SONGS, VOICES, and ROLES UNFINISHED

Art, whether it’s a poem, painting, dance, or a song, begins to breathe on its own. It begins to talk back and create its own terms. The artist learns to “listen” and becomes a servant to those terms. He gives everything to them, hopefully.

One example instantly comes to mind: The late Karen Carpenter started out like many singers. First, reluctantly. And like most of us, she had her favorite artists who she probably wanted to sound like. We take our cues from those who inspire us. Meanwhile. she entered her brother’s jazz band as a drummer. She sang the band’s songs, but no one paid much attention to her sound or style. Until one day, her brother, Richard, asked her to change key for the sake of a particular piece, which meant lowering her register. He wanted more mezzo-soprano/contralto.

Karen began singing, and suddenly those around her heard something they’d never heard before. Richard told her to stop and start again. She did, and he was simply floored. Something was born with which no other voice would ever compare (even to date), forty years (exactly) after her tragic death. Magic happened that day with one of the most beautiful voices ever put to celluloid (or tape).

Around that same time, in the late 1960s, a song was being written by another artist, for another artist. Most people don’t realize, even today, what the song Galveston was really about. Written by Jimmy Webb, sung by Glen Campbell, it’s about an Army recruit who finds himself in Vietnam. While listening to the bombs overhead, while polishing his gun and fearing death, he dreams of home. It’s an anthem, a tribute, to the thousands who did the same during that “ten thousand day” war.

Galveston came out in 1969 and was certified Gold that October. It was one of the signature hits that made Glen Campbell famous. But the strange thing about it was that not much else was said about it, lyrically or musically. Campbell simply kept singing it through the years (as it’s still heard today), while accompanying himself on guitar with orchestra.

Fast forward to 2012 and Webb and Campbell decided to reunite (Glen Campbell and Jimmy Webb: In Session), and, maybe by sheer accident, maybe by suggestion, they agreed to play Galveston at a slower tempo. It almost immediately dawned on these two immensely talented artists that the song was being written “again, for the first time.” It meant the song had been done a grave injustice all those years. – Here was a piece still waiting, still protesting, still holding back, until it was played right. It was a magic moment, hence a poignant, frustrating one. What the world had been hearing was a song that really wasn’t finished. Still popular, still wonderful, but it hadn’t yet fully metamorphosed.

Jimmy Webb said this in 2012 during the session: “When we first recorded it I wasn’t complaining because it was Top Ten. As the years have gone by, the tempo seems to have settled on back to where it was originally meant to be. It was almost as though songs know where they want to be sung, they know how fast they want to be sung. If you try to sing them any faster, they creak and they protest and they complain until finally you get them back to where they should have been in the beginning.”

The song “creaked” on deaf ears and no one knew it. Tragically, this happens more times than not, not just in the music business but with art in general. In music, there’s the writer, then there’s where/when it’s recorded, and by whom. If the song is great, it’s going to be successful, even if the artist chosen to do it (the arranger, producer, engineer, orchestra/band) isn’t right. But writing the song is just the beginning of a delicate alchemy, a complex collaboration of converging forces.

I remember the country song Son of a Preacher Man, released in November, 1968, sung by British-born Dusty Springfield. An excellent piece, superbly rendered. It was almost too sensuous/sexually implicit for its time and place, but it became an international hit nonetheless. The only complaint came from other singers, like Aretha Franklin, who recognized the song’s further potential and wished she had found the song before Springfield did. She sensed it was still holding back, still waiting for something. Springfield actually agreed after hearing Franklin’s version, regretting that she hadn’t done it her way. – Again, another song (among thousands) which was holding off for the right singer, the right arrangement.

Listening to Galveston (reprised), one fills up with the same “after the fact” frustration that Campbell and Ellis must have felt. It echoed the very same artistic moments felt by artists in all mediums and genres. So many works still need (and deserve) redoing. It’s the old esprit d’escalier regret which can never be revisited or repeated. It’s simply too late. Fate plays its worst trick on us, then leaves us in the dust.

Indeed, there are many songs still waiting for the right alchemy, still fighting the wrong parts, while getting published before their time. The same applies to movie actors who should have either played a role, or not played a role. Actors and their scripts move into a symbiotic relationship. That is, the actor is only as good as the script given to him/her. Reversely, the script is only as good as the actor reading its lines. How many times have we watched an amazingly gifted actor look bad-to-average because of a bad-to-average movie role? Some scripts have even ruined careers. I can also think of a few films that made very bad actors/actresses look good only because the scripts were written specifically for and around them – perhaps as personal favors.

One very bad actress (name withheld) comes to mind, someone who became “a star” only because she was in a relationship with the film producer, who wrote an entire script around her. It “worked,” so well in fact that it was one of the highest grossing films of the decade, and she pressed her footprints into the wet cement at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. Alas for her, every film she did thereafter did not come with the same serendipity. Each demanded a fair degree of “talent.” As it was non-forthcoming, she became, as they say in music, a “one hit wonder.” And, sadly for her, her affair with said producer ended. – An interesting footnote: It was Jimmy Webb who wrote the original score for that highly successful film, but it was turned down.

One hears about a writer/philosopher “the early years,” then his “later years.” In that case, the more adult and mature version can revisit his more naive self and try to mend his indiscretions. Many artists on the other hand simply refuse to “look back” because they don’t have that option. If they did, it’s almost futile in any case. Because the young and foolish version is already “out there,” and the public already rendered its verdict.

This is why Campbell’s/Webb’s reprise was basically a “for what it’s worth” session. They did it for themselves, just as a writer writes “for the drawer” and a painter paints just for pleasure. It comes down to self-satisfaction and finally giving a song all it deserves – if just for the hell of it. Galveston could have been re-recorded and published, but “why?” The times had changed, musical tastes had changed, the terms and conditions of “success” had changed. Wasn’t it simply better to flow with “what was” and just say hello again to an old song?

At least the song had been fully redeemed, many years later. It could finally rest in its intended form. It reminds me of something else as well: How many times has an artist come along at “the wrong time,” the wrong place, the wrong circumstances, with too many obstacles in the way? Only to be just the right artist at another time and place – for the same project? It sets in motion what I’ve always preferred calling “living in the subjunctive” – the world of “what ifs” and “if onlys.” (I’ve written about the subjunctive many times, most recently in The Dream Revisited in Dec. 2020). – Alas, asking “what if” never changes “what was.”

A song’s “intended form” becomes almost daunting, because we seldom know what that is. It makes us hesitate, fearful. It deprives the moment of its spontaneity and magic. We want to hold back and apportion our instincts. This is the insidious side of art-making. It wants to bring us out, while also warning us of stepping out too soon, too fast. It seduces and warns at the same time – the proverbial “push-pull” which destroys everything in the end.

And so, in the end, it finally comes down to “trust” and “letting go,” and saying to hell with the outcome. Seasoned artists like Campbell and Webb knew the costs of holding back, which was more about the cost of regret and embarrassment. They could not afford to think that, just maybe, they didn’t do it “exactly” right. Galveston was “what it was.” It was still an outstanding song, and that was good enough. There were no regrets in that respect. There were only the drippings of hindsight and sadness, that the world had not heard how it still longed to be heard after everyone tried, and failed, to hear it themselves.

© 2023 Richard Hiatt

SANCTUARY

We all seek it in one form or another, at different times, in different ways. Maybe it’s just my projection, but these times seem to be all about the layers of sanctuary. Each of us trying to find his own in his own way. Maybe it’s true at any time in history, but today stands out, if only by way of degree and frequency.

I find solace (safety, peace) in mostly quiet places. But I also find it in convictions confirmed; that is, knowledge I know to be true and unwavering. I find it in friendship, beauty, animals, and in nature. From there it comes in a constantly shifting but descending order: music, books, childhood memories, romance, superb humor, good (vegan) food, good wine, working out, an occasional “bud” from the ganja god. and in places and times captured in movies.

