For those living near Cincinnati, Ohio they would likely know of the strange archaeological remains of Serpent Mound off to the east—a mound built by an ancient people several thousand years ago clearly displaying a serpent design visible to the air which has astronomical calculations built into certain points of the large site. The people who built it went to incredible trouble for reasons that are even more mysterious. Thickening the plot the site sits on a significant portion of a crypto explosion which took place over 300 million years ago. There was no way that the ancient people could have at the time known of the explosion as erosion had removed most of the sight references visible without advanced scientific equipment. Yet out of all the locations that Serpent Mound could have been built—it was on the edge of this gigantic 4 mile wide crater that looks to have come from inside the earth as opposed to a traditional meteor impact from space. The reason this is significant is that modern scientists are mystified–a helicopter spotted a large mysterious hole in Siberia Tuesday July 15th, 2014—and it has left scientists largely perplexed thus far. The first explanation rationed was that gas from deep in the earth exploded due to the mystical global warming phenomena perpetuated by paper-thin intellectuals—a falsehood designed to disguise their ignorance.
The massive hole, about 260 feet wide, is located in the Yamal peninsula and can easily fit several helicopters inside the entrance, according to the U.K.’s Independent. It is believed to be about two years old, RT.com reported.
The area’s name, Yamal, translates to “end of the world” and is home to some of Russia’s largest gas reserves.
Yet this wasn’t the first such hole to appear in Siberia.
On June 30,1908, a giant fireball exploded in Siberia’s remote Tunguska region, leveling trees for more than 20 miles around and causing atmospheric shock waves that were detected round the world. At the time, scientists thought that a giant meteorite had crashed into the earth. Later, when they failed to find a major crater or clearly identifiable meteorite fragments at the site, they began to question their earlier theory.
Many scientists have since attributed the phenomenon to a comet head that exploded in the air before hitting the earth. Others suggest that a stray clump of antimatter from elsewhere in the universe was the cause through some dimensional portal—a fold of space and time which is concealing the evidence.
Back at Serpent Mound just outside of Cincinnati, hardly a location at the “end of the world” the same type of thing occurred long ago. The valley beneath the effigy is really the western rim of a mysterious, four-mile-wide, circular crater – the eroded remains of a huge, catastrophic event geologists call “The Serpent Mound Disturbance.” About 300 million years ago, either an asteroid collision or an underground explosion blew apart more than seven cubic miles of rock. The central area was uplifted more than 1000 feet, while an outer rim dropped more than 400 feet.
What we see today results from eons of erosion, although the shattered fragments of the “Central Uplift” remain among the hills above Serpent Mound. The distant ridge tops, visible from the overlooks, stand high today because they are the much harder Ordovician bedrock that was offset by the event.
The strange geology of this spot was first noticed in modern times by Dr. John Locke of Cincinnati, who named it “Sunken Mountain” in 1838. Yet, it’s not hard to imagine that the ancient effigy builders could have recognized the unusual land forms. The serpent looks out from the edge of the Central Uplift zone.
This little recent hole in Siberia is much smaller than the four mile wide one that occurred at Serpent Mound but one thing is for sure about the Serpent Mound crater—it wasn’t caused by global warming and much stronger forces were at work. At this time the two craters may have been caused by entirely different forces but what is clear is that even with all of our modern equipment and satellite analysis the hole in Siberia wasn’t even noticed for two years. This confirms that there is very little that modern science really knows about anything as our study into nature is still infantile. The cause and effects of forces known and yet to be discovered are not complete, so static conclusions are impossible at this time.
But what is most mysterious of all is that a so-called primitive people knew enough about the geology of the Ohio area which had filled back in after hundreds of millions of years of erosion to build a tribute to it as if they knew that their monument in the shape of a serpent might appease the forces that created the impact.
Many societies could have risen and fallen over several hundred million years and not all of them may have been terrestrial. Yet by some word of mouth or written documentation which is no longer seen, the ancient people who constructed Serpent Mound likely knew about the strange ancient events that took place on that site. And in our modern times similar holes are opening up right under our feet and we have no explanation for them but to blame the occurrences on our own development and science. That only goes to prove how feeble our modern grasp on reality truly is. The mysteries of the earth are alive and well, and mankind looks upon them with fear of the unknown for which they lack the courage to probe with honesty to an origin that does not reside on this planet—but out into the Milky Way toward one of NASA’s recent proclamations—that within 25 years life will be discovered afar and the answers to some of these mysteries will then become known—and we may not like the answer as it will disturb our religions, mythologies and basic concept of existence. If history is to be followed when matched up against a superior intellect and culture—it is likely that we might want to build a monument to appease them in the same way that a weak-willed politician licks the boots of those they perceive to be their superiors. In that future time the real answer to the mysterious crypto explosions on earth will then be provided by documents that left long ago only to return by the minds responsible.
The term cryptoexplosion structure (or cryptovolcanic structure) means an explosion of unknown cause. The term is now largely obsolete. It was once commonly used to describe sites where there was geological evidence of a large-scale explosion within the Earth’s crust, but no definitive evidence for the cause such as normal volcanic rocks. These sites are usually circular with signs of anomalous rock deformation contrasting with the surrounding region, and often showing evidence that crustal material had been uplifted and/or blown outwards. The assumption was that some unusual form of volcanism, or a gas explosion originating within the crust, was the cause. The use of the term went away with the rise of the science of impact crater recognition in the late 20th Century. Most structures described as cryptoexplosions turned out to be eroded impact craters, caused by the impact of meteorites. Today geologists discount former cryptoexplosion theories.[1]
Yet, geologists have yet to explain what caused “The Serpent Mound Disturbance” and have relegated their investigation to the back of their desk drawers and left investigations to theorists who must resurrect the term, “cryptoexplosion” once again to properly term the classification. And such explosions are not regulated to the distant past, but still occur right under the nose of science who believed that just because they stopped using a term, that the need would cease to call attention to itself. By the evidence of the new hole that has opened in Russia–“cryptoexplosion” would appear to be much more appropriate as a term than “global warming.”
There was a lot of Star Wars news this past week as the world revs up for the most recent reports from that line of mythology originating during the 1970s. As I received news from Lucasfilm about their schedule at Comic Con, San Diego, a fan from Germany did a brilliant YouTube video showing vehicles from the Empire being unloaded at a foreign airport. It was a remarkable short film and showed how easy it is for anybody these days to make wonderful visual effects—putting story telling within reach of the entire world. Even more remarkable was that the creator was not an American, but was German—meaning that the very American Star Wars mythology was important enough to him to create such a video which would have taken a considerable amount of thought and time.
But most remarkable of all was the report from Kevin Smith—the filmmaker from the Clerks movies and Red State who was given permission to visit the Star Wars Episode 7 set by invitation of J.J. Abrams. Smith is personal friends with Ben Affleck and a number of notably progressive Hollywood types, but he is also a very pop culture lover of comic books and heroic endeavor. If he and I had a dinner conversation together it is likely we would agree on nothing related to politics, but everything regarding comic books and Star Wars which is the magic of that particular mythology.
I was not a fan of Smith’s movie Red State—which felt to me like a Hollywood shot at life in the Midwest. Most of the antagonists in the film were perverted versions of the type of characters Hollywood views as “Bible Thumpers” so I nearly ignored the report that Kevin Smith gave after his visit to the Star Wars set. However, under the recommendation from some of the filmmakers from the Atlas Shrugged set I gave it a chance and was glad I did. Smith gave a remarkably honest breakdown not only of what he saw there—but in how it made him feel which reaches to the heart and soul of the entire Star Wars movement.
Star Wars is a movement, philosophical, political, and religious—it is a culture building exercise that extends far beyond simple entertainment. Cultures throughout the world have spent decades now having values removed from them leaving them empty. The causes have been varied—but the results are massive cases of emptiness leaving people desperately hungry to fill themselves with something of value. Star Wars created by George Lucas was intended for children to provide value and this hunger for all things Star Wars is most reflected in the excitement level of grown adults who are rediscovering their inner—long lost child through new movies and products.
I promised my children and wife when we all saw the movie Hook together by Steven Spielberg that I would never become lost like the Robin Williams character and lose my inner Peter Pan. And I have never broken that promise to them—I understand all too well the character of Peter Pan. I live the life of Pan with every breath that I take. With that said, the bedroom of my wife and I looks like a Star Wars toy section at Target. Looming over our bed is a large Millennium Falcon and located around our bedroom are several different versions of that same ship in various sizes. I know what Star Wars means to me because I have never left that part of my life behind—instead I incorporate it seamlessly into my mature life in the way that Peter Pan had to reconcile at the end of Hook.
I’m sure that J.J. Abrams invited Kevin Smith to the Star Wars set to generate positive publicity ahead of Comic Con in San Diego and to put some of the negative rumors about Harrison Ford’s broken leg—which is healing, to rest. Ford is doing what he has always done—he’s fighting back to health so he can complete the film. (Harrison Ford suffered an ACL tear during the making of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and ruptured a disk in his back during the filming of Temple of Doom. In both cases he hit the weight room and recovered and finished his film as the star. He is doing the same thing as a 71-year-old man for Episode 7. That is what makes him great and a man’s man.) Smith came to the set and reported in a video what he saw which was captivating, but what impressed me most was his sense of understanding of what happened to him when he stepped to the top of The Millennium Falcon ramp.
It was an interesting admission that Kevin Smith made when he declared that everything he had been—as an adult—was a corrupt caricature essentially shaped by the times of society’s impression upon him. He was very honest about stating that when he visited the Star Wars set he returned back to his childhood which for him was a treasure—as it is for most people. His intense revelation about crying at the top of The Millennium Falcon ramp says a lot about our culture. It is that lost Peter Pan persona that most of us seek to regain.
So the question must be asked—why do we give up that treasure in our teenage years? Some of the most courageous among us regain that persona later in life once we become grandparents—and too old to care what people think of us. Once we lose our sex appeal, our hair, our nice skin, and the ability to impress others with our appearance there is once again a chance to become childlike with the wisdom of years of learning to support ourselves. Kids don’t care what they look like, they just like to play and have fun, and this is a trait that we should not give up on as adults.
I never have—I promised my family I never would, and I never will under any conditions. Every day in my life is like the end of the Robin Williams version of Peter Pan in Hook. I skipped right over the crises period and just went from childhood to adulthood with the same enthusiasm. What Kevin Smith, Seth McFarlane, and I all have in common is that even though we differ dramatically in our politics—we share emphatically a love of Star Wars for the same reasons—as the mythology is a direct link to the energy of childhood which should never be lost to any adult anywhere.
Kevin Smith obviously would have been a happier person if he didn’t start swearing, doing drugs, and adopting progressive causes. This is why our politics is different essentially. He would have been happier if he had kept that inner child all through his life and dropped the cynicism of adulthood. He shouldn’t have had to cry when he stepped to the top of The Millennium Falcon ramp. But, his friend J.J. Abrams probably did Smith a huge favor on a personal level by bringing him to the set to see the Star Wars shoot in person. It is good that Kevin Smith had that experience and reported it so honestly—because this is part of the healing qualities that I have spoken about so often regarding Star Wars. The culture that will come from all this will leave us all much better off than we are today—because the stories are about values that the inner child in all of us crave so deeply. The cynical adult in us has yielded to the pressures of existence which imposed compromises of those values leaving us shells of ourselves to live as caricatures of our former dreams—which is the essential story of Hook.
Disney will surely give the rest of the world the same opportunity Smith had when they build a full scale Millennium Falcon in Orlando, Florida for visitors to their theme parks. It will be a common sight to see grown adults weeping at the top of the ramp in the same way that Kevin Smith did because the long suppressed magic of childhood will come rushing back to them in that instant. It’s not immature to feel such things–it is actually rational to reacquaint an adult life with the foundations of their belief systems formed during childhood. For many people, Star Wars is the clearest representation of value that they have and is why so many fans go to such elaborate measures to touch that mythology any way they can, even if it is in a short film remarkably done like the one at the German airport. There have been few people who have put their finger on the pulse of the Star Wars movement better than Kevin Smith did when he so honestly reported his visit to the Episode 7 set.
