Decoding The Language Of Social Control

(Democracy Is Communism and Must Be Destroyed)

“Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” — Ronald Reagan, First Inaugural Address, 1981.

“It’s not the government’s money, it’s the people’s money.” — George W. Bush, stump speeches, 2000.

“I don’t want to pay for somebody else’s…” “problems” (welfare), “kids” (public schools), “medical” (health care).

Character Is Fate (Heraclitus/Novalis)

The social programming language of capitalist authoritarianism seeks to activate personal greed, intellectual insecurity and visceral racism as motivators of guided popular political reaction. The Pavlovian logic to this scheme of social manipulation is that all human beings are possessive, gullible and fearful.

Don’t think this last generalization too extreme. Rare are the people who are as unconcerned about their survival and possessions as were Diogenes of Sinope, the Greek “cynic” philosopher of the 4th century BC, and Ry?kan Taigu (1758-1831), the hermit Zen monk poet and calligrapher. Similarly, rare are the people, without organic brain disorders, who do not have some fear of being made fools of when matching wits with more polished, more educated, more experienced, more charismatic or simply a luckier class of people. Lastly, we are all racists. As highly evolved monkeys, we instinctively identify with our monkey troop of people with similar appearance, existential outlook, language, culture, place of origin, the economic neighborhood we imagine we deserve a place in, and the socio-political fantasy we have been imprinted with and trained to take as the thread of history that expresses us.

As we become more self-aware, more experienced and better educated, we can see through many of the racist concepts and attitudes of the past. But it is self-deception to imagine that we have ever individually “gone beyond racism” in our visceral responses to the instants of daily life that erupt before us, or that we will never have a sudden emotion, thought or fear that is completely above the muck of primordial racist reaction. It is intellectual pride, and false, to assume we can consciously will ourselves to transcend the psychological reactions of our paleo-mammalian brains. Instead, it is psychologically much healthier to realize that our common human nature assures that any behavior humanly possible, remains humanly possible for each of us as well.

C. G. Jung made this point about Nazism, that those people least likely to act like Nazis and Nazi collaborators were those who knew they had no special immunity to Nazi psychology (not assuming they were too “intellectual”, “moral”, or “religious” to be swayed), but instead actively countered its influences to their behavior. A similar attitude operating out of the cerebral cortex is needed to manage the unthinking motivations arising out of our deeper-set limbic system, our reptilian brain. Racism is a burst of raw emotional energy whose emergence is to be detected and redirected intelligently, while within the individual.

People whose self-awareness, of the type described, are weak and under-developed and can be manipulated more easily. “There’s a sucker born every minute” (pre-1898, attribution uncertain). People who are keenly aware of this psychology, and devoid of moral principles, like the fictional Elmer Gantry and the all-too-real Joseph Goebbels, can manage the herding of a mass of people to give up their power — in every sense of the word — to a driving elite. The few rule the many by persuasion. The levers of direction are the popular flaws of character.

We The People

In theory, the many governments (federal, state and local) in the United States of America are democracies: assemblies of elected representatives of populations of citizens, and officials appointed by the elected representatives to execute specific tasks in the public interest. In this model, government is the apparatus designed to implement the popular consensus about the management of the shared material existence of the citizenry.

Identifying and prioritizing the specifics of the popular will are supposedly accomplished by the concentrating and winnowing effects of competitive electioneering and parliamentary debate. The regulation of markets and trade, the upkeep of public infrastructure, the provision of emergency services against natural disasters, and the prudent maintenance of defense forces are all examples of publicly shared concerns governments are created to manage. The education of children till they reach adulthood, intellectual maturity and a self-sustaining professional competence, as well as the health care of the citizenry are enduring publicly shared concerns that are ideally suited for management by functionally dedicated government apparatuses.

When Ronald Reagan said “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” he was saying that we, the people, were the problem since our government is the democratic abstraction of our shared existence. So if we are “the problem,” then whose problem is this? Why would “our” President disown the apparatus of our common will, whose implementation he had been entrusted to lead? Certainly, one could understand “our” President saying that there were problems in the government apparatus limiting its responsiveness to our needs, and effectiveness in achieving our goals: “my purpose as your President is solving the problems our government has in meeting all its obligations to the public.” Note however, this last quote is fictional.

