. If the person you love unconditionally were in that situation, how would you want her or him to be treated by a stranger? You would want your loved one to be helped and healed. Or the very least, to be told “no” in a polite way, without abuse. When considering what to do about the beggar, this mental exercise points the way.

America is in the business of manufacturing homeless people, mainly via the penal system and the military.

Some say the homeless are just a bunch of ex-cons, who deserve any misery they have brought upon themselves. Aside from being statistically inaccurate, the proper answer to that is – so what? Think about the fact that most inmates are locked up for non-violent offenses. America imprisons a larger percentage of its population than any other country, including the wicked dictatorships we are always rushing around trying to bestow democracy upon.

If you know a hundred people, one of them is in prison. An awful lot of them are casualties of the immensely destructive war on drugs, which is an incredibly efficient producer of people who come out the other side with very little chance of making it, in any viable sense.

The “perpetual prisoner machine,” to use Joel Dyer’s phrase, produces a massive number of people who, though capable and even willing, can’t get jobs because they have records. A lot of them could cope quite well, but they’re not allowed to.

The military chews up and spits out people who come back incapable of coping with life, to the point of being unable to hold a job. A lot of these folks are so torn up physically and/or mentally and/or emotionally, they can’t handle the responsibility of self-support, let alone take on anything as ambitious as home ownership. For some, it’s a major project just to wait in line for a pair of donated socks.

Righteous businessmen spend their lunch hour talking about how much the towel-heads need their asses kicked, then leave the restaurant and walk right past the panhandling homeless vet – the very guy who went over there and did the ass-kicking. The veterans who hated what they had to do, and came to believe that war is truly hell, they’re the ones who come back and have breakdowns. The successful warriors, the ones who enjoyed the experience, come back and get jobs with police departments, gravitating toward the SWAT teams or black ops.

Is anybody making the connection between the huge numbers of homeless vets, and the conflicts our country is continually engaged in? One of the many consequences of these glorious incursions is that thousands upon thousands of American lives are going down the crapper.

Whether you believe America’s wars happen for mom, the flag, and apple pie, or whether you believe they happen so arms manufacturers can buy a better quality of caviar, either way, the people who took the oath don’t deserve what’s happening to them on their return.

It ought to concern us very much that so many veterans are homeless. These are people who presumably have some degree of capability. They made it through basic training. They made it through various tech schools. They acquired skills, and in many cases, managed to keep their shit together enough to avoid being thrown out of the service for a very long time. Many of them have survived combat or situations closely related to combat. These are tough folks, with grit and determination and patriotism. America’s finest.

Why in hell are they out wandering around in the cold, looking for spare change?

The wife and kids traveled to safety, and the husband, inspired by the canoe he had bought on a whim, stayed behind. He rescued survivors, and brought food and water to people in need, and to starving trapped pets. The military and paramilitary presence in the city left the frightened citizens unable to trust anyone. Zeitoun encountered some supposedly helpful soldiers who ignored his information about a disabled preacher and his wife who needed rescue.

Zeitoun was at one of the houses he owned, with the tenant and two other men, doing salvage and repair work. All four were arrested, with a lot of gratuitous cruelty. The cops who arrested them made no effort to secure the house, so the tenant ended up losing even the few items he had managed to keep from the flood waters.

And on and on, with one horrible circumstance piled upon another. The four men were taken to Camp Greyhound, a prison compound out back of the bus station, and held in open-air cages. Eggers explores the interesting topic of the miraculous speed with which materials were acquired. In a devastated city where transportation was hazardous if not impossible, where so many other things needed to be done, the facility was built in mere days.

One of Zeitoun’s fellow captives was a man whose company had sent a crew from another state to render aid. He had documentation to prove that he was one of the good guys, but nothing made any difference. In this mini-Guantanamo, no prisoners were allowed any outside communication, and there was overzealous use of pepper-spray, and several other kinds of gratuitous maltreatment. The jailers took special delight in serving pork products to Zeitoun and other Muslims, knowing they would go hungry sooner than eat it.

