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.
That is the kind of nonsense that is being taught in public schools and has been adopted into general business practices. It is essentially behind the new Common Core methods of teaching which Glenn Beck so elaborately dismantled in his new book Conform. That book shows why well-meaning politicians and philanthropists are backing Common Core—which is a complete destruction of the American education system—specifically destroying the individuality inherit in American children—and integrating them into a more global view which embodies that basic quote of Miyamoto Musashi shown above. As traditionalists cling to the notion that Common Core must be eradicated from public education systems so to preserve the uniqueness that is desired in American children a far more sinister threat can be found behind the politics of the movement.
Most large companies in The United States cling blindly to the management teachings of William Deming—which has proven itself to be a tragedy. Deming is the man responsible for all the ridiculous attempts at Total Quality Management which has tied the hands of American business by putting engineers essentially in charge of the management of company resources so to hamper proper productivity. This trend exploded in America through the largest manufacturers in a time when it appeared that the Japanese were dominating all fields of productive endeavor threatening to overtake American methods in the 1980s. The Japanese in a desperate need to get back on their feet after World War II had embraced Deming, an engineer from America to beat their former rivals at their own game. Deming found among the Japanese people a collective based society that quickly unified behind his management methods which were essentially old Samurai strategy concepts dressed up behind mathematical formulas to justify himself being a paid consultant. Deming was perpetrating a scam to justify his celebrity status as he propped up the Japanese.
Deming was a ruse because he essentially disliked management and sought later in his classes to ridicule American executives free of their ego and to force them into collaboration with employees and co-workers through his collective based management methods. American businessmen listened to Deming as it was believed that the Japanese were dominating manufacturing because of him—which wasn’t true. The Japanese were dominating because of their sense of selfless dedication to collective causes. They thought differently than Americans and the result of their labor could be seen in their products.
It must be remembered that American businesses and the Japanese were both struggling with the spread of communism in post World War II global economic concerns, so Deming was delivering a way that management could restrict the impact of labor union quota refusals by offering managers up to laborers as sacrificial victims. This worked well in Japan who had managed to contain the spread of communism in their society through their selfless dedication to Miyamoto Musashi’s strategy guide The Book of Five Rings. As they were already functioning as a collective society, labor unions had little to offer them, so they were able to resist the push toward communism. Labor unions in Japan maintained an unusually close relationship to their companies as their identities were less focused on individual achievement and more concerned over the general health of their company. This gave Deming fertile ground to develop his management methods.
William Edwards Deming (October 14, 1900 – December 20, 1993) was an American engineer, statistician, professor, author, lecturer, and management consultant. Trained initially as an electrical engineer and later specializing in mathematical physics, he helped develop the sampling techniques still used by the Department of the Census and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, championed the work of Dr. Walter Shewhart, including Statistical Process Control, Operational Definitions, and what he called The Shewhart Cycle[1] which evolved into “PDSA” (Plan-Do-Study-Act) in his book The New Economics for Industry, Government, and Education,[2] as a response to the growing popularity of PDSA, which he viewed as tampering with the meaning of Dr. Shewhart’s original work. [3] He is best known for his work in Japan after WWII, particularly his work with the leaders of Japanese industry which began in August 1950 at the Hakone Convention Center in Tokyo with a now seminal speech on what he called Statistical Product Quality Administration, which many in Japan credit with being the inspiration for what has become known as the Japanese post-war economic miracle of 1950 to 1960, rising from the ashes of war to become the second most powerful economy in the world in less than a decade, founded on the ideas first taught to them by Dr Deming:
That the problems facing manufacturers can be solved through cooperation, despite differences.
Marketing is not “sales,” but the science of knowing what people who buy your product repeatedly think of that product and whether they will buy it again, and why.
That In the initial stages of design, you must conduct market research, applying statistical techniques for experimental and planning and inspection of samples.
And you must perfect the manufacturing process.[4]
He is best known in the United States for his 14 Points (Out of the Crisis, by Dr. W. Edwards Deming, Preface) and his system of thought he called the System of Profound Knowledge, consisting of four components, or “lenses” through which to view the world simultaneously:
Deming made a significant contribution to Japan’s later reputation for innovative, high-quality products, and for its economic power. He is regarded as having had more impact upon Japanese manufacturing and business than any other individual not of Japanese heritage. Despite being honored in Japan in 1951 with the establishment of the Deming Prize he was only just beginning to win widespread recognition in the U.S. at the time of his death in 1993.[6]President Reagan awarded him the National Medal of Technology in 1987. The following year, Deming also received the Distinguished Career in Science award from the National Academy of Sciences.
The philosophy of W. Edwards Deming has been summarized as follows:
Dr. W. Edwards Deming taught that by adopting appropriate principles of management, organizations can increase quality and simultaneously reduce costs (by reducing waste, rework, staff attrition and litigation while increasing customer loyalty). The key is to practice continual improvement and think of manufacturing as a system, not as bits and pieces.”[26]
In the 1970s, Deming’s philosophy was summarized by some of his Japanese proponents with the following ‘a’-versus-‘b’ comparison:
(a) When people and organizations focus primarily on quality, defined by the following ratio,
quality tends to increase and costs fall over time.
(b) However, when people and organizations focus primarily on costs, costs tend to rise and quality declines over time.
“The prevailing style of management must undergo transformation. A system cannot understand itself. The transformation requires a view from outside. The aim of this chapter is to provide an outside view—a lens—that I call a system of profound knowledge. It provides a map of theory by which to understand the organizations that we work in.
“The first step is transformation of the individual. This transformation is discontinuous. It comes from understanding of the system of profound knowledge. The individual, transformed, will perceive new meaning to his life, to events, to numbers, to interactions between people.
“Once the individual understands the system of profound knowledge, he will apply its principles in every kind of relationship with other people. He will have a basis for judgment of his own decisions and for transformation of the organizations that he belongs to. “
Deming advocated that all managers need to have what he called a System of Profound Knowledge, consisting of four parts:
Appreciation of a system: understanding the overall processes involving suppliers, producers, and customers (or recipients) of goods and services (explained below);
Knowledge of variation: the range and causes of variation in quality, and use of statistical sampling in measurements;
Theory of knowledge: the concepts explaining knowledge and the limits of what can be known.
Knowledge of psychology: concepts of human nature.
He explained, “One need not be eminent in any part nor in all four parts in order to understand it and to apply it. The 14 points for management in industry, education, and government follow naturally as application of this outside knowledge, for transformation from the present style of Western management to one of optimization.”
Key principles
Deming offered fourteen key principles to managers for transforming business effectiveness. The points were first presented in his book Out of the Crisis. (p. 23–24)[28] Although Deming does not use the term in his book, it is credited with launching the Total Quality Management movement.[29]
Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive, to stay in business and to provide jobs.
Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age. Western management must awaken to the challenge, must learn their responsibilities, and take on leadership for change.
Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for massive inspection by building quality into the product in the first place.
End the practice of awarding business on the basis of a price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move towards a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust.
Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.
Institute training on the job.
