Tarzan The Invincible Pt. 9: by Edgar Rice Burroughs

A Review

Themes And Variations

The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs

#14, Tarzan The Invincible

by

R.E. Prindle

Part 9: Politics

The Entertainer

 

The Big Bwana

 

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

–L.P. Hartley- The Go Between

I would like to take a moment to organize the content and direction of the Tarzan oeuvre within the context of Tarzan The Invincible and Tarzan Triumphant.

It is close onto a century now since Edgar Rice Burroughs burst onto the international literary scene.  He was not literarily well regarded by the intelligentsia.  In the language of the time he wrote adventure novels.  They were thought of as sub-literary.  In our times after literature has evolved from Burroughs’ time into its various genres that didn’t exist as such back then he would more properly be designated as a fantasy or sci-fi writer.

Even though very great minds wrote ‘adventure’ stories their efforts  are usually classified as sub-literary, relegated to the teen section.  There has certainly never been a more profound writer than H. Rider Haggard nor is his literary style inferior in any way to the pretensions of literary fiction.  Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs all had a great deal to offer.  If it is necessary to say so their work has remained popular while most literary heavyweights of the past are unknown and unread in non-specialist circles today.

Edgar Rice Burroughs is not usually accorded the dignity of being ranked with even the above adventure writers.  It pains me to say it but I think the literary consensus is that Burroughs is a semi-literate lightweight trash writer with no other value than ‘entertainment’ or a diversion for men and women who haven’t quite grown up yet.   I receive sniggers and raised eyebrows whenever I am forced to admit I write what I hope are scholarly essays on Edgar Rice Burroughs.  I have to scramble to find any scrap that will give me a little dignity.  But that’s not the way I see it myself.  The way I see it is that there are two groups of people who do take Burroughs seriously.  The small group of which I am a member that sees something of value lying like a huge diamond in the tall grass and a much larger group of Left-Liberals who quite correctly see Burroughs as a threat to everything they wish to believe.

Burroughs’ publishing career has not been well researched or examined.  The research I have done leads me to believe that ERB was exploited while his career was sabotaged by McClurg’s from the start.  Although MClurg’s seem to have had no intent to promote his work from the beginning they nevertheless tied him up with a contract that went on forever.  Compare it with MGM’s contract twenty years later.

Ten years after ERB’s death with the firm of McClurg’s on the edge of bankruptcy ERB, Inc. had to buy out the contract.  This is all so contradictory it boggles the mind.   Rather than attempting to maximize sales and therefore profits McClurg’s took the opposite approach of minimizing sales while reducing profits both for themselves and ERB to the lowest possible level.  If it hadn’t been for the movies Burroughs’ benefits from his efforts would have been minimal, a fraction of what they should have been.

From 1914 to 1919 politics do not seem to have been involved; there is some other reason for McClurg’s behavior.  Then from 1919 to 1924 ERB’s relationship to the Liberal Coalition took form.  His Under The Red Flag of 1919 let the Reds know where he stood politically.  Also in 1919 he was felt out by the American Jewish Committee for his stance on Semitism.  He failed this test by taking an insubordinate stance.  So from 1919 to 1924 he seems to have been under attack from the Left.  He remained defiant through his Marcia Of The Doorstep with its very reasonable criticism of Semitism but then he seems to have been ovewhelmed by economic pressures that were exacerbated by his own poor decisions.

While McClurg’s should have been supportive of their, or what should have been their walking gold mine, they strangely continued to get in his way.

Burroughs wanted his reissues to be sold at a dollar but G&D and McClurg’s adamantly insisted on 50 cents which gave ERB a very small return.  Why McClurg’s should have resisted higher prices that would have doubled their own income must remain a mystery.  A dollar doesn’t seem unreasonable to me but there seems to have been the intent to restrict Burroughs’ income as far as possible.

By the late twenties the Liberal Coalition was also actively interfering in Burroughs’ career.  There seems to have been a blacklist against making Tarzan movies from 1922 to 1928.  As Hollywood was controlled by the Coalition it was possible to restrict Burroughs’ income from movies to zero.

The blacklist was broken in 1927 when Joseph Kennedy’s FBO Studios made a Tarzan film.  ERB also began searching for another publishing arrangement.  Not finding anything satisfactory he took the last ditch recourse of self-publishing.  He established the Burroughs imprint.  As this act was taken just as the stock market crash took place the move was fraught with dangers.

Now freed from publishing restraints does it seem like a coincidence that the first title under the Burroughs imprint was Tarzan The Invincible?  Or, with its success it was followed by Tarzan Triumphant?  Perhaps taking vengeance for 1919′s snub of Under The Red Flag, Tarzan The Invincible is a full scale attack on the Communism in general and Uncle Joe Stalin in particular.

Perhaps also responding to 1924′s rejection of Marcia Of The Doorstep the succeeding novel, Tarzan Triumphant parodies the Jewish religion while making some not so subtle comments about big noses and receding chins.  Either book would be difficult for the Liberal Coalition to misunderstand.

While Burroughs would publicly proclaim that he undertook self-publication because he was too greedy for high royalties, certainly tongue in cheek,  privately he complained that McClurg’s refused to promote his books, turning them over immediately to reissue houses depriving him of his just royalties.  I’m sure the industry understood the irony of his first reason while the second is true.

Tarzan The Invincible is both a defense and a counterattack.  Burroughs himself said that defensive wars could never be won.  One must take the offensive.   With Invincible he was doing just that in what was in fact a literary and cultural war.

The power arrayed against him was terrifying.  The Reds could prevent the publication of his books through regular channels.  I believe they did.  ERB publicly said he took up self-publication in the relentless pursuit of the dollar.  What else could he say?  One doesn’t go around saying people are out to get you.  That’s giving your enemies ammunition.

Ask, is it a coincidence that the first novel under the Burroughs imprint is a direct attack on Liberal Communism?  A work that almost certainly would not have been published by any mainstream publisher, including McClurg’s.    There isn’t a Freudian in the world who believes in coincidence.  I sure don’t.  Burroughs launched his publishing effort in 1930 the year after the depression began in 1929.  The guy was either crazy or knew something other publishers didn’t wish to acknowledge.

When he met his former publisher, Joe Bray, of McClurg’s afer the crash he sneeringly told Bray who was complaining about business that he was doing very well with the Burroughs imprint and he was.  In the height of the depression Burroughs’ books turned a profit.  That was a profit no publisher seemed to want.  McClurg’s certainly never exploited this literary gold mine.

Was it political?  Well, Burroughs’ first publishing venture certainly was.  And remember that Tarzan The Invicincible must have caused a reaction.  The Reds had to say among themselves omething like ‘Don’t worry we’ll get that bastard yet.’  It had to be, nor did his even more sneering Tarzan Triumphant smooth anything over.  Think about this for a moment; let it sink in, this is open warfare.  There must have been a retaliation.  What was it?  The Reds did not cease their campaign of vilification during his lifetime nor have they ceased to this very day nor will they cease until either the Reds or Tarzan is triumphant.

I have discussed Richard Slotkin’s  Gunfighter Nation several times previously.  Slotkin in his book tries to pin responsibility for the My Lai massacre in Viet Nam on Burroughs.  He uses nearly seven hundred pages of fine print to try to prove that My Lai was the inevitable result of Burroughs’ writing.  The guy’s got a job at a prestigious university too.

While one can discount the hysteria of Liberal academics heavily no one necessarily attacks someone they do not consider a threat.  So what Bibliophiles have to ask themselves is whether there is a basis for the Liberal reaction or not?

I think my analyses of Tarzan books so far shows that Burroughs had a much more serious political intent than is commonly thought.  Underneath the buck and wing, the old soft shoe of the entertainer is some very serious thought and reflection.  Also his means of expression itself is the very antithesis of Liberalism.

 

Joseph P. Kennedy

Burroughs’ writing does reflect the sea change in world history noted by such academic analysts as Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard.  Whether ERB ever read these thinkers or not there is no conflict between their conclusions and his own.  ERB is of the same mindset so on that basis Slotkin is correct.  None of the three writers is eiher wrong or evil it’s just that Liberals think any opinion but their own is inherently evil in intent and ought to be censored.  I say censor the censors.

Liberalism is a religious reaction to the Scientific Consciousness.  Their core constituent, Judaism’s sole purpose is to defeat Science and reimpose the religious yoke of absolute conformity to its religious ideal.  As I’ve noted, American Liberalism which evolved from the quasi-Hebrew sect of Puritanism is in complete accord.  Combined of fundamentalist Christians, who pursue an Old Testament program not much different from the Liberal agenda and the insurgent Moslem fundamentalists, the challenge to Science and all that Burroughs represented is formidable.

The determined effort to plow the concept of Evolution under is a supreme threat to the whole Scientific Consciousness.  Of course, the Liberals talk peace, while as the Old Testament proclaims, peace, peace, everyone talks peace but there is no peace.  There is no peace anywhere on earth and there never will be.

Burroughs realized that war was inevitable.  He decried the disarmement movement and applauded preparedness.  In Triumphant he makes the wry comment that the Chicago underworld gunner, Danny Patrick, and his fellow criminals believed in pareparedness, always having a gun with them.

Burroughs was brought into a world of conflict, nor so far has the world disappointed his expectations.  As he says the only good defense is a terrific offense.  Defensive wars cannot be won.  I believe he has been proven right there too.  Whether you’re looking at John Carter, Tarzan or any of his protagonists you will see that they never barricade themselves.  They are always on the offensive, nor do they hesitate to kill as part of that offense.  My god, Tarzan ripped a man’s head off in Ant Men.  His Beyond The Farthest Star posits a world of never-ending war.  Prefigures the Cold War in its way.  Any concept of ‘peace’ is merely a temporary cessation of hostilities; war by other means.  The Liberal, Slotkin, may lament such a reality but being a man of ‘peace’ making endless  appeasements and concessions to belligerents can end only in disaster to oneself.  There aren’t any Americas left to bail civilization out; that possiblility ended with WWII.

I think it fair to say that in today’s war situation versus the Moslem and Mexican invasions ERB would take the aggressive position of throwing them out.  As the Shona state explicitly, and believe me the Mexicans and Moslems are no different from them, if you need to hear it from an African there are those who dominate and those who are dominated, which is another way of saying perpetual conflict.  Either Americans will dominate Mexicans and Moslems or they will be subservient to them.  Need anyone go further than to look at the condition of both Matabele and European in Shonaland?  It is a given that Burroughs would rather dominate as Tarzan does at the end of Invincible.  If you’ve got to fight you might as well win.

Let us never forget that Burroughs participated in the opening of the frontier and he saw its closing.  He lived through the two most devastating wars in history.  One must fight or die was the lesson he learned.   Tarzan still lives.

And then we must deal with the persistent charge of racism brought against ERB.  One finds it difficult to understand what Liberals mean by the term ‘racism.’  There is nothing more inherent in human nature than pride in one’s own kind.  In that sense all peoples are racist.  What then?  Racism is the natural state of affairs.  Certainly Liberal heroes like Robert Mugabe and the Shona are as racist as could possibly be, yet, he and they are Liberal heroes.  There must be something else going on.

Liberals themselves are responsible for passing racial laws that would have staggered the imagination of Adolf Hitler.  Someone who they say they despise.  Whereas Hitler called his laws what they were, Liberals are more adept at disguising their intent, still they appropriately call their laws ‘hate’ laws which is exactly what they are.  The unspoken assumption behind them is that ‘White’ males ‘hate’ everyone who is neither White nor male, excluding homosexuals, and that they therefore have to be socially isolated and denied.

The apparent belief is that only White males are capable of ‘hating’ while the rest of the world is a loving brother and sisterhood.  Of course such a notion leaves the Moslem attack on the Twin Towers unexplainable as well as the Shona extermination of Black brothers like the Matabele.

Hey fellas, it’s the exception, even multiple exception that proves the rule, isn’t it?

I have no doubt that ERB would have been opposed to such ridiculous racial laws no matter what language was used to disguise them.  He does seem to have been aware of the dangers of the evolutionary collision of the human species.  ERB was an evolutionist.  His novels explore evolutionary possiblities in enormous variety and detail.  While much of his speculations and jokes seem ridiculous in the light of current knowledge, at the time of composition most if not all of the speculations would have appeared to be not that far fetched, even possible.

At the least Burroughs was on the side of Science at that time when the controversy really raged, while even today over fifty percent of Americans reject evolution in favor of religious explanations, that’s one hundred fifty years after Darwin, while the Moslem invasion of the world is rapidly spreading the slime of superstition over scientific knowledge.  As I understand it, it has progressed so far that I could be put in jail in France, Germany or Austria for blaspheming the prophet and Allah by referring to their atavistic religion as ‘the slime of superstition.’

Within just a very few years since 9/11 an intolerant superstition like Moslemsism has overturned the scientific attitude of the Enlightenment.  May Georges Chirac burn in hell forever and a day.  If President Obama doesn’t  back off, him too.  Don’t any of these guys listen to what people are saying about them?

As I have noted, by the second decade of the twentieth century more sensitive minds perceived the sea change in the relationship of the various human species.  Among these, in fiction, were Sax Rohmer with his Fu Manchu stories and Edgar Rice Burroughs.  Prominent in non-fiction were Madison Grant with his Passing Of The Great Race and Lothrop Stoddard ‘s Rising Tide Of Color.

At the risk of repeating myself, I flatter myself that at least some Bibliophiles have been reading my stuff for the last few years, let me place a quote  from Darwin here that clearly explains what happens when similar species compete for the same territory on the same economic basis.  Darwin:  On The Origin Of Species, Chap. III, Para. Struggle For Existence- Struggle for life most severe between individuals and varieties of the same species:

As species of the same genus have usually, but by no means invariably, some similarity in habits and constitution and always in structure, the struggle will generally be more severe between species of the same genus, when they come into competition  with each other, than between species of distinct genera.  We see this in the recent extension over parts of the United States of one species of swallow having caused the decrease of another species.  The recent increase of the missal thrush in parts of Scotland has caused the decrease of the song-thrush.  How frequently we hear of one species of rat taking the place of another species under the most different climates!  In Russia the small Asiatic cockroach has everywhere driven before it itx great congenor.  One species of Charlock will supplant another, and so in other cases.  We can dimly see why the competition should be most severe between allied forms, which fill nearly the same place in the economy of nature; but probably in no one case could we precisely say why one species has been victorious over another in the great battle of life.

As we are certain that Burroughs read the Origin Of Species we can be sure that he read the above passage.  If it struck him as forcibly as it strikes me then we share the same basic outlook on life and the passage shaped his way of looking at the intra-genus conflict between Homo Sapiens species.

As most agree that Homo Sapiens has an African history of 150K to 200K years, most assume, and this is only an assumption, that the First Born of Homo Sapiens were black because the indigenes of Africa today are black.  This may or may not be true, we have no way of knowing, but let us assume it is.  There are no people in Africa today who can absolutely trace their descent unbroken from the Last Hominid Predecessor or the first specimen of Homo Sapiens.  No one knows what the individual looked like or what his mental constitution was compared to the various African races of today.

It therefore follows that over that course of a very long history peoples have been exterminated to make way for others innumerable times.  One wave of rats, one wave of cockroaches after another have succeeded for a moment only to be replaced by another in due time.  This is how evolution and nature work.  Homo Sapiens is not outside either history or nature and it is foolish to act as though it were.  One must understand the natural process and adjust one’s actions to it.

To use the Shona example.  The Shona are not indigenous to the soil.  At one time they must have exterminated and displaced a predecessor people in what they now consider ‘their’ territory.  Beginning about 1830 the Ndebele Zulu as an incoming wave of new people began to exterminate and displace them.  There is no difference between this Ndebele invasion of Shonaland and the Moslem and Mexican invasion of the United States.  Nature is red in tooth and claw.  What can one say?

Had the Matabele, to use the Ndebele’s other name, not been interrupted by another wave of incoming people, the Europeans, (color and race have no real bearing on this issue of Nature and evolution) the Zulus, (the Matabele were Zulus) would have completed the process and today the Shona would be at best a memory.  But the succeeding wave of Europeans did come crowding after the Matabele.  So far Darwin’s thesis is correct.  One species of rat drives out another.  Had the Europeans behaved normally they would have exterminated their predecessors and driven them before them.

But then evolution throws in a clinker.  The Europeans were evolutionarily more advanced than the Blacks.  While the fact that the evolution of the human species is continuing is clear from the visual physical evidence,  scientific research has proven it beyond any quibble.  So, even though those at the turn of the century lacked the evidence to prove their case they were right.  The most obvious evolution is taking place in the brain and it is not taking place in all human species.  Only one species is evolving while the others are now sterile.  Hard thing to accept but it’s true.  Thus Europeans had developed consciences that prevented them from doing what Nature commanded them to do.  Instead they set themselves up as a parasite class believing they could control the Blacks without special intermixture forever.

As Burroughs would have noted this put them on the defensive and no defense outlasts a good offense as the Shona have proven.  Thus the Shona having been given a breathing space reorganized, regained the initiative and won the dominant position.  They are now doing the natural thing exterminating or driving out both the Ndebele Zulu and the Europeans.  If you won’t fight or can’t, you lose everything.

So, you have the Darwinian struggle for existence presented to you in plain terms in a human context that cannot be misunderstood.  No rats or cockroaches as necessary examples.  One must be intolerant of other species.  One must be a ‘bigot’ as the Shona are or go under.