First, let’s distinguish some terms. The term sanctuary is most often seen as a “place” of safety, protection, or shelter. Whereas refuge most commonly refers to a “state” or “condition” of safety, protection, or shelter. Nitpicking academics say the terms are different, but then they admit that a refuge can in fact also be a “place.” – Hence, the bottom line: one is the other’s synonym after all, and who gives a damn one way or the other?

Films about the past have topped my list lately for places of sanctuary. Topping the list of course should be no surprise: Ricks’ Cafe Americana in the film Casablanca. It’s the perfect ambiance which stirs up a wonderful alchemy, one that becomes airborne with tobacco smoke and jasmine. The chemistry draws in exotic figures who then fuel more ambiance. It’s a warm swirling convection that keeps churning until the predawn. And, then, everyone either retires to their Tiffany boudoirs, or they go out for coffee, still driven by conversation. – In Denver years ago, I knew “nocturnal” souls who normal working people would never see, not until midnight, if lucky. I just called them the “night people.”

One of them lived down the hall in my apartment building. In my mind she was the winner of the Madame Morticia lookalike contest, painted in black every night, always behind dark sunglasses, anorexically thin, long and straight jet-black hair to match her Morticia wardrobe. The smell of cigarettes filled the hall just by opening her door. Here was a wonderfully, refreshingly, dysfunctionally, semi-crazy creature of the night obsessed with what absolutely needed sharing with fellow conspirators somewhere in the depths of LoDo. She was driven, and I envied her idee fixe – almost.

Most people think Rick’s Cafe was pure fabrication. It was not. It leaped out of the active imagination of its director, Michael Curtiz, alias Mihaly Kaminer by birth – Americanized in New York. As a director and writer he brought with him memories of the real cafe he left behind in Budapest, called The New York strangely enough. It’s ironic how sanctuary for Europeans becomes America; for Americans, Europe. Curtiz was part of a fraternity of bright Hungarian Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler’s Reich. Another was Arthur Koestler, whose own life could have passed as a real-life antecedent to Rick Blaine (Bogart’s alter ego).

On the occasion in March [1940], when the police searched my flat, they took away nearly all my files and manuscripts, but the typescript of Darkness at Noon escaped their attention. The top copy was lying on my desk, where I kept it on the theory of Edgar Allan Poe that conspicuous objects were least likely to attract suspicion; while on an opposite theory the carbon copy was hidden on the top of the bookshelf. In the end, I was again arrested and the original German version of the book was lost. But by that time the English translation had been completed.

Ten days prior to the Germans reaching Paris on June 14^th, Koestler’s life began to read like a Hollywood script.¹ While writing and finishing Darkness at Noon, he fled trying to find safety wherever he could. First to Lisbon for two months where he failed to obtain a visa from the British consulate. Afraid of getting caught, he borrowed suicide pills from Walter Benjamin (who did commit suicide at the Spanish border). The British consulate at least helped him gain passage to New York, but instead he decided to stay in Portugal, preferring to risk uncertainty than be exiled in America. Here was a man who had to live on the edge. This whole ordeal of course he turned into another book, Arrival and Departure.

With Koestler we begin to explore the real depths of sanctuary. Darkness at Noon drew from Koestler’s early experiences. The book’s protagonist mirrors his struggle to flee Nazi oppression and the moral dilemmas following from that, what he called “Kafkaesque events.” Though specific names aren’t mentioned (it refers only to generic names), it’s set in the USSR during the 1938 Purges. The main character gains depth from Koestler’s experience of being imprisoned by Franco during the Spanish Civil War (caught impersonating a Franco sympathizer while working for the Comintern), kept in solitary confinement and “expecting” to be shot. The book is divided into four “hearings” (interrogations).

Koestler’s story mirrors the stories of his confederates, all fleeing imminent danger at the same time. Together, we get scripts leading to Casablanca, Darkness at Noon, an almost endless list. In his book Artists in Exile, Joseph Horowitz wrote: “As a group, they were the intellectual immigrants most prone to sudden obscurity… where some found sinecures as ostensible screenwriters. They also proved exceptionally prone to return to Europe once World War II ended.”

From Germany alone: Bertolt Brecht, Herman Broch, Alfred Doblin, Lion Feuchtwanger, Heinrich Mann, Erich Maria Remarque, and Franz Werfel. Visual artists and architects: Josef Albers, Marcel Breuer, Walter Gropius, Laszlo MoholyNagy, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Painters: Max Beckman and Hans Hofmann. Sculptor: Jacques Lipschitz. Cartoonist: Saul Steinberg, photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt. Immigrant actors and filmmakers: Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Great Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and on and on. Again, the list is almost endless.

It’s no surprise that Hollywood’s general depiction of sanctuary hailed from those most needing it. European Jews fleeing Europe, even before Hitler. I wrote about this some time ago, in a piece titled The Great American Story (9/30/21). Arriving in California and seeking permanent asylum, they knew their “subject matter” firsthand. That is, they found themselves in a “young” nation still without a national mythology. It desperately needed one, and working citizens needed a place to go to “escape” the hardships of the street, and then later the Great Depression. All they had was the movie theater. Hence, they set to do invent a new American story. If successful, it would also cement the opportunity to stay in America. “Change your name, get rid of the accent,” and become as Anglo-Protestant looking as possible. Asylum was sanctuary.

The “sanctuary” narrative became America’s narrative. From Lady Liberty’s “Give me your huddled masses” through Ellis Island, the national myth was one of refuge for refugees. We were all refugees in one way or another. – Immigrant Jews, most of whom didn’t know anything about American history, who could barely speak English, but who knew how to market ideas, authored the great American myth through images, movie scripts, fashion, literature, and the media. The motif was all about the pioneer spirit, the rugged seeker of freedom, the Hollywood cowboy, the self-made entrepreneur, and “rugged individualism.” – Americans ate it up like candy, and John Wayne (believe it or not) owed his career to immigrant Jews. It may have been whole cloth, but it didn’t matter.

My generation was born into that American storyline, and we basically know nothing else. In other words, we were indoctrinated at birth. But, now that we’re old, we also have our own ideas about what sanctuary means, especially if it’s the kind that repels “indoctrination.” For myself, it rests in the deepest recesses of the mind, corners no one can find.

Interestingly, my favorite characters fit a visual stereotype of the exhausted and haggard emigre artist (writer, painter, philosopher, psychologist) freshly arriving from out in the cold. His only protection is a Bogart-trench coat and fedora. He needs a smoke and hot java. He has a story to tell, information vital to us all. He’s as alert and anxious as Morticia scurrying into LoDo. He points us to a cafe across the street where coffee waits for us in a naugahyde booth (a la Tom Waits).

Impressions of Peter Lorre eluding police inside the Cafe Americana fill my mind. The anti-hero no one knows or thanks, perhaps because of his slippery ways. But one has to thank him for what he’s done to the Gestapo couriers. Bogie remarks (in the script), “Maybe I am impressed with you after all.” Versions of us all emerge from the cast of characters – Bogart’s “Rick Blaine,” Claude Rains’ “Louis Renault,” Conrad Veidt’s “Major Strasser,” Paul Heinreid’s “Victor Laszlo,” Ingrid Bergman’s “Ilsa Lund,” and Peter Lorre’s “Ugarte” – like archetypes. We are all of them.

The message which carries from the lips of our newly arrival, cold, wet, shivering, huddled over a candle at the bar, is to “keep silent.” Be invisible, inconspicuous, nonpartisan, myopic, and dull, if you are to survive in this world. It was the same message in the 1930s. The “SS” has never gone away. It has simply changed form and appearance under the guise of democracy and the American Way.

