The Tanah: Proverbs

[The following is the thirty-second of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, here is the twenty-fifth, here is the twenty-sixth, here is the twenty-seventh, here is the twenty-eighth, here is the twenty-ninth, here is the thirtieth, and here is the thirty-first–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

Translator’s Introduction

This set of pithy maxims was not thought to be requiring a magical ritual, involving the use of the four elements personified by the Crims. The words were thought to be magically effective in themselves: the original language uses such musical elements as metre, alliteration, assonance, consonance, and rhyme felt sufficient to influence the feelings of those in the tribe and to deter them from using magic in aid of sinning, by curbing unhealthy emotions.

They are to be chanted repeatedly, louder and louder, and with more and more emotional intensity.

  1. Pride is the father of shame.
    Humility is the mother of honour.
  2. Anger is a moment of madness.
    Calm keeps sanity everlasting.
  3. Envy is admiration and hate embracing.
    Its lack looks on without malevolence.
  4. Greed never grasps enough.
    Giving never gets empty-handed.
  5. One getting fat while many starve
    reverses how food should be shared.
  6. Lust loves the flesh and hates the heart.
    Lovemaking gives life, never taking.
  7. Despair hates all the outside world,
    because it hates all that’s inside.

Commentary

It’s fascinating how this ancient tribe, through these proverbs, seems to have anticipated the deadly sins of the Church.

Analysis of ‘Phantasm’

Phantasm is a 1979 supernatural horror film written and directed by Don Coscarelli. It stars A. Michael Baldwin, Bill Thornbury, Reggie Bannister, Kathy Lester, and Angus Scrimm. The film was independently produced, being financed by Coscarelli, his father, and local investors; the cast were mostly amateurs and aspiring professionals.

Following its expanded theatrical release, Phantasm would become a box office hit, grossing $22 million internationally. It got mixed reviews from critics, but in the years since its release, Phantasm has become a cult film. It’s on several critics’ lists of the best horror films, being praised by film scholars for its surrealistic qualities and themes of mourning, loss, and sibling relationships. JJ Abrahams is a fan of the movie.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, here are links (<<< this second one’s really bad) to the full movie, and here is a link to the (only first nine chapters, unfortunately, of the) novelization.

Since mourning and loss are major themes in the movie, I think it’s useful to go into the psychoanalysis of mourning. It’s also useful to examine the difference Freud saw between mourning and melancholia. In mourning, the painful process of dealing with the loss of a loved one is eventually gone through, and the mourner can redirect libido to objects other than the lost one; we can see Jody Pearson (Thornbury) largely getting over the loss of his parents and redirecting his feelings towards friends, bandmates like Reggie (Bannister), and women.

Things haven’t been so easy for Jody’s 13-year-old kid brother, Mike (Baldwin), who I would say is experiencing a repressed, unconscious form of melancholia, which involves not only a failure to accept the loss of his and Jody’s parents, but also involves the absorbing of their lost parents into his ego to make them internal objects (which in turn is the basis for object relations theory).

Furthermore, this internalizing also involves taking in those aspects of Mike’s parents that he doesn’t like, and so since those aspects are in him now, he dislikes himself for those aspects. His way of dealing with those disagreeable parts is to split them off and project them into the external world. These expelled objects would be what Melanie Klein called the bad father and the bad mother, those aspects of one’s parents that are frustrating and withholding of gratification.

These would be the Tall Man (Scrimm) and the Lady in Lavender (Lester), symbolically speaking, of course. Her sexual allure is symbolically in the Oedipally-desired parent, and his creepiness is symbolically in the Oedipally-hated parent. Since both are aspects of the same phantasm, they can also be seen to represent Klein’s notion of the combined parent figure, in which a child sees or imagines, in the primal scene, his mom and dad engaging in violent sex, which traumatizes him.

These phantasies (or phantasms) are the unconscious basis of all of the terror that Mike is experiencing as he continues failing to accept the loss of his parents. He’s been having nightmares ever since they died. Since part of him felt the usual frustrations any kid feels towards parents who don’t always do as a kid wishes, he imagines that he somehow ‘willed’ their deaths, and so he’s racked with guilt and self-hate over having ’caused’ their deaths–hence his being terrorized by the Tall Man, or the internalized bad father object, as his punishment for having ‘wished for’ the deaths of his parents. The terror he’s going through is all in his head.

Note that “phantasm” can mean both “spectre” and “fantasy,” or “figment of the imagination.” The Tall Man can be understood in both of these senses. He is a ghost terrorizing the Oregon town in which the film is set, and he is a fantasy in Mike’s mind. That fantasy comes from the internalized object of the bad father in Mike’s mind.

His conflict (and to a lesser extent, Jody’s conflict) with his mom and dad stem from the universal, narcissistic trauma of his love/hate relationship with them. They drove him crazy (presumably with their list of dos and don’ts) while alive, and now he can’t bear to lose them, now that they’re dead. He keeps them present and alive in his mind, in the unrecognizable forms of the Tall Man and the Lady in Lavender, for such is the way that repression works: feelings are pushed into the unconscious mind, then they return to consciousness, but in unrecognizable forms, hiding in plain sight.

What’s good and bad in Mike’s parents is split, in what Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position (“schizoid” referring to this splitting). The Tall Man, as Mike’s bad father, terrorizing him represents the persecutory anxiety the boy feels (“paranoid”) as a result of having rejected (and, as he imagines, having unconsciously wanted the death of) his father.

As with A Nightmare on Elm Street, Phantasm blurs the distinction between dream and reality. Because of this blurring, we can see the supernatural horror and the surrealism of Phantasm as being an allegory of the inner workings and conflicts of the unconscious mind. The dreamlike state that permeates not just this film, but also its sequels (generally regarded as inferior), explains to a great extent their many plot holes and inconsistencies.

The film begins at night, with a young man named Tommy making love with the Lady in Lavender in Morningside Cemetery. She takes a knife and stabs him to death, then changes into the form of the Tall Man. The juxtaposition of sex and death (or of Eros and Thanatos), as well as of the Lady in Lavender (or bad mother transference) and of the Tall Man (or bad father transference) allegorizes and personifies the unconscious processes described above.

Tommy has not just had the Oedipally-desired mother transference, he’s also experienced the combined parent figure, whom he penetrated and was penetrated by with a phallic knife (Indeed, in the novelization, the stabbing is described thus: “Quickly she sank [the knife] as hard and fast into his heart as he had plunged his body into hers.”). He later can be understood to be a kind of brother-figure for Mike, the way Reggie will be understood to be by the end of the film when we learn of Jody’s death, since we learn that Jody, Reggie, and Tommy were supposed to be a kind of Crosby, Stills, and Nash-style band of singers and guitar strummers (“It’s a hell of a way to end a trio,” Jody says of Tommy’s death to Reggie on the day of the funeral). The togetherness of the three young men suggests a tripling of Jody for Mike.

Because of the trauma Mike has suffered from his and Jody’s parents’ deaths, the boy has terrible fears of abandonment, and so he follows his older brother everywhere around town. Jody in fact plans on leaving Mike in the custody of his aunt, which of course the boy will hate, but Jody wants his freedom to pursue making music with Reggie, and leave that dull town.

Part of Mike’s fears of losing Jody the way he lost their parents can be seen as expressed in nightmare form: the stabbing of Tommy, and later of Reggie, the two victims being symbolic brothers. Mike’s unconscious mind is thus displacing the status of brother onto two men who aren’t his biological brothers, in order to ease the anxiety of facing up to the loss of his actual brother, Jody.

Mike’s melancholia, expressed musically through the haunting synthesizer theme in E minor, demonstrates the self-hate Freud wrote about in his paper on the subject (link above) in how the boy subjects himself to dangerous situations. His hanging out in the cemetery at night where the Tall Man’s crushed dwarves are, his going in the mausoleum, and even his rather precocious (for a 13-year-old) riding around on a motorbike (and, at one point, driving Jody’s car) all demonstrate at least potentially self-destructive behaviour, indicative of Freud’s death drive, something people who hate themselves might do, because they have bad internal objects haunting them.

After Tommy’s funeral, his death understood (but not believed, according to the novelization) to be a suicide, and it’s understood just how heavy his coffin is, Mike comes to the cemetery and sees the Tall Man pick up, carry, and put the coffin in a hearse all by himself. Mike is so amazed at the mortician’s superhuman strength that he whispers, “What the fuck?” and wants to tell a local fortune teller (played by Mary Ellen Shaw) about it. The height and strength of the Tall Man (especially as compared with the height of his dwarves) reinforces him being representative of the bad father, who from the point of view of a child, is much bigger and stronger.

The fortune teller, who has reassured Mike that if Jody leaves, they’ll go together, is an old lady. As such, she is as much a symbolic mother to Mike as the Tall Man is a symbolic father. (Her granddaughter, played by Terrie Kalbus, is a symbolic sister.) That the fortune teller is amused at Mike’s fear from feeling his hand trapped and hurt in a magic box indicates that she, like the Lady in Lavender, is a bad mother figure, too.

That the box seems to be taking away Mike’s hand and is scaring him (the losing of his hand would have been a symbolic castration) is indicative of castration anxiety, and castration at the hands of the bad father (or here, of the bad mother) can in turn be representative of corporal punishment. To overcome his melancholia, Mike must overcome his fear and unconscious hate of his dead parents. Only then will their bad internal objects stop tormenting him. Hence, the granddaughter (Sarah in the novelization) tells him not to be afraid, and only when he controls his fear does the box, a yonic symbol, release his hand.

The old and young women want Mike to understand that it’s fear itself that is his problem. A funny thing, though, happens soon after, for the granddaughter goes to the cemetery and enters the mausoleum; and when she finds a room in it with containers holding the Tall Man’s crushed dwarves (as we’ll eventually learn), she finds herself overcome with terror, and screams. We don’t see or hear from her again. The fear she warned Mike about became her very problem.

While she’s at the cemetery and mausoleum, Jody is at home, singing and playing his electric guitar on his porch, and Reggie arrives in his ice cream truck with his acoustic guitar and joins in playing the new song Jody has been working on. He’s singing of his lady having left him, and I can’t help linking that idea with how his parents’ death must have felt like an abandonment (hence, Mike’s fears of abandonment). The unconscious Oedipal attachment to Jody’s mother could have easily been displaced to his lady leaving him (his local girlfriend [see the novelization], or his coming sexual encounter with the Lady in Lavender). An expression of his displaced grief in song is one way Jody has been successful in overcoming his grief and loss–something Mike can’t do.

The novelization points out in Chapter Two that Tommy sang and played guitar just like Jody and Reggie–hence I say their trio would have been like Crosby, Stills, and Nash, especially judging by the mellow style of the song we hear the surviving two musicians working on. They only need to work out the vocal harmonies, which would have been three-part had Tommy still been alive, like the harmonies of CSN. As a trio, they would again be a tripling of brothers for Mike, an unconscious wish-fulfillment for a boy so scared of losing any more of his family.

When Jody and Reggie finish playing the song, Reggie takes out a tuning fork and strikes it, then touches it with his fingertips to stop the ringing sound. Immediately after that, we see Sarah, the fortune teller’s granddaughter, walking through a hall in the mausoleum towards the door to the room with the dwarf containers, where she’ll scream.

We learn towards the climax of the movie, when Jody, Mike, and Reggie find that room, that there’s a pair of metal bars sticking up from the floor. These look like a giant tuning fork, but without the connecting bottom. Mike will put his hand between the bars and see it disappear, just as when his hand disappeared in the box; he’ll discover what Sarah must have seen–a hot, hellish world of slave dwarves toiling away for the devil Tall Man. Reggie later will touch the tops of those bars, just as his fingertips touched the tuning fork. This causes a vacuum in the room from which he narrowly escapes.