All this time Zeitoun’s family didn’t know if he was dead or alive. After being moved to another prison, he was finally able to convince someone to contact his wife. Mrs. Zeitoun managed to get a lawyer, but when a hearing was scheduled, they were told that the location of the impromptu court was privileged information. The outrageous violations went on and on. Zeitoun himself was held for a relatively short, though grueling, time. The others arrested with him were imprisoned in maximum security for up to eight months. One of the four had been carrying his life savings of $10,000 in a duffel bag, which he never saw again. Another had over $2,000 disappear while he was in custody. The official position is, if you ever have to flee for your life from a ruined home, possessing only what you can carry, just make sure it’s not money. They’ve managed to screw things up to the point where only criminals use cash, and cash is proof of criminality.

When Zeitoun finally got his wallet back, the money and credit cards were missing. Even in the most disorganized emergency, there is no justification for jail personnel stealing from the prisoners. Over and over it became clear that many people who came to New Orleans to “help,” were worse than the marauders they were supposed to protect the populace from. In the experience of Zeitoun and the survivors he met with, the representatives of law and order got far too much satisfaction from being contemptuous of human rights. Here was a whole city full of people who could be kicked while they were down. It was just a big playground for brutal strangers who exercised their worst impulses with no consequences whatsoever.

Dayton Literary Peace Prize

After Katrina, New Orleans Cops Were Told They Could Shoot Looters

Yes, I’ve been very much wanting to say something about this volume published by Nine-Banded Books. I kept putting it off, because I read “The Myth of Natural Rights,” which is the anchor of the collection, a few years ago, and there are notes somewhere. Also, my Must Read stack is a couple of feet tall. And too much time has passed. So, it’s come to where I’ll do what I can now, and add more when the other stuff turns up.

And besides, I already know what I think about natural rights. In both nature and science, a law can’t be broken. If it can be broken, it isn’t a law. It’s only a law if it can’t be broken. If it’s breakable, it is neither natural nor law. “Law” is a description, not a prescription or a proscription. Natural rights are like natural law. It’s only a natural right if it’s incapable of being violated. If it is amenable to violation, it’s not a natural right.

I have no idea how closely this resembles the thought of L. A. Rollins on the subject, because I don’t remember what those notes said, that I took so many years ago. I might have bought the Rollins party line wholesale. Or maybe he said something completely different. So I urge you to have a look at it yourself.

There is more between these covers, including “An Open Letter to Allah,” which has got to be ten times worse than anything Salman Rushdie ever wrote. And “Lucifer’s Lexicon,” which is like Ambrose Bierce’s “Devil’s Dictionary,” a very subversive work in its day.

Also, here’s the sarcastic “Ode to Emperor Bush,” which I believe I first saw in manuscript form. I used to have quite a lively correspondence with L. A. Rollins. (I heard from elsewhere that he also corresponded with Robert Anton Wilson, co-author of the Illuminatus trilogy, which put me in very distinguished company.) This was back in the day, when people wrote by hand or typewriter. Which Rollins probably still does. It takes guts to so thoroughly resist the computer era. And he was able to resist it despite working in the publishing business, as proof-reader and copy-editor for Loompanics. You have to be really good, to get away with computer refusal. Rollins is, in general, one of those people I learn from; admire for their wit; recognize as very, very smart; and enjoy arguing with. I also disagree with a large percentage of what he says…I think.

I’m not the only one who sometimes doesn’t quite comprehend L. A. Rollins. In the Preface, publisher Chip Smith talks about Rollins’s study of Holocaust revisionism.

It seemed at times as though Rollins was in the revisionist camp himself. At other times, he seemed to hold revisionists out for wicked ridicule…I just couldn’t get a fix on it.

Well, that’s L. A. Rollins for ya, an ornery SOB if ever there was one. And a fair one. In one of his pieces on the topic, he invites anybody with better evidence to send it to him, saying,

‘Revisionism’ is sometimes defined in terms of setting the record straight. Thus, I see no reason why the writings of avowed revisionists should be exempt from revisionism.