On the 20th of January, 1981, the new President of the United States was telling us that “we the people” were in somebody’s way, a somebody who actually was represented by the power and authority he now held, and which he intended to use to destroy the deposed government that was “us.” A coup. In the light of subsequent history, a reasonable characterization. Twenty-nine years and one day after Ronald Reagan came to power, the U.S. Supreme Court made it plain, by issuing its Dred Scott decision of the 21st century, elevating corporate rights above those of individual flesh-and-blood human beings. Now, every legally recognized person — real or corporate — is equally entitled to spend as much as they have to influence political debate. Clearly, because political access is so precious, it must be metered out on the basis of wealth.

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” (Anatole France: Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault 1844-1924)

“It is true that liberty is precious, so precious that it must be rationed.” (Attributed to Lenin: Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov 1870-1924)

Yes, we, the people, are certainly in somebody’s way, unless our consumption, labor or demise lards a corporate bottom line. Think of yourself as a unit in a statistical ensemble of metabolic form virtual property, an advanced concept of slavery that transcends the 13th Amendment and the unitary static materialist concept of the lump-of-flesh slave; a human herd whose collective activity in a spectrum of markets exudes profitability like the methane clouds that flatulate up from bovine concentrations. The free market system strikes a match to the gas, charges you for the heat and leaves you with the ashes, if not a scorched rump. We are herded by the owners of the markets we are counted in.

One example is health care; our medical needs are not the prime concern, but instead preserving the profits of the parasitic medical financing business carried on by the insurance industry, which is interposed between medical providers and patients. So our medical market owners, the insurance industry, must herd us to its best advantage, not ours. When we, the people, try to fashion a public health care system that does meet our needs, by cutting out the middleman (the essence of good business practice), we immediately find that “government is the problem.” In fact, democracy is the problem. If democracy is not strictly rationed, the whole herd might stampede and any number of markets tossed over and sunk, like the bales of tea dropped into Boston Harbor on December 16, 1773.

It’s All About The Money

When George W. Bush said “It’s not the government’s money, it’s the people’s money” during his campaign speeches in 2000, he was broadcasting coded programming language designed to activate resentment over personal inadequacies and have the resulting shame-based anger projected onto a victim population. The purpose of such social programming is to train the indoctrinated population to maintain its unthinking visceral obedience to the directing ideology, and so provide political support to an oligarchy that simply exploits its trained masses shamelessly.

When you hear people say “I don’t want to pay for somebody else’s…” “problems” (welfare), “kids” (public schools), “medical” (health care), you hear the internalized programming. With blissful obliviousness these political automatons will allow their economy to wither, and dispatch their tax dollars to fund the gold-plated war-waste of the Pentagon system and the many outrageous corporate subsidies (“bonuses”) that remain protected by the “tax cuts” that are so liberal to corporate wealth, so measly for the suckers, but do bump those “welfare cheats” off the dole most satisfactorily to both the duped and the malevolent.

The great con-job here is in training a large population into accepting that property has more rights than people. Since under democracy there is always the threat that popular consensus could place some restrictions on “property” (the “right” of money to do as it pleases), then property — as it is understood today: wealth protected by the legalistic über-persona of corporate structure — must destroy democracy. Democracy is communism.

A History Of Social Control

How did the corporate ideology social programmers manage to peel back a million years of human evolution to produce the “Tea Party” sideshows where people act at their limbic level, like monkey troops howling over the invasion of their banana groves? Let’s skip through history to piece together an answer.

The European white man used a divide-and-rule strategy to control the native populations of the many countries he colonized in the Western Hemisphere, Asia, Africa, the Pacific and the Middle East. Tribal rivalries stoked by the white overlords could keep the natives distracted from coordinating a united opposition to colonialism. Selected native groups and individuals could be educated and trained to become the local managers and enforcers of the white man’s rule. They internalized the white man’s culture up to a point, sufficient they hoped to “elevate” them out of native society and into some respectable place in the white man’s social hierarchy, and along with that add to their wealth and prestige. These were the compradors, native-born agents of colonial interests in Asia, and the native troops deployed by white colonial management to control the native masses. Successors in the role of native collaborators with white social control are the racial and ethnic tokens deployed by U.S. corporate and political management today; some are quite polished, prominent, and well-paid.

