A Word From the Folks at GYWO

On the Other Hand (or, Lately it Occurs to Me)....

In my lifetime, I only went to about a half dozen Dead shows because it took a lot for me to handle the scene. I was at the Dead's last show in Pittsburgh, PA (June '95) and witnessed them make it rain. I swear I did and I was NOT on psychotropics.

The other day, I was walking along on campus and, as somebody passed me, I caught a whiff of pachouli and nearly burst into tears.

If, in my youth, the general level of fascism in this country had been as high as it is today, I think I would have gladly taken refuge in the Deadhead scene despite my many reservations. But I don't know for sure. I've come to believe that if white people are not drugged up and made to dance in that weird Scenehead tai chi kind of way, they will spend their time travelling the world killing and robbing brown people. So, in a way, I think a case can be made that the Deadheads and Sceneheads alike were the last line of defense.

Perhaps I should be more kind...

Of Deadheads, Sceneheads, and the Whitmanian Republic

1. I have been a fan of the Grateful Dead since 1970. I was only 10 years old in that fateful year, but I have an older brother 10 years my senior. A friend of his was traveling cross country that summer and he stopped at our house to crash for several days. As it turns out, he was carrying in his rucksack several newly released record albums. The two I recall most vividly were the Dead's Workingman's Dead and Stage Fright by the Band. The rockified American roots music that these albums exemplified struck me as urgent dispatches from what Greil Marcus would later dub the "invisible republic"--that old weird America of folkies and proto-hippies who seemed always to operate outside accepted channels and who represented something not only authentically American but something good, true, and beautiful about this country.

2. Workingman's Dead quickly became one of my favorite records. In High School (mid-1970's) I bought a copy of it on 8-track so that I could stick it in the stereo and let it play continuously (no doubt to the dismay of my parents). In college (late '70's, early 1980's), I began to encounter my first Deadheads. I found them a rather queer folk, insofar as their appreciation of the Grateful Dead struck me as cultic and exclusivist. Espousing a non-conformist ethos, I detected an oppressively high degree of conformism within the confines of the GD community. Tie-dye, SYF, dancing-bears, and the cultivated "great-unwashed" look prevailed among this overwhelmingly white, middle-class crowd. Had they no sense of irony? Despite this, I never lost my love of the music or the "don't tread on me" sensibility that lived on in many of the band's lyrics. I was a Deadhead, but not a Scenehead.

3. The Sceneheads were those who, in my opinion, mistook the Deadhead "scene" for their final destination in life. By slipping on the uniform, they felt that they had arrived: the scene was an end in itself. But to my way of thinking, the scene was a "dead end"--not a proper Dead end. It was as though a group of people who were honestly seeking something of value in their lives had happened upon the entranceway to the journey that they longed to take...and then stopped, propped up their feet and announced, "We're home." Would that it were that easy. Being around Sceneheads was like being caught in a congested doorway where no one seemed to enter or exit fully; instead, folks just hung out and blocked the path for those who would enter the room. I was one of those who would enter the room.

4. I did enter the room, but not through the Sceneheads' passage. I entered the room with Bob Dylan, mainly, and the Band, and Woody Guthrie, Josh White, Cisco Houston, Pete Seeger--and Bruce Springsteen, who has always been one of Dylan's most attentive students. Indeed, I would often chide Sceneheads that, since the Dead were "the world's greatest Bob Dylan cover band," why didn't they ever stop, think, and really spend some time listening to Dylan? I was often shocked to discover how little the average Scenehead understood about the deep roots that descend from the Grateful Dead's music into the Invisible Republic that Dylan haunts and mines for the very notes he plays and the words he sings.

5. I am hard on the Sceneheads when, I suppose, I should be "kind." But sometimes one must be cruel to be kind. A lifetime spent "making the scene" rather than penetrating the scene to the reality that lies through the doorway is, in my view, misspent. What lies in the entrance is an ersatz tribalism; through the doorway is an authentically American spirituality and invisible polity whose founding prophet was none other than Walt Whitman. Ever since the good, gray poet gifted this country (and, indeed, the world) with his cosmopolitan vision of a new way of being in the world--a distinctively American way, yet one purged of the taints of jingoism and militarism--successors have risen up to summon the Whitmanian angels. In the wake of the spiritual crisis and moral blindness that our use of nuclear weaponry in the 1940's has visited upon us, Kerouac and the Beats resurrected Whitmanian song. During the folly of Viet Nam, ambassadors of the Whitmanian republic emerged from the woodwork. Among those sent forth was the jug-cum-jazz band that called itself the Grateful Dead. The majority of Sceneheads I have known were always too busy waiting on a miracle to attend to the true prophet who was calling them through the Dead to an older American consciousness and sensibility.

