Ode to Roving Death-robots

The Obama administration’s enthusiastic love affair with the roving death-robots openly referred to as “predator” drones (a rare display of accurate nomenclature, as the military is more often than not inclined to christen their infernal devices with far more upbeat nomenclature, allowing one to imagine an alternate universe in which the nation’s papers are filled with articles decrying the domestic deployment of our new armada of remote-controlled “patriot” drones and “peacekeeping” drones) has recently inspired vitriol from all quarters, as evidenced by these two opinion pieces published only a few days apart from each other.

This first piece is a letter written by Bruce Fein, associate deputy attorney general under President Reagan, which was published in the 2-4-13 edition of the Financial Times.  The letter reads:  

Sir:

The United States and Israel are now dancing on the rubble of international law shattered by their respective limitless conceptions of preemptive warfare. Last week, Israel conducted an unprovoked air strike on a convoy of trucks in Syria suspected of carrying SA-17 anti-aircraft missiles towards Lebanon without evoking a whisper of United States opposition. The United States claims authority to perpetrate predator drone killings in any country where international terrorists or their associates are suspected of dwelling [emphasis mine--RG], including Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Both nations preposterously maintain that national self-defense (uniquely to them) includes the right to exterminate any person suspected of a connection to any activity that might at some unknown future time support an enemy attack, e.g., an Iranian nuclear scientist. No imagination is needed to divine how the United States would respond to a Russian predator drone strike against a suspected Chechen terrorist inhabitant of New York City; or how Israel would respond to an Hamas killing of an Israeli scientist assisting its Iron Dome anti-missile program. After its apogee at Nuremberg, international law has plunged like Lucifer from heaven to a doctrine of might makes right indistinguishable from a Hobbesian state of nature. The United States and Israel have been major culprits.

Sincerely,

Bruce Fein

The second piece to which I would like to draw your attention is an editorial entitled “Terrorism and the War at Home" published in yesterday’s edition of the Los Angeles Times.  Here are some choice excerpts:

This page has repeatedly expressed concern about the administration's open-ended approach to targeted assassinations around the world. This week's discussion shows again that the United States is sliding down a slippery slope, with the government gaining power to head off potential attacks at the expense of individual rights. And it's not at all clear where it will stop.

[Rand] Paul's protest on Wednesday was ostensibly aimed at President Obama's nominee for CIA director, John Brennan. As the president's top counter-terrorism advisor, Brennan has been an architect of the drone strikes that have killed hundreds of alleged enemy combatants and Al Qaeda operatives overseas, including a handful of American citizens […].

As this page has warned repeatedly, these presidents [i.e., Obama and George W. Bush] have claimed far-reaching authority to summarily execute people they deem a threat to homeland security, with little or no oversight over whom they target or where they carry out the killings. Paul took the White House's position to an absurd extreme in arguing that vocal government critics could be targeted for drone strikes in this country. [In actuality, the possibility of a drone strike on U.S. soil is far from “absurd.” In fact, it’s more than possible that such occurrences are already several years behind us.—RG] But the fact remains that the administration has steadily increased the use of drones, widened the definition of an "imminent" threat and expanded the boundaries of the "battlefield" where they can be used.

Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. tried to dispel concerns in letters to Paul on Monday and on Thursday, when he flatly declared that the president does not have the authority to use a drone to kill a citizen "not engaged in combat" here in the United States. But just as the Obama administration has stretched the meaning of "imminent" to cover situations in which there's no evidence of a looming attack, so could future attorneys general interpret "combat" as something other than actively trying to kill Americans [emphasis mine--RG].

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, declared that Paul's nightmare scenario of a citizen being assassinated in a cafe "will never happen in the United States of America." That's because, in Feinstein's mind, there's a clear distinction between enemy combatants overseas who easily elude capture and plotters in the United States who can be tracked and arrested. But the last two administrations have blurred the line separating crimes from acts of war [emphasis mine--RG]. And even if you trust Obama's judgment, do you want to grant the same discretion to his successors, whoever they might be?

The unexpurgated L.A. Times editorial can be seen HERE.