The management of today’s masses in the United States evolved out of the mechanisms for managing the natives that began with Christopher Columbus and the European Conquest of the Americas. Native and slave management in early colonial times evolved into race management after the Civil War, and then to the economic and social class management of the present day. The entire mentality of social control is that of colonialism.

The most significant Civil Rights legislation since the end of the Civil War was enacted during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson (Democratic Party):

  • The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (extended voting rights and outlawed racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and by facilities that served the general public),
  • The National Voting Rights Act of 1965 (outlawed discriminatory voting practices that had caused the widespread disenfranchisement of African Americans),
  • The Civil Rights Act of 1968 (the “Fair Housing Act” prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental, and financing of housing).

The combined tensions of desperation by white racists at losing overt social control, and the pent up rage of blacks over the slow pace of authentic relief of oppression and the opening of economic opportunities, erupted into many urban riots during the 1960s. Very prominent ones were: the Watts Riots of 1965 in Los Angeles; the 1967 riots in Newark and Detroit; and the 125 cities that erupted into riot during April and May of 1968 in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4th.

In 1968, Richard M. Nixon (Republican Party) used a “Southern Strategy”, a “law and order” play on Southern white racist resentment, to win the presidential election. Johnson likely assumed that Civil Rights legislation would bring a flood of black votes to the Democrats nationally, and perhaps compensate somewhat for the certain loss of Southern white racist votes; but, blacks are only about 12% of the population, and Nixon counted on there being more than 12% white racist resentment within the 75% white population — both in the South and nationally. He won by a landslide.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan tapped into the submerged bigotry that exists coast-to-coast, to call forth the resentful inner white Southerner (the inner Confederate) within much of the national electorate, and win the presidency. Reagan’s managers had learned from Nixon, and devised an expanded form of the Southern Strategy.

During George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign (as well as his two terms in office) economic class and “race” code words were euphemisms for each other. The decoded programming message was: poor and unworthy people, like wasteful and lazy blacks, and dirty and ignorant Mexican (Latino) immigrants are taking “your” (deserving inner whites’) money by creating social welfare burdens that “your” government is now forced to pay, because of bad “give-away” legislation foisted on it by wrong-headed liberals (white snobs and non-white agitators). Your undeserved (because of your inner whiteness) increasing poverty is directly attributable to the drain on taxes by these unworthy, non-white-centered, strange-language populations. In voting for George W. Bush (and obeying his managing oligarchy), you put money “back” into the pockets of people like you, who deserve it.

All the language publicly broadcast by “conservatives” is pure lying to induce visceral obedience to the corporatist oligarchy’s political control, and allow it to continue bleeding the public like a swarm of elephant-sized ticks. Following are generalized decodings of the core instructions and their imprinted reflection.

The Hypnotic Message (“watch the watch…”):

You lack… stuff (money, brains, looks, youth, education, a nice location, a desirable mate, successful children), so you resent paying for others who get it free; others who are inferior, threatening, strange, unclean, unwholesome, wasteful, disrespectful of your importance (as a real American), and of your precedence in “our” traditional system of social rank. You resent these others polluting and degrading the system you expect to provide for you, to profit you, to honor you, to hold still and not progress beyond your capacity to understand, and to preserve the order of social rewards so no unworthy others pass you by and push you back.

You must fight back, don’t let them have free things which your work has paid for, don’t let them have advantages that makes it easier for them to advance ahead of you, and makes it harder for you to maintain your superiority without learning anything new, without becoming smarter or richer on your own. Don’t let these others have advantages that crowd the places you expect to occupy as you move on in life; crowd them with more unwholesome unworthy competitors, whose increasing number threaten to diminish your standing, and end your way of life.