The Preface also states that works by L. A. Rollins appeared in the zine I used to publish. They did, and I was honored to have them there among the pages of Salon: A Journal of Aesthetics.

Along with lengthy letters, he supplied examples of truly disturbing literature, the likes of which I had not imagined. Or we’d be wrangling about something, and he would send me news clippings that supported my side, in case I’d missed them. You gotta respect that. He’d rile me up by claiming, for instance, that Dalton Trumbo abandoned his anti-war stance in the 1940s. The revered author of Johnny Got His Gun, the blacklisted screenwriter, one of the Hollywood Ten, – according to Rollins, this hero of free speech rolled over, but people didn’t know. They still perceived him as one of the great pacifist voices of the age, and sent fan mail, which he turned over to the FBI. Well, hell!

This was long before I ever had Internet access, and it made me crazy, but I had no way of cross-checking that information, and in fact I forgot about it, up until about ten minutes ago. So now I’m gonna consult Wikipedia. Which says, Johnny Got His Gun was published in 1939 and won the National Book Award. Then in ’41, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, so Trumbo and his publishers decided not to print any more copies until the war was over. But people sent him letters asking for copies, and he gave the letters to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That really sucks!

This article says he regretted it, but seems to imply the regret was only because it focused the attention of the Communist-hunters in Washington on him. He ended up being called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and served almost a year in federal prison – even though he had cooperated by turning in the people who were trying to buy copies of his anti-war book. Bummer.

Anyhow, never think that L. A. Rollins is not a nice person. In the book’s Acknowledgements pages he thanks about a hundred people, including Ace Backwords, Mike Hoy, Jim Hogshire, Adam Parfrey, Bob Black….. and me.

You’re welcome!

*****

Short Takes from “Lucifer’s Lexicon” by L. A. Rollins

Vain, n. A foreign domain in which many a soldier has died.

Transubstantiation, n. A supperstition.

Labor Union, n. An association of workers organized to advance the interests of union organizers.

I don’t even know who Glenn Beck is, or what he does. I only know a lot of people are down on him, and feeling very sanctimonious about it. And I know this: Glenn Beck doesn’t matter. There will always be a Glenn Beck – whoever or whatever the hell he is. Here’s why. We’ve got things set up so there is perpetually a Glenn Beck role waiting to be filled. Five years ago, somebody else was filling it, and five years from now it will be another somebody else. Life is just one big video game. All these roles are built in, and different humans come along and sign up to fill them.

Their names don’t matter! Their clothes and hairstyles don’t matter! People: nobody’s hair matters worth a damn. No, not even Sarah Palin. Not even Hillary Clinton. It. Doesn’t. Fucking. Matter. Even their gender doesn’t matter, or what they do about it. It’s amazing, how folks will comment about the appearance, wardrobe, or sex life of a public figure, and actually delude themselves that they are partaking in political discourse. What they’re partaking in is a flashback to third grade.

Never mind pissing and moaning about Glenn Beck. Where are the ideas? Which of his beliefs are so odious that nobody should believe them? So, why do people believe them? What’s it gonna take to persuade them to believe something else?

Never mind the individuals, the personalities. For instance, one tin-pot dictator is very much like the next. There’s no point in endlessly analyzing any particular one of them, whether it’s Hitler, Idi Amin, or your boss. The thing is, going back to the video game analogy, how do we get in there and just take the tin-pot dictator role out of the game? That’s the challenge, not picking off these assholes one by one.

The great thinker Voltaire went to an orgy and had a good time, but declined a follow-up invitation. He said, “Once is philosophy, twice is perversion.” That’s how I feel about watching the WTF Network.

