The Tanah–The Laws, Book 2, Chapter 7

[The following is the twenty-seventh 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, and here is the twenty-sixth–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 basic principle underlying the avoidance of all of the sins previously discussed is one that can sum them all up in one law.

Magic should never be used in aid of only oneself.

Use of magic with oneself as the one and only concern is what leads to all of the other sins. This is why the teaching of the Three Unities, as passed down to us from Rawmios, is so important. These unities of space, time, and action teach us our place in the world, as well as how to live well in it.

As for avoiding selfish purposes in using magic, one must focus on the unity of space, for it teaches us that we are not separate from each other, as our sense perception deludes us into believing. We are all one: everywhere is here. The suffering of one causes suffering for others, and the joy of one causes joy for others. When we can fully understand how the self is in the other, and the other is in the self, we will know the unity of space, we will have compassion for each other, and be selfless in our use of magic.

The selfish use of magic, though, leads to the Ten Errors, which deny the unity of all things. Selfishness leads to mad thinking, being dazed by images, the scurrilous use of language, all work and no rest, family fighting, murder, adultery, theft, lying, and greed.

Selfish uses of magic, as noted above, also lead to the sins warned against in the previous chapters.

Using magic in aid of all the forms of fornication makes a mockery of the unity of humanity. We are to be unified in spirit, not in body (except through marriage).

Using magic to be cruel to other people, or to animals, denies the unity connecting all of life. Kindness to each other, and to animals, restores and strengthens that unity.

Using magic to control others denies our unity with others and reinforces our illusion of separateness. Relinquishing control of others allows for the full freedom of everyone.

Using magic to start wars, or to take the land of other peoples, denies the unity of all of humanity. We must always be mindful of our common humanity, all around the world, and never regard one nation as greater than any other.

Using magic to gain excessive wealth, or to steal, denies the unity maintained between honest livelihoods and obtaining our necessities with the use of money, as elucidated among the Ten Errors. It also denies the unity of humanity between the rich and the poor, creating even greater division between men by making the rich overly luxurious and the poor wretched.

These abuses of magic, only for one’s own gain and at the expense of all other people, not only cause pain and suffering for many, but also ensure division between men, egoism, and isolation. The Echo Effect, moreover, will ensure that the pain, division, and isolation will come back to punish the sinner. Do not think they won’t come back to plague the guilty!

The Tanah–The Laws, Book 2, Chapter 5

[The following is the twenty-fifth 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, and here is the twenty-fourth–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.]

There is one particularly wicked way to control others, and to be cruel to others at the same time. This way is through the taking away of another people’s land by use of military force, and this brings us to a discussion of the next sin.

Magic should never be used in aid of starting wars.

Now, using magic in aid of defending one’s land against invading armies, or in aid of resistance against an occupying power, is a perfectly worthy aim. We elders do not recommend, however, that we Luminosians, currently under the yoke of the Zoyans, should use magic in resistance against them. Indeed, we should not resist the Zoyans at all, for it is the Echo Effect, the law of sow and reap, that justly put us in bondage to them as punishment for our having invaded the city of Zaga and oppressed and killed their people. The Echo Effect will one day free us of the Zoyans, once our penance is complete; we must have faith in the eventual arrival of the judgement of the Echo Effect.

It is indeed providential that the name of the people who oppress us, the Zoyans, should be so similar to the name of the people we Luminosians once oppressed, the Zagans. In this similarity of names, the Echo Effect seems to be teaching us something of the law of sow and reap. What we do to others will one day come back to us, like our voices echoing back to us.

We had succeeded in using magic in aid of liberating ourselves from the Tenebrosians, as related in “Migrations,” because our bondage to those people was not a reaping of any evil we had sown. Our invasion of the city of Zaga, however, had a success that would not last because it was evil. We therefore should not use magic in aid of liberating ourselves from the Zoyans; nor should we–once we are finally liberated from the Zoyans, through the Echo Effect–ever contemplate invading, making war with, and oppressing another people, especially not with the aid of magic.

War is political murder, and murder is one of the Ten Errors as related in “Beginnings.” One must never kill or harm another, except when absolutely necessary, as in self-defence or the defence of others.

No people has the right to take land away from another people. If one people has done so, in order to mitigate the punishment of the Echo Effect, they should restore the land they stole to its original inhabitants as soon as they realize the gravity of their sin; for if they do not do so, terrible will be their loss one day!

We Luminosians, enslaved by the Zoyans, are a lesson in history, not only to the children of our posterity, but also to the peoples of all nations of the earth. If ever you invade other lands and kill their people, you will one day have your land, stolen as it is, stolen from you, and you will be killed, too! The use of magic in aid of such sins only strengthens and intensifies the sin, resulting in a harsher punishment for you!

The Tanah–The Laws, Book 2, Chapter 4

[The following is the twenty-fourth 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, and here is the twenty-third–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.]

There are many ways to be cruel to others, and to use magic in aid of being cruel to others; but there is one form of cruelty that deserves special attention, and so we will focus on that here.

Magic should never be used in aid of controlling others.

We have seen in Chapter Two how magic can be, and mustn’t be, used in aid of seducing others. We gave the example from the writing called “The Migrations” how a Luminosian boy used magic to seduce a girl living next to his home, and how after using her to satisfy his lust, he beat her to death when she, realizing after his magic’s power had worn off, was horrified at what he had done to her.

We repeat the same warnings again and again because they are never heeded, and we will continue to make the same warnings until they are finally heeded! Just before the writing of this chapter, another young Luminosian, among us slaves here in Zoya, used magic to help him seduce a Zoyan woman. He was discovered with her in bed, her slave, and then taken away to be put to death. Some never learn.

Seducing others is a form of controlling others. It must be stopped among us Luminosians if we are to have any hope of liberation from our Zoyan masters. They used magic to help them control and enslave us. We must not think, as some Luminosians do, that using magic to control the Zoyans and enslave them will be our revenge on them, as that boy did.

The law of sow and reap that is the Echo Effect does not come about through man’s attempts at manipulating it. The Echo Effect works of its own accord, as a direct consequence of man’s actions. The Zoyans will one day receive the Echo Effect from their own control and enslaving of us; we Luminosians, too, will receive the Echo Effect from our own control and enslaving of others!

There are those who rule a country who may use magic to control, seduce, enslave, and lie to others in order to strengthen their power. Upon the day of our liberation from Zoya, we Luminosians must resist the temptation, when founding a new nation for ourselves, to use magic to be tyrannical rulers. If we tyrannize others with the aid of magic, the Echo Effect will ensure that we one day will be tyrannized again, as we are now under the Zoyans.

Magic must never be used in aid of telling lies to others, to create false proof of lies. Heads of state may create such false events to bolster their power, or people in communities, families, places of work, or schools may do so to harm others. Such sinning must be condemned and stopped if our people are to survive, be free again, and grow. If we allow liars to use magic to make their falsehoods seem more vivid, and their illusions seem more true, then one day, the lies will come back to us all in the most convincing of illusions. The Echo Effect will make disproving those illusions impossible!

The Tanah–The Laws, Book 2, Chapter 3

[The following is the twenty-third 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, and here is the twenty-second–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.]

There is the sinful use of magic in aid of indecent pleasure, and there is also the sinful use of magic in aid of inflicting undeserved pain on others. This leads us to a discussion of the second sin on the list from the first chapter.

Magic should never be used in aid of cruelty to others.

Such cruelty is not to be limited to cruelty to one’s fellow man, but also cruelty to animals, the needless destruction of plant life, or that of any form of life in our world. Killing of any kind must have justification and be necessary.

Cruelty exists in many forms, and magic can and has been used in aid of these forms. They include beatings, intimidation of the weaker and smaller, torture, murder, sexual violation for the purpose of causing another pain, the spread of lies and slanders, and many others.

The Luminosians, on the taking of Zaga and in their rule of it, were guilty of all of these cruelties, as well as the use of magic in their aid.

When Zagans tried to resist the Luminosian theft of their land, we used magic to aid us in beating them. The magic spells we used gave us greater force in our fists and the clubs we used to hit them with.

Against Zagan resistance, we also used magic in aid of intimidation. Our magic spells made us appear larger, fiercer, and more frightening to the Zagans, making them recoil and retreat.

We Luminosians would capture Zagan resistors and subject them to torture. We would use magic spells to sharpen and intensify the pain we inflicted on them, to deter the rest of them from resisting us.

Other Zagans, who tried more aggressive forms of resistance, what we called ‘terror,’ were murdered by us. We Luminosians used magic spells to murder many more Zagans than ordinary weapons could, and our spells made the deaths far more painful and slow than ordinary weapons could. This sin of ours was the true terror.

While in the previous chapter, we discussed uses of magic in the aid of using women, girls, and even animals for the sake of filthy, lewd pleasures for oneself, there is also the use of magic for such filthy and lewd use of these objects of supposed love that is meant to inflict pain. This sin was often committed by Luminosians against Zagan women and girls, as part of our intimidation and subjugation of all Zagans.

We also used magic spells to help spread lies and slanders against Zagans, calling them ‘uncivilized,’ ‘barbarian,’ ‘animals,’ and the like, in order to justify our cruelty to them. The magic spells were used on our own people, so Luminosians would never doubt the lies about the Zagans. Only a few of us had the wisdom not to allow ourselves to fall under the spells of the wicked among us.

In time, all these evils came back to us in kind! The Zoyans use their own magic to aid them in beating, intimidating, torturing, murdering, raping, and slandering us. The Echo Effect returned our sins to us. Those sins will also be returned to the Zoyans one day, freeing us finally. When that day comes, we must remember never to use magic for evil again!

Analysis of ‘First Blood’

First Blood is a 1972 novel by David Morrell. It was adapted into a 1982 movie by Ted Kotcheff, the screenplay written by Michael Kozoll, William Sackheim, and Sylvester Stallone, the last of these three of course starring as Rambo. Brian Dennehy and Richard Crenna costarred.

The film went through development hell for ten years because of such difficulties as finding the right director and cast, and getting a suitable screenplay. Morrell had sold the film rights in 1972 to Columbia Pictures; the rights were then sold to Warner Bros., and finally Orion Pictures produced the film. Another reason a film adaptation didn’t appear in the early to mid-1970s was that the Vietnam War was still going on, and film studios were worried about moviegoers’ reactions to such sensitive subject matter as that of a Vietnam vet waging a one-man war against an American town.