We are left wondering what connection there could be between the tuning fork, the bars, and the box. Since as I said above, the events of Phantasm are an allegorizing of the goings-on of the unconscious mind, there will be an association of various images that we see, all signifiers of some kind meant to represent certain mental concepts. Since the magic box is a yonic symbol, the tuning fork and metal bars can be seen as phallic. Putting one’s hand in the box or between the bars makes the hand disappear, a symbolic castration.

Touching the tuning fork or bars, and putting one’s hand in the box, is symbolic masturbation. The threat of castration, symbolic of corporal punishment, is parental discipline against a child’s indulgence in forbidden pleasures.

Furthermore, the tuning fork and metal bars can be seen as both phallic and yonic, the spaces in between the “phalli” being yonis; therefore, the tuning fork and metal bars can be associated with the combined parental figure. That Mike’s hand disappears in the in-between “yoni” as well as that of the magic box indicates the vagina dentata of a punitive bad mother, one every bit as threatening as the bad father of the Tall Man, disciplining a child for his Oedipal urges. Recall how the Lady in Lavender, knife in hand, is ready to stab Jody just outside the mausoleum as Reggie is about to touch the bars and cause the vacuum in the room and the storm outside.

All of these elements in combination reinforce the idea that Phantasm is all about unconscious paranoid anxiety that the hated, internalized mother and father are out to punish Mike and Jody for wanting them dead and gone, however repressed that wish may be.

We learn from Chapter Seven of the novelization that Jody doesn’t want to take over his father’s bank. One can imagine some nasty argument between Jody and his parents over whether or not he should pursue a career in music rather than take over the family business. Jody’s wish to be free of his parents’ dictates surely contributed to an unconscious wish on his part to be rid of them…and so their deaths would have been a source of unconscious guilt for him as well as for Mike.

While Jody is visiting the bank in Chapter Seven of the novelization, he’s in the suit he had on during Tommy’s funeral, and apart from giving the management of his dead father’s bank to George Norby until Mike is old enough to take over, Jody also has a brief, intimate moment with Suzy, an employee there who likes him in that suit and, being of a traditional woman’s mindset, hopes her boyfriend will be the new boss of the bank. One of the film’s outtakes shows her with him in the office that was his dad’s.

Being an aspiring musician, though, Jody doesn’t want to be part of the money-obsessed, capitalist world. As I said above, I imagine his dad being upset with him for not wanting to do that. This conflict can be linked to the later scene of Mike seeing the slave dwarves in that hellscape beyond the metal bar portal in the room with the dwarf containers. Jody doesn’t want to be a slave to capitalism, angering his father, and so his and Mike’s unconscious is showing them the infernal punishment their devilish bad father (the Tall Man) has planned for them.

You see, Jody has a bit of paranoid anxiety of his own, though it’s not as intense as Mike’s is. Jody, too, has a nightmare, one of dwarves grabbing him and pulling him away into hell, just as Mike has a nightmare of the Tall Man standing over his bed with his arms out, ready to grab the boy, and the dwarves all then do.

With the blurring of the line between dream and reality, we don’t know for sure how much of Phantasm is actually in waking life. For all we know, it’s all a great big, unending nightmare, Dante’s tour of the hellish unconscious with Virgil. For this reason, I feel free to interpret any and every character as an extension of Jody’s and Mike’s family.

Thus, Suzy can be an extension of Jody’s unconscious Oedipal feelings for his mother (with Dad dead, he can have her, provided he’s willing to carry on with the family business). If not, though, he’ll be with the Lady in Lavender that night in the cemetery, taking his chances with the bad mother instead of having the good mother transference in his dad’s office in the bank.

Indeed, because things have gone sour between Jody and Suzy (she representing the good mother), he’ll go that night to the local pub and pick up the Lady in Lavender. Mike will be following Jody, as usual. The two lovers going at it in the cemetery represents a fusion of Eros and Thanatos, the life and death drives.

Mike, of course, will be in the cemetery, too. He’ll be scared by the presence of those dwarves, making him scream for help and distract Jody from her…also saving his life without him even realizing it.

The whole point of the Oedipus complex, properly understood in its expanded sense to include the jealous wish to hog the Oedipally-desired object to oneself (be this object the mother, father,…or really anyone), is that it’s a universal narcissistic trauma expressing hate and hostility to anyone who wishes to share that object and not let one hog him or her to oneself. This is what we see when Mike is following Jody everywhere, not wanting his older brother to be free to live his own life (e.g., to be with the Lady in Lavender). Saving Jody from her knife is thus a justification of Mike’s narcissistic wish to hog his brother all to himself, and is thus a wish-fulfillment. Remember how all of Phantasm could just be Mike’s ongoing dream, all an expression of his unconscious.

The next day, Mike is downtown, and across the street he sees the Tall Man walking up to Reggie’s ice cream truck. The cold of the truck seems to affect the Tall Man negatively. Indeed, we come to understand that the antagonist, being a devil of the hottest hell, has a strong aversion to heat’s diametrical opposite.

Later, Mike is in the garage, tinkering with a car. His precocious talent at fixing cars seems to reflect a wish to know how to bring things back to life, as it were. If only he could bring people back to life, like his parents. Dwarves scare him again, and he tells still-disbelieving Jody about them.

That night, Mike will go with a knife to the mausoleum to figure out what’s going on there. As he’s hiding in a coffin, he sees a caretaker looking around. This is another middle-aged man, like the Tall Man, so as far as Mike’s unconscious is concerned, the man is yet again representative of the bad father that the boy has internalized and whom he wishes he could be rid of.

Note how in all of Mike’s fear of the Tall Man and his dwarves, the boy still ventures out to the places that are the sources of his fear. This willingness to go out there demonstrates his self-destructive nature, which in turn demonstrates the self-hate he feels from his having internalized his bad parental objects, the source of his melancholia in the Freudian sense. He hates himself because he hates them, who are now a part of him.

Still, he keeps trying to project them outward, hence he has to confront them in the forms of the caretaker and the Tall Man. The coffin he hides in is a yonic symbol, representing his forbidden Oedipal desire, which as I said above is much more than just the wish to have his mother incestuously; but in the more expanded sense, it means he wants to hog all desired objects (her, the good father, Jody, and other brother-figures–Reggie and Tommy) all to himself.

Lacan‘s Non! du père forbids Mike to hog everyone just to fulfill his personal wishes, though: Mike must enter society and share everyone with everyone else; he cannot be the symbolic phallus for the mother, which represents the wish to be the desire of the Other. This inability to be that phallus is thus a symbolic castration, which is a recurrent motif in Phantasm.

Mike struggles with the caretaker, even biting his hand…and we’ve seen how a hurt or disappearing hand is symbolic castration. Mike wants the frustration of his wishes to be projected onto others. Immediately after the biting of the hand comes the flying ball with the blade, which stabs the caretaker in the head and kills him. This flying testicle and phallic blade are both castrated and (symbolically) castrating in their mutilation of the man’s face.

Right after this struggle, Mike has to confront the Tall Man, who chases him into a room, with Mike bolting the door to keep the mortician out, his hand slipping through the crack. Mike uses his knife to slice off the Tall Man’s fingers, yet another symbolic castration and Mike’s wish-fulfillment to project the frustration of his desires onto his bad father internal object. This wish-fulfillment is a form of revenge against his father’s frustration of his desires, which led to his unconscious wish for his parents’ deaths, which in turn led to his guilt and melancholia over their actual death. Instead of human blood, the severed fingers drip yellow ichor (the blood of the Greek gods), fittingly the colour of piss and therefore it reinforces how the fingers are phallic.

Mike takes a finger, puts it in a little box [!], and takes it home to show Jody the proof that he isn’t going crazy. Later on, the finger turns into a horrible, black flying insect that attacks Mike and then Jody and visiting Reggie soon after. Its ugliness, and the revulsion that the insect causes, are the diametrical (and dialectical) opposite of the beauty of Aphrodite, who emerged nude from the foam of the sea into which the severed genitals of Uranus were thrown. Indeed, the original sky-father god was castrated by his son, Cronus, in a reversal of the fear of the castrating father of Freud’s conception (Freud, on page 469 of his Interpretation of Dreams, wrote of a variation in which it’s Zeus who overthrows and castrates Cronus in revenge for devouring all of his children.).

The insect is shoved into the kitchen sinkhole, just as the Tall Man will be trapped in a hole going down into an abandoned mine shaft. Apart from being more yonic symbols, these traps also represent attempts at repressing traumatic memories…and of course, neither of them will last long or be effective. Reggie’s seeing of the insect means he too will be involved in doing something about the Tall Man.

Jody is the next to go to the mausoleum alone, and he’s attacked by the dwarves, one of which then chases him in a hearse, it being too short for Jody to see it through the car windows. It turns out that, once Mike has arrived in Jody’s car to help and that the dwarf has been stopped, that it was a crushed, shrunken version of Tommy.

Jody and Mike come to realize that the Tall Man has been killing people in the town (including their parents), and he has been crushing the bodies down to dwarf height, reanimating them, too, in order to do his bidding. As Mike later learns through the twin metal bar portal in that room with the dwarf containers, the dwarves will be the Tall Man’s toiling slaves.

On a symbolic level, this all means that the bad father wants to infantilize Jody and Mike (i.e., to shrink them down to size), and thus make them obey their dad’s every command (e.g., continue to run their father’s banking business, and so abandon their dreams of a music career, etc., and be good slaves to capitalism) without question. Another thing to consider is how the dwarves, as symbolic children, are projections of Mike’s self-loathing. He screams in terror at them because they are him; they’re what Wilfred Bion called ‘bizarre objects,’ hallucinated projections of Mike.

As Jody tries to confront what’s going on in the mausoleum, he tries to keep Mike out of it, in a misguided attempt to protect him. The Tall Man will go after Mike in the house, anyway. Jody trying to lock Mike up in his bedroom just makes Jody into yet another bad object, frustrating Mike in his wishes to be involved with confronting the Tall Man. Mike, in his frustration as Jody is carrying him upstairs to his bedroom, struggles and screams, calling Jody a “goddamn bastard!” and fearing that Jody will abandon him forever.

Mike manages to break out of his bedroom, and the Tall Man, all fingers intact again, abducts him and puts him in a hearse to take him to the mausoleum. Mike has a pistol, though, and he shoots his way out, making the hearse crash and go up in flames. He goes in the mausoleum and finds his father’s coffin, as Jody has already done.

Just before opening the coffin, Mike says, “I’m sorry, Dad, but we had to”…do what? Wish for his and Jody’s parents’ deaths? He’s horrified to see his father’s corpse gone. A bladed ball flies at his head, but Jody intervenes and shoots it with a shotgun. Instead of being mad at Mike for disobeying and escaping his bedroom, though, Jody hugs him. Jody is thus a good object again.

They’re pleased to run into Reggie again, knowing he isn’t dead (after having assumed that he and a couple of young women were killed earlier by the dwarves). Mike is especially pleased, of course, since Reggie’s another brother-figure. They go in that room with the dwarf-containers and the portal. Mike calls the other world, the one he’s almost fallen into, another planet, but I think it’s supposed to be hell, where the Tall Man and his dwarves are all evil spirits.

Finally, with everyone outside the mausoleum again, Reggie, thinking he’s helping the Lady in Lavender, is stabbed by her, just as Tommy–another brother-figure to Mike–was. Then Jody devises his plan to lure the Tall Man into the mine shaft and trap him there.