6. In the dozen years that have elapsed since Jerry Garcia's passing, the Deadhead scene appears to have grown thin. I do not know what the Sceneheads are up to. Maybe some, like the "Sceneheads" of first century C.E. Palestine, are waiting for the return of the Messiah. Others, I hope, have let lessons of love and loss sink deep into their consciousness and are itching (not for another scene but) to conjure the Whitmanian angels that reside within themselves and to discover the power to bring to visibility the republic that lives on even in the heart of the Empire. This republic is composed of true non-conformists--not scene-makers--who, like the Dead themselves, understand how to work and play together in a way that makes room for internal diversity and, at the same time, challenges others to do the same. Such a republic is not an exercise in nostalgia, but a vision of the future that the Dead's approach to music and the making of it modeled with greater consistency and clarity than the Deadhead scene ever did or could.

Anarchy, State, and the Grateful Dead

As we recently observed the 12th anniversary of the passing of Jerry Garcia, I have been thinking a lot about the Dead and what they modeled for us on-stage.

It wasn't Utopia, exactly, but it was pretty damn close, it seems to me.

What the Dead accomplished musically was intimately related to the "polity" that they configured whenever they performed publicly: a loose confederation of individual talents, each intensely concerned with working through his (or her, let us not forget Donna Jean) particular musical vision.

What that meant for many of us was hours of time chewed up while the members of the "band" noodled around with their instruments, ostensibly searching for something--like a bunch of absent-minded professors groping first their suit-coats, then their valises, desperately trying to remember where they left their lecture notes.

Much of the time, the fact that the individual members of the Dead were located in reasonably close proximity to one another on stage was the only legitimate sense in which it could be said that they were playing "together" at all.

But, eventually, one musician would come up with something--a riff, a thin ribbon of melody--that would attract the attention of another musician and the two would begin to play off one another; others would pick up on what the pair was doing and a musical consensus would emerge. Before you knew it, Garcia was standing at the mike murmuring the words to Bonnie Dobson's apocalyptic folk standard "Morning Dew" and, as with all apocalypses, the shit was about to go down. And the Dead--all together now (as the Beatles would say)--were bringing the eschaton home.

It was just too much. A revelation almost every time.

I would contrast this musical methodology with that of another long-time favorite of mine, Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band. Bruce and the E-Streeters are nothing if not tight. They have a work ethic that produces music of amazing intensity and, live, even improvisation. But it is always at the direction of the band-leader, Mr. Springsteen (they don't call him the Boss for nothin'). Their magic (interestingly, the title of their forthcoming release) is a honed magic.

The Dead's magic was also honed by years of playing together, but it always had a surprisingness and spontaneity about it that I doubt Bruce and the E-Streeters would care to risk--in public at any rate. Rehearsal may be another matter. For the Dead, however, it was always rehearsal--a lifetime of it. And it had to be that way because the individual members of the group refused always to subordinate their individual visions to the collective--except when the moment seemed right.

In this way the Grateful Dead modeled for us all a vision of an egalitarian society: one that trades the efficiencies necessary to generate sustained intensity for the individual space necessary to allow idiosyncrasies to play themselves out. It could be aggravating, boring, narcissistic-seeming and, sometimes, even a little bit embarrassing: but these down-sides just may be the price one must pay to maximize individual artistic freedom.

Tom Tomorrow on Tom Friedman's Utter Inanity

The only thing missing from this comic is a reference to Friedman's "My Zion, right or wrong" political philosophy...But one can only do so much with six panels...

Dept. of Eternal Optimism

Joyce's Motto or Gnostic Politics

In A Portrait of the Artist..., Joyce wrote:

"I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use--silence, exile, and cunning."

NON-VIOLENT, NON-COOPERATION with the principalities and powers that rule over this present darkness is the Gnostic political mode post-8:15 a.m., August 6, 1945, Japanese time.

In December of that same year, in upper Egypt, near the village of Nag Hammadi, two brothers digging for sabakh (a soft soil used to fertilize their crops), unearthed the first Gnostic reply to the Leviathan's display of epic bestiality of the previous summer: a large red earthenware jar containing 13 books, bound in leather. The message in the bottle contained instructions for the eventual subversion of the Christo-Fascistic Empire that had made its pact with the Demiurge for white world supremacy.

Everyday we must resist the devil's tricknology with silence, exile, cunning...

Notes on the State of Things

Recommended Reading:

"Shine, Perishing Republic," by Robinson Jeffers. Jeffers was responding to the U. S.'s involvement in the "Great War" (WWI). I date the end of our republic and the beginning of the Empire to the poet's salient observations.

Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman. Whitman was the great visionary of an America that might have been but, alas, is not. His poems remind us of the road not taken. Read them and weep.