A suitable adaptation was finally created, to a large extent from Stallone’s rewrites, when the novel’s violence was toned down, Rambo was made more sympathetic, and he would survive in the end, which–thanks to the box-office success of the film–allowed for sequels to be made.

In fact, Morrell wrote the novelizations for Rambo: First Blood Part II and Rambo III, having informed readers in the preface to Part II to disregard the death of Rambo in his original novel. Then came two other films, Rambo and Rambo: Last Blood; all of the sequels’ screenplays were co-written by Stallone, with Morrell having no involvement in any way with the writing of the last two…though he praised Stallone’s portrayal of Rambo in the fourth film, saying Stallone had returned the character to Morrell’s original intentions as angry, cold, burned out, and filled with self-disgust.

Here is a link to quotes from the first film, and here is a link to an audiobook of the novel.

While the two sequels from the 1980s, as I said above, novelized by Morrell (fittingly, as you’ll see why below), were little more than mindless action movie nonsense, and one can basically say the same about the other two sequels, in a sense it is fitting to see Rambo in actual war situations (in Vietnam in Part II, in Afghanistan in Rambo III, in Burma in Rambo, and in Mexico in Last Blood). I say this because I see the original novel and first movie as telling a story that, while set in an American town, is an allegory of the Vietnam War, with Rambo personifying US imperialism, and the local cops representing the Vietnamese army.

Accordingly and predictably, as far as the sequels are concerned, the Vietnamese and Soviets are portrayed negatively (except for pro-US Vietnamese spy Co Bao (played by Julia Nickson) in Part II, the Soviets are portrayed negatively in Rambo III, the Burmese government is portrayed so negatively (which should not be misconstrued that I’m advocating for the junta) in Rambo as to have had the film banned in the country, and in Last Blood, Mexicans are portrayed so badly that there have been accusations of this last sequel promoting racist and xenophobic attitudes towards the country (in a rather Trump-esque vein). This sort of propagandizing against and vilifying of any country or government going against US interests is typical of imperialism.

As for the first movie, the local police of the town of Hope, Washington (in the novel, the town is Madison, Kentucky) are also portrayed negatively, with sheriff Will Teasle (Dennehy) being prickly to Rambo right from the start. Deputy Sergeant Arthur “Art” Galt (played by Jack Starrett) is abusive to Rambo to the point of psychopathy; and the other police, when chasing Rambo in the forest and getting wounded by him, cry out to Will for help like children weeping for their daddy.

In contrast, the novel’s portrayal of Teasle is much more sympathetic and nuanced, with lots of backstory to tell us the kind of world the sheriff is from. His wife has left him, so he has to deal with the pain of that. Also, Teasle is a Korean War veteran, so in that, among other things, he parallels Rambo the Vietnam vet.

Also, in the novel, Teasle doesn’t arrest Rambo (who is called only “Rambo” or “the kid”; the “John” and “James” are inventions of the movies) until after he returns to the town several times. This is opposed to Dennehy’s Teasle, who is abrasive with Rambo just upon first seeing him and not liking how he looks. He arrests him immediately for vagrancy upon Rambo’s just beginning his first return to the town.

It’s important to contrast the tone of the film with that of the novel in light of my allegorizing them as representative of American involvement in Vietnam. The film is, as I’ve said, far more sympathetic to Rambo, and far less sympathetic to the local police and reserve army “weekend warriors,” while in the novel, there’s much more moral ambiguity between the two sides.

In the film, Rambo injures those coming after him, but he never kills them, except for Galt, and even he is killed only accidentally, in self-defence. In the novel, Rambo kills many cops, and most deliberately, including Galt, who isn’t the ACAB pig of the film, but rather a somewhat inept cop who often forgets to lock the door leading upstairs from where they keep the incarcerated downstairs.

This contrast can help us understand the film’s attitude, as opposed to that of the novel, concerning the Vietnam War allegory that I see in both. The film, in having us sympathize with PTSD-stricken Rambo, as against the obnoxious local cops, takes the pro-American attitude towards Vietnam. The novel, with its morally ambiguous attitude towards both sides, allegorically takes into account how wrong it was that the US went into Vietnam and did all the damage it did there.

When we see Teasle telling Rambo, with that American flag on his jacket, to get out of town and stay out, we can see Teasle’s intolerance towards Rambo as representative of the Vietnamese not wanting any more imperialists or colonialists in their country. After all, they had just finished driving out the French colonialists by the mid-1950s, and because of Western Cold War paranoia about the ‘Red menace,’ then, by the 1960s, they had to put up with Uncle Sam moving into their country.

So the cops’ arresting Rambo, then chasing him into the mountainside forest, are allegorical of US troops taken as POWs by the Vietnamese, who then would have chased any escaped POWs in the jungles of Vietnam. Certainly in Rambo’s PTSD-addled mind, his reliving of the trauma he suffered in Nam as he flees to the forest from the cops makes the whole story into the Vietnam War all over again, from his perspective.

Seen in this light, the notion of who really “drew first blood” has a chillingly ironic new meaning.

It’s assumed by most in the West that Vietnam started the war because the “commies” were out to take over the world and ‘enslave’ everybody, so the US had to stop the spread of communism (i.e., the ‘domino theory‘) and intervene. Actually, the US lied, through the bogus Gulf of Tonkin incident, to justify greater involvement in Vietnam. US imperialism and colonialism (i.e., the French) drew first blood, not Vietnam. Allegorically speaking, Rambo’s insistence on coming into town again and again (as in the novel)–defying Teasle’s insistence that he not do so (however more patient he is with Rambo in the novel, even allowing him to have something to eat in a local diner)–is what has metaphorically drawn first blood, too.

In the film, why should Teasle think that Rambo’s entering town with the American flag on his jacket, of all things, to be a sign that he’s looking for trouble? And looking the way he does, in combination with the flag (long hair, sloppy, and smelling bad), is what’s implied, of course, but allegorically speaking, it can represent a white man in Southeast Asia in a green army jacket, with that flag on it, implying a military uniform.

To make Rambo more sympathetic in the film, we see good-looking Stallone with combed hair and no beard or mustache…unlike the far shaggier and scruffier-looking Rambo of the novel. Also in the film, he is further humanized in its opening scene, in which he tries to visit a veteran friend from his team in Nam by going to the vet’s home, only to learn that he died of cancer from Agent Orange. Rambo is lonely, homeless, and suffering from PTSD. The Rambo of the novel has the same problems, but because of his tendency to kill, he’s far less sympathetic.

The issue of veterans’ PTSD, emphasized in the film, is of course a valid one, especially given how shabbily the US government has treated its veterans when they’re no longer of any use to the imperial war machine. Empire doesn’t just harm those outside the imperial core: it hurts those within it, too, and that’s why it’s valid to allegorize a vet’s war in an American town as a war in one of those Third World countries that the empire wants to subjugate and plunder.

These soldiers traumatize others and get traumatized themselves. Rambo’s loneliness represents the alienation and estrangement people feel in society and workers feel doing their work. Accordingly, while Col. Samuel Trautman (Crenna) in the film knows Rambo well (calling him “Johnny”), has personally trained him, and–as the final scene makes clear–is a father figure to him (once again reinforcing our sympathy for the US Army’s point of view), in the novel, Capt. Trautman merely headed the training facility where Rambo learned to be a soldier, he hardly knows Rambo at all, and he’s the one to put a bullet in Rambo’s head at the end of the novel.

My allegorizing of the story as one of Rambo fighting in the Vietnam War, instead of the local American cops, can be seen clearly in the novel, when shortly before Rambo’s breaking out of the police station and racing off to the forest on the mountain, he remembers a time in Nam when labouring as a POW, he gets sick, and he is given a chance to escape when the Vietnamese guards leave him to his own devices. Going through the jungle, he’s given food by local villagers, and he eventually rejoins members of the US Army.

Paralleling this Vietnam memory is Rambo’s escape from the police station, where instead of being sick, his vulnerability is from running outside completely naked (he’s just had a shower to clean away his body odour, and before he even has a chance to get dressed, he’s freaking out from a PTSD trigger from the cops’ attempt to shave his beard and give him a haircut). In the forest on the mountainside, Rambo gets clothes, food, and a rifle from an old man and a boy illegally making moonshine from a still; this help parallels the Vietnamese villagers having fed him.

Rambo is extremely averse to getting a haircut and a shave. In the novel, he’s kept in a cell that gives him claustrophobia. In the film, the sight of the straight razor gives him a PTSD flashback, making him relive the terror of a Vietnamese guard bringing a blade up to his chest and slashing it, triggering Rambo’s fight/flight response. Cutting his hair and shaving his beard, as the cops try to do in the novel, can be compared to the cutting of Samson‘s long hair, thus depriving him of his great strength. In the end, Samson kills all the Philistines, but also himself; in the novel, Rambo kills many of his enemies, and himself gets killed, too.

Having Rambo escape naked reinforces our sense of how tough he is. He can ignore public embarrassment, the discomfort of his unprotected nut-sack slapping against the seat of the motorbike as he races into the wind on it, and the possibility of scraping his skin on the ground if the bike crashes. Him naked among the trees on the mountainside also reinforces our sense of how feral he is.

Another point of contrast between the novel and the film is in who they emphasize as being the main victims of the Vietnam War. In my allegorical interpretation of the novel, Rambo’s shooting and killing of all of Teasle’s cops, as well as that of Orval Kellerman (played by John McLiam in the film) and his dogs, and on top of them, his setting of much of the town on fire suggests the American troops’ shooting and napalming of the Vietnamese and their villages. The film’s emphasis on Rambo’s PTSD, leading to him breaking down and crying at the end, as well as his never deliberately killing anyone, emphasizes how victimized the American vets felt.

Now, Rambo’s rant to Trautman at the end of the film, about how wrongly he and other vets were treated by antiwar protestors, them spitting on him and calling him “‘Baby-killer,’ and all kinds of vile crap,” is valid insofar as some troops really were innocent of such atrocities. Other troops, however, weren’t so innocent, as was the case with the My Lai massacre of 1968.

In any case, the antiwar protestors should have reserved most of their ire for the top military brass and American government. Recall that old antiwar song by Black Sabbath, which condemned the generals and politicians that plotted and started the Vietnam War, then had the poor–young men like Rambo–do all of their dirty work for them…and it was those very same poor who came home–if they weren’t killed–traumatized, unemployed, and often homeless, like Rambo; it wasn’t the generals or politicians who suffered thus.