Mike has to confront the Tall Man yet again at home, the mortician calling him “Boy!”, like a harsh, disciplinarian father. He chases Mike out to the mine shaft, where he falls in the hole, one which Jody then drops boulders from on high to trap the Tall Man in. Jody seems like a triumphant hero.

Mike wakes up in bed. It was all just a dream…wasn’t it?

As it turns out, it was Jody who died…in a car wreck, and not Reggie from a stabbing. Mike knows those rocks won’t hold the Tall Man for long (if he could survive the fire from the crashing of the hearse into the pole, surely he can get out of that trap): of course not–Jody’s trap is merely symbolic of repression in the unconscious. We know Mike has been having nightmare after nightmare ever since his parents’ deaths, and now he’s having even more of them after Jody’s death.

Has the whole film been a dream, on and off?

We see Mike and Reggie in the living room of the house, with a fireplace burning behind them. It looks almost like a romantic setting. I don’t mean to say that Reggie is being a pederastic predator, or that Mike is welcoming such predation in his unconscious; but rather that these overtones are symbolic of Mike’s deep need to have the (platonic) love of a brother-figure, a need that would be particularly intense now that he’s just lost Jody. His feelings of abandonment are overwhelming.

Since Mike has been frustrated as well as loved by his now-all-dead objects, the bad versions of them, including that of Jody now, will all be internalized by the boy. He’ll need Reggie as a good object and brother-figure. Fittingly, Reggie picks up his acoustic guitar and begins humming and strumming that song he played earlier with Jody, the one about his woman leaving him. The film is all about loss, mourning, and a feeling of abandonment.

When Mike is in his room to begin packing for the road trip he and Reggie have planned, he sees the Tall Man again, in the mirror. Seeing the bad father, instead of himself, in the specular image is a reminder to us that the boy’s demons are all inside himself, internalized, not out there somewhere and so he’d be safe from them.

Like a stern father about to spank his son, the Tall Man calls out “Boy!” again, and the dwarves’ arms crash through the mirror glass, grab Mike, and take him screaming away. The childlike dwarves, about Mike’s height, get him because, like the Tall Man, they are him.

The Tanah–The Preaching: The Remaining Spells for Preventing Sin

[The following is the thirty-first of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, here is the twenty-fifth, here is the twenty-sixth, here is the twenty-seventh, here is the twenty-eighth, here is the twenty-ninth, and here is the thirtieth–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

The following are the remaining spells for preventing sin–their instructions and verses.

[Find an expansive, flat area of land. Perform a ritual with one group of people at one side, and another group of people at the other side. As the verse is chanted, the first group will march together to the other side, as if to take it from the second group of people; then the second group will do the same, marching to the first side while grabbing the arms of the people in the first group, as if to take their land and enslave them. This will all be done while repeating the following verse, louder and louder, and with more and more emotional intensity.]

What you from (others) take(,) others
>>>………………………………………..<<<

Commentary: The verse is to be read thus: “What you take from others, others take from you.” The syntax in the original language allows a smooth reading back and forth.

[Collect coins of gold, silver, and copper, and pile them in a hole in the ground; do this ritual on a windy day. Surround the pile with dirt, leaves, and kindling. As the verse is chanted, burn the leaves and kindling, then put out the fire with water, and bury the coins in the dirt. Chant the following verse repeatedly and in a growing volume and emotional intensity.]

Weleb, Crim of air, blow away my greed!
Nevil, Crim of fire, torch my greed!
Priff, Crim of water, drown my greed!
Drofurb, Crim of earth, bury my greed!

Commentary: It should go without saying that, as the wind blows on the coins, Weleb’s line is chanted repeatedly; as the leaves and kindling are burned, Nevil’s line is chanted repeatedly; as the fire is put out with the water, Priff’s line is chanted repeatedly, and as the coins are buried, Drofurb’s line is chanted repeatedly.

[Prepare a bag of coins to be ‘stolen,’ in this ritual of mock-robbery. Participants in the ritual will run around, each ‘stealing’ the bag while having it ‘stolen’ from him soon after. This running around and ‘stealing’ will continue, again and again, as the following verse is repeatedly chanted.]

When you from (others) steal(,) then others
>>>………………………………………………….<<<

Commentary: As with the verse above meant to prevent the stealing of others’ land, this verse, meant to prevent the stealing of others’ wealth or possessions, is to be read in a similar back-and-forth manner, to represent the karmic nature of the Echo Effect: “When you from others steal, others then steal from you.” Again, the syntax of the original language allows for a smoothness of reciting that cannot be properly reproduced in English.

[This ritual is to be done by one man alone. He is to stand in a flat, open field on a windy day. A circular ditch is to be dug, surrounding him. Leaves and kindling are to be left surrounding him, too. As he chants the verse over and over, he is to light the leaves and kindling on fire, then put it all out with water, then go in the ditch and crawl around in it, rolling in the dirt until his whole body is filthy.]

Weleb, if I think of myself alone, may I be alone!
Nevil, if I think of myself alone, may I be alone!
Priff, if I think of myself alone, may I be alone!
Drofurb, if I think of myself alone, may I be alone!

Commentary: Again, each act in the ritual is to correspond with the Crim repeatedly invoked, so Weleb is addressed during the blowing wind, Nevil during the burning, etc.

[Prepare a weighing scale, piles of dirt, small amounts of water, leaves and kindling, and do this ritual on a windy day. First, put unequal amounts of dirt in the two bowls of the scale so they’re uneven; then as the line addressing Drofurb is chanted, move some dirt from the heavier bowl to the lighter bowl to reverse the unevenness. As the line addressing Priff is chanted, have unequal amounts of water in the bowls, then move some water from the heavier bowl to the lighter one, again, to reverse the unevenness. Do the same with the leaves and kindling, lighting them on fire while addressing Nevil with his line. Finally, let the wind blow against the scale while chanting the line for Weleb.]

Drofurb, may my unfairness come back to me!
Priff, may my unfairness come back to me!
Nevil, may my unfairness come back to me!
Weleb, may my unfairness come back to me!

Commentary: As with the rituals meant to prevent the stealing of land or money, and to prevent selfishness, this ritual, to prevent unfairness, dramatizes how the Echo Effect punishes our sin, and so it is meant to instill in the tribe the importance of knowing never to bring bad karma on oneself.

Redacted

******************those************
************************************
****girls***************************
**********************did**********
***********************************
**********nothing******************
************************************
**************************wrong***
************************************
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Analysis of ‘Aqualung’

I: Introduction

Aqualung is a 1971 album by Jethro Tull, their fourth. It was their first album to have John Evan (keyboards) as a full-time member, and their first with Jeffrey Hammond (bass–billed jokingly as “Hammond-Hammond” at the time); incidentally, the new bassist had already been referred to in a number of Jethro Tull songs: “A Song for Jeffrey,” “Jeffrey Goes to Leicester Square,” “For Michael Collins, Jeffrey, and Me,” and even “Inside” (i.e., in the line, “Old Jeffrey makes three.”). Aqualung would also be the last album with Clive Bunker on drums; when he was replaced by Barriemore Barlow, band leader Ian Anderson (vocals, flute, acoustic guitar, etc.) would be the only remaining original member of the band as of Thick as a Brick.

Aqualung was a great success for Jethro Tull, with four classic songs: the title track, “Cross-Eyed Mary,” “Hymn 43,” and “Locomotive Breath.” The band would go on to become a major radio and touring act in the 1970s. Aqualung is Jethro Tull’s best-selling album, having sold more than seven million units worldwide, being generally well-received critically, and being included on several music magazine best-of lists.

Though it’s been understood by many to be “an antichurch/pro-God concept album” (George-Warren/Romanowski/Pareles, page 495), the band has consistently denied that Aqualung was ever intended to be a concept album, and that only a few songs share common themes. I plan, however, to show that certain themes presented in the lyrics–homelessness/destitution, sin/perversity, prostitution/being of the working class/Lumpenproletariat, etc. on Side One (those down low), and religious authoritarianism and of the powerful on Side Two (those up high)–are more consistent than that.

There is indeed a dialectical relationship here between both sides of the album, fittingly subtitled Aqualung and My God. The “least of [Christ’s] brethren” would represent God far better than the Pharisee-like Church authorities scorned on Side Two. Christ came for the sick, and not the healthy, after all, hence His sitting and eating with sinners, as well as His forgiveness of Mary Magdalene, the “Cross-Eyed Mary” of His time. He never condoned her sin, nor that of the adulteress, nor of the tax collectors; with His mercy, He would have them “go, and sin no more.” (John 8:11)

Such is the real meaning to be found in Aqualung. We’ll find God in the sick and the oppressed, not in the powerful and holier-than-thou. When we look at the cover of the album and see the filthy homeless man on it, his long hair and beard may remind us of Christ’s. Consider also the text on the back cover of the album, which reverses the Creation by having Man create God, and later form Aqualung out of the dust of the ground, Man’s Adam, who in being cast out of Eden is thus made homeless.

So, in helping these least of His brethren, one is helping Christ, which thus equates Aqualung, “and a host of others likened unto his kind”, with Christ, and therefore in turn with God, an ideal created by Man. But Man cast all of the Aqualungs into the void, out of Eden, made homeless. Thus, Man became the God he created, that is, the stern Church authority figure to “rule over all the earth.”

Man isn’t seeing the Spirit that lives on within all men, and even in Aqualung–that creative, divine Spirit within all of us, a ruach-breath made sick from Man’s mistreatment of Aqualung. Man had better start looking for that Spirit, though, if he wishes to save himself and his world.

Here is a link to all of the lyrics on the album, and here is a link to the whole album.

Side One–Aqualung

II: Aqualung

The character of Aqualung was inspired by a number of photographs of homeless people on the Thames Embankment, taken by Anderson’s then-wife, Jennie, who co-wrote the lyric for the title track.

The song begins with a riff played by lead guitarist Martin Barre: D, G, A-sharp, C, C-sharp, C-natural. The shift from the perfect fifth (D) of the tonic key (G minor) to an augmented fourth (C-sharp) is significant, for this latter note is a tritone in relation to the tonic.

Finding the tritone dissonant, unsettling, and difficult to sing, the Church called the interval the diabolus in musica, or the “devil in music.” If we rename the augmented fourth with the enharmonic interval of the diminished fifth (or the flattened fifth), we thus can see in its descent from the perfect fifth a symbolic fall from ‘perfection’ to ‘devilishness,’ or to ‘sin.’ We will hear this descent from perfect fifth to tritone again in the main chord progression of “My God” (see below).

Speaking of sin, this is exactly what we find Aqualung doing on that park bench, looking lustfully at pretty little girls there, like a sex pervert. Though we naturally would never condone his pedophilia, his “watching as the frilly panties run,” matters will get more complicated. We look on him with disgust for his “bad intent,” for the “snot running down his nose,” and his “greasy fingers smearing shabby clothes”; yet we also pity him for his “broken luck.”

He’s “drying in the cold sun” because without a home, one is often cold even when the sun is out. When we go from the first verse to the second, Barre’s angry electric guitar riff changes to Anderson’s sad acoustic guitar strumming, a musical shift from the judgemental attitude towards Aqualung’s proclivities to compassion for “an old man wandering lonely.” Perhaps if we’d pitied, rather than shamed, him, he wouldn’t have stooped to the low of lusting after children.

Another thing to remember in connection with his pedophilia: many men in positions of religious authority have been guilty of the same thing, as well as having gotten away with it, thanks to that very religious authority (at least in the case of Aqualung, he’s only had impure thoughts that he, presumably, hasn’t [yet] acted on). Note what I said above in connection with this moral equivalence: there is a dialectical relationship between those in the lowly state on Side One and those in the exalted state on Side Two. These least of Christ’s brethren are equivalent to ‘Him’ (i.e., to the Church) in sin; they’re equivalent to the real Christ in piteousness, though.