There is no shame in rediscovering the Peter Pan in all of us—the eternal youth forever thoughtful of the hopes and dreams of discovery and imagination. When those things are lost, we are robbed of much—and it is always good to revisit these traits which we are born with. It has only been recently when there was a mythology like Star Wars providing the mechanism through simple sight of a movie prop that could make a grown man cry like a baby at the purity of the emotion—the long lost hopefulness of childhood and the values of the uncompromising dreams of youth.
Parents and teachers in Warren County want more money and better benefits for the Mason City School District.
The Mason Education Association, which represents 650 educators, has been negotiating a new employment contract since April. Mason teachers say they’re not only concerned about money and benefits but also concerned about cuts to academic programs and facilities.
The union also declared a “no confidence” position in superintendent Gail Kist-Kline.
The district meanwhile says it’s hopeful that negotiations will continue during the summer months, and a contract settlement will be reached before the beginning of the school year.
According to school board members, Dr. Kist-Kline was hired following a levy failure, and asked to lead during a time of economic challenge that required the district to improve efficiency and make difficult decisions.
The story continued with the MEA (Mason Education Association) threatening to go on strike and late in the afternoon on July 8th 2014, a contract agreement was reached which will then go to a vote by the union members. Teachers all across Ohio rejoiced as one of the wealthiest districts in that state had proven that it was once again ripe for pillaging. The entire story of how the teacher’s union in Mason threatened a hostile action—work stoppage—preventing parents who pay the taxes there from retaining their free baby sitting service at the end of summer, forced the payment of ransom which were pay increases. It was all too reminiscent of an old pirate story about Blackbeard’s blockade of the Charleston harbor in 1718. That old story about pirate action was essentially the same as the modern story of the MEA in Mason, Ohio 2014.
Edward Teach (also Edward Thatch, c.1680—22 November 1718), better known as Blackbeard, was a notorious English pirate who operated around the West Indies and the eastern coast of the American colonies. Although little is known about his early life, he was probably born in Bristol, England. He may have been a sailor on privateer ships during Queen Anne’s War before settling on the Bahamian island of New Providence, a base for Captain Benjamin Hornigold, whose crew Teach joined sometime around 1716. Hornigold placed him in command of a sloop he had captured, and the two engaged in numerous acts of piracy. Their numbers were boosted by the addition to their fleet of two more ships, one of which was commanded by Stede Bonnet, but toward the end of 1717 Hornigold retired from piracy, taking two vessels with him.
Blockade of Charleston
By May 1718 Teach had awarded himself the rank of Commodore and was at the height of his power. Late that month his flotilla blockaded the port of Charleston (then known as Charles Town) in South Carolina. All vessels entering or leaving the port were stopped, and as the town had no guard ship,[40] its pilot boat was the first to be captured. Over the next five or six days about nine vessels were stopped and ransacked as they attempted to sail past Charleston Bar, where Teach’s fleet was anchored. One such ship, headed for London with a group of prominent Charleston citizens which included Samuel Wragg (a member of the Council of the Province of Carolina), was the Crowley. Her passengers were questioned about the vessels still in port and then locked below decks for about half a day. Teach informed the prisoners that his fleet required medical supplies from the colonial government of South Carolina, and that if none were forthcoming, all prisoners would be executed, their heads sent to the Governor and all captured ships burnt.[41]
Wragg agreed to Teach’s demands, and a Mr. Marks and two pirates were given two days to collect the drugs. Teach moved his fleet, and the captured ships, to within about five or six leagues from land. Three days later a messenger, sent by Marks, returned to the fleet; Marks’s boat had capsized and delayed their arrival in Charleston. Teach granted a reprieve of two days, but still the party did not return. He then called a meeting of his fellow sailors and moved eight ships into the harbor, causing panic within the town. When Marks finally returned to the fleet, he explained what had happened. On his arrival he had presented the pirates’ demands to the Governor and the drugs had been quickly gathered, but the two pirates sent to escort him had proved difficult to find; they had been busy drinking with friends and were finally discovered, drunk.[42]
Teach kept to his side of the bargain and released the captured ships and his prisoners—albeit relieved of their valuables, including the fine clothing some had worn.[43]
The behavior of the MEA was essentially of the same morality as Blackbeard’s seizer and extortion of Charleston. Blackbeard’s actions were designed to exploit the weaknesses of the governor; the MEA was designed to exploit the weaknesses of the superintendent of Mason schools. Both groups used force and fear to obtain wealth—the Blackbeard pirates used fear of physical violence, the Mason teachers’ used the fear of work stoppage by refusing to perform contracted obligations as employees of the state of Ohio. There is no real difference between the piratical acts of Blackbeard or the MEA.
So why weren’t the Mason teachers arrested for their piratical acts instead of rewarded with more money? Because the pirates run the government in 2014 unlike in 1718. The only difference between the MEA and Blackbeard is that they are now the lawyers, legislators, and union leaders who have infiltrated the law to have easy access to the plunder of the tax payers. Pirates have changed their tactics over the years—instead of violence and blockades, they just gained a government backed service—like education—and threatened to take that service away unless they obtained their desires. The ideal of the blockade of education services through a labor strike and Blackbeard’s extraction of medical supplies from the Governor of Charleston are the same because tax payers have no other option. There are no other schools for their children to attend just as there was no other way out of the harbor of Charleston for the citizens to embark on any kind of trade by sea. So Blackbeard had the city by the throat and used it to his advantage just as the MEA had Mason by the throat regarding education. The intentions were extortion to fulfill the desires of piracy. The only difference is that these modern pirates in the MEA were backed by the law which is an evolution from the days of Blackbeard. But the intentions were the same—fear, power, and plunder at the expense of others.
So if anyone dared wish to see examples of modern piracy, don’t look to the South China Sea or the dangerous waters off of Somalia—just look in Mason, Ohio at the members of the Mason Teacher’s Association and you will see pirates just as vicious and greedy as Blackbeard.
I’m not a particularly huge Harry Potter fan. There are aspects to it that I enjoy—there is too much magic in it for me—too much mystic fantasy. There is a tendency to hope that the world is different from what it is—so fantastic creations bridge that gap intellectually. But there are some wonderful values explored in the Harry Potter books and movies that have provided many of the values today’s young people possess. But the new Diagon Alley exhibit is a living mythos—that is the point of the place—to put visitors into that world in a way that has never yet been possible anywhere on earth. But to what end—for simple entertainment? Human beings require myths to hold themselves together and put their values in line with priorities. Harry Potter was born out of this need, and it has been so successful that Universal Studios built a magnificent shrine to that mythos.
Mythos carries over into every aspect of human life. It goes to the voting booth, it becomes the focus of productive enterprise in business, it creates the values a family uses to bond themselves to one another—or to fly apart. It provides a mechanism for people to recognize evil, or good depending on the vantage point—a mythos can be either destructive or beneficial—but so long as human beings exist, there will be the creation of myths. Once those myths are created, a physical manifestation will be attempted, such as what Universal Studios has done with Diagon Alley. Visitors to those parks will attempt to bring the values of Harry Potter—for good or bad—into their daily life. So to me, watching the mythos of our world is the most important things a culture can do.
My excitement over this current mythos period is in the realization that only a few years ago none of this easy access to so much mythos was available. When I was a child, Disney World was brand new and nothing like it is now, Universal Studios was simply a dream, Dungeon and Dragons was very primitive and movies were limited in what they could create due to budget constraints and film executives functioning from the philosophies of Kant and Plato. Tolkien was the premier fantasy writer inspiring a new generation that would magnify his work hundreds of times over, the culmination being stories like Harry Potter. And video games were clunky. The opportunity to step into a mythos the way young people can now simply did not exist. But now things are changing rapidly—much more rapidly than any conniving bankers in Europe, or politicians in America can even fathom—any thoughts of potential tyranny are being crushed under the weight of a dynamically changing mythos.
That doesn’t mean all is well, there are major problems that will play out in the years to come—the bankruptcy of America, the continued attempts to spread collectivism to every corner of the earth at the expense of the individual—but those are the results of the previous mythos built by the pre and post Renaissance periods, religious ignorance, and minds so stifled with daily obligations that they did not have the liberty to think. My greatest joy of late has come from Fantasy Flight Games in that they create a product that generates not only a positive mythos—culturally, but a lot of thinking. When those types of entertainment options are coupled with the physical reality of something like Diagon Alley there are real opportunities for massive human enjoyment.
As I write this I know of several individuals planning their visit to Diagon Alley. They are reading the Harry Potter novels again at Steak and Shake at 3 AM in the morning and going to work when the sun comes up. They are playing Fantasy Flight’s Game of Thrones card game at Starbucks with their friends and are living in the mythos of those fantasy realms for a large portion of their life—and that is wonderful for the psychological well-being of their many otherwise treacherous disappointments in life. The joy of the mythos created artificially by the human minds behind Harry Potter and The Game of Thrones replaces the many areas where deficiency has otherwise occurred.
It is not good to substitute reality for fantasy—but it is not good to be crushed by too much reality—and often a positive mythos can alleviate the impact of such a disappointing force. With minds full of value, the diabolical schemes concocted by maniacal tyrants losses their ability because of the hope given by a mythos which feeds an individual mind as opposed to a soul looking to be filled by some come-lately leader drunk with power and filled with ill intent. But Universal Studios has performed a modern miracle, they have recreated Diagon Alley the way that only imaginations had previously contemplated, and made it real. The impact of this dramatic shift in mythos will resonate for quite some time in a positive way as the future unfolds itself out away from the small minds who previously wished to contain it. Diagon Alley is proof that such attempts have failed and that the human mind is now relishing in triumph over feats that are only now available for the first time on planet earth. When such things become real—they become a new reality in the realm of mythos.
Minds free to think, and contemplate new ideals create the mythos that will become the foundations of future values—but more importantly, such minds cannot be controlled. So long as a mind can contemplate mythos, a physical body will reject the chains placed upon it—literal or metaphorical. What I see in Diagon Alley is a culture in America who has professed that it values imagination and thinking to such an extent that it wanted to make it into a physical reality—which is a beacon to the world that imagination is alive and well and that tyrants have no place in Central Florida. You can feel it at the Orlando airport—as you travel down the people movers from the grand departure gate where hotel guest look down into the giant room of people traveling from everywhere in the world to see the theme parks of Florida first hand. Of those great theme parks, Universal Studios has recaptured the lead of the most spectacular attractions among them with Diagon Alley. There is nothing like it anywhere—except deep in the mind those who generate mythos upon a blank page to share with the world and incite in them the freedom of thought which is the greatest gift to civilization that there is.
If I could claim to have had a teacher which had a great influence on my life as many contemporaries feel is so pertinent, it would be Joseph Campbell—which I’ve talked about before. Campbell was in the time of his life at the center of many intersecting ideals and he acquired that center through a grand adventure that could only have been found pursuing an extremely individual course through his life. One of those adventures found him to be one of the characters in the John Steinbeck novel Cannery Row as the great American novelist chronicled those years in that literary work. Steinbeck and Campbell were friends until Campbell fell in love with Carol Henning, Steinbeck’s wife. The group lived a pre-hippie existence in California as communism was becoming all the rage in America and all these intense experiences became the subject matter of Steinbeck’s novels. In a speech given by Steinbeck over Radio Free Europe in 1954 to the repressed people of Eastern Europe Steinbeck revealed some of his more mature political ideals refined over the years through his art and experiences. It is an eloquent defense of free expression and the power of the individual that represented the culmination of Steinbeck’s life work which is very pertinent to this very day. Instead speaking to the censorship behind the Iron Curtin, as Steinbeck had in the following speech, in the present day, the same censorship is occurring behind the veil of intelligentsia. The goal is the same—just the method of execution has changed. So before elaborating on the life of Steinbeck, Campbell, and our modern times—read that pertinent speech.