The Internalized Message:

I lack stuff, and it is these unclean others who have degraded the system that previously would have moved me up faster and more comfortably. So I want to exclude these others, keep them from crossing “our” borders, and taking our advantages without paying as much as I did; even worse, creating problems my tax dollars have to pay for and which wouldn’t even happen if those people weren’t here, so I would have more of my own wealth. I have to stand up for the people like me who run for office and are willing to get the government to take care of the real Americans, who deserve the benefits that they paid for, and their parents and grandparents paid for; that will push out the unclean ones and ensure there are no extra moochers sapping our wealth, and bringing me down. Because I lack stuff, I don’t want to pay for other people to have stuff, and because I don’t want the government to take more of my money, I’m voting for the people who want to cut down the government, and cut down taxes. I’m voting to stop the give-aways, because the politicians who will do that care about me, a real American who makes a real contribution to the country, and deserves not to have it pissed away on wasteful others.

And so are fools serenaded into the abattoir.

Manuel Garcia, Jr. is an occasional writer who is always independent. His e-mail address is: mangogarcia@att.net. Read other articles by Manuel, or visit Manuel's website.

22 comments on this article so far ...

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  1. bozh said on March 11th, 2010 at 10:02am #

    For at least 15 k yrs people have been led first by shamans and later priests and king-priests or even god-kings.

    At a point of time, ‘leaders’ arose and began imposing on trusting people their version of morality; which consisted of lying, cheating, deceiving, dividing people, etc.
    Over millenia and by 8 bc it had been perfected to the point that soocieties in those days had priestly and godful leaders who institutionalzed serfdom and even slavery.

    Today we can see that in most societies lying, cheating, robbing, thieving, deceiving, murdering, lust for possesing people is as strong as ever. Such behavior is not only permited, but also demanded.
    And just as 8 or 10 k yrs ago, the worst at this are ‘our leaders’: most ‘educators’, pols, priests [as always before], judges, et al.

    And there may be one bn people who wld even kill or do kill anyone who wld ask we change institutionalized lying, cheating, murdering.
    Fortunately for the us, a number of societies appear to understand how we became enslaved and are doing s’mthing ab it!

    In US, tho, vast numbers of americans do not show signs of awakening to the facts i just posited. Hopefully, more and more of them wld opt to change the system now in US.
    There are a number of great educators in america now. More than ever. So, that is a positive sign. tnx

  2. Don Hawkins said on March 11th, 2010 at 3:24pm #

    Oh there will be an awakening to the facts and so far it’s pitting one side against the other oldest trick in the book. Good article

  3. An Individual said on March 11th, 2010 at 5:21pm #

    Mr. Garcia Jr. tells the reader that “we” are the government in a democratic arrangement such as exists in the United States. Unfortunately, this premise is utterly destroyed by, among other things, the opening paragraph of this essay, especially the last two sentences:

    “Under this reasoning, any Jews murdered by the Nazi government were not murdered; instead, they must have “committed suicide,” since they were the government (which was democratically chosen), and, therefore, anything the government did to them was voluntary on their part. One would not think it necessary to belabor this point, and yet the overwhelming bulk of the people hold this fallacy to a greater or lesser degree.”

    Sincerely,
    A “wasteful and lazy black” individual (that is, according to Mr. Garcia Jr.’s “decoding” theory)

  4. Deadbeat said on March 12th, 2010 at 2:28am #

    The author writes …

    When Ronald Reagan said “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” he was saying that we, the people, were the problem since our government is the democratic abstraction of our shared existence. So if we are “the problem,” then whose problem is this? Why would “our” President disown the apparatus of our common will, whose implementation he had been entrusted to lead? Certainly, one could understand “our” President saying that there were problems in the government apparatus limiting its responsiveness to our needs, and effectiveness in achieving our goals: “my purpose as your President is solving the problems our government has in meeting all its obligations to the public.” Note however, this last quote is fictional.