I mentioned above how there are parallels between Rambo and Teasle in the novel, i.e., they’re both vets. Also, it’s not just Teasle et al hunting Rambo; it’s vice versa, too. Both men sustain nasty injuries in the mountainside woods, and it’s as if there’s a psychic link between the two, because later on in the novel, when Teasle is back in town, he’s had a vision in a dream that Rambo is coming back into Madison.

This time, Rambo’s going back into town to torch it all, linking this return to the other ones at the beginning, which prodded Teasle into arresting him and starting the whole conflict in the first place. This linking of going back into town, in terms of my allegory, shows how Rambo’s arrival has always been an invasion, even if he didn’t kill anybody at first. It’s like the imperialist establishment of South Vietnam (or South Korea, for that matter), a preparation for coming war and prompting the establishment of the Viet Cong.

The whole point in allegorizing the conflict in First Blood, with a US vet fighting a local American town to represent the US army fighting in Nam, is to show how imperialism’s ravaging of other countries eventually turns back on itself, causing the empire to eat itself up and ravage the imperial core. This is what we can see the Trump administration doing as I’ve been writing this post: first, they did the usual–continue to enable the Gaza genocide and Ukrainian war, and threaten Venezuela; now, they’re sending the National Guard into American cities like Washington DC, Chicago, Portland, and Los Angeles to terrorize American citizens, regardless of whether or not they’re illegal immigrants, in response to an “enemy within.” When we hurt people outside, we hurt people inside (e.g., Vietnam vets’ PTSD), because in the end we’re all one.

Before Rambo goes back into town, though, he still has to hide from those doing the manhunt for him, which by now has included the National Guard and civilians. He goes deep into a mining cave, in which at first he imagines it’s like being in a Catholic Church where he can go to confession; indeed, he contemplates how he wasn’t justified in killing those cops–he could have simply escaped, but he knows that his instinct to keep fighting is powered, at least in part, by his enjoyment of killing. In his bloodlust, we can see how he personifies US imperialism.

Deep in that black pit of a cave–which in the novel, at one point shorty after he’s come back out, is aptly compared to hell–Rambo comes to a filthy chamber with toxic fumes and a floor covered in shit. Bats fly out all over him, biting and scratching him (in the film, it’s rats). He is repelled back, but he soon realizes that it’s only through this awful chamber that he’ll be able to come back out to the surface. Only by going through the darkest hell can one come back out to the light: this heaven/hell dialectic, like any dialectical unity of opposites, is something I’ve discussed in a number of blog posts before.

So in this situation, Rambo is like Jesus harrowing hell before His resurrection…though Rambo’s return to the earth’s surface will make him anything but holy.

Nonetheless, the notion of Rambo emerging from the cave as a kind of resurrected, avenging Christ is apt when we consider, in the context of my allegory, how the missionary spread of Christianity (in places like Africa, for example) has been used to justify colonialism and imperialism. Recall Ann Coulter‘s incendiary words about Muslim-majority countries immediately after 9/11: “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” The Western capitalist complaint about “Godless communists” would have also been used as a rationalization for fighting the Cold War in general and the Vietnam War in particular.

In any case, when Rambo comes out of that cave, he feels “good,” as it says in the novel, being the only apt word to describe how he feels. He’s full of resolve and energy, eager to fight his personal war on the town. This good feeling is comparable to experiencing the transformed, ‘spiritual body‘ of the resurrected Christ, ready to go out and fight as a Christian soldier against the ‘civilian’ pagans, or those whom Rambo fights, those without his military training and discipline.

In the film, he steals a military transport truck carrying an M60 machine gun. In the novel, he steals a police car and some dynamite. With these weapons, he’ll cause a mayhem to the town comparable to the napalm mayhem the US Army caused in Vietnam. He’ll blow up two gas stations, the police headquarters, and much of the town.

But of course, he can fight this personal war only for so long before he’ll be stopped. His inevitable, ultimate defeat is allegorical of the quagmire that the Vietnam War turned into, an unwinnable one that was beginning to be seen as such by the aftermath of the Tet Offensive in 1968, the year Morrell began writing his novel.

Trautman tries in the film’s and novel’s varying ways to convince Rambo to stop fighting and thus to save his life. Allegorically, this is like the US Army’s big brass realizing that they had to pull out of Vietnam before more of their men needlessly got killed.

In the novel, Teasle and Rambo shoot each other, and Teasle–in that connection I said he has with Rambo–feels a need to be near Rambo when he’s finally killed. The police chief, a former vet, and this Vietnam vet parallel each other in their shared forms of pain (sustained injuries in the mountainside forest, alienation and loneliness [recall Teasle’s wife having left him], etc.).

The ultimate connection, though, between Teasle and Rambo is, in terms of my allegory, a dialectical one, in the sense of Hegel‘s master/slave dialectic. One can be recognized as self-conscious only through the other recognizing him as such. Rambo and Teasle react to each other at the beginning of the story. They have a fight to the death; one becomes lord, and the other, bondsman (in my allegory, these would respectively be Rambo-as-US-imperialist and Teasle-as-Vietnamese-resistor). The contradiction between the two is resolved through the efforts of the local police to stop Rambo in the end, making him realize he cannot go any further. This resolution is allegorical of Vietnam fighting so hard for many years until finally liberating themselves from Uncle Sam.

On the surface, it might seem that it’s Teasle who is the lord, and Rambo the bondsman, since it’s through Rambo’s hard fighting that he ends up outdoing the cops for so long, and escaping them; but even if we take this interpretation, it just shows how dialectically interchangeable Rambo and Teasle are, each other’s yin and yang.

Finally, what is ironic about a franchise with a seemingly indestructible tough guy is how, in this first film, the one unequivocally good one, in its climactic and emotional final scene, Rambo cries like a baby, just like Teasle’s wounded cops in the forest. Trautman comforts Rambo like a father figure (as opposed to the novel, in which Orval–the old man with the hunting dogs–is Teasle’s father figure, yet another parallel between Rambo and Teasle). The big action hero is thus a rough, tough cream puff, a Herculean masculine ideal as impossible for men to live up to as is the Marian/Aphrodite ideal for women to attain.

A scene was filmed of Crenna’s Trautman being made by Stallone’s Rambo to shoot and kill him, a forced suicide; for obvious reasons, it was disliked and excluded from the film. As I said above, in the novel, Trautman blows Rambo’s head off; earlier in the novel, wounded Rambo intended to kill himself with some of that dynamite he had.

In any case, Rambo dying at the end may not be pleasing to moviegoers who’ve invested so much time sympathizing with him, but it is the fitting end to the story, because the whole point of First Blood is how Rambo’s projection of who ‘started the fight’ is ironically how he started it (if only allegorically so, according to my interpretation); also, the whole point of the story is how it ends, with Rambo-as-US-imperialism killing many others, then self-destructing.

As of the writing and publishing of this analysis, Americans have been witnessing that self-destruction of empire on their very soil. They ought to reflect on that, and not wish for any sequels to the fighting.

The Tanah–The Laws, Book 2, Chapter 2

[The following is the twenty-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, and here is the twenty-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.]

Once we have listed the sinful uses of magic, as we have just done previously, we can give examples of them, as well as details as to what specifically makes these uses of magic so sinful. We shall start with the first sin on the list.

Magic should never be used in aid of lewdness, the enjoyment of erotic pleasure at others’ expense.

Sex is for procreation and the raising of a family, and is to be enjoyed in those confines. It is not to be enjoyed when corrupting or taking advantage of others, and therefore using magic for such corrupting or exploitive purposes is especially sinful.

Magic must never be used to seduce others to enjoy them when they, if not under the influence of magic, would never consent to it. Such a use is violation, ravishing. The Unity of Action is manifest in this sinful use of magic, since the love of the object of one’s passion quickly turns into hate upon seeing the object not wishing to be used thus. It is written, in “The Migrations,” how a young Luminosian burned in passion for a girl, his neighbour in Zaga, the place we Luminosians shamefully stole from the people who’d lived there before. The boy used magic to have her, and when the magic’s power wore off, she realized what he’d done and screamed. Then his love turned into hate, and he beat her to death.

Magic must never be used to seduce and take to bed any member of one’s family. Again, the Unity of Action turns love into hate here, for the proper love of family, in acting so shamefully, destroys that love and makes parents and children, brothers and sisters, uncles and nieces, and even distant cousins, hate each other.

Magic must never be used in aid of adultery, be it a married woman with another man, or a married man with another woman. Both are equally wrong. These again, through the Unity of Action, which makes all opposing things as one, turn love into hate: hate of the paramour who tempted the lust of the married one, and hatred of the spouse one was disloyal to, as well as the hatred of the betrayed spouse.

Magic must never be used in aid of engaging in lewd, filthy acts with animals. Such behaviour is bestial, disgusting, and perverse. It makes oneself as filthy as the animal one has violated and polluted. Again, love of animals is corrupted into hate of them, and hate of oneself for acting so shamefully.

All of these hateful uses of magic were indulged in by the Luminosians during our time of the theft of Zaga, these sinful uses as well as others far too foul and disgusting to be named. In our captivity by the Zoyans, the innocent have been punished as well as the guilty, for not even one Luminosian has ever been truly innocent. We never punished the guilty, not even the elders who gave such vociferous warning against their sin. Thus, the Echo Effect punished us all–man and child.

For these reasons, we Luminosians now in captivity must be strict in our punishment of any among us guilty of using magic in aid of lewdness and the corrupting or exploiting of objects of base passions. If the lewd one suffers the pain of disease, this will be punishment enough for him: give him no medical treatment. If no disease results, The following will be the punishments.

Adulterers will be divorced and shunned from society. Mild or moderate transgressions will be punished with incarceration for a year. Those who are filthy with animals or family members will have their genitals mutilated or cut off. Rapists will be publicly executed.

It is far better that one offender be punished than the entire community for his sins.

Commentary

Readers must remember that these are ancient texts, from about two millennia ago, and therefore they reflect the common prejudices and preconceptions of the time. Such prejudices include the, however only implied in the text, condemnation of homosexuality: “Sex is for procreation and the raising of a family, and is to be enjoyed in those confines”; also, “…these sinful uses as well as others far too foul and disgusting to be named” (i.e., ‘the love that dare not speak its name’). We scholars are only translating…not condoning…such prejudices.