Here’s the setup: Out on the West Coast, a colleague is fighting for a cause that’s already taken him to some extremes. Apparently, he slanted his story in a way that fits the format of a TV series called “Most Daring.” (We’ve discussed the proposition that there is no such thing as bad publicity.) So for the sake of team spirit, I decided to watch it, and even turned the TV on a bit early, and caught part of a show called “Cops.”

You will have guessed that the title up there at the top of the page is a gag. Oh, the network has a three-letter name, but they’re a different three letters. I call it the WTF Network, because the words that come to mind again and again are – “What the f***?”

Take “Cops,” for instance. I’m sitting here with a cup of tea, engaging in the spectator sport of looking at my fellow citizens being violently arrested. WTF were the people thinking, who first proposed this as entertainment? WTF causes anybody to watch this genre of television? It’s hard to imagine anyone who has actually been a victim of police brutality, wanting to see this stuff. Or the families of anyone at all who’s been in trouble with the law which, these days, is most people. If I had a son, I wouldn’t want to see a boy his age and general description being taken down by the cops.

Is any of this stuff for real? How much of it is “re-enactment”? I can’t imagine any actor, no matter how underemployed or desperate, consenting to be brutalized in the ways shown here. A large part of this has got to be real, genuine police photography.

“Cops” includes a long, Academy-quality performance by a shirtless driver who is questioned by officers at the roadside. With just a slight tweak, this old boy could be on the “Blue Collar Comedy” stage. Can this possibly be spontaneous and real? Why does this dude so tamely allow his humiliation at the hands of the law to be filmed?

Is any of this stuff, on any of these shows, spontaneous and real? Are they seriously asking us to believe it’s all real? Okay, tornadoes and stuff like that. Fine. But other stuff is impossible to have captured in the way it is shown, under any conceivable circumstances. Is it only obvious to media professionals? Maybe it’s obvious to everybody. Maybe the entire TV audience, these days, is so hip that everyone knows exactly what degree of verisimilitude to infer from any given image. Am I the only moron too unsophisticated to understand that nobody believes anything they see on TV any more, and I’m getting all excited over nothing?

Pretty soon, “Most Daring” starts up. It offers:

—- A subway riot in Buffalo, where I once lived.

— -A train/trailer truck collision that seems to have been filmed from about 99 different angles. Does a railway crossing really have that many cameras pointed at it?

—- A high-speed chase, where two truckers collaborate on blocking the fugitive from passing them. When he tries to pass on the right, they pin his car to a guardrail. Cut to cop being interviewed, later. He says, “To this day, I don’t know who they are.” Are you kidding? They just rode off, like the Lone Ranger? “Who was that masked man?” “Dunno, we’re just an agency with the ability to tap every nationwide database there is, as well as review the footage we ourselves took. How the hell should we know who those truckers were?”

—- Some pedestrian bandito leans in the window of a car stalled in traffic and steals a purse. He weaves his hazardous way through a herd of vehicles, and is chased, and so on. The amazing thing is, the footage is shot from many different directions. No single, stationary surveillance camera took all these pictures. I mention this to somebody, who assures me: Everybody has camera phones now. Okay, say there were 20 people in the area, who could spare enough attention from driving their own cars to take pictures of the crook. How did it all wind up on this show? Did the producers send out a call throughout every possible channel, asking for footage of the event that took place on such-and-such street, on such-and-such date? Did everyone with a camera spontaneously realize they could sell their footage to “Most Daring,” and take the initiative to get in touch? Do people get paid for turning over their amateur videos? Do they get paid the same whether it’s real, or really real?

How does it happen, that cameras are always present for these weird incidents? Sure, security cameras are ubiquitous, the average person is photographed 300 times a day, bla bla bla. But how does all this artful tracking and refocusing come about? This isn’t the work of automatic camera mounted on a wall.

The editors work overtime. If for some dire reason, they don’t have shots from a lot of different angles, they just replay one snippet a whole bunch of times. A suspect on foot gets mowed down by a cop car, and we are treated to the sight of the impact at least half a dozen times. Apparently, they could just put that vignette on an endless loop and sell it to people as a standalone product.