“To my friends,
There was a time when I could visit you and you were free to visit me. My books were in your stores and you were free to write to me on any subject. Now your borders are closed with barbed wire and guarded by armed men and fierce dogs, not to keep me out but to keep you in. And now your minds are also imprisoned. You are told that I am a bad writer but you are not permitted to judge for yourselves. You are told we are bad people but you are forbidden to see and to compare. You are treated like untrustworthy animals, subjected to conditioning as cold and ruthless as though you were rats in a laboratory. You cannot travel, you cannot read freely and you cannot work at the profession of your choice. Your writers are the conditioned servants of a regime. All of this is designed to destroy your ability to think.
I beg you to keep alive the integrity of the individual in his ability to judge and compare and create. May your writers write secretly and hold their writing for the time when this grey anesthetic has passed as pass it must. The free world outside your prison still lives. You will join it again and it will welcome you. Everything around you is cynically designed to destroy you as individuals. You must remember and teach your children that they are precious, not as dull cogs in the wheel of party existence, but as units complete and shining in themselves.”
John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. (February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) was an American author of twenty-seven books, including sixteen novels, six non-fiction books, and five collections of short stories. He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), East of Eden (1952) and the novella Of Mice and Men (1937). Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962 “for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception”.
Steinbeck graduated from Salinas High School in 1919 and went from there to study English Literature at Stanford University in Palo Alto, leaving, without a degree, in 1925. He traveled to New York City where he took odd jobs while trying to write. When he failed to have his work published, he returned to California and worked in 1928 as a tour guide and caretaker[7] at Lake Tahoe, where he met Carol Henning, his first wife.[3][7][8] The two were married in January 1930 in Los Angeles, where, with friends, he attempted to make money manufacturing plaster mannequins.[7]
When their money ran out six months later, Steinbeck and Carol moved back to Pacific Grove, California, to a cottage owned by his father, on the Monterey Peninsula a few blocks from the border of the city of Monterey, California. The elder Steinbecks gave John free housing, paper for his manuscripts, and from 1928, loans that allowed him to write without looking for work. During this period of the Great Depression, Steinbeck bought a small boat, and later claimed that he was able to live on the fish and crab that he gathered from the sea, as well as fresh vegetables from his garden and local farms. When that didn’t work, he was not above getting welfare, or rarely even stealing food from the local produce market.[7] Whatever food they had, they would share with their friends.[7] Carol became the model for Mary Talbot in Steinbeck’s novel Cannery Row.[7]
Many of Steinbeck’s works are on required reading lists in American high schools. In the United Kingdom, Of Mice and Men is one of the key texts used by the examining body AQA for its English LiteratureGCSE. A study by the Center for the Learning and Teaching of Literature in the United States found that Of Mice and Men was one of the ten most frequently read books in public high schools.[28]
At the same time, The Grapes of Wrath has been banned by school boards: in August 1939, Kern CountyBoard of Supervisors banned the book from the county’s publicly funded schools and libraries.[14] It was burned in Salinas on two different occasions.[29][30] In 2003, a school board in Mississippi banned it on the grounds of profanity.[31] According to the American Library Association Steinbeck was one of the ten most frequently banned authors from 1990 to 2004, with Of Mice and Men ranking sixth out of 100 such books in the United States.[32][33]
Joseph John Campbell (March 26, 1904 – October 30, 1987) was an American mythologist, writer and lecturer, best known for his work in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work is vast, covering many aspects of the human experience. His philosophy is often summarized by his phrase: “Follow your bliss.”[1]
Campbell traveled to California for a year (1931–32), continuing his independent studies and becoming close friends with the budding writer John Steinbeck and his wife Carol. On the Monterey Peninsula, Campbell, like Steinbeck, fell under the spell of marine biologistEd Ricketts (the model for “Doc” in Steinbeck’s novel Cannery Row as well as central characters in several other novels).[8] Campbell lived for a while next door to Ricketts, participated in professional and social activities at his neighbor’s, and accompanied him, along with Xenia and Sasha Kashevaroff, on a 1932 journey to Juneau, Alaska on the Grampus.[9] Like Steinbeck, Campbell began writing a novel centered on Ricketts as hero, but, unlike Steinbeck, he did not complete his book.[10]
Bruce Robison writes that “Campbell would refer to those days as a time when everything in his life was taking shape…. Campbell, the great chronicler of the ‘hero’s journey’ in mythology, recognized patterns that paralleled his own thinking in one of Ricketts’s unpublished philosophical essays. Echoes of Carl Jung, Robinson Jeffers and James Joyce can be found in the work of Steinbeck and Ricketts as well as Campbell.”[11]
To this day many of the people who infect the literary world are the same Marxists, socialist and political Democrats/communists who hung around circles like the one Campbell and Steinbeck had experimented with creating the same kind of stunted philosophic exploration witnessed in Eastern Europe during 1954. Nowhere else in the world were these concepts challenging convention than they were in places like the Monterey Peninsula during the time of Campbell and Steinbeck who would both move on to become some of the most prolific American writers of the 20th Century. Both men later in their life would be described as conservatives or libertarians depending on the source even though they were surrounded by the typical coastal communists so prevalent in artistic and scholastic circles. In the battlefield of ideals—both men would reject collectivism ultimately. Steinbeck’s thoughts on the matter were easy to see in his speech to Radio Free Europe. Campbell would ultimately develop the simple line, “Follow your bliss,” which is an extremely individual proclamation. Campbell would bounce back and forth for the rest of his life between the cause of that “bliss”–the origin of what makes a unique life part of some programmed destination—be it a god, or some unforeseen force—but his declaration was one that supported vehemently the value of an individual in pursuit of their own life.
I see the work of John Steinbeck as some of the pinnacle moments of observation and discovery ever recorded in human history–because of the impact they had on culture thereafter. His novel, and thus the performance by James Dean in the movie version of East of Eden are some of the most haunting and realistic portrayals of complex human problems ever seen in print. What is vastly important about all these literary works—those of Steinbeck and of Campbell was their sincere dedication to the lives of the individual as the rest of the creative world plunged down the drain of collectivist thought most adequately reflected in the communist push to take over the Democratic Party. Even though modern times has slid treacherously toward socialism—the kind of America that was a product of uniquely individual thinking can be found specifically in Steinbeck’s writing. Those who hated it—those college professors and critics who declared negativity toward Steinbeck were the same type of people spoken to in Eastern Europe—those who desire to destroy the individual in favor of collective salvation. These were aspects of John Steinbeck that were formed during that critical year of 1931 when he and Joseph Campbell were penniless and far from famous—where they worked out a complicated web of the human struggle between collectivism and individualism even when it threatened to destroy things they held precious—namely women. America’s literary future took a drastic turn for the good in these adventures between those two men which would be one of the few pillars left between the America we hope to preserve and the vile intentions of the European collectivists and their desire to spread the dark ignorance of philosophy that John Steinbeck tried to shine through across Eastern Europe in 1954.
This adventure was told in lurid detail in the great book, A Fire in the Mind. Click the link below to read it for yourself. I like the authors—even if they lean too far to the left for me. They are—following their bliss and captured in time the great work of these two men John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell in their struggle to behold the strength of the individual.
MYTHOLOGY / BIOGRAPHY
“A marvelous account of the life of a man who fell in love with stories and became our greatest teller of timeless myths. A feast for the mind, the imagination, and the heart.”
–Sam Keen, author of Fire in the Belly
“Joseph Campbell was an amazing, abundant, humane man. This book, by incorporating his journals, letters, and a massive offering of his intellectual sources, helps us understand how, in this half-dead world, such a character comes to be.”
–Robert Bly, poet and author of Iron John: A Book About Men
“Joseph Campbell: A Fire in the Mind ignites the soul of the reader with immortal longings. To read it is to swim in a river of old with Joseph Campbell, whose capacity for knowledge was as vast as his passion for living. [It is a] potent telling of the quest of one who brought life to myth and myth to life.”
–Jean Houston, author of The Search for the Beloved
Joseph Campbell forged an approach to the study of myth and legend that made ancient traditions and beliefs immediate, relevant, and universal. His teachings and literary works, including The Masks of God, have shown that beneath the apparent themes of world mythology lie patterns that reveal the ways in which we all may encounter the great mysteries of existence: birth, growth, soul development, and death. Biographers Stephen and Robin Larsen were students and friends of Campbell for more than twenty years. With exclusive access to his personal papers and journals, they weave a rich tapestry of stories and insights that catalogue both his personal and public triumphs.
The authors, STEPHEN LARSEN, Ph.D., is the author of The Shaman’s Doorway and The Mythic Imagination. He is a practicing psychotherapist and Professor Emeritus of Psychology at SUNY (Ulster). Robin Larsen, Ph.D., is an exhibiting artist and art historian. She is editor-in-chief of the tricentennial biography and anthology Emanuel Swedenborg: A Continuing Vision. The Larsens co-direct the Center for Symbolic Studies in New Paltz, New York.
We know better—America was formed as a philosophy not just another country and it was a direct response to many years of human failure. It was a flash in the pan relatively speaking and is now threatening to fade away back into history because of two primary forces always present in the nations of mankind—Attila and the Witch Doctor. Way back in 1961 Ayn Rand put her finger on these two types of characters in her book, For The New Intellectual. It was and continues to be a revolutionary mode of thinking that is the only path forward—which she identified as the forces of the brute Attila in perpetual conflict with the Witch Doctor—the man of spirit always with a gaze to the ever-after. America was a rejection of the Witch Doctor and a protection against the Attila types which allowed for a new kind of person—the “thinker”–to invent and create a new nation.
However, governments always desire to spring back into the mode of Attila—no matter what type of government it is and they use the Witch Doctor types as their crutches for aggressive action. The Witch Doctor type as well use the Attila types for their ascension and left unchecked will revert back into the old European mode of compete rule of Attila and the Witch Doctor over all of humanity. Presently the fault of this reversion is in the government sponsored education institutions specifically the public school system—capped off by the college system. Those education institutions specifically teach the systems of Attila and the Witch Doctor making them completely useless in the modern world. But before explaining why, please review the excerpts from the Ayn Rand classic below explaining firsthand what these two types of terrible characters are.
For the New Intellectual
(By Ayn Rand, the foremost philosopher for Capitalism) “When… an entire society is approaching bankruptcy, there are two courses that those involved can follow: they can evade the reality of their situation and act on a frantic, blind, range-of-the-moment expediency—not daring to look ahead, wishing no one would name the truth, yet desperately hoping that something will save them somehow—or they can identify the situation, check their premises, discover their hidden assets and start rebuilding.
“…America’s intellectual leadership has collapsed… America is a country without a voice or defense—a country sold out and abandoned by her intellectual bodyguards.
“The professional businessman and the professional intellectual came into existence together, as brothers born of the same industrial revolution. Both are the sons of capitalism—and if they perish, they will perish together…”
“…with very rare and brief exceptions, pre-capitalist societies had no place for the creative power of man’s mind, neither in the creation of power nor in the creation of wealth… Such societies were ruled by faith and its practical expression: force…”
“…the man of faith and the man of force… they are the actual leaders of most of mankind’s societies, who rise to power whenever men abandon reason…”
“…Attila, the man who rules by brute force… respects nothing but man’s muscles, and regards a fist, a club or a gun as the only answer to any problem—and the Witch Doctor… escapes into his emotions, into visions of some mystic realm where his wishes enjoy supernatural power unlimited by the absolute of nature.
“…Attila feels no need to understand, to explain nor even to ponder, how men manage to produce things he covets—‘somehow’ is a fully satisfactory answer… His view of the universe does not include the power of production. The power of destruction, of brute force, is to him, metaphysically omnipotent. Attila never thinks of creating, only of taking over.