Annals, by Cornelius Tacitus. Tacitus is often considered to be the greatest historian that ancient Rome produced, and the Annals are his masterpiece. He is particularly important today because of his understanding of the social role of the historian: "to pass political and moral judgments on the past and thereby affect the future" (Ronald Mellor, The Historians of Ancient Rome, p. 393). Mellor adds: "In these books Tacitus creates a psychological portrait of the tyrant and his flatterers. The historian has no interest in sociological or economic explanations; he is concerned with political life, the loss of liberty, and the pathology of power" (pp. 393-394). The relevance of Tacitus increases when one considers the ways in which he would contrast Roman life and character under Empire with life and character during the Republic. More reading and weeping, I'm afraid.

John Hersey, Hiroshima. I first read this book in Middle School. It was a riveting read--especially so for me because my father, a nuclear chemist, had worked on the Manhattan Project (the secret government program that produced the atomic bomb). It chronicles the day America turned a moral corner that can never be un-turned; the day on which the military-industrial-complex took its "first communion" with Satan.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Even more reading and weeping.

James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. This book is suggestive of how those of us who live here in the heart of Leviathan can engage in effective political action. Entering a voting booth under duopolistic monoparty rule is no more harmful nor helpful than entering one of Wilhelm Reich's "orgone accumulators." Personally, I think I would take my chances with Reich... In any event, in a pseudemocracy such as we have in these Benighted States today, voting is an exercise in futility. Nevertheless, I recommend that people continue to do it so that we do not lose the habit. When the Empire falls, we may be able to re-invent a democratic republic.

What might cause the Empire to fall? Any number of things, but those of us on the inside may hasten the day by subverting it from within. Scott's book shows "the manifold strategies by which subordinate groups manage to insinuate their resistance, in disguised forms, into the public transcript" (p. 136). In other words, they "booby-trap" the Narrative.

In my view, an important aspect of any resistance to the Neo-Fascist/Christo-Fascist Leviathan is to reclaim the religious imagination. Left-leaning people have made the mistake of ignoring religion, thinking, I suppose, that if they did so, religion would just go away. Let's just get this out of the way up front: RELIGION IS NOT GOING AWAY ANYTIME SOON. And since the left abandoned religion--rather than cultivating the many ways in which religious thinking and literature may bolster a leftist agenda--it has been twisted into a potent source of totalitarian motivation by the plutocratic enemies of republican (i.e., meritocratic) governance.

Religious fundamentalism represents a failure of the religious imagination. Rationality can (and should) be used as a means of curbing credulity and wishful thinking, but it will never replace religious creativity. The latter must be harnessed for worthwhile ends.

Another reason to read Tacitus was his biting wit. Perhaps the closest thing we have to a Tacitus today is Al Franken. Tacitean shaming, scolding, and ridicule all contribute to the subversive program by means of which we must drive the neo-Fascists from power. Franken understands this and is leading the charge. And since the religious right in this country is so utterly rife with hypocrites, it can seem like shooting fish in a barrel. But these aren't gold-fish we're aiming at --they're piranhas. Therefore, fire at will.

Let me be clear that the subversive activity that I am advocating is only the sort that is protected by the Bill of Rights. I do not recommend violence in any form. Violence is, in fact, anti-political. I advocate the politics of continual "nuisancery," ridicule, and non-cooperation. It is the sort of political platform that can be carried out by all of us individually and daily.

Bill O'Reilly is a swine; Ann Coulter a word I have the decency not to print. Fox News is a tele-tabloid: if you actually watch that channel for information about the world, you are a dupe. These people and the organization that pays them emit a very bad odor in civilized society. We should take every opportunity to show them the door.

Bush and his co-conspirators are criminals. There will be no justice in this land until they are arrested and brought to trial by an international tribunal. I don't give a damn that they have refused to allow the United States to submit to the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice. That fact is just a further indication that they are well aware of their guilt. We must condemn them and their criminality at every opportunity.

And we must lament the end of the American Republic and the rise of the American Empire, the engine of which is the military-industrial-complex.

Our task is long and grim. Traitors (like the Republicrat-Democan duopoly, the 4th estate, and compliant religious communities) surround us on every side. But as Mao said: "A revolution is not a dinner-party." Nevertheless, if we work at it every day, we can make it approximate a Rabelasian carnival.

A Brief Broadside

The 9th and 10th Amendments to the U. S. Constitution legally underwrite the non-violent people's revolution to come:

Amendment IX

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Amendment X

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

The people have rights and powers vested in them by this country's founding charter that must be exercised!

