They search the culture when they arrive
To build a vehicle to drive
You see some thing familiar but not the whole truth
Behind image and projection is a booth
Flying saucers and Jews are history
Agents of change that demand respect
In the margins more often than you'd expect
At liminal times of anti-structure
There as catalyst and trickster
Flying saucers and Jews are religions
It matters not if disbeliever,
Doubter, faithful or hater
In praise or in bile
In worship or denial
Flying saucers and Jews are important
They affect the course of things
In radiating concentric rings
Everywhere and nowhere
It is important not to stare
Flying saucers and Jews are dangerous
To your employment and your sanity
To culture and humanity
Your life and home and such
And especially if you know too much
Flying saucers and Jews are secret
There are shadowy groups of men
Who have this as their ken
Causal forces are kept from you
Whether UFO or Jew
You'll lose family and friends
Who won't follow 'round the bends
They'll think you mad or cruel
Or just a hopeless fool
They will not hear your facts
And they will not have your back
Their worldview is their ground
So they must assume it's sound
They don't want to leave confused
Or think that they've been used
So they start on the offense
And say you don't make sense
The alternative seems bad
To learn and become sad
Ignorance is bliss
But there are some things they have missed
~~~
I considered framing this as a selfless and objective account. I told myself (as I would tell you) that it wasn't a petition for pity, not a rant rooted in ressentiment, nor a humblebrag, nor a piece of excuse-making. Those are lies. The truth is that I am sad, and angry, and I do feel unfairly deprived of my privileges. I can only bring myself to admit so because I suspect I'm not alone in this feeling.
The question lurking behind the present storytime is "How many?" How many young men like me had every reason to believe they were going places, so they did their best, only to discover that the system was not interested in their contributions? How many have given up, and shut down, as I have? Finally, what are the results for a society if this happens on a regular basis?
Speaking from my own experience, grade school gave me the sense of being singular, at least among those kids within busing distance. My alleged smarts were spoken of like sorcery, a strange mysterious power conferred on me by the Fates. A classmate once asked if I had eaten a dictionary. I finished Grade 8 Math with a final mark above 100, which might say more about my math teacher than myself. All of which is to observe that the ear of one's ego has to bend toward something. It wouldn't have been sports. It couldn't have been church. Lord knows, it wasn't Canada. Not having a tribe of my own or a healthy and harmonious family, I could only take pride in my numerically-quantified academic accomplishments as an atomized individual.
So I was a student. A good student. A very good student. I would often like to protest that I didn't work that hard, only as hard as the projects apparently required, yet that minimal standard seemed to exceed that of others. Completing these mostly pointless and stupid assignments, and watching others struggle with them, undoubtedly warped me in all kinds of ways. I only wish that inflation and distortion of my character might have been harnessed for good.
This may be where I went astray. I never got to a point with math or science where it was anything more than rote learning. If you understood the principles and followed them correctly, you always found the right answer. Maybe I could have been a great mathematician, but I could think of nothing less interesting. The practice of science looked similarly thankless, long stretches of dull routine broken up by occasional excitement. I made the choice to go into arts and humanities instead as soon as I had the option.
What was the essence of that choice? Was I moving toward understanding humanity, expressing myself, and thinking creatively, or was I just fleeing from the boring business of keeping this shit show running? I surely revelled in the maverick move of not doing the obvious, and I really hoped to find engaging shades of grey demanding messy interpretation, but I was also lazy, and worn-out from a decade of busywork while my peers were having childhoods. I think I had legitimate grievances against the status quo, against war and waste, corporatism and kakistocracy, but did I actually believe that I could not operate within the establishment without compromising my principles, or did it just look like too much trouble? I'm trying to recount the ways my education failed me, but I can't get past my own complicity. I could be a rich doctor right now, instead of a destitute dreg. Sometimes smart people are improbably stupid.
On that note, I eventually chose to attend Trent University. They had a department of cultural studies, and Maclean's magazine said they wore Birkenstocks and sometimes went to class in pyjamas there, so that's the school I picked. The highfalutin hand-waving the program used to describe itself sounded good enough. Of course there are power imbalances in society. Of course there's injustice. Who wouldn't want to make the world more just and fair? It did all sound a little airy, but the program promised workshops in the arts. I would learn practical skills. If not a professorship, I could go into film or theatre. Three career tracks in one degree! What could go wrong?
I must pause at this point to draw out another animating idea for this bit, and that's the good faith assumption of a functioning society. You want to believe that your elders and superiors have guarded against decadence and decline. You want to believe that expensive degrees have value. It looked on the surface like cultural studies might be an indulgently speculative enterprise, an ivory tower endeavour far-removed from reality. I knew that to be the unschooled assumption of retrograde country bumpkins. It simply wasn't conceivable that so many smart people could be caught up in a lie. If the Emperor had no clothes, someone would have said something, and that cultural studies department would disband in shame.
Of course, they had no shame. I was told about the pathological propensities of my people to want a happy family and a strong leader, and I was told that another people were the supreme paragons of moral virtue in human history. I figured out that I was only being very poorly taught how to put on a play or make a movie so that I could advance the social theories of my professors. Despite my efforts to avoid the drily predictable patterns of rationalistic quantitative analysis, there was still only one right answer, and what was worse: it didn't even agree with reason. 2 + 2 was always 5.
My experience of cultural studies was akin to gaslighting. The hostility to anything normative seemed to come out of nowhere in second year, after I had committed to the major, yet all the students and professors treated it as established, proven, and beyond debate that we should all be Marxists disassembling the dominant culture. I looked around the table and couldn't see anyone as confused as I felt. Maybe it was me. Maybe I was mistaken. Maybe I was mad. The alternative was a lot worse to contemplate.