Now, not having the will and perhaps no longer having the power to do as Nature commands Europeans attempted to retreat, to withdraw within their own territories.  As anyone knows they all come out at the first sign of weakness.  One would have to be stupid or utopian not to realize that.  As a sonsequence Europe and America are being invaded by the other human species in the Darwinian sense.  I mean, folks, they call evolution science.  Science means knowing.  Anyone who does not act on certain knowledge is foolish or, perhaps, too religious.

However in the first two decades of the twentieth century the Liberal ideology was formed by the weakest and lamest members of Western civilization.  Not understanding actual differences between the human species, even denying them on religious grounds, they used conscience as a weapon to first emasculate themselves, and I mean this in the literal sense, and then they shamed those who knew better into silence.

Among those silenced were Grant, Stoddard and Burroughs.  Although all these men were initially very influential telling Americans the nature of evolution and its consequences their reputations were dismantled.  By the beginning of WWII Grant and Stoddard were regarded as mere ‘racist’ cranks.

It is time to debunk the debunkers.  The wheel has turned.  Bunk is bunk and shouldn’t be tolerated by anyone.

Burroughs who hadn’t left himself quite so open was provoked into acts of defiance so that sanctions could be applied against him as much as had been done to Henry Ford.  Ford is another whose reputation should be rehabilitated much as Khruschev rehabilitated the reputations of various Communists after the death of Stalin.  The tool preferred by the Liberal Coalition to discredit someone was the charge of  ‘anti-Semitism’, a religious charge be it noted.

The most potent weapon in the Liberal religious armament is the term ‘anti-Semite.’  It is used liberally usually combined with Fascist to defame and control an opponent.  Oddly enough they couldn ‘t make it stick on Burroughs.  Even Slotkin in Gunfighter Nation only hints that ERB might have anti-Semitic tendencies.

I know it is unpleasant to discuss the Semitic issue but I think the time has come to discuss the issue head on especially as Burroughs was and is involved to a much more serious degree than might be apparent at first blush.  The problem of Asia, from whence the Semites come, and Europe has roots in prehistory.  Indeed it is a tale of two species.  This is one of those eternal conflicts that will not be settled until one side annihilates the other much as the Shona are doing in Zimbabwe to their competitors.

In ancient days both the European Greeks and the Mediterranean Egyptians were in a constant conflict with what the Egyptians referred to as ‘vile Asiatics’, the Greeks as ‘barbarians.’  The Asiatics were vile not on the basis of race but because of the differing view of life of the two species.  As regards the Egyptians and the Semites one or the other had to be exterminated.  If you know anything of Egyptian history you will know that few true Egyptians still survive.  The Semites have exterminated the true Egyptians.

Thus the related species of HSII, the Egyptians and HSIII, the Europeans found the Semitic species unassimilable.  We are back to Darwin’s competing species of rats and cockroaches.  In the religious terms in which the problem is usually stated one says the animosity is racial or in other words, moral;  in scientific terms one says that it is genetic or special.  In other words, the problem is much deeper than mere surface appearances.  It extends to the genetic development of the brain.  The Semite cannot understand as any other human species understands and vice versa.

Thus the current problem in the Sudan between Negroes and Semites which is genetic or biological can only be resolved by the extermination or expulsion of the other.  The whole course of this new African conflict can be projected historically and scientifically.  It may be delayed but it cannot be stopped.  Compare it with the Shona in Zimbabwe.  There is no question as to what course the conflict will take.

Why Liberals choose to make an issue of Darfur while they ignore the South Sudan and Zimbabwe and South Africa where genocide is also going on is known only to themselves.  It is absolutely necessary to analyze the matter in scientific rather than emotional or religious terms.  These are not matters of race but species.  The mental capabilities of the Negro, the Semite and the European are different and irreconcilable.  An unpleasant fact, perhaps, but true.

The conflict between Europe and Asia or the Semites and Indo-Europeans began according to legend with the Semitic abduction of the European woman Io from Argos.  The history of the Mediterranean in ancient times was the perpetual warfare between Europeans and Asiatics or Semites.  At one time the Semites seemed to be besting Europeans and then turn about.  For the long Hellenic and Roman period the Europeans seemed to have won.  But, and this is a big but, they failed to exterminate or drive the Semites out.  A very bad mistake.

Two things happened.  The Jewish Semites began a peaceful infiltration into Europe which came to a head in the long Jewish Wars that lasted from 66 AD to 135 AD.  The Jewish Semites were militarily defeated in their homeland but came to spiritually dominate Europeans through the Judaeo-Catholic religion.

None of this struggle went unobserved by the Semitic peoples of the Arabian penenisula.  In the seventh century the Arab or Ishamelite, to use the Jewish term,  branch of the Semitic peoples led by Moslem ideology which had its base in Jewish ideology overran North Africa, large parts of the Eastern Mediterranean into the steppes of Asia and over the Hindu Kush into India.  More or less following the path of Alexander.  The Indo-European Persians, now known as Iranians, were Islamized or Semitized which they remain today.  They were stultified hence their ridiculous position today.

The southerly Egyptians, the native Copts, are on the verge of extinction or what the modern world fondly describes as genocide.  There are few surviving true Egyptians today.

Thus the Hellenic-Roman hegemony was reversed.

The Semitic Arab incursion into Europe which was a continuation of the multi-thousand year conflict between Europeans and Semites was defeated by Charles the Hammer at Tours in the heart of Europe.   Over the next nearly thousand years the Moslems were expelled from Western Europe but they advanced in Eastern Europe.

From the expulsion of the Moors from Spain in 1492 the southern Med if not the Med itself was controlled by the Barbary pirates.  During that period Europeans supinely submitted to a slave trade that greatly resembled that of sub-Saharan Africa.  Even as Negroes were being transported to the Americas countless Europeans were captured on European soil, transported to Africa and enslaved.  So, the Africans have no cause to complain of Europeans.  Some people whine some people don’t.

No one European State was strong enough or determined enough to clear the seas of the Moslems while they were unable to concert a united attack.  The piracy and enslavement continued until France annexed Algeria in 1830.  Rightfully so.

In Darwinian terms it is quite clear that the struggle was one of the replacement of one population by another.  Thus when France conquered Algeria it behove them to either exterminate or drive out the existing population replacing it with Europeans.  They ought to have relentlessly warred on every North African people until North Africa was once again European.

The attempt to coexist was a defensive war that could only end in defeat.  The defeat was adjudicated by General De Gaulle in the nineteen sixties.  The French stupidly and erroneously thought the war was over, but in reality the momentum shifted once again to the Semites.

As noted by Lothrop Stoddard the Wahabi Moslems went onto the offensive.  No longer able to comptete militarily with Europeans they resorted to guerilla warfare, something the West now chooses to call terrorism, combined with an infiltration of Europe using their reproductive capabilities as a weapon.  The situation now is a replica of the 3000 BC infiltration of Sumer.  Hence the balance of power of the age old war between the Semites of Asia and Europeans has once again shifted toward the Asiatics.

As the Libyan, Moamar Qadaffi gloated in May 2006 there are fifty million Moslems in Europe.  Europeans have the option of fighting or submitting.  He knows whereof he speaks.  As the war will now be conducted on European soil with the certain loss of the entire cultural superstructure of the last two thousand years there seems little chance of any European resistance.  Notre Dame will be renamed and become a mosque.

If there is resistance then Burroughs’ prophecy of a flattened Europe turned Black over the centuries is a distinct, nay, certain probability.  In addition to their submission to the Wahabi Arabs, Europeans seem incapable of resisting the Black Moselm invasion from sub-Saharan Africa.  Thus once Blacks and Moslems have the strength they will undoubtedly follow the ancient plan of killing the men and keeping the women.  Need I point to Haiti after the slave rebellion as an example?  Within three or four generations both Arabs and Europeans will be absorbed into Black Africa.

Any discussion of the problem is now impossible in Europe as the blackest censorship has been imposed on dissent.  Astonishing that the enlightenment could disappear just like that, isn’t it?  Anyone who dissents from the Semitic program is liable to imporisonment, heavy fines or both.  The term Semite includes both the Jewish and Arab branches.

Once the Moslem are powerful enough to direct the European military it will mean the end of Israel as that State will be completely encircled by Moslem powers with irresistable might and control of all land, sea, air and satellite communications.

With European technological war materiel at their disposal the Moslems will be able to isolate the United States by depriving it of oil or with the huge and growing population in the US sabotage any war effort if threatened.  Let’s have a round of applause for the brilliant leadership of Chirac, Blair, Bush and Obama not to mention the morons of the US Senate.

Burroughs foresaw the results of the West’s waffling before the Communists, the Moslems and perhaps the Africans but he was prevented from examining the problems too openly for fear of bringing the Liberal Coalition with its charges of anti-Semitism down on his head.  Both he and Henry Ford were having a tough fight for survival.  W.R. Hearst.

Burroughs had already called attention to himself by questioning a survey sent him by the American Jewish Committee in 1919.  It seems apparent the survey drew his attention to Jewish matters which he had ignored up till that time.  This resulted in the character of Bluber in Tarzan And The Golden Lion as well as several characters in 1924′s Marcia Of The Doorstep.  As the AJC would have considered these characterizations ‘anti-Semitic’ the publication of the book was prohibited.  Censored as it were.

Probably as a result of questioning the AJC survey he was put under surveillance.  While a number of movies had been made from his books, in 1921 movie making from his novels ceased reducing his income potential drastically at a very critical time in his finances.  For whatever reason there was a hiatus in the production of Tarzan films that lasted until 1928.  It is only fair to assume that Tarzan had not lost his box office appeal which is the usual Hollywood cover for blacklisting.  One also imagines that Burroughs would have leapt at any movie money.  Indeed, in 1922 the Stern Bros. and Louis Jacobs, a trio of Jewish movie makers, tied up the rights to Jungle Tales Of Tarzan and Jewels of Opar for $40,000.  This was a very decent sum to spend yet the movie makers made no effort make the movies, they were content to tie up the titles.  Whether Burroughs was being disciplined for being ‘anti-Semitic’ or not can’t be determined for certain at this time.

 

Richard Slotkin

Hollywood was notorious for being a Jewish industry.  W.R. Hearst was one of the few goys making movies.  D.W. Griffith was being increasingly marginalized.  In the interim then, the noted ‘anti-Semite’ Joseph P. Kennedy, the father of the future president John F. Kennedy, formed or bought FBO Studios.  The story of this multi-cultural struggle for dominance has never been adequately researched for obvious reasons, but what with the Ford conflict with the Semitic Jewish culture flaring in the foreground it is not unlikely that there was a great deal of maneuvering in the background.  It will be noted that when RKO was formed which incorporated FBO Studios the R for Radio came from RCA and KO for Keith Orpheum were retained while FBO was deleted.  The R and KO were Jewish concerns while FBO had been a great goyish disrupter.

Nevertheless, as Burroughs was blacklisted by Hollywood which the Hollywood historian Neal Gabler describes as a Jewish empire, it is noteworthy that an ‘anti-Semite’ broke the blacklist making Tarzan movies again.  It would have been the equivalent of Dalton Trumbo being allowed to script movies under his own name again in the 1960s.

The blacklist broken, the Stern Bros. and Jacobs then decided in 1928 to exercise their rights to the two Tarzan novels to release Tarzan The Tiger and Tarzan The Mighty.  Calling Tarzan a tiger may have been a slam at Burroughs who erroneously introduced tigers into Africa in the magazine version of Tarzan Of The Apes.

The silent era of movies over, MGM produced the first talkie of Tarzan in 1932.  Watch the dates.

Now, in both Tarzan The Invincible and Tarzan Triumphant Burroughs takes undisguised hits at Communism, pointing fingers and naming names; in Triumphant he continues his open attack on Communism and covertly ridicules the Jews in his portrayal of Midians with their enormous noses and receding chins.  Both attributes are well known caricatures of Jews.  Was this a gratuitous insult or was he responding to insults to himself?

If he had been given courage by the presence of Joseph Kennedy and FBO Studios then he might have relaxed his vigilance a little.  However his open and blatant attack would not have been unresented by Judaeo-Communists.  While Hollywood had always been run by Jews, by 1930 Communists had also made much more serious inroads than is usually admitted.  In other words, ERB’s well being in this multi-cultural war zone depended on his sworn enemies.  As both a goy and counter-revolutionary ERB was an odd man out.  It could not possibly be any other way.

There can be no question that he would have to be gotten for what could only be seen as egregious insults to both Communists and Jews. In fact, the two were nearly one.  The question then was how best to get Burroughs short of outright assassination.  The blacklist had already been broken by Kennedy but possible a movie could be made to make ERB’s great creation ridiculous.  Destroy him in that way, you see.

Thanks to technological marvels like DVDs it is now possible to study old movies at will.  I have a sets of most of the films.  I have viewed Tarzan Of The Apes a number of times.

Bearing in mind that Burroughs was in a struggle with both Communists and Semites as exemplified in 1930′s Tarzan The Invincible and 1931′s Tarzan Triumphant while being surreptitiously listed as an anti-Semite by the American Jewish Committee, I think it worthwhile to speculate on the intent of Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg’s productions.

Having watched the movie a number of times while bearing  books Invincible and Triumphant in mind I have come to the conclusion that the movie’s ulterior motive was an attempt to ridicule the Big Bwana into oblivion.  We all know that ridicule is a most effective weapon, especially when it can’t be answered.  It was undoubtedly thought Tarzan could be destroyed in this manner.

MGM did not negotiate to obtain rights to any particular story but, and this is important, they bought the right to use the characters as they thought fit.  Thus as the movie poster picture in Bibliophile David Fury’s book Kings Of The Jungle on p.63 published by McFarland, it is stated that the movie is ‘based on the characters created by Edgar Rice Burroughs.’  In other words, this is not the Tarzan of Invincible and Triumphant.  Oh no, no.  This is Tarzan The Defeated, Tarzan The Buffoon.

The vision is no longer Tarzan Of The Apes but Tarzan, The Ape Man.  A subtle but important shift in emphasis.  Tarzan is no longer a man raised among apes he is a man who is an ape.  The fabulous brain of Tarzan which allowed him to master reading and writing with the aid of only a picture book, that allowed him to learn new languages instantly has now been replaced by an inarticulate moron who does five minutes of  ’me Tarzan, you Jane.’

This was free love in the jungle between a hunk and a babe.  Apparently it slipped by unnoticed at the time until it was picked up thirty years later by an astute librarian.  Tarzan and Jane are no longer married in the movies, Jane just began cohabiting with Tarzan because he was such a handsome hunk.  Fortunately she, he, or both were infertile.  Thus Tarzan was subtly defamed, his universality removed.  His audience constricted by that much.

Having slipped this bit past the censors, as incredible as it may seem, in the next movie, Tarzan And His Mate, not wife but mate, you know, a live in,  MGM included the famous nude swimming scene that did not get past the censors.

Both these items would have had the effect of defaming Tarzan and constricting his audience.  A certain type of viewer would be offended by these items and refuse to see the movies while another type would gratified by such items and drawn to the movies but lower the quality of the audience moving Tarzan toward porn.  Thus by degrees Tarzan movies would gain the reputation as porn flicks.  Porn is porn even if it is Tarzan so you aren’t going to let your kids eat popcorn in front of dirty movies nor are legitimate first run theatres going to show them.  At least, not then.

Thus MGM was well on their way to making Tarzan porn before the censors forced a change in plan.  There was nothing Burroughs could have done about this as he, or rather his office manager signed away all his rights to his character.

The MGM poster then portrays Tarzan as a criminal freak:

Mothered by an ape- He knew only the law of the jungle- to seize what he wanted.

The ‘to seize’ is in attention grabbing italics.

Mothered by an ape is ambiguous and meant to be repulsive.  It could mean that Tarzan was fathered by a human on an ape or it could be so obscure as to be meaningless.  If you were familiar with the books you could probably guess what was intended but if you weren’t who knows what it could mean to you.    Remember the first volume, Tarzan Of The Apes, was no longer in print even in 1930 so the original story couldn’t even be bought.  The later volumes don’t recapitulate his birth and raising so there may have been actually few who knew the whole story.  We are led to believe that the MGM Tarzan is completely lacking in morality.  If he wants something he just steals it.  Not the Tarzan I would want to emulate.

The director was W.S. Van Dyke who had just had a major success with his Trader Horn, another African picture.  That one had been phenomenally successful and Tarzan is billed as “Another Miracle Picture directed by W.S. Van Dyke, Creator Of “Trader Horn.”  Van Dyke was certainly not the creator of Trader Horn as the movie was adapted from the book by Trader horn, there was such a man, thus in a way Tarzan, The Ape Man is subordinated to W.S. Van Dyke and Trader Horn.

What is called ‘the adaptation’ is done by someone called Cyril Hume.  As the dialogue was written by Ivor Novello I presume that both the storyline and the alterations to Tarzan’s character can possibly be attributed to Hume.

There is little on Hume on the internet but a New York Times review that was cribbed from All Movie Guide.  It says ‘…During the 1920s, Hume proved a worthy rival of Fitzgerald with such lost generation novels as Wife Of The Centaur and Cruel Fellowship.’  An interesting couple of titles in relation to this Tarzan movie.  The review then goes on to say ‘…During the 1930s , he was the principal writer of MGM’s “Tarzan ” films, bringing prestige to these escapist exercises by treating them with dignity and respect…’  That’s one man’s opinion anyway.

As we all know the attributed movie writer frequently has very little to do with the finished script so we will assume that Hume’s script went through many revisions by many minds with perhaps different agendas than his.  One wonders why Ivor Novello, who was a well known playwright of the time was broght in to do dialogue.  Apart from the Tarzan yell, with which Novello is given no connection, that seems to be the major portion of the dialogue along with the famous ‘Tarzan-Jane’ sequence,  there seems to be little dialog that an amateur couldn’t have written.