With pain in his leg, Aqualung picks up cigarette butts, discarded ‘dog ends,’ since they’re all the penniless man has available to smoke. When he has to use a public washroom–a “bog”–he gets some of his piss on his feet, warming them, which ironically makes his soiling of them seem comfortable.

He’s alone, and the Salvation “Army’s up the road,” that is, not near him to give him aid and comfort. The Salvation Army has been known historically, by the way, for being rather selective with those to whom they want to be charitable. An interesting point to be made here is the reversal of the words “Salvation” and “army” in the two lines of the verse, which seems to represent a reversal, or inversion, of moral values: one isn’t charitable to whom one should be.

Anderson ends the verse with more sympathy for the “poor old sod,” then with the beginning of the third verse, the tempo and energy pick up the pace. He imagines the “agony” that Aqualung must have felt in the last, freezing cold winter, out there without any shelter.

The derelict’s “rattling last breaths/with deep-sea diver sounds” bring us to the meaning of the song’s title, which is a reference to the name of one of the first SCUBA devices. Aqualung’s heavy, laboured breathing, probably a result of pneumonia or emphysema from his smoking, exposure to air pollution, viruses, and bacteria, sounds like someone breathing in SCUBA gear.

This difficulty breathing in turn can be related to what I said above about the ruach (“breath,” “wind”) of God. This relation can symbolize the corruption and other problems of the Church, which make it difficult for the Spirit of God to flow effectively. More on this later.

The rest of the song’s lyric is repeats of the previous verses. That angry, judgemental first verse, with Barre’s electric guitar riff, ends the song, with the chord progression moving from the G minor tonality up a tritone to C-sharp major, D-sharp major, and F major. Evan finishes the song off with some piano arpeggios in that final chord.

III: Cross-Eyed Mary

The song begins with minor third tremolos on Anderson’s flute (What is a Jethro Tull song without the flute?), backed with Evan’s piano chords and Mellotron (strings tapes). The transition, from this instrumental opening to the rock riff and Anderson’s vocals, comes with a few trills on his flute.

The first two lines of the first verse are a reference to an old traditional English counting rhyme, “Tinker, Tailor,” which includes this line: “rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief.” Anderson’s lyric, though, reverses the poor men and other Lumpenproletariat with the “rich man,” as he did previously with the Salvation Army in “Aqualung.” Again, this restates the album’s theme of a reversal of how things normally would be.

Here, however, instead of things being reversed to become bad, they’re reversed…perhaps…to become good, with the poor coming first and the rich last, as Jesus would have had them. Only in the case of this song, the poor coming before the rich is in the form of Cross-Eyed Mary, a teenage high school prostitute who offers her services to dirty old men…if they have the money.

Being a prostitute, she is a member of the Lumpenproletariat, like Aqualung, who is referred to later on in the song. These two are the ‘low-lives’ of Side One; Anderson himself referred to her as such. With the other poor wretches of the Aqualung side of the album, they’re meant to contrast sharply (and dialectically) with the highly-placed religious authorities of the My God side.

As I said above, it’s the men who have the money who pay for her services, for “she dines in Hampstead village,” a wealthy area of London, hence her clients will be moneyed businessmen. The “jack-knife barber” who “drops her off at school” is a back-alley abortionist who illegally solves her pregnancy problems.

Also as I said above, it’s older men whom she services, not “little boys.” If only Aqualung had the money for her, since he’s got her attention as he watches her lustfully “through the railings” to the schoolyard. If he can manage to scrounge up a few pounds, though, he might get lucky with her, for “she’ll do it for a song.” With the money she gets from her rich clients, she can do charitable sexual favours for poorer men, thus making her “the Robin Hood of Highgate” (one of the most expensive suburbs of London, and the site of the St. Mary Magdalene House of Charity, for the rehabilitation of “fallen women,” or prostitutes).

So where Aqualung is the Adam, having been kicked out of Eden and into homelessness, Cross-Eyed Mary is the Eve of the album, a fallen woman. These are the sinners and the lowly who are judged by those on high, the religious authorities on Side Two…yet they’re men who really aren’t any better from a moral standpoint, if one regards such men more closely.

IV: Cheap Day Return

This short song opens with Anderson playing a brief prelude on his acoustic guitar, with Evan backing him on the organ. Anderson is singing about his sick father in hospital, hoping the nurse is taking good care of him. Thus, his father is another of the wretched, deserving of pity, one of “these least of [Christ’s] brethren.” and so he’s like God.

Also, being Anderson’s father, he can be seen to represent God the Father, who is sick because of Church corruption and lost of faith in Him. The nurse would thus represent the priesthood, who are trusted to guide us in understanding God, just as Anderson hopes the nurse will do well in nursing his old man back to health.

Yet the nurse, knowing Anderson to be a rock singer, asks him for his autograph, which to him is “What a laugh.” This hero-worship of a singer is like the idolizing of a false god, symbolically implying Church corruption, which has made God so sick in the first place. Such idolatry makes religion cheap, hence the Sunday service is on a “Cheap Day.”

V: Mother Goose

The title of this song reminds me of a quote from Clarence Darrow: “I don’t believe in God because I don’t believe in Mother Goose.” Thus, the song’s title could be seen to represent the God of Church authority that is no longer believable.

The song lyric has been described as being a surreal pastiche with images of the same abstract ideas as in “Cross-Eyed Mary.” Indeed, there are schoolgirls in the song: is Mary one of them?

I suspect that, underneath the ‘surreal’ imagery, Anderson was–if only unconsciously–dealing with the loss of faith in the Church and the resulting indulgence in sin. If God is as unbelievable as the fairy tales of Mother Goose, then having “turned her loose” is a renunciation of that faith, leaving the Church authorities “screaming” at Anderson’s apostasy.

The Church and its faith can seem like a circus, or like a school, drawing the attention of “a foreign student” of Sunday school, as it were. The foreigner, knowing so little about the local faith, imagines that its ‘circus’ is full of fanciful animals–“elephants, lions, too,” like those in Noah’s Ark, when the place is really Piccadilly Circus, a not-so spectacular place, like our world, without the Biblical miracles and whatnot.

Since the Church’s teachings make it like a school, it’s fitting to hear Barre play a descant recorder and Hammond play an alto recorder, reminding us all of the instrument we as kids used to play in music class at school. Mother Goose tales tend, directly or indirectly, to teach morals (i.e., Charles Perrault‘s renderings of them), just as the Church teaches, through Christ’s parables. Anderson doesn’t want to learn all that, though, so he went “down by the bathing pond to try and catch some sun.” All those schoolgirls were there, too, and they probably didn’t know he was playing truant.

To get back to the circus-as-Church imagery, we learn of Anderson being chided by “a bearded lady” to stop “misbehaving,” or sinning. Apparently, though, a red-bearded man’s sister driving a lorry is far weirder. Could it be that the bearded lady of the Church-circus sideshow ‘freaks’ is really a man speaking for women, who are supposed to be silent in church (1 Corinthians 14:35), while a woman driving a lorry is all the more brazenly defying of traditional sex roles, since she, like Anderson, is giving up on her faith?

I suspect a sexual meaning in Anderson’s putting and having “popped ’em in their holes.” Other men seem to be doing the same, “four and twenty” of them, to be exact, like the “Four and twenty naughty boys/Baked in a pye” of the original version of the nursery rhyme, “Sing a Song of Sixpence.” (I’m sure the original rhyme meant something far less naughty than what I’m implying about the “pie,” but my concern is with Anderson’s lyric, not the original verse.) The labourers are “digging up their gold,” again, there’s an implied sexual meaning, while Anderson, as cunning and opportunistic Long John Silver, is figuring out a way to get at that treasure of girl-gold (the schoolgirls, including Cross-Eyed Mary?).

Another example of sinning is when Johnny Scarecrow stole a “jet black mac…from a snowman.” This kind of sinning, along with the lechery and truancy cited above, is what worries the Church authorities when the flock loses its faith. Such sinners might sink low, down to the depths of Aqualung, Cross-Eyed Mary, and others among the Lumpenproletariat.

VI: Wond’ring Aloud

This is an acoustic guitar ballad about a loving married couple, though there’s some implied sexual meaning…or sinning…in the lyric, too. This combination of love and sexuality in a married couple suggests the sensual love expressed in the poetry of the Song of Songs, whose male and female lovers the Church often allegorizes as the love of Christ (the bridegroom) for His Church (the bride).

That the groom and bride “are [their] own saviours,” like Christ and His Church, leads us to wonder “will the years treat [them] well,” that is, will their faith in the Church remain intact, or will they lose faith in it, and will that lack of faith lead to sinning, as we saw in “Mother Goose”?

The sinning could be in the form of unbridled passion, the kind that priests might warn newlyweds of (recall Friar Laurence‘s admonition to Romeo and Juliet to “love moderately” [II, vi, 14]). After all, “the butter runs, then she comes, spilling crumbs on the bed.” The reference to crumbs sounds a lot like crumpet in this context.

Since “it’s only the giving that makes you what you are,” we hear what sounds like a negating of the Church doctrine of salvation by grace through faith. The giving, or the act of generosity, is an example of good works, which Paul insisted could not, in and of themselves, save you (Ephesians 2: 8-9). So here again, we see an example of Aqualung‘s theme of rejecting the morality of Church authority.

VII: Up to Me

This song begins with a blues-oriented riff, at first on Anderson’s flute and acoustic guitar, in E.

The verses of this song give us a series of vignettes of the life of an ordinary, working-class man: going to the movies with a friend, leaving him in a Wimpy fast-food restaurant, getting into a drunken fight with someone (with broken glasses and beer bottles not put away), being stuck in the cold or in the rain, and what seems like a sexual encounter with a smoking (and presumably smoking hot) girl…Cross-Eyed Mary, by chance? as she’s looking up to him while having something other than a cigarette in her mouth.

As contrasted with the sins of the lower classes, we also have the excesses of the upper classes: they who have a Silver Cloud (a kind of Rolls Royce), one big enough to fit inside it the tennis club they’re members of, and the indulgence in the ephemeral fashions of the time (e.g., bell-bottoms, etc.)

One notable manipulation in the lyric is the multiple meanings given to “up to me”: “running up to me,” “that one’s up to me” (i.e., it’s my responsibility), the high social status of the rich “was up to me” (i.e., “up” in relation to my low status as a worker), and the naughty girl with yellow fingers from smoking “is looking up to me” as she smokes…something else. It’s also “up to me,” that is, an uphill battle, to scrounge up money and ask of it from others “when the copper fades away” from the pockets of “a common working man.”

And so, this is the last of the songs of the lowly: the homeless, the prostitutes, the hospitalized, the sinning apostates, the lustful lovers, and the working class. From the Aqualung Side One, we move on to the My God Side Two, and deal with those highly-placed…and see what’s wrong with them.

My God

VIII: My God

The song begins with Anderson doing an acoustic guitar solo, one very dark in mood. First, we hear octaves in A, with a few Gs thrown in, all played accelerando, before other notes come in, giving us an A minor tonality with an added ninth. Played in a fast 3/4, the solo repeats the same basic motif, but ends in an A minor chord with an added high tritone (E-flat).

After a run of single notes up the A natural minor scale, from the root up to the minor sixth (F), we go into the main riff of the song, which is the strumming of an A minor triad and an inverted B seventh chord. This involves, as I pointed out with the electric guitar riff of “Aqualung,” the perfect fifth descending to the tritone (i.e., to the major third of the B-seventh chord, a dropping from the A minor triad’s E to an E flat). And as with the album’s title track, this going down, from the perfect interval to the ‘devil’s’ interval, symbolizes a descent from grace into sin…only this time, it isn’t a lowly, homeless pervert who is falling–it’s the Church authorities who are doing so.