    Note however that the paragraph written by the author is fictional. What Reagan was saying was this in the context of a recession, oil shocks and the Iranian revolution …

    I have to build an electoral base of reactionaries in order to take control of the government to make it function for the rich and capitalists. I going to use the rhetoric of fear, cynicism, racism, and red baiting, in order to build that base. I going to blame the Liberal agenda that foolishly sought to mitigate Capitalism and to expand Capitalism for the benefit of the rich. I going to sucker you white reactionaries by blaming those negros on “welfare” and “affirmative action” and those Arab “terrorists” so you’ll vote for me. SUCKERS!!!

  5. John Andrews said on March 12th, 2010 at 2:34am #

    Not a bad piece Mr Garcia, but there are a couple of points I would dispute.

    1. You claim that: “It is self-deception to imagine that we have ever individually “gone beyond racism” in our visceral responses to the instants of daily life that erupt before us, or that we will never have a sudden emotion, thought or fear that is completely above the muck of primordial racist reaction. It is intellectual pride, and false, to assume we can consciously will ourselves to transcend the psychological reactions of our paleo-mammalian brains.”

    This means that we’re incapable of learning anything. When I was a child I was a racist – just like most of the other white Africans I was growing up with. I also used to believe that my Christmas presents every year were dropped off by an old guy riding through the sky in a magic sleigh.

    At some point I learnt that the old guy and his magic sleigh were a myth, and I’d been tricked. I also eventually learnt about the myth of racism. To claim, as you appear to, that I never actually learnt about the myth of racism and am still a racist at heart is to also claim that I still secretly believe my presents come from an old guy riding around in the sky.

    I can assure you, Mr Garcia, I don’t. We are all capable of learning that things we once sincerely believed were in fact complete rubbish.

    2. You close your piece with the words: “And so are fools serenaded into the abbatoir.”

    I think its sad that there are so many ‘enlightened’ people who sneer at the unenlightened ones. For the most part it is all but impossible for people to be anything but unenlightened. To use your analogy, they have about as much chance of escaping their fate as livestock. In other words, using the word “fools” is a little unnecessary – as though they had some sort of choice in the matter. Mostly they are helpless victims and “innocents” would be a better word. Our mission is to enlighten these people, Mr Garcia, not sneer at them.

  6. John Andrews said on March 12th, 2010 at 2:58am #

    P.S.

    Don’t forget George Orwell’s immortal truth:

    “If there is hope, it lies with the proles.”

  7. Danny Ray said on March 12th, 2010 at 5:47am #

    Thank you, I have always enjoyed the writings those individuals who insist there are hidden meanings behind everything, and I especially love the writings of people who claim to understand what someone else is thinking when they say or write something. What people should always remember is that Moby Dick was a story about a dude hunting a whale. They should forget what their university sociology professor said, there is no hidden meaning, and it was just a damn good story. Even Sigmund Freud said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

    What Reagan said and meant was that the government has never made anything any better for anyone. Only thru the work and sacrifice of ordinary people will this world improve. The government (no matter who is in charge) is a self-perpetuating entity. Government is like kudzu (for those not from the American south forgive the analogy) it will grow and grow until it smothers its host and it will look good to fools all the time.

    This site is crowded with people who will calmly discuss the hidden meaning in anything. Moreover, it always amazes me that the hidden meaning always jibes with the writer’s agenda.

    Danny

  8. Max Shields said on March 12th, 2010 at 6:48am #

    John Andrews it appears that those who use the term “racist” or “racism” do so with no particular regard for its meaning (to the point of creating its own “myth” as you put it).

    Forthrightly, racism is an ideology of demonization and dehumanization of a group of people making them eligible to be the victims of atrocities with impunity (since they are less than “we”). This is the only definition of racism that makes any sense to me. It has little to do with color except color can be easily used to segregate the victim. It is most pronounced in the way Westerners conquered various parts of the world and the indigenous people who lived in those parts. So forms of colonization, and now neo-colonialism are inherent in racism and the legacy of colonialism continues to breed this kind of dehumanization. Inherent in colonization (and slavery) is a socioeconomics. In other words, people don’t conquer others for nothing, but for resources, land, water, minerals – to control these, to conquer these through ownership and privatization.