Institute leadership (see Point 12 and Ch. 8 of “Out of the Crisis”). The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines and gadgets do a better job. Supervision of management is in need of overhaul, as well as supervision of production workers.
Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company. (See Ch. 3 of “Out of the Crisis”)
Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, in order to foresee problems of production and usage that may be encountered with the product or service.
Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.
Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor. Substitute with leadership.
Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers and numerical goals. Instead substitute with leadership.
Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality.
Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia, abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objectives (See Ch. 3 of “Out of the Crisis”).
Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.
Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody’s job.
“Massive training is required to instill the courage to break with tradition. Every activity and every job is a part of the process.”[30]
Of course there is one essential ingredient that Deming avoided and if his work, lectures and methods are studied properly it will be discovered that Deming was attempting to use mathematic equations to get his mind around leadership—and he never succeeded. The Japanese succeeded because as a society they are happy to yield their individualities toward collective goals, but in The United States—which is an individually based society—workers are not. Goals for American workers have to be made to align with the company’s goals—they cannot be bent to subjugate themselves to a system devised by Eastern manufacturing methods. Deming’s methods worked in Japan, but they never have, and never will work in America. There were initial increases in profit for companies who applied Deming techniques—simply because they began with so much waste to begin with—but most large companies today have simply outsourced their manufacturing to evade the impact of Deming—because once an American worker is broken down from their individuality they become automatons and resist the impulse to innovate. Their negativity often turns into a corrosive relationship with their company as they psychologically see their employer as the source of crushing their individual will.
All through the 80s and 90s in America there was grave concern that America was somehow inferior to Japan and everyone else in the world who seemed to find success with Deming’s methods. Yet what those same critics ignored was that America produced Deming, and the machinery that won World War II, and had never had any manufacturing issues prior to Deming—so why did they need him? American executives had lost their incentive to be innovative, and to push themselves as they had been pushed into a collective goo following Deming methods of Total Quality Management that really sought to alleviate their personal input. Modern managers were discouraged in using their individual gifts to improve productivity, quality, and work environment because Deming had already provided a system that their companies were forcing them to adhere to—leaving them generally uninterested in the manufacturing process.
What Deming never put his finger on and seemed to struggle with all his life was the source of his “concept of human nature.” Within that was the realization that some people were born leaders and some people were just born followers and this equation did not fit well into the mathematical formulas of an electrical engineer. The ability to create a leader is what everyone wanted, but they lacked the ability to detect them—so companies used Deming as a second hander to give them a process that would hide their inability—and deficiency in recruiting, staffing, and mid-level leadership.
Yet, America has produced without any help from any college, or management consultant many leaders who have created companies that amassed huge amounts of wealth—Microsoft comes to mind. Yet Bill Gates who founded Microsoft as a college dropout is the premier instigator of Common Core leaving him to be thought of as the modern Deming. Politicians and other business leaders think that because Gates created a company that generated so much wealth that he is somehow qualified to provide an education method that would create a generation of children that can compete with the world. However, Americans are not like other people—there is a reason that American Excepetionalism exists and it isn’t because they can integrate themselves into a Deming process. Bill Gates with all his genius has been unable to put into any kind of mathematical formula the reason for his success—so has been unable to create an education system that can make more of him—which American companies and state governors are hoping Common Core will do for the youth.
Common Core like Deming’s Total Quality Management ignores human initiative and thus fails to find the best among human populations to instigate innovation and productive enterprise—and to capitalize off of American Excepetionalism. Instead they are seeking kill it which is why most people are ready to hang themselves in The United States after they take one of Deming’s four-day seminars. It’s not the extreme boredom of the classes, or the lack of real relevance to manufacturing—it is the destruction of individual initiative yielding toward collective causes that creates the anxiety.
The failure of Deming, and thus of every company that follows his methods is the destruction of internal leadership that was foolishly studied from the East as if such things could have been born there. Deming was an American creation and had he never went to Japan, he would have remained an obscure engineer that nobody would have listened to if he had not struck it rich bringing together a battered people in the Japanese to resurrect themselves. For Japan, Deming was like the feather Dumbo carried around making the elephant believe it could fly—Deming was a crutch to rely upon in a time of need. He didn’t give the Japanese anything they couldn’t have given themselves—because their culture would have achieved those same heights completely on their own. Deming in the United States appealed to the second-handers who live through others and looked at Japan and wanted to copy what they were doing—ignoring their own propensity toward leadership, because they failed to see who among them had the capacity to rise. When second handers are in charge and fear being replaced by those who are truly oozing with leadership and human initiative, Deming systems are adopted to protect their social status—which is why Total Quality Management ultimately fails in America.
Those same second handers are behind Common Core and for the same reasons. Bill Gates became wealthy building operating systems that could interact with machines to usher in the personal computer revolution. He doesn’t know why he was so different from everyone else—but he was. Now he hopes to do the same for education through Common Core. However, like Deming his problem is a complex one because what his methods are achieving is not self initiated leadership among work forces—but rather destroying individuals into simple machines who can function within a system. Gates is building a machine with Common Core and like Deming before him—the world is eating out of his hand hoping that Gates knows something about human nature that they don’t.
Deming his whole life struggled with the notion he obviously learned from the Japanese of profound knowledge. As he said, “once the individual understands the system of profound knowledge, he will apply its principles in every kind of relationship with other people. He will have a basis for judgment of his own decisions and for transformation of the organizations that he belongs to. ” But he never figured it out. He was seeking the basis of leadership which is not produced by any system put in place—it comes from human initiative and creativity and is a by-product of American Excepetionalism—the same Excepetionalism that invented the airplane, the light builb, and built an economy based on capitalism where the exceptional rise to the top and are easy to spot instead of being hidden behind a TQM system obscured from the eyes of the people who could most directly benefit. Common Core is essentially the same failure applied to American business from Deming—which has all but destroyed manufacturing in the United States, and passed it on to education. The crime is not that Common Core will destroy the millions of minds who are destined to be simple cogs in a grand machine that will dance willingly to Deming’s processes. The crime is that Common Core will destroy the few exceptions that will have a vast impact on the development of the human race led by America. It is for that reason that Common Core must be vanquished. Deming did enough damage for one lifetime. The world certainly doesn’t need more of him.
Taking a break from the usual heavy subjects explored at this site I have to say more about a company I have highlighted often in America who I think is having a major impact on world culture. This is not a movie company, a video game developer or even a traditional television broadcaster—it is Fantasy Flight Games who again appear to be at the absolute top of their field. I was at my favorite game store—Nostalgic Ink, in Mason, Ohio buying my son-in-law some expansion ships for our X-Wing Miniatures game which is a Fantasy Flight creation which I have raved about often. I had my grandson with me so he wanted to walk around the store looking at all the other products, which I of course allowed him to do. While looking elsewhere in the store I ran across the Fantasy Flight Game Arkham Horror which looked fabulous and further impressed me with what Fantasy Flight has been doing in the realm of gaming.