At some point I realized this was the wrong TV show. “Most Daring” comes in several varieties, and this was “Commuter Chaos,” which I knew wouldn’t include the segment I was watching for. But I sat there anyway, wondering how much worse it could get. “Commuter Chaos” was a lot like “Cops.” In fact, I’m not even sure which things were on which show. But that doesn’t change the basic essence of the matter.

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Finally, the show I’ve been waiting for – “Most Daring: Bedlam in the Burbs.” The person I sort of know is supposed to be in this one. Some highlights:

—-  A backyard demolition derby. My inner libertarian says people have the right to do whatever they want with their own property, including destroy it. Still, whenever I see cars being gratuitously wrecked, I think of all the people who could really, really use a car and can’t quite manage to get one. What a waste.

—- Police chase a motorist through a semi-rural neighborhood. A guy comes out of a house and throws something at the fugitive’s car as it goes by. Further on, another resident comes out with a gun and shoots at the fugitive’s car. Cut to a cop being interviewed about the helpful citizen with a firearm. “He’s listened to the police scanner over a case of beer and decided to get involved.” Not a word about the wrongness of vigilantism, no word on any arrest of the gun-wielding citizen, nothing like that.

—- This guy tells his girlfriend to pick up a dog collar, and they’re walking along, and all of a sudden she yelps and falls on her ass. It is, of course, a shock collar, whose purpose is to cure gratuitous barking, and the boyfriend has the control in his pocket. We’re supposed to think it’s all spontaneous and the girl was surprised. Didn’t she wonder why somebody was filming her and her boyfriend on their ordinary, mundane stroll through the back yard?

—- There’s a real short clip of a guy firing some kind of long gun, and when it goes boom, his pants fall down. Okay, that was interesting. But why was anyone filming him, to begin with? The unaccountable presence of a camera at these boring scenes is a pretty good indication that a lot of what the audience is supposed to believe accidental, is really on purpose. WTF is the point?

Okay, fine, set up a gag and film it. That’s what Chaplin did. Nothing wrong with that. But these guys want viewers to believe their subject matter is real accident, rather than a staged scene. It’s not enough that an audience should see it and laugh at it. The creators of it also require the audience’s belief in its authenticity. Why?

Why would anyone be filming any of this stuff, unless they knew beforehand that something would happen to liven things up? Well, one of the reasons is that parents will take any amount of pictures of their kids. This is how we get such masterpieces as a little boy learning to ride a bike, crashing into a toy car. And little boy knocked off a trampoline. This is how we get nonsense like the Balloon Boy media circus, as a direct result of the WTF Network culture.

— Some moron douses a basketball with gasoline, lights it on fire, kicks it, and manages to set his foot on fire.

Is it only because I worked as a nurse, that I don’t see the humor? There really isn’t anything funny about, for instance, a hand whose digits are all fused together by scar tissue. I knew a man whose hand was like that. When he was a little boy, his brother tied a rag around his hand, soaked it in kerosene, and put a match to it. He probably told him it would be fun. The parents were Alabama sharecroppers. Reconstructive surgery wasn’t in the cards for that kid.

The argument for not televising jackass stunts: I knew a kid who tried to duplicate one of them, broke his leg, cost his parents a bundle of money and hassle when they could least afford it, because his mother was recovering from two major surgeries and his father had been out of work for a couple of years. Do we really need TV that encourages that kind of thing?

The other side: I had a relative, a couple generations back, who spent his entire life on a couch, in the kitchen of a farmhouse without plumbing or electricity. There was nothing else he could do, being permanently crippled by a fall from the barn roof. Maybe he was up there on legitimate business; maybe it was a jackass stunt. They didn’t have TV. Nobody had TV. Those Alabama folks had kerosene lamps, not electricity. Okay, it could be said that I’ve just demolished my own argument. Kids have always gotten hurt

But to go from “Boys have always done asinine things” to “Therefore we should televise the asinine things done by boys” is a leap of logic I can’t quite negotiate. (For somebody who doesn’t believe in censorship, this is a difficult position to be in.) Let’s start with the very real possibility that the basketball pyromaniac could have set the building on fire. There’s very little humor in a house fire, or a fire of any kind, really. People’s lives are devastated by fire. It’s the kind of thing a survivor never really gets over. I sure hate to typecast myself as a curmudgeon and a stick-in-the-mud, but fire just isn’t that funny.

