UFO

When Jared Taylor Came To Town

Your Favourite Viola Player is an Evil Wizard

Big Buts: My Intellectual Journey

~~~

When I was six years old, I saw a flashing electric blue rectangle descend from the night sky.  I thought it over, and decided this was not the sort of thing I should talk about to anyone ever.  Because I couldn't talk about it, I gradually forgot about it.  This is the story of my intellectual journey.

When I was thirteen I bought Fingerprints of the Gods.  I discovered in that book that humanity's past might not be a single simple linear ascent to greater sophistication.  So I took Ancient History in high school, where I was told that humans began as apes, and civilisation began with pyramids.  There was no acknowledgment of any uncertainty in this story, so I kept my mouth shut.

I tried LSD, psilocybin, mescaline and synthetic phenethylamines, dextromethorphan, salvia divinorum, and a weak preparation of dimethyltryptamine.  These helped me to apprehend that every person has a spark of divinity within, an eternal consciousness watched over by an absolute awareness that precedes the universe.  It's not the sort of thing you talk about, so I didn't.

I went to university for three things: film, theatre, and the critical examination of culture to determine what the hell is wrong with the world.  I learned how to use a primitive camera for greater authenticity, how to pretend that a wooden box is really a chair, and how to place the blame for all the ills of the world on straight white men like myself.  Marx and Freud got together with Adorno and Marcuse to say that I was a born oppressor whose guilt was proven by my denials, a pathological sort of person who must be repressed to encourage tolerance.  I saw the mental dressing down that occurred when you didn't agree this was all brilliant stuff, so I gave up on participating in seminars.

Disillusioned with academic cultural studies, I applied my philosophy education to the perils and opportunities of the internet.  What could be gleaned from those who spoke only to niche audiences, or took advantage of anonymity?  I found that most every time there was a subject considered too crazy to countenance by polite society, there was at least a kernel of truth to it. Every time, too, there was someone who took that truth too far.  I didn't want to be a fool or to be thought one, so I didn't even begin to engage with any of these interesting topics, except to study them.

The Earth is almost certainly round, but I haven't been to space or studied the physics of planetary formation, so I have to take someone's word for it.  The return of flat earth theory is likely being helped along by intelligence interests for the study and manipulation of the population, but as a thought experiment it's a peerless gauge of a person's capacity for challenging their assumptions.  No, the Earth isn't flat, but all it would take is a vast intergenerational conspiracy to deceive you on the matter.  It's a valuable exercise to consider the inconceivable for a moment or two.

Vaccines are described as safe and effective, but their inserts list serious conditions as side effects.  The unconscionable opinion of the science-denying anti-vaccine Dr. Andrew Wakefield is that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine should be issued separately at different times as three generic vaccines instead of one patented product at once with a greater potential for adverse effects.  This is why people have tried to silence and destroy him.  Vaccines may claim credit for the benefits of nutrition and sanitation, but the basic theory is still sound.

The elite meet in secret to party away their cares and perform ritual magic to absolve their consciences, but they always have, and the world hasn't ended yet.

There is strong laboratory evidence for mostly weak but almost universal powers of precognition, telepathy, clairvoyance and psychokinesis, but the people claiming strong powers have more reason than most to fake them.

JFK wanted to limit the power of the central bank, tell the people about UFOs, and cooperate with the Russkies to go to the Moon, so everyone got together to kill him, but he was probably Abraham Lincoln in a past life, so he may already be back.

Crop circles are mostly faked, but the people who regularly make them feel compelled to do so by an unknown force.

Stratospheric aerosol geo-engineering seems like it might be a real thing, but if we're all being contaminated by metals falling from the sky and seeping into our brains, then the people saying that necessarily have addled brains, and shouldn't be trusted.

Bread and milk are very bad for you.  You shouldn't eat them.  But they're delicious.

9/11 was executed by Saudi terrorists with help from Mossad, the CIA, and members of the Bush administration, but everyone fucking knows that.

Some people are absolute jerks, and when the delicate equilibrium of your brain is tipped so that you stop breaking down endogenous DMT at the normal rate, you spontaneously trip out on your own brain juices and your asshole boss turns into a lizard.  But that still doesn't prove there aren't reptile people.

Unidentified Flying Objects are a mixture of psychological, social, optical, and piezoelectric phenomena coupled with the observer effect operating on chimeric projections of consciousness grounded in other layers of reality, distorted by terrestrial psy-ops instigated by boys with toys they want to keep secret.

But before I had found all of these qualified positions, I was willing to throw myself into one.  Dr. Steven Greer said that he could use a combination of remote viewing protocols with Vipassana meditation to call down these UFOs.  I had just read some relevant books, and I dimly recalled seeing something in my youth, so I decided to reverse engineer Greer's methods and see me some UFOs.  With a vague sense of addressing myself to interdimensional star people, I continually asked in my head for a period of several months if I could please see some saucers. It worked, but what do you say about that?

After years of coping with the psychological fallout of seeing a fuckton of flying saucers on request, I came to terms with the mystery of our perennial interaction with others from a distant land, whatever the truth of it is.  I made my peace with the unspeakable at last.  I had weathered the gauntlet of conspiracies and the occult, of all the impossibly crazy ideas a person can consider, and I had emerged half-sane and not completely unreasonable.

It was around this time that it was pointed out to me that the critical theory I had read at university as an apparent critique of "our" own culture was actually disproportionately written by members of an ethnocentric tribe that considers itself as distinct from, and superior to, our deplorable culture.  It wasn't sober self-criticism at all.

It was then that I realised that actually paranormal phenomena are relatively easy to discuss.  You may accept or deny them.  Jews can only be praised or ignored.  To do otherwise is to invite accusations of stupidity and evil, for having the misfortune of asking a question that has been rendered curiously cartoonish.

This has been my intellectual journey thus far.

Tribalism and Phish