These types of games are a participatory mythology—meaning they allow players to jump into a scenario and live the values of a mythology. These games unlike everything else in society are all about recognizing value instead of evading it—so there isn’t any escape from the process of assessment. I wasn’t a fan of these kinds of things until my nephews and son-in-law brought them back into my life last summer while on vacation. While I don’t enjoy traditional board games like Monopoly and most of the games on the Target gaming shelf dealing with contemporary matters, I do love these mythology based games in that they are like novels lived in the field of time and space which have uncertain outcomes.
The Arkham Horror game attracted my attention because it deals with the Roaring Twenties and involves horror, monsters, and ancient secrets. Of course it is this time period I love which featured near perfect capitalism and a wonderful President in Calvin Coolidge, so the time period itself is interesting as a backdrop for such a story. At Nostalgic Ink we were in a time crunch so I didn’t buy the game as of yet, but I will at the next available moment. It plays up to eight people in a cooperative play which would do well in my family. We had a birthday party for that same son-in-law who is very skilled with these games. It’s impressive to watch him. At the party several groups broke off and played games, some in the house, some outside set up around the pool, some out under a shade tree. One of the games was Magic the Gathering which I’ve seen quite a lot, the other was my son-in-law’s new Game of Thrones card game again by Fantasy Flight Games. I watched a bit of that game and again it was another amazing creation by Fantasy Flight with the usual quality in game pieces and such detailed manuals, card design, and even box artwork.
I had been wondering if Fantasy Flight was just freakishly good at game design with their X-Wing series—because it’s Star Wars and thus sells well. But after seeing what they did with the Game of Thrones card game I’m convinced that it is just the nature of the company. Any doubts I had about buying The Arkham Horror game evaporated in that instant. The gaming that night at our house went well into the night well past the time my wife and I went to bed—so my family would love Arkham Horror.
During a typical day when things sometimes seem overwhelmingly difficult—and impossible—I take a minute and visit the Fantasy Flight Games website to see what’s going on new—which every day appears to be something. I enjoy reading the game forums for X-Wing and it actually relaxes my mind. This is distinctively different from the typical escapism, evasion tactics of something like a baseball game, or Fantasy Football—which does similar things for a more mainstream audience. For me, and my love of mythology, these games are just marvelous.
Walking the aisles at Nostalgic Ink the owner does a great job of displaying all his vast collection of games—most of them are like these Arkham Horror, and Game of Throne games. These are different from traditional board games like Life, Candyland, or card games like Uno. They have the added element of plot and story to accentuate the randomness of a dice role—and are quite intriguing. If I had time, I’d like to play one of each kind of game in Nostalgic Ink. My grandson not yet two years of age already understands that there is something special about the place, he enjoys the colors on the boxes displaying all the bizarre artwork and wanted to look at everything. It’s a very stimulating atmosphere much like how book stores used to feel minus the references to popular culture—which is often distracting when you need a break from it.
It cannot be ignored that people who play these types of Fantasy Flight Games enjoy thinking. My son-in-law certainly embodies that trait—he loves to think and in the realm of those games—is a maestro. But what’s better is the plot and advancement of intrigue that makes the experience like a shared novel. In a high-tech age such as what we live in now, it is just wonderful to see such a low tech—creative—and traditional format of storytelling that has emerged as powerfully as Fantasy Flight Games has done over these last few years. I was already a fan because of their X-Wing Miniatures work, but their efforts don’t end there. It is unlikely that I would have ever stepped into Nostalgic Ink if not to purchase my first B-Wing fighter in the September of 2013. Since then, I have been there often and now find myself going there to primarily buy gifts for other people. But for me X-Wing Miniatures has been a gateway to the rest of the Fantasy Flight Games product line. It is what they are doing now that will still have meaning many years from now when I want to play the same games with my future grandchildren and other family members who will grow up to love those games. I remember the kind of things I loved growing up and to a large extent, I still love those things. Video games and tech related entertainment has a dated feel that cheapens those experiences over time as improvements come out in future years. But these Fantasy Flight Games products will still have the magic of their appeal hundreds of years from now because the root of their effort is in the great presentation of their material– the invocation of thought as their mechanism into story telling. And it is in the stories of our society that the truths we all seek reside—whether realistic, or fantasy based, it is the process of thought which the human race most seeks. And Fantasy Flight Games has their pulse on the importance of thought—and that makes them for my money one of the best companies on earth creating one of the most important needs humans have aside from food and clothing—mythology.
I’ve told a portion of this story before but now with context provided, it is time to give a proper answer. When the Enquirer reporter Michael Clark was at my home photographing me for what was surely at some point in time to become a major circus scandal he asked me if I was sure that I wanted my picture taken with my bullwhips while making series claims against one of the largest and wealthiest public schools in Ohio for fear that my message might become lost in the entertaining antics. I have said that it was part of a plan, but without context the words don’t have much meaning to novice readers—so I simply gave the steps without providing the meaning. However, since this blog for many has become a sort of silent strategy guide for how to defeat the left—to understand what I was doing was important because it will help those same minds through this next—difficult phase with much ore assuredness.
It was my idea to do the bullwhip story in the same week that I went on WLW to argue teacher wages at Lakota. Before going on the air I had many friends and family warn me against such a thing. After all, they had seen labor strikes locally from General Motors, AK Steel, and many other union type organizations and it was well-known that teacher unions destroyed private property of those who stood in their way—and I was asking for trouble by going on WLW to call them out. The Enquirer article was done to take away one of the weapons of the labor union—which was hard to explain at the time. People would understand the wage issues I was bringing up, but all too often those stories are suppressed because people are afraid to put their name out there against such a collective force.
So here’s the little secret at beating the political left which can now be obviously confirmed with history—not just my own, but that of others who have also dared push back against the forces trying to reshape us all into something despicable and useless. No group, especially the political left can win if two things are removed from them, their ability to exert force—and thus fear so to manipulate through silence the facts to their favor. Whatever methods are used to create fear—threat of labor strikes, vandalism, personal name calling, physical violence you need to match them blow for blow. When I showed them what I could do with the bullwhip, I was performing a strategy I learned from Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kun Do martial arts school. Lee never worried about conflict with another human being because he had made himself into something that could not be beaten by another human being. He may not have won every confrontation, but he could decide if he would lose. If you pick a variation of a martial art and become so skilled at it that you are the best there is—you have made yourself invincible so to speak to defeat in that particular category. That is a very good thing, it doesn’t matter if it is bullwhips, knife handling, various forms of self-defense—the act at becoming so good at something that nobody can beat you is a sense of assuredness that provides freedom to an individual that is paramount to beating back any aggression committed against you.
After my WLW visit I had every manner of fear creating method thrown at me by the labor unions who had some type of stake in the Lakota levy—every kind. But, because of my use of the bullwhip, opponents learned quickly that I could easily beat the monkey snot out of them without really breaking a sweat. It didn’t matter if they came as individuals or groups—the result would be the same unless they decided to cross the line and elevate their terrorism with guns—which of course I also had an answer and they knew it. Violence and threat of harm is the first desired strategy that labor unions use to get what they want—so I took that away from them. This forced them into territory they were not comfortable with—a logical argument.