The net result is a movie that seriously demeans Tarzan as conceived and portrayed over fifteen novels.  In order for their ridicule to be successful MGM did have to produce a movie that someone would go see.  They were apparently successful beyond their wildest hopes or fears as the movie was described as a ‘surprise’ hit and an enormous grosser.   Now MGM was stuck with the character.

If it was a surprise hit then one can discount the publicity that the movie cost a million dollars to produce.  There are no well-known stars in the movie, while much of it is footage left over from Trader Horn which had already been amortized with the rest being shot on lot.  If the movie cost MGM a quarter  million I would still be astonished.

In their attempt to ridicule Tarzan they were too clever by half.  The character of Tarzan may not have that of the books but audiences still found it satisfying, especially the yell.

Those of us who have read the books have always been uneasy with those MGM movies although Johnny Weismuller was perfectly cast in the role of the Ape Man.

So, while the NYT reviewer may believe Cyril Hume brought ‘prestige to these escapist exercises by treating them with dignity and respect’ there are dissenting opinions other than mine.

Another interpretation was that of the first movie Tarzan, Elmo Lincoln, who commented to ERB “the house seemed to think it was a comedy.  Why do they portray Tarzan without dignity?…with the right treatment and portrayal, Tarzan could a romantic, thrilling character, and still have the sympathy of his audience…I don’t like to see him treated as a clown…”

Elmo Lincoln and I both see the MGM version in the same light, while I have to question the interpretation of the NYTimes writer.  I think Lincoln was right, the movie was a comedic effort meant to defame the persona of ERB’s great creation and thus destroy Edgar Rice Burroughs.  After all ERB, Inc.’s  publishing arm was dependent on sales of Tarzan’s.

By 1932 the troublesome ERB had learned which side his bread was buttered on so he publicly endorsed the MGM movies, after all this was big money, bigger than any other souces of income combined.  It may be said then that just as Henry Ford recanted and apologized for offending the Jewish Cultural entity in the ongoing culture wars so Burroughs bent the knee to Liberal suzerainty.

As ERBzine reports, privately Burroughs had other thoughts:

Daughter Joan Burroughs revealed:  “Dad found it hard to reconcile himself to the movie versions of the Tarzan stories and never did understand the movie Tarzan.  He wanted Tarzan to speak like an educated Englishman instead of grunting.  One time we saw a movie together and after it was over, although the audience seemed enthusiastic, my father remained in his seat and kept shaking his head sadly.”

So Burroughs and Lincoln both resented the screen adaptation based on the Tarzan ERB had created.

There was nothing Burroughs could do about it.  His rights had been signed away by his agent Ralph Rothmund.  Rothmund must have been aware of the tension between Burroughs, Communists and Jews, yet he essentially gave the courthouse away.  He placed Burroughs in the hands of his enemies.  He gave Tarzan to MGM stripping Burroughs of his only weapon and asset.  Why?  Did he contact MGM or did MGM contact him?  Why did he negotiate behind Burroughs’ back presenting him with a fait accompli? Why not tell his employer,  ‘I’ve got this deal worked out with MGM.  Do you want to take it?’

Presented instead with a check, Our Man seduced by vain desires went out and bought five Packard automobiles.  Ah, ERB…

Did he repent of this deal?  I believe so.  Trapped by the contract his only way of retaliation was a futile one through his novels.

Louis B. Mayer

Can it be a coincidence that Tarzan And The Lion Man written over February to May of 1933, published by ERB, Inc. in book form on September 1, 1934 (Septimus Favonius BB#55 p. 34) ridiculed MGM, Irving Thalberg and Trader Horn.  The second MGM movie Tarzan And His Mate was released on April 16, 1934.  Bear these two dates in mind, the movie was released five months before the book leaving time for a revision of the book text.

Certainly severely wounded by the MGM adaptation of Tarzan Burroughs had been beaten.  He had lost the culture war between himself, the Communists and the Jews.  Having lost control of his character in the vital field of movies his only recourse was to lampoon MGM in a book which he did in Tarzan And The Lion Man.  Strangely his illustrator St. John chose this book to experiment with an unrepresentative cover that was believed to have killed sales.  Thus this magnficent achievement was undersold.

Lion Man recounts W.S. Van Dyke’s movie making in Africa, telling it in a ridiculing manner.  MGM’s version of Tarzan is portrayed by a character named Stanley Obroski, perhaps a takeoff on Johnny Weismuller, who is a pale imitation of the real Tarzan.  Burroughs makes a careful comparison showing what a joke the MGM Tarzan was.  In a fit of pique he kills the fake Lion Man off.

One of the more interesting characters is Balza- The Golden Girl.  After escaping from the Valley of Diamonds she joins the movie company where she cavorts about in the nude.  This scene has baffled me but if one remembers that in Tarzan And His Mate Maureen O’ Sullivan is stripped by Tarzan followed by the nude swimming scene, the novel makes sense.  ERB had seen the movie in April of 1934 possibly an earlier studio screening and incorporated the changes in his text for the 9/1/34 release date.

So his retort against MGM while ineffective made for what must rank as one of his very best efforts.

Just as an aside note that while this struggle was going on in Hollywood Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January of 1933; Franklin Delano Roosevelt became President of the United States in March of ’33.

One of FDR’s first deeds was to recogtnize the USSR regime of Joseph Stalin.  In late 1933 a chubby little ex-draper’s assistant acted as a go-between for Stalin and Roosevelt.  Having first visited Stalin,  H.G. Wells carried his messages to Roosevelt.  Thus under the very eyes of the world some very important communications were passed back and forth.  Nineteen thirty-three was also the year the former draper’s assistant wrote his Shape Of Things To Come.

These things can’t be stated with absolute certainty but the character of God– the formerly handsome Englishman in Lion Man, is certainly based on the pompous little H.G. Wells.

Thus while I at first objected to Slotkin’s accusations against ERB, barring the My Lai stuff, I think I am beginning to see ERB’s relation to the cultural wars between Communists, Jews, Liberals and Conservatives.  there is more going on here than meets the eye.

But let us look at some of the religous aspects of this interesting situation.  The religious war between Semitism and the Astrological Religion as represented by Tarzan Of The Apes.

 

Weissmuller As Tarzan

 

 

 

Pt. II: H.G. Wells, Sigmund Freud, Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Development Of Contemporary Sexual Attitudes

 

H.G. Wells, Sigmund Freud, Edgar Rice Burroughs

And The Development Of Contemporary Sexual Attitudes

by

R.E. Prindle

Edgar Rice Burroughs And His Tiger

     To put our three protagonists into perspective:  Sigmund Freud The eldest of the three was born in 1856, Wells in 1866 and Burroughs, the youngest in 1875.  All three were heavily influenced by Charles Darwin and the various theories of Evolution.  While today Darwin is touted as the sole source of evolution he was in fact one of many voices as the theory of evolution developed.  Thus all three spent their formative years in the latter half of the nineteenth century.  Freud was 44 as the century turned in 1900, Wells 34 and Burroughs 25 each neatly spaced 10 years from his predecessor.

     Wells was the first to make the leap into prominence followed by Freud and then Burroughs.  All three men were desperate to find fame and fortune.  Freud even advtertised he’d sell his soul to do it.

     Wells came from close to the bottom of the social ladder.  His parents eked out a living as shopkeepers without commercial abilities on the edge of London.  Wells’ father was an able cricket player who gained his self-esteem from that sport.  The parents split up.  His mother went into domestic service.  She placed young Wells as a Draper’s assistant- a clerk in a dry goods shop.  As one might well believe Wells rebelled at this dead end destiny in life.  Possessing a good brain Wells began a series of educational maneuvers that led to his being a student of T.H. Huxley, an apostle of  Evolution.  A science career seemed to be opening for Wells but he was led away by his sexual needs.  He married a cousin with whom he was a boarder in her mother’s house only to discover her Victorian notions of male-female sexual relations differed widely from his.  He divorced her taking up with a fellow student.  She was an able financial manager so he put her in charge and began chasing skirts.  It didn’t seem to bother his wife Catharine who he renamed Jane.  After a series of hairy but educational employments Wells began to find success in journalism and writing.  With his story The Time Machine he broke into the bigtime giving Jane some real work to do.   Quickly following The Time Machine up with his succession of sci-fi novels by 1900 he was assured of a lifetime income.

    

Bertie Wells

     It was well because his work after 1906 while prolific was unlucrative except for 1922′s Outline Of History. There was a winner.  The Outline was his second great break setting him up for the rest of his life along with the science fiction.  Ah, those Seven Science Fiction Novels.  And, of course, his close to amazing collection of short stories.  There was another gold mine.  Jane raked in the cash and Bertie, for that was how he wished to be called, spent it.

     He associated himself with the socialist Fabian Society of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with their ‘advanced’ sexual notions.   Why the old Hetaerist notion of promiscuity is considered ‘advanced’ is beyond me.  At the same time Bertie claimed to be a Feminist.  The women’s Matriarchal movement was very active from mid-century on.  His Feminism, however, was concerned only with eliminating chastity thereby allowing any man access to any woman at any time, anywhere.  Purely Hetaeric, although Wells wouldn’t have understood his ancient roots in that manner.

     It was when Wells turned to his sex novels that he put his reputation in jeopardy.  After his intial spate of sci-fi his reputation slid, the only bright spot being The Outline Of History.  While his later novels, tend toward the tedious and require a certain determination to read through they are almost always redeemed by the social context.  I like Wells and don’t mind the stuff too much but I can’t recommend it very strongly.  It’s a matter of taste, either you like Wells or you don’t.

     Wells major themes are outlined in the last of the Seven Sci-Fi Novels- In The Days Of The Comet- when he shades into the sex novel.  In my estimation this is a very fine book as utopian novels go.  After Tono-Bungay and When the Sleeper Wakes it may be my favorite.  The turn of the century was a hey day of the utopian novel with the dystopian novel being introduced.  If you like the genre many fine ones were written:  News From Nowhere by William Morris.  I came to Morris late in life but if you like the mystical utopian or quasi-utopian novel Morris has a lot to recommend himself including several utopian forays.  I’m sure he influenced both Wells and Burroughs; Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward is another fine example of the period.  They’re all bushwa but fun to read.  Utopian novels are usually a projection of the author’s own needs and desires into which all humanity is to conform.  Usually by some miracle all humanity becomes reconciled to living in universal harmony with no unseemly disturbances of the temper.  Museums and lecture halls flourish while dance halls and crime atrophy.  Culture is much more elevated.  To the most casual observor such an utopia is impossible without an alteration of the human brain.  Only one utopianist I have read has addressed that problem and that one is H.G., our Bertie.

     In The Days Of The Comet was published in 1906 at the time that Halley’s Comet was due to make its scheduled seventy-five year fly-by in 1910.  It was projected to pass very close to the earth which it did unlike its 1985 appearance when you had to know where to look for it.   Indeed, the comet came with trails of glory so bright you could read newsprint by it at night.

     Thus Wells uses the comet as his agent to change the physical structure of the human brain.  Wells fails to mention any change to the brains of the lesser animals and insects.  Perhaps the lion really did lie down with the lamb.  Before the comet, or the Big Change as the passing was referred to, people’s brains were as ours are now; after the Change they all resembled that of H.G.  I am in sympathy with Wells; I fancy that one morning I will sally forth, flick my finger tips a couple times, say abracadabra and the people of the world will be tranformed into clones of myself.  What’s holding me back is that I don’t know which will be the Big Morning and I don’t wish to be seen as an eccentric or worse who failed to take his medicine by repeatedly trying and failing.  You know, out there flicking my finger tips into the empty air.

      But, Wells had it worked out.  The comet came trailing this tail of green gas.  As the comet passed the gas enveloped the earth much like a magnetar, I suppose, knocking people out for several hours while the gas did its work.  When England came to the world was changed and everyone thought like Wells.  Sort of the same thing that was thought would happen when Obama was elected.  The Magic Negro would save us all.

     Actually the Comet reflected a change in Wells own circumstances.  In 1898 when Wells published The War Of The Worlds he was balanced between hope and despair.  He was close to financial independence but not quite there.  Thus in WOW the tone is  between hope and despair.   The world is invaded by Martians who destroy everything in their path, themselves being destroyed by a virus taken in through their beastly habit of drinking human blood.  One neglected detail is that the projectiles they arrived in trailed some green clouds.  The last projectile had a larger one so that perhaps Wells was going to develop the notion but then couldn’t work it in.  He did have the Martians project a black gas that killed people though.

     By 1906 his success was assured, he was shooting his pistol off around London having several sexual affairs so his outlook was brighter and, hence, that of the planet, so the novel describes the transition from the evil old world to the brave new one  In other words, Wells had passed from poverty to affluence.

      Sex is the issue here.

     Before the Comet Willie, the hero, was courting his childhood sweetheart Nettie from whom he expected to be her sole sexual companion.  In the weird old world sex was exclusive.  They had committed themselves to each other as children which remained a claim in Willie’s mind.

     However Willie is a poor boy with no prospects.  Nettie is courted by the rich guy’s son, Verrall with whom she runs off.  Willie treks 16 miles to see her only to find she has abandoned her parents’ home in company with Verrall.  Well, Willie’s not going to endure such treatment from Nettie or take that from Verrall so he steals some money, buys a revolver and a train ticket to track them down and shoot them dead.  You see, in the days before The Big Change that was the way things were done.

     In the meantime the Comet is getting closer, C-hour is near, and war breaks out between England and Germany, this is eight years before 1914 so Bertie exhibits his prescience.    The details are well handled so we have the increasing color of the green cloud and the flash and boom of the big navel guns as the climax takes place by the seashore.  This was really nicely handled.

     Willie tracks the couple down to a Bohemian enclave on the East Anglian coast.  Nettie and Verrall had gotten married so it seems rather odd that they searched out a Bohemian enclave.   So, as the battle rages and the green cloud descends on the earth Willie is chasing the couple down the beach firing his pistol wildly.  This is the moment of the Big Change.  Everybody gets gassed for a few hours then arise, born again, in a new heaven and a new earth.  Utopia!

      The same device is used a few decades later in the great movie The Village Of The Damned.  A good device.  It won’t go stale.

      In the new world, new rules and reasonings apply.  Nettie no longer has to choose between Willie and Verrall.  She can have both…and more.

     As Willie comes to he hears groaning.  The groaning is coming from a prominent politician who was out bicycling at two in the morning when the green fog descended and  fell off his bike as he conked breaking his ankle.  Thus Willie makes a connection changing the direction of his life allowing him to become prominent in the establishment of this brave new world.  Thus he later meets Nettie and Verrall on equal terms.

     Nettie informs Verrall that she wants a menage a trois with Willie to which, in this best of all impossible worlds, Verrall compliantly agrees.  Later Willie marries making the arrangment a menage a quatre.  Neato!  Was this all?  No…

     In the frame for the story it turns out that the story teller is Willie.  In the Frame Wells comes upon this white haired old dude, Willie,  writing this memoir.  He has pages clipped in fascicles of fifty that Willie allows the editor, H.G., to read.

      Finishing the last fascicle the author asks if Nettie had sexual relations with others.  The white haired dude replies somethng like this:  ‘Oh, heavens, yes.  Hundreds.  You don’t think a beautiful girl like Nettie wouldn’t attract numerous suitors do you?’

     So there you have it.  In the brave new world the woman of Wells’ dreams is a mere sex object who spends her life being pawed by, shall we say, all comers.  A Hetaerist’s dream.  This is Wells’ sexual program.  At this point he began to lose readers.  Too avant garde; you don’t want to get too far out in front of the pack.  In addition to the sexual proselytizing of his novels he carried his didacticism to extremes advancing educational theories for instance.  For over a hundred years we’ve been told our educational system is faulty.  New systems have succeeded new systems.   After over a century of tinkering are people better schooled?  No.  They’re worse.  There’s only one way to learn and that’s the drudgery of study.  Not every mind is prepared to do that, somebody’s going to be left behind.  Wells’ notions as everyone else’s is what they think they would have liked.  No study.  Lots of play.

     At any rate carrying all these utopian notions Wells passed through the horrific war years to have all his expectations disappointed.  Not surprisingly his mind broke and he went into a deep depression.   First he tried the God trip and when that failed he embraced the Communist Revolution in Russia.  He essentially became an agent of Moscow.  As a very prominent writer he was a desirable acquistion for the Revolution.  As a major theorist and propagandist he had an entree first to Lenin and then after 1924 when Lenin died, Stalin.

     In 1921 he interviewed Lenin and received his instructions.  the Soviets had a system of State prostitution.  These women were assigned as agents to service writers while spying on them for Moscow.  In 1921 he met Moura Budberg for whom he fell.  At that time she had been assigned to manage a consular agent, Bruce Lockhart, who along with the agency was in process of being expelled.  Wells became intensely jealous of Lockhart because of this connection badmouthing him from then on.  In any case Moura Budberg was assigned to Maxim Gorky then living in exile in Italy with whom she stayed until Gorky was enticed back to the USSR at which time she was reassigned to shepherd Wells.

     Now Wells became a Soviet literary hatchet man.  It was his job to interfere and discredit writers who refused to propagate the Party line.  Among these was Edgar Rice Burroughs who had proclaimed his anti-Communism with a tract or study titled Under The Red Flag of 1919.   Publishers refused the piece.  Wells anti-Burroughs campaign was so discreet that my discovery of it three or four years ago was the first mention of it.  I repeat the story here for those who have not read my earlier essays.