    Israel does it to the Palestinians and wherever else they can reach a greedy hand.

    Certainly every war and conflict, direct or through proxy that the US has been involved in at least since WWII (and almost all wars before) was waged through the auspices of racism.

    Racism does exist but I fail to see it as something white people inhabit just because they are white. It is a state of mind and white people are no more racists by nature than Africans are inferior by nature. Racism is all about power and conquest. It is a means to that end. It is used conveniently to divide and rule.

    The boogeyman of racism must be shown for what it is. To use it as a reversal of intent is totally counterproductive.

  9. bozh said on March 12th, 2010 at 8:41am #

    Racism does exist; however, never in isolation from miseducation; i.e.,lying.
    And lying by our ‘leadership’; by word an deed.
    Looking dwn on people- also known as discrimination- is also lying. The words nobles, nobility, queen are loaded with false values by our dear leaders.
    The word government also has false symbolic value. One cld go on and on and won’t find one important symbol that had not been usurped by dear leaders.

    And yet kids in US here these symbols and evaluate them as any sane child wld: in the right way. As per intent of our dear leaders.
    What child wld be against defense, God Bless America, Our fathers of the declaration of independence, sacred US laws/constitution, our brave soldiers, democarcy, freedoms, christian values, our ideals-culture.

    So, the task appears not only to spread education but also to show how-why children are miseducated. tnx

  10. Max Shields said on March 12th, 2010 at 8:44am #

    “education” may be an enabler or corrector, but it is not the cause of racism.

  11. bozh said on March 12th, 2010 at 8:59am #

    Danny,
    We have already -or s’m of us have- said that the meanings are in people and not in the symbols they use. The word defense, defending US interests, God Bless America evokes in me entirely different feelings-thoughts or meanings, if u will than in most USans.

    Such symbolisn means different things to different americans; however, to one% of americans these words mean, guess, s’mthing entirely different.
    But by their deeds only can we arrive at a conclusion what the onepercent means by whatever it says.

    Another good princpile to keep in mind that we cannot ever tell ALL even ab an apple, let alone the onepercent [or less or more] who rule america.
    That doesn’t mean that one shld sit and muse only ab it; one shld also try to acquire the same weapons they have and prepare people in cuba, china, venezuella for the worst scenario. tnx

  12. bozh said on March 12th, 2010 at 9:11am #

    One caveat ab symbolic values of words. I venture to aver that at one time words alway had its unchanging values. Probably for millennia!
    In short, a word matched the deed. When a hunter wld say, I saw just moments ago deer by our lake, every listener evaluated w.o. moment of hesitation as true.

    Or living in small groups, people wld say, We have each other. That’s our strength and wealth. We will all eat; have shelter; stay together in whatever times and share what we have. Everybody evaluated that as true. There was no wars on nerves as now!

    Well all this had been destroyed by just a few individuals. One cld not imagine in those days of caring-sharing worst societies than what we have in some lands. tnx

  13. bozh said on March 12th, 2010 at 9:24am #

    I aver that miseducation or lying, if u will, is main cause for racism and its twin sister, discrimination.
    But then lying, to me, is the only cause for all ills that befall us on interpersonal and interethnic or int’l levels.
    We are not evil, but lying or miseducation, take ur pick, is the greatest evil that befell us and not satan-god duopoly; duopoly self being a lie. tnx

  14. kalidas said on March 12th, 2010 at 9:50am #

    Danny, too bad Melville isn’t around so you could explain his own work to him.
    You know, bring him around, so to speak…

    “When Brahma, or the God of Gods, resolved to recreate the world after one of its periodical dissolusions, he gave birth to Vishnu, to preside over the work: but the Vedas, or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to have been indispensable to Vishnu before beginning the creation…were lying at the bottom of the waters.”
    —————————————————————–
    Melville describes the whale as a manifestation (avatar) of the Hindu deity Vishnu, whose mythology he recounts, the Matsya Avatara.

    Please, whatever you do, stay away away from Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.”