Quickly the liberals involved in public education—which is most everyone—tried to play the other strategy of the left—the theory of emotion where they use fear of speculative outcomes such as fear of death, fear of ignorance, fear of losing in competitive comparisons with the rest of the world as their means of advancing their own plot without ever getting into the details. This is that Witch Doctor mentality mentioned on this site before—it’s the speculation of things to come based on raw emotion and justified by feelings, not fact. I forced them—really an entire education industry from the Department of Education in The United States, and Ohio—college professors, tenured teachers, politicians, union presidents to beat the facts I presented to the public and on this site and not a single person could do it—for over four years now. This is the big secret behind their push for violence and why if that weapon is taken from them—they are left naked as the day they were born—intellectually. They cannot win an argument if they are on the wrong side of the facts—which they know they are. They must bring emotion into their arena as an alley because they are seeking to supplant the facts with emotion to win their position. Even the smartest people in the education industry—and you’d think that there would be a lot of smart people in education—could not refute a single claim I made in the public forums such as the Enquirer, all the television stations and over the radio. Many of those radio broadcasts went out to over 100,000 to 500,000 people and not a single soul was able to refute the facts I brought up—which in essence was that teachers were overpaid, their instruction was ineffective to children, and that it wasn’t worth the cost of increased taxes.
When “they” could not win with threats of force, or feelings they resorted back to force—but instead of making it private they went public—which of course was predicted. The Enquirer again played its role and put up all the residual impact of the word war that was going on between my opponents and myself showing how ugly things were getting. But the essence of it was this—the levy supporters attempted to win their side with a combination of force and emotion by making the argument one about sexism—since many of the radicals were women—they hoped to play that old progressive trick, which worked on many of the weaker minded people on my side who actually feared those despots—I’ll get into that with more detail in a bit. When I showed them that I would take a head for an eye in whatever manner they wished to pursue things it got out of control for a bit as the panic set in leaving Lakota as a large progressive organization with little to do but to retreat and regroup. They cut a deal with me lasting for two years and spent that time not trying to incorporate what they had learned from me, but in trying to build on their emotional position. They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on public relations to suppress the negativity caused by our fights so that they could come across as benevolent once again. They eventually won their money but in the process had proven everything I claimed against them leaving the process open for all to see stripped away of fear in all its forms. People were able for the first time to see how all these things worked together to impose social elements against the society at large and they were learning how to counter it.
If fear of violence and mystic facts based on emotion are removed from the left—or from anybody—they can be handedly defeated. However there is one last element that must be utilized in such a conflict which the political left uses to prevent a challenge to either of their key strategies—it is the plight of the second hander. The way that the left protects itself from scrutiny is through this mechanism. A second hander desires the approval of others for internal sustenance—for instance, second hander people enjoy being told they look nice, they buy cars that they know other people will admire; they change their aroma hoping to present themselves attractively to other human beings and generally spend a lot of time seeking the approval of others. What protects the political left most from challenges to their two primary attacks–physical violence and mystic emotion is the peer pressure of social judgment. If challenges are presented to their two control mechanisms the default protection is this destruction of public acceptance.
From the time that I was a little kid up until about 15 years ago I used to get a lot of grief about wearing a cowboy hat in public. For me, the hat was a symbol of traditional values which I hold strongly. For the rest of society—it also represented that—which was out-of-step with the progressive direction of the country. People let me know about it. Even as a twenty something young man living campus life at the University of Cincinnati I walked around everywhere with my cowboy hat—and people always looked at me funny for it. Most of the time I was by myself as well—often I would get up in the morning and walk to Coryville to have breakfast and read my books with my hat on. I would get the strangest looks, people actually felt anxious—first they couldn’t understand why I was by myself, and two, why I had on the hat. Who was I trying to impress? The answer was nobody—and this scared people. What they never figured out—and which is a fact that remains to this day—is that I don’t care an iota what anybody thinks about anything. When I do something I do it because I want to. I wear what I want, when I want to and do it for my own reasons. Therefore, I also do the same with thinking—I think what I want, say what I want, and in no way feel hampered by third-party judgment and am thusly immune to peer-pressure.
This is a very liberating attribute because it allows you to challenge the two mechanisms of liberal strategy–brute force, and emotional speculation directly without concern of being cast out of any group or the collective opinions that might be controlled by money, social prestige, or God forbid—consensus. In this way, people have seen slowly what kind of scam has been perpetrated upon them and have taken action on their own to advance the plot. Now that the first bricks of that intellectual damn have been removed the cracks are now crawling everywhere ahead of the break and what will be free finally are all the things hidden behind that damn by the political left for years—things put there through force and emotion. Logic breaks the damn, and freedom from peer pressured allows the bricks to be removed one by one until the whole thing comes crashing down.
There are people who read here every day for their sustenance—because they want to see how the world really is and expect me to present it without fear from violence, or handcuffs by emotional debate, or the concern of being blacklisted from the latest charity dinner by socialites and despots hungry for attention and yearning for approval by their peers. Through that journey they come to the truth and now that they facts are adding up, they are able to act upon those truths. Luckily, I’m not alone in this journey and the culmination of these efforts is beginning to have a major impact. The Bill Ayers interview with Megan Kelly is just the start—the left in the wake of a terrible Obama Presidency have to defend themselves really for the first time–and are now coming out to meet the challenge. They really have no choice; public opinion is beginning to stack against them. But now that other people know how to beat them at their own game—the frequency of these challenges are tearing away at their façade leaving them deeply exposed for the first time in over 100 years, and they don’t like it. The way to fight them is now known and it is the task of the individuals reading here to carry these methods into their personal life to fight these corrosive elements in the proven fashion. The guarantee of success is 100%. So now that you know dear reader how to beat them………………..what’s stopping you?
The cries of anger from the Supreme Court ruling in favor of Hobby Lobby by feminist groups is so reminiscent of my complaints of school levy supporters who are typically feminists looking to cover their parenting deficiencies with tax payer funded baby sitting services, that I had to go back to an article that caused a lot of controversy toward me as a kind of time capsule confirmation of my thoughts—to validate its merit. An article I wrote after a very contentious first quarter—politically in 2012 became cherry picked for negative comments to use against me, so I put it on password protection to stop the bleeding. Of course it was the Cincinnati Enquirer who was doing the cherry picking on behalf of the type of feminists who are now howling in rage against the recent high court decision. In the wake of that political turbulence I had not revisited that article to take the password off—which I should have done earlier—because if people could have seen the context of the article—they would have seen what the Enquirer had done. But I never got around to it until I wanted to see how true many of my statements were in the winter of 2012 compared to the radical position of the feminists against Hobby Lobby. At the link below, my comments from that time can be revisited.
The trouble with these feminists—the ones against Hobby Lobby and the typical school levy supporters which I described with my open opinion is that they cross the line in expecting other people to fund their beliefs. People are free to believe what they want to—those feminists are free to conduct their lives in their families and be man hating despots all they want—until they ask me for something. In the case of the school levy supporters they demanded that I support their politics with my tax money. Their reasons for a school levy and their demands of the public education system put the burden on me as a tax payer to support. When they did not respect the vote from Lakota residents in the fall of 2011, I saw that they were just going to keep coming until they got what they wanted, and I let my thoughts about their actions be known. What is the point of playing the same stupid game with them when they have only one objective in mind—higher taxes to support their progressive world outlook—which I do not support? The essence of their argument was take something from me that I didn’t want to give—and to get it they were more than willing to assassinate my character and anyone attached to me through brute force.