     In the first place all these writers read each other.  Kipling and Haggard for instance read each other as well as writers like Wells and Burroughs and vice versa.  They could pass disguised messages in their novels.  As Burroughs was the last of these writers to begin writing and that in US pulp magazines in 1912 that may never have reached Europe while his book titles only reached print in 1914 after the Great War began and were only the Tarzan titles until the end of the decade Wells may not have read Burroughs until 1918 or slightly after.  Nevertheless Burroughs influence shows in Wells’ 1923 effort Men Like Gods.  This book also ridicules Burroughs.

     Men Like Gods takes place in a parallel universe.  There is some resemblance to the Eloi of The Time Machine.  For the first time Wells’ characters are nearly nude.  This was the only time he ever did this so he was probably under the influence of Burroughs whose characters never wore clothes or only minimally.

     Burroughs apparently picked up the references or had them pointed out to him.  In any event in 1926 he wrote The Moon Maid in answer to Wells, The First Men In The Moon.  Wells’ book was pretty clumsycompared to that of Burroughs who demonstrated his imaginative superiority by running circles around Wells.  The second part of the story was a rewrite of Under The Red Flag that was a direct challenge to the Soviets.  By 1926 of course Stalin was directing the USSR.

     Wells then countered with an undisguised attack that portrayed Burroughs as insane.  This was Mr. Blettsworthy On Rampole Island.  Here Wells parodied a pulp magazine story not yet in book form, The Lad And The Lion, and the last third of The Land That Time Forgot.  Burroughs returned the fire with Tarzan At The Earth’s Core and Tarzan The Invincible that featured Stalin himself as a character.

Moura Budberg Young

     At about this time Moura Budberg was assigned to Wells as a concubine as Gorky had returned to the USSR.  This was to cause a falling out between Wells and Stalin while perhaps leading to Stalin’s assassination in 1953.

     Burroughs’ entire series of novels from Tarzan At The Earth’s Core to Tarzan And The Lion Man deals with Wells and the Reds.  The Communists attacked unrelentingly on several fronts probably robbing Burroughs blind in royalties while trying to squeeze off his sales.  His British publishers did just that.  Although it appears that they refused or were reluctant to keep his titles in print Alan Hodge and Robert Graves in their history of the twenties and thirties, The Long Weekend, twice refer to Burroughs’ great popularity, once in the twenties and once in the thirties.

     In Germany the Communists attacked ERB for his anti-German comments in books written during the war

Moura Budberg Old

years thereby destroying that lucrative market.  The Soviets never paid royalties anyway so there was no monetary effect from that market.  In the US Burroughs had troubles with his publishers McClurg’s and Grossett & Dunlap who seem quite hostile  to in the correspondence in the archives at ULouisville.  ERB left McClurg in the late twenties going through two more publishers before winning the battle by publishing under his own imprint. Thus by 1930′s Tarzan The Invincible, note the title, he seemed to have won the battle if not the war.

     However sound had come to the movies in 1927-28 which rearranged the playing field.  Rather than just being ‘flickers’ they were now more on a par with literature while being even more influential.  With sound the movie version of a story took pecedence over the book, heck, it took precedence over history.  Thus the movie version took precedence as the canon over the book, the latter became an adjunct that few read in comparison to those who saw and heard the movie.   As the movies paid in one lump sum what it might take years to dribble in as royalties authors were willing to give the devil a cut to have their novels produced.  Books could be issued in their thousands of titles a year but there were only a couple hundred movies released in a year.  The number of producers had been consolidated from many to a few after the shakeout of the twenties, hence combines like Metro, Goldwyn and Mayer, Radio-Keith-Orpheum- RKO- and the combine of Twentieth Century Pictures and William Fox.

     MGM was of course top dog by far.  There was no vacuum there but the Commies moved in anyway soon taking over de facto control.  When Burroughs published his own books, quite profitably, he had slipped the noose but only temporarily.  As a strategist he did poorly.  In 1931, because Burroughs didn’t ever bother to dread his contracts, MGM finessed his meal ticket, Tarzan, from him thereby making him financially dependent on them.  Even though they might have exploited the Tarzan character by making two or three movies a year and zillions of dollars they chose to make only six movies between 1931 and 1940 thereby keeping Burroughs on a short financial lease while depriving him of hundreds of thousands of dollars in income.  Remember that at the same time Roosevelt after 1933 drove the income tax rate as high as 90% so there was some difficulty forcing a grin in those trying times.

     This is a good story and I covered it in some detail in my ten part review of Tarzan And The Lion Man, expecially parts 6-10 to which I refer you if you’re interested.  Wells and Burroughs bickered back and forth although it appears that Burroughs lost heart after Tarzan And The Lion Man.  By that time he knew he had been had.  He did concede defeat in the issuance of a book version of  The Lad And The Lion in 1935; a notice to both Wells and Stalin.   The story was a short one so while leaving the old story as  a notice to Wells who had mocked him and the story in his Blettsworthy novel, Burroughs interpolated chapters with a story mocking the Communist Revolution in Russia.  Then he retired from the field.

     However he gives Wells a grand slam in the story of  ’God’ in the middle of Lion Man.  That is a great story within the story however I wasn’t clear on its relation to Wells at the time so I will give a modified version here.

     Now, Burroughs had a remarkable mind.  He was able to carry the story lines of hundreds of books he had read in his head retrieving details whenever they suited his needs.  He was always conscious of what he was doing but he wrote pastiches anyway.

     The story of Tarzan and God mocks Wells’ The Island Of Dr. Moreau.  Burroughs had already used Moreau in his 1913 novel The Monster Men plus he wrote around the theme repeatedly.  Moreau itself plays around with the Frankenstein theme which also figures prominently in Burroughs’ literary antecedents.

     Remember that Burroughs is able to combine numerous details of other books into one composite figure so that Wells is only one source for the character of ‘God’ in Lion Man.  For our purposes one may assume that when Tarzan talks to God (smirk) it is equivalent to Burroughs talking to Wells.  Gone is the transcendant confidence of Tarzan The Invincible and Tarzan Triumphant.  However the coup of the capture of Tarzan in 1931 when Burroughs signed away his rights to the movie representation of Tarzan to MGM had stripped Burroughs of all defences and he himself was now trapped in a cage at the mercy of MGM, Wells and Stalin.  During Tarzan’s movie history dating back to the late teens Burroughs had always complained, making a nuisance of himself because the studios weren’t following his stories closely.  Now, he had given MGM the right to create their own stories.  ERB was dissatisfied with the representation of Tarzan but the character was so good that even though MGM tried they couldn’t destroy it.

     Nevertheless they were in a position to substitute the movie Tarzan for the literary Tarzan in the public mind and they did.  For me and many others the discovery that there was a literary Tarzan came long after we had been viewing Tarzan movies.  We invariably found the literary Tarzan superior.  For now Tarzan/ERB was imprisoned in a cell.  The best ERB can do is to come up with a better Moreau story than Wells.

     So, ERB creates a mock London, England in the wilds of Africa with a replica of the court of Henry VIII peopled by mutated gorillas.  By 1930 when this story was written ERB was probably as well informed about evolution as anyone.  He had kept up his reading becoming as knowledgeable concerning genetics as any but researchers.  Thus while thirty years earlier Moreau had been clumsily experimenting with vivisection ‘God’ had used the lastest genetic techniques that ERB can devize to convert gorillas into a cross between apes and human beings.  The apes of God are human in all but appearance.  There are many jokes concealed in this episode, apes of God perhaps being one.  Wyndham Lewis used the term apes of God as a synonym for writers so he may be calling Wells as God and writer an ape.  ‘God’ himself who has exchanged ape genes with himself is now half ape.  See, a joke.  Whether Wells recognized his portrait isn’t known.

     Tarzan sets about to escape but as there is no escape from his real life situation ERB merely burns God’s castle down disrupting one supposes the USSR.  Perhaps gratifying to the imagination but futile for changing his situation.  No longer in control of his creation Burroughs creative powers begin to atrophy.

Uncle Joe As FDR Would Say

     Thus Stalin triumphed over his literary adversary.  Perhaps Stalin despised writers for he set out to humiliate Wells after the defeat of Burroughs.  As noted the State prostitute Moura Budberg had formerly serviced Maxim Gorky while after his return Budberg was assigned to Wells.  H.G. had fallen hard for Budberg apparently seriously in love with her.  Stalin called Wells to Moscow in 1936 when Gorky was on his last legs, about to die.  Budberg was also in Moscow but when Wells asked to see her she told him she was called out of town.  In a rather malicious ploy Stalin arranged for Wells to see Gorky and Budberg together as, of course, she wasn’t out of town.

     Wells was completely destroyed unable to penetrate Stalin’s duplicity, or at least believe it, at the time.  However when it finally sank in  he had no  more means to retaliate  than Burroughs so he wrote a book too- The Holy Terror.  In that book, the ruffian leader of the revolution, or Stalin in real life,  has lost the ability to lead the revolution and has to be discreetly removed.  A conspiracy is set afoot.  A doctor’s plot in which the leader is artfully removed by medical means.  I am unaware of how much influence Wells may have had to incite others to achieve his result.  At any rate the War intervened making it inexpedient to dispatch Stalin while Wells died in 1946 before he could reactivate the plan.

     It may be coincidence but Stalin discovered a doctor’s plot in the early fifties that he was able to foil.  However Khruschev and Beria and others poisoned Stalin at a dinner in 1953 thus removing this singularly successful but troublesome dictator.

     The turmoil of the thirties may have derailed Wells sexual program somewhat but sexual matters were still moving in his desired direction.  Sexual matters had been loosened a great deal but there were still miles to go.

Sex And The Psyche

 

     In Part III I will deal with the key mover in sexual matters, Sigmund Freud who was the second of the three to reach prominence.  Thus Burroughs the third to arrive on the scene and the last to leave will be saved for the last part.

 

 

A Review: Pt. 5 Tarzan The Invincible by Edgar Rice Burroughs

 

A Review

Themes And Variations

The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs

#14 Tarzan The Invincible

Part V of X

by

R.E. Prindle

First Published On The Ezine, ERBzine

The Man

Six White Men In Search Of An African Empire

     If one believes that Burroughs is merely on a rant against Communism in Tarzan The Invincible and Tarzan Triumphant then there is nothing more to say.  Still, it is remarkable that ERB specifically names Stalin as a persecutor of Tarzan in both books.  As Burroughs says he doesn’t mind fictionizing political and religious realities the question is , is he fictionizing a real life situation where Stalin, or the Communists are giving him a hard time?

     Seems really improbable doesn’t it?  People are used to thinking of Burroughs as a barely literate fantasy writer better ignored by the literati.  But more insignificant men than ERB have been the victims of hate campaigns.

Dr. Harvey Springer- The Cowboy Evangelist

      Who now, for instance, remembers Harvey Springer?  Harvey Springer?  Never heard of him?  I don’t wonder.  Oddly enough when I was in San Diego in 1957-58 Harvey Springer, who was some kind of evangelicalist, was going to appear at some church out where no sailor ever went.  He was kind of a cowboy evangelical from Denver.  His most dramatic stunt was placing one of size fourteens, he was a tall rangy man, on one chair and the other on another to harangue the crowd.

     I hadn’t heard of him, you know, nor had anyone I knew, but Harvey Springer was reputed to be an arch anti-Semite.  Could have been for all I knew, but I’m not going to take anyone’s word for it.  The point is the Jews sent all kinds of people into the streets to tell people not to go see Harvey.  I don’t how many times they must have heard- Who’s Harvey Springer?- in reply.  Rather than say he’s an anti-Semite, of which I had even less knowledge at the time never having heard the term, all that was necessary was to say the two words, church and evangelical to cool my ardor, if I had any, to find where he was speaking and go see him.

     In addition the AJC and ADL published books in which they denounced Harvey Springer as a very dangerous anti-Semite.   Now, if certain people would go to such extremes to persuade someone not to do something he had no intention of doing what would they do to defame someone with an international reputation?  The only one who didn’t realize the extent of ERB’s fame seems to have been ERB himself.  He was no self promoter, he thought it best to keep his head down.

     In that sense, judging from the unpublished Under The Red Flag and the published Moon Maid, Invincible and Triumphant Burroughs was actually a leading anti-Communist voice.  I mean, people read this stuff.  They read it in America , they read it in England, they read it in numerous translations and they read it in the Soviet Union.  Here’s the kicker, Stalin read it.  Not only that, Stalin was a movie buff.  And he requested Tarzan films (reported in a recent UK Telegraph story and the book of Simon Sebag Montefiori: Stalin:  The Court Of The Red Tsar.)

     History is not a mystery, it’s just schoolyard bullies bigger than life.

     We also know that Stalin ordered his scientists in the 1920s to attempt to cross an ape and a human to create a super warrior.  It’s clear to me that Stalin had read Beasts Of Tarzan.  The Man of Steel may have had a difficult time distinguishing between fact and fiction as many another.  Besides, remember eugenics was a hot topic of conversation in Red circles then as it is today.  Not knowing what we know now about genetics crossing an ape and human may not have seemed that far fetched.  It doesn’t to a lot of people now.  Heck, the Old Testament enjoins one to destroy the results of an animal-human union so the ancient Hebrews thought it was not only possible but a regular occurrence.

     There is very clear evidence that the Reds were conducting a campaign of vilification against Burroughs.  I’ve mentioned it before but the clearst evidence is H.G. Wells’ novel Mr. Blettsworthy On Rampole Island.

Bertie Wells

     May we take a moment to look more closely at Wells?  Don’t think I’m antagonistic toward Wells.  I dearly love Wells just as I do Burroughs.  I have a complete collection of Burroughs while I’m looking for the odd volume of the more obscure Wells.  I’m not boasting,  I’m just saying this in the way of credentials.  I’ve read all of Burroughs more than once and I’ve read all the Wells’ titles I have, many of them  more than once.  In point of fact I love all the literature from say, Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines to 1930 and perhaps an odd year or so beyond.  I love.  I mean, I love it.  I love Edgar Wallace who, if you can believe it, is claimed to have sold one out of four books sold in England during this period.  If you don’t know him  he was one of the co-writers of the movie King Kong and then he died.  All  this stuff of this period is wonderful.  Robert Hitchens, P.C. Wren.

     So, you know, it’s like this:  H.G. Wells was a Soviet literary hatchet man.

     The man had a wonderful career.  You know his most famous novels, The War Of The Worlds, First Men In The Moon, The Island Of Dr. Moreau, In The Days Of The Comet.  If you like Wells, and I do, those are the tip of the iceberg.  A few of his short stories and he wrote many  are as good as short stories get.

     He was always a socialist and perhaps a terrorist conspiritor, but he was a child of the nineteenth century until his mind broke at the end of the Great War.  At that time he lost faith, in god, transferring his faith to the Revolution, becoming a Soviet dupe.  His literary career may be divided into two halves, pre-God- The Invisible King and post-God.  That was one of his books.

     He was not taken seriously as a fiction writer after the war.  During the twenties and thirties he turned out an unending stream of novels that were ignored.  It’s not difficult to see why, but I find them a little more tolerable.  I like Wells.  His reputation and career were saved by his 1922 effort An Outline Of History.  It was a massive volume and it sold massively for twenty years or more while being hugely influential in literature.  Put him on easy street for the rest of his long life.  As much as any artist who is skilled at spending money can be on Easy Street.

     As a novelist however, he was pretty much a has been.  While none of his post-1920 novels take off he hits the spot with me.

     From 1920 on his soul belonged to the Revolution, which is to say the Socialist homeland, which is to say the Union Of Soviet Socialist Republics.  That means he was more loyal to Russia than he was to England.  In short, a traitor in intent if not in deed.  While no Liberal ever deals in realities hence are in constant denial, The Man of Steel, Josef Stalin, was his boss.  Wells naturally would have denied this.

     The Soviets had a pretty comprehensive system which once again is denied.  There were a number of State prostitutes who were assigned to the various important Red writers to service them as mistresses, while reporting back to the Kremlin.  This is, of course, denied by the Liberals.  I don’t understand living a life that has to be denied, where everything you do has to be represented as something else, but such duplicity is apparently congenial to the Liberal mind.  They must seek it.

   

Moura Budberg

   Wells was assigned a woman named Moura Budberg.  She must have known how to turn on the charm as she was able to make a number of men she was assigned to sincerely love her, including the British diplomat Bruce Lockhart, the Russian writer Maxim Gorky and H.G. Wells.  She wasn’t that good looking either.  All of these people led double, triple or quadruple lives.  They must have been really able to compartmentalize their minds.  Freud didn’t touch that type.

     After Wells’ visit to Lenin in 1921 he was signed on.  He began his career as literary hatchet man.  In his writing he portrayed recognizable people, sometimes under their real names, in negative or positive lights.  As a skilled writer, whether you like his later stuff or not, he was more than competent to do this.  It appears that he first targeted Burroughs in his 1923 novel Men Like Gods.  Among his science fiction novels this one should rank more highly than it does.  Burroughs’ 1926 Moon Maid reads like a reply to Wells.  Especially the first part of the trilogy where Burroughs dances imaginative rings around the First Men In The Moon.  From there Wells took up the challenge with Mr. Blettsworthy On Rampole Island of 1928 which unmistakably is a parody of Burroughs in which he portrays Burroughs as insane, but not a bad analysis.