And there’s the rub. It was the conundrum that came crashing down on Europe’s exiles in the 1930s. How much can one stay quiet and still consider himself a breathing individual, with a conscience? What is to be ignored and dismissed, and what simply cannot be ignored and must be said? Another irony: Those most predisposed to “silence” are those who, when pushed enough, make the most noise of all. They are, after all, artists. Even those artists who write “for the drawer,” who paint/sculpt only for themselves, tap into creative spaces that evoke nothing but trouble. Trouble because they conflict with everything they’ve been told. Then the question is, to what extent does he share what he knows? How much, and with whom?

The character of “Carl” in Casablanca, played by S.Z. Sakall, comes to mind – another Hungarian Jew seeking refuge when Hungary joined the Axis powers. His sisters, niece, wife’s brother and sister were all killed in concentration camps. He recalled, “My childhood friend, Mike Cortiz, stood on top of a two-story high director’s rostrum and gave his orders through a megaphone. He was talking in German.” It was for the film Sodom and Gomorrah which launched Cortiz’ career. Cortiz, by the way, filled Rick’s Cafe with real European refugees, like Sakall, who crowded the dining room. Even the more humorous scenes were fraught with tension from actors who’s memories were very recent.

The last refuge of all, which some say is outer space (others say the deepest parts of the oceans), is really that of the mind. And even that isn’t safe, since our surveillance friends are busy learning how to “harness” even it. To date, though they can control what we know, they can’t yet control what we think (outside of the media). We still have the capacity to think freely if we “put our minds to it.”

It’s no mystery that certain elements exist to steer us along certain paths of awareness and understanding. That’s old news. The “public relations” industry (euphemism for “propaganda industry”) starting during World War I, found itself to be highly effective in controlling the public mood, especially regarding one’s enemies, about the government, the national religion (Christianity), our notions of democracy, justice, liberty, and so on.

In that context we each need to do what the medieval king did when his villagers were going mad from a poisoned well. He gathered his closest lieutenant and said “We too will drink from the well to show our allegiance to the people. But you and I will paint crosses on our foreheads to remind us that we know we are mad.” Sanctuary is all about knowing we are mad while living in the throes of madness. As a friend once said, “in an insane asylum run by the inmates.”

One may see sanctuary as a form of running, an expression of paranoia, etc. But there comes a point when one sees the difference between running and preserving, fearing unknowns and protecting what one does know. It’s a contrast amplified between the characters of Captain Louis Renault and Rick Blaine.

To demand a photomontage of this political (existential) atmosphere isn’t to be found in Hollywood or a bookstore. The best (and only) are “street photographers.” The best that ever were (in my view) have been deceased for some time, but they captured the essence of sanctuary not found. Dorothea Lange (1895-1965), Diane Arbus (1923-71), and Vivian Dorothy Maier (1926-2009). Lange of course captured people caught in the Great Depression, Japanese-American internment camps, sharecroppers, and rural poverty. Maier captured mostly street scenes, while Arbus captured strippers, carnival workers, dwarfs, nudists, children, mothers, couples, and old people – unexpected, unprepared, unrehearsed, invisible, “unimportant,” with nothing to say (yet so much to say). These were shots of “the street,” people caught unaware, naked and exposed, who, at one level, didn’t care about facades and lies. They were just surviving. — This was America, the blood and marrow of a nation, believing somehow that America was still about safety and sanctuary.

It’s the face of everyone all at once, vignettes on the cellar wall (of my imagination), sometimes photographed, sometimes painted, cropped, sometimes painfully real, sometimes distorted, abstract, surreal, superimposed. They are not the images people in the “real” world, airbrushed and painted. These are the “night people.”

What Curtiz did was paint a portrait of real people all gathered in one dining room. Everyone is elegantly dressed and pretending to be having a good time. But, as mentioned, they were real life refugees wearing the faces of shock and disillusionment – essentially the same faces photographed by Lange, Arbus, and Maier.

In that sense, the denizens of my sanctum sanctorum are those most traumatized, disillusioned, confused, alienated, and self-exiled, but also stubbornly creative. They survive only by the grace of insight and artistry – both which carve out a place to go when life gets disingenuous, saccharin and toxic. It’s the only place left where crosses stay painted on foreheads.

© 2023 Richard Hiatt

1Koestler’s life was indeed a story worthy of Hollywood. Consider, his mother a patient of Sigmund Freud’s, a member of the Zionist movement, becoming a Communist, friend of Langston Hughes, reporter on the Spanish Civil War where he’s imprisoned and nearly executed,, friend of W.H. Auden, fell in with the Comintern (student of Marx), friend of Bertolt Brecht, flees France, befriends Walter Benjamin (also fleeing), meets Thomas Mann, gets drunk with Dylan Thomas, meets George Orwell, flirts with Mary McCarthy, is imprisoned in a French detention camp after the war but freed again by friends like Noel Coward, starts the “Congress for Cultural Freedom” in the 1950s, takes LSD with Tim Leary, and lectures at colleges. Throughout his career he publishes numerous novels and essays. Married three times, multiple awards and an honorary doctorate. In 1976 he’s diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. In 1983, he and his wife commit suicide together (taken in part from an interview given by journalist and historian Anne Applebaum). – If anyone knew the importance of “sanctuary,” it was Koestler.

CALL of the WILD

I read an article about deer hunters being “frustrated” with “the sport” of hunting. Then I read another about how the deer hunting industry is suffering because young people are no longer signing up, perhaps knowing something their predecessors don’t. I’ve written about hunting in the past, even published a lengthy piece for a magazine whose name escapes me now. It’s an old story, for sure. But the problem is not old, because, even as young people may be seeing an ethical-moral dilemma in “the sport,” it keeps rearing its ugly head. It keeps rearing because no one wants to look too deeply into the abyss.

I’m going to approach this as advocatus diaboli and from two different angles: one from that of a psychotherapist, the other from that of the “targeted.” With the exception of maybe a war veteran, what keeps the waters stirring in our consciousness is the unimaginable experience of being shot at, having someone/something trying to kill you. Hunters try to resolve this by visiting it over and over, which means they never can. Meanwhile, it’s the animal that remains the target of that confusion and dysfunction. It’s an unconscious fixation that never gets resolved, hence never ends. It only feeds on itself and seeks further means to justify itself. For example, by assuming an animal’s stupidity (obliviousness to suffering and death), by concocting data to justify the killing (percentages of those that elude death), by needing meat to survive, by assuming that a Darwinian “superiority” grants us a moral right. The question is, do we really believe it? Or do we seek a finality to killing?

The fascination as opposed to the real thing (kept at arm’s length) is a danse macabre. Believe it or not, it’s not unlike sex. Its absence fuels an obsession and builds into something that it isn’t. An old adage says, “The only way to overcome something is to have it,” then “be done with it.” The refusal to actually experience death is what pornography is to sex – a substitute which never replaces the real thing, so it becomes an addiction. The obsession to kill is the unconscious desire to have it, to be it, and be done with it. Meanwhile, there are victims.

From a shrink’s point of view, the problem is relatively simple: What to do with the problems of substitution and compensation? What also to do with one of its symptoms – emasculation and mythic “rites of passage?” My personal bias/response is to get some psychotherapy, but “real” men don’t do that (another problem). It’s still too unmanly and gets into “feelings” (which are dangerous, as they tap into what I’ve just said). Therapy is what women and “liberals” do. – No, their method of dealing with inner demons and conflicts is to go out and simply shoot things, and/or find every tool imaginable which simulates killing and death (if only in language and ritual) – i.e., sports, weightlifting, cars, getting laid (aggression/violence towards women), etc. All the energy is “outwardly” oriented, never “inward,” where epiphanies lie in wait.