I never kept my grades up for their own sake. The mark was a measure of the degree to which I had committed myself to understanding and embodying the principles conveyed. I could feel good about myself because I was playing along. I was learning the ropes so that one day I might captain my own ship in a vast armada. Together we would do great and glorious things, noble things we can't even imagine. All I had to do was listen to the words of those older and wiser than myself, apply what they had taught me, be reasonable, and speak the truth. Speech is social, and justice is true, so I thought that I was on board with social justice.
I never expected that my degree would end with an epic moral quandary. I was just a few papers away from earning my Honours, papers that I had imagined would be the culmination of my learning, tying it all up in a neat bow that would point to what the next step should be. Instead I was more confused than at the beginning, not to say that I didn't have more ideas in my head. I knew the sociopolitical bullet points that I should work from if I knew what was good for me, but in truth, I had not been convinced of them. I could fake it, I was sure of that, but I wasn't sure I would emerge from that process the same person. A little part of me would die, the part that wants my reason, actions, and conscience to be in accord with one another. The very part that torments me to this day, but I keep alive anyway, in the hopes that one day I'll find a worthy use for it.
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.
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.
This does not mean that the police never unjustly kill Black people
or that any particular anecdote is false. But it does mean that we can
not infer from any anecdote the sort of generalized narratives which BLM
types are prone to pushing.
Those who have a college indoctrination, regularly consume mainstream news media, and make a lot of money, have become more trusting of institutions in the eight years since the financial collapse of 2008. They are the "informed public." Everyone else, the "mass populations," have certain questions and concerns. This is corrosive to democracy! They should have more faith in government, for the good of society.
I wonder why anti-Semitism is on the rise in Europe? Is it because Europeans have finally begun to notice that Jews overwhelmingly support
flooding European nations with non-Europeans? Perhaps the best solution
to the issue of anti-Semitism would be for Jews in Europe to respect
the self-determination and sovereignty of ethnic Europeans – but I think
we all know that isn't going to happen.
Joseph Hirt was concerned about ignorance of the truth, so he made up a lie to support the truth.
He wasn't arrested by the Nazis, he didn't escape from Auschwitz under an electric fence, and he didn't meet Jesse Owens, Eleanor Roosevelt, or Dr. Mengele. He did get a tattoo of Primo Levi's camp number, “in no way an attempt to take on his identity, but in an effort to incorporate his symbol as a way of remembering him”.
As historian Ken Waltzer wrote when Herman Rosenblat was found to have embellished his memoir, "This shows something about the broad unwillingness in our culture to confront the difficult knowledge of the Holocaust." People's susceptibility to lies about the Holocaust proves the necessity of believing in it, obviously.
Historical investigation of the event remains verboten.
A "virtual Holocaust survivor" who lived through an extermination camp and a death march will now be educating children by "upsetting the viewer’s sense of comfort."
The interactive hologram and associated artificial intelligence answers questions with selections from 25 hours of footage of Pinchas Gutter, creating a vivid and convincing testimony intended to "jolt another world into your own."
Historical investigation of the event remains verboten.
Here’s who the New York Times blames, in order: Republican
politicians, Republican-led state legislatures, Republican governors,
Republican federal lawmakers, Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz,
North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Texas Attorney
General Ken Paxton, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant, anyone who believes in
traditional marriage, anyone who’s ever voted to preserve traditional
marriage, and anyone who has ever voted for anyone who believes in or
has voted to preserve traditional marriage.
The lone witness to allege that the killer of British MP Jo Cox shouted "Britain First!" before and after the murder is himself a member of the rival British National Party. Another witness, a Muslim, denies the statement was uttered. Journalists, politicians, and the pundits of social media proceed with their confidently bigoted denunciation of anyone with any ideas in common with the crazy person.
A giggling old man employed as a humanitarian mascot thinks that universal secular ethics and common sense will inevitably defeat regressive imperialistic theology rooted in violence and oppression--so there's nothing to worry about. The nice man said so.
Teen girls in Germany are being sexually assaulted by migrant men on public transit on a daily basis, but they haven't said anything because their elders have told them we mustn't judge.
While the Catholic Pope Francis calls walls unchristian and washes the feet of migrants, the Russian Orthodox Church makes the ethical argument for sovereignty in the face of the financial and cultural pressures of transnational elites.
Almost fifteen years after the event, the terrorist attack on the WTC in New York is still being used by all parties as a political weapon in a dangerous war of words.
If you live in the CBC matrix, you are living in a bubble that will soon
be pricked by reality. A reality that even the CBC cannot hold at bay.
Your trusted information gatekeepers will not be able to stop the truth
from busting through and overwhelming you. The shock will render you
bewildered and paralytic. You will not be able to make sense of what has
befallen you, much in the way that the establishment media pundits are
dumbfounded by Trump's success. How could this happen?
Elijah Wood, himself having avoided being preyed upon by Hollywood moguls, has seen enough, heard enough, and read enough to break ranks and attest to the presence of organised child abuse in the global centre of culture creation.
"Imposing human editorial values" is the job of a team of "news curators" who decide what stories Facebook will display as currently important to users.
As thousands of residents of Fort McMurray fear for the loss of their homes and lives to raging wildfires, people of all sorts work to help however they can. Where some see a human tragedy, others a terrible example of nature's power, some see an opportunity for the advancement of their political agenda, and others praise this effort as much as the charity being reported.