Similarly, punishments are harsh, justified by a fear of collective punishment as a result of bad karma from The Echo Effect, as was believed to have happened to all of the Luminosians as a result of the occupation of Zaga and their lenience with sex offenders at the time. Again, we translators are only informing the reader of such draconian laws, not defending them.

Analysis of ‘Murder on the Orient Express’

Murder on the Orient Express is a murder mystery novel written by Agatha Christie and published in 1934. The novel’s original American name on publication that year was Murder in the Calais Coach, so as not to confuse it with Graham Greene‘s 1932 novel, Stamboul Train, which in the US was published as Orient Express.

HRF Keating included MOTOE in his list of the “100 Best Crime and Mystery Books.” Mystery Writers of America included the novel in The Top 100 Mystery Novels of All Time list in 1995. MOTOE was included in Entertainment Weekly‘s 2014 list of the Nine Great Christie Novels.

It has been adapted for radio, film, TV, the stage, comics, and video games. As for the two film adaptations, I’ll be focusing on the 1974 one as a comparison to the novel, and not the 2017 version, because first of all, I’ve seen the former version and not the latter, and second, the former is generally considered to be much better than the latter, in spite of the latter’s strong cast and good production values.

The 1974 adaptation’s ensemble cast includes Albert Finney (as Hercule Poirot), Martin Balsam, George Coulouris, Richard Widmark, Sean Connery, Lauren Bacall, Anthony Perkins, John Gielgud, Michael York, Jean-Pierre Cassell, Jacqueline Bisset, Wendy Hiller, Vanessa Redgrave, Rachel Roberts, Colin Blakely, Denis Quilley, and Ingrid Bergman (who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Greta Ohlsson in 1974).

Here is a link to quotes from the 1974 adaptation.

Now, the crucial element of MOTOE, the motive for murder being the case of the kidnapping and killing of the little girl, Daisy Armstrong, was inspired by a real-life kidnapping and murder case, that of the son of Charles Lindbergh, back in 1932. There are a number of other parallels in Christie’s novel with the Lindbergh case, too: the parents were famous, the mother was pregnant, the child, a firstborn, was kidnapped for ransom directly from the crib, and the child was killed even after the ransom had been paid. The Lindbergh maid was suspected of complicity in the crime, and after a harsh police interrogation, she killed herself, just as in the novel.

Linked to the Armstrong case as prompting the murder of the suspect, who though responsible for the crime had escaped justice through corruption and legal technicalities (as well as his leaving the US), is the issue of whether or not vigilante justice is valid. In a world of corrupt courts and governments, where the wealthy can pay their way out of having to face justice for any crimes they commit, that very justice is still needful, and when the crime is so heinous–like the killing of a little girl–that it is unbearable, then even Poirot can see that vigilantism should be winked at.

Now, if you’ve never read the book or seen an adaptation of it, read no further to avoid spoilers. If you know the solution to the murder, though, read on.

The murder victim calls himself Samuel Ratchett, but his real name is Cassetti, and he’s an American gangster responsible for the kidnapping and murder of Daisy Armstrong. As is the case with any murder victim in a detective novel like MOTOE, he has an extremely unlikeable personality, so the reader is left wondering which of the suspects hates him just enough to want to murder him. As far as Poirot is concerned, he comes to dislike Ratchett right upon his first meeting with him, and thus refuses to be employed to protect him (Christie, pages 19-31).

As for the guilty in the average murder mystery, we may assume there to be one, maybe two, killer(s). In the case of MOTOE, though, all of the passengers on the train in the coach which includes the area including and between compartments four and sixteen, starting with that of Pierre Michel (Cassell) and ending with that of Edward Henry Masterman (Beddoes in the film–Gielgud) and Antonio Foscarelli (Quilley), that is, except for the Countess Helena Andrenyi (Bisset, though in the film, we see her and her husband, the Count Rudolph Andrenyi [York], hold the knife and stab together) and, of course, Poirot, are collectively guilty of the murder.

Ratchett is thus stabbed twelve times, with varying degrees of strength or weakness. Each stab is from one of the suspects, so there are twelve of them, making up a kind of vigilante jury…and a “trial by jury is a sound system” (page 134), according to Col. John Arbuthnot (Connery), which is something Poirot emphasizes later as being “composed of twelve people” (page 266).

So, their twelve-man jury is meant to give a kind of juridical legitimacy to their revenge, since the actual law has failed them. They aren’t merely murdering a man–they’re passing a death sentence onto him, as he had onto the sweet little three-year-old girl.

Note also that it isn’t just she who died. Recall the suicide maid accused of complicity in Ratchett’s crime. There are also Daisy’s father and mother: she, Sonia, gave birth prematurely to a still-born child and died herself as a result of the labour; he, Col. Armstrong, shot himself out of grief. So the revenge of the ‘jury’ wasn’t just for the death of the little girl, but for a total of five deaths, all just to sate Cassetti’s greed.

Let us now consider who the ‘jurors’ are, what their relationships are–by blood or not–with Daisy and the other four, and therefore what their exact motives are. Mrs. Caroline Hubbard (Bacall) is revealed to be the American actress Linda Arden, and the maternal grandmother of Daisy, and so also Sonia Armstrong’s mother. Mary Debenham (Redgrave), mistress of Arbuthnot, is an English governess and thus formerly that of Daisy; as for Arbuthnot, Col. Armstrong was his best friend. Princess Natalia Dragomiroff (Hiller) is Sonia Armstrong’s godmother. Hector MacQueen (Perkins) is Ratchett’s secretary and translator, a job he got to get close to Cassetti; MacQueen’s father was the Armstrongs’ lawyer, and MacQueen also had feelings for Sonia. Count Andrenyi takes the place of the Countess in the murder, she being Sonia’s sister. Foscarelli was the Armstrongs’ chauffeur.

There are still a few more. Greta Ohlsson (Bergman) is a Swedish missionary who was Daisy’s nurse. Masterman became Rathett’s valet to get close to him; he was Col. Armstrong’s batman in the war and his valet in New York. Hildegarde Schmidt (Roberts) is Princess Dragomiroff’s German maid; she was formerly the Armstrongs’ cook. Cyrus Hardman (Blakely) is an American former policeman who was in love with the French maid who killed herself after being falsely accused of aiding and abetting Cassetti. Michel is the Orient Express train conductor and father of the suicide maid.

When we see who these characters are, we can then understand that the five deaths are not just a statistic. These people deeply grieved over the losses of those they loved. And when they saw the corrupt court wink at Cassetti for the pain and suffering he caused them, just through his having paid off the authorities, can you even begin to imagine the rage that swelled in the hearts of that dozen or so people? There was no way that they would let Cassetti get away with what he did.

Now, Ohlsson in her religiosity would naturally have found it almost impossible to reconcile her Christian beliefs with her participation in a murder; she surely gave Ratchett one of the weakest of the stabs. In the novel, when reminded by Poirot of the Armstrong case, she gets all emotional, saying that the killing of the little girl “tries one’s faith.” (page 110) The commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ must have been ringing in her ears forever since she gave that stab; indeed, Bergman as Ohlsson quotes the commandment in the 1974 film.

Still, she may find some solace in that very same Bible she surely has with her all the time. She can read Ecclesiastes: “To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose after heaven.” (3:1) Then she can read a little past that: “a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to break down and a time to build.” (3:3) Yes, even in the Bible, it says there’s a time to kill.

There are times when the law fails us, when the government and the ruling classes whom these institutions work for (as opposed to working for the common people!) grow so rank in their filth and self-serving that the people must rise up and take the law into their own hands. The killers of Cassetti all come from different countries, classes, and backgrounds, ranging everywhere from a Russian princess to an Italian-American chauffeur/car salesman; such a diversity of walks of life shows the universality of their passion to seek justice through unavoidably violent means.

As Mrs. Hubbard explains towards the end of the novel, “It wasn’t only that he was responsible for my daughter’s death and her child’s, and that of the other child who might have been alive and happy now. It was more than that. There had been other children before Daisy–there might be others in the future. Society has condemned him; we were only carrying out the sentence.” (page 273)

Very often, when an act of vigilante justice is acted out against any of these rich, powerful people, as in the case with Luigi Mangione against the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, there will be those liberals out there who condemn Mangione’s violence, but stay silent over the repeated violence of the denial of health insurance claims, which leads to many deaths or bankruptcies. When confronted with the Gaza genocide, these liberals will pipe in, “But do you condemn Hamas?”

The fact that the twelve killers are of all different social classes, from royalty to the working class, can be see to symbolize people from across the political spectrum: left, centre, and right. Such people in our real world–being enraged at the injustices of the corrupt health insurance industry, government in bed with corporations, and Zionism’s ongoing atrocities against the Palestinians–may have differing diagnoses of these problems, but their anger is the same. The anger and presumed political attitudes of the twelve killers can be considered to be similar.

As for Ratchett/Cassetti, he–as a rich mafia man paying off the courts so he can escape punishment for his crimes–can be seen to personify predatory capitalism, a representation I’ve made in many other blog posts.

Poirot proffers up two possible solutions to this murder case on the train. The first, contrived by the actual killers obviously to shield themselves from suspicion, is that a man boarded the train at Vinkovci, disguised himself as a conductor, and killed Cassetti as part of a mafia feud, then left the train before it went off again and got caught in the snowdrift that has kept the train from moving during this entire investigation.

Evidence of this simple first solution includes the discovery of a conductor’s uniform, with a missing button, in a large suitcase among the belongings of the princess’s lady-in-waiting, Hildegarde Schmidt (page 194). Elsewhere, there has been Mrs. Hubbard’s vociferous complaining of a man being in her compartment around the time of the murder, a complaining given with particular loquacity in Bacall’s performance.

Yet Poirot is able to piece together what really happened through various slips of the tongue from the suspects and certain inconsistencies in how the events of the night of the murder were presented to him–the far more complex solution that incriminates the twelve suspects. Examples of such slips include Schmidt’s freely-given boast that all of her ladies have praised her cooking, implying that she was the Armstrongs’ cook. Inconsistencies include the understanding that it was Cassetti calling out, on the night of the murder, something in French, a language he couldn’t speak a word of, hence his employment of MacQueen as his translator.

Still, in the end, after contemplating how, as Finney’s Poirot puts it, “a repulsive murderer has himself been repulsively, and perhaps deservedly, murdered,” as well as considering Mrs. Hubbard’s long speech at the end of the novel, explaining the twelve killers’ reasons, which include how “Cassetti’s money had managed to get him off” (page 272), the first solution is preferred.

