On paper, my notes look difficult to flowchart. They seem like a bunch of mis-matched notes and signs that have no reasonable connection. The art of writing from them would then seem to be an arbitrary exercise in showing that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts but I think in reality they demonstrate that the “bewildering myriad of surface details,” described by arch-criminal Gregory Karl does in fact lead to an understanding of the criminal mind vying for control of our society. I want to lecture, then, on what I think is happening in our society.
The idea that peace was death was first presented to me by a King Crimson song when I was ten years old after my father (part of the mobile society that emerged after World War Two, of which he was a veteran) opted for his fourth wife and left me to fend for myself in a Pittsburgh Public School while he was authoring books on school reform. He hated Germany. He thought that Adolf Hitler’s ideas about man in constant struggle was transparently abject villainy. He wouldn’t even fly through their airspace when he lectured on five continents and to his credit he never abandoned his Jewish son the way he did me.
Father’s oldest known work was written while he was at Teacher’s College in the 40’s with Eisenhower, part of the Atoms for Peace era but the strange thing is the co-author’s name is Israel Light. One of my earliest memories was rocking on my father’s knee to the musical introduction of the short-lived television show, “Secret Agent Man,” a hit song, but the following series, “Man from UNCLE,” was on the air a lot longer. His nickname for me, after Sourball, when I was in my diapers, was Sam.
One of the points I make an issue today is how our names are being orchestrated into nom de guerres, a moniker junta if you will, in which overt descriptors like Israel Light may seem hokey enough to make questions about more discrete things seem erroneous when, in fact, there are other flippant codifications. My father was a humanist. The first issue of Humanist Magazine came out in January of 1964 with a bisected image of Kennedy on the cover. In addition to the odd contribution of Robert Anton Wilson there was someone named Otto Krash.
It may be very reasonable to ask how much of what I write about is real, but I plan to thwart the more derogatory question of how much of what I write about is rational. One thing I’m sure after getting through this: you won’t like me. No one likes the bearer of bad news.
There is a theory of childhood known as Blank Slate Theory. It sums up as the idea that children are there to absorb whatever comes their way, while having little to go on. People object that commonsense and judgment are inborn but certainly many facts have to be learned. So I feel strongly that one of the things being born in 1960 faced me with was a Blank Slate Theory from within the government’s media program scene, back in the golden age of General Mills and Captain Kangaroo, who knew the children didn’t know about World War Two. In fact, Captain Kangaroo may have really been a far-out allusion to America’s ideas about the Nuremberg Trials. Why would I be so bold as to present such a tongue-cluckable and easily rejected formulation? When what I believe is considered my weak spot and my blindspot?
The University of Pittsburgh is so important to the field of Philosophy, where men like Adolf Grunbaum developed logical positivism and the Vienna Circle met there. My father's genial resemblance to Captain Kangaroo may invite whispers that I am overplaying his academic standing out of childlike idealization. Anyone from there who watched me or my siblings grow up has heard that before. He wasn’t Chair for Philosophy of Education forever and he lost his office in the Cathedral of Learning when they opened Forbes Quad. So is this connection arbitrary? A joke from a comic book mind? My point can be delivered from a more serious angle that doesn’t depend on the play on words that posits mockery of America’s judgment in the name Captain Kangaroo. Martin Heidegger became a revered intellect among groups like the Vienna Circle after being questioned at Nuremberg.
Recently, the man, John Shulman, whose gangster cause forced me to abandon ship and leave Pittsburgh for Tacoma, was arrested and sent to prison in a case that made the cover of Smithsonian Magazine, but Clint Eastwood, who wrote to me here, is a much harder nut to crack. My father took me to, “Where Eagles Dare,” which Clint likes to call, “where doubles dare.” I like to note here that University of Pittsburgh is proximate to the Y2K man, a sideshow you may have forgotten, Herbert Simon in Machine Intelligence at Carnegie Mellon, a war machine run by students. Clint, under Y2K, could be mistaken as an abbreviation for Clinton. Recall that Clint Hill entered public discourse in Dallas on Nov. 22nd, 1963, the date the gray matter at Skibo was dedicated at CMU was also Nov. 22, I believe 1961. There’s an obscure plaque, or was. Simon’s confederate Cutofsky would always argue with me that children were born to be programmed. The Great Caesar of programs of course is denial.
Richard Cyert, the President of CMU for a time, liked to laugh at the 60’s jargon that called the establishment by names like or “the system.” Brainy and aware of the anti-industrial revolution and opposition to America’s status as a diplomatic and peace-making entity by the murder of RFK and the war, he is the type who would note what people will come to believe on drugs if the real truth is withheld from them, so it doesn’t surprise me to see a photo of Donald Trump and CMU’s Pittsburgh claim to NY identity, Andy Warhol, together under a billboard reading Piaget, the great child-learning programmer, a photo easily found in Google Image, because CMU is where Yoko Ono was glamorized as a higher order of intellect, an AIDS sage, an inexplicable sybil. Jay Inslee’s gang, probably chosen for JAY (John and Yoko) have subjected my body to dangerous and unhealthy poisons leading to mouth infection and diabetes in this struggle with the right to know laws and the right not to be used as a sacrifice by Seattle authorities in their deranged fulfillment of a masterplan from Warhol.
Double Fantasy means both pretend. Bogart said of Ingmar Bergman, the notorious Nazi cinema star, “I let her pretend.” Letting the man you are going to kill pretend was a plot device of the Argentinian writer, much admired by the White Russian Nabokov, named Borges who is just right for Ringo Starr.
People shrug about me. Time hasn’t been much of an object in desolation. They let me pretend for a while. She was really pretty.