“The Witch Doctor’s method… is the conquest of those who conquer those who conquer nature… With the Witch Doctor, emotions are tools of cognition, and wishes take precedence over facts. …knowledge of the universe will be granted to him by blind, unfocused stare of his eyes turned inward, contemplating the sensations, the feelings, the urgings, the muggy associational twistings projected by the rudderless mechanism of his undirected consciousness. Whatever his mechanism produces is an absolute not to be questioned; and whenever it clashes with reality, it is reality he ignores… The only validation of his consciousness he can obtain on earth is the belief and the obedience of others, when they accept his ‘truth’ as superior to their own perception of reality. While Attila extorts their obedience by means of a club, the Witch Doctor obtains it by means of a much more powerful weapon: he pre-empts the field of morality.
“…they come to need each other. Attila feels that the Witch Doctor can give him what he lacks: a long-range view, and insurance against the dark unknown of tomorrow or next week or next year, a code of moral values to sanction his actions and disarm his victims. The Witch Doctor feels that Attila can give him the material means of survival, can protect him from physical reality, can spare him the necessity of practical action, can enforce his mystic edicts on any recalcitrant who may choose to challenge his authority. Both of them are incomplete parts of a human being, who seek completion in each other…
“…The power of ideas has no reality for either of them, and neither cares to learn that the proof of their power lies in his own chronic sense of guilt and terror.
“Thus Attila and the Witch Doctor form an alliance and divide their respective domains. Attila rules the realm of men’s physical existence—the Witch Doctor rules the realm of men’s consciousness. Attila herds men into armies—the Witch Doctor sets the armies’ goals. Attila conquers empires—the Witch Doctor writes the laws. Attila loots and plunders—the Witch Doctor exhorts the victims to surpass their selfish concern with material property. Attila slaughters—the Witch Doctor proclaims to the survivors that scourges are a retribution for their sins. Attila rules by fear, by keeping men under a constant threat of destruction—the Witch Doctor rules by means of guilt, by keeping men convinced of their innate depravity, impotence and insignificance.
“Against whom is this alliance formed? Against those men whose existence and character both Attila and the Witch Doctor refuse to admit into their view of the universe; the men who produce. In any age or society, there are men who think and work, who discover how to deal with existence, how to produce the intellectual and material values it requires. These are the men who produce the means of survival for the parasites of all varieties: The Attilas and the Witch Doctors and the human ballast. The ballast consists of those who go through life in a state of unfocused stupor, merely repeating the words and the motions they learned from others. But the men from whom they learn, the men who discover any scrap of knowledge, are the men who deal with reality, with the task of conquering nature, and exercising their rational facility.
“A Producer is any man who works and knows what he is doing. He may function on a fully human, conceptual level of awareness only some part of this time, but, to that extent, he is the Atlas who supports the existence of mankind…” (Excerpts from Ayn Rand’s “For the New Intellectual,” copyright 1961.)
When a public school hosts a pep rally for their football team to beat a cross town rival, what is being taught to the students is the mode of Attila—that conquest, force and might rule under the Friday Night Lights and that the entire community—like the nations of the world—will get behind their school sponsoring the team stepping out onto the battlefield. Students at the school must learn where they fit into the pecking order of society in such a system because the power is on full display. Of course the players of the game are at the top of such food chains with school administrators joining their ranks among the socially powerful—because they decide who plays in the battle and who doesn’t. From there society tiers off downward by order of importance—but within those class rooms when the lights are not on for football games, the way of the Witch Doctor is being taught. This would be the climate terrorism that is so prevalent—the avocation of religious tolerance such as the current insurgency of the Muslim faith. Other aspects of the Witch Doctor are the labor unions themselves who control the teachers in these schools—their position is a combination of force and mysticism. They have no idea where the money comes from or where it goes, they just want it—so they take it by force with strikes, public slander, and sheer intimidation. The byproduct of this activity has been an education system ruled by Attila and the Witch Doctors creating several generations of Americans who only understand those two modes of thinking.
There is a third class—for which I am proud to be a part—those are the thinkers. When the thinkers of the world wonder why so many American citizens are so apathetic toward the current scandals in the White House, or seem paralyzed to act against the bizarre notions of the green movement—it is because the modes of thinking that are committing the crimes are due to Attila and the Witch Doctors who are in control of politics, art and entertainment, and the entire intellectual class as it is currently understood. Because most people are taught to be Attila or the Witch Doctor, they are paralyzed to act on what they see is a crime committed right in front of their face. Intellectually, they have been paralyzed into inaction by their education systems leaving them defenseless to make any judgments against.
Saul Alinsky who taught Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in the methods of eroding away power from those who had it understood this whole Attila and the Witch Doctor mentality and his methods of activism were designed to exploit it—which Obama has done to hide his many crimes. Read below a few excerpts from his “masterpiece” Rules for Radicals which came out ten years after Ayn Rand’s For The New Intellectual to gain an understanding of the way that crimes are committed by radicals but are pardoned by a public respectful of the Attila types who rule over them with force—and are often stuck between the Witch Doctor types who seem to have all the answers. The system that Alinsky is talking about in the following quotes was created by the public education system giving vast numbers of American citizens a complete paralysis in the face of such forces because intellectually they are not equipped to deal with the assault. Modern Americans functioning from respect of Attila have lost the ability to think leaving them vulnerable to Alinsky’s methods of attack—which is destroying the nation presently—and purposely.
Rules for Radicals
by Saul D. Alinsky
“Today’s generation is desperately trying to make some sense out of their lives and out of the world. Most of them are products of the middle class. They have rejected their materialistic backgrounds, the goal of a well-paid job, suburban home, automobile, country club membership, first-class travel, status, security, and everything that meant success to their parents. They have had it. They watched it lead their parents to tranquilizers, alcohol, long-term-endurance marriages, or divorces, high blood pressure, ulcers, frustration and the disillusionment of the “good life,” They have seen the almost unbelievable idiocy of our political leadership – in the past political leaders, ranging from the mayors to governors to the White House, were regarded with respect and almost reverence; today they are viewed with contempt. This negativism now extends to all institutions, from the police and the courts to “the system” itself. We are living in a world of mass media which daily exposes society’s innate hypocrisy, its contradictions and the apparent failure of almost every facet of our social and political life. The young have seen their “activist” participatory democracy turn into its antithesis – nihilistic bombing and murder. The political panaceas of the past, such as the revolutions in Russia and China, have become the same old stuff under a different name. The search for freedom does not seem to have any road or destination. The young are inundated with a barrage of information and facts so overwhelming that the world has come to seem an utter bedlam, which has them spinning in a frenzy, looking for what man has always looked for from the beginning of time, a way of life that has some meaning or sense. A way of life means a certain degree of order where things have some relationship and can be pieced together into a system that at least provides some clues to what life is about. Men have always yearned for and sought direction by setting up religions, inventing political philosophies, creating scientific systems like Newton’s, or formulating ideologies of various kinds. This is what is behind the common cliché, “getting it all together” – despite the realization that all values and factors are relative, fluid, and changing, and that it will be possible to “get it all together” only relatively. The elements will shift and move together just like the changing pattern in a turning kaleidoscope.
For the real radical, doing “his thing” is to do the social thing, for and with people. In a world where everything is so interrelated that one fells helpless to know where or how to grab hold and act, defeat sets in’ for years there have been people who’ve found society too overwhelming and have withdrawn, concentrated on “doing their own thing.” Generally we have put them into mental hospitals and diagnosed them as schizophrenics. If the real radical finds that having long hair sets up psychological barriers to communication and organization, he cuts his hair. If I were organizing in a orthodox Jewish community I would not walk in there eating a ham sandwich, unless I wanted to be rejected so I could have an excuse to cop out. My “thing,” if I want to organize, is solid communication with the people in the community. Lacking communication I am in reality silent; throughout history silence has been regarded as assent – in this case assent to the system.
As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be – it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system.”
Alinsky here has set himself up as the Witch Doctor and Obama and Clinton have come to suckle from his nectar and are presently using it to destroy the world in much the way that the same Witch Doctors destroyed the world after the fall of the Roman Empire and ushered in the Dark Ages. During that period in human history, it was religion that held down the minds of man. Today, it is another religion—this time worship of Mother Earth as the deity of highlight. Society must then fall in behind the Witch Doctor because they are intellectually incapable to reason through the problem because their efforts have been placed into the role of Attila—the conqueror.
The way out of this whole scandal literally and intellectually is to discard Attila and eradicate the Witch Doctor from the language of human activity. It is those two forces which destroy advancement of civilizations and currently brings much misery to the world. And it is specifically those two ways of thinking that are the primary topics taught in modern education no matter where in the world things are taught. And for the human mind—there really isn’t anything worse than learning to be like Attila or the Witch Doctor. Both are ancient evils meant to be surpassed and leave the lives of mankind vulnerable to real threats such as Saul Alinsky who wish to build empires on the backs of human slaves shackled not with literal chains, but intellectual ineptitude.
In this way the education systems of present must be completely dismantled and rebuilt to create thinkers. The focus should be on that brief moment in human history where America invented The New Intellectual and gave birth to a nation that ended slavery, invented new economical means, and freed the minds of mankind wherever the philosophy of America touched. Those who hate America hate it because they wish to be either Attila or the Witch Doctor. Their cries against imperialism are not the rule of Attila which typically belongs to a brute force, but in the ability to stand up against such force—and they don’t like it. This is why so many in the world who wish to rule by either force or religious mystics desire to see American dismantled and destroyed. Because the Attila types in the world wish to rule over mankind and the Witch Doctors wish to rule over Attila. They can only do that if Attila first conquers the world. This is why those who hate America desire the brute force of Islam to have their caliphate—because then Attila will have won leaving the Witch Doctors open to place shackles on the minds of the entire world. All this begins so innocently in the public education institutions sponsored by government desiring not to build minds, but compliant servants to Attila and the Witch Doctor.
Let’s make something clear since Jay Carney brought it up on his last day as the White House spokesman—the Bush administration was not a good 8 years for America. And certainly, Obama has been bad for American just in even worse incompetence. There isn’t a competition between the Republican loser in office and the Democrat—they both were terrible. At the end of Obama’s second term, America will have seen 16 years of terrible presidents and America has suffered terribly for it. America will be well over $18 trillion dollars in debt and will have virtually everything that has been taken for granted–good jobs, a flourishing economy, food, power, and medical help in question as Obama leaves the White House. However, the folly doesn’t start there—Clinton was a terrible president, and Bush the senior wasn’t a cup of tea either. It is then no wonder that America is a shell of its former self as the political leadership has reflected a society on the decline. The people who have elected these losers are of less quality than previous generations and the result has been horrible leadership in the White House that has had a detrimental effect on America’s quality in every category.
Nobody will argue that Dick Cheney was far from the best vice president—just as Joe Biden appears to be a complete buffoon in the same position. Jay Carney’s reference to the poor Bush presidency as a defense of the Obama presidency is like saying that thunder is better than lightning in a rain storm—as they accompany each other in the grand scheme of things. It is best to not have a storm at all if no damage is desired—and in politics, it is best to avoid terrible presidents—so to avoid damage once they leave.
Yet is it clear now why America went to war in Iraq? It was to prevent the spread of terrorism, not because of “oil.” It was to keep wealth and resources out of the hands of diabolical terrorists. Does everybody now understand why there must be a border between Mexico and The United States that is secure—because all the impoverished countries from the south in Central America are flocking to the border hoping for relief from their circumstances? The cause of those circumstances is the socialist and tyrannical policies of their corrupt governments giving America the obligation to protect itself by imposing freedom on those places. When such strength is not present—there is no reason for tyrants to oppress their people with no option but to flee those lands of terror in pursuit of opportunities for freedom.
America never should have to concern itself with the affairs of other countries, but when it is the only good place in the world beholding freedom—and immigrants flood our boarders looking for freedom from oppression, America has a right to defend itself by helping those countries have freedom on their own. But if those countries do not have a philosophy that allows for freedom, then it won’t last, like what has happened in Iraq. It is not enough to give a country a set of laws and turn them loose in pursuit of democracy. If most people in the country are corrupt by bad, collectivist thinking, they will not be able to maintain freedom under any circumstances.