This judgement is made by Monsieur Bouc (Bianchi in the film–Balsam), who is a director of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, and Dr. Stavros Constantine (Coulouris) at the very end of the novel (page 274), leaving Poirot to retire from the case. As we can see, compassion for the twelve is far more fitting than for Cassetti. It is their crime, and not his, that should be winked at. Those in power should be the ones brought down when guilty of a crime, not the powerless.

Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express, London, HarperCollins, 1934

The Tanah–The Laws, Book 2, Chapter 1

[The following is the twenty-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, and here is the twentieth–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 best uses of magic, coupled with the old teachings as a guide, have been outlined in writings from before. Now, we must focus on the worst uses of magic, why they must be avoided, what the sins are behind the intentions of this worst use of magic, and the inevitable consequences of such a use of it.

These evil uses of magic have been described in some detail in previous writings, but we must warn again of these evils, and repeat the warnings many times, for so many people never heed us. We must enumerate these evils one by one and give specific instances of them, how they arise, and what results from each of them, hoping that at least some fools will think twice before using these evil spells.

A studious review of the Echo Effect, with its laws of sow and reap, as well as of the Ten Errors, the very sins that lead to the use of the evil spells, should be enough to deter any from being tempted into using the evil spells.

Magic should never be used in aid of lewdness, the enjoyment of erotic pleasure at others’ expense.

Magic should never be used in aid of cruelty to others.

Magic should never be used in aid of controlling, manipulating, or exploiting other people.

Magic should never be used in aid of starting wars.

Magic should never be used in aid of taking the land of other peoples.

Magic should never be used in aid of gaining excesses of wealth.

Magic should never be used in aid of stealing from others.

Magic should never be used in aid of oneself, to the exclusion of others’ needs.

Magic should never be used in aid of treating other people unjustly.

The Tanah–The Laws, Book 1, Chapter 4

[The following is the twentieth 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, and here is the nineteenth–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.]

While it is perfectly good and wise to use magic to aid and benefit others, and wicked and foolish to use it for selfish or malignant ends, the very best use of magic is to gain knowledge and enlightenment. As far as enemies of the community are concerned, magic should be used for defence–never for attack.

Use magic as an aid in meditation, for contemplation of the foundations of all being in the world: the Three Unities of Space, Time, and Action; the Echo Effect, and how to make it return good to oneself, and not evil; the Crims of air, Weleb, fire, Nevil, earth, Drofurb, and water, Priff–not to use them for personal gain at the expense of others, but for how they interact with and parallel the Unity of Action and the Echo Effect; and the most foundational of everything, Cao and the Pluries.

One should use magic to help in studying all of these, to know the world better, to understand its rhythms, and thus to become wiser. This wisdom will aid in making decisions that will benefit the community, deliver them, we hope, from their current slavery under the Zoyans, and protect them from the temptations that do only harm.

In this, we can see the wisdom of combining magic with the old teachings. If used well, magic can give concrete examples of exactly why the old teachings are wise and correct; if used foolishly, to replace the old teachings, magic will be only a curse to the community, if not now or soon after, surely at some point in the distant future, and it will be only a harsher curse the later it comes.

If one wishes to contemplate the Three Unities of Space, Time, and Action, while also contemplating the four Crims of the elements, one can sit in a bath of water up to the neck, with the smell of mud surrounding it, a breeze blowing around one’s head, and a fire burning nearby. With one’s eyes closed and breathing in and out slowly and deeply, one relaxes, goes into a trance, and can feel not only a closeness to Priff, Drofurb, Weleb, and Nevil, but also the waves of Cao with Weleb’s breeze blowing on the water.

In feeling the unity of all things in this way–the unity of the complementing Crims, the wavelike Unity of Space in Cao, and also staying mindful of the ever-present now–the Unity of Time–one can feel how the Echo Effect moves to bring weal or woe to us all. While sitting thus in the bath, one can chant, “Cao, Pluries, make me know you,” over and over again. The bath is best had outside, so that after the chant has been said enough times, the rain should fall, soaking one’s head in the Pluries to achieve even greater illumination. It is good that the rain will quench the nearby flames; the spell will thus help to calm the fires of desire, malice, and selfish craving.

Doing this meditation and spell often enough will help one feel a oneness between oneself and all others, even with animal and plant life, thus strengthening love, compassion, and goodwill to all others, even to those outside the community. If enough of the community does this meditation and spell regularly, it may even cause the Echo Effect to free us all from slavery to the Zoyans.

[The text breaks off here.]

Analysis of ‘MASH’

I: Introduction

MASH: A Novel about Three Army Doctors was written by Richard Hooker (with the help of WC Heinz) and published in 1968. It was adapted into the 1970 feature film by Robert Altman (with a screenplay by Ring Lardner, Jr.), which starred Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, and Tom Skerritt, with Robert Duvall, Sally Kellerman, René Auberjonois, Roger Bowen, Fred Williamson, and Gary Burghoff.

From these came the long-running hit TV series (1972-1983) whose original cast included Alan Alda, Wayne Rogers, McLean Stevenson, Larry Linville, Loretta Swit, William Christopher (except for the pilot episode, which had George Morgan as Father Mulcahy), Timothy Brown, and Burghoff. Both the film and TV series use the story’s setting, a US Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in the Korean War, as an allegory for the Vietnam War.

Neither Hooker nor Altman liked the TV series, feeling it took the story in the opposite direction of its original purpose. In contrast to the liberal, anti-war stance of the series, with its tendency to advocate progressive causes (e.g., opposition to discrimination against blacks, tolerance of gays, equality of the sexes), Hooker was politically conservative. In fact, the novel uses a number of racial slurs (particularly against Asians, as opposed to Alda’s Hawkeye calling out US troops for referring to Koreans as “gooks”; only bigotry against blacks is judged by Hawkeye as wrong), and its protagonists tend to refer to women as “broads.” In the film, the MASH unit’s dentist wants to commit suicide because a moment of erectile dysfunction has made him worry he’s become a “fairy.”

Here‘s a link to a PDF of the novel, a link to an audiobook of it, and a link to quotes from the film.

II: Political Background

As for the contrast between the liberal TV series and the conservative/apolitical novel and film, though, I’d place these contrasting stances at the centre-left and right of a continuum. For as noble as it may be to talk about ending war, as is often wished for on the TV show (as opposed to the novel’s doctors’ indifference to the issue, and instead just wanting to finish their time in the army and return home), the real left-wing stance, the one that is truly to be contrasted with the general stance of the entire MASH franchise, is that the US Army should never have meddled in Korea in the first place, as was the case with Vietnam, too, the aforementioned allegory of the story.

Conventional wisdom would have us believe that, during the Cold War, the capitalist ‘free world’ had to contain and stop the spread of communism, therefore both North Korea and North Vietnam had to be stopped by American military intervention. Actually, as had been revealed years later, the Gulf of Tonkin incident that was used to justify greater American involvement in Vietnam was a lie. Similarly, the conventional narrative that a North Korean invasion of South Korea, which would involve Soviet and Maoist Chinese involvement, started the war was also based on dishonest accounts from hawks like MacArthur, as is related in IF Stone‘s Hidden History of the Korean War, 1950-1951. These wars were just exercises in, and excuses for, US imperialism.

It is further assumed that South Korea is the free, liberal democracy, and that North Korea is the brutal, totalitarian dictatorship. Actually, South Korea has been occupied by the US ever since just after the end of WWII, hardly giving the people a breather after the Japanese occupation of the land, with its exploitation of Korean ‘comfort women.’ US troops soon would also use Korean women as prostitutes to satisfy the men’s lust.

As for the ‘totalitarian DPRK,’ while it’s surely difficult living there because of Western economic sanctions placed on the country, living in a place that provides (or at least strives to provide…sanctions notwithstanding) free or affordable housing, healthcare, education, and other basic needs is far better than living in a country of cutthroat capitalism, the kind that causes the poverty dramatized in films like Parasite. People in the West might also want to reconsider how ‘free’ they are in a world drowning in neoliberal capitalism.

So when we contrast the TV series of MASH, on the one side, against the novel and film, what we’re really dealing with is a culture war of liberal vs conservative, not left vs right. Everyone knows that conservatives are on the right, of course. Liberals, though, are properly understood to be swaying whichever way the political wind happens to be blowing at the time. During the decade that the TV series was on the air, that political wind blew in a relatively leftward direction. Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear should be able to understand which direction liberals have been blowing under leaders like Clinton, Obama, Biden, Tony Blair, Justin Trudeau, etc.

Seen in a broader political context, conservatism vs liberalism is just moderate-to-extreme right-wing infighting. This context will help us understand the MASH franchise as a whole.

III: Foreword, Chapters One and Two

After a brief foreword–in which Hooker explains how the paradoxical combination of stress from overwork and nothing-to-do boredom, from living and working in a MASH unit during the Korean War, made some of the staff into insubordinate, scruffy, badly-behaved alcoholics (i.e., the Swampmen)–the book goes into a description of Corporal “Radar” O’Reilly (Burghoff), and where he is from–Ottumwa, Iowa. He’s called “Radar” because he has ESP: he can “receive messages and monitor conversations far beyond the usual range of human hearing.”

Radar, sitting at a poker game in the Painless Polish Poker and Dental Clinic of the 4077th MASH, can hear the commanding officer of the unit, Lt. Col. Henry Blake (Bowen; Stevenson), shouting into his phone in his office that he needs two surgeons. In the film, Radar demonstrates his ESP by saying Blake’s words just as Blake is saying them, standing outside, by a chopper with wounded.

The two doctors that the 4077th will get are Captains Benjamin Franklin Pierce, or “Hawkeye” (Sutherland; Alda), and Augustus Bedford Forrest, or “Duke” (Skerritt). Hawkeye got his nickname from his father, who read The Last of the Mohicans; he’s from Crabapple Cove, Maine. Duke is from Georgia; the character never appears in the TV series, though in a season 3 episode, when asked what happened to “that surgeon you had from Georgia”, the answer given is, “He got sent stateside!”

From the physical description given Hawkeye in the novel, Sutherland looked a lot more like him than Alda. He and Duke steal a jeep and drink a bottle of alcohol on their way from Transient Officers’ Quarters at the 325th Evacuation Hospital in Yong-Dong-Po to the 4077th. Both men are married and with kids; but that won’t stop them from fooling around.