Jesus is in a “golden cage,” the wealth of the Catholic Church. Now, that golden cage isn’t limited to religion, for many in the Western ruling classes have used Jesus to justify their accumulation of wealth, their wars, their bigotries, their colonization, and their right-wing tendencies in general. Indeed, mankind has “made Him bend to [man’s] religion.”

Just as the lowly on the Aqualung side of the album aren’t only sinners, but are also the working class (proletariat) and those destitute and outside of society (the Lumpenproletariat), so are those on high on the My God side of the album not just the Church authorities, but the rich bourgeoisie as well.

If all one can see in God is the God of the religious and political establishment, then He is no real God at all–“He is the God of nothing.” In the next two lines of the second verse, Anderson seems to be hinting at his pantheistic leanings when he says that “the God of everything” is “inside you and me.” What’s more, if the God of nothing is He of the establishment and those in power, then the God of everything is He of the people, the working poor and the global proletariat, those least of Christ’s brethren, those equated with Him.

We should “lean upon Him gently,” that is, have Christ as a figure of comfort, love, and aid to the wretched, and not as a figure to judge others with. We shouldn’t “call on Him to save us,” that is, use Him as a crutch to limp our way to heaven and to help us save face when our sins disgrace us publicly. Salvation is supposed to be about real moral betterment, not about social status and being with ‘the right group’ or social circle.

“The bloody Church of England” would have been used as the religious justification for British imperial conquest and the “white man’s burden.” Going to “the vicarage for tea” reminds me of the line in “Aqualung” about the Salvation Army “and a cup of tea.” Instead of prioritizing the poor, the Church all too often prioritizes social gatherings; it’s all about that being in the right group, an exclusive social circle, and keeping the Aqualungs out.

Next, Barre does a blues-inflected guitar solo, then Anderson comes in with his trademark breathy flute-playing, similarly full of blues licks. After that, instead of the flute being backed by the band, we hear the “odd voices” of Hammond, sounding like a church choir…only the music doesn’t have the usual peace-inducing effect it’s supposed to have; it sounds rather eerie, suggesting how disturbingly corrupt the Church has typically been.

To get back to the lyric, we’re reminded of how the second Commandment condemns the use of images for God, or any god, for that matter; yet Christians have images of Christ all the time, including the crucifixes they wear–Jesuolatry is even acknowledged in the New Testament itself (Colossians 1:15). Does God actually get a kick out of this excessive emphasis on His Son?

Will “confessing to the endless sin,” which one all the same will continually fall into, actually lead to salvation? One will be “praying to next Thursday,” or before Good Friday (or even before the Muslim day of congregation), “to all the gods that you can count,” because far too many people out there think that only saying, “Lord! Lord!” is sufficient, as opposed to actually doing the good deeds that God wants us to do (Matthew 7:21).

The song ends with some soft flute playing…that is, not with a bang, but a whimper.

IX: Hymn 43

This song, in D, continues the criticisms of Church corruption, with its hoarding of wealth and violence to secure its ends. God on high looks down on Christ (or on His Church, anyway), as we the lowly looked up on Side One. We ask Jesus to save us from our sin instead of correcting ourselves.

Examples of that violence have been the genocide of the Native Americans to make the US into a ‘Christian nation.’ Then, Western movies in Hollywood portrayed the white man as the hero and vilified or denigrated the aboriginals.

Again, we ask Christ for forgiveness while we, “the gory glory seekers…use His name in death.” As was complained about in “My God,” we find hypocritical believers praying for forgiveness, then committing the same sins, the worst ones (killing), over and over again.

A heavy riff is heard a number of times on Barre’s guitar: these notes–D, D, D-C-A, F, G–then his pick scratches on damped strings, four groups of three scratches each, with Bunker pounding the same rhythm on the drums to emphasize it all.

Jesus is said to have been sighted in places from those as mundane as a city to those as legendary as the Mountains of the Moon, yet the bloody violence of the Church throughout history makes us doubt such miracles of His as the rolling of His stone to leave Joseph of Arimathea‘s tomb, to indicate His resurrection.

So, why is the song named “Hymn 43”? It’s an arbitrary title Anderson used to reflect how the song is just one of many ‘hymns’ or critiques of Church corruption and hypocrisy. Normally, hymns are given specific names, dealing with particular issues in a meaningful way, whereas the generic, random number of 43 shows that the issues critiqued here are generalized ones, widespread and having occurred throughout the history of the Church.

X: Slipstream

The song begins in a cheerful E major, with Anderson singing and playing his acoustic guitar. If you pay close attention to the song lyric, though, things are not all that cheerful.

“The lush separation [that] enfolds you” is your alienation, as one of the common people, not only from each other, but also from the luxurious life of the ruling class, who would separate you from themselves “and the products of wealth.” You go “on the bow wave” of the slipstream (a pun on a stream that you slip on–then “you paddle right out of the mess”–and an actual slipstream), one of the “spiritless, undying” rich, who have no souls, yet never seem to disappear from the world.

You give “God’s waiter your last dime,” leaving you penniless “as he hands you the bill”: in this we see how the Church, far from doing what it’s supposed to do–to help the poor–instead has a way of propping up the bourgeoisie (We need churches to do more than just react to homelessness, for example…we need them to help prevent it.). “You spin in the slipstream,” like so many whom the religious and political establishment have ruined and left behind, and all alone you have to solve your own problems, unaided.

Anderson’s singing and strumming are accompanied by an arrangement for strings by David Palmer (who would become a member of Jethro Tull in 1976). His arrangement is similarly cheerful…until the end, when it changes to creepy-sounding, dissonant glissandi, as one might hear in a horror movie. The effect is to tell us that the ‘cheerful, free life’ promised by capitalism and the Church is an illusion, and when we finally wake up from the dream, we find waking reality to be a nightmare.

XI: Locomotive Breath

The song begins with some bluesy/jazzy piano playing by Evan, soon to be accompanied with Barre’s bluesy guitar licks. Then the song proper begins.

The rhythm, with more electric guitar scratching, is meant to imitate the chugging sound of a train. As for the lyric, Anderson had grown worried about overpopulation, hence, our world is a “runaway grain” because “of population growth and capitalism,” as Anderson himself explained. Is the train going to crash because of overpopulation, capitalism, and the using-up of our Earth’s limited resources? In the years since he wrote this song, in which so much more population growth has undoubtedly happened, Anderson has grown much more worried.

The steam power “of the locomotive breath” can be linked thematically with Aqualung’s laboured breathing, partly a result of air pollution, coming partly from trains. As with Aqualung’s difficulty breathing, the smoky “breath” of the runaway train can represent the diseased breath of the ruach–God’s spirit–in today’s troubled world.

Indeed, there’s an almost apocalyptic quality to a song about a runaway train that “won’t slow down,” one in danger of crashing because of not only overcrowding, capitalism, and the using-up of Earth’s natural resources, but also Cold War fears of a nuclear Armageddon–a fear from back then as well as of now. The train can thus be seen to represent our imperiled planet.

“The all-time loser” would have to be Satan, since with the dying of Christ on the Cross, the Devil has lost the battle for our souls. Still, as “the god of this world” (2 Corinthians 4:4), Satan has control of the train, and he’s running it “headlong to his death,” endangering us all, too. I suspect that “Old Charlie” who “stole the handle” is also Anderson referring to the Devil, since the name can be associated with a demon, and such an interpretation is consistent with the rest of the song.

In other posts, such as this one (scroll down to VIII: Conclusion), I’ve used the metaphor of a runaway train racing to a cliff, to represent how neoliberal capitalism is driving us all to the abyss; it’s rather similar to what Anderson is singing about. I wrote of Marxist-Leninists as being the ones actually jumping off the train in time to save themselves from the inevitable crash. In “Locomotive Breath,” Anderson sings of “children jumping off at the stations, one by one.” These kids are sensible enough not to have any more kids (perhaps like millennials today?), while the Devil is “crawling down the corridor, on his hands and knees”: the Devil is like the conservatives, liberals, and moderate leftists of my analogy–they’re either staying on the train, or they’re not moving fast enough to get off in time.

Meanwhile, the Devil’s “woman and his best friend [are] in bed and having fun.” The horned cuckold doesn’t care that his woman is getting pregnant with another man’s child…because he doesn’t care about rampant population growth. After a flute solo by Anderson, we hear the final verse.

Satan “catches angels as they fall,” just as he caused the fall of the rebel angels, as well as his own fall, in his failed war with God and the good angels (Revelation 12:7-9). Thus, as he’s the all-time loser, God is the “all-time winner,” who’s “got [Satan] by the balls.”

An amusing side note ought to be made here. Since this song would be a single played on the radio, many were uncomfortable with tender ears hearing the word “balls,” so in one of the most ridiculous examples of censorship ever, the word “fun”–from the second verse, where the melody is the same–was spliced in the place of “balls,” rendering the new line as “got him by the fun,” and giving us a new, amusing euphemism for that part of the male anatomy.

Anyway, the “all-time winner” seems more accurately to be the Church rather than God, since the Devil finds Gideon‘s Bible (presumably in the hotel room where his woman and his best friend are in bed and having…balls?), and on page one it says “be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth” (Genesis 1:28), implying that the corrupt Church is also at least partially responsible for the population boom problem. After all, “God, he stole the handle” now, rather than the Devil holding it.

XII: Wind-Up

As the last song of the album, “Wind-Up” sums up what Anderson has been saying the whole time. There’s a huge difference between blindly following the dogmas of the Church and having a genuinely spiritual relationship with God, the Divine, or whatever you would call the Ground of All Being.

With Anderson singing about having been “packed…off to school” as a kid, we’re reminded of the references to school in “Cross-Eyed Mary” and “Mother Goose.” The point is that conforming to the ways of the Church is like going to school: not merely learning the three Rs, but also being made to conform to a way of living, “how not to play the game,” or not to sin. In the other two songs, we have examples of people who played the game sinfully…Mary, and Anderson the truant/apostate.

As a child, Anderson was “groomed…for success,” and he had “their God tucked underneath [his] arm,” that is, the Bible, or the family’s idolatry of the Good Book as linked with a bourgeois wish that he grow up to make a lot of money; recall the Church’s “money games” from “Hymn 43” in this connection. “Their half-assed smiles” indicate the hypocrisy of a self-righteous, ‘loving’ bourgeois Christian family “and the book of rules.”

In prayer to God, Anderson got the reply that God is “not the kind you have to wind up on Sundays,” that is, you don’t have to wind up in church to know Him, and you don’t have to get wound up over Him there, shouting “Holy, Holy!” and “Hosannah!” Anderson doesn’t care if the Church excommunicates him for playing truant from Sunday school; as in “Mother Goose,” he didn’t want to be inside on a sunny Sunday–he instead wanted “to try and catch some sun,” not catch the Son.

Instead of conforming to Church dogma, Anderson would “rather look around [him], compose a better song, ’cause that’s the honest measure of [his] worth.” As he sang in “Wond’ring Aloud, “it’s only the giving that makes you what you are.” We’re justified to God based on the good we do, not on the faith we conform to, a conformity based more on a fear of what will happen to us after we die than on sincere piety.

XIII: Conclusion

Though the members of Jethro Tull have denied that Aqualung is a concept album, I’d say that it is unconsciously a concept album…and I’m a strong believer in the power and meaningfulness of the unconscious mind.