     Burroughs responded possibly with At The Earth’s Core but definitely with Tarzan The Invincible.  At the same time one interprets Stalin’s interest in crossing apes with humans as being derived from Beasts Of Tarzan and other Tarzan novels there may have been more direct Soviet interest in ERB.  One notes that Tarzan The Invincible was the first title published under the Burroughs imprint.  I think it highly probable that his publishing was being interfered with by the Reds in addition to whatever other grievances against his publishers Burroughs may have had.

     One may say that Burroughs was too insignificant for Stalin to bother with, yet according to Simon Sebag Montefiori Stalin put out a contract on John Wayne because he was such an ardent anti-Communist.  Khruschev is said to have told Wayne that he concelled the contract after Stalin’s death.  Edgar Rice Burroughs was at least as significant in 1930 as Wayne in the 1940s and 50s.

     At any rate in 1930 Burroughs has Stalin and the Reds invading his dream world of Opar to steal his gold, i.e. put him out of the publishing business.  Invincible and Triumphant, notice the titles,  both deal with Stalin and the Soviets then the topic disappears from the oeuvre.  Was Burroughs given incentive to counter-attack the Reds?  I think there is enough evidence to warrant the opinion while time will tell even more.  Research is just beginning.

     It is signficant that Burroughs introduces the story in his own voice, not a framing device.  He may be simply talking to the reader or he may be addressing Wells and, dare I say say it, The Man Of Steel himself.  Perhaps a subtitle could be ‘The Big Bwana Meets The Man Of Steel.’  Now, it should also be remembered that this is the fourteenth novel of the series.  the first title had been written eighteen years earlier.  At that time the surprise of the character had knocked the socks off the reading public.  In 1930 Tarzan was in danger of becoming old hat.  Burroughs had to think up new and interesting devices to keep his readers coming back.  As with most series of this type the readership was limited.  Maximum sales could be predicted so that success meant not falling below a certain level of interest or letting interest diminish below unsupportable levels.  As his own publisher Burroughs was now taking all the risks financial as well as literary.  He had to turn out a successful book.

     I think he did a superb job.  Since the series continued to flourish his readers must have thought so too.  I do wish ERB, Inc. would release some sales figures though.

     For the premiss of his story Burroughs postulates that Stalin and the Soviets wish to instigate a new world war which will allow them to pick up the pieces establishing a complete European dictatorship.  Not at all farfetched.  Burroughs postulates that Mussolini and his Fascists are aiming at a European hegemony.  This is 1930 so Hitler and the Nazis are not on anyone’s radar as a threat to world peace except for a few fringe elements.  At the time Hitler and the NSDAP were in hand to hand combat with the Communists for control of Germany.  They would not assume power until three years hence.

     The Reds then wish to create an incident that would cause the Italians to attack France.  The indirect approach is usually more effective than the direct approach so they wish to create an incident in Africa where French colonial troops appear to invade Italian Somaliland.

     At that instant expendable confederates in Italy would reveal a bogus French plan to Mussolini.  It is assumed that Italy would then declare war on France and the holocaust would begin.  As we all know Italy did not declare war on France in 1930 so the plan must have misfired somewhere along the way.  Tarzan was the reason.  Burroughs gives these little known details that would have been lost to…well… if not history, remembrance.  So, uh, really ERB is providing a valuable service here.

     There may be two sides to every story, but usually one is on one side or the other.  We don’t have to be reminded ERB is not on the side of the Reds.  In fact, ERB is exposing their plans and weaknesses.  He displays a fairly profound understanding of the goals and workings of the Communists.  He is read up on the subject,  He has studied.  He is not shooting from the hip.  He knows whereof  he speaks.  If not an authority on the subject he is pretty darn close.

     ERB has his eyes on how ‘American’ manufacturers are relating to Moscow.  He has Zora Drinov analyze the situation this way, p. 12

     “But what do the puny resources of this single American (Wayne Colt) mean to us?”  demanded Zora.  “A mere nothing compared to what America is already pouring into Soviet Russia.  What is his treason compared with the treason of those others who are already doing more to hasten the day of world communism than the Third Internationale itself- it is nothing, not a drop in the bucket.’

     “What do you mean Zora?”  asked Miguel.

     “I mean the bankers, and manufacturers, and engineers of America, who are selling their own country and the world to us in the hope of adding more gold to their already bursting coffers.  One of their most pious and lauded citizens is building great factories for us in Russia, where we may turn out tractors and tanks; their manufacturers are vying with each other to furnish us with engines for countless thousands of airplanes; their engineers are selling us their brains and their skill to build a grreat modern manufacturing city, in which ammunitions and engines of war may be produced.  These are the traitors, these are the men who are hastening the day when Moscow shall dictate the policies of our world.”

     “…their government is a capitalistic government that is so opposed to our beliefs that it has never recognized our government; yet in their greed, these swine are selling out their own kind and their own country for a few more rotten dollars.”

     Sound anything like the US and China today?  That was a mouthful.  The first thing FDR did upon taking the reins of government was to recognize Soviet Russia.  Tell you anything about FDR?  That was a mouthful that should have eraned ERB the hatred of the Liberal Coalition.

     You can see why they wanted to stop his mouth.  Passages such as this are probably the reason Richard Slotkin and his crowd, John Taliaferro, group ERB with Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard.  A charge of racism is usually a cover for a multitude of offences that have nothing to do with race.  One is merely opposing the Liberal program.   If they were to say- the fellow opposes the Liberal program they would get no rise- they might even have to explain the Liberal program- so the charge of racism is used as a red herring.  One should always suspect such an accusation and disregard it.

     Liberals however, never answer such charges.  They merely deny them.  In 1953-54 they were even denying themselves as Communists or taking the Fifth, which is the euivalent of saying, yes I am, but I’m not going to admit it.

     The Revolution was only twelve years old in 1930.  The CPUSA had been briefly outlawed in the early twenties but ‘disinterested parties’  believing in the time honored notion of ‘free speech’  had the ban lifted.  Over in Russia their free speech loving comrades were filling cattle cars with dissenters destined for the Gulag or else they were murdered outright.  Today, of course, these freedom loving people are throwing dissenters in prison on the basis of trumped up laws.  The Program is moving right along isn’t it?

     Even William Z. Foster denied he was a Communist as he was running for President on the Communist ticket.  Today a tenured Law Professor at Harvard actually denies that AIPAC, which is a registered lobby group, exists.  They ought to throw such people into cells next to David Irving.  Denial of themselves is what Liberalism is all about.  You couldn’t find anyone to admit to being a Communist.  They all denied it.  The hypocrisy of Liberals throwing men as decent  or moreso than themselves into jail for denying the holocaust is mind boggling.  Well, it would be, if you didn’t already know what’s going on.

     So ERB would have been roundly denounced as a paranoid delusive for the above passage.

Henry Ford- Philanthropist

     Men like Armand Hammer, Bernard Baruch, essentially the whole Jewish government in exile here in the US were working furiously to make the Revolution a global reality.  They really had no idea of Hitler’s intentions at the time, yet they attempted assassination while through the German Communist Party they were waging street warfare against the National Socialists.  The word National is what they objected to not so much the man Hitler.  Burroughs mentions the Third International.  The Comintern- short for Communist International as it was known- was essentially a beta model for what is now multi-culturalism.  It was the Jewish cultural vision of the world.  Thus industrialists like Armand Hammer and Bernard Baruch using their Jewish identity as a shield from criticism, any criticism would be characterized as anti-Semitism, were directing huge sums of money into the development of Soviet Russia.

     In addition a well-meaning industrialist, Henry Ford, who would later be denounced as a Nazi, was doing the

Armand Hammer

same thing.  The mention of tractor factories refers to Henry Ford- the Jewish bete noir-  who was trying to relieve the Communist induced famine by selling or even giving tractors to the Russians to increase food production.  He was also building the factories for them.  I mean, you know, gratis; altruism run rampant.   The great industrial city probably refers to Stalingrad.

      Even Burroughs biographers Porges and Taliaferro disparage Burroughs for his rational stance against Communism.  Burroughs doesn’t stop his analysis with the multi-cultural contradiction within American society, p. 35:

      “The general plan, of course, is no secret to any of us here,”  said Zora, “and I shall betray no confidence in explaining it to you.  It is part of a larger plan to embroil the capitalistic powers in wars and revolutions to such an extent that they will be helpless to unite against us.”

     “Our emissaries have been laboring a long time toward the culmination of the revolution in India that will distract the attention and armed forces of Great Britain.  We are not succeeding so well in Mexico as we had planned, but there is still hope, while our prospects in the Philippines are very bright.   The conditions in China you well know.  She is absolutely helpless, and we have hope that with our assistance she will eventually constitute a real menace to Japan.  Italy is a very dangerous enemy, and it is largely for the purpose of embroiling her in war with France that we are here.”

     Once again you will note that there is no reference to a threat from Germany.  No one could have seen it but the Communists who were opposed not merely to Hitler but any Volkish attempt to govern.  The Volkish movement was inherently anti-Communist.  To be anti-Communist was equivalent to being anti-Semitic, so that Hitler was automatically an enemy to be destroyed.  When he and the Nazis assumed power in 1933 an automatic boycott of Germany and things German was instituted by the Jews.  One might say that WWII began in January of 1933 at the instance of the Jews.  The obvious conclusion is that if Hitler’s actions against the Jews were not self-defense, they were acts of war in which the first offensives had been begun by the Jews.  Needless to say any such opinion is and will be denied.  Any such discussion of such matters will be ridiculed and suppressed.  But there you have it.  At any rate ERB was not one of those far-sighted individuals who foresaw the rise of Hitler.  Italy turned out to be a not so dangerous enemy.

     In his story Italy was merely to be a dupe of  the Soviets.

     In order to present his analysis ERB had to be especially well informed.  What he read or where isn’t clear as there is nothing in the existing library that even deals with the Communists per se.  ERB does have a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf but that could only have been obtained after 1940 when the war was in progress.

     As the story opens then, the Reds are assembling their forces for the march on Italian Somaliland.

     Things aren’t to be quite so simple as the leader of the expedition, Peter Sveri, develops delusions of grandeur hoping to establish his own Empire in Africa with himself as Emperor.  On the one hand Communism breaks down on the rocks of the interests of the various cultures, while in seeking to establish himself in Africa Zveri is infringing on the domain of its current Emperor, Tarzan.

     Tarzan handily frustrates Zveri’s designs, while at the same time beating Stalin and the Reds, hence the title Tarzan The Invincible.  One imagines though that there may be something more behind it.  Originally titled Tarzan, Guardian Of Africa the change of title indicates something deeper.

     In order to finance his operations Zveri intends to loot the fabled treasure vaults of Opar of which, one assumes,  he has read about in The Return Of Tarzan, Jewels Of Opar and Tarzan And The Golden Lion.   This makes him somewhat a fan of the amanuensis of the Big Bwana.

      This is the fourth and last of Burroughs’ Opar stories.  In section six let’s review Opar and its significance to this story.

 

 

   

 

A Review: Part II The Myth Of The Twentieth Century by Alfred Rosenberg

 

A Review

Part II

The Myth Of The Twentiety Century

by

Alfred Rosenberg

Rosenberg, Alfred, The Myth Of The Twentieth Century, Noontide Press, 1982.

 

     It should be borne in mind that The Myth is subtitled:  An evaluation of the spiritual-intellectual confrontations of our age.  The book then is an attempt to objectively analyze the political situation in those terms.  While himself a Nazi this is not a Nazi tract while at the same time it is inevitable that Rosenberg ananlyze the situation from a Nordic or Aryan viewpoint.  If Nazi and Aryan are synonomous in your mind you should disassociate the terms.

     When Rosenberg says the conflict is one of differing values between Asiatics and Europeans it is necessary to know what he means as his basis of interpretation is accurate.  The conflict between Asia, which is to say the Middle East, began fifty-five hundred years ago on the plains of Mesopotamia, todays Iraq; and has slowly spread outward until today the Asiatics, or specifically, Semites, stand on the verge of worldwide victory.  Even though the Semites themselves are divided between Jews and Arabs, which is why the Jews support Arab Semites outside the Middle East, the Jewish segment is confident that they will be able to manage the Arab Moslems in the triumph.

     The major conflict then in Rosenberg’s mind was the prime conflict between Semitic values and Aryan values.  He considered the Roman Catholic Church as auxiliaries.  The Church may be said to be a third Semitic religion.

     The situation as Rosenberg perceived it, and he was a very perceptive man, was that the German people were surrounded on three sides by Semitic forces alien to Aryan ideals.

     He saw a Roman Catholic Semitic Church centered to the South of Germany that had also infiltrated and alienated a large part of his German people.

     To the East he saw the Semitized Soviet Empire looming as a threat.  He had no doubt, and sincerely believed that Communism was a Jewish political system managed according to Semitic ideology.

     Just as the behemoth to the East was controlled by Jews so with the ascension of Franklin D. Roosevelt was the behemoth of the West, the United States of America.  Of course, denial is the order of the day but denials are ridiculous in the face of facts.

     Just as Jews had managed the hyper inflation of German currency in 1923 so Jews had maneuvered the West into the Great Depression through their control and literal ownership of the Federal Reserve Banking System of the US.

     Through the manipulation of credit and currency in the years leading up to the Great Crash of 1929 the Fed, which is to say the Jews, created the speculative stock market bubble.  At the same time they created the unsound practice of holding companies  of holding companies.  Thus shares with no substance behind them collapsed entirely losing all value.  Between such failures as these and extended credit for margin speculation the stage was set, as in Germany, for the complete collapse of the US economic system.  This was no different than the real estate and credit bubble of today.

     While many many volumes on the crash have been written over the decades none of them would deal with the problem as it actually was for fear of being denounced as anti-Semites.

     You may be sure that Rosenberg, Hitler and the Nazi think tank understood the situation completely. The question is how the Nazi finance minister Hjalmar Schacht interrelates with his banking counterparts of the West.

     That the situation was created that ‘discredited’ the capitalist system, allowing a Judeo-Communist like FDR to assume the the reins of power you may be assured.  Roosevelt was a disciple of Woodrow Wilson.  Just as the Jews flooded into Washington  in 1913 managing Wilson’s presidency so in 1933 they returned to power with FDR.  You can see how urgent it was for Roosevelt to stay in office for as many terms as he lived.

     The situation of today is a replica of 1929-33 with the hope of putting Barry obama into the role of FDR.  Rosenberg and the Nazis predicted this scenario in the 1930s.  They also predicted the dissolution of the United States over racial problems.  This is bound to and must happen.

     In addition to the USSR and the USA the Jews were running France and directing England so that Rosenberg believed the Germans to be beleagured, which they were.

     The history of the entire period has been written by Liberals, Communists and Jews, hence you have been conditioned to see the issues soley from their point of view.

     If you were to view the times from a slightly different perspective a quite different picture would appear before your eyes as if by magic.

     It is true that the Nazis took a direct and brutal route to obtain their objectives.  They have been thoroughly castigated for this however they merely did what had already been done during and after the Great War in Russia and Hungary and what the Liberal/Jewish/Negro/Communist coalition is in process of doing today as regards the White species.  So in light of current deeds what makes the Nazis so evil?

     While we were all astonished in the fifties as the insanity of the Nazi attempt became real to us we should no less condemn the Liberal/Jewish/Negro/Communist coalition for their plan to exterminate the entire White species of a billion plus people.  This means you.

     I am sure that Rosenberg and Hitler are sitting up in Heaven looking down upon us with wry bemusement.

     So, this is the way in which Rosenberg perceived the racial aspect of the spiritual and intellectual confrontation of early twentieth century Europe.

     Rosenberg calls it the struggle for freedom rather than submission to a false god, which is to say Semitic intellectual belief systems.  He rightly says that the confrontation is between Asia and Europe going back fifty-five hundred years.  The Fascist States, that is to say Germany, Italy and Spain placed themselves in battle with the entire semiticized world.  The Semites themselves without military might did as the ancient Semite Cadmus did in ancient Boeotia of Greece when he incited the indigenous peoples into a ruinous civil war that allowed his Semitic invaders to take control.

     Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

Part III will follow in another post.

    

A Review: Part V The Mucker And Marcia Of The Doortstep by Edgar Rice Burroughs

 

The High Brow And The Low Brow

The Mucker And Marcia Of The Doorstep

Part V

Marcia Explicated

by

R.E. Prindle

 

     The contrast between The Mucker and Marcia Of The Doorstep can be seen as a response to two different challenges united by Burroughs’ personal psychological development.

     He took the whole of 1924 to write this story so it may have been a real struggle.  Unlike his other novels he doesn’t record a beginning and ending date in Porges so we have no accurate idea of how long it took him.  It is possible that he had taken so much time, felt the need for money so intensely, that he rushed the ending through to try to sell the story.  One the other hand he usually scamps his endings.

     An indication that Emma may have been an influence in the planning and organization of the story is that it concerns matters that were very familiar to her.  Just as she was a voice student as a girl, so Marcia.  As Emma had to give up the studies so does Marcia.

     The milieu of the stage would have been more familiar to Emma, although having gotten involved with the movies ERB might also have familiarized himself with the stage somewhat.  I would have to opt for more involvement from Emma though.  (For further thoughts on this read Part VI)

     Unlike the other novels which feel as though they were written from the top of the head, Marcia has indications of more careful plotting.  If that is true I don’t think ERB would have been capable of it so that would argue for more involvement by Emma once again.  This is also a fairly complex plot that differs from ERB’s usual style.

     Unless I’m mistaken the novel, even though unpublished, landed him in hot water with the AJC and ADL.  I’m sure the reason would have been a mystery to ERB.  If you’ve read Part II, Section II what I have to say will be clear, if you haven’t read the Parts I recommend it.