~~~

In the summer of '97, when I was thirteen, I somehow convinced my father to take me to see the band Phish for a whole weekend.  We drove to a decommissioned air force base in Maine, where tens of thousands of smelly travelers had convened to hear jams and hang out in the lot that was here a whole airstrip.  My mother didn't have any idea of the scene we'd find, else she wouldn't have allowed it.  My father rightly saw that it would be an interesting novelty for us both, and bless him for the effort.

The first sign on approach was one selling water pipes by the side of the road.  I didn't know what water pipes were, but I sensed I was entering another world.  Shortly that telltale stoner gave way to thousands of cars, and thousands more people setting up tents and meeting friends. 

There was a pervasive funk in the air that could not be avoided.  I learned years later that it was not the pot smoke I was smelling everywhere; it was the pot everyone was carrying in their pockets.  The word was "nuggs."

It wasn't just the drugs, though.  I can't remember ever seeing so many happy people in one place, and I know at least two of them weren't on drugs.  There was something more going on.  I was glimpsing not just a subculture, but an actual community, with its own economy, etiquette, and attitude.  It was a group of people cultivating a particular consciousness, and doing it not just with hallucinogens but with a shared sensibility.  I think the rot was just beginning to set in as it always does, but by and large these were peaceful, loving, unified and respectful individuals.

At one point Dad related to me a conversation he had with a woman with plates from some distant state.  She had seen her first show, and decided to hop into her car and start following the band for the rest of the tour.  Many people did that, suddenly leaving their square lives to relax on the road.  I sensed they were the ones who could afford to do so.  People sold food and jewelry and drugs out of their vans, but to even be in the position to drop out of society in that manner, one must have a certain standing in it to begin with.

There were surely a goodly number of trustafarians, but a lot of otherwise ordinary people too.  Young and old, hippie and normie, from every corner of America and beyond.  I saw a sea of people washing away from the stage after every set.  There were no fights, no bad vibes that I picked up.  Everyone was cooperating to create a spontaneous city of people with a taste for fun, surprising, eclectic music.  Phish as a band is musically omnivorous, contagiously sharing their love for different forms.  That kind of idiom can only welcome all kinds.  They studiously avoided politics or serious worldly concerns.  Phish was a safe space without judgment.

So what a twinge I felt when I got home and read an article out of Boston reporting on The Great Went.  One line stood out, a needle seeking to puncture that pleasant bubble.  The author observed, and then pointedly said nothing further on the matter, that there were almost no black faces in the crowd.  It just hung there, in the middle of the article, awkwardly interjecting itself as a non-sequitur.  What was the reader supposed to make of it?

Some people got together, and had a good time, and no one got hurt, and great memories were made, and happy songs were sung, and it felt like a rite of passage for me, but there weren't any black people there.  I should probably feel bad about that.  Why don't black people like Phish?  They play blues and jazz and funk music all the time.  Is that cultural appropriation?  Is Phish racist?  Is that why blacks don't like them?  Am I racist because I like Phish?  I wish more black people were there, so I wouldn't have to worry about this.

I had never seen a more cohesive and cheerful community, but the implication was that it must be doing something wrong.  I couldn't figure out what that was.

It should be said that Phish followed a cultural template from the Grateful Dead, who apparently trafficked LSD for the CIA.  Every rebellion of the last while has had an element of social engineering somewhere within.  I really don't think that Mike Gordon, the Jewish bass player, is actually the handler for three programmed stooges, deliberately removing good-hearted people from regular society where they might do some real damage, but it would be naive to pretend the mass movement of lots of people on lots of drugs listening to nonsense songs to escape from their privileged lives instead of improving their world is an unmitigated good. 

Nevertheless, however embarrassing, there is a fundamental sweetness to an unpolitised hippie.  Those who fall into the lifestyle of following a jam band, or who manage it on their vacations, find a fandom that could be called a family without too much hyperbole.  Certainly, they are a particular tribe, with symbols and chants that may move them more than those of their nation or town.  Phish doesn't have a constitution.  They don't have a foreign policy or a seat at the UN.  They do have singing, and dancing, and drums, and drugs, and lots of friendly, welcoming people, but apparently no black people, and that's a problem.