Cryptoscatology in OTHERZINE

Media ecologist Gerry Fialka recently reviewed Cryptoscatology (as well as two related works, Doug Harvey's 2012 book patacritical Interrogation Techniques Anthology Volume 3 and Rodney Ascher's 2012 film ROOM 237:  BEING AN INQUIRY INTO THE SHINING IN 9 PARTS) for OTHERZINE.  
 
After reading this article, I discovered that I'm a "cosmic DJ" (!): 

"Ascher, Harvey, and Guffey are cosmic DJs:  MC-ULTRAs (reimagining the CIA mind-control program MK-ULTRA) as the antennae of the race—broadcasting the hidden effects of technologies."

You can read Fialka's entire article HERE.

THE BIG CON AT DEALEY PLAZA

A reader of Cryptoscatology recently sent me an email entitled “A shame this wasn't cited in Cryptoscatology.”  I offer this information here as an addendum to Chapter 5, “Science Fiction as Manipulation:  SF’s Intersection With the Intelligence Community.”  Anyone who’s read Chapter 5, specifically the section regarding the work of science fiction writer Paul Lineberger (AKA Cordwainer Smith), will recognize the important implications of this missing piece of the puzzle in the JFK assassination, namely Linebarger’s intimate connections to conspirators Major General Edward Lansdale (portrayed as the character called "General Y" in Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK) and E. Howard Hunt (infamous for his involvement in the 1972 Watergate Scandal).  Of course, Hunt’s recent “deathbed” confession regarding his role in the assassination of JFK was ignored by most mainstream media outlets except for the April 5, 2007 edition of Rolling Stone.  (To read Erik Hedegaard's Rolling Stone article, "The Last Confessions of E. Howard Hunt," click HERE.  Learn more about Hunt’s confession by clicking here:

E. HOWARD HUNT DETAILS JFK-PLOT PART 1

and here:

E. HOWARD HUNT DETAILS JFK-PLOT PART 2.)

What follows is the entire content of the aforementioned email, which consists of a brief quotation from an article entitled “The Big Con at Dealey Plaza” by William E. Kelly, one of the original founders of the COALITION ON POLITICAL ASSASSINATIONS:

The best black [ops] artists in the CIA during the Cold War were trained by Professor Paul M. A. Linebarger (1913-1966), whose book on Psychological Warfare and Propaganda (Combat Forces Press, 1948; 1954) is the classic textbook on the subject.  In his classes, Linebarger didn’t just use his own book "Psychological Warfare" but had his students read David Maurer’s "The Big Con" for examples of how successful covert operations are planned and executed.  

Besides being professor of Asiatic Studies at John Hopkins, Linebarger was also a part time professor at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), a transparent front for a CIA think tank.  CIA recruits who were invited to take Linebarger’s SAIS classes, which he taught at his home at night, were required to use tradecraft in avoiding detection to get there so as to avoid being followed. 

Among Linebarger’s students were E. Howard Hunt, David Atlee Phillips and Ed Lansdale, three of the most prolific covert operators during the Cold War.  It wasn't until after his death that Linebarger was exposed as being science fiction writer Cordwainer Smith, and that he had worked with E. Howard Hunt in Mexico City. ...

When Paul Linebarger gave his lectures to young CIA officers, he warned them that these techniques should never be used domestically or it would totally destroy our form of democracy.  Well, those techniques were used in the assassination of President Kennedy, and are being used today, and democracy has never been the same.

Judging from what I know of Smith, based mainly on his writings—both fiction and nonfiction—I strongly suspect he would not have approved of this severe misapplication of his intelligence techniques.  No doubt he would have recognized the pedigree of his own stratagems upon seeing them played out on such a massive scale in November of 1963.  Perhaps this is why Cordwainer Smith wrote, only a year after the assassination of President Kennedy, “I'm a machine, but I used to be a person, long, long ago” (a passage from his classic short story “THE DEAD LADY OF CLOWN TOWN”). 

You can read William E. Kelly’s entire article, “The Big Con at Dealey Plaza,” HERE. 