The same is going on over the Hobby Lobby case, the feminists are very concerned that the progressive gains they have made against American tradition—which I support—are slipping away so they feel they must become aggressive to defend their position. But their position is essentially the expectation that a corporation fund the sexual exploits of women without those women taking responsibility for their actions. In a lot of ways, this is far worse than the school levy supporters who really just want free babysitting and the guilt of their career building removed from them as the government takes responsibility for their children’s educations. In this case the feminists are demanding that Hobby Lobby fund sexual activity—which is the decision of women whether or not they wish to participate in such an activity or not. Sex doesn’t just happen—it is a decision and Hobby Lobby has no obligation as a corporation or a family business to contribute to those kinds of personal activities. If women want to work for a company that does endorse that kind of activity—then they can apply for a job at such a place, or start their own company where they can provide those benefits to employees–that way feminists could work together and not muddy the water of women who actually enjoy working for a company that respects religious beliefs and traditional value.
Yet the feminists expect “others” to fund their recklessness—and their personal philosophy of complete independence of males in their life. At the foundation of their proposal is to actually enslave everyone—whether they believe in the same things as the feminists or not—into contributing to their lifestyles. So the feminists are far from independent—but rather they are more dependent than ever. The only difference is that the feminist demands that society care for her instead of a single husband which might expect something in return—such as traditional housewife roles within a home, caring for children, preparing a majority of the meals, taking care of most domestic obligations—etc. The feminists want to be free of all those obligations, yet they still want the support of big government to care for them the way a typical “man-of-the-house” traditionally did, bringing home the money, taking care of fixing things and providing non emotional advice regarding priorities for the family’s direction—the “father knows best role.” In that role a housewife might have told children—“don’t do this or that or I’ll tell your father.” The children fearing such an overpowering figure might then correct their behavior. The modern feminist instead tells her children—“do what the government tells you, do what your teachers tell you, and mind the police.” The feminist has simply replaced the traditional head of household man with government. The trade-off was that government doesn’t expect anything from the feminists in return leaving them free to do anything they want, believe anything they want, and to espouse values regardless of their destructive tendencies without feeling the impact of direct consequence. Instead—those consequences are distributed to many people—people like me who do not support the feminist cause.
It’s not that women should be pushed down into a passive role in society. The only real difference between men and women are purely physical. The mind of people is where value really is—so in that context men and women are equal—if the mind is the root of judgment. But the feminists do not have the right personal philosophy—they are wrong about most of their assertions—at least compared to my traditional American values. They are free to believe or be as wrong as they wish—but they are not free to impose those values on other people who disagree with them. In essence, that is what the feminists against Hobby Lobby are attempting to do. It is that same attack gay rights advocates have against Chick-fil-A, or that race baiters have across the entire economy—the goal of all these parasitic groups is to gain something from other people who do not necessarily support those viewpoints—making those parties contribute in the acts by default.
This strategy puts the blame of bad, reckless behavior on the entire society as a result making correction of such behavior irredeemably impossible. For instance, a cost of feminism is the destruction of parenting ability provided to children. The divorce rate has increased, men have become feminized, and role models have been removed from the home as the state through teachers, and through court appointed liaisons became the central figures in a child’s life. Judges decide where a child sleeps in divorce hearings as opposed to the parents. The parents lose their rights to instruct their children once lawyers and government in general becomes part of the process. The adverse effect is that a whole generation of children are coming to age who look to government for decisions—which government is incapable of making—causing major problems currently. Feminism can be traced as the cause. It is of course more complicated than that—not all men are capable of being a good head-of-house; women not so attractive then don’t have access to the same type of good men as attractive women do—most feminists are not very attractive—which is the deep insecurity that they have and foundation for their commitment to feminism. Yet their commitment to that particular cause then has a chain reaction effect that could be blamed on destroying society—the effects are just now being recorded—socially. But all that is hidden because feminists through legal victories in the past have pulled everyone into contributing to their faults.
Feminist are fearful of the Hobby Lobby case because they see the trend turning against them and it is scary. If they cannot hide their stupidity behind all of society—behind large corporations like Hobby Lobby and others—they will be left vulnerable to take responsibility for the cost of their beliefs against society. For them, that is a terrifying prospect. Just as my comments from over two years ago have proven, the feminists are extreme radicals and when I made sure that I wasn’t going to go along with their plan—they did everything they could to come after me publicly which still angers me. They had no right, which led to my comments in the article linked above. And when I called them on things, they cherry picked my words and attempted to manipulate the situation into their favor just as they are doing now against Hobby Lobby and the Supreme Court. But history will prove what I’m saying correct. Just as I was able to resurrect the article above from two years ago, ten years from now this article will be reviewed similarly. And the facts will be known, the cost of feminism will be well documented, and the truth will be obvious. It is that truth which the feminists are terrified of in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling in favor of Hobby Lobby. The tide is finally turning against them—and there isn’t anywhere or anybody to hide behind. Hobby Lobby is one less place in a field of vanishing confinements that a decade from now will be an empty plain leaving the feminists and other such progressive groups bare and completely exposed for what they have always been.
Wonderful American women are people like Dana Loesch, Ayn Rand, and Annie Oakley. There are many others, those are just a few examples. So it isn’t women hating to declare that feminists are destructive, and on the wrong path. Just factual. And thank God for women like the Tampa Bay Buccaneer cheerleaders–symbols of American exceptionalism.
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.
The IRS is guilty of several crimes and they are stuffing the information behind a veil of social masks designed to conceal their actions. During our talk it hit me that the only way to explain this IRS situation is through the proper context of the history of Attila which was actually a concept Nathaniel Branden provided to Ayn Rand. Those two archetypes, Attila and the Witch Doctor were constructed during a period of American history where near pure capitalism was seen being snuffed out by regulation and the events which would create The Great Society were being implemented. The book discussing Branden’s archetypes was For The New Intellectual published by Ayn Rand in 1961 well before any of the current troubles occurred—but the signs were clearly present. The temperament of talk radio which requires a lot of back and forth as a fluid discussion would not allow for the introduction of the Attila concept without all the back story—so it wouldn’t fit during our one hour talk radio show. But as Matt played several clips from the IRS hearings—things I had heard, but not in the condensed order that he played them—it was obvious where America was going wrong and how it had to be fixed.