In any case, the issues raised on the album–homelessness, lechery over underaged girls (including those involved willy-nilly in sex work), people needing proper health care, the working poor, questioning Church authority (and the despair that often accompanies it), and apocalyptic fear from overpopulation, ecocide, and nuclear war–are more relevant than ever.

In a world where the ruling class, including evangelical Christians, rationalize an ongoing genocide, we can see how what is not being done for these least of Christ’s brethren, the Aqualungs of the world, is something that should make us all say, “My God, ‘people, what have you done?'”

The Tanah–The Preaching: Four Spells for Preventing Sin

[The following is the thirtieth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, here is the twenty-fifth, here is the twenty-sixth, here is the twenty-seventh, here is the twenty-eighth, and here is the twenty-ninth–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

Four Spells: their instructions and verses

[Light a fire, surrounded by rocks, on a windy day. If it is winter at the time of preparing this spell, have snow or blocks of ice to put out the fire; otherwise, use water to do so. Chant the following verse over and over, louder and louder, with increasing…then decreasing…emotion, to the four Crims of air, fire, earth, and water/rocks.]

Lust,
the
son
who grew out of fire,
must
shrink
back.

Commentary: Ai (pronounced like “eye”) is the son of Nevil, the Crim of fire. Ai is the demon of lust, who tempts us to practice fornication. Ai also drives people to act aggressively and to intervene unwelcomely in others’ affairs. This spell is meant to drive him away.

[Take two sticks of long but brittle wood and strike them together repeatedly until one breaks. Then break the other in two. Chant the following repeatedly as the sticks are struck together.]

He
who
will
is thus to hurt himself and be
[by]
other
men

Commentary: The cross shape of the verse represents the two sticks being struck together. It is recited thus: “He who will hurt other men is thus to hurt himself and be hurt by other men.” The breaking of the sticks, by sympathetic magic, is meant to represent cruelty killing cruelty and being killed by it, an enactment of the Echo Effect.

[Make a life-sized effigy of a man. Tie a rope around its waist with one end, and around the waist of a living man with the other. Pull the effigy far enough the opposite way of the man so he is pulled with the effigy. After doing this for some time, let go of the effigy and let the man pull it back to the starting place. Then burn it, douse it with water, and bury it. Do all of this while repeatedly chanting the following lines to the Crims.]

What you pull one way

will pull you the other way.

Nevil, Priff, and Drofurb: stop the pulling!

Commentary: This ritual is meant to prevent the controlling of people.

[Have two men in the tribe dramatize a fight with wooden swords on a windy day. After a while of clashing swords, one man pretends to stab the other; then the fallen one reaches up to stab his killer. Both men lie on the ground, pretending to be dead. Then the swords are to be burned, doused with water, and buried. This is all done while chanting the following, over and over, to the four Crims.]

The
man cuts, stabs, and kills
who

is
cut, stabbed, and killed. to
be

Commentary: These verses are to be read thus: “The man who cuts, stabs, and kills is to be cut, stabbed, and killed.” It’s a plea to the Crims to ensure the karmic retribution of the Echo Effect on all of those who would wage war.

What Is Feared of Communism Is Here in Capitalism

I: Introduction

Several weeks before I started writing this post, I shared a meme on Facebook, one whose pro-Soviet content I don’t remember (and which isn’t all that relevant, anyway), but which also got me a troll reaction from some liberal who said, “No Gulags.” This comment is what has inspired the current article.

I’ve already written a number of defenses of communism in such articles as these, as well as a number of criticisms of capitalism, from both my former anarchist and my current ‘tankie’ perspectives, as can be found here. In this article, though, I feel I need to address something different.

There’s always this fear among many in the West, including many on the left: what if we ‘tankies’ are in denial about how the dictatorship of the proletariat will inevitably become totalitarian and oppressive? My answer in this article is that capitalism has already become so. We’d might as well try socialism. What else have we to lose, but our chains?

II: The Forms of Totalitarianism

Totalitarianism, tyranny, an oppressive state–whatever you want to call it–takes on many forms. I’ll list off pretty much the main forms here. First, and most obviously, totalitarianism discards these:

–a free press
–freedom of speech, and
–democracy

Then, with its intrusive government, we start to go into totalitarianism’s harsher forms:

–cults of personality
–surveillance, and
–police brutality

Finally, we come to the most horrifying forms:

–concentration camps, and
–mass murder, or genocides

Communism, of course, has been accused of perpetrating all of the above. Fascism, even more obviously (or, at least it should be more obvious), has been genuinely guilty of all of these. The horseshit horseshoe theory would have you believe that the extreme left and extreme right are similar in having supposedly led to the same outcomes, leaving liberal democracy as the only viable alternative.

A far more accurate representation of the relationship between the left, centre, and right, however, would be the fishhook theory, in which we can see liberal centrism backsliding into fascism. Recall Stalin’s words on the subject: “Social-democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism.” Note in this connection that social democracy is as left-leaning as liberals get; the rest of liberalism moves only further rightward.

A casual observation of Western politics, especially from the dissolution of the USSR to the present day, should demonstrate the truth of Stalin’s words. First, liberals demonized communism in lockstep with conservatives. Then, declaring an “end of history” with communism’s demise and the “free market” as the only viable system, liberals helped to chip away at social welfare, since there was no longer any fear of socialist revolution. Finally, as leftist agitation revives, they’ve used fascism to thwart it.

And here we are.

One must take seriously the notion of a fear of communism, through its association with the atrocities listed above, to understand the great lengths to which right-wingers will go to defend capitalism. Note that these right-wingers are usually of the petite bourgeoisie, the useful idiots of the ruling class, whose real reason for fearing communism is the loss of their wealth; so they fear monger in the media they own to tell the middle and lower classes about communist ‘atrocities.’

As a result, the conservative and liberal masses will tolerate any horrors that go on in our society today so as to prevent a resurgence of socialism. If the poor are so bad off, it’s because they’re lazy, talentless, incompetent ‘losers,’ or they waste money that they should be saving. Never mind that class mobility is a myth. People generally stay in the class they were born in.

When one tries to tell these bootlickers of the rich that the root of the problem of the poor is systemic, the inevitable result of capitalism, they claim that our political problems stem from ‘corporatism,’ because apparently, ‘real capitalism’ and the government are mutually-exclusive antitheses of each other. Never mind that capitalists have always used the state to protect their private property interests: that’s what the cops are for.

Even today’s boot-lickers of the rich cannot deny that the political system, especially that of the past twenty-five years or so, has been nothing less than an unmitigated disaster, one that continues to get worse and worse. What they cannot bring themselves to admit is that this disaster has been the result of the neoliberal experiment, which is a subordination of everything, the government in particular, to the Almighty Market. Hence the need to describe our growing totalitarianism as ‘socialist,’ even when it should be obvious to anyone with half a brain that the current system is anything but socialist.

Politicians on both sides of the political fence accuse each other of being ‘communist.’ Trump and his administration spew constant verbal flatulence about the dangers of ‘radical Marxist extremists,’ when if anything, even among today’s progressives, Western Marxism is practically moribund. Liberals are similar, with Kamala Harris bizarrely calling Trump a ‘communist.’ At first, this comment just seems to be yet another air-headed one from her; yet on closer inspection, we can see how its purpose was really to associate today’s totalitarianism with communism rather than with its true source–fascism.

Her Democratic Party has also joined Republicans in issuing a blanket condemnation of socialism just before Trump’s meeting with ‘socialist’ Zohran Mamdani. This bipartisan fear of socialist ‘totalitarianism’ is bogus given their recent embrace of fascist totalitarianism, as I’ll attempt to prove below. Their real fear, as I mentioned above, is the plan to have workers take control of the means of production, and therefore to take the excess wealth of the billionaire class and redistribute it among the masses. Such a taking of wealth is a taking of power from the ruling class.

But let’s now look at all of the ways that capitalism has turned totalitarian.

III: No More Free Press

This loss didn’t come about in one fell swoop (i.e., with Trump). It started decades ago, and gradually got worse before we came to where we are today. While the mainstream Western media has always been bourgeois in ideology, we can see the beginnings of this particular problem with the abolition of the fairness doctrine in 1987. Introduced in 1949, the fairness doctrine was a policy requiring the media to present controversial issues of importance from differing points of view. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the demise of the Eastern Bloc would come not too many years since the abolition of this policy, it’s easy to see how the already anti-communist stance of the media during the Cold War would become even more insistently pro-capitalist after that.

Next came the Telecommunications Act that Clinton signed into law in 1996, which allowed mergers and acquisitions in the American media, leading to today’s control of about 90% of the US media by only six corporations. This change thus means that most of Americans’ access to information is decided by the ruling class, and therefore reflecting their agenda and interests. There’s an international networking of media to tell essentially the same stories from largely the same political points of view, so this problem is not limited to the US.

The situation got worse in 2013, when Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post. Just so there’s no misunderstanding that the centibillionaire supposedly has no interest in the political content in his newspaper, in 2025 he announced that the WaPo would essentially promote right-wing views only, euphemistically worded as defending “personal liberties and free markets.” Well, we all know what conservatives mean when they say that.

Additionally, Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, idiotically renaming it “X.” The social media website has also become a haven for right-wing views, which should not be surprising, given its owner’s Nazi salute during Trump’s inauguration and other manifestations of Musk’s far-right leanings.

Indeed, Mint Press News (MPN) published an article in late November of 2025 about how seven oligarchs, including of course Bezos and Musk, are now controlling key elements of the mainstream media. Remember in this connection Mark Zuckerberg’s ownership of Facebook. Larry Ellison is to purchase CNN as of the writing of my article, and CNN has already been partisan to the Democratic Party/liberal wing of the ruling class.

When you have oligarchs like these controlling the average person’s access to information, who needs a state-owned media to brainwash them into compliance (and, incidentally, the presence of ex-FBI agents, ex-CIA officials, ex-generals, and former security state operatives in the news–all of whom work for imperialist capitalism, in case there was any misunderstanding–is enough to make one wonder if American media is anything other than state-owned)? The attendance of elites like Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk at Trump’s inauguration should have been sufficiently and disturbingly portentous of things soon to come.

Now, there are still left-wing voices like mine and those in alternative media, like MPN or ChatNews Net, to give the people a dissenting voice, but firstly, our voices get nowhere near the circulation of the establishment ones, and we also get trolled a lot by reactionary types, either the useful idiots of that establishment, or paid trolls whose job is to discourage us from being those necessary ones shouting in the wilderness.

The point is that a stifled free press marks the beginning of totalitarianism, because no free press means no freedom of speech, which brings me to my next topic.

IV: No More Freedom of Speech

The one crowning example of a lack of freedom of speech in recent years has been the suppression of pro-Palestinian protestors on the campsites of American universities. This suppression is of crucial importance, for it is about preventing the one basic thing anyone in a truly democratic society should be given the freedom to do: protest injustice.

Injustice has always been a part of human experience, and overcoming it has sadly never been easy. We should, however, at least be able to talk openly about injustice and make demands that it stop. This is especially true if the injustice is as extreme as an ongoing genocide. If the powers-that-be can suppress the protesting of ethnic cleansing, it will become all the easier to suppress the protests of smaller injustices, which leads to…

V: No More Democracy

Let’s start by defining what democracy actually is. At the risk of sounding pedantic and condescending, I’ll use an etymology you should already know: the word comes from Greek words meaning “people rule.” Now, what does the rule of the people actually entail? Mindless voting for a particular political party, with little thought as to what the real issues are (i.e., “Vote blue, no matter who”)? Or does it mean ensuring that the policies enacted serve the will and interests of regular, working-class people?

I’ll put my money on the latter definition.