There is one term hunters have allowed into their lexicon (borrowed from liberals), and that is “bonding.” Male bonding is crucial, especially in the military. But it also cements a common thought process and an atmosphere. Both of which enable the excuse to kill while claiming to “help” whose killed. In other words, claiming to help herds thrive and ecosystems to heal. They talk about herd overpopulation, starvation, genetic integrity, etc. Many also “use the meat” (suggesting they need it).

These arguments are simply too shallow to earn any validity. What we’re really witnessing is the care & maintenance of what began to see (30 years ago) as an “Iron Triangle.” An invisible aligning of three industries with one predominant interest and goal – profit. First, the gun industry (including bows & arrows) which doesn’t give a damn who it sells to, using the selling point of “manhood” (tested, confirmed, “rites of passage,” etc. ) as a carrot. Second, the government itself, specifically the Forestry Department which has a history of selling off public lands to private interests (covertly or not). The fact that those lands become unregulated hunting havens is of no concern. Thirdly, the hunting industry itself, companies providing khaki, camping gear, night-vision goggles and lights, ATVs, hunting licenses, and of course magazines filled with images about the “outdoor man.” – These three work side-by-side, each enabling the other, while raking in millions. Together they market America’s “outdoor heritage,” the “pioneer spirit,” and a “hero mythology” born out of whole cloth (thanks to James Fenimore Cooper, Francis Scott Key, Stephan Foster, Longfellow, Stephan Crane, John Wayne, Billy Graham, Tom Clancy – the list goes on).

Meanwhile, problems continue to escalate as they stay unreported, and/or denied. Perhaps the biggest of all being how these three industries actually work to emasculate men (hence, fuel the addiction to guns and hunting). The message being: If one fails at hunting (or even fails to partake), he fails as a man. Hunting is a “rite of passage” because “this is what men do!” The vast majority then end up grappling with the pressures of “what to do” in lieu of that. Sports, hobbies, the “man cave,” try to compensate. But they too often fall short and escalate into misdirected frustration and anger (road rage, domestic violence) – which is really anger at oneself.

Meanwhile, for the hunter and hunted, a huge gulf is created between cause & effect. The cause (the newly minted “man”). The effect (an injured/dead “trophy,” traumatized herds, cubs missing mothers, the strongest genetic link extracted from the herd leaving only the weak, old, and sick, herds trapped in smaller and smaller enclaves – between roads, traffic, zones of human development, thanks to the government selling off public lands).

More and more animals are prone to disease and die early because the genetic integrity of those species has taken a significant hit. How? When left alone, predator species like wolves and bears take only the old and sick – whatever fails to keep up with the herd, including the very young. – Meanwhile, Billy Bob wants his “trophy,” the largest and strongest, for his wall. That leaves only what’s left. And the herd only weakens from there on. This is why Game Departments set quotas on sexes, ages, points, length of antlers, bagging limits, areas open or closed, etc). allowing herds to “heal” — that is, to recover from the stressors placed on them. Quotas are announced each hunting season, not unlike for fishing.

The “Triangle” argues that it’s for the good of the herd, to keep it regulated so as to not overpopulate, so they don’t starve, etc. But that argument puts the cart before the horse. The question is, what created a population problem in the first place? And what sustains that problem? It’s a meticulously monitored and managed program to keep the status quo, not as much for the animal’s welfare as to draw in as many paying customers as possible per season. The argument then shifts away from animal rights to human (recreational) rights, to keep America’s “proud tradition” up and running.

The problem gets lost in a Darwinesque kind of “natural selection” argument – man’s “natural right” to dominate lower species. Humans show an unshakable solipsism by way of rationalizing that animals “don’t know” what’s happening anyway, that they suffer little because they don’t “show” pain or cry out in ways we recognize. As for terror, they don’t “show it.” The point made by Jeremy Bentham is routinely ignored and dismissed: “The question is not, ‘can they reason?’ nor ‘can they talk?,’ but can they suffer?”

On a related topic, it never dawns on us that more and more predator species (and their prey) are taking up residence in cities, and for good reasons. First of all, they have fewer and fewer places to go in their natural habitats which are not visited by humans. Second, they’ve learned that the “high country” is actually not as safe as the city anymore, as strange as that sounds. Too many face being shot at in open fields and forests. Hence, it’s actually safer to find refuge under bridges, in culverts, in between houses and backyards. And thirdly, they’ve learned to follow “our” cues on where to find food. Crossing busy highways (with young) and raiding city dumpsters (with young) is where we guide them. – Bottom line: They’ve learned from us and have been coerced into patterns that play havoc with thousand-year-old instincts. And still, we call it an animal problem, not a “human” problem. The problem is never ours (another point for the solipsistic mind).

It’s self-serving egocentrism that’s so commanding that the hunting industry has even attempted to introduce legislation allowing hunters to shoot from car windows, without even getting out of their vehicles (“for the physically challenged and elderly,” they say). In other words, it’s all about making killing more convenient, hence bringing in more revenue. This again, they call a “sport.” Why? Because it’s a moving target??

Once upon a time, “sport” involved a competition between two parties of equal strength and ability and on equal terms. It was not predator versus prey, but actors of the same species. One had just as much chance to be injured or killed as to injure and kill. When sport then transferred to animals, both had an equal chance of killing and being killed – a one-on-one contest. Since then, the “terms” of sporting have been so debased, abused, and compromised that, today, it’s measured by “odds” and “percentages,” the number of times a bullet or arrow misses a target. Meanwhile, nothing accounts for “near misses” which involves the injuring of animals. If Billy Bob shoots and only injures the animal, where it then limps away and suffers horribly, it’s simply considered a miss. – Couple this also with the despicable (and illegal) practices of running animals down with ATV’s and motorbikes (even helicopters) to the point of exhaustion, to make them “easy shots.” This is how far the “sport” of hunting as fallen into a moral abyss. Again, the question of human rights supersedes animal rights, because animals “don’t suffer.”

The levels of degenerate behavior have sunken so low (in the name of marketing and profits) that African “safaris” actually still take place where, for a cool $5000, one can enter a caged area, select a lion of his choice, and simply shoot it from 20 feet away. One can then have it immediately stuffed and sent home. This, he can then call “a hunt” on an African safari. Cowardice and shame have never stooped so low.

This is how low hunting in general, as a trade, as a therapy, as a recreation, and as a sport has gone. At the same time it ensures that our fearless hunter remains as safe a possible (for liability reasons). “Maximum efficiency with minimum effort” is the new call of the wild for our weekend Rambo.

Just walk through the modern, state-of-the-art hunter’s campsite today, and one gets a convincing sense of what “safety” entails: High clearance 4X4 trucks, campers, tents, TVs, radios, cellphones, GPS systems, computers, medical kits, dirt bikes, microwave ovens, free-dried meals and beer coolers seeing to his every need. He sits around a fire and chews beef jerky while romancing images of his manhood bathed in a virtual climate of Hollywood myth, rough-hewn soldiers of fortune, and pioneer adventuring. The conversation shifts alternately between guns, trucks, scoring the “trophy,” and the Cowboys-Raiders game. (Pardon the wanton stereotyping, but again I’m playing devil’s advocate to an industry/tradition/practice in desperate need of an ablution).

Upon returning home, our hunter recalls having “roughed it” in the great wild. After all, he slept outdoors, hiked several miles, prepared a deer blind, and sat on his belly for hours just to shoot something. The fact of being a poor shot (sometimes even shooting himself a la Dick Cheney) could be the reason he comes home empty-handed. But he doesn’t talk about that. Neither does he discuss the possibility of wounding an animal without killing it, leaving it to suffer. It’s all “part of the sport,” he says. Those are “the odds” of survival, he says.