The IRS clearly has become the modern Attila—an entity which rules by force and is controlled by the Witch Doctors in the White House and Supreme Court. They were hiding their obvious crimes against the American Constitution which was created specifically to protect citizens from future Attila types so that the protection of the Constitution would be eroded away before America realized a crime had taken place. All of America had been trained to support either Attila or the Witch Doctor through their education systems—provided of course by the government and their metaphorical Witch Doctor lawyers. That is a mouthful to say on live radio but it was dashing through my mind as Matt and I spoke. This leaves Americans defenseless to deal with a corrupt IRS because most citizens have either already submitted to Attila the ultimate dominatrix or a committed alliance to a Witch Doctor following the philosophy of Immanuel Kant essentially declaring that reality is anything that the mass collection of people in a democratic government believe it to be. So if the masses believe that the IRS is innocent of a crime—then this is to be the projected fact in the news media and legal briefs for all time. When the IRS commissioner revealed to Trey Gowdy—which Matt and I spoke of—that the commissioner did not believe the IRS did anything wrong he was playing the Witch Doctor role. His assertion was that the government was spending considerable time and money convincing the masses through public relation tricks that a crime at the IRS had not been committed, that evidence had not been destroyed and that there was nothing to see for the inquisitive eye. The arrogance found on the face of the commissioner was the knowledge that if the government through the Witch Doctor antics of Obama could sway enough American support to believe in their innocence—that the reality of their innocence would follow—therefore leaving the IRS free of conviction.
This obviously was not the case; The IRS is guilty of using its power to harass citizens into a particularly desired political direction—good for the Attila regime represented by the IRS. The IRS is not serving the needs of the people, and government certainly isn’t serving the tax payers of The United States—they were falsely believing that they were part of an exclusive culture of aristocrats and that the IRS were their personal minions to force compliance protecting that aristocracy. I blame much of this trouble on the philosophers of the past, people such as Kant, Marx, Descartes, Hume, Hegel—basically the Rationalists, and the Empiricists—or put more simply those who abandoned reality and those who clung to it by abandoning their mind. Those philosophers shaped the modern world to fit the mold of old world Europe. Marx was so backward he had no answer for capitalism which he sought to destroy after watching the two primary revolutions in France, particularly the Revolution of 1848. The workers of the world unite slogan was built up against the Attila aristocracy so affiliated with Europe at the time. Capitalism freed the minds of man—especially in America. But for anyone who has seen the play Les Misérables it is clear that it was the Attila of aristocracy that was suppressing the people of France. Capitalism would have freed them, but Marx had arrived first to their radical minds in the form of the Witch Doctor who wanted to rule over Attila—so the young communists used Attila tactics to overthrow the aristocracy thus catapulting them all not toward freedom, but to continued oppression because they didn’t understand what they were doing—philosophically. That is why there is a red flag in the play—and the movie—it represents the blank red flag of socialism as proposed by Karl Marx—a fellow Witch Doctor from the philosophic school of Kant.
In America roughly 50 year later the IRS formalized itself in 1918 after first being created during the Civil War in 1862 to raise funds for the effort. Once the government received a taste of the revenue collection system they became addicted and continued to collect taxes long after the war was over passing law after law not because they needed to—but because they could—the Witch Doctors had the power of Attila and they intended to use it—and did. As that same European socialism came to America through its universities by way of Marx and Kant the IRS gained more and more Attila like tendencies becoming essentially Javert from Les Misérables the mindless functioning Attila with a terminator like persistence to recapture Valjean at any cost—in spite of him becoming a successful factory owner and caretaker of Cosette. This was a classic case of cutting off one’s nose to spite its face—but being a non thinking servant of the Witch Doctor aristocracy Javert mindlessly served that order and in the end when he had failed could only commit suicide in self sacrificial obedience to the Witch Doctor oriented “law” which he enforced with brute force and conviction. The IRS as a government organization became this “Valjean”—the Attila by default and would spend the next hundred years destroying capitalism in America until as Matt and I pointed out during the broadcast America only had a -2.9% GDP in the first quarter of 2014—which apparently shocked everyone—except me. I’ve only been saying it for four years now. That drop is a direct result of too many Attila types in American government imposing force upon job makers instead of freeing them up to create jobs and products. (Why is this so damn hard for people to understand, the hero in Les Misérables was a factory owner. Fantine suffered because she lost her job at the factory–had to sell her hair, teeth and her body to care for her child—but why—because not enough people built factories for god’s sake. She was poor because there weren’t enough jobs. There needed to be more people like Valjean, not less and only capitalism provides such things) The IRS has spent a century destroying capitalism and now they have been caught as law breakers—and the government instead entrenched itself to protect its Witch Doctors. Obama got on a plane and flew to the Midwest to rally support seeking protection from a congress that wants to sue him over Executive Order malpractice. Again, the philosophy Obama exhibits is the one of Immanuel Kant—that if enough people believe something—the reality is subjugated toward that majority belief. So the facts of the IRS case are ignored in preservation of Attila and the Witch Doctors in Washington.
Matt Clark and I had a great talk as usual—and it was very productive. Many people who avoid reading, thinking, or taking responsibility for the state of the world were not aware of the Branden/Rand metaphor developed in 1961 because universities are teaching Kant and Marx, not the new philosophies born in America by minds defending capitalism. Instead, the goal has been to return America back into the European fold of Attila and the Witch Doctor through art, like Les Misérables and the persistence of the IRS who is the metaphorical Javert protecting the aristocratic system of government with mindless commitment. Too much to discuss on AM radio, but it was the essence of the problems covered on Matt’s show. It is because of Attila and the Witch Doctor that the IRS has been committing so many crimes in the light of day and getting away with it—and why the government itself is powerless to do anything about it—even though justice is crying out for attention—and revenge.
Yikes, I watched recently what may be the worst movie I have ever seen—which is very embarrassing for the movie. I mean, Jesus Christ—it was absolutely terrible. Diabolically ridiculous, lampoonist, flawed, disjointed—it was a wrecked concoction of poor philosophy, disastrously stupid politics, and a sheer waste of the three hours I spent watching it. Tragically, I hoped it would be good, Tom Hanks was in it, Halle Berry was as well, the Wachowski family was involved who did films like the Matrix and Speed Racer—so even though I thought I would dislike the politics—which were noticeably progressive—I hoped the movie would have its moments. It didn’t. It was just terrible and the only reason I am reviewing it is so that I can show readers here that not every movie review is good. Some people have accused me of working for Warner Brothers because of my glowing reviews of the Batman films, and Eastwood projects—but this—this Cloud Atlas—it was just wretched. It was like looking at something a dog puked up after eating feces in the yard mixed with freshly cut grass and garbage out of the hamper. It is unbelievable that anybody ever gave a green light for that movie because if that is what people in Hollywood think is a good movie, we are in big trouble.
I gave the film a chance because Roger Ebert loved it—he said he thought it was one of the most ambitious films ever made and was a complicated riddle that deserved multiple viewings. And parts of it were very ambitious, the budget was large, the visionary attempt was epic, and it had stars. Susan Sarandon’s inclusion almost made me not even watch it because of her active progressivism—but I recorded it on my DVR in March and finally got around to watching it in June out of obligation really. I felt because of what Ebert said that the film deserved attention, but I knew it was a progressive film—so I treated it like a trip to the dentist—something you don’t really enjoy, but is needed from time to time for basic maintenance. My conclusion was that Roger Ebert lost his mind. Cloud Atlas was that terrible.