For over twenty years now bad presidents have led America on a chase mimicking these bad global governments instead of standing for what was right in defense of freedom. At least Ronald Reagan as an actor/president understood that America had an obligation to help oppressed people so that freedom would spread around the world instead of tyranny—his presidency was a strong one that left the entire world a better place. There were presidents before Reagan who were also pretty good at defending that basic premise from both political parties—but as for the last twenty years, representation for freedom from the White House to the world has been terrible.
Many of the problems experienced presently in the American nation are due to weak leadership and foreign policy vision. Bush and Obama have very little understanding of economics and abandoned capitalism under their terms. Clinton was simply a socialist who defended his corruption with his legal skills as a diabolical lawyer. Without question, he is likely enjoying these current problems as they fit his open border philosophy where the value of America is diminished in favor of a new global government.
The premise that every time Obama is criticized for being a complete idiot, which he is, a defense for his stupidity is not to point at George W. Bush and say “he did it too.” They were both idiots, and they have both left America worse as a nation than it was when they took over as president. But for context, the Pentagon moved the Aircraft carrier George W. Bush off the coast of Iraq to show the terrorist insurgents that America is nearby. That brought forth the thought that it is now unimaginable that a future aircraft carrier would be named, the “Barack Obama.” Such a carrier would be a laughing-stock, and certainly would not incite fear into the opposition. It is in that reality that the quality of the presidents can best be determined. For as bad as Bush was for the free market, he at least understood how to project strength in the military—even if it was at times overreaching. It is better to reach too far in foreign policy than to not reach at all—like Obama has. Lack of American projection of strength to the world leads every cockroach to come forth as a potential tyrant and ruthless dictator—which is what is happening from Russia to the Middle East. And in the end, that is why Barack Obama will forever be known as the worst president in the history of America, and make the top ten list of worst leaders of all time the world over. Obama will own that designation on his own and no deflection to George W. Bush will cover his ignorance from the responsibility of that title.
It is not enough to simply defeat a dictator or to send military support—or to throw money at countries who are functioning from poor philosophic beliefs and collectively based cultures. When that sense of collectivism carries over into religion these countries become even more dangerous to themselves and others. What all poor countries have in common is collective based economies based on Karl Marx and Keynesian thought, and religions based on sacrifice and worship through collective yielding to higher powers. Those failures of thought are what cause hopeful immigrants to pour into the U.S. border and terrorists to believe they have a right to impose religious law against non-believers through force and terror. The failure of the American presidents of the last 20 years is that they failed to identify this root cause—and have instead let them fester unchecked until presently the world is in disarray. Money cannot be thrown at the problem of poor philosophy, and neither can lip service. People have to think differently. They have to “think” like Americans instead of just running to America hoping to be put on welfare and cared for by the tax payer in The United States for the rest of their lives. They have to adopt new philosophies that allow them to have flourishing economies and religions that don’t require the eradication of those who don’t believe the same things under the premise of social collectivism. If traceability between these two differences in thought could be made it is the difference between Immanuel Kant, and Adam Smith—or the difference between Aristotle and Plato. The root cause of evil is in philosophy, and it is the philosophy of poor nations which leave people looking to escape into The United States, or to flee tyrants on their way into Bagdad that causes the trouble. The only way to really help the people of the world is to change the way those people think—and Obama, Bush, Clinton as well as many other presidents have put American value into reactive defense instead of assertive projection of philosophies born on American soil—which would do far more good than all the tanks, planes and missiles in world history of stopping tyrants in their tracks. Recent American presidents have failed to show pride in that American philosophy born of Adam Smith, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and Ayn Rand—and that is why they are embarrassments in the context of history—all of them.
It was an astonishing revelation when Michelle Obama admitted that she was a bad parent prior to gaining access to the White House and receiving the vast resources available to government workers who become president. She stated:
“Before coming to the White House, I struggled, as a working parent with a traveling, busy husband, to figure out how to feed my kids healthy, and I didn’t get it right,” she explained, sharing a story about her children’s doctor who pulled her aside to talk about her family diet.
“I thought to myself, if a Princeton and Harvard-educated professional woman doesn’t know how to adequately feed her kids, then what are other parents going through who don’t have access to the information I have?”
That explains a lot and sounds like most of the levy supporters in my neighborhood—the kind of people I’ve termed as “latté-sipping prostitutes”—as they lack common sense, are overly dependent on government services, and spend much of their spare time sipping lattes and complaining about their spouses. These are a new breed of people invented by the big government socialist policies born of the Great Depression—and the result is these parents unwise about child rearing and deeply insecure about their roles as parents. Government services have made them lazy and dependent not feeling qualified to even make decisions about what their children should eat—let along much more complex social issues. These are not the days of Leave it to Beaver where the parents were wise and had all the answers a child could possibly need to ask. These are the days of Oprah where parents were taught to ask a professional and surrender their children’s sovereignty to the care of public schools. Michelle Obama represents this new age parent who can’t even answer simple questions without professional assistance in whatever topic is in question.
So it comes as no wonder that Michelle Obama thinks that the rest of America is as dim-witted as she has been, and needs vast government services to support their lives, and robust cabooses. I often term these types of people as latte sipping prostitutes because they tend to be drastically out-of-touch regarding world affairs primarily getting their news, and ultimately their philosophy from day time television. There is nothing against places like Starbuck’s, but often their dinning rooms are filled with these types of people, the kind of people who Michelle Obama is—social climbing neurotic, dependent personalities. When I refer to them as prostitutes it is because often these types of parents put their careers before their children and somehow expect everything to come out wonderfully in their families. Prostitutes often are willing to do anything for money. They most of the time sell various degrees of sexual interaction with male clients, but usually their obligation is not sexually related at all—only on the surface. Men who use the services of prostitutes are often looking for company—someone to spend time with. So the prostitute must be ready to sell her body for sex, or just for company—which isn’t any different from most jobs in most careers where time is sold in exchange for money. The only real difference is that time is sold instead of a physical body.
Michelle Obama complained that she was in a relationship with a man who traveled a lot, and she was an attorney with a Harvard law degree who made a decision to serve others by selling her time instead of giving that time to her children. Thus, it was her conclusion that she needed help feeding her children correctly—because she didn’t have time or knowledge to perform the task. But it was her decisions in life that prevented her from obtaining that knowledge—she chose instead to whore herself out to a legal profession full of radical social advocates—such as Bernadine Dorn from the Weather Underground and similar reformers instead of pouring that same energy into learning what foods are good for her children, or what they should be doing and thinking about. Typical school levy supporters are of the same type—they whore themselves to occupations with the sole intention of making money—and wonder why their children are faulty—lacking parental input. It’s not always the case, but generally you can easily tell children who have a full-time parent in the home and children who are raised through baby sitters, public schools, and empty homes owned by parents too busy with careers to care for them. The parents are doing essentially the same thing that prostitutes are doing—selling their time for money and what gets deprived are the children who need that sold away time.
This is the heart of why Michelle Obama was lost on how to feed her children. She was raised to be a prostitute. Instead of selling her body, she has sold her time to a law firm and legal career. Her mind was not on raising children; it was on the concerns of the Weather Underground as she worked at the same Chicago law firm that the former American terrorist worked at. Before her husband became a big time public looter, she worked the streets sipping lattés at lunch while looking over legal briefs for judges interpreting the law of corrupt politicians whose only productive enterprise was creating more paperwork. And she felt sophisticated, and accomplished as most progressives established value. Michelle Obama by her own admission was so deficient as a parent that she didn’t even know how or what to feed her children without professional input. That was because she was too busy whoring herself to society that she didn’t have anything left for her children—that is why she is a latté sipping prostitute.
When I called the levy supporters in my home district of Lakota schools latté sipping prostitutes, they wanted to assume that the statement was derogatory toward women—again as progressives have defined the value. But it wasn’t meant toward women—but at their neglectful behavior as parents who were too busy raising future attention starved children instead of productive members of society—which becomes my business when they become hapless adults like Michelle Obama—unable to even know how to feed themselves without professional help. They expect to cover up their mistakes with increased tax money to wave a magic wand and “puff” make their children scholars and successful adults—and that wand is waved in public education classrooms. But the results are often as accurate as newspaper horoscopes and just as factually based. They are a destructive species who are pretentious and corrosive to the human race—and it starts in lunch time cafes among cackling, unhappy parents who attempt to justify the guilt they feel in selling their time for money while others do the jobs of raising their children. That is why they are latté sipping prostitutes.
Occasionally, these whores strike it rich. They marry someone who could sell the pants off a priest, lying their way from one social circle to another until they are in the White House. When they arrive at such a place, they are still unequipped to be parents, because their background as whores has not prepared them for such things—but they can now command vast resources supplied by the tax payers to attempt to cover their deficiencies. In this way, Michelle Obama is no different from a typical school levy supporter. But the fault is not common to everyone, only to people like the Obama family—who have sold themselves for years to everyone in trade for power, money, and political power. Yet, that power can’t even help them feed their children on their own—they still have to hire help to cover their ignorance. And that is the fault and fate of every latté sipping prostitute in existence—which means that their children will tragically suffer under their care.
The other intent of this blog, which again was addressed from the very beginning, was that it promised to take readers down the “rabbit hole” of knowledge so to unlock the reasons for many of the events occurring in the world. Of course the reference is to the novel Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll brought to immortal life by the Walt Disney film of the same name. I knew that those reading here would find themselves at some point in a world they never knew existed, but perilously aware that the mechanisms emitting from deep down the Rabbit Hole would explain the type of insanity seen in the nightly news. Such a tragedy is similar to a child watching a puppet show and believing that what they see on stage is real, only to discover as their eyes become more sophisticated that there are strings on the marionettes which extend off stage somewhere. So the inquiring mind gets out of their seat and climbs onto the stage to follow the strings up above the stage where it is discovered that the real manipulators of movement reside. In this way, the “rabbit hole” is anything and everything which helps support the puppet show away from the stage. The stage where the puppets act is the reality witnessed, but anything away from the stage would be considered Rabbit Hole material.
But the rabbit hole of our real life can be much more tragic than a child realizing that the puppets in a show are not real, and are manipulated by talented actors off stage. The realization that from deep down the Rabbit Hole of existence are the mechanisms which affect our daily life from news stories like the ISIS invading Iraq to the countless scandals involving President Obama, the IRS claiming to have lost two years of emails, or the real intentions of the legalization of drugs in America. On this site I also deal with the origin of the human race pointing to religion often as simply a puppet show to mask that true reality—but there is danger in going down such Rabbit Holes. I often give hints to games I endorse, or literary achievements which can help preserve the mind not from the fantasy of escapism, but the linking of a mind back to the accepted reality of the true dream world. Sports are a good mutual bonding agent between life in the Rabbit Hole and the world the rest of the society lives in. I often reference these types of things to keep sanity a close ally when the images of the Rabbit Hole threaten to shatter consciousness. For some people, it is too much to know what is really happening off the stages of life and they do fall into insanity. My goal with this blog is to show people what happens in the Rabbit Hole without destroying the minds of the inquiring minds who want to know more. So not only do I help lead people down the Rabbit Hole, I also provide mechanisms for dealing with the crisis of learning the truth once there.