     According to the Religious Consciousness there is no freedom of speech concerning the specific religion.  The Religion will control who is speaking, what is said and how expression is to be allowed.  ERB was not a member of the Jewish religion and as he was speaking unacceptably he was perforce an anti-Semite as the religion he was discussing was Judaism.  Had he been discussing Liberalism he would have been pathologized as a crazy bigot.  As Judaism was part of the diversity composing the Coaliton, Liberals would have considered him a bigot anyway.  Bigot is the Liberal equivalent of anti-Semite.

     The character in question is the shyster Jewish lawyer, Max Heimer.  Max is an expecially well drawn character from the viewpoint of the Scientific Consciousness, which is to say, Max is accurately drawn.  Whether from life or not is not yet known.

     Max is the protagonist of the story.  That anything happens at all is because of him.  He is not an admirable character but on the other hand he is neither truly malicious or evil.  The only thing that matters to Max, and would especially offend  the sensibilities of the AJC and ADL, is the bucks.  Max would probably stoop to outright thieving but he is a blackmailer, a swindler and a cheat.  While what he does is criminal it is done in such a way as to escape detection.  Even if you know he’s guilty the chances are you could never get a conviction.

     But, he’s not really a bad guy at heart and by his lights he’s darn near a philathropist.

     Max is always on the qui vive.  One has the impression that he never lets an opportunity pass.  Thus, one night he came across a drunken gentleman on the street, John Hancock Chase II.  Chase II for some reason was totally incapacitated.  Heimer took him home sensing an opportunity.

     Max had been living with a woman, out of wedlock, named Mame Myerz.  Although Mame wasn’t at home Max conceived the notion to tell the married Chase II that he had had sexual relations with Mame which he did nine months later when he showed up to tell Chase II he was a proud papa.  Max would keep this a secret for a fee.  Unable to sustain the blackmail Chase II shoots himself ruining a perfectly good source of income for Max.  This is no skin off Max’s nose as he blithely goes about his and other people’s business for the next sixteen years.

     That fine old gentleman, John Hancock Chase I bears the loss of his son stoically.

     As it happened Della Maxwell bore her child and left it on the Sackett’s doorstep on 4/10/06.

     If Max is finely drawn, no less can be said about Marcus Aurelius Sackett and his wife Clara, the long suffering wife of the air headed Mark, who is especially finely depicted.  Just a few deft strokes but she is always in the background worrying over her man.  Either I’m projecting from knowledge or ERB is able to portray a large loving woman who accepts the foibles of her husband, tolerating him and perhaps even loving him for them.

     Both she and Mark are overjoyed at the child left on their step.  They are no less overjoyed when Della shows up next day to move in with them.  Della Maxwell is a well chosen name.  Max-bad, Max-well.

     Mark Sackett is ably portrayed as an actor of the old school who while he fumes at the modern trash of the stage is nevertheless the kind of trooper who doesn’t leave his fellows in the lurch.  At this time in New York City he is working for Abe Finkel.  Abe is obviously another Jew modeled on the producers Klaw and Erlanger.  This is at the time of the development of movies from 1905 to 1914 or so.

     In 1919 ERB moved to Hollywood where he would have been privy to all the stories of the origins of the studio owners who with few exception were Jewish.  Most were from New York while Carl Laemmle was from Chicago via Wisconsin.  They all had risen from mundane occupations to real wealth.  Samuel Goldwyn had been a glove salesman.  Harry Cohn had been a street car conductor, Louis Mayer had had a string of jobs worthy of ERB himself so it will be historically accurate for both Max and Abe to turn up in Hollywood as studio owners.

     ERB was very good at weaving real life stories into his writing.  There are probably real life models for many of these characters and their stories may be based on true stories as they say in Hollywood.  For instance, Marcia’s first boyfriend Dick Steele goes to Hollywood as a stunt pilot where he meets his death, some mgiht say committed suicide, in a spectacular airplane stunt.  As it turns out ERB didn’t make this story up from scratch but merely, fictionalized an actual event that occurred on a movie lot in 1920.  William K. Klingaman tells the story ERB used in his popular history ’1919′ of 1987.

     Lieutenant Ormer Locklear moved to Hollywood in February 1920, where he originated many of the airplane stunts used in the movies.  (He was the first aviator charged with reckless driving in the air, when he looped the loop over a public park in Los Angeles in April.)  In the summer of 1920 he was working on a film called, “The Skywayman”; the last stunt was supposed to be a shot of a pilot plunging to his death with the plane in flames.  Just before he ascended to film the sequence on the evening of August 3, Locklear turned to friends and said: ‘I have a hunch that I should not fly tonight.’  Spectators on the ground watched and marveled at the stuntman’s skill.  Then they suddenly saw the plane only two hundred feet from the ground, struggling to right itself.  It crashed in flames.  Locklear died instantly, the farewell letter to his mother that he always carried with when he flew was found undamaged.

     As ERB had no experience with the theatre and as his stage stuff seems fairly authentic and knowledgeable he may have borrowed stories like the Locklear tale and adapted them for his uses or else Emma had a fund of stories which she supplied for the novel.  At an rate these first 125 pages are full of charming detail about the theatre.

     Now safe in LA ERB even takes a loving poke at hometown Chicago.  Della Maxwell explaining her breaking of an engagement in Chicago says on p. 30:

“I couldn’t stand (Chicago) any longer, Uncle Mark…It’s a hick town, filled with coal dust, wind and tank town talent.  And slow, say, if I’d smoked a cigarette on the street I’d a been pinched for sure.”

     Max Heimer keeps the story moving along when he visits the Sackett household as the legal representative of some unpaid actors.  While there he notices the sixteen year old Marcia.  Learning that she is sixteen his mind clicks back to 1906 when his and Mame’s plan fizzled when Chase II committed suicide.  Ever on the qui vive he learns that Marcia was left on the Sackett’s doorstep on 4/10/06 which conincidence he can put to use.

     Ever shameless and brazen, they call it chutzpah, he contacts Chase I to advise him that he has found Chase II’s illegitimate daughter.  He’s picked the wrong man because the Senator, that fine old example of early American manhood, refuses to have anything to do with him however he has his Jew, that fine old examplar of the race, Judge Isaac ‘Ike’ Berlanger contact Heimer for him.  If his son’s daughter is out there the fine old gentleman feels obligated to take care of her.

     Probably already in deep for selecting a chosen person for a villain ERB begins here to really compound his error in the confrontation between ‘Ike’ Berlanger and the wily Max Heimer.  Woodrow Wilson during his first administration appointed the first Jew to be a justice of the Supreme Court.  This was Louis D. Brandeis of Louisville, Kentucky.  Just as the Liberal Coalition propaganda machine remorselessly pilloried its victims so it equally exalted its favorites.  Brandeis has been depected as a wise old saint for so long no one questions it.  FDR in his administration referred to Brandeis as our ‘Isaiah’ whatever that might mean.

     ERB doesn’t usually go far to find his models so I’m suggesting that Louis D. Brandeis was the model for Judge Berlanger.  Alright.  ERB probably thinks he’s going to get away with portraying ‘a Jew of the type; of Heimer by presenting a ‘fair and balanced’ picture of a ‘Jew of the type’ of Brandeis/Berlanger.  Doesn’t work that way as Charles Dickens, who was accused of being an anti-Semite, found to his dismay when he balanced a Jew of probity against the villainous Jew, Fagin, of Oliver Twist.

     One should always bear in mind that the very worst of a Chosen People is better than the best of the rest.  Thus all heroes must be from the Chosen while the villains must be from the rest.  So it is that all the villains currently have Anglo-Saxon/Teutonic names while all the heroes are of the Liberal Coalition.

     Thus ERB was very ill advised to meddle in these proto-Politically Correct matters.  Even though the entertainment industry of the twenties had been thoroughly Judaized he should have made Heimer an Anglo-Teuton while he was on track by making Berlanger an element of the Coalition.

     The exchange between Berlanger and Heimer very likely sealed ERB’s fate for the next several years while he confessed his error in his portrait of the wise old Jew in The Moon Maid in attempt to do his penance.  I can’t recall any more references to Jews in the corpus after this period.  If you know of any, let me know.

     The result of the conference between the two Chosen ones is that Senator Chase I is to settle twenty thousand on the Sacketts while providing Marcia with an income of a thousand a month.

     Here ERB goes into some interesting ruminations on the effect of coming into money when you’ve never had any.  Probably by 1924 he was wishing he had his finances to do over although he does say of Mark Sackett that he would never learn the value of money.

     The intention of Heimer was to receive the twenty thousand from Chase, keep fifteen for himself and give five to the Sacketts.  Berlanger is ahead of him giving the twenty directly to the Sacketts.  Don’t rule out Max yet though; he’s one canny Scot.

     Watching Mark come into money provides some amusing moments and an insight of how it had been with ERB.  Mark goes out and buys a car which allows ERB to work in his accident with the taxi in Chicago.  Charming passage though.

     The old ham Sackett decides to use the money to bring back the glories of the stage; he wants to organize a touring Shakespearean company.  There is some really nice wordplay as he attempts to inform Max of his plans.  Max on the gui vive.  He had not been denied that twenty thousand he had only been forestalled.  He appoints himself the tour’s business manager so not only will he embezzle the tour’s profits but the original capital.  But I get ahead of myself.

      Bear in mind that all along Della Maxwell is aware of what a shyster Max is as she knows for a fact that Chase II wasn’t close to being the father of Marcia and she is also absolutely certain that Mame Myerz isn’t the mother.  She keeps trying to warn Mark of what a shyster Max is without giving herself away to Mark.

     As far as Max and the Sacketts go in the first 125 pages of the book, that covers it.  The first third is of very nice quality, notwithstanding the ‘Politically Incorrect’ aspects.  If ERB could have sustained this level of concentration throughout the book he would have had a truly excellent story.

     Marcia is the other story line which has to be followed.  When this precocious girl comes into her money, and twelve thousand dollars a year was nothing to sneeze at in 1922, her life changes also.  Prior to the advent of her wealth she had been virtually betrothed to young Dick Steele.  Marcia is troublesome as a character becasue ERB portrays her with such incredible maturity for a young girl.  She’s barely legal, completely inexperienced but handles herself so well.

     Dick with quick prescience realizes that this is the end of the line for his hopes but he’s going to hang on as best he can.  He immediately quits school and gets a job in an airplane plant to make lots of money fast because he knows he’s going to need it.  This employment leads to his job as a stunt pilot.

     Marcia had been taking voice lessons for some time where she had met a wealthy young socialite named Patsy Kellar.  When Patsy learns that Marcia is worth twelve thousand a year she invites her to join her circle.  Marcia snaps into place like a memory stick in a digital camera.  Personally I think ERB is pushing his luck here.  The only thing that makes Marcia’s ability to fit in plausible is that she comes from a family of actors who may have aped the manners of the well-to-do.  Indeed, ERB has speeches coming out of Sackett’s mouth that prove his ability to use the King’s English just in case anyone thought ERB was an illiterate, fantasy writer.  ERB shows ‘em how to in this one.

     The Ashtons to whose circle Patsy belongs are about to take a cruise into the South Seas in their yacht, the Lady X.  They think this sixteen year old flower of youth would be a delightful addition to their party.  Which, in fact, she turns out to be.

     Patsy takes her on a buying trip for clothes during which Marcia finds out how little a thousand dollars is.  This also allows ERB to build some female interest a la Zane Grey to appeal to the lady readers of the Saturday Evening Post.  So, the crew splits for Hawaii via San Francisco.

     Now, when Chase II chose to exit rather than face the music he had a little son, Chase III.  J.H. Chase III is now a twenty some odd Lieutenant in the US Navy and is stationed in- ready?  Hawaii.  Does he know Patsy Kellar and the Ashtons?  Darn right.  Old buddies.  Welcome aboard.  Chase III could have used his leave to go back to NYC to visit Grandpa but he opts for those soft South Sea breezes instead.  Who can fault him except Grandpa and Grandpa doesn’t.  Alright.  So now he’s on board the Lady X with Marcia.  All sixteen lovely years of her.  Now begins the action of the middle part of the book.

     ERB begins to fall back into his old ways although he has two stories to keep going.  In the story of the Sacketts everyone considers Mark’s dream of bringing quality theatre to the heartland of America the height of foolishness but, I’ll be darned, the Heartland flocks to Mark’s performances to lap up the Bard.  A little touch of culture really finishes off the man, you know.  The tour is a huge success playing to SRO houses everywhere.  The fly in the ointment is Max.  The guy just can’t keep his hands off the money.  He embezzles everything except for pocket cash of 300.00 for the Sacketts.

     Stranded in San Francisco again, Max got the loot while the Sacketts got the hotel bill.  The question is where did ERB get the story?

     I had the haunting feeling the story was familiar.  ERB didn’t have any theatre experience, nor did Emma, so he must have gotten the story, or combination of stories, really, from somewhere.

     By 1924 he had been in LA for four years so he’d plenty of time to pick up theatre lore.  The story of the tour sounds very close to the tour that brought Charlie Chaplin West.  Chaplin wasn’t doing Shakespeare on that tour, that tour may have been another one ERB heard of.  As I recall the Chaplin tour went bust in Salt Lake City also with Chaplin hoofing it to Hollywood.

     In Salt Lake Max tells Mark that the jig is up, the show has gone bust, financially that is.  Mark is incredulous as he has been playing to sold out houses but Max tells him there is no money and that is a fact difficult to argue about.  Mark accepts the fact and, indeed, even if he knew Max had embezzled the money whatever records Max kept he said he had sent back to New York while as Mark was broke he couldn’t afford to sue anyway.

     Now, let’s look to see if we can relate this to ERB’s life.  ERB had had his best year ever after the move to LA in 1921 in which he earned approximately  one hundred thousand dollars which might equate to the twenty thousand Mark received.  While Mark lost his money in this improbable Shakespeare tour, or rather it was embezzled, ERB lost his on his pig farm.  Who knows what was going on there? ERB had his income from 1919, 1921 and 1922 which must have amounted to from 200,000 to 250,000.  Multiply that by fifty or so for inflation and that is a tremedous expenditure.  It seems improbable that anyone could spend that much on a pig farm.  Perhaps ERB thought someone had embezzled from him.  Probably could use some investigation if for no other reason than to clear it up.

     OK.  Why Salt Lake City?  If ERB is following Chaplin’s story then Salt Lake City would logically follow.  However Salt Lake is one of ERB’s critical geographical locations.  His interest in the Mormons hasn’t been properly examined although Dale Broadhurst made a stab in that direction.  ERB made a special visit to Salt Lake in 1898 just after he purchased his stationery store.  That was his first visit.  Then in 1904 he and Emma resided there for several months during a very crucial period in his life, even a terrifying, desperate, excoriating one.

     One that had him at his wit’s end shaking in his boots.  While it is difficult to accurately pinpoint when his attitude toward Emma turned sour the several months in Salt Lake as a railroad shack may have been it.

     Thus the tour breaking up in Salt Lake City may represent the beginning of the breaking up his marriage in 1904.  The city certainly held a lot of memories for him.

     Mark and Clara are left high and dry in SF.  While Clara is out Mark turns on the gas and sticks his head in the oven.  I’ve read that exact story before too but I can’t remember where.  Or, perhaps, it is standard theatre fare.

     From the Land of Fogs Mark and Clara wend their way down the coast to the Land of Smogs, the mecca of all actors.  Mark is still too proud to work in the movies…but, we’ll leave the Sacketts in Hollywood while we follow out the story line of Marcia.  This one is pure Burroughs.

     While ERB has written Emma and himself into the story as Mark and Clara Sackett, Chase III and Marcia also represent his Anima and Animus.  This central section is essentially a retelling of The Mucker ten years after.  ERB no longer feels like the low brow scuzzy Billy Byrne, who was nevertheless ‘all man’, but is attempting the high brow Chase III.  ERB has changed back from the Pauper to the Prince.  His Anima presents a different problem.  He didn’t feel up to Barbara Harding so he married her off to Byrne in Out There Somewhere.  In Bridge And The Kid   he scaled down from a New York socialite to the daughter of a big man in a small town.  Gail Prim was apparently too much for the beat up hommy he was so now he scales down even further to a girl who is an orphan left on a doorstep to be brought up by strangers.  Thus the role of Harding and Byrne are reversed.  The Animus, Chase III, now has social standing while the Anima, Marcia does not.  However everybody loves her and she is acceptable wherever she goes.  There is some competition for her between the foppish socialite Banks Von Spiddle, the humorous name is a giveaway, and the military officer Chase III while the latter wins as might be expected given ERB’s prejudices.  This very likely reflects the competition between ERB and Frank Martin that ERB won and is a recurring theme in his writing from his unpublished first story, Minidoka, and this one.

     Just as there was a shipwreck in The Mucker so there is one here.  Here ERB produces a new variation in that there are two life boats in one of which the best people were to go while in the other the muckers.  In the turmoil of the storm and sinking Chase III and Marcia are separated from the first boat ending up with the muckers including the terrible Bledgo who obviously represents John the Bully as the storm represents the encounter on the street corner.

     After the usual interval of several days adrift on the sea the crew spots the inevitable desert island.  Going ashore the better people separate themselves from the worst of the muckers forming two parties which sends Bledgo searching for Chase III and Marcia.  As the Animus represents the spermatic side of the body while the Anima represents the ovate Bledgo is really searching for the two aspects of Burroughs’ personality- the one he wishes to kill and the other to rape.