Top Ten Fortean Books (Esoterica & the Occult)

A few weeks ago, on the 7^th of February, The Daily Grail began running a poll that requested a list of the Top Ten Fortean Books in the category of esoterica and the occult. I found it difficult to narrow down the list to only ten titles, but eventually settled on these (which include nine nonfiction books and one novel): 

1. The Books of Charles Fort by Charles Fort
2. The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly. P. Hall
3. The Mothman Prophecies by John A. Keel
4. Monstrum!: A Wizard's Tale by Tony "Doc" Shiels
5. Flying Saucers and the Three Men by Albert K. Bender
6. The Goblin Universe by Ted Holiday
7. The Morning of the Magicians by Jacques Bergier & Louis Pauwels
8. The New Inquisition by Robert Anton Wilson
9. Unified Physics by Reginald Irvan Gray
10. A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay

To see the complete list of recommendations made by those who have already taken part in the poll (or if you want to add your own recommendations), simply click HERE. 

Conspiracy Music (Part 9)

In 1980 Roky Erickson’s band, Roky Erickson and the Aliens, released an album entitled The Evil One which featured two songs based on the work of novelist and screenwriter Curt Siodmak.  Siodmak is best known for having written the stories and/or screenplays for several classic horror and science fiction films such as The Wolf Man (Universal, 1941) and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (Columbia, 1956). According to his engrossing 2001 memoir, Wolf Man’s Maker:  Memoir of a Hollywood Writer, Siodmak was an agent of the Office of Strategic Intelligence during World War II (and later, the CIA).  Much of his work deals with the subject of mind control, most notably his bestselling science fiction novel, Donovan’s Brain (1942).  In Wolf Man’s Maker, Siodmak states that it was this novel in particular that convinced the OSS to invite him into the Agency’s fold.  (Siodmak further claims that various influential officers in the OSS were convinced he had based the titular character of Donovan’s Brain, a disembodied monomaniacal serial murderer named W.H. Donovan, on “Wild Bill” Donovan, the head of the OSS throughout World War II.)

 

After joining the OSS, Siodmak’s interest in the subject of mind control seemed to deepen, eventually culminating in the 1955 B-flick, Creature With the Atom Brain, directed by Edward L. Cahn.  Despite its outlandish title and plot, Siodmak’s story actually contains some genuine information about real life U.S. government mind control experiments that were being conducted by MKUltra (a CIA-funded program created to research various techniques—the vast majority of them decidedly illegal—for the behavioral engineering of human beings) even as Creature With the Atom Brain was being released in theatres throughout America during the summer of ’55.  

Roky Erickson may very well have been aware of the above information.  Whether conscious or unconscious of this wider frame of reference, the subtext of his 1980 song “Creature With the Atom Brain” concerns the horrors of actual U.S. government mind control experiments that were being enthusiastically performed on unsuspecting subjects (such as children, prison inmates, and mental patients) throughout the 1950s and '60s.

A second song on The Evil One, “I Walked With a Zombie,” is also based on a Siodmak-scripted film:  I Walked With a Zombie directed by Jacques Tourneur and produced by the legendary Val Lewton for RKO in 1943.  The screenplay was co-written by Siodmak and frequent Lewton collaborator Ardel Wray.  Within the context of supernatural horror, I Walked With a Zombie also deals with the subject of mind control (though in a far more oblique way).

Erickson’s “Creature With the Atom Brain” can be heard HERE.

Erickson’s “I Walked With a Zombie” can be heard HERE.  

 

I've Been Nominated For a RONDO!

Tim Lucas, editor of VIDEO WATCHDOG MAGAZINE, contacted me earlier today to let me know that I've been nomintated for a RONDO AWARD for my article, "Charles Darwin and the Suppressed Science of Dr. Mirakle," which was published in the Jan./Feb. 2012 issue of VIDEO WATCHDOG (#166). 

You can see the complete ballot by clicking HERE (scroll down to the 13th category entitled "BEST ARTICLE").

Sign up and begin voting TODAY!!!

The Rondos, by the way, are named after the late acromegalic actor Rondo Hatton (AKA "The Creeper") who may have broken more spines than anyone else in Hollywood.  Of his many outings as The Creeper, my favorite is HOUSE OF HORRORS (Universal, 1946) directed by Jean Yarborough from a script by George Bricker. 