To me the Rabbit Hole is a way of understanding the world of quantum mechanics and the world of macro and nano technology which is evolving at a rapid rate. From this realm it might be denoted that a ultraterrestrial species lives in conjunction with the human race and injects its influence upon us—and certainly stirs the pot so to speak. So dealing with this species is a conflict which goes well beyond the world of commerce, politics, or acknowledged philosophy—and can really only be discovered through advanced mathematics. Ironically, the author of Alice in Wonderland was a mathematician, and seemed over a century ago—well before anyone at the time had an inclination—whether through tragedy, sexual crises, or just a mind folding over on itself with the realization that all was not what it seemed and lacking a philosophy to deal with it—Lewis Carroll wrote a novel from inside the Rabbit Hole. So for those who thought they understood Alice in Wonderland as a beloved children’s story and classic Disney animated cartoon with images inescapable at Disney World, it is time to reveal what many of the metaphors mean. To make that the easiest transition as possible, I have shown the Cliff Notes below, along with video explaining the meanings of the classic novel. A link to the Cliff Notes origin article is provided below after a rather robust gathering of explanations on Alice in Wonderland and the life of Lewis Carroll are provided.
The novel is composed of twelve brief chapters; it can be read in an afternoon. Each of the brief chapters, furthermore, is divided into small, individual, almost isolated episodes. And the story begins with Alice and her sister sitting on the bank of a river reading a book which has no pictures or dialogue in it. ” . . . and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?” Thus, we find many pictures and read much dialogue (although very little of it makes sense) in this novel.
After introducing us to one of the creatures in Wonderland, the Gryphon, for instance, the narrator tells us, “If you don’t know what a Gryphon is, look at the picture.” As noted earlier, Wonderland is filled with strange animals, and Alice’s encounters with these creatures, all of whom engage her in conversations, confuse her even more whenever she meets yet another inhabitant of this strange country.
Slowly losing interest in her sister’s book, Alice catches sight of a white rabbit. However, he is not merely a rabbit; he will be the “White Rabbit,” a major character in the novel. In this first paragraph, then, we learn about the protagonist, Alice, her age, her temperament, and the setting and the mood of the story. In a dream, Alice has escaped from the dull and boring and prosaic world of adulthood — a world of dull prose and pictureless experiences; she has entered what seems to be a confusing, but perpetual springtime of physical, if often terrifying, immediacy.
The White Rabbit wears a waistcoat, walks upright, speaks English, and is worrying over the time on his pocket watch. Alice follows him simply because she is very curious about him. And very soon she finds herself falling down a deep tunnel. For a few minutes, she is frightened; the experience of falling disorients her. Soon, however, she realizes that she is not falling fast; instead, she is falling in a slow, almost floating descent. As she falls, she notices that the tunnel walls are lined with cupboards, bookshelves, maps, and paintings. She takes a jar of orange marmalade off a shelf. But finding the jar empty, she replaces it on a lower shelf, as though she were trying to maintain a sense of some propriety — especially in this situation of absolute uncertainty. As she reflects on the marmalade jar, she says that had she dropped the jar, she might have killed someone below. Alice is clearly a self-reflective young girl — and she’s also relatively calm; her thinking reveals a curiously mature mind at times. But like an ordinary little girl, she feels homesick for her cat, Dinah. In that respect, she is in sharp contrast with conventional child heroines of the time. Although Alice may be curious and sometimes bewildered, she is never too nice or too naughty. But she is always aware of her class-status as a “lady.” At one point, she even fears that some of Wonderland’s creatures have confused her for a servant, as when the White Rabbit thinks that she is his housekeeper, Mary Ann, and orders Alice to fetch his gloves and fan.
Thus, in Chapter I, Carroll prepares us for Alice’s first major confrontation with absolute chaos. And note that Alice’s literal-minded reaction to the impossible is always considered absurd here in Wonderland; it is laughable, yet it is her only way of coping. As she falls through the rabbit-hole, for instance, she wonders what latitude or longitude she has arrived at. This is humorous and ridiculous because such measurements — if one stops to think about it — are meaningless words to a seven-year-old girl, and they are certainly meaningless measurements of anything underground.
In Chapter II, Alice finds herself still in the long passageway, and the White Rabbit appears and goes off into a long, low hall full of locked doors. Behind one very small door, Alice remembers that there is “the loveliest garden you ever saw” (remember, she saw this in Chapter I), but now she has drunk a liquid that has made her too large to squeeze even her head through the doorway of the garden. She wishes that she could fold herself up like a telescope and enter. This wish becomes possible when she finds a shrinking potion and a key to the door. The potion reduces her to ten inches high, but she forgets to take the key with her (!) before shrinking, and now the table is too high for her to reach the key. To any young child, this is silly and something to be laughed at, but on another level, there’s an element of fear; for children, the predictable proportions of things are important matters of survival. Yet here in Wonderland, things change — for no known reason — thus, logic has lost all its validity.
Then Alice eats a cake that she finds, and her neck shoots up until it resembles a giraffe’s. Suddenly, she is a distorted nine feet tall! Clearly, her ability to change size has been a mixed blessing. In despair, she asks, “Who in the world am I?” This is a key question.
Meanwhile, the rapid, haphazard nature of Alice’s physical and emotional changes has created a dangerous pool of tears that almost causes her to drown when she shrinks again. Why has she shrunk? She realizes that she has been holding the White Rabbit’s lost white gloves and fan — therefore, it must be the magic of the fan that is causing her to shrink to almost nothingness. She saves herself by instantly dropping the fan. But now she is desperate; in vain, she searches her mind for something to make sense out of all this illogical chaos, something like arithmetic and geography, subjects that are solid, lasting, and rational. But even they seem to be confused because no matter how much she recites their rules, nothing helps. At the close of this chapter, she is swimming desperately in a pool of her own tears, alongside a mouse and other chattering creatures that have suddenly, somehow, appeared.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is full of parody and satire. And in Chapter III, Victorian history is Carroll’s target. The mouse offers to dry the other creatures and Alice by telling them a very dry history of England. Then, Carroll attacks politics: the Dodo organizes a Caucus-race, a special race in which every participant wins a prize. Alice then learns the mouse’s sad tale as Carroll’s editor narrates it on the page in the shape of a mouse’s very narrow, S-shaped tail. The assembled, unearthly creatures cannot accept ordinary language, and so Alice experiences, again, absolute bafflement; this is linguistic and semantic disaster. Indeed, much of the humor of this chapter is based on Alice’s reactions to the collapse of three above-ground assumptions: predictable growth, an absolute distinction between animals and humans, and an identity that remains constant. We might also add to the concept of a constancy of identity a conformity of word usage. But in Wonderland, Alice’s previous identity and the very concept of a permanent identity has repeatedly been destroyed, just as the principles of above-ground are contradicted everywhere; here in Wonderland, such things as space, size, and even arithmetic are shown to have no consistent laws.
In Chapter IV, the confusion of identity continues. The White Rabbit insists that Alice fetch him his gloves and his fan. Somehow, he thinks that Alice is his servant, and Alice, instead of objecting to his confusion, passively accepts her new role, just as she would obey an adult ordering her about above-ground. On this day when everything has gone wrong, she feels absolutely defeated.
In the rabbit’s house, Alice finds and drinks another growth potion. This time, however, she becomes so enormous that she fills up the room so entirely that she can’t get out. These continuing changes in size illustrate her confused, rapid identity crisis and her continuous perplexity. After repulsing the rabbit’s manservant, young Bill, a Lizard (who is trying to evict her), Alice notices that pebbles that are being thrown at her through a window are turning into cakes. Upon eating one of them, she shrinks until she is small enough to escape the rabbit’s house and hide in a thick wood.
In Chapter V, “Advice From a Caterpillar,” Alice meets a rude Caterpillar; pompously and dogmatically, he states that she must keep her temper — which is even more confusing to her for she is a little irritable because she simply cannot make any sense in this world of Wonderland. Alice then becomes more polite, but the Caterpillar only sharpens his already very short, brusque replies. In Wonderland, there are obviously no conventional rules of etiquette. Thus, Alice’s attempt at politeness and the observance of social niceties are still frustrated attempts of hers to react as well as she can to very unconventional behavior—at least, it’s certainly unconventional according to the rules that she learned above-ground.
Later, Alice suffers another bout of “giraffe’s neck” from nibbling one side of the mushroom that the Caterpillar was sitting on. The effect of this spurt upward causes her to be mistaken for an egg-eating serpent by an angry, vicious pigeon.
In Chapters VI and VII, Alice meets the foul-tempered Duchess, a baby that slowly changes into a pig, the famous, grinning Cheshire-Cat, the March Hare, the Mad Hatter, and the very, very sleepy Dormouse. The latter three are literally trapped (although they don’t know it) in a time-warp — trapped in a perpetualtime when tea is being forever served. Life is one long tea-party, and this episode is Carroll’s assault on the notion of time. At the tea-party, it is always teatime; the Mad Hatter’s watch tells the day of the year, but not the time since it is always six o’clock. At this point, it is important that you notice a key aspect of Wonderland; here, all these creatures treat Alice (and her reactions) as though she is insane — and as though they are sane! In addition, when they are not condescending to her or severely criticizing her, the creatures continually contradict her. And Alice passively presumes the fault to be hers — in almost every case — because all of the creatures act as though their madness is normal and not at all unusual. It is the logical Alice who is the queer one. The chapter ends with Alice at last entering the garden by eating more of the mushroom that the Caterpillar was sitting on. Alice is now about a foot tall.
Chapters VIII to X introduce Alice to the most grimly evil and most irrational people (and actions) in the novel. Alice meets the sovereigns of Wonderland, who display a perversely hilarious rudeness not matched by anyone except possibly by the old screaming Duchess. The garden is inhabited by playing cards (with arms and legs and heads),who are ruled over by the barbarous Queen of Hearts. The Queen’s constant refrain and response to seemingly all situations is: “Off with their heads!” This beautiful garden, Alice discovers, is the Queen’s private croquet ground, and the Queen matter-of-factly orders Alice to play croquet. Alice’s confusion now turns to fear. Then she meets the ugly Duchess again, as well as the White Rabbit, the Cheshire-Cat, and a Gryphon introduces her to a Mock Turtle, who sings her a sad tale of his mock (empty) education; then the Mock Turtle teaches her and the Gryphon a dance called the ‘Lobster-Quadrille.” Chapters XI and XII concern the trial of the Knave of Hearts. Here, Alice plays a heroic role at the trial, and she emerges from Wonderland and awakens to reality. The last two chapters represent the overthrow of Wonderland and Alice’s triumphant rebellion against the mayhem and madness that she experienced while she was lost, for a while, in the strange world of Wonderland.
This story is characterized, first of all, by Alice’s unthinking, irrational, and heedless jumping down the rabbit-hole, an act which is at once superhuman and beyond human experience — but Alice does it. And once we accept this premise, we are ready for the rest of the absurdities of Wonderland and Alice’s attempts to understand it and, finally, to escape from it. Confusion begins almost immediately because Alice tries to use her world of knowledge from the adult world above-ground in order to understand this new world. Wonderland, however, is a lawless world of deepest, bizarre dream unconsciousness, and Alice’s journey through it is a metaphorical search for experience. What she discovers in her dream, though, is a more meaningful and terrifying world than most conscious acts of intelligence would ever lead her to. Hence, “Who in the world am I?” is Alice’s constant, confused refrain, one which people “above-ground” ask themselves many, many times throughout their lifetimes.
Throughout the story, Alice is confronted with the problem of shifting identity, as well as being confronted with the anarchy and by the cruelty of Wonderland. When Alice physically shrinks in size, she is never really small enough to hide from the disagreeable creatures that she meets; yet when she grows to adult or to even larger size, she is still not large enough to command authority. “There are things in Alice,” writes critic William Empson, “that would give Freud the creeps.” Often we find poor Alice (and she is often described as being either “poor” or “curious”) in tears over something that the adult reader finds comic. And “poor Alice” is on the verge of tears most of the time. When she rarely prepares to laugh, she is usually checked by the morbid, humorless types of creatures whom she encounters in Wonderland. Not even the smiling Cheshire-Cat is kind to her. Such a hostile breakdown of the ordinary world is never funny to the child, however comic it might appear to adults. But then Wonderland would not be so amusing to us except in terms of its sheer, unabated madness.