  15. Danny Ray said on March 12th, 2010 at 1:56pm #

    Ah Kalidas, this is a new one on me, I have heard that Moby was socialism, was mans desire to return to nature, man’s desire to conquer nature and many others, hell I once had a feminist argue that Melville was a woman and Ahab’s pursuit of Moby was everywoman’s quest for the big “O” but I have never heard of him as Vishnu. Your take on it makes it completely rational for me now. Again, you can read anything you want to, into anything you read. The Jews read the Old Testament and say that God has made them the chosen people, while I read it and I am now sure that Gods chosen people are Americans. And I am sure that you believe that neither of us is right. My point is that unless an author says in an interview on nightline or Chris Mathews that he meant Moby to symbolize Vishnu you are just speculating on what he meant.
    And as for Good old Walt. Well he was making a political point wasn’t he? Or am I reading things into it.

  16. Danny Ray said on March 12th, 2010 at 2:13pm #

    By the By kalidas, If you are a Scholar of the Indian Gods I just finished a great book which might interest you. It’s called Indo European Origins which devotes several chapters to the relationship and similarities between the Avestan holy books from Iran and the Sanscrit Vedas as well as their relationship to the tantric texts in Tocharian

  17. Hue Longer said on March 12th, 2010 at 3:14pm #

    Danny,

    Sigmund Freud has that quote attributed to him but consider why he would say it if he did…HE was the one smoking the thing, not some lesser who would obviously be craving male genitalia. It’s a terrible quote

  18. kalidas said on March 12th, 2010 at 4:59pm #

    Say what?

    Moby-Dick/Chapter 55

    “Now, by all odds, the most ancient extant portrait anyways purporting to be the whale’s, is to be found in the famous cavern-pagoda of Elephants, in India. The Brahmins maintain that in the almost endless sculptures of that immemorial pagoda, all the trades and pursuits, every conceivable avocation of man, were prefigured ages before any of them actually came into being. No wonder then, that in some sort our noble profession of whaling should have been there shadowed forth. The Hindoo whale referred to, occurs in a separate department of the wall, depicting the incarnation of Vishnu in the form of leviathan, learnedly known as the Matse Avatar…”

    In addition to this reference to the portrait of the Hindu leviathan at Elephanta, Melville mentions the context in which Vishnu incarnates himself as a fish and relates him to the whaleman’s fraternity:

    “That wondrous oriental story is now to be rehearsed from the Sashras which gives us the dread Vishnoo, one of the three persons in the godhead of the Hindoos; gives us this divine Vishnoo himself for our Lord: – Vishnoo, who, by the first of his ten earthly incarnations, has forever set apart and sanctified the whale. When Brahma, or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved to recreate the world after one of its periodical dissolutions, he gave birth to Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the Vedas, or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to have been indispensable to Vishnoo before beginning the creation, and which therefore must have contained something in the shape of practical hints to young architects, these Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnu became incarnate in a whale, and sounding down in him to the utter-most depths, rescued the sacred volumes. Was not this Vishnoo a whaleman, then? Even as a man who rides a horse called a horseman?”

  19. Danny Ray said on March 12th, 2010 at 5:57pm #

    OK, you got me. I have to admit that I did not know that was in there. ( I hate the book myself) However, I still believe that the only Melville wrote the book was to tell a good story and make a buck.

    Hue, The quote is directly attributable to Freud, I have an idea that it was a case of do as I say and not as I do.

    I have to earn my money now, you guys have a great weekend there.

  20. kalidas said on March 12th, 2010 at 6:25pm #

    Ten-four, Danny.

  21. Hue Longer said on March 12th, 2010 at 10:55pm #

    heheh,

    Apologies to all for straying out.

    Danny, I agree with your last point on it and that is what makes it useless. I know it doesn’t have much to do with anything here other than saying that if you want to make the point that some things are only as deep as they appear to be, it’s a shit quote to appeal with. Funny is that I’ve heard it used the last year heaps more than ever before and wonder where the recent popularity came from.

  22. kalidas said on March 13th, 2010 at 8:42am #

    Ten-four, Hue.

    Now about that lame ass Aryan migration nonsense..