Apropos of Dick Cheney, our ex-vice president simply followed in the steps of LBJ who used to shoot deer from the backseat of his convertible, probably while drunk, while his chauffeur drove through a friend’s private preserve. What the hell, they were just stupid deer! Cheney did the same with birds, delivered in cages, and set loose right in front of him so he could gun them down. There, the birds would fall, either obliterated instantly or injured and left to flutter around and die slowly.

So let’s address the “statistics” (i.e., “misses”) argument, finally. The fact that something is easy or difficult to kill has no bearing on the ethics, and morality, of killing. It’s the kind of excuse one uses when there is no other. And yet, hunting magazines defer to this legal defense all the time. An analogy might be the mass slaughter of something just because there are so many to count (as with the American buffalo), laying waste to a forest just because “enough” have been spared, or the acquittal of a murderer because he’s a Church deacon and a Boy Scout leader. “Odds” are irrelevant, and “misses” don’t make it right.

In fact, “misses” (and their percentages) are the cruelest acts of all. Mostly, it’s an embarrassing testament to the amateur incompetency of people with guns. They equip themselves with the most sophisticated high-tech weaponry available, including powerful scopes, and they still miss their targets. Even worse, again, they only injure animals. Billy Bob then does nothing about it, because he simply can’t. The fact is, Park Rangers see deer and elk with arrows stuck in their sides, not to mention coyotes, foxes, and bears limping on three legs. They are then forced to “deal” with the problem. – But again, nothing gets in the way of the Number One priority of all – profit. Money always takes priority. Hence, virtually nothing is said or reported. It’s the Ranger’s job to “correct” what Billy Bob leaves behind.

So again, I return to the problem of men (and women) trying to deal with a psychological problem (of worth, power, control, purpose, identity) through actions which have nothing to do with the problem. In psychology there is what’s called a “reaction formation.” It means expressing an unconscious feeling or wish through the opposite reaction. If you feel tremendous shame about something, you express shamelessness. A boy bullies a girl because he’s attracted to her, feels vulnerable next to her, etc. – The analogy spills into the sport of killing like a bucket of cold water. The need/compulsion to announce one’s superiority over nature ties right into one’s confusion with himself. And he takes it out on “lesser” species. It also ties into what I mentioned at the top regarding “fixation” and “sex.”

They are loathe to admit it, but killing (for some) is a highly erotic moment, as sick as that sounds. They get a rush from it – just as rapists get a rush out of the violence they inflict on weaker/vulnerable people. What is that all about?! It’s about a subject area no one dares explore. Better to simply attack “the messenger.”

But what’s most fascinating about this is the “opposite reaction” to the reaction formation. In other words, the fact that some men (and women) feel no such need to kill, because they’re comfortable with who they are. Such men/women do not hunt. They have no appetite to prove anything. And it becomes increasingly Jungian-Freudian the more we go in that direction. That is, the tougher a man’s persona needs to be, the weaker he feels. The strongest and most secure men (and women) are those who are the most invisible, unassuming, unpretentious, unprepossessing. They don’t own guns, and if they do, it’s only for self-protection, and they rarely even shoot them. Most of all, they love animals and understand their worlds. It comes down to a capacity not just for empathy but to be empathic.

Surprisingly, there are signs of a paradigm shift in this direction – starting with (as mentioned) fewer young people signing up to hunt. Men and women (young and old) are evolving (borrowing another “liberal” term). And when they feel compelled to “shoot” something, it’s no longer with a gun but with a camera. The “trophy” is a prized photo on a wall, AND the animal lives another day to be re-photographed. Most importantly, they are beginning to see the world from the animal’s perspective. Even their diets are readjust to this. Suddenly “food consciousness” takes on real meaning.

The world’s ecosystems have suffered for so long (under clouds of denial, lies, and myths) that (need we be reminded?) too many animals are endangered, and the planet is dying. Thank goodness for this new paradigm shift because now it’s a balancing act between saving or not saving nature. The habitats (and habits) of wildlife are now so irrevocably fucked up that local/temporary band-aid repairs no longer fix them. Fixing symptoms do not heal the disease. We applaud ourselves for cleaning up one ecosystem, while multiple others lie damaged, or dead (deferring to “percentages” again). An immediate shift is needed in our thinking.

Unbelievably, despite this, the hunting industry keeps going full-throttle and remains unphased. Like the oil & gas industry which claims to be environmentally friendly as it proceeds to poison everything, “experts” insist that hunting is good for keeping “the balance.” Where extinct or endangered natural predators used to keep the balance, the hunter now steps in as proxy under the auspices of “wildlife management.” The “Triangle” continues to ensure that nature remains dependent upon it, no differently than how the oil industry made the world dependent on it and insists that we can’t live without it. ¹

What should concern us all immediately is the primary “motive” used for saving endangered species in the first place. The motive should be simple and clear – because we care for the planet and feel a kinship with wildlife. But it’s not. The primary reason (in Africa, for example) is because of the profits from tourism. Some very savvy people knew they needed to come up with a “profit motive” very quickly if they were to save lions, elephants, rhinos, zebras, giraffes, and other species. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been able to stop widespread indiscriminate poaching. – Looking at it, the thinking is all wrong. But this is the world we live in. Profit is what greases the gears of progress. It’s the god from which all blessings flow, and it’s the primary tool that saves animals. It’s a matter of “consciousness” which must change.

Fortunately, tourism is doing something positive after all, beside saving animals. As humans view living habitats, it’s reviving a lost and forgotten connection to nature. People are remembering their primordial roots, and this is sparking a new energy in the environmental movement. Poaching still happens, just as hunters still shoot for their own pleasure and personal greed. But both are being held to the fire more and more. People are beginning to understand nature without the interference of industry, profits and markets.

What comes to mind in this conversation, time and again, is the legacy of the American buffalo, the most tortured American national symbol of all. To know all of what this creature has suffered through, yet survived, is to witness nature’s perseverance over man’s stupidity. It’s the story of human predation (for tongues and hides), not to mention the mass extermination of indigenous tribes and cultures. The new PBS documentary by Ken Burns tells this story in full, from beginning to end, from the European’s first days in the American wilderness. It’s equally mindful of what the white settler/hunter did to the wolf, the bear, the beaver, the elk, the wolverine, the fox, the moose, and the coyote – virtually everything.

The “depopulating” of indigenous tribes and the marketing of tongues and hides actually became a kind of “sport” in the eyes of hunters, trappers, military scouts, and so-called pioneers. Scalp-taking was a white man’s invention, a way to count the number of kills made and proving it while getting paid for them – not unlike scoring points. It speaks to the “mindset” required in the first place, doing it while feeling absolved at the same time. One hardens himself against having a conscience while validating a celebratory kind of savagery – and calling it “God’s will.”

This again, hopefully, is changing, but not fast enough. Especially now that nature is literally “moving in” with us – because we’re moving into their spaces. When an animal is killed, we all die just a little bit. We feel the pain of their death and our own stupidity. This could not be more true than in one of the most obvious places – the “meat packing” industry (euphemism for slaughterhouse). It’s where denial and hypocrisy glare back at us every day. We turn away and ignore what goes on because we want our Jimmy Dean in the morning. At the same time, we claim to “care” about chickens, turkeys, and cattle and want animal suffering to end. You can’t have it both ways. It behooves meat eaters to visit a poultry/cattle “processing” facility (just once) to witness firsthand what happens in delivering the (high cholesterol, high fat, hormone laden) flesh we demand every single day. ²

The whole animal/nature dilemma is now existential (but always has been). Whether it’s the bloody mass-slaughter of animals (behind closed doors) or the “marketing” of shooting for profit and psychological need, its the same nightmare either way. The bottom line is, we either come to terms with it, or we perish with the animals. An old American Tribal adage says, “The day the animals die will be the day we die.” That’s no exaggeration. The animals are trying to tell us this. We have only to listen to them.