Let’s compare, for example, Libya under the rule of Muammar Gaddafi, as contrasted with the years of revolving-door voting for different leaders, say, every four to eight years or so in the US, the UK, Canada, etc. Neoliberalism has, over the past forty to fifty years, eroded economic democracy by crushing unions; it has cut welfare funding and regulations to allow the rich to gain more profit at the expense of the people and the environment; and it has generally immiserated the poor, leading to an epidemic of homelessness. How is any of this power for the people? How is it democratic?

Contrast that with the ‘despotic’ rule of Gaddafi. His Jamahiriya, or Third International Theory, was a kind of Islamic socialism that provided for the basic needs of Libyans throughout the years of his rule of the country. The benefits that his government provided included guaranteed universal housing, education, and health care, as well as free electricity and the free starting of farming businesses, bursaries given to mothers with newborn babies, cheap gas, and the raising of Libyan literacy from 25% to 87%.

How is ‘Western democracy’ better than that?

The notion that Gaddafi was a ‘brutal dictator’ would be based on the idea of his suppressing of anyone opposed to his system of government; but who would have opposed such a system? Anyone opposed to the kind of thing his government was providing, of course–that is, opposed to giving the benefits described above to his people (such opposition would have included Islamic fundamentalists, who were often imprisoned during his rule). I don’t know about you, Dear Reader, but I don’t have much sympathy for those opposed to giving the Libyan people the aforementioned benefits.

My point is that Gaddafi may have been a dictator, but whatever actual objective flaws he may have had, he was by any reasonable standard a benevolent dictator. Why is his having stayed in power for over forty years a problem if he had provided those benefits to his people; whereas having an assembly line–as it were–of presidents or prime ministers who change every half- or full decade or so, but largely serve the rich instead of the ordinary people, is considered more democratic?

Another important point must be considered: are the candidates available to be voted for truly representative of the wishes and interests of ordinary people in Western elections, or are they people chosen–directly or indirectly–by the ruling class, while more truly representative candidates are deliberately marginalized, and therefore unavailable?

As anyone who has read enough of my articles should already know, I am no supporter of Bernie Sanders, but note how not only does he not have a snowball’s chance in hell of ever being elected (let alone of being allowed to tax the rich to gain the revenue needed to pay for the FDR-New-Deal kind of social programs that are so popular among working-class Americans), but he is correctly understood to be a sheepdog for the left. The establishment uses people like him and AOC to sell hope to the masses, then at the last minute, he bows down and tells his crestfallen supporters to vote instead for the newest corporate whore of the Democratic Party. This is by design.

Similarly, because of their left-wing political positions, the Green Party of the United States stands no chance of even being in a position to challenge the corrupt and morally bankrupt two-party system of the US, let alone to win elections and implement their policies.

Anyone with any sense knows that the Democrats and the Republicans are, at best, mere variations on each other, and at worst, two wings of the same party, the Capitalist Party, with virtually identical, imperialist policies. While generally less extreme than in the US, the bourgeois political parties of any country under capitalism are of essentially the same nature.

This sad state of affairs is actually worse than having a one-party state (and contrary to bourgeois propaganda, there was and is far more democracy in the Soviet and Chinese systems than is assumed in the West), because in multi-party bourgeois politics, there is the illusion of choice that fools the public into thinking they needn’t change the system. The ruling class will never allow any party to challenge the capitalist system; they’ll never allow anyone to legislate them out of their wealth. Recall Goethe’s words.

Voting does not work. I haven’t even gotten into the corruption of the US electoral college or gerrymandering. Revolution is the solution.

VI: Intrusive Government

Thanks to anti-Soviet propaganda like George Orwell’s Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-four, as well as Leon Trotsky‘s description of the USSR as “totalitarian” and his description of their labour camps as “concentration camps,” we in the West have come to associate big, intrusive government with socialism and communism, when associating them with right-wing and fascist governments is far more apt, as I’ll try to demonstrate.

The association of intrusive government with communism is so consummate in the minds of so many in the West that whenever one sees examples of such intrusiveness in the US, it’s assumed that the country has become ‘communist.’ This is especially true when the Democrats are in power, since they are assumed by the politically illiterate to be ‘left-wing.’

Recall in this connection the conservative reaction to Obama becoming president, and how they idiotically said “there’s a communist living in the White House,” and he would enact socialist policies, when in reality he did nothing of the sort. He extended George W Bush’s Patriot Act, ordered more drone strikes than Dubya, was the Deporter-In-Chief, helped oust the actually socialist Gaddafi, and helped the capitalist class do particularly well during the economic crisis of the late 2000s and early 2010s, including bailing out the banks. He was in fact groomed by the ruling class to do things like these. The colour of his skin is completely irrelevant.

The problem of NSA surveillance was exposed by Edward Snowden back in 2013, during Obama’s very capitalist administration. AI is only going to make this surveillance worse, as I’ll demonstrate in its section below.

Obama’s continuation of Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as his administration’s involvement in the regime change operations in Libya and Syria, are clear, blatant examples of capitalist imperialism in those countries, not of socialism. When people speak of ‘human rights violations’ in Cuba, I have two words to say to them: Guantanamo Bay, something Obama allowed to continue from Bush’s administration, and which continues to this day, though with fewer people imprisoned.

The point is that the US government, like any capitalist, imperialist government, is so intrusive that it insinuates itself into the affairs of other countries, places it doesn’t belong, either through military invasions or coups d’état. Right-wingers think of intrusive government as being an essentially socialist affair (welfare, single-payer healthcare, etc.), while ignoring the military, NSA, and CIA as branches of the government, which are totally bloated.

The libertarian notion of ‘small government’ is a con game, anyway. It’s not about whether government is ‘big’ or ‘small’; it’s about who the government serves–the people, or the wealthy elite. Similarly, the validity or invalidity of taxation depends on two things, as I see it–who is being taxed the most, and how the tax revenue is being spent. If the rich pay the most taxes, and the revenue is spent on social programs for the poor, taxation is valid; if the middle and lower classes are being taxed up the kazoo, while the rich pay little if any taxes, and if the tax money is being spent mostly on the imperial war machine and to bail out the banks, taxation is invalid.

So, intrusive government can be totally capitalist; socialism has no monopoly on the problem.

Since I’ve been criticizing the Obama administration a lot, and since liberals are always fawning over him and finding no fault in him at all, this brings me to my next point.

VII: Cults of Personality

Anti-communists love to quack about how we tankies supposedly revere men like Stalin and Mao as if they were gods. We do no such thing. It must also be understood that Stalin and Mao rejected the idea of being raised up on such pedestals, contrary to bourgeois propaganda. We Marxist-Leninists are also thoroughly willing to acknowledge their faults as leaders.

Their achievements in helping to modernize Russia and China are enough to explain that their people simply loved them rather than ‘worshipped’ them. Indeed, decades after it was ‘necessary’ to love Stalin, huge numbers of Russians still love him, and it shouldn’t be difficult to see why: over a mere two and a half decades or so, he transformed the USSR from being a backward, agrarian state into an industrialized, nuclear-armed superpower, while also having defeated the Nazis.

Mao’s attempts to modernize China went on a rockier road, admittedly (with the deaths from the Great Leap Forward wildly exaggerated), but the foundation he built was essential to the glorious success of China today. Again, the Western painting of Stalin and Mao as cruel tyrants has far more to do with bourgeois, Cold War propaganda than it does with reality.

Still, all of that is secondary to the point I want to make, which is that the political right has its cults of personality no less, if not much more, than the left has. Hitler and Mussolini had cults of personality, and contrary to the delusions of many right-wing libertarians, fascism is a capitalist ideology, not a socialist one. The whole purpose of fascism is to crush leftist uprisings (which, by the way, should explain the recent rise in fascist totalitarianism); Hitler’s big business donors ensured that he’d never take seriously the S in NSDAP.

But even more to my point is how we can see a cult of personality in recent, capitalist presidents like Obama and Trump, in each of whom one could write up an epic catalogue of awful things both have done. Still, their worshippers refuse to find fault in them, or they at least minimize their faults.

How many times have we seen nauseating praise of Obama has having led the US for eight years without any scandals, and how he was all grace, style, and class? Let’s just conveniently ignore his drone killings, his prosecuting of (and, based on political and social status, double-standards on) whistle-blowers, his expansion of all of the evils of his predecessor’s administration, and everything else I mentioned above? Eight years of grace, style, and class war…there, I fixed it.

Then, there’s Trump’s even more obvious cult of personality. Many among the religious right have imagined that God sent Orange-face to take on the “deep state” and to “drain the swamp” of corruption. If that isn’t a cult of personality, I don’t know what is.

Not only will the MAGA crowd believe such nonsense about Trump, they’ll also do all kinds of mental gymnastics to do away with their cognitive dissonance upon facing the truth. They claim, for example, that as with King David (who committed adultery with Bathsheba and had her cuckolded husband, Uriah the Hittite, killed so he could marry her), God chose a sinner in Trump to do His will. This is so even in light of how it’s pretty much settled that Trump is guilty of having joined in on the sexual exploitation and abuse of underage girls with Epstein et al.

And the ‘president of peace’? Apart from his failure to end the Russia/Ukraine war (which I figured he wouldn’t have been able to do even if he’d sincerely wanted to), his banging of the war drums against Venezuela–not to stop a drug cartel, but to steal their oil, a motive freely admitted to–proves that he’s no less of a warmonger than any other US president. The MAGA crowd still won’t admit that they were conned…that their Lord and Saviour is as much a sheepdog for the right as Bernie Sanders is a sheepdog for the left.

VIII: Surveillance

Now, if there’s any one thing that we associate with totalitarianism, it’s surveillance. We can thank Orwell for that: BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, telescreens that, as you watch them, people on the other side are watching you, the Thought Police, etc. Furthermore, also thanks to the snitch, totalitarian surveillance is also associated with socialism. So, if people today feel themselves to be surveilled, they all too often tend to think theirs is a socialist government.

Well, we’re far beyond what Snowden discovered over a decade ago as of this writing, and as I’ve endeavoured to demonstrate to you, Dear Reader, ours is a capitalist world. Only a small handful of countries today are of the Marxist-Leninist ideology (and some leftists dispute whether a few of those even are truly socialist). People are going to have to confront the reality that it’s our capitalist government that is oppressing us.

To start with a relatively minor example, you must have noticed by now that whenever you show an interest in this or that product online, you tend to see ads for similar products, or ones associated in one way or another with that product. Obviously, capitalists are surveilling you, and trying to get you to part with your money to buy their product and line their pockets. BIG BUSINESS IS WATCHING YOU.

There are surveillance cameras on streets, ready to catch proof of drivers violating traffic laws (including relatively trivial ones) as an excuse to pass out fines and take more money out of your pockets. There seems to be less of an interest in driver safety than there is in controlling people.

Of course, surveillance has recently been enhanced through the use of AI in the forms of smart homes, smart TVs, smart cars, and smart cities. Orwell’s telescreens had nothing on this. Keep in mind also how this AI is linked with some of the richest men in the world: Jensen Huang, cofounder of Nvidia, as well as Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg. There has been growing concern that tech bros like these are further eroding democracy (News flash: they’re all capitalists!)

This surveillance can, of course, be used to help the ruling class track any and all revolutionary activity, on- or offline. Remember how a number of those tech bros are buddying up with Trump. Palantir is another big tech company using AI in aid of government surveillance, helping to enable such things as Trump’s deportations.

Two of Palantir’s founders, Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, have publicly shown themselves to be particularly problematic in their attitudes to human rights, democracy, and warmongering. Thiel has been described as both an Ayn Rand libertarian and a ‘skeptic’ about democracy–something many might find contradictory, but not me, for the reasons I’ve given above and in other posts. As for Karp, one need only watch him ranting in YouTube videos to get a clear sense of how unhinged (and/or addled by narcotics, most likely) he is, fanatically defending imperialist war, Zionism, Western chauvinism, and ICE.