The foundation of Cloud Atlas is deeply flawed making all the interesting interconnected storylines worthless. The film is about gay love, slavery, feminism, and is clearly against big oil. It is also about the worthless nature of individual lives and only concerned about how they fit into the larger tapestry of existence. Considering Ebert died shortly after Cloud Atlas I’ll give him a pass—maybe the idea of resurrection through a future life was something appealing to him in those last moments and he saw in the Cloud Atlas insanity a ray of hope for himself. The film was released around the same time that Atlas Shrugged Part II hit theaters and I remember well having to defend that film from people who loved Cloud Atlas. So I made a point to see the film at the first available moment which is why I recorded it. Being an open supporter of the filmmakers producing the Atlas Shrugged films, I wanted to understand how the other side could make such comparisons, and what I learned was that Cloud Atlas is the exact opposite philosophy of Atlas Shrugged. The two couldn’t be further apart in values—they have nothing in common other than the word “Atlas” in their titles.
And before anybody says that I didn’t understand the film………………….please, don’t waste the time. I understood all the metaphors in the film and I get the interaction of the characters and the various time periods. But to what point—so that the sick guy on the ship trying to get home to his wife who was really the future goddess of civilization could tell her bigoted father that she was running off with her husband? That was the closing scene and the climax of the picture?????????????????????????????? No, there was another climax, the one with Tom Hanks and Halle Berry married and living happily on another planet well into the future telling the story of Cloud Atlas to his grandchildren who wanted to look up at the stars and know which one was earth. Really???????????????????? I wasted three hours to come to that stupid revelation? You can refund money but you can’t refund time—and I am resentful that I lost three hours of my life to Cloud Atlas.
However, one thing that I did learn is that everything I say about progressives is absolutely 100% correct. Their world vision was on full display in Cloud Atlas and philosophically, they are like children right out of the womb—yet they believe they are at the height of human knowledge. Cloud Atlas was presented as an exclamation point and epic triumph toward progressive thought. Tom Hanks is a smart guy and a great actor—so he consciously took on multiple roles in the film. It was obviously for him a labor of love—he believed in the project intensely—and that concerns me greatly for his very mental health. There was nothing profound about Cloud Atlas. It was like watching the news with a progressive slant. It was ridiculously simple and anti-climatic. I mean crap…………..it was just terrible.
I understand that I hate progressive and liberal philosophy. Those idiots can call me a right-winger all they want—because if Cloud Atlas is what they think merits thought—they are thoughtless. They do not even have the ability to make a compelling argument if that is the best they can do. Cloud Atlas is the culmination of that kind of crappy Hollywood politics where screenplays are written by boot lickers at parties where drugs flow freely and everyone thinks they are brilliant from the vantage point of the little flat of land nudged up between the Pacific Ocean and the Nevada desert mountains. The Wachowski family is not the second coming. They likely ripped off the concept of the Matrix from another writer and have struggled to make a good film since—even though studios have thrown massive budgets at them. Larry Wachowski wrecked his life in the Hollywood Dungeon when he started hanging around with Iisa Strix and Buck Angel the transsexual known as “The Dude With a Pussy.” Worse yet, one of the directors of Cloud Atlas was Lana—who used to be Larry after he went through a sex change operation—so he is one of those LGBT people and that wrecked identity became Cloud Atlas.
It’s not that the many incidences in Cloud Atlas where male characters play females, and females play males was artistically wrong—it was just too simple. Anyone who bases their identity purely on sexual function is a lost cause—and in essence, this is what was going on in Cloud Atlas. The premise of the characters is from the vantage point of the kind of person who desires to engage in bondage in the Dungeon which is a huge part of that transsexual community in Los Angeles. But for the rest of the nation—it’s considered stupid. So while Cloud Atlas had a 10 minute standing ovation at Sundance and progressives raved about the film—it is only hard-core progressives who enjoyed it. For everyone else—it is ridiculously simple—and tragically limited in its philosophical outlook. What makes a person is not the holes they have in their bodies which allow for sexual penetration—it is the content of their minds—and in Cloud Atlas, the minds are disasters who made a film seething with liberal talking points ridiculously displayed as a work of art that belong nowhere else but in a litter box.
Ironically, I didn’t even know that Larry had turned himself into Lana before I watched Cloud Atlas. I discovered that trying to figure out why the movie was so fu**ed up. I was trying to understand how and why Warner Brothers distributed the film and discover who put up the money for the project and learn what on earth the directors were thinking. That’s when I learned that Larry never recovered from his divorce after being caught with the dominatrix Strix in the Dungeon—and had poured way too much mental energy into becoming a woman. He then directed a film about the quality of a soul regardless of gender roles over a long-span of time to justify his/her terrible decisions in life.
Wow……………………………
Do yourself a favor———never watch Cloud Atlas. Something’s are better left alone—and that movie is one of them.
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.
If it wasn’t such an astonishing film with some truly remarkable points to make—I would likely have just enjoyed Jersey Boys as a pleasant movie. It’s not the normal kind of film that I would go to the theater to see. I’m not really crazy about pop music, and I could care less about another mobster movie—which Jersey Boys is at its heart. But this was different—I have been a Clint Eastwood fan all of my life and continue to admire his work late in life when most people would have cashed in and checked out a long time ago. I remember well when George Burns was still living well in his 80s which defied logic—but even he looked like a burnt up old man. Eastwood still has his swagger—and his mind at 84 without any sign of slowing down. I knew during the filming of Jersey Boys Clint’s wife wanted to run off with an old friend—a much younger man, then when Eastwood was ready to give her a divorce, she decided she didn’t want it. I also knew that Eastwood’s oldest son Kyle was in the film as a musical coordinator, and that one of his newest daughters Francesca was supposed to be in the cast. I also knew that he was in pre-production for American Sniper—and there was a lot of other subplots not even related to the difficult production of Jersey Boys which is very well documented. Heck, the main character Frankie Valli is still alive and performing, and would see everything that Eastwood put on film—which can be intimidating to get right. There were at least 1000 reasons Jersey Boys should have been a bad movie and there would be every excuse available for it—so I went to see the film to support Clint Eastwood and his tireless efforts as a brilliant film director. What I saw wasn’t just good, or even great—it was magnificent.
Jersey Boys is a movie filled with very subtle scenes of radiance. The strength of Clint Eastwood not only as an actor, but a director is in his ability to put many emotions in a scene from moment to moment. This was never clearer than when Frankie Valli rescued his daughter who was a run-away from a vile scum bag with a mobster hit man. The moment brought laughs from the audience and was reminiscent of one of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry films but within a moment in the same scene was a level of drama seen in Mystic River. Valli had rescued his daughter then tried to tell her he was going to save her by making her dreams come true—helping her develop a singing career. As Valli spoke the words, it was clear he was making a mistake—the girl only wanted her father’s attention and her rebelliousness was clearly a response to an emptiness left in her life by a father who was always on the road. The scene was like Eastwood himself, a person who works at many levels all at the same time. The actor clearly had to know how Eastwood wanted to shoot the scene, yet the real Frankie Valli is one of the producers of the film and the decisions he had made eventually would lead to the death of that daughter and had to be painful for him. Eastwood handled all these elements like a symphony—effortlessly. Most directors would have wanted to show off how brilliant they were in such a scene—but Eastwood doesn’t even feel he needs to put a light on it. It just is—and he moves on to the next scene which is just as brilliant for the rest of the movie. It is amazing not only on how Eastwood handles things in front of the camera, but the elements behind the camera which affect what’s in front like an untouched maestro that only extreme maturity and philosophic understanding could provide. I had the feeling that the scene would cause the real Frankie Valli a lot of pain, but Eastwood didn’t care. I thought of his character from High Plains Drifter from many years prior—“people are only scared of what they know about themselves inside.” Eastwood had seen through the emotion written on the page of a screenplay to the heart of the problem and he did not hesitate to cast his opinion through film—which was gut wrenching. Moments later, Eastwood had the audience laughing again and enjoying music. It was quite phenomenal to see.