© 2023 Richard Hiatt

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1It’s the old “crack baby” argument. A baby is conceived in a world where the mother is already addicted. It’s born and has no choice but to see everything through the lens of addiction. As he or she grows (s)he tries to ween herself off of crack, but every step of the way the crack dealer says “no, you need me, you can’t live without me.” She tries anyway against the odds. Weening ourselves off oil is an accurate analogy.

2Another 3,800 words could be spent on a related host of nightmares: Bears caged their entire lives, mutilated to extract bile from their gall bladders; geese fattened by gavage (forced feeding) to extract fat livers 10 times their normal size (foie gras); pigs born in cages too small to turn around in, fed growth hormones, impregnated repeatedly to give birth to 12 piglets at a time, kept in “gestation crates,” males castrated at birth without pain killers, tails cut off (“tail docking”), ears sliced (“ear notching”), unable to stand or walk because of arthritis caused by genetic manipulation; factories slaughtering 1,000 pigs per hour (stunned, throats slit, left to bleed out, dunked in scalding water to remove hair – all happening so fast that some are not stunned and see, hear, and smell what’s happening.; cows held in holding pens for days (smelling blood, hearing screams), sometimes not stunned properly, sometimes beaten to death, strangled, suspended by hooks while conscious, calves slaughtered in front of each other; baby goats cut open alive while still conscious and hung on conveyor belts – and on and on. What happens to chickens and turkeys is even worse. And the old saying: “Two things you never want to be in Mexico is a dog or a horse.” In Spain, a chicken, dog, horse, pig, goat, or a bull (the “blood-sport” of bull-fighting continues).

ANATOMY of a MOVEMENT

Right wingers don’t know it (seldom do), but the January 6^th insurrection led by a narcissistic zealot was a prelude to a wildly unprecedented wet dream. Most belonging to that ideological camp have already stated that they’re “tired of democracy” (too messy, too slow, too “compromising”) and prefer a monarch or a king. They also long to follow someone willing to draw clear, simple lines in the sand between good and evil, right and wrong.

This burgeoning ideology has already made itself clear on issues of racial profiling, ethnic cleansing, voting restrictions, immigration, xenophobia, guns, mixed marriages, homosexuality, religion in schools, censoring books, shutting down “liberal” media outlets, white supremacy, and “intolerance/hatred” in general – to say nothing about global warming (that “liberal” conspiracy!) and women’s reproductive rights. Their way, they claim, is the path to “freedom” and “justice.” – Meanwhile, anything remotely “liberal-leftist-progressive-socialist” isn’t even on the political radar. It was laughed off the national stage in 1980 by Reagan’s new phalanx of televangelists and neo-liberals.

This is a highly emotional movement thirsting for a final coup de grace with a culminating mass-celebration, the likes of which (they wish) could be witnessed with “awe.” Flags, lights, uniforms, trumpets, and salutes, united under stadium klieg lights and flyovers by military jets. In the background, a new Anthem played through loudspeakers – Lee Greenwood’s Proud to be An American, the party’s answer to Deutschland uber alles.

And so, let’s just cut through the crap and get to it. If someone were to suggest a uniformed protocol of allegiance to a charismatic leader and his cause, this group would jump at it in a heartbeat. If someone introduced a new Pledge of Allegiance – ditto. If someone drew up a new Constitution – ditto. And if they demanded a more dramatic name for “leader” or “guide” (such as guardian, defender, preserver, keeper, savior) – they’d say by all means, yes!

This is a predominantly illiterate (information-challenged) movement that puts faith over science and sensationalism over logic. It wants a nation of men, not laws. It is, obviously, history repeating itself, and so what?! They’re grabbing their AR-15s and saying bring it on!

To show ninety-year-old footage of the Nuremberg rallies to this movement would evoke sexual excitement. Its members would see themselves as they truly feel. Some would actually stand and salute the Sieg Heil. Someone would most likely come forward and demand a whole new restructuring of “the party” based on the film they had just watched.

Indeed, to watch the Nuremberg rallies is to watch exactly where the movement is going, knowing it or not. The corporate media (in its financial clutches) dignifies its existence more and more by airing its stories and rallies, which only empowers it further. Sixty years ago the American Nazi Party and other hate groups wouldn’t even rate a hundred words on page eighteen of The New York Times. To completely disarm them, all it had to do was ignore them. Today, they’re given headlines and front-page photos and interviews. Which is to say, “As Americans, this too is who we are.” Sixty years ago, The Times censored them. Today they censor us. The ideology takes a huge share of airtime and even succeeds in steering legislation. The First Amendment is on trial, while the Second Amendment is not. Intolerance & impatience is America’s growing mantra.

The 1934 Nuremberg rally is a firsthand deja-vu. In the beginning (1923), these rallies started small. The first two took place in other locations, but the third was in Nuremberg near the center of where the German empire began. From then on they were also conducted on the Autumnal equinox (tribal, pagan references). There were at least twelve rallies from 1923 through 1939, each lasting up to eight days, each becoming more and more significant as the Reich gained momentum. Interestingly, the 1929 rally was called the “Day of Composure,” while the very next one (1933) was called the “Rally of Victory” (going from temperance to all-out aggression). Hitler had seized control of the Weimar Republic, and Leni Riefenstahl had just made her first propaganda film for the party.

The 1934 “Rally of Power” was pivotal, and all the subsequent rallies simply built on the growing foundations of conquest – the “Rally of Unity and Strength,” “Rally of Freedom,” “Rally of Honor,” “Rally of Labour,” “Rally of Greater Germany,” “Rally of Peace,” and so on. The final rally actually never happened as it was preempted by World War II. – In other words, reality interfered.

There’s something to be said about “group psychology” (even if it’s Psych:101). The herding instinct/mentality by nature is obviously a dangerous thing. For reasons that filter down to a desire for acceptance and inclusion by one’s peers, the individual’s ability to think rationally and intelligently simply sublimates into the subconscious. He forfeits both (rationale, logic) for peer acceptance. And when the whole group forfeits simultaneously, a lowered mentality takes control. Before he knows it, he finds himself saying and doing things he can hardly believe and can’t quite comprehend. But he does it anyway and tries to fool himself that it’s the right thing (for “the cause,” God & Country, the sacred leader).

When alone, individuals see the stupidity of it through a rational lens. When conscripted by force, peer pressure and guilt, the lens is switched for another. Before they know it, as George Carlin once said, they’re “wearing uniforms and funny little hats.”

The danger to rational thought and behavior has been around for millennia. Hence, the obvious warning: If you see a large powerful group, especially one drunken on high emotion, take note and be wary. It doesn’t matter what group it is. If it’s growing, or already large and organized, it will most likely try to convert you, change what you know and believe, or censor you and leave feelings of regret and guilt. One might even attempt to draw violence down on you if you resist. As a resister, you will be made into a pariah and reduced to a stereotype. On the subject of pariahs and stereotypes alone, just ask any minority group in America. – The only real difference between some groups and others is “degree, frequency, and staying power.” In other words, the nation defines itself by some groups that have been around so long that they make up the fabric of who (we think) we are. Christianity, Manifest Destiny, predator capitalism, a predominantly “white” America, all come to mind.

Hitler’s definition of (national) “socialism” was not socialism. Real socialism promotes autonomy, free expression, equal rights). Hitler’s version terminated all of those. The only “rights” allowed were those in full service to the Fatherland. Lifelong friends and extended families were forced to spy on each other. And yet Hitler called it the “Peoples’ Party, ” a movement for “all of Deutschland.” These tags were designed to twist and confuse notions of “peace and freedom” with total subjugation. Orwell brought this home in 1984: “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.” And as Hitler said, if you repeat a lie frequently and loudly enough times, the people will eventually believe it.