Seriously, do we want loose cannons like these in charge of AI and surveillance? Now ICE, among other things, brings me to my next topic.

IX: Police Brutality and ICE

Now, let’s start going into the truly nasty and violent aspects of our growing totalitarian world, in case what I mentioned above wasn’t enough to convince you, Dear Reader. I know I’ve been focusing a lot on the US, the belly of the beast to which ICE is specific, but manifestations of the militarization of police can be found in many countries around the world–not just in the US, but also in Brazil, Canada, Colombia, France, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Mexico, and the UK, as well as in Africa. I should hardly need to go into great detail about the harm police militarization does to democracy, to public trust, to marginalized communities in particular, and to civilians perceived as enemies. The Thought Police, NKVD, and Stasi had nothing on these cops.

A lot of white people in the US and elsewhere in the West show little, if any, sensitivity to how these cops brutalize blacks, Latin Americans, and LGBTQ+ people. If such white and conservative people had ever had the experience of being disproportionately targeted by militarized police, though, they’d not only realize what a totalitarian world we’ve been living in, they might also realize that those marginalized groups…are…actually…people, too, no less so than the straight white crowd.

We always hear stories of how the secret police of socialist states would round up dissidents in the middle of the night, using torture and intimidation to crush political dissent. What we don’t hear is how these dissidents were, or were at least perceived to be, the kind of capitalist sympathizers who, if left to do whatever they wanted, would have all the sooner and surer brought back capitalism, leading in turn to the capitalist totalitarian nightmare we’re in now…which includes having the same kind of cops doing the same kind of thing to the anticapitalist dissidents of today.

We’ve already seen the extent to which ICE will terrorize people in the Latin American community on the pretext that they’re illegals, kidnapping them, separating children from their parents in cages, then deporting them. Venezuelans have been sent to CECOT in El Salvador; others have been sent to “Alligator Alcatraz,” places that are actually concentration camps (more on that below), where they’ve suffered all kinds of abuses. These cops often nab them at night, too.

We’ve known for ages about police brutality and the killing of blacks, often with impunity. Note that none of this started under Trump, whom liberals like to blame for everything while ignoring the sins of their favoured presidents: the Obama and Biden administrations presided over a lot of this kind of brutality, as well as the ICE deportations. Fascism has been building and growing in the West for a long time.

Things have taken a recent turn for the worse under the second Trump administration, with Pam Bondi announcing that law enforcement officials are to investigate Antifa and other supposed domestic terrorist groups. This will be nothing less than a crackdown on leftist groups perceived as a threat to the American capitalist government. Note that ‘Antifa’ just means antifascist, which should be deemed a perfectly reasonable stance to have, especially in our increasingly fascist world. So criminalizing an ‘organization’ not clearly defined as such should tell you what kind of a government the US really has. Now, let’s talk about those…

X: Concentration Camps and Prisons

Before I get into the current situation, it might be fitting to point out that, contrary to anti-Soviet propaganda that came from such groups as the CIA during the Cold War, the CIA themselves knew that being in the Gulag labour camps was nowhere near as bad as we’ve been led to believe. Among the many facts given in the link above, the Soviet archives reveal that 20 to 40 percent of Gulag inmates were released every year, and the vast majority of inmates were charged with nonpolitical offences: murder, assault, theft, and any of the other usual crimes punishable in any society.

The Nazi concentration camps, on the other hand, were genuine death camps, in which up to 11 million inmates were victims of murder for being Jews, Roma, gay men, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the mentally ill and mentally or physically disabled, political and religious opposition to the regime, etc. And fascists were and are allied with capitalism, not socialism…in case you forgot.

As for today’s capitalist concentration camps, I’ve already mentioned those in El Salvador and in Florida, where many have been held without charge or due process, and where many are being subject to beatings, psychological and sexual abuse, inhumane living conditions, denial of medical care, incommunicado detention, overcrowding, inadequate food rations, etc.

Let’s now do a comparison of the characteristic detainees: in CECOT and Alligator Alcatraz, the great majority of inmates are Latin Americans; in the Nazi concentration camps, the inmates were mostly “Untermenschen“–Jews, Roma, gay men, the mentally ill and disabled, and political prisoners; in the Gulag, they were mostly criminals. Seriously, which political stance is far, far guiltier of using labour camps as places for abuse and injustice–the far left, or the far right?

Next, we can look at the for-profit prison system, which uses inmates to do labour for corporations and typically pays them wages far below the minimum wage, making the work hardly distinguishable from slavery. Prisons for profit are perhaps most notorious in the US, but they also exist in countries around the world, including the UK, Australia, New Zealand, France, South Africa, South Korea, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Jamaica, Peru, etc., to varying extents.

Note how capitalistic such prisons are (i.e., the motive is maximizing profits for the corporations). The near-slave status of the prisoner-labourers is easily comparable to that of the slaves in the Nazi concentration camps, who generally worked for nothing. In the US, the 13th amendment permits prison slavery. In contrast, in the Gulag, inmates were paid or given food, given more or less of it depending on how productive their work was.

Of course, the very worst concentration camp in the world–and it can legitimately, if metaphorically, be called one, for its victims (innocent men, women, and children) are trapped in the place and murdered and brutalized every day–is the open-air concentration camp that is Gaza. The totalitarian mass murder going on there and elsewhere is my next topic.

XI: Mass Murder

Before I go into the capitalist mass murder of today (and of so many years and decades before that), we need to take a brief look at the nonsense that bourgeois propaganda has said about the deaths blamed on communism, or more accurately, how many deaths there supposedly were due to communism, as opposed to how many deaths there actually were.

The spurious sources of the ‘100 million killed by communists’ idea are such books as The Black Book of Communism, the lies of Robert Conquest, and the like. Please click on the links if you want more detail on that, since I don’t wish to waste time and space going into that. Suffice it to say that the 100 million figure is wildly exaggerated and deliberately contrived for maximum propagandistic effect. Bourgeois paranoia about the spread of communism during the Cold War necessitated, from the ruling class’s point of view, exaggerated numbers meant to shock, not to inform. You know the old cliché: in war, the first casualty is the truth.

In any case, even if one accepts the absurdly high number of 100 million deaths as accurate, this otherwise bloated figure is dwarfed by the millions of people who have died, and who continue to die annually, under capitalism. We’ve been able to feed the entire world for a long time, but we don’t because there’s no profit in doing so. The combined wealth of oligarchs like Musk, Ellison, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Buffett, Thiel, Karp, and others could feed the world, build hospitals and schools, provide affordable (if not free) housing, and the like. The deaths resulting from starvation, disease, homelessness, and war are largely preventable: only the ruling class’s greed and psychopathy prevent it.

The endless imperialist wars cause constant, needless deaths. The Iraq War alone resulted in at least a million deaths. Contrary to what right-wing libertarians think, war is not just ‘government stuff.’ War is a business. Weapons manufacturers like Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, Northrop Grumman, and others are laughing all the way to the bank with all the glorious profits they’re making off of human suffering and death. The stealing of natural resources, like the oil in Iraq and Syria and the oil to be stolen from Venezuela, is a crucial aspect of capitalist imperialism and the obvious motive for these wars.

The recent genocides in Yemen, Palestine, and Sudan are the most egregious recent examples of capitalist mass murder, though. Again, weapons from many countries around the world have been sold to the killers in these genocides: the Saudi-led coalition killing Yemenis, the IDF killing Gazans and those in the West Bank, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) killing the Sudanese.

Special attention ought to be given to the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, though. The real reason for the support of so many countries around the world, especially the Anglo-American NATO-allied empire, for Israel–apart from the obvious business interests (i.e., the buying and selling of weapons)–is how crucial the Jewish state is as an ally in maintaining imperial control of the region. There’s a lot of oil there, and so a lot of money is to be made. Israel is needed to kick ass in the region to secure those capitalist imperialist interests.

The official number killed in Gaza since October 7th, 2023, as of this writing, and excluding the thousands estimated to be buried under the rubble, is over 70,000 people. The ‘ceasefire’ is of course complete bullshit, since the IDF has still been killing Gazans without interruption, and of course we can see no end to the killing any time soon, for the whole point of the killing is not to stop Hamas, but total extermination.

What should be particularly chilling about all of this is that not only are the people with the power and authority to do so aren’t lifting a finger to stop the killing, but also that these genocides can be seen as a template for possibly wiping out any other group of people who try to stand up to imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism in general. With AI surveillance, any of us in the resistance can be fingered and hit with a drone strike, if not a balls-out genocide like in Yemen, Palestine, and Sudan. The psychopaths in power simply have no respect for human life.

XII: Utopian Thinking

Critics of communism like to claim that we leftists all dream of a perfect world with no pain, and that we’ll force our vision on everybody with a globe-spanning government. It is especially amusing to get this charge of utopianism from the supposedly anti-government right-wing libertarians, who imagine that the “free market” is naturally self-regulating and efficient (easily seen as total bullshit when we consider wasted food and starving people, as well as empty houses and homelessness, to give just two examples), and that the “invisible hand” will magically make everything right.

This “free market” ideology has been increasingly the dominant one in our world since the Reagan/Thatcher years, of course. It would be far more correctly called neoliberalism, since this new liberalizing of the market (translation: let the capitalist class be “free” to be as selfish, greedy, and hoarding as they like) really involves a subordinating of the government (and everything and everyone else) to the whims of the market, not an eliminating of the government.

Just as right-wingers imagine there’s no such thing as governments eradicating poverty (even though many governments have at least made impressive progress in doing so), so do we on the left (as well as anyone with a modicum of common sense) know there’s no such thing as allowing “rational” selfishness to run rampant and magically provide for everyone’s needs, while also not needing a government to protect capitalists’ private property.

For people so supposedly anti-government, many right-wing libertarians sure like getting into it. Look at the ‘libertarian’ Koch brothers, who pumped so much of their wealth into the Republican Party. Look at libertarians Ron Paul and Rand Paul, who work in the government. And look at Argentina’s current president, Javier Milei, a self-proclaimed “anarcho”-capitalist, who is set to receive $40 billion from the Trump administration in exchange for forcing Argentinians to vote for Milei, whose policies ruined the country’s economy. I thought it was bad to let the government intervene in the economy, and to force its will on the people.

Apparently not.

XIII: Cold War Fears of Nuclear War

Now, as if all of the above wasn’t bad enough, the one peace dividend we were supposed to enjoy from the end of the Cold War–no more fears of the two great superpowers, the US and the USSR, going into a hot war and killing everybody all over the world through nuclear annihilation–is no longer to be had. The US/NATO provocation of war with Russia over Ukraine, as well as the looming war with China over Taiwan, has killed even that one peace dividend.

That nut-job I mentioned above, Alex Karp, envisions a three-way war between the West on one side, and Russia, China, and Iran on the other. With the connections between the tech bros (and their AI in the US military) and Trump’s right-wing government, such fears of the world’s annihilation are well-founded.

XIV: Conclusion

So, even if socialist revolution leads to the totalitarian nightmare that the right-wingers are so scared of…so what? What’s the difference between that kind of totalitarianism and the right-wing kind we’re currently living in?

I’ll tell you what the real difference is…and yes, the capitalists are terrified of it. Ordinary people will gain access to free healthcare, housing, and education up to university, full employment, food security, a social safety net, etc…all of their basic needs met, and recipients will include people in the Third World. Getting all those things, however, will also mean that the ruling class will lose all their excess wealth–that’s the real reason they’re so scared of socialist revolution.

Let’s scare them.