The Bush Administration has perpetrated criminal acts domestically and internationally. In accordance with the rights and powers vested in the people of the United States under Amendments 9 and 10 to the present U. S. Constitution, the Bush Administration may be declared a rogue regime. The largely ceremonial Congress that was elected to correct the Bush Administration's criminality has proved complicit in the Administration's crimes and it, too, may therefore be declared as having placed itself outside the bounds of law and legitimacy.

I call upon the people of this great nation to begin to engage in acts of civil disobedience and to demand the arrest and trial of George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, and Colin Powell to answer for the high crimes and misdemeanors they have committed against the people of the United States, its laws and founding charter, and against the people of the sovereign nations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and against the people of Palestine.

Why standest thou afar off, O Lord? why hidest thou thyself in times of trouble? The wicked in his pride doth persecute the poor: let them be taken in the devices that they have imagined... Psalm 10: 1-2.

The rest of this Psalm is equally appropriate to our present predicament. I call upon every religious organization across this land to have Psalm 10 recited aloud at special services to be held this weekend and to preach sermons relating the words of this psalm to the criminality of the Bush Administration. I call upon every religious institution to publicly and explicitly condemn the continuing criminality of the United States government and to join with people of good will in all the States to call for a constitutional convention for the purposes of drafting a new charter that will bestow upon the people of this great nation a modern multi-party parliamentary democracy.

Let a non-violent people's revolution interrupt politics as usual:

God judgeth the righteous, and God is angry with the Wicked every day...Behold, he travaileth with iniquity and hath conceived mischief, and brought forth falsehood. He made a pit, and digged it, and is fallen into the ditch which he made. His mischief shall return upon his own head, and his violent dealing shall come down upon his own pate. Psalm 7: 11, 14-16.

Think on that, Mr. War President, if you think at all.

Bloomian "Mere" Gnosis

From H.B.'s "spiritual autobiography" (Omens of Millennium, 1996):

I am not a Jungian, and so give no credence to the archetypes of a collective unconscious. But I am both a literary and a religious critic, a devoted student of Gnosis both ancient and modern, and I have enormous respect for recurrent images of human spirituality, no matter how they may be transmitted. Images have their own potency and their own persistence; they testify to human need and desire, but also to a transcendent frontier that marks either a limit to the human, or a limitlessness that may be beyond the human. I return here to...Henry Corbin's "suprasensible world which is neither the empirical world of the sense nor the abstract world of the intellect." In that intermediate world, images reign, whether of the plays of Shakespeare, the scriptures of religion, our dreams, the presence of angels, or astral-body manifestations. The Millennium may be an event only in that middle world, but who can establish or prophecy the ultimate relations between sense impressions, images, and concepts?

I bought a copy of Omens the moment it appeared in my local bookstore. My first read-through disappointed me. When people asked me what I thought of it, I complained that Harold had said all these things before. And he had. I am currently reading the book through for at least the 3rd time (judging by the various underlinings and marginalia in my copy) and the book grows dearer to me with every reading. It no longer matters to me that he said nothing new in this book; what he said bore repeating.

We are now living the Millennium, a worrisome time indeed. Neo-fascists are at the helm of our ship of state. The "2-party system" every day exposes itself as the Republicrat-Democan mono-party (with a "liberal" and "conservative" wing)--the lap-dog of the plutocratic ruling class. Any possibility of democratic action has been repeatedly betrayed by the 4th estate. The "news" is nothing more than plutocratic political theater, designed to reinforce the illusion that our Congress is more than merely ceremonial, that there is no difference between a modern multi-party parliamentary democracy and our own. The opiates of the masses are the life-boat delusions of "salvation religion" and "salvation politics": just "get saved" by Jesus or by the right presidential candidate and all your troubles will be over.

Gnostics have always known better. The god of this world and the principalities and powers of this present darkness have matters well in hand. Our troubles are not at all superficial, but deep, pervasive, systemic. There will be no relief from our Millennial troubles until we recognize that fundamental change is needed: a moral or spiritual revolution that will awaken us to the true nature of our predicament. We are living in thrall to the military-industrial-complex.

This is not some conspiracy theory; the MIC does not operate in a shadow world but brazenly and in broad daylight. It openly takes our tax dollars. It advertises for the lives of our children on television and publicly recruits them on school campuses. And when ever any one of us innocently suggests that there is something deeply wrong with taking another person's life, and that organizing into military forces for that very purpose, making a career out of it, going to a foreign country and killing people in the name of "liberating them" and getting paid to do it, is downright pathological...

Oh My God!

"That's right," replies the Gnostic--"your God, though you call him (or her or it) Jesus or Yahweh or Allah, is nothing other than this murder-for-money-madness. Your religion is the MIC and your Pentagonal cathedral is supported in all of its operations by the government. So much for the separation of church and state."

This is the Millennium we are living. If we do not wake up, we will not rise up. If we do not rise up, we will continue to go down, down, down...