Leni Riefenstahl was Germany’s celebrated photographer and filmmaker. She produced and directed Triumph of the Will in 1935 which became the Reich’s official propaganda film for all Germans to watch in theaters. She also produced Olympia: Festival of Nations about the 1936 Olympics. Hitler collaborated closely with her on three separate films.

What Riefenstahl focused on was not was athletes and patriots, but the theme of Aryan purity and superiority. America had not (yet) come that close to rallying behind this theme, even with its own deeply embedded racism. But let’s not forget that the whole eugenics theory did not originate in Germany but the United States, by the likes of Sir Francis Galton and his theory of “genetic determinism” (which, by the way, received extensive funding from the Carnegie Institute and the Rockefeller Foundation). German scientists and doctors borrowed it from him. The Carnegie Institute then also helped fund Germany’s research into eugenics while applying it to Jews. One could almost say that the whole Aryan mythology movement took seed elsewhere, where there was no Beethoven, Nietzsche, Wagner, or handmaidens to the gods (Valkyries) deciding “who shall live and who shall die.”

What has been obvious for a very long time has been the (unwritten, handshake) agreement between Hollywood and Washington – to always cast Americans (especially in uniform) as unwaveringly brave, noble, strong, patriotic, unified in a purpose and vision. Washington said to Hollywood “You wave the flag, and we’ll wave the regs” (on filmmaking). Today, anyone who does not stand for the National Anthem, does not salute the flag, is not a member of the “national religion” (Christianity), and (most of all) who scrutinizes the military industrial complex — is subject to stereotypes, ridicule from all sides, and even physical harm for the offense of “disloyalty.” An athlete or celebrity refusing to stand for the Anthem because of personal conviction is forced to defend himself for the rest of his life. The burden of proof (of innocence) is on him.

If/When unchecked, stereotypes only grow into monstrous caricatures. “Ingrates” and “liberals” today often end up in the press, first as socialists and atheists, then finally as seditionists, terrorists, treasonists, and even the Anti-Christ. – It’s equivalent to showing up at a Nuremberg rally out-of-uniform and waving “anything” other than a Nazi flag, which would have gotten him killed. – It’s what happens when an intelligent person finds himself in the midst of mongrelized (herded) masses.

Personally, it sickens me as I watch virtually anyone in a uniform (military, firefighter, police, healthcare provider, Boy Scout, sewer inspector, flycatcher) already hailed as a “hero” before even doing anything. He walks in “slow motion” towards his patriotic task every morning as the sun rises on Iowa corn and mom’s apple pie. The flag is draped above, sounds of a tearful America: My Country Tis of Thee rings loud with the backdrop of amber waves, hot dogs, Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and purple mountain majesties. The mental indoctrination (conscription) process is stunning.

But, then, there’s everyone else. And who is everyone else? What’s to be done with them (Germany’s dilemma before the Final Solution)? Are they standing up for the National Anthem? Are they standing at home in their living rooms? Such unbelievable (nativist) programming requires a steady supply of scapegoats, those who do not stand, salute, or show up at the parades. They’re to be hated in order to balance out good with evil. It doesn’t matter who it is or what they have to say. They’re already guilty anyway. The Party will find them.

This is the atmosphere/climate I personally see taking over – if it isn’t stopped. Yes, enclaves (oases) of an “old liberal” spirit live on, but they’re constantly besieged on all sides – 24/7. On the other hand, not everyone at the 1934 Nuremberg rally lost his mind to the herding instinct. Many did, but some did not. And as the thousands adjourned the stadium, what came under fire was the proof of allegiance. In other words, the inductee found himself alone, without moral support. He returned to himself and his conscience. It was a candle in the wind for signs of lucidity.

The same goes today for those few who sit alone with themselves, when the gatherings have dispersed. This is also why, as I observe it, there exists an almost phobic fear of being alone. The system warns against it, calling it “antisocial, withdrawn, depressed, low self-esteem,” and so forth (extroversion, gregariousness – good; introversion – bad). The danger is one of thinking too deeply by oneself, for oneself. It stirs up too many shadows and demons.

But, as with death, we’re all alone anyway in the end, unavoidably, inevitably. That said, it’s nothing less than phenomenal how a movement’s worst nemesis is always itself. All it requires is time – time to run through its own cycles of life and violence, to reach its own penultimate fate.

The fascist movement in America today still needs time. It has to cycle through its own process and run its course. As Aristotle, Cicero, Plato, Polybius, Machiavelli, Marx, Chomsky, Tytler, Schlesinger, and so many others have taught, it’s part of a greater cycle: (roughly) mob rule, to monarchy, to kingship, to tyranny, to aristocracy, to oligarchy, to democracy, to anarchy, back to mob rule again. Right now, many Americans are “tired of democracy.” Mob rule is trying to find its new Nuremberg. Past is prologue, once again. We need to resist and educate (also part of the cycle), but it needs to go through its dark night, its kristallnacht of broken glass.

© 2023 Richard Hiatt

LIVING INSIDE the REICH

There were many heroines of World War II who have been overlooked and forgotten in America. One was Rose Valland, the only “monuments woman” among a phalanx of men tasked to save Europe’s art from Hitler. She performed harrowing deeds which put her in imminent danger many times over.

Briefly, Valland was a French art historian appointed as overseer of a museum in German-occupied France in 1941. By 1944 she had witnessed hundreds of paintings and sculptures looted by German officers and discreetly documented where they were going. The Germans looted from museums and private art collections. She documented 20,000 pieces from one museum alone. In August of 1944 a single train was overloaded with 148 crates containing 967 paintings placed in 53 railroad cars. French railroad workers bravely went on strike and train broke down from too much weight. By the time they fixed the problem the French Resistance arrived and stopped the transport.

After the war, Valland was temporarily put under arrest as a collaborator, but soon released. In the following years she helped recover 1,400 crates of artwork. In the end, she helped the Allies recover a total of 60,000 works.– Upon returning home, Valland was showered with numerous citations, awards and accolades from France, England, Germany, and the US. In 1953, she was appointed as conservator of the Musees Nationaux. She died in 1980 and was entombed in her French family vault along with her lesbian partner. – Interestingly, John Frankenheimer’s famous 1964 film, The Train, was loosely based on Valland’s story, as was the 2014 film, The Monuments Men where Cate Blanchett’s character was inspired by Valland.

Lynn H. Nicholas, author of The Rape of Europa, said that “In this mad and secret scene, Rose Valland managed somehow to survive. Her dowdy looks certainly did not invite advances from the Germans, and she was regarded by all as an insignificant administrative functionary. Her presence… was an anomaly.” In other words, she was good at appearing unremarkable and out of sight.

The Germans did not want French citizens to know what they were doing, fearing it would lead to espionage. But “this was exactly what Mlle Valland was doing” said Nicholas. “Four times the Germans threw Rose Valland out” when trouble began. But then “she would come back,” hiding behind concerns about heating and maintenance problems. “At night she took home the negatives of the archival photographs being taken by the Nazis, and had them printed by a friend. In the morning they would be back in place. Every time there was a theft or damage she would be questioned… but she managed to stay on. Loyal French guards filled her in on details of events in those parts of the Louvre which were off limits to her. Packers and drivers told her what they were doing.” ¹

The Valland story is now our story. She was the modern archetype of those of us challenging authority and speaking truth to power in a climate of intolerance and newly emerging waves of fascism (white supremacy, censored books in schools, racial intolerance, xenophobia, restricted voters’ rights, controlling women’s (abortion) rights, religion into schools, gay-bashing). Indeed, a fascist shift can hardly be denied. Neither can asking the “wrong” questions, saying the “wrong” things at the “wrong” time in the “wrong” company, which leads to violent retaliation. Those interdictions and taboos are expanding daily.