Barry Gifford, author of numerous books and screenplays including the David Lynch film WILD AT HEART, has this to say about HOUSE OF HORRORS in his 1988 book THE DEVIL THUMBS A RIDE: 

"A personal favorite of mine, HOUSE OF HORRORS is a fractured exegesis on art, love, and curvature of the spine.  The Creeper--Rondo Hatton--steals the movie, hands down.  His hands are usually wrapped tightly around the throat of a prostitute cornered in an alley or on a lonely sidestreet, until he's rescued and taken in by a deranged sculptor who exhorts The Big Guy to strangle an art critic or two [...].

"This is all supposed to be happening in New York, but it was obviously shot on a Hollywood backlot on a rockbottom budget.  The feel of the movie is genuine, however; there are some seriously scary scenes as The Creeper stalks the streetwalkers.  The use of shifting shadows and sudden dark-to-light maneuvers similar to Edgar Ulmer's method in DETOUR are effective tricks that create an appropriately moody black-and-white rhythm.  The predictability of the plot and denouement notwithstanding, the real show is The Creeper.  HOUSE is Rondo Hatton's greatest performance; his strange shape and countenance are unlike anything on screen this side of Tod Browning's FREAKS, or the traveling carny sideshow wagon in Hitchcock's SABOTEUR.  The Creeper's problem with women is right on the surface, unquestioned; no hokey psychologizing in this one.  Old Rondo's operative philosophy is simple:  don't complain, don't explain.  Hollywood's exploitation of Rondo Hatton is no different than the use of Jayne Mansfield:  something for everyone."

I couldn't agree more.

You can see Rondo's performance in HOUSE OF HORRORS by clicking HERE.

NON-CONSPIRACY CRYPTOSCATOLOGY: THE PERILS OF MOVIEGOING IN AMERICA AND TEEN ANGELS & NEW MUTANTS

The word “cryptoscatology” refers not just to conspiracy theories, but to any field of endeavor that’s considered by mainstream culture to be transient, peripheral or hopelessly obscure.  Today I’m shining a spotlight on two recent works of non-conspiratorial cryptoscatology that are noteworthy for the similarities between the authors’ individual prose styles and research methods, namely an obsessive attention to ostensibly insignificant historical factoids and data that—when joined together and seen as a whole—form a much more complex and vivid picture of the subject matter at hand. 

 

The first book under discussion is Gary D. Rhodes’ THE PERILS OF MOVIEGOING IN AMERICA (Continuum, 2012), an exhaustive and yet highly entertaining history of America’s tumultuous relationship with the cinema, which carefully walks an impressive tightrope act between meticulous, academic scholarship and highly readable prose.  Perils reminds me of one of my favorite non-fiction books, Herbert Asbury’s The Gangs of New York (1927), in the sense that the book paints a detailed picture of an era that’s so distant from us now that it almost seems like a piece of outlandish fiction. 

The description on the back of the book reads:  “During the first fifty years of the American cinema, the act of going to the movies was a risky process, fraught with a number of possible physical and moral dangers.  Film fires were rampant, claiming many lives, as were movie theatre robberies, which became particularly common during the Great Depression.  Audiences also confronted an array of perceived moral dangers.  Blue Laws prohibited Sunday film screenings, though theatres ignored them in many areas, sometimes resulting in the arrests of entire audiences.  The Perils of Moviegoing in America:  1896-1950 provides the first history of the many threats that faced film audiences, threats which claimed hundreds, if not thousands, of lives.”

On the back of the book is also a blurb by Charles Musser, author of The Emergence of American Cinema, calling Perils a “page turner,” and in an odd way Musser is absolutely correct.  Perils reads like an eccentric novel in which the protagonists are the ghosts of long-dead movies theatres.  There are images in the book that are as haunting as anything one is likely to read in a popular supernatural novel.  Early on, in the introduction, we’re treated to this heavily symbolic—and yet real—image describing the inside of a movie theatre called the Knickerbocker that had been wiped out by a sudden cave-in due to poor building construction:  

Laughter filled the auditorium during Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford (1921) until a “roar like thunder” transformed the screening into a tragedy.  Two feet of snow proved more than the theatre’s roof could bear.  When it gave way, steel, concrete and wood rained down onto the audience.  The newly added weight on the balcony caused it to collapse as well […].  Screams from a “tangled mass” greeted rescuers.  They worked through the night to move over 100 injured moviegoers to nearby hospitals and makeshift infirmaries.  They also discovered body after body.  Four of the corpses sat upright in their seats, as if they were still watching the film.