One of the central concerns of Alice is the subject of growing up — the anxieties and the mysteries of personal identity as one matures. When Alice finds her neck elongated, everything, in her words, becomes “queer”; again, she is uncertain who she is. As is the case with most children, Alice’s identity depends upon her control of her body. Until now, Alice’s life has been very structured; now her life shifts; it becomes fragmented until it ends with a nightmarish awakening. Throughout the novel, Alice is filled with unconscious feelings of morbidity, physical disgrace, unfairness, and bizarre feelings about bodily functions. Everywhere there is the absurd, unexplainable notion of death and the absolute meaninglessness of death and life.
Alice’s final triumph occurs when she outgrows nonsense. In response to the Queen’s cry at the Knave’s trial: “sentence first — verdict afterward,” Alice responds: “Stuff and nonsense! Who cares for you? You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” At last, Alice takes control of her life and her growth toward maturity by shattering and scattering the absurdity of the playing cards and the silly little creatures who are less rational than she is. In waking from her nightmare, she realizes that reason can oppose nonsense, and that it can — and did — win. And now that the dream of chaos is over, she can say, from her distance above-ground, “It was a curious dream,” but then she skips off thinking that — for a strange moment — what a wonderful dream it was.
Of all Lewis Carroll’s major works, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has a unique standing in the category of whimsical, nonsense literature. Much has been written about how this novel contrasts with the vast amount of strict, extremely moralistic children’s literature. This is true; Alice is quite different from all other Victorian children’s literature. Yet, as odd as this story appears in relation to the other Victorian children’s stories, this short novel is odder still because it was written by an extremely upright, ultra-conservative man — in short, a quintessential Victorian gentleman.
Lewis Carroll was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson on January 27, 1832, in the parsonage of Daresbury, Cheshire, England, the third child and eldest son of eleven children of Reverend Charles Dodgson and his wife, Francis Jane Lutwidge. The parents were descended from two ancient and distinguished North Country families. From the Dodgsons, the son inherited a very old tradition of service to the Church and a tradition that he belonged to one of the most respected lineages in England — for example, family legend has it that King James I actually “knighted” either a loin of beef or mutton at the table of Sir Richard Houghton, one of Carroll’s ancestors. This incident has been thought by some critics to have inspired the introductory lines in Through the Looking Glass, the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, when the Red Queen introduces the leg of mutton to Alice: “Alice — Mutton: Mutton — Alice.”
For the sake of those who are curious about pen names and how authors choose one over another, “Lewis Carroll” is an interesting example. While teaching at Christ Church, Oxford, Charles Dodgson (Carroll) wrote comic literature and parodies for a humorous paper, The Train. The first of the several pieces submitted to The Train was signed “B. B.” It was so popular that the editor asked Dodgson to use a proper nom de plume; at first, Dodgson proposed “Dares,” after his birthplace, Daresbury. The editor thought that the name was too journalistic, so after struggling over a number of choices, Dodgson wrote to his editor and suggested a number of variations and anagrams, based on the letters of his actual name. “Lewis Carroll” was finally decided on, derived from a rearrangement of most of the letters in the name “Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.” Clearly, Carroll was fascinated with anagrams, and he will use them throughout Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; his interest in anagrams also explains much about the writings in his later life, and his mathematical works. Concerning Carroll, one cannot safely exclude any influence, least of all hereditary ones, but a good case can be made for the formative effect of Carroll’s father on him. Those who knew Reverend Dodgson said that he was a pious and gloomy man, almost devoid of any sense of humor. Yet from his letters to his son, there is recorded evidence of a remarkablesense of fun. For example, in one letter to his son, he speaks of screaming in the middle of a street:
Iron-mongers-Iron-mongers — Six hundred men will rush out of their shops in a moment — fly, fly, in all screwdriver, & a ring, & if they are not brought directly, in forty seconds I will leave nothing but one small cat alive in the whole town of Leeds, & I shall only leave that because I shall not have time to kill it.
To a boy of eight, such correspondence from his father must have greatly heightened his later love for literary exaggeration; indeed, such fanciful letters may have been the genesis for Carroll’s so-called nonsense books.
As we noted, Reverend Dodgson was said to be an austere, puritanical, and authoritarian Victorian man; Lewis Carroll’s mother, however, was the essence of the Victorian “gentlewoman.” As described by her son, she was “one of the sweetest and gentlest women that had ever lived, whom to know was to love.” The childhood of Lewis Carroll was relatively pleasant, full of ideas and hobbies that contributed to his future creative works. His life at Daresbury was secluded, though, and his playmates were mostly his brothers and sisters. Class distinctions did not permit much socializing between children of the parsonage and the “lesser” parish children. Curiously, a number of the Dodgson children, including Carroll, stammered severely. More than one author has suggested that, at least in Carroll’s case, his stammer may have arisen from his parents’ attempts to correct his left-handedness. Isa Bowman, a childhood friend of Carroll’s, has said that whenever adults approached them on their walks, Carroll’s speech became extremely difficult to understand. Apparently, he panicked; his shyness and stammering always seemed worse when he was in the world of adults. This stammering made him into a bit of a “loner” and explains, somewhat, Carroll’s longtime fascination with puzzles and anagrams, solitary games to amuse himself. It was as though the long suppressed, left-handed self endured in the fanciful, literary adult Carroll — in contrast to the very stern adult librarian, mathematics lecturer, deacon, dormitory master, and curator of the dining hall. Carroll was, seemingly, the archetype of the left-handed man in a right-handed world, like his own White Knight in Through the Looking Glass (the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland).
And now if ever by chance I put My fingers into glue Or madly squeeze a right-hand foot Into a left-hand shoe . . .
Carroll’s fondness for games, language puzzles, and the world of the bizarre is further demonstrated in his flair for amusing his brothers and sisters — especially his sisters, which explains, perhaps, his lifelong attraction for little girls. In fact, a great deal of Carroll’s childhood was spent taking care of his little sisters. At home, it was he who was in charge of these seven sisters, and his imagination was constantly being exercised in order to entertain them. In one of his fanciful story games that he invented, he imagined a sort of “railway game,” and as one of the rules of the game, at least three trains had to run over the passengers in order for the passengers to be attended to by physicians. Fortunately, though, rarely were Carroll’s amusements cruel, and when the family moved to the Croft Rectory, Yorkshire, where Carroll’s father assumed the Archdeaconry, Carroll wrote, directed, and performed light, gay plays, and he also manipulated puppets and marionettes for his family and friends.
In addition to the plays that Carroll wrote and the scripts that he composed for his puppet theater, he also wrote poems, stories, and humorous sketches for his own “magazines.” In his “Useful and Instructive Poetry” magazine, for example, a volume that was composed for a younger brother and a sister, he satirized a copybook of stern, dogmatic maxims (a typical Victorian children’s book), and in this poem, he alluded to his own handicap:
Learn well your grammar And never stammer.
Eat bread with butter; Once more, don’t stutter.
Other poems in the volume focus on the theme of fairy tales, an interest which played a large part in the creation of Alice. An early poem of Carroll’s, for instance, “My Fairy,” suggests the contrariness of the creatures that Alice will meet in Wonderland:
I have a fairy by my side Which cried; it said, “You must not weep. “If, full of mirth, I smile and grin, It says, “You must not laugh.” When once I wished to drink some gin, It said, “You must not quaff.”
Similarly, in another early poem, “A Tale of a Tail,” there is a drawing of a dog’s very long tail, suggestive of the very slender, increasingly smaller mouse’s tail in Alice, which coils across a single page in a sort of S-shape. Also, an early poem about someone falling off a wall anticipates Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass, and a “Morals” essay reminds one of the ridiculous conversations between the ugly Duchess and the evil Queen in Alice. It is difficult to ignore the writings of Carroll as a child in any analysis of his works, for in his childhood productions, we find conclusive evidence of early imitations, hints, allusions, suggestions, and actual elements of imaginary creatures, dreams, and visions that will appear in his later works.
Education
All his life, Carroll was a scholar; when he was not a student, he was a teacher, and until two years before his death, he was firmly imbedded in the life of Oxford University. Quite honestly, though, nothing very exciting ever happened in Carroll’s life, apart from a trip to the Continent, including Russia. His vacations were all local ones, to his sister’s home in Guildford, his aunt’s home in Hastings, and to Eastbourne, the Lake Country, and Wales. He did not begin his formal schooling until the age of twelve, when he enrolled in Richmond Grammar School, ten miles from the Croft Rectory, but he had already received a thorough background in literature from the family library. Yet it was mathematics — and not English literature — that interested Carroll most. When he was very young, for example, Carroll implored his father to explain logarithms to him, presumably because he had already mastered arithmetic, algebra, and even most of Euclidian geometry.
Carroll entered Rugby in 1846, but the sensitive young child found the all-boys environment highly unpleasant; the bullying abuse, the flogging, and the caning was a daily part of school life. Nonetheless, Carroll was, despite his three years of unhappiness there, an exceedingly studious boy, and he won many prizes for academic excellence.
Carroll matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1851, and remained there for forty-seven years. But, two days after entering Oxford, he received word of his mother’s death, something which deeply distressed him and seemed to have worsened his stammering. By all accounts, Carroll was not an outgoing student; with little money, and because of his stammer, his circle of friends always remained small. Yet in his academic work, he applied himself with the same energy and devotion that characterized his career at Rugby. He won scholarship prizes, honors in Classical exams, and also won a First Prize in Mathematics. His scholastic efforts were rewarded by a lifetime fellowship and a residency at Christ Church, so long as he remained unmarried and proceeded to take Holy Orders.
In 1854, the year Carroll took his B.A. degree, he began publishing poetry in the student magazines and in The Whitby Gazette. Carroll’s writings had already established him as both a superb raconteur and humorist at Oxford, and in 1854, he began to seriously teach himself how to express his thoughts in proper literary form; it was at that time that his writings began to show some of the whimsy and fantasy that are contained in the Alice books.
In 1857, Carroll took his M.A. degree and was made “Master of the House.” During those years, he immersed himself in literature, mathematics, and also in the London theater. He produced freelance humorous prose pieces and verses for various periodicals, explored theories of dual identities, wrote satires, published mathematical and symbolic logic texts, invented word games and puzzles, and took up photography, a hobby that would make him famous as one of the best Victorian photographers. In short, Carroll became a sort of lesser English equivalent of Leonardo da Vinci. He invented the Nyctograph, a device for writing in the dark, and he also invented a method of remote control self-photography. Helmut Gernshein, the author of Lewis Carroll: Photographer, calls Carroll’s photographic achievements “astonishing”; in his estimation, Carroll “must not only rank as a pioneer of British amateur photography, but I would also unhesitatingly acclaim him as the most outstanding photographer of children in the nineteenth century.”
Carroll’s Interest in Little Girls
In every study of Carroll’s life, one finds that Carroll had only the most formal encounters with mature women. There was seemingly no romantic interest in adult women. Some biographers have attributed this asexual interest to Carroll’s stammering and his self-conscious shyness about it. On the other hand, Carroll’s diaries and contemporary accounts about him are full of his encounters with children, nearly always with little girls. He obviously delighted in the company of little girls twelve years old and younger, and his diary records in great detail the aesthetic pleasure that he took in viewing “nice little children.” Carroll’s attractions for little girls were honorable and above reproach — at least we have, almost a century later, absolutely no evidence to the contrary.
Carroll’s interest in discovering new little girls for his photographic studio seems to have amounted to his discovering hundreds, perhaps thousands, of girls in his lifetime. And in nearly every recorded case, Carroll produced a masterpiece of character study. His photographs are filled with unusually sensitive and candid “personalities” of the subjects. They caught the essence of human beings; they were not merely stiff, embalmed-like “objects.” Occasionally, there is an extraordinary sense of straightforward eroticism — but it is straightforward; it is not murky or perverted. And in nearly every recorded case, Carroll had the full approbation of the child’s parents, and invariably his work was chaperoned, at least indirectly. Had there been any intimacies between Carroll and his young female subjects, it would long ago have been ferreted out by the multitude of Freudian-oriented literary critics.