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I include, as a target for scorn, “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” which may be on a different network, but that’s not really important. On most of these programs, most of the material involves somebody getting hurt, with genital injuries especially prized. Again, WTF? Just as a baby can find endless fascination in a bunch of jingling keys, men find endless amusement in the sight of some other guy taking a shot to the balls. And for some unfathomable reason, men love the sound of emergency vehicle sirens and screeching brakes. What’s up with that?

One of these shows even has a motto, “There’s nothing funnier than pain, embarrassment and humiliation!” Maybe so. Maybe also, there’s nothing worse than justifying sadism and bullshit under the guise of humor. Maybe there’s nothing worse than a sense of humor that’s limited to pain, embarrassment and humiliation, and incapable of moving beyond those hilarious qualities. Maybe there’s nothing sadder than elevating funniness to the very highest echelon of values. Maybe… a lot of things.

Humor is great, it’s healing, it’s stress-relieving, yada yada…. But just because a thing makes us laugh, that doesn’t mean it’s intrinsically good. I’m sure there were concentration camp guards who found abundant humor in some of the stunts they got up to. There’s nothing sacred about humor, and if we’re able to see that there are different kinds of humor, and that some are more desirable than others, we are probably happier. The fun of “Blue Collar Comedy” can make you feel good for minutes at a time, and even affect your whole day. The humor of a guru can blow your mind and change your life. Why not aim high?

When negativity takes over my brain, I apply the Codger Test. “If I were 16 or 21, would I feel the same way?” (A song by Will Crist says, “I’ll help you remember your youth.” To which I reply, “No, thanks.” It is all too easily remembered. While I wouldn’t change anything, neither would I want to live through it again.) So I imagine watching “America’s Funniest Home Videos” or, Goddess forbid, “Cops,” at one of tender young ages. First of all, in the Sixties, only a few science fiction writers (and Paul Krassner) could have envisioned the shape of media to come. If, as a young adult, I had by some magical means glimpsed this future, it would have been added to my list of reasons for suicide. So, that’s the Codger Test. Would my opinion then, be the same as now? Hell, yeah. Pacifist though I was, I might even have found it a good reason to put my foot through the TV screen.

“Cops” is particularly distressing. The law-and-order freaks and cop wanna-be types who justify this show’s existence, sit hypnotized by the flashing lights of the patrol car – exactly like strobe-mesmerized hippies at a rock concert, a class of people they consider deviant zombies. (Has anyone ever sued the show for inducing an epilepsy attack with those flashing lights?) I keep wanting to say, “This is pornography,” then I remember the word means “writing about prostitutes.” Does that apply to this show? I haven’t watched enough of “Cops” to know whether it covers hookers, and don’t intend to. Sometimes research is a waste of time.

But on another plane of cogitation, yes, this is prostitution. What is prostitution, but selling something that probably shouldn’t be sold? It’s the same kind of whoredom practiced by small American towns struggling for economic survival, that can’t think of any idea better than “Let’s build a prison!” – with all the enthusiasm of an old cornball movie, “Hey kids! Let’s put on a show!”

Another TV series I don’t intend to treat myself to is “Operation Repo.” Just the ad for it was enough. This is how our invisible rulers maintain control over the population. All they gotta do is, make half the people into government minions with weapons, and the other half into outlaws with weapons. Keep our sorry asses busy clobbering each other, while they get their hands on everything. And free Americans voluntarily subject themselves to this indoctrination. The whole WTF Network is about America wallowing in its own worst impulses, and ya know what? It’s okay not to like it.