     As the rest of Chase’s party realize that Bledgo only wants Chase III and Marcia they urge the pair to flee which they do.  Bledgo doesn’t give up the search but pursues the pair up the mountain.  There is a fight during which Chase III brings the butt of his revolver down on the forehead of Bledgo, reminiscent of ERB’s bashing in Toronto.  The pair then continue their flight up the mountain.

     In this sequence Burroughs takes vengeance on John the Bully by defending himself and his Anima as he felt he should have on the streetcorner while retaliating the horrific blow to the head he received in Toronto on his ancient enemy.

     Thus as Chase III and Marcia continue up the mountain in a torrential downpour ERB’s Anima and Animus are reunited.  He is a whole person again.

     Reaching the top of the ridge they discover the best people singing, playing on the beach on the sunny side of the mountain.  Thus ERB rejoins the people he was supposed to be among but was separated from by his encounter with John.  How well this squares with real life is uncertain.  It may just be wishful thinking especially as ERB is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

     Incest and cannibalism are two recurring themes in ERB.  The latter was a concern on the boat, the former now rears its ugly head.  Chase III and Marcia reach the Philippines where they are to be married the next day however Marcia opens the mail waiting for her which includes a letter from Judge Berlanger.  The letter advises her that Jack Chase is her half brother.  Horrified and chagrined Marcia steals away in the night to take ship for San Francisco.  SF and disaster again.  It always happens that way for ERB in Baghdad By The Bay.  Wonder why.

      Aboard ship an entertainment is organized for which Marcia agrees to sing and act in a skit.  She’s emaciated but that can’t mask her loveliness.  Also aboard is a famous Hollywood producter.  Needless to say Marcia is ‘discovered.’  A movie contract awaits her in Hollywood.

     As I pointed out earlier there was a hiatus in the production of movies from Burroughs’ books from about the time he wrote Girl From Hollywood  until 1927.  Part was probably due to ERB’s writing on Jews in this novel but part was also due to his very negative portrayal of Hollywood in ‘Girl’.  Thus just as he portrays a venerable Jew in The Moon Maid  to atone for his portrayal of Heimer et al., here in this novel he lauds Hollywood as the home of the most wonderful people in the world.  He reverses his portrayal of the director Wilson Crumb in the character of the kindly upright director Otto Appel, who also sounds Jewish.

     ERB has now told two thirds of his story and is at page 295 of 351.  He’s got a lot of story to go that he crams into the remaining fifty of so pages.  Honestly, he needs at least two hundred to flesh out his story properly.  Perhaps he had been at work on the story for most of 1924 during which he had generated no new income and wished to get the story off to the Saturday Evening P{ost for that fifty thousand dollar paycheck plus book rights.  The amazing thing is that ERB doesn’t seem to have received advances from his publishers at any time.  Also at this time things were getting strained between McClurg’s and himself.  It won’t be too long before he breaks with them.  We need more information on this aspect of his career.

     So, Jack and Marcia are separated again while Jack has no idea where she may be.  In the interval between their leaving and returning the world as they knew it had broken apart.  No one was where they had been except Grandpa.  Chase III runs into Pilkins, one of the sailors in SF.  Pilkins had taken the same ship back with Marcia so he advises Chase III that she has gone to LA to be in the movies where Chase III follows.

     I can’t think of a positive reference to SF in ERB’s writing.  Either he just didn’t like the city or something happened there.  If so, it would be good to know what.

     At this time we have a whole crew in LA:  The Sacketts, Marcia, Dick Steele, Banks Von Spiddle, Chase III, Max Heimer and Abe Finkel with Ike Berlanger to follow.  This may be the alternative version of how the West was won.

     I wish ERB had put more effort into this ending.  Fleshed out this would be a pretty good story of the exodus of the entertainment industry from New York to Hollywood.  This would be good first hand history of Hollywood at least, of which ERB was actually a fairly significant figure.  I get kind of excited trying to piece together how it may have been.

     ERB at one time had been allowed on the lots so we may assume that his production scenes were authentic as well as his depiction of Poverty Row.  the latter was real where the more impoverished companies had their quarters.  Mack Sennet had his quarters on Poverty Row.  Sennet’s autobiography is well worth reading.  Poverty Row is where F&H Studios set up business.  Yes, after embezzling that thirty thousand dollars from Mark Sackett Max Heimer ran into his old acquaintance Abe Finkel.  The two combined to form F&H.  They are the one’s who give Dick Steele his start as a stunt pilot.

     Max is about town where he runs into Mark Sackett frequently.  Max is not a bad guy, in the same circumstances many another who had injured a man would hate him contriving to injure him further.  Not Max.  Once he’s got the money he’s a congenial fellow.  He presses small loans on Mark who after all is only receiving his own again.  Max, who undoubtedly has developed some pull, gives Mark leads to jobs that if Mark had taken them would probably have led to decent prosperity if not more.  As Mark is too proud to accept movie roles he doesn’t follow up but Max does his best by him.

     As I pointed out in Part III,  Sam Goldwyn had revived the Potash and Permutter stories of Montague Glass filming the Broadway play in 1923 which was a great success.  In 1924 he filmed In Hollywood With Potash and Perlmutter that was an equal success while probably charming ERB so much that he based the F&H Studios of Finkel and Heimer on the movie.

     Here ERB compounded his error of the first part of the book by making the two Jews humorous and despicable.  The inference is that because of their cheapness they were responsible for Dick Steele’s death.

     Remember Mame Myerz?  No sooner does Max make a few dollars than he takes up with a gorgeous starlet.  Mame gets wind of this back in the Big Apple where she goes berserk.  She immediately tramps into Judge Berlanger’s office attempting to sell him the true story of Marcia.  The old Judge doesn’t give in that easy so Mame spills the beans that she isn’t Marcia’s mother and she wasn’t anywhere near Chase II.

     Thus the way is cleared for Marcia and Chase III to marry; no danger of incest.  Max hears of this putting the screws to Mame to retract her statement which she does.  Now there’s enough doubt in Marcia’s mind that the marriage is off once again.

     In Max’s last scene, I kinda hated to see the little guy go, Judge Berlanger, also now in LA confronts Max with the theft of Mark’s money.  Chutzpah deserts the wily little attorney.  Unable to brave it out with Berlanger Max accepts defeat turning his assets over to Mark.  He was forbidden LA and New York in which places he hasn’t been seen to this day.  By stories end I kind of liked Max Heimer although it would be best to go the other way if you saw him coming.

     Marcia was lost track of after the Philippines.  She has lost track of everyone else.  She becomes a star but as she had taken another name no one knows where she is.  They don’t go to her movies, apparently.  Mark and Clara’s fortunes continue to decline becasue of his bullheadedness until finally their landlady turns them out into the street.  This was probably how ERB and Emma felt when they had to leave Tarzana after only four years.

     ERB’s situation must have created a lot of gossip.  After all a famous author comes to town buys a huge estate, c;mon 540 acres? and within two years is in financial difficulties and after four a virtual bankrupt forced from the estate.  Tongues must have wagged.  I’d sure like to know what they were saying.  Just exactly how ERB’s Hollywood contemporaries thought of him.

     In the meantime, completely destitute, Mark accepts movie work.  He is sitting on a lounge on the set when the star, Marian Sands, walks on the set.  She sees Mark who recognizes her as Marcia and the family is reunited again.

     Chase III arrives in LA in search of Marcia.  He apparently never goes to the movies so he doesn’t make a connection between Marian Sands and Marcia Sackett.  He enters a career of dissipation turning to drink and gambling.  Too proud to contact granddad he runs through his money. 

     He has some amusing encounters with oilmen which probably reflect ERB’s own as he floundered around trying to find ways to make money fast.  There’s a lot to be done here in researching ERB’s business doings in LA.  Later in the decade he will get involved in the Apache airplane engine and airport development so it seems unlikely that he wasn’t trying to be a business success in the early and mid-twenties.  Dearholt showed up a couple years later with movie schemes that ERB bought into so what was he doing in the business sense?

     Chase III who has been hanging around the studios looking for Marcia rather than studying theatre marquees gets into the movies finally locating his loved one.  Some direct borrowing from Merton Of The Movies here.  Moving very rapidly and sketchily ERB throws in a couple suicide attempts as the couple get together.  Resemblance between Edith Wharton and Scot Fitzgerald here.

     Together again there is still no hope of marriage because of possible incest, even though Marcia will never love another or marry.

     OK.  Della Maxwell.  Remember her?  She’s back in Chicago in the hospital dying a slow death.  Well, you know, she is Marcia’s mother.  On her death bed, I mean, the pen falls from her fingers as she signs the letter to Marcia, she makes a clean breast of it telling the story, sending the bigamist marriage license, birth certificate, everything so there will be no doubt that Marcia is semi-legit and not related to Chase III.

     We’re almost there do you think?  Not by a long shot and there’s only ten pages left.  The mail train with Della’s package is held up somewhere in Arizona.  The bandits disappearing over the border with the swag that contains Della’s letter and little metal box.

     Wow?  What next?  OK, ERB’s got a twist or two still hidden up his sleeve.  Banks Von Spiddle- yes, he’s out there, too- has a ranch down in Mexico that the Revolutionaries of 1914 failed to expropriate.  A guy with a name like Banks Von Spiddle ought to get lucky once in a while I should think.

     He and his vaqueros go out coyote hunting.  They have a good day, getting a full bag.  The last coyote tries to hole up in a small cave where Von Spiddle blasts the life out of him.  While he’s drawing the coyote from the cave he notices a decayed leather mail pouch kind of thing.  What do you suppose that might have been?  Yeh, right.  Della’s letter and little metal box intact.  Von Spiddle can be small or he can be big.  He chooses to be big giving the info to Chase III and Marcia so they can be married and live happily for however long marriages last in Hollywood.

     Thus ERB manages to compress a marathon into a hundred yard dash in the last fifty pages.

     Over all a good enough story.  Neither Collier’s, Saturday Evening Post nor anyone else wanted it so ERB lost a year with no income, or income from new work anyway.  If he was living on edge at the beginning of the year he was still on the edge at the end.  Whew!

     How did he get out of that financial bind?

Part VI and End is the next post.

 

Part 10 Tarzan And The Lion Man: A Review

 

A Review

Themes And Variations

The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs

#18 Tarzan And The Lion Man

Part 10 of 10 parts

by

R.E. Prindle

First published on the ezine, ERBzine

Tarzan’s Excellent New York Adventure

 

     Sound movies were a unique cultural addition.  The Studios had little or nothing to do with ‘artists.’  The Studios were entertainment factories organized along the same lines as Ford’s assembly plants.  Like Ford’s factories their interest was mass production.  There was a tremendous investment in theatres and distribution.  The theatres could not sit idle waiting for the next picture hence a studio’s goal was to porduce fifty-two A movies a year, or one a week to change the marquee.

     Unlike Broadway theatres where the production and performance would hopefully last a year, two, or three or publishing where a bestseller would take a writer quite some time to compose, usually, and would take a year or two to sell through, the writers, actors, directors and such were merely employees.  ‘Workers’ in Communist terminology.  This was a major departure in the ‘arts.’

     The only entity taking a risk was the Studio or corporation hence each and every film was organized and supervised from the top down.  Once the executives determined on a project the necesary ‘workers’ were assembled.  With the amount of money involved in each production the Studio could ill afford to let projects originate in any other way.

     Thus as industrial units writers were not allowed sole authorship of any movies.  One writer might work up the idea which was then assigned to other writers to add to, change and polish until the executives thought they had a money maker.  And then the movie was taken for a test  drive for audience reaction and underwent other changes.  Few original ideas were used.  Usually a project was based on a a proven entity like a novel, old play or tried and true plot line.

     Naturally in such a situation any group could be disciplined to follow one of any number of tacks.  The jobs were highly paid and desirable.  To not go with the flow, to not follow orders was to lose a very lucrative employment.

     The executives were in control.  When Burroughs was in the employ of MGM for those five weeks he had a chance to view the system in operation.  As he observed in Lion Man, p. 8:

     “There ain’t no tigers in Africa, Milt,”  explained the director.

     “Who says there ain’t?”

     “I do.”  replied Orman, grinning.

     ‘How about it, Joe?”  Smith turned toward the scenarist.  (Writer)

     “Well, Chief, you said you wanted a tiger sequence.”

     “Oh, what’s the difference?  We’ll make it a crocodile sequence.”

     Quite clearly the writer is not an originator but an employee who works up material to order.  This quite natural consequence of mass production, then, played into Communist hands.

     The Communists arrived in Hollywood almost simultaneously with sound while Communism was already the normal way of Jewish collective thinking.

     Thus the collective mindset of Judaism and Communism was already in place.  It remained only for the Communists to organize the ‘cultural workers’ as in any other indistry which they immediately set to do.  The cultural clash between individualistic actors and writers as ‘artists’ was already undermined by the studio system but some ‘cultural workers’ were still offended by becoming mere ciphers in an industrial machine.  Nonetheless the Communists organized the culural workers into units such as the Screen Actors Guild- SAG-and Screen Writers Guild-SWG.  IATSE covered the technical people.

     Once a collective is formed, whether a guild, a religion, a corporation or political party, an executive committee is necessary to handle affairs and set policy.  Anyone who doesn’t accept policy must be disciplined until he does or he is expelled, denied work, blacklisted or in the extreme case of  Stalin’s USSR, eliminated.

     So the Communists set their ideals against those of the studios.  In a few years this would create a conflict between the Communists and the Studio heads when HUAC came to Hollywood.  The Communists denied guilt acccording to John Howard Lawson, one of the leaders.  (Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund: The Inquisition In Hollywood:  Politics In The Film Community, 1930-1960, University Of California Press, 1983.)

(Ceplair and Englund speaking)

      Communist screenwriters could not themselves, directly improve or change content through political inserts- whistling the “Internationale”, speeches about democracy- or by writing Communist films stressing the importance of collectivity over the individual and graphically depicting the plight of the dispossessed, the nature of their struggle, and their inevitable class triumph, or by imitating Russian Marxists aethetics.  (John Howard) Larson, for one, was very forthright about the lack of success in those directors:

     Ceplair, Englund quote Lawson:

     As a matter of undeviating practice in the motion picture industry it is impossible for any screen writer to put anything into a motion picture to which the executive producers object.  The content of motion pictures is controlled exclusively by producers; {all aspects of  a film] are carefully studied, checked, edited and filtered by executive producers and persons acting directly under their supervision.

     While I would disagree with Lawson that a clever writer couldn’t slip quite a few items past any censor or censors I think the point has been clearly made that the final film product reflects the wishes and attitudes of the Studio executives.  Thus whatever the process, the content and apparent meaning of the six MGM Tarzan films reflect the intent of the MGM executives from Lous B. Mayer on down.  Thus Judaeo-Communists are forming the popular image of Tarzan to reflect their own ends.  The chief caveat is that the films must make money so any motives on the screen must be ulterior so as not to destroy the entertainment value.  Ceplair and Englund’s idea of making bloated politial speeches as the only way of injecting political or social content is absurd.

     Perhaps in those days people weren’t as yet so sensitive to multi-culturalism and Diversity as society is today.  For that reason I am reevaluating the era in terms of modern Multi-Culturalism  and Diversity.  It’s like hitting the Saturation button, if you know what I mean.

     Before moving on from the background of the situation to the actual analysis of MGM’s last Tarzan effort it will be necessary to update the Jewish Cain and Abel play to the United States.

     As mentioned previously the thirties brought a tremendous influx of Central European Jews to Hollywood.  While Freud himself remained in Vienna until well past the last moment then choosing to emigrate to England as his 1909 visit to Clark College in Massachusetts left a worse taste in his mouth than those horrid cigars, huge numbers of psychoanalysts and psychologists found their way to the West as well as a large percentage of the Jewish film colony of Germany.  Accompanying these Europeans west were the Jewish criminals attached to the Outfit of Chicago.  These were all Jews from the Pale born c. 1900-10.

     The earlier German Jews who arrived after the 1848 Revolution were now being absorbed by the Jews from the Pale or dying out.  They had been responsible for establishing the first Jewish occupation when they aligned themselves with the Woodrow Wilson Administration of 1913-21.  There they established the classic Abelite relationship with higher authority.  President Wilson gave them pretty much the same latitude as the Spanish kings of the pre-Inquisition or any number or early rulers.  This has gone unnoticed but they established their traditional role of ‘tax farmers’ or overseers of the goyim cattle under Wilson.

     The WIB or War Industries Board, was a key instrument in the attempt to subordinate the goyim.  Wilson himself was a self-absorbed simpleton who was easily manipulated; I doubt if he had any idea of what was really going on.  He placed the Jewish speculator and financier, Bernard Baruch, at the head of the WIB.

     Baruch then under the guise of the ‘war emergency’ required each and every business of each and every industry to submit their confidential data so they could be reorganized as a component of the war effort.

     This sounds reasonable enough but there was no war emergency in the United States.  War hysteria perhaps, but no emergency.  Wilson himelf, beneath his outward calm, was an hysteric.  He was not emotionally qualified for the presidency.  Interestingly Teddy Roosevelt perceived this without any difficulty.  The stringency of the measures taken to ensure uniformity were not based on war necessities but on a socialistic program to render everyone ‘equal’ or the same while at the same time bringing industry under Jewish control.

     Industry protested vigorously against the measures taken by Baruch and his WIB only to be called anti-Semites.  Foremost of these were Henry Ford and the Dodge Brothers.  The Dodge Brothers who were less temperate than Ford in denouncing the WIB and Baruch correctly identified the problem as the Cain and Abel syndrome.  For this they were murdered in 1920.  Ford went into strong reaction buying the Dearborn Independent which ran his series of articles denouncing the syndrome thereby being characterized by the Jews as ‘anti-Semitic.’