Today, we can understand why, occasionally, certain people thought Carroll’s photographs to be erotic. Most people now, however, wouldn’t consider them to be. His photographs are alluring; they look as if they almost could speak. They all have a provocative quality about them. But, they are “safe,” and as we view them, they help us to understand Carroll’s interest in seeing children as his own personal, private, peculiar escape from mature sex.
Alice Liddell
In 1846, Carroll met Alice Liddell, the four-year-old daughter of Dean Henry George Liddell of Christ Church. Carroll had already established himself as a close friend of Alice’s elder sister and cousin. But it is Alice who figures most prominently in Carroll’s most famous creation, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
On July 4, 1852, Carroll and a friend, Rev. Robinson Duckworth, took the Liddell children, Lorina (13), Alice (10), and Edith (8) on a boat ride (a row boat) up the Isis River (the local name for the Thames River). As they made their way upstream, Carroll began telling a story about the underground adventures of a little girl named Alice. According to Duckworth, the story “was actually composed and spoken over my shoulder for the benefit of Alice Liddell, who was acting as ‘cox’ of our gig. I remember turning around and saying, ‘Dodgson, is this an extempore romance of yours?’ And he replied, ‘Yes, I’m inventing as we go along.'”
Upon disembarking, Alice asked Carroll to write out Alice’s adventures for her, and Carroll promised to do so by the following Christmas, but the work was not completed until February 10, 1863. By that time, Alice was eleven, and Carroll was no longer seeing her with the regularity that he used to. Now he had made a new friend, the famous ingénue Ellen Terry, who was nearly seventeen. His interest in Ellen Terry is the closest relationship that Carroll had with an adult woman, apart from his family, of course.
From an initial length of 18,000 words, Carroll’s manuscript expanded to 35,000 words, and the famous English illustrator John Tenniel read it and consented to draw illustrations for it. As Carroll searched for a publisher, he gave anxious thoughts to a perfect title. Various ones came to him: Alice’s Golden Hour, Alice’s Hour in Elf-land, Alice Among the Elves, Alice’s Doings in Elf-land, and Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. Finally, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was chosen, and Macmillan, the publishers for Oxford University, agreed to publish the book on a commission basis.
Alice was an immediate critical success when it appeared in 1865. The Reader magazine called it “a glorious artistic treasure . . . a book to put on one’s shelf as an antidote to a fit of the blues.” The Pall Mall Gazette wrote that “this delightful little book is a children’s feast and a triumph of nonsense.” About 180,000 copies of Alice in various editions were sold in England during Carroll’s lifetime; by 1911, there were almost 700,000 copies in print. Since then, with the expiration of the original copyright in 1907, the book has been translated into every major language, and now it has become a perennial bestseller, ranking with the works of Shakespeare and the Bible in popular demand. In the words of the critic Derek Hudson: “The most remarkable thing about Alice is that, though it springs from the very heart of the Victorian period, it is timeless in its appeal. This is a characteristic that it shares with other classics — a small band — that have similarly conquered the world.”
I consider Alice in Wonderland to be a real treasure of literature—and relevant in a metaphorical way to Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce, which is a favorite of mine—just for the puzzles and allusion to another dream-like existence. Finnegan’s Wake is far more complicated than Alice in Wonderland nearly to the point of being completely useless to the average person. Disney saved Alice in Wonderland by making it relevant as a cartoon—which would have been the only way to preserve such a story as the age of media has cheapened the mind of man by providing information so easily that few wish to think deeply about things any longer—being less prone to exploring the Rabbit Holes of existence—rather than the other way around. The question of the day—philosophically, which reality is the dream in our lives and which is the true reality—and this is my primary concern with this blog.
Most people accept that the words they hear coming from President Obama at a press conference, or a school board announcement for more tax money, or the tragedies on the nightly news reflect the reality of the living world—but I contend that it is far from the case. What we see are only marionettes to a stage play without a title anybody understands, and to learn the plot, title, and actual cast members you have to follow the strings down the Rabbit Hole to where reality actually exists. In this way most of society is already Alice—they are in the land of the Mad Hatter, the Queen of Hearts, or the Cheshire-Cat and the way to understand the bizarre behavior of Wonderland—the stage play we are all witnessing in “reality,” is to go down the Rabbit Hole to where quantum mechanics will reveal who holds the strings and ultimately the fate of mankind hidden behind the deceptions of reality.
But beware while traveling down that hole—it is a superhuman journey that requires courage, and a sane mind. While it may seem easy to get up out of your chair while watching a puppet show and gaze up at the puppeteers above the stage with their hands on the strings of the stage actors—it is not. It is one thing to notice that the strings extend beyond the reality of a stage play—it is another to confront those puppeteers on their terms and deal with them directly. For that—it will require every bit of cleverness, and intellectual aptitude that can be gathered—and for that—I have prepared a road map to guide the weary traveler inclined through the curiosity of Alice, to jump down the Rabbit Hole to the truth and to meet the horrors found there squarely, and with valor.
When traveling down this Rabbit Hole, be sure to stay sane, stay grounded, and maintain a relationship to those still stuck in the dream so not to get lost along the way—otherwise—you will never be able to help them down the Rabbit Hole when they are ready to travel. Because it’s only a matter of time before they will. Talk to them about sports, movies, books and other nonsensical trivia because all those things are part of the dream. And most of all beware of ultraterrestrials, they are devious creatures who are more a part of your life than you might wish to acknowledge. To learn more about them, read the Mothman Prophesies by John Keel. The strings of the puppet show extend into their hands—and they are not friends—but rival foes in a fight for the same resources in the long drama known as the human race. Ultraterrestrials have formed religions to serve their needs in a plot they wish to sell to their four-dimensional rivals—us—and they are withholding much of the truth to serve their own ends.
I have a long history of dealing with people who believe that they are the smartest people in the room—people who work very hard to be masters of a specific field of endeavor—no matter what it is. I have dealt with some of the worst people imaginable—from actual killers of men hired for the task so to suppress competition—and those who just believe that they are smarter than everyone else hiding their true intentions behind a veil of confident mastery over specific fields of endeavor. However, I have always had since the age of a very small child the unique ability to see through any level of bullshit into the soul of the perpetrator and know exactly what they are up to and why. Some might call it a gift from God—my unique skill which sets me aside from virtually everyone. Some people can run fast, some can calculate complicated mathematics without a calculator, some can read pages and pages of legal documentation and actually retain the knowledge—etc, but almost nobody who I’ve ever met had the ability to see into, and through people the way I do. Some might think it a curse—but I wouldn’t trade that ability for all the gold in the world and a life of ease and immortality on a paradise island with only pleasure in the forecast—I enjoy my ability that much.
So I started this blog as a way to address the crimes that I was seeing and challenge the premise that those same crimes were committed under—specifically by a class of people who sincerely believed they could get away with harming intellectually others while hiding their maliciousness behind a superior intellect. They can’t. To demonstrate my effectiveness, I have now written millions of words in this blog, virtually every article is over 1200 words each, and I’ve done it every day since 2010. It has changed the lives of many people for the better and shattered the once confident hiding places of those most vile in our society—who hope to perpetrate their ill will toward mankind in obscurity. They have tried every trick imaginable—but have failed utterly to shake me off their scent—which to me was never in question.
The good thing about the blog is that with all those words and the public forum of it—where anybody can answer my comments and pick holes in my theories, to date they have not been able to do so. They can certainly insult—but they cannot answer or refute my claims and they’ll never be able to—and they hate it. The proof is in the vast swath of articles I have produced in such a short time—relatively speaking. At this point in this blog’s history I could take all the books of Ayn Rand and Leo Tolstoy and combine them—and I have written more than they have specifically targeting the crimes of our modern age. I will certainly not proclaim that these works are as well edited—most of the articles are raw, and from the heart, the way a writer’s notes would be when formulating an idea for refinement—but that doesn’t take away the results which are enormous, and likely only rivaled over the entire Internet by a few outlets.
I mostly deal with excessively smart people who universally believe they are the smartest people around at any given time. It is my task to show them that they are not—so that their efforts do not become a detriment to an enterprise—but a contributor and this often causes resentment. This has been my task for four decades now, so I knew that by taking on the established thinking especially in regard to politics and education, what I was getting into. That is the history of this blog to this point. It has evolved away from the more specific task of identifying education industry crime—and has evolved more into a philosophic analysis of mythology and how it impacts the static patterns of the human race. Because it is within that phrase that my special gift shines most brightly—when I go into long tirades about Star Wars, or some new game, literary work, or musical effort, it is because I see the impact of those achievements well before the rest of society does. What I say today, will become the standard of thought approximately 15 years from now. I am so confident in my assertions that I write these things audaciously for free on the Internet for future testimony without revisionist deflection. People may not always understand why or what I’m doing, but if they did—they’d be the ones writing about them instead of me—but they aren’t, and they can’t.
Because they can’t, this leaves critics bitterly resentful, and constantly plotting and scheming so that they can return to the safety of their cloaked behavior within society. Most people from the perpetrators of injustice currently sitting in The White House to the local labor union leaders within the education industry spend large amounts of their time trying to stay hidden—and they despise anyone who can see what they are really about—so they plot, scheme, and manipulate any way possible to return to that status. But in regards to this blog, it makes it impossible for them. Readers here have taken my words and used them as tools to change behavior and flush out the pretentious thugs of their localities in much the same way and embolden their efforts at justice—which is all I want. But those motives still elude the most dastardly terrorists of the mind and within their circles of self-imposed exile have begun spreading reference to me in the following fashion:
“Our universe explained by the god Rich Hoffman”
On my blog I can see the site stats hour by hour of the kind of terms people use to find it online—and that phrase has been coming up more often by different origin IP addresses lately. This is an indication of the temperament of the critics out there and how they view this blog. It is unfathomable to them that any individual would attempt to declare that they unshakably know facts, and can see into their hearts unless those individuals were supernatural. So this is their new derogatory term used to confront the light which shines into their lives grudgingly preventing them from hiding in plain sight. We live in a time where information is easier to get than ever before in human history—yet people are expected to be dumber than at virtually any point since the dawn of man. People are expected to remain stupid so to prevent inquiry into the nature of crimes that those who think they are smarter than everyone else, wish to commit upon the innocent—and genuinely good-hearted.
Referring to me as a “god” in their context is not a compliment—but I take it that way—because it shows me more about them than they wish for me to see. At the start of this blog I knew I was challenging people who thought they were the smartest people in existence, and the shattering impact that they were not has often proven too much for them to handle—which serves them right. It is ultimately best for them to learn that they cannot use their intelligence for evil—but should utilize it for good, productive ends—and they’ll only do that if they are not allowed to hide behind an industry that does not question their merit for what it is.
A “God” is universally accepted as one who can see everything at all times—they are omnipotent. Does that accurately describe me? That is for me to know, and nobody else. But my enemies do see me that way—and that is because they have been unable to match my assertions which leaves them metaphorically stripped naked for all to witness—and the sight is not a pleasant one. But it is one that makes society and all endeavor better—which makes me sleep better at night knowing that I did the work that was required—and if some see that as the work of a “god” well—so be it. I may be a lot of things to a lot of people depending on the context—but one thing I am not is humble. Humbleness is a waste of time when the only goal of it is to make others feel better about their life decisions and ultimate fall from grace. And that is not a business I want to be a part of.
Back at Serpent Mound just outside of Cincinnati, hardly a location at the “end of the world” the same type of thing occurred long ago. The valley beneath the effigy is really the western rim of a mysterious, four-mile-wide, circular crater – the eroded remains of a huge, catastrophic event geologists call “The Serpent Mound Disturbance.” About 300 million years ago, either an asteroid collision or an underground explosion blew apart more than seven cubic miles of rock. The central area was uplifted more than 1000 feet, while an outer rim dropped more than 400 feet.