An example of such brilliance was the way the main characters provided narration throughout the film looking directly into the camera like it was a live stage play. Typically, it is a big error for an actor to look directly into the camera and speak to an audience—yet Eastwood pulls it off without being distracting. I can’t ever recall seeing such a narrative that does not interrupt the flow of the film and it wasn’t just one character—but several. It is a difficult concept to conceive, and even harder to pull off—yet Clint Eastwood effortlessly pulled it off knowing very well that he was shooting a period piece that most of the audience was alive to confirm—and playing music that many in the audience knew by heart. For any other film director—the task would be daunting—but for 84-year-old Clint Eastwood who is a master of his craft and at the top of his game—it was just the result of a life fully lived by a man who had seen and done everything and lived to tell the stories.
Jersey Boys could have been a PG film—there was no sex in it, or nudity. It was done very stylishly—except that the F-bomb was used extensively. But it was never distracting—it felt natural—like part of the culture we were witnessing. Warner Brothers would have reigned in any director except Clint Eastwood. They would have cut the language to get the PG rating for ticket sales, but because of whom the director was—they left Jersey Boys alone which tremendously elevated the authenticity of the subject matter.
Jersey Boys is a musical, but it didn’t go out of its way to be elaborately flowery in that category—the way Chicago, or even Walk The Line did—it again was an effortless exchange between a master filmmaker who happens to be old and uniquely able to convey wisdom that only elderly people can achieve—without being stuffy. Jersey Boys is really amazingly efficient in its delivery of complicated subject matter, well-known songs, and the telling of a story backed by actual history. In one scene the music is interrupted while one of the band members turns to the camera and speaks directly to the audience. It was a strangely satisfying way to tell the story that might only make sense on a printed page as a dream sequence. Most filmmakers would struggle to tell the crew in a meeting what their vision for such a scene would be—yet again Eastwood pulls it off as if everyone does it in every film ever made.
I found myself identifying with the young Frankie Valli and his unique relationship to a mob boss in Christopher Walken. I had a similar background—and understand how complex those types of relationships can be—how the morality between right and wrong can easily be colored gray. Eastwood in telling this kind of story never loses sight of right and wrong while at the same time covering every shade of gray that there is with humor, horror, pity, and honor. There hasn’t been a mob film done this well since The Godfather or Goodfellas. Christopher Walken played his part with all the confidence one would expect—and entered the storyline reminiscent of Pulp Fiction. Again there is typically a tendency to overplay the Walken type of mob boss in films because his performance was so incredibly strong. Yet Eastwood backs off the thrusters just enough to hit the right speed with the entire mob portion of the story seemingly taking a back seat to the music—which of course it was actually the support structure without naming it.
Yet my favorite character in the story was Bob Gaudio who at the end of the film proudly proclaimed to the camera—that without him, none of the events of the story would have happened—and he’s right. Gaudio wrote the songs that made Frankie Valli famous and carried the Four Seasons to heights they wouldn’t otherwise achieve. It wasn’t a teamwork exercise—it was because of Bob Gaudio that the Four Seasons produced so many hits. Frankie Valli had the unique voice, and everyone in the band did the hard work on the road—but it was because of Gaudio that there was anything to sing. I think only Clint Eastwood could have had a character deliver a line like that without sounding pretentious. It was a uniquely Clint Eastwood line delivered authentically.
If you go back to Eastwood films like Play Misty for Me the fabulous cinematography seen in Jersey Boys is not there. But the substance of subject matter was. Eastwood films are always intelligent, even in his comedies like Every Which Way But Loose. But Eastwood never let technical limits stop him from making a film. He doesn’t seem to worry about making something that will be criticized by someone who might think they can do it better. He just makes things—and really doesn’t seem to care how it’s judged. In this fashion he has made a lot of movies over a very long career. But starting with the movies he has made since his late 60s, the subject matter and quality of the films has become much better culminating in Jersey Boys. If this isn’t the Best Picture at the 2014 Academy Awards—I don’t know what would be. It is filmmaking at its best by a director who is the best. It was a pleasure to watch, and a real treasure to come from Clint Eastwood who once again has not disappointed me at the movie theater. I got more out of Jersey Boys than I thought I would—and that is always a good thing. And for me to feel that way about a film—it has to have some unique texture that speaks at many levels—and Jersey Boys does—just like the guy who made it.
I first ran into the music of Frankie Valli when I saw Grease as a kid, the movie with John Travolta and Olivia Newton John. Even back then, Valli was already considered an elderly music legend. At that same time, Clint Eastwood was an aging actor playing parts in films that were nearing retirement. It is then ironic that these two entertainment professionals are still around and kicking in 2014 and that they united to make the film Jersey Boys. For me the most haunting portion of the film was the first time the daughter who would die later in the story sat at the top of the steps of their home angry at her daddy, Frankie Valli for not being home more. For both Eastwood and Valli this had to be a hard scene to film, because their entertainment lives had taken a toll on their personal lives. For Eastwood it was happening again and again, and during the filming of Jersey Boys his wife wanted to run off with a another man. But who could blame her Eastwood hadn’t been a saint. Eastwood has had so many girlfriends and children by them over his long life that he had to have many similar discussions with them as shown in Jersey Boys. The pain is that Valli did not listen to his daughter even though it was obvious that he loved her. There has been several times where I have had the same talk with my daughters and I chose to stay home—and to this day my kids appreciate it. I never had to deal with the kind of things Valli or Eastwood did—but these are the kinds of decisions that must be made by people who want to play the entertainment game at that level. Eastwood handled the scene with haunting coolness given the fact that several of his own children were on the set of Jersey Boys and undoubtedly the real Frankie Valli had to watch the dailies and it had to hurt him. There was real pain in those scenes—and they were handled with care without being too mushy.
If you dear reader were thinking of seeing Jersey Boys, you should take a moment over the upcoming weekend to see it at the theater. The end of the film transposes into a large musical number that is reminiscent of the stage play. It was just another example of the expert care Eastwood’s direction of the film exhibited. It was stylish without being campy—and unusually potent for a bookend to the entire film. Jersey Boys is one of those unique films, and it is a treat for everyone who sees it. It embodied all the elements of living life the way only an 84-year-old man who has always pushed the limit can tall it—making it a real American treasure that will never be forgotten. It is quite simply an amazing film.