      The ‘war emergency’ ended just as some of the more remarkable edicts of the WIB were about to be put into effect.  Wilson was run out of office in 1921, he would have run for a third term had his health permitted, thus the Jewish cultural program was put into abeyance until 1933.

     Franklin Delano Roosevelt was an under Secretary Of The Navy during Wilson’s last term.  Roosevelt became a disciple of Wilson’s so that when he was elected President in 1932 the whole Wilson program was reinstated.  The Jews returned to government in unprecedented numbers under the shelter of the higher authority of Roosevelt.  Punitive income tax rates were established to emasculate men the Jews considered enemies such as W.R. Hearst.

     Twentieth century Amrica was different from fifteenth century Spain in that the executive role was considerably reduced as Governmental functions had become institutionalized.  The executive was now subject to a consitution and the rule of law.  Secure under the wing of the executive it was necessary for the Cain and Able Syndrome, the Culture, to subvert the law.

     Woodrow Wilson had appointed the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis.  He had been canonized by the media as would be his successor to the ‘Jewish’ seat on the Supreme Court, Felix Frankfurter.  These two men were put forward as secular saints although it is difficult to imagine why when one examines their careers in the light of today’s multi-culturalism and diversity.

     The agents of Jewish culture would make many decisions to undermine the British based legal system to convert it to a Semitic based system favoring the culture of the Jews.  Today’s ‘hate’ laws promulgated under the cover of a mistaken version of multi-culturalism and diversity are an impostion of civil disabilites on dissenters and are an example of what evolved.

     Thus working above board legally and below board criminally the Jewish culture sought to realize the age old Cain and Abel dream in the United States.  While Gus Russo in his Supermob concentrates on arch criminals like Sidney Korshak and other crooks looting the American industrial system he passes lightly over the career of one who seems very significant by the name of David Bazelon, also from Chicago’s Lawndale.

     Bazelon functioned as an enabler while being a civil servant.  In this way he was able to direct certain opportunities to his mob contacts in the Chicago Outfit.  All the Jews connected to the Outfit were lawyers.  They used their legal knowledge and skills to circumvent the law rather than applying it.

     Bazelon later almost made the Supreme Court.  In the year or so following the confiscation of Japanese property in California in 1942 he used his position in the Office Of Alien Properties disposing of that property.  In a very corrupt manner he sold the properties at bargain prices to his associates in the Outfit, both Jewish and Sicilian.  Thus they were not only able to utilize the immense proceeds from their criminal activities but were able to bilk from the upper world legal profits from these properties.

     Thus Bazelon violated the trust placed in him by the American government but at the same time was able to sabotage that same government.

     To return to Mr. Netanyahu’s complaint about the Jews in Spain.  A Spaniard by the name of Marcos Garcia who was a leader of the insurrection against the Jews felt that the crimes of the (Jews) embrace all spheres of life.  They are manifest in religion, economy, government, and of course in all personal relationships between the (Jews) and the (Spanish.)  Thus they gnaw at (Spanish) society from all angles and undermine all its institutions.

     Thus Mr. Netanyahu unconsciously states how ‘anti-Semitism’ comes into existence.  He doesn’t seem to be aware of the Cain-Abel Syndrome but that is what he is explaining.  From the origins of the Hebrews through Spain to the contemporary situation in the Central and Eastern Europe and the United States of then and today the story is always the same.

     Just as the Spaniards he is describing were attempting to exterminate the Jews, so as in Burroughs’ time both Nazis and Communists were doing the same.  That is the inevitable programmed result of the Cain-Able Syndrome.  Mr. Netanyahu should diligently study Sigmund Freud’s The Future Of An Illusion.

     In the multi-cultural sense the Jews then and now were trying to establish their cultural supremacy.  I do not argue against this per se as the inevitable result of the clash of cultures is and must be the dominance of one.  The inevitble result of diversity is the destruction of all cultures but one.  I have demonstrated this in the Darwinian evolutionary sense repeatedly.  The point is there is no reason for me or anyone else to supinely allow their culture to be destroyed for the benefit of another.  Or course, if a culture doesn’t have the backbone to defeat another then so be it.

     I have also quoted Rabbi Schneerson’s ‘scientific’ argument for the innate superiority of the Jews.  In Spanish times a religious argument demonstrating such superiority was used.  Quoting Juan de Torquemada, the uncle of the Inquisitor, Mr Netanyahu argurs thusly, pp. 481-82:

     …it is a fact that the gentiles, to elevate their status, had to be ”grafted” onto the “tree” of the Jews.  As the Apostle said, “You gentiles, (this word is added to Torquemada), who are an oleaster” (namely a wild olive tree which cannot bear good fruit), you had neither the Law nor the Prophets, or even the worship of God, as you were dedicated to idolatry, ought to remember that you “were grafted among them”- that is, among the standing branches (ramis stantibus), which are the apostles and the other faithful Jews, “and with them you aprtake of the root”- that is the faith of the Patriarchs and the Prophets, “and the fatness of the olive tree”- that is, of the doctrine and grace of Christ which came from the Jews.

      So, the context changes but the argument always remains the same.  As George Santayana said:  Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.  Since the Illusion has not changed the result must ever be the same whether Spain, Europe or the United States.  Mr. Russo in his Supermob without realizing it was replicating the description in the United States of Mr. Netanyahu’s description in Spain.

     So now, with a grasp of the underlying strategies we can return to Burroughs and MGM.  The purpose of MGM was to discipline a ‘loose cannon’ like Burroughs.

     There had been recent renewed activity in Tarzan films after a hiatus of several years, however MGM’s interest seems to have been catalyzed by their interest in Trader Horn.  Perhaps the story showed them the way.  All the MGM Tarzans would bear the imprint of Trader Horn.  It appears that MGM first considered a Trader Horn series with Tarzan as a subsidiary character.  Cyril Hume’s first script was a Trader Horn sequel in which Tarzan appeared only as a supporting character having little or no relationship to the literary Tarzan.  There wasn’t even a Jane as Tarzan was paired up with a female scientist.  That’s an interesting subliminal association.  As Hume was undoubtedly trying to fulfill suggestions from the executives we don’t know why the screenplay was scrapped.  As Burroughs got his paychecks for those five weeks probably attending planning sessions in Thalberg’s office it may be that he objected.

     The finished product clearly reflects the first script although the emphasis is changed to make Tarzan more prominent but not clearly the central character.  Jane actually is the more dominant personality.

     The entire series takes place on the MGM invented Mutia escarpment which would have been above the Murchison Falls of the Nile.  As is well known the name Mutia comes from the first name of the actor playing Renchoro in Trader Horn. 

     The first two movies which were either pre-Lion Man or unaffected by the novel don’t seem to refer to any of Burroughs’ works being a free interpretation of the character.  The last four movies have references to Lion Man while Tarzan’s Secret Treasure reflects the Opar theme, Tarzan And The Leopard Men as well as Lion Man.  Both the latter novels make reference to Trader Horn as MGM seems to date the beginning of Tarzan to the post-Trader Horn period.  Tarzan is introduced as a grown man in the movies whle as an infant in the novels.

     The movies attempted to denigrate and belittle the character which if you’re familiar with the literary Tarzan they do.  The magnificence and appeal of the character is so great that even the MGM Tarzan defeats their efforts remaining an entrancing character for the movie going public.

     As a boy I can’t be sure which movies I saw other than Tarzan Triumphs although I must have seen all the Lesser films.  On reviewing the MGM Tarzans they don’t ring any bells.  Perhaps the movies were forgettable but Tarzan wasn’t.  As a young boy I was entranced seeing nothing negative in the ape man’s portrayal so perhaps most of the audience didn’t either.  Of course neither they nor I knew what to look for.

     After five profitable successes MGM decided to abandon the series which must be unique In Movieland.  For the final film the location was moved to New York City.  In Trader Horn the location was moved from the US to Africa; in the final Tarzan episode Africa came to the US.  In this episode Tarzan is subordinated to civilization and stripped of his jungle mystique.

     By this time Burroughs himself had been exiled from Hollywood to Hawaii.  There he separated from his young wife while sinking into alcoholism.  His son had to go to Hawaii in an attempt to win ERB from the bottle.  I don’t mean to be unkind but it is true.  From MGM’s point of view he may have appeared a shattered wreck of a man who no longer merited their attention.  As they were done with the Lion Man so they were done with his alter ego.  ERB might have drunk himself to death if the war hadn’t intervened.  The movie obviously has a lot of references directed at Burroughs; some I picked up but I may not have interpreted correctly while many have probably gone over my head but I’m sure that as ERB sat watching they didn’t go over his.

     The reference to the Mutia Escarpment immediately refers to the Trader Horn connection.  I can’t get the exact relationship between Trader Horn and Tarzan but it obviously existed to MGM.  The Escarpment is said to be so high that it reaches to the stars.  Stars may be a reference to MGM which boasted ‘more stars than there are in Heaven.’  Thus the reference would be mocking ERB.

     One of the key goals of both the Reds and Jews would be to subordinate Tarzan.  One has to keep Freudian concepts in mind at all times.  A culture is a group and must obey the laws of its group psychology.  That group psychology can be scientifically analyzed just as individual psychology can.  There is no escaping the evidence of your behavior or its consequences.

     Both groups, the Jews and Reds were into collectivism.  Independent thought is not allowed.  Tarzan was the supreme individualist.  He is in fact a loner among humans although on very good terms with the animals.  Tarzan was a law unto himself; he was not subject to any external law.  thus he had to have his independence destroyed and brought within the Law and the collectivity.  Let’s deal with jewish aspects first.

     The movies were made in 1932, 1934, 1936, 1939, 1941 and 1942.  The New York adventure was conceived and finished before Pearl Harbor so that event had no effect on the movie.  So the spacing is two, two, three, two and one in years.  Burroughs lamented that MGM wasn’t producing at least one movie a year.  MGM might have chosen to have done this.  As the Charlie Chan movies, on which ERB commented were being popped out at the rate of three or four a year to a profitable tune it is obvious that the same could have been done with Tarzan.  One imagines that ERB urged MGM to do so.  MGM chose to pass on the profits.  One asks why?

     As the decade wore on ERB became more and more dependent on the movies for income.  Book sales must have lagged overall while he had no major successes after Tarzan And The City Of Gold.  Lion Man’s sales were disappointing while it is difficult to see its successors doing any better.  He was off the radio after 1935 while the comic strip was not a major contributor to his income.  Thus MGM controlled his purse strings.

     ERB’s finances were desperate after his movie venture if 1935-36.  He had those notes oming due.  MGM might have helped him along by putting out two or three quick Tarzans, instead at this crucial moment there was the long hiatus from 1936 to 1939.  With no movie money coming in for three long years the spendthrift writer must have been driven to the wall contributing to his decision to exile himself to Hawaii where he lived on a pittance.

     The appearance in Hawaii is that he was a broken man seeking solace in alchohol.  In ’41 and ’42 in quick succession Tarzan’s Secret Treasure, note the mocking tone of the title, and Tarzan’s New York Adventure were made.  As they intended to drop the series, the release of one per year for those two years may have been a calculated insult, both could be viewed as mocking films.  A great deal of work has to be done to determine how Burroughs was perceived in Hollywood.  I suspect as somewhat of a joke. 

     In the early novles when Tarzan needed money he made another run on the gold of Opar.  Now living in actual poverty in Hawaii MGM made a movie where large gold nuggets lay at the bottom of a pool while Tarzan knew of a place where gold could be scooped out of veins by the bucketful.  But ERB’s ability to turn a buck now depended on MGM, so the notion could be viewed as a mockery, especially as the mine was Tarzan’s but it was to be exploited by others i.e. MGM.

     As it is possible that MGM now saw ERB as a wreck, totally defeated, they decided to wrap thier involvement up with the succeeding movie.  Their object of the destruction of Burroughs having been realized, they lost interest abandoning the series.

      They certainly had not exhausted the possibilities of story lines.  Nor had the series become unprofitable as Sol Lesser proved for a decade or more.  The probable reason is simply that with Burroughs out of the  picture their intent was realized.  So as a farewell gesture they lectured Tarzan on his attitude toward the Law by which I mean to say the Jewish Law.

     As the New York Adventure begins some circus types abduct Boy to perform as an animal trainer in their circus.  As I watch the picture from this vantage point it is easy to see how MGM is ridiculing the ape man.

     After ten years of living with Jane, during which her good cooking has fattened the feral boy up Tarzan still can’t put together a complete sentence.  He’s still at the Me Tarzan, you Jane stage or the even simpler, Tarzan, Jane.  Boy, who was found in the jungle two years previously, has learned a great deal from the very literate Jane, even being able to write cursively although weak in orthography, But then the kid’s big for his age of three.

     So if Boy could learn to speak intelligently from Jane why after ten years of living with Jane is Tarzan still grunting?  Not only grunting but he appears to be simple minded, purely a natural savage.  He doesn’t even act like he knows his way around the jungle.

     But Jane and Tarzan set out to find Boy in the big wide world with a twenty-five or fifty pound bag of nuggets slung over the Big Fella’s shoulder.  Let me say here that the average viewer is not nearly as critical as I am here.  The animal scenes are actually pretty thrilling while Boy’s fight with the lion using a stick must have bowled the kids over.  So, while my point of view here is to understand how MGM mocked Burroughs and disparaged Tarzan, as a theatre experience New York Adventure is not a bad movie.

     MGM’s attempt to ridicule Tarzan in the first film was not nearly so successful as in this one.  Tarzan and Jane in clothes lose all their charm.  Jane although dressed stylishly becomes just an ordinary looking woman.  A little on the frumpy side, actually.  Although Maureen O’ Sullivan was a beautiful woman in any circumstances the insouciance and verve of her jungle raiment and demeanor is completely gone in a suit and hat.  Not the same.

     Tarzan, or Weissmuller in a double breasted suit while handsome is not commanding.  So, right away Tarzan and Jane are demi-gods brought to earth.  The scene in the tailor’s shop with the Chinese tailors might also be a joke on Burroughs bringing to mind Charlie Chan.  Tarzan’s primitive manner of speech just becomes ludicrous and oafish in New York city.  You can take the feral boy out of the jungle, but you can’t take the jungle out of the feral boy.  Here the contest becomes one of Tarzan’s law versus the law of the legal system and by extension the Jewish Law.  Tarzan fights the law and the law wins just as the Jewish Law did over Burroughs.

     Thus the crucial part of the movie begins in the ludicrous scene in the courtroom.  The trial is being held for the custody of Boy.  On the one side are Buck and his circus associate who have kidnapped and actually enslaved Boy; they have no claim on him legitimate or otherwise.  On the other side are his apparent parents, Tarzan and Jane.  Tarzan had wanted to handle the situation  according to his own law but Jane, as usual in the movie version , dissuaded him, telling him to rely on the law of the legal system and by inference the Jewish Law.  I hope Tarzan hadn’t forgotten how vilely Jane betrayed him just the previous year.

     Jane lets slip that she and Tarzan ‘found’ Boy in the jungle.  Boy is not the issue of Tarzan or Jane.  In this zany courtroom scene the ‘ownership’ of Boy thus becomes unclear.  It seems that the kidnappers and enslavers who are about to sell Boy to a Brazilian circus have as much claim to the kid as his ostensible parents.  This is apparently ‘law.’

     Tarzan reacting in the tried and true jungle manner grabs the opposing attorney and dumps him bodily into the jury box.  The act of violence proves him an unfit parent.  The trial is interrupted.  Waiting for the trial to resume Jane concedes to Tarzan that as usual she was wrong, his law is better than the Law.  Coming to life Tarzan announces in amazing pidgin English:  Tarzan find Boy.  Slightly obscene in its application actually, but why nitpick?  Tarzan crashes through a twelfth story or so window which luckily has an ample ledge.  If logic isn’t essential to your enjoyment of an ‘action’ film the next few sequences are quite thrilling.

     The end result is that Tarzan is taken into custody and delivered before the kindliest judge who ever graced the bench.  Now, there can be no doubt that Tarzan offended the Majesty of the Law by rioting in court.  Under Jewish Law the accused is guilty until proven innocent but is supposed to gratefully accept any verdict just or not.

     He is then duly convicted of what is apparently considered a misdemeanor or even an offense rather than a felony as his crime only carried a sentence of thirty days and sentenced as guilty, which he was.  It is important to remember at this point that Tarzan has been convicted as a criminal.  He has a criminal record from this point on.  The judge generously suspends the sentence but remember Tarzan is still guilty.

     Tarzan mutters some more memorable pidgin English to the effect of ‘Tarzan bad, law good.’  Thus Tarzan is subsumed to the collective culture giving up his independence.  No longer as the Invincible or Triumphant will he pass judgment on jungle offenders or Stalinites.

     The judge even invades his territory up there on the Escarpment as a right and as the Law assuming paramountcy in Tarzan’s former Jungletopia.  The judge advises Tarzan that he will visit him on a fishing trip.  Tarzan says something like: ’Judge come’, rather than ‘Bring money.  Tarzan bailiwick.  No license, no fishee.’  Or he could simply have arrested the judge, convicted him of the offence of fishing wihout a license, make him a criminal, and then suspend the sentence, appropriating the fish and iviting the criminal to a fish fry.

     Tarzan wasn’t that quick and from this point on he has a criminal record in Tinseltown.  MGM successfully emasculated Burroughs and his Big Bwana.  After ten years  MGM succeeded in its goal.  It is probably for that reason they abaondoned this profitable series.  It wasn’t that they had run