That last line sets the tone for the rest of the book.  It’s a disturbing, almost surreal image that lingers in the mind long after the book is closed.

In March of 1931, Charles Fort wrote the following response to a positive review of his book LO!:

Something that you see in LO! is that it is a kind of non-fictional fiction, or that, though concerned with entomological and astronomical matters, and so on, it is “thrilling” and “melodramatic.” I have a theory that the moving pictures will pretty nearly drive out the novel, as they have very much reduced the importance of the stage—but that there will arise writing that will retain the principles of dramatic structure of the novel, but, not having human beings for its characters, will not be producible in the pictures, and will survive independently. Maybe I am a pioneer in a new writing that instead of old-fashioned heroes and villains, will have floods and bugs and stars and earthquakes for its characters and motifs.

Fort doesn’t mention long-dead movie theatres as potential protagonists, but if he had the above description would apply perfectly to Gary Rhodes’ The Perils of Moviegoing in America. 

On a synchronistic level, it’s interesting to note that I finished reading Perils only a few days before July 20, 2012, the night James Holmes went on an inexplicable rampage and shot up a theatre audience in Aurora, Colorado during a screening of Christopher Nolan’s film The Dark Knights Rises.  This shooting resulted in the deaths of twelve people and the wounding of fifty-eight others.  Only a few days after this tragic massacre, ultra-right-wing radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh went on the air and blamed the entire affair not on guns but on Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman film and the “dystopian” negativity rampant in American media and culture.  Since I had just read Rhodes’ book, however, I knew full well that theatre shootings extend at least as far back as the 1920s, long before Tim Burton’s parents were even born.  Oh, well.  So much for modern culture being to blame.  (Say, maybe it is the guns after all….)

The second book under discussion today is Stephen R. Bissette’s TEEN ANGELS & NEW MUTANTS (Black Coat Press, 2011), the most comprehensive analysis ever published of any single graphic novel—in this case, Rick Veitch’s Brat Pack (King Hell Press, 1990-91), the main characters of which are a homosexual superhero named Midnight Mink and his underage protégé, Chippy, and a steroid-popping white supremacist vigilante named Judge Jury and his underage sidekick, Kid Vicious.  Bissette’s analysis is well over double the length of the graphic novel that spawned it.  With seeming effortlessness, over the course of 400-plus pages, Bissette weaves a complex web of connections among such disparate subjects as pulp fiction, pornography, junkbond culture, subliminal sex, the Mickey Mouse Club, skateboarding, two-fisted zombies, real life mutants, Francisco de Goya, Arthur Rimbaud, Elvis Presley, 1980s teen comedy stars (“teen meat,” as Bissette refers to them), Dr. Fredric Wertham and his 1950s anti-comic-book campaign, Michael Jackson, the general exploitation of children, Make Room For Daddy, and the death of Superman—and that’s just scratching the surface.

Of special note here are Chapters 3 and 6.  Chapter 3 (“W-Wertham was—RIGHT!”) and Chapter 6 (“Up From the Deep”) both focus on the career of psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham, author of the infamous 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent, which stirred up a wave of anti-comics hysteria in the 1950s that directly led to a U.S. Congressional inquiry into the effects of crime and horror comics on the minds of American children.  These two chapters are worth the price of admission alone.  I’ve read a great deal about Fredric Wertham and Seduction of the Innocent over the years, but Bissette’s analysis of what Wertham was actually attempting to accomplish with his work is the most illuminating and thorough I’ve ever come across. 

Anyone interested in the history of comic books, the increasing influence of mega-corporations on the minds of children, the impact of societal taboos on popular entertainment, the deleterious cultural effects of censorship (self-imposed or otherwise), and the art and commerce of killing underage sidekicks, needs to read Stephen R. Bissette’s Teen Angels & New Mutants.  Without a doubt, this book raises the bar for the scholarship of what Will Eisner called “sequential art.”