Which means the spaces in between them are shrinking. Valland worked inside the German infrastructure, wore a government uniform, spoke native German, and worked at a job that supported the Third Reich. At the same time, she was one of the most effective Resistance workers on “the inside.” She put to work the Sun Tzu rule of war: The way to defeat an enemy is to live with them and learn their ways.

The Valland-Nazi dynamic drew an even more obvious distinction. Valland was faute de mieux a democratic socialist, as opposed to a national socialist. Valland fought for social and economic freedom as well as “regulated” capitalism when it monopolized and ended individual freedom, equality, and personal autonomy. Reversely, Hitler was a laissez-faire capitalist and gave free reign to private industry prior to and during the war. His position was not leftist (socialist) but extreme right (fascist). Some of his biggest heroes were American industrialists like J.P. Morgan and Henry Ford (who did not hire Jews). – “Hitler” is what happens when citizens confuse left with right and blindly follow the rantings of demagogues (promising quick answers to difficult problems).

Anyone considered “leftist” today is a latter-day Valland who now lives in a world more engulfed than ever in a fascist zeitgeist. Valland could see the front-lines, literally, could see the enemy’s uniform, and knew exactly where the physical boundaries were beyond which led to freedom. All those are gone now. Today, we Vallanders are so deeply swallowed by “the system” that we’re in it even when thinking we’re outside of it. The very tools and methods we use to extricate ourselves are themselves part of the system. It’s mindful of Einstein’s statement that you can’t solve a problem using the tools creating it.

In other words, the system (or if you prefer, the “deep state”) has every base covered. We’re “in it,” even contribute to it, even while fighting it (shadows of Orwell flood in). Howard Zinn once said that the most horrible things (war, genocide, slavery) happen, not because of disobedience, but because of “obedience.” Imagine a situation where even when you disobey, you’re obeying. — How can one respond to that? How does one speak from the outside when he’s inextricably inside? The problem is one of psychology – for both ourselves and the system.

Think about it. Even open discussions (like this one) change nothing. And the psychology goes even deeper. It allows leftist-Vallanders to use their own thinking against themselves. In other words, we wonder if the whole problem is just in our minds, that we’re fabricating a monster where one doesn’t exist. It’s all a product of paranoia – “a piece of undigested beef,” said Scrooge. And that’s the end of it. This is extreme power.

But what it doesn’t account for is the reverse of that. If we can be so manipulated, remain so inert and irrelevant, at the same time the system cannot be rid of us. It needs us. We are necessary to its existence in order to function. Every light requires a surrounding shadow. The system attempts to contain even that axiom, but it cannot. There are universal laws which contain even it.

Therefore, it’s reverse psychology which becomes the weapon of the left; that is, if we try to understand it better than the monster itself. Valland was the virus inside the Reich. Leftist thinking today can still become a virus. It can attack the host by getting various pieces to mistrust each other and agitate. The system then throws you out (a la Valland) while knowing it cannot, since we are its own invention. It’s another way of describing the subversive imagination born inside the system by its own devices. It generates its own virus. At first it requires no vaccine. In time that changes.

The idea of rescuing art (as Valland did) becomes a metaphor. It showed how the Reich’s thinking began to self-destruct. First, it was Europe’s “finest art.” Second, it was tagged “degenerate” by decree. Third, it became the most sought after art among the highest ranking Nazi officials (while being condemned at the same time). This irrational and chaotic juggling generated cracks in the German armor. Even Goering and Hitler could not reconcile the contradiction. It became a nightmare for which an over-burdened train (breaking down) was symbolic. The official Nazi response? Denial! But when asked “Who did the art?,” the responses were never honest or straightforward. They could never say “Jews.” Only sociopathic minds skilled in self-denial could maintain such a monumental secret (and lie).

Valland was caught in the middle of this schizophrenia, witnessing incredible frustration, fights, official cover-ups, fraud, and allegations of disloyalty to the Reich. She stood silent and watched the system begin to unravel.

The latter-day Valland finds herself working inside the system and calling out fraud and hypocrisy where it lies, even knowing there is no front-line to escape beyond. The “underground” eighty years ago was the Radio Free Europe, heard on ham-radio sets in cellars throughout Western Europe. Today the system’s underground is itself talking to itself, like an echo. Today’s fascism is subtle, discreet, and subliminal (less so in our political parties). It just watches, catalogs, monitors, files, censors, and leads us on. But “the echo” rings louder everyday by way of “information” – the most powerful and effective propaganda tool ever. – The stronger the system’s own voice, the more it hears what isn’t being said, what it fears most about itself.

The war ended in 1945. The good guys held the bad guys accountable. Today, the war is “undeclared,” undefined, and self-perpetuating. The state never worries, even as it allows subversive news and “independent” news outlets to sound off. The system permits them because it soothes the “radical” fringes, knowing they will change nothing. The singers are allowed to sing to their own choirs, everyone feels vented, and everything stays the same. The system plays with its own shadows – for now.

The echo/shadows have to work according to the system’s rules. Valland was tossed out many times, but always came back because the system needed her (as scapegoat, shadow of self-doubt). In the same way we always come back, just as echoes always return. As a system veers to “the right” more and more (politically, ideologically), its shadow grows, especially as its members slowly find themselves without any rights at all. Every entity walking in the light has a shadow pursuing it. The Nazis created Valland. The system creates us.

We’re now at that critical point – again – where the political spectrum has drifted so far to the right that “they” actually dignify hate groups, white supremacy, voter suppression, citizen spying, surveillance operations, and so on. A recent poll actually showed that a large percentage of Americans are “tired of democracy” and favor an autocracy again (a king, or monarch). Even George W. Bush said “the Constitution is just a goddamn piece of paper.” In other words, a democracy is simply too messy for what it wants. They’re tired of having to wait on votes and majoritarian views. They want quick solutions to overwhelming problems.

In her book Spying on Democracy, Heidi Boghosian essentially wrote about the huge gap between democracy and fascism. When unchecked, the system “categorizes and monitors people based on their activities, their associations, the movements, their purchases, and their perceived political beliefs.” In the book’s Forward, Lewis Lapham wrote,

Suspicious of all forms of unlicensed expression, the custodians of the nation’s conscience find the practice of democracy to be both uncivil and unsafe. Entirely too many people … don’t do what they’re told, don’t swallow their prescribed daily dosages of the think-tank swill slopped into their bowls by the wardens of the corporate security state. Such people present the risk of having thoughts of their own, and therefore they must be carefully and constantly watched. ²

But Boghosian also wrote about a movement in New York called Critical Mass. It was the story of the NYPD’s hostile reaction to a monthly bicycling event which aims to call attention to sustainable transportation, safety, urban space, and pollution. Critical mass by definition is “the minimum size or amount of something required to start or maintain a movement.” This is where real socialism (justice) refuses to roll over and die. It’s part of the deep state which on one level stays tragically contained and ineffective, but on another trusts in forces outside the system itself, forces which restore a higher equilibrium. There is always a critical mass brewing for the fundamental need to exist freely and outside systems.

All systems are contained; otherwise they wouldn’t be systems. That means it must, by definition, exclude other forces Those other forces happen to include what it rejects; in this case, the instinct to call out injustice, fraud, and thievery. They create Rose Vallands and plants them squarely in the middle of whatever sets out to subjugate and rule. And the system becomes its own virus. The serpent eats its tail.

© 2023 Richard Hiatt

1Lynn H. Nicholas, The Rape of Europa (New York:Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), pp. 135-36.

2In Heidi Boghosian’s Spying on Democracy: Government Surveillance, Corporate Power, and Public Resistance (San Francisco: City Light Books, 2013) p. 13.