They come into Ouijongbu, where they drive past The Famous Club Service Whorehouse, which has contributed much to the venereal disease problem faced by the US Army Medical Corps. An American flag is seeing flying from its central edifice. Such signs as these, in combination with the irreverent attitude of Hawkeye, Duke, and the other Swampmen to be introduced later, illustrate the imperialist encroachments on Korea.

Hawkeye’s plan on arriving at the 4077th is for him and Duke to work so hard as surgeons that they outclass the other talent there. They’ll thus be able to get away with their insubordination and other acts of naughtiness.

Arriving at the 4077th, Hawkeye and Duke go into the mess hall and meet Blake, who already thinks they’re “a pair of weirdos.” He tells them they’ll be living with Major Hobson in his tent; Blake would have Radar told of the order, but Radar’s already there to take them, thanks to his ESP.

The film takes Hobson and merges him with Frank Burns (Duvall; Linville), who is a captain in the novel, but because of this merging, becomes a major in the film and TV series. Hobson’s/Burns’s praying for everybody is comical and annoying to the non-religious Hawkeye and Duke, who insist that Blake get him out of their tent; the two also insist that Blake get a chest surgeon. This will result in the arrival of Captain “Trapper” John McIntyre (Gould; Rogers).

IV: Chapter Three

McIntyre is from Winchester High Medical School, in Boston. His face is hiding inside a parka hood when he meets everybody, and at first he seems aloof, laconic, and introverted. Hawkeye finds him familiar, though.

It’s when Hawkeye offers McIntyre a martini that he finally comes out of his shell, happily accepting the martini but insisting on olives for his, Hawkeye’s, and Duke’s drinks. He has a bottle of olives in his parka pocket, so all three can have one.

Hawkeye is still trying to remember where he’s seen McIntyre before. One day, the latter picks up a football that’s just landed at his feet. He throws a perfect pass to Hawkeye, who’s now racking his brain trying to remember who McIntyre is. Finally, he realizes that McIntyre is “Trapper” John, an old football player from the Boston/Maine area.

He got his nickname after being caught fooling around with a woman in the ladies’ room at the Boston and Maine train. She said to the conductor, who found her with McIntyre, “He trapped me!”

It’s interesting how, when Hawkeye finally remembers, he says, “Jesus to Jesus and eight hands around, Duke!” Trapper is replacing a major who prays to Jesus. Trapper, in Chapter Seven, will dress up as Jesus in a scheme to raise money to help a Korean houseboy, Ho-Jon (played by Kim Atwood in the film, and by Patrick Adiarte on the TV show), go to the US to study in a university there. There’s a lot of Christian imagery in the novel and film, though it’s usually presented in an irreverent way. Chaplin Father Mulcahy (Auberjonois; Christopher) is well-liked, but derogatorily nicknamed “Dago Red” for his mixed Irish-Italian descent and his red hair.

V: Chapter Four

In this chapter, we learn that the tent that Hawkeye, Duke, and Trapper are sleeping in will be called The Swamp, hence the three are known as the Swampmen. A sign, in big capital letters saying THE SWAMP, is painted in red on the door of the tent.

It’s called The Swamp in part because the tent resembles “the kind of haunt one might come across in a bog”…in other words, the place is a mess. It’s also the centre of social activity in the 4077th, where the three doctors do their boozing.

When one combines the Dionysian messiness of The Swamp with the sloppiness of the three doctors–that is, their often being unshaved and without the short haircuts one would expect of not just army men, but men of pre-Beatles Western society–we see in their sloppy appearance, as well as in the (often mean) pranks they pull on others and their general contempt for authority, a personification of the kind of mess the US army left Korea in by the end of the war.

A certain group of people are mostly marginalized in the novel, film, and TV series–the Koreans, played mostly by Japanese-American and Chinese-American actors. (The situation with Ho-Jon, to be dealt with below, is one of the few exceptions to the rule of marginalization.) As I said above, racial slurs against Asians are used a number of times in the novel, including by our presumably sympathetic Swampmen. As I’ve also mentioned, Ho-Jon is one of many Korean houseboys, there to do menial chores for the American army hospital staff–in other words, their servants. Finally, I’ve mentioned the reality of Korean prostitution for American GIs, something acknowledged in the novel, but never judged.

This marginalization and racism should form the backdrop of what is the biggest issue of the Korean War, but one rarely given scrutiny in the West: how the US military bombed and destroyed pretty much everything in North Korea. 20% of the total population was killed. The US made a messy swamp, if you will, of North Korea. This reality might help Westerners to understand why the DPRK now has nuclear weapons–not to attack other nations, but to defend themselves. The collective trauma the surviving North Koreans suffered from those bombings meant they were determined never to let it happen again.

Audiences are charmed and amused by the Swampmen’s wisecracking, pranks, and general defiance of US military authority. While I am in principle sympathetic to such defiance, one must take into consideration the fact that one shouldn’t just defy authority for its own sake; one should instead look into the evils caused by that authority and direct one’s defiance against it with an aim to stop those evils.

The Swampmen in the novel and film aren’t interested in directing their defiance with such aims. They just want their fun and games (golf, football, drinking, poker, chasing women, etc.) to be uninterrupted by the officious military. Unlike the more progressively-minded Hawkeye and Trapper of the TV show, the novel’s and film’s Swampmen are just self-absorbed hedonists. As such, they fit in well, ironically, with the US empire’s depredations in East Asia.

One example of a victim of the Swampmen’s depredations is a Protestant chaplain named Shaking Sammy. In Chapter Four, we learn that this chaplain has a bad habit of writing overly optimistic letters to the families of wounded soldiers without inquiring into whether or not these soldiers’ wounds could have resulted in lethalities. Shaking Sammy will tell the soldiers’ families that all is well, and the soldiers will be home soon, for example…yet the soldiers in question could be dead, thus cruelly getting the families’ hopes up, only to be crushed when the truth is known to them.

He’s been warned repeatedly not to send such misguidedly optimistic messages, yet he still does it. Furious with Shaking Sammy, Duke and Hawkeye have him see them use their .45s to shoot all four tires of his jeep. Justice has been done, it seems.

Soon after dealing with a particularly difficult patient who, it seems at first, isn’t going to live, yet with the help of Father Mulcahy’s “remarkably effective Cross Action,” the doctors are able to save the wounded soldier after all. Hawkeye and Duke, very drunk, decide to show their gratitude to Mulcahy for his prayers.

They do so in the form of what Hawkeye calls “a human sacrifice”, and for their sacrificial victim, they choose Shaking Sammy, imagining in their total inebriation that Mulcahy will appreciate this ‘gift.’ Tying Sammy to a cross and surrounding him with a pile of hay and assorted inflammable junk on the ground, Hawkeye, Duke, and Trapper are lying on mattresses by him. Duke has a Molotov cocktail in his hand, and it looks as if Sammy’s about to be immolated.

Indeed, the contents of a gasoline can are poured on the debris surrounding Sammy as well as on him. Mulcahy watches the scene in horror, hoping to stop the Swampmen. Duke lights the Molotov cocktail and throws it at Sammy, who screams. It turns out, though, that it wasn’t gasoline that’s been poured on him and his “funeral pyre.” The Molotov just sizzles and goes out.

So no, they didn’t kill Sammy, but they gave him one hell of a scare. This is an example of how mean and excessive the Swampmen’s pranks can be. Another example, from the film, is the famous dropping of the shower tent, exposing the nakedness of the beautiful but disliked head nurse before the entire camp, publicly humiliating her.

The Swampmen know they can get away with this kind of scurrilous behaviour because of their skill as surgeons, and because of how needed they are when the wounded come into the 4077th, as will be the case soon after the prank pulled on Shaking Sammy. Three companies of Canadians will be coming in, flooding the 4077th with casualties, as Hawkeye is aware. The surgeons can’t operate while under arrest.

Tying Sammy to a cross and making him into a “human sacrifice,” a chaplain made into a kind of lamb of God to take away the sin of the world, is an example of the novel’s use of Christian imagery to ridicule religion. As I said above, the Swampmen stick their tongues out at authority, including the authority of the Church, not to right any wrongs inflicted by the powers-that-be, but simply to be enfants terribles for the sheer fun of it. However ill-conceived the optimism may be of Sammy’s letters, he has been cruelly and unusually punished for them.

VI: Chapter Five

Captain Walter Koskiusko Waldowski (played by John Schuck) is the dentist of the 4077th. He’s known as “The Painless Pole” because of his amazing skill at doing dentistry without it hurting his patients. His dental clinic is also where poker games are played, so he is the most popular man in the outfit. Apart from poker and dentistry, his greatest hobby is women.

He’s well-endowed, too…so much so that whenever he takes a shower, other men stop by to see his equipment with awe and admiration. I suspect he’s bipolar, though, since according to the novel, he suffers monthly bouts of depression, each one lasting anywhere from twenty-four hours to about three days. On one particular occasion, he tells the Swampmen he wants to commit suicide because of one moment of impotence.

Hence the song, “Suicide Is Painless,” as the MASH theme music, heard in instrumental form on the TV show, and for the film, with a lyric by Mike Altman, the then 14-year-old son of Robert Altman (music by Johnny Mandel). The song is sung twice in the film, first by “The Mash” (John and Tom Bahler, Ron Hicklin, and Ian Freebairn-Smith) during the opening credits, then by Ken Prymus (playing Private Seidman) during the scene of Painless’s suicide attempt.

Duke and Hawkeye suggest that Painless use a “black capsule” to kill himself with. The Swampmen et al have no intention, of course, of letting Painless kill himself; their plan instead is to cure him of his suicide ideation by, ironically, indulging him in it. This plan, along with their helping Ho-Jon to go to an American university, is one of the few genuinely charitable acts of the Swampmen in the novel or film, which in turn makes them even remotely likable.

They plan to put amytal, a barbiturate derivative with sedative-hypnotic properties, into Painless’s “black capsule.” They figure he’ll take it after getting him drunk, then when he wakes up, he’ll be OK.

On the night of the supposed suicide, everyone will have a party for Painless in his dental clinic/poker hangout. The party is called “The Last Supper”; in the film, there’s even a shot of all the men seated at a pair of long tables as a parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting.

Painless is more or less at the centre, where Christ is in the painting. So this scene is another example of MASH using Christian imagery and concepts irreverently. Christ, after His Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, accepted His impending death on the Cross; Painless is about to die (or so he thinks). Christ was raised from the dead; Painless will rise from…well…a death-like state, anyway.

The irony here is that Painless’s salvation will come by a suicide attempt, the ultimate loss of faith, whereas we are saved by Christ through faith. In wanting to save one’s life, one will lose it; but in losing one’s life for Christ, one saves it (Luke 9:24). His yoke is easy, and His burden is light (Matthew 11:30). Suicide is painless. ‘Tis a consummation/Devoutly to be wished (Hamlet, Act III, Scene i). Fittingly, Mike Altman’s lyric quotes “to be or not to be.”

Suicide is painless because, of course, life is painful. Part of the ostensible purpose of religion is to provide solace for that pain. One ‘loses’ one’s life, for the sake of Christ, or to attain nirvana, to achieve painlessness…hence the Painless Pole is a kind of Christ figure, if comically so.

Koreans were historically Buddhist and/or Confucian, and such thinking is still quite influential there today, but it has waned somewhat in the modern world, with today’s influence of secular thinking and Christianity. We’ll learn that Ho-Jon is Christian, and with his trip to the US to study there, he’ll be further inculcated with such Western ideas.

The point is that Western imperialism’s encroachment on Korea has its cultural as well as military aspects, so the Christian imagery in MASH is apt, even if presented irreverently. The irreverence is just part of the theme of defiance of authority for its own sake: it never rights wrongs. As long as liberals can enjoy imperialist privileges in the countries the West occupies, they’ll give the finger to authority all they like, and it won’t make a real difference to the occupied.

Anyway, to get back to Painless, in the novel, while he’s sedated from the amytal in the black capsule, a blue ribbon has been tied to his cock (implying the return of his sexual prowess), he’s been hooked to a harness and dropped from a helicopter (Is this to imply that he’s supposed to believe that he died, harrowed heaven, then had a resurrection back on Earth?); all of this has apparently ended his depression and suicide ideation. As for the film, during his sedation, the gorgeous nurse, Lt. “Dish” Schneider (played by Jo Ann Pflug in the film and by Karen Philipp on the TV series), has been asked by Hawkeye to sleep with Painless and thus allay his fear that he’s becoming a “fairy.” She does so, and his depression is cured.

VII: Chapter Six

This chapter deals essentially with Frank Burns (Duvall; Linville), a captain before the film and TV series promoted him to major. Hawkeye hates him more than anyone else. Burns will never admit his faults as a surgeon, blaming any problems or deaths on someone else, or they’re held to be acts of God. He also has a $35,000 home and two cars back in the States; he has no formal training in surgery, having learned from his father.

On one occasion, a patient in Burns’s care dies after a rather simple hospital staff worker, Private Lorenzo Boone (played by Bud Cort) tries to use a non-functioning suction machine on the patient. Burns claims Boone killed the patient. Not being very bright, Boone assumes Burns’s opinion, as a doctor, is of infallible authority, and he is overwhelmed with guilt and weeps over the death.

Duke sees this exchange, and he hits Burns. In the film, it’s Trapper who sees it and hits him; in the novel, Trapper hits him on a later occasion.

Burns will develop a mutual admiration for and romantic interest in the new Chief Nurse, Major Margaret Houlihan (Kellerman; Swit). While in the book and the film, Burns will be kicked out of the 4077th and sent stateside after he physically attacks Hawkeye for taunting him about his (in the novel, only rumoured) sexual relationship with her, in the TV series, both Burns and Houlihan will stay at the MASH and personify the hated army authoritarianism that the Swampmen rebel against. But again, it’s a self-absorbed, American antagonism between the two sides that has little, if anything, to do with leaving the Koreans alone.

VIII: Chapter Seven

This is the chapter in which the Swampmen raise money to help their Korean houseboy, Ho-Jon, go to the US to study in university there. As I said above, this is one of their few charitable acts in the novel. Even with this one, though, there are some qualifying factors to consider.

As I’ve tried to argue from the beginning, the Americans shouldn’t have been in Korea in the first place. A few scruffy American doctors sticking their tongues out at military authoritarians does nothing to compensate for the damage caused to the Koreans by occupying, bombing, prostituting, and forcing capitalism on them.

If the Koreans had wanted to pursue socialism after the end of the Japanese occupation, then that was their prerogative. Imposing starvation sanctions on the DPRK, and then claiming disingenuously that their problems are all because ‘socialism doesn’t work,’ has been a tried-and-true tactic that Western imperialism had used on a number of occasions, including Cuba and Venezuela. If ‘socialism doesn’t work,’ then just let the countries attempting to build it fail on their own, and after a few months, they should be running back crying to the capitalist West for salvation. Instead, consider what Cuba, burdened with an economic embargo from the 1960s, has been able to achieve.

Ho-Jon would be properly described as an Asian Uncle Tom. He thinks his Swampmen masters are “the three greatest people in the world.” Sure, the three doctors are good to him: they allow him to spend time with them in The Swamp when he isn’t shining their shoes, doing their laundry, etc.; they help him with his English. All of this can be seen as simple rewards for the boy’s loyalty to them. Accordingly, they like him as much as he likes them.

Ho-Jon still has to fight in the war, though, despite the attempts of Blake and the Swampmen to intercede with the Korean government…he’s seventeen at the time, and he gets wounded, with a mortar fragment in his chest. He thus returns to the 4077th to be operated on by Hawkeye and Trapper.

After the surgery and Ho-Jon is getting better, the Swampmen are debating which college would be the best one for him to study in. After briefly considering Dartmouth and Georgia (the latter being a place where the KKK won’t take kindly to an Asian being there), the Swampmen agree on Androscoggin College. Hawkeye writes to the dean, who replies, saying Ho-Jon will need a thousand dollars a year. To raise the money, which will probably add up to five or six thousand, including travel and expenses other than the aforementioned tuition, the Swampmen decide to have Trapper, as hairy as he is, dress up like Jesus, and sell photos of ‘Him.’

Mulcahy doesn’t like the idea of religion for money, but the Swampmen know “there are a lot of screwballs in the army” who will buy the photos for laughs and souvenirs, and there doesn’t seem to be any other way to raise money for Ho-Jon. Once again, MASH uses Christianity irreverently, and we see in it more of Western culture imposed on Korea.

By “more of Western culture impose on Korea,” I mean that Trapper’s clowning around in a Jesus outfit in South Korea and making money from the photos is a symbolic presentation of Christian missionary work and capitalism nosing their way around Asia to spread their influence among the locals. Ho-Jon is already a Christian–that is, he’s been indoctrinated with Western values and ethics–and he’s about to be educated in an American university. The Swampmen are content to work to raise money to send their friend there and be further indoctrinated. Consider in this connection how much money the American government has given to South Korea to keep the country under its spell.

IX: Chapters Eight and Nine

A soldier whose father is a US Congressman has been wounded, and the Congressman wants Trapper to fly to Japan with an assistant doctor, Hawkeye, and do emergency surgery on the boy. The doctors’ major motivation in going to Japan, though, is to play golf there. They even bring their golf clubs with them.

When they get there, Hawkeye reconnects with an old friend, “Me Lay” Marston, who is an anesthesiologist and helps a Japanese doctor run a pediatric hospital that doubles as a whorehouse. In fact, the place unabashedly calls itself “Dr. Yamamoto’s Finest Kind Pediatric Hospital and Whorehouse,” or FKPH&W, for short. This openness shouldn’t be all that surprising, for of course, the US military has been known for frequenting such places in East Asia, as I’ve mentioned above.

When the doctors are going to the operating area, an army nurse tries to stop them. During the operation, a colonel shows his disapproval of their barging in to the place. Neither of these people deter the doctors, obviously. Examples of their usual defiance of military authority can be seen in the film. Again, though, this defiance of authority is just about two men who want to get the surgery out of the way as soon as possible so they can play as much golf as they can get in. They don’t want to wait around for the right people to arrive so they can be authorized to operate. They’re not even dressed as doctors: they’re all scruffy and have their golf clubs with them. Military authority isn’t an oppression to be overthrown–it’s just an inconvenience.

Later, while Trapper and Hawkeye are playing golf, some women caddies there get the impression that Trapper is Jesus when Hawkeye says the Lord’s name in vain after Trapper has hit a good shot. Hawkeye still has some old Jesus photos of Trapper on him, so he gives them to the “bimboes…[who] are on a real Christian kick.”

Though it looks as if Trapper and Hawkeye are planning to get laid, and they even hope to hang out in FKPH&W, speaking of which place, Me Lay wants the two doctors to take care of a half-white, half-Japanese baby, the result of an American john and a careless prostitute there. The doctors deal with the baby’s medical problems and talk Me Lay into adopting the orphan.

That officious colonel, who doesn’t approve of the Swampmen’s dealings with the baby, is blackmailed with photos of himself in bed with a prostitute, so the doctors won’t get in trouble. After all of these adventures, though, the doctors must rush back to the 4077th to deal with a huge, seemingly endless deluge of wounded, which is what Chapter Nine is all about.

X: Chapter Ten

This chapter starts with a description of Captain “Ugly John” Black (played by Carl Gottlieb in the film, and by John Orchard in the TV series), the 4077th’s anesthesiologist, how important he is to the hospital, and how his work is never done. He’s called Ugly John in the novel as an ironic joke: he’s actually “the handsomest man in the outfit.” He also hates everyone in the Commonwealth Division: Brits, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, etc.

Later on in the chapter, a new doctor arrives who is christened by Trapper with the nickname of “Jeeter.” He shares some martinis with the Swampmen, and as he’s getting tipsier and tipsier with each drink, Jeeter reveals how horny he is for the women there. He gets advice from Hawkeye on how he can get his hands on a nurse; while Hawkeye offers a few suggestions, he’s not sure which one is the best, so Trapper suggests that Jeeter announce his availability to all the nurses in the mess hall.

By now so drunk that he’s staggering, Jeeter goes to the mess hall with the help of the Swampmen, and standing at the doorway, he announces his availability in the crudest and most aggressive terms possible, shocking everyone there. Trapper can’t resist inspiring him to say he’ll start by screwing “Hot Lips” Houlihan.

Now, “Hot Lips” has been Major Houlihan’s official nickname, much to her chagrin, ever since her sexual relationship with Frank Burns. Trapper is the one who has christened her with the nickname, though in the film, it’s inspired by her telling Burns to “kiss [her] hot lips,” not knowing that a microphone has been surreptitiously placed by her in her tent where she and Burns have been making love.

Another surgeon, Roger the Dodger, arrives at the 4077th, and he’s inspired to shout out “Hot Lips Houlihan,” which will provoke her all the more.

In the novel, she races into Col. Blake’s tent, fresh from the showers and wildly irate. There’s no reference to a prank involving the shower tent dropping and exposing her nakedness to the whole 4077th, as in the movie, but it’s easy to see how the filmmakers took the idea of the prank as implied in the novel.

When she goes into Blake’s tent, the ends of her hair are still wet, and the strap of her shower cap is hanging from an end of her towel. She obviously ran out of the shower tent before she was finished in there, because the Swampmen, “those beasts, those THINGS,” have upset her so severely. She threatens she’ll resign her commission if Blake won’t do anything about them.

Blake couldn’t care less if she does. He never properly disciplines any of the Swampmen. As she says, the 4077th “isn’t a hospital…It’s an insane asylum,” and Blake is to blame for not using his authority to stop men like McIntyre from calling her “Hot Lips.”

This incident, especially as it’s represented in the film, underlines another unsavoury aspect of the original MASH that makes nonsense of the more progressive aspects of the TV series: its sexist attitude towards women. Houlihan may be a major, but she’s given no respect. In the TV series, especially the later seasons, much is made of her as a spokeswoman for sexual equality in the army.

Not so in the novel or film, where women are called “broads,” chased by the men for sex, objectified and exposed as described above, had orders barked at them by the Swampmen to do such things as cook for them, etc. All of this fits in line with the imperialist project of trying to control the entire Korean Peninsula, as well as Japan, where in both US-controlled places, there is prostitution provided for the GIs. A huge part of world domination is in controlling its women, as of the 2020s, just under 50% of the global population.

I never found the film’s shower scene with Houlihan amusing. It always came across to me as a mean, humiliating, demeaning prank devised by the immature Swampmen, all just to find out whether or not she’s a natural blonde. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: as charmless as army authoritarianism may be, cheap pranks like these are not the way to deal with it; they’re often not even funny.

Houlihan will try to get Blake in trouble by informing General Hammond (played by G. Wood) of how out of control the staff of the 4077th are. Ultimately, nothing will be done about it. Indeed, the general goes so far as to say, “Screw her.”

XI: Chapter Eleven

Blake has been sent to Japan for temporary duty at the Tokyo Army Hospital. He’s been replaced by Col. Horace DeLong for the three weeks that Blake is gone. DeLong, another regular army guy, will be quite dismayed with the erratic behaviour of the scruffy Swampmen, though he will come to respect Hawkeye for his skills as a surgeon.

Bored during a spell of no wounded, and suffering in the heat, the Swampmen get some amusement by pretending they’ve gone insane. They speak of mermaids as if they were real, and they tell DeLong that when they catch a mermaid, they’ll “screw the ass off her.” They figure that if they can convince DeLong that they’re nuts, they’ll be sent to some psychiatrists in Seoul for a while, then get sent back to the 4077th in time for when more wounded come.

To add to the craziness about mermaids, Hawkeye says he’ll agree to DeLong’s plan–to have the Swampmen go to the 325th Evac for psychiatric observation–if he can get “a shot at the epileptic whore,” an idea inspired by a psychiatrist Hawkeye once knew who had a female epileptic patient; she’d go crazy every time her husband tried to have sex with her. Hawkeye hopes to find such a prostitute in Seoul during the Swampmen’s rest and ‘therapy.’

They go to the 325th Evac, meet a psychiatrist named Maj. Haskell, and do their crazy routine with him. They act as though Hawkeye is the worst case. When Haskell meets Hawkeye, the latter makes a number of incoherent remarks to seem crazy.

The Swampmen also find a place where they can get at the “epileptic whore”–Mrs. Lee’s, whose brothel’s girls are “velly clean.” They visit the place, but don’t end up trying the prostitute with “hysterical convulsion[s].”

XII: Chapter Twelve

Hawkeye gets the idea to have the 4077th set up a football team. He considers certain men in the unit, including one named Vollmer, to be a centre, then Jeeter as a second string halfback, among others, all of whom have had football playing experience, according to Hawkeye. Their new team can play against that of the 325th Evac, a team coached by General Hammond.

Since Hammond’s team is really good, Hawkeye knows someone who can be a ringer to ensure that the 4077th can beat the 325th Evac: Captain Oliver Wendell Jones–“Spearchucker,” (Williams; Timothy Brown in the TV series) an excellent football player who’s become a neurosurgeon. When Duke hears the man’s name, he (correctly) assumes that Jones is black, flaring up Duke’s racial prejudice.

Hawkeye gives Duke a slight chiding for calling Jones a “nigra,” and when Duke meets Jones and taunts him a bit, Jones puts him properly in his place. This is the first time in Hooker’s novel that someone is called out for using racial slurs or otherwise demonstrating racial bigotry. Since the novel was published in 1968, it is safe to assume that, because of the Civil Rights movement, conservative Hooker knew he couldn’t get away with racism against blacks the way he could racism against Asians at the time. Still, calling Jones “Spearchucker,” a nickname he accepts because he “used to throw the javelin,” is plenty racist as it is.

The Swampmen go to Blake to make a twin request that is really one: they need a neurosurgeon, Jones specifically, and they need him also for the 4077th’s new football team. Blake remembers that Hammond coaches the 325th Evac team, and that Hammond’s sense of how to coach a football team is years out of date; Blake also knows that with Jones playing for the 4077th, they can beat Hammond’s team and make a lot of money. After all, people bet on these football games, and so a profit can be made on them.

When Blake agrees to set up the new 4077th football team, insisting that he be their coach, Hawkeye is pleased and tells the other Swampmen, “Henry believes in free enterprise, too.” Note here the combination of capitalism with the liberal concession of having a black man on the football team. Of course, the far more progressive stance of the TV series includes far greater respect for blacks…the dealing with “Spearchucker” early on notwithstanding.

The character had been written out of the TV series by the end of season one because it had been understood that there were no black surgeons in MASH units during the Korean War, and so the sitcom’s creator was concerned, apparently, with maintaining historical accuracy (about something most people probably wouldn’t have known, anyway; and actually, there had been several black surgeons at the time). Hmm: a TV series–one that ran for just over a decade about a war that had lasted for only a little over three years, that was meant as an allegory about the Vietnam War, and which had men in the early 1950s with shaggy 1970s hair instead of short, army haircuts–fired a black actor because of concern about historical accuracy? Speaking of racism…

Then again, continuing to call a black man “Spearchucker” over and over again would have been problematic in itself for a TV show that was to be more politically progressive, anyway. In all of this, we can see how the contrast between the show, the film, and the novel is not a conservative/liberal dichotomy, but rather a continuum between the two supposedly opposing political stances.

XIII: Chapter Thirteen

When the players of the new 4077th football team are practicing, they’re awful, but not hopeless. When the game happens, it turns out that Hammond has a few pro footballers of his own for his team, so the 4077th will have to find ways around such obstacles…including cheating. One of the pros, for example, is surreptitiously given a sedative during a pileup in order to incapacitate him.

One way to think about this football game is to allegorize it as a war, except that instead of it being a war between the capitalist West and the ‘dirty commie’ North Koreans and Chinese, it’s a war between the scruffy anti-authoritarians and the military authority, as personified by Hammond’s team. Such an interpretation seems fitting, since throughout the novel and the film, we get very little of the actual Korean War, apart from all the wounded needing surgery.

This war-allegory ties in with what I’ve been saying on and off throughout this analysis: there’s very little concern with the actual war and the damage that was done to the Koreans at the hands of US imperialism. All the MASH staff care about is themselves. They deal with the horrors of war not by demanding a stop to it or by making fun of anti-communist hysteria (as happens from time to time in the TV series), but instead by indulging in pleasure: boozing, sex, golf, and now, football. They oppose the military not because of its imperialism, but because it gets in the way of their fun.

The football players are profiteering from bets on the game, just as there are profiteers in war. The team opposing that of the 4077th are called, significantly, “the enemy” in the novel. The game is a war, a comically self-absorbed one between Americans and Americans, with the Koreans so marginalized this time that they’re not even present.

One of the major reasons for divergences from the film and the novel (and even Lardner’s script, for that matter) is Altman’s encouragement of his actors to improvise, to allow more creative freedom for them and to have more spontaneous interactions between them, adding more realism. One result of this indulgence in MASH is, during the football game, Schuck as Painless saying, “Alright, bud, your fucking head is coming right off,” making this the first time in a mainstream Hollywood movie that that word was ever said…and allowed.

Another example of the 4077th team cheating is when Radar uses his ESP to listen in on the upcoming plays Hammond’s team is planning. They also use a trick involving Vollmer hiding the football and walking it over to the enemy’s side while everyone else is kept busy and distracted. As a result, the 4077th wins the game 28-24, and they make a huge profit.

This blatant disregard for the rules, as well as the contempt shown for authority, can be seen to represent the real political stance, if there even is one, of the Swampmen–they’re anarchists. Yet their penchant for making profits makes them a most dubious kind of anarchist…’anarcho’-capitalists! I told you this novel/film was far from left-wing or progressive.

XIV: Chapters Fourteen and Fifteen, and Conclusion

The days of the deployment of Hawkeye and Duke in South Korea are numbered, so between now and when they get sent home, Blake is having them teach two new doctors how to do “meatball surgery,” which is a set of surgical short-cuts, since saving the lives of the wounded is the priority, and not daintiness, which can be left to the doctors in, say, Tokyo.

In the final chapter, Hawkeye and Duke finally leave the 4077th and go back to the States. They do a lot of drinking on the way, and they engage in a lot of their usual naughtiness, including at one point shirking certain medical duties by pretending to be chaplains. Finally at home, they rejoin their wives and kids in Maine and Georgia.

In the TV series, though, of course, Hawkeye (as well as Frank Burns) have not gone home, and Hawkeye (played by the ever-so-charismatic Alan Alda) is a bachelor. The show truly was an allegory of the Vietnam War, the last years of which overlapped with the film and the first few seasons of the series. As a result, the TV show, with its eleven seasons, ended up turning a three-year-war into an eleven-year quagmire, if you will, in ironic imitation, it seems, of Nam.

The more progressive liberal stance of the TV show, as I said above, should be seen as on a continuum with the more conservative vision of Hooker and Altman, since the one progressive stance of consequence–that the US army should never have been in Korea in the first place–is never even considered, not in the novel, the film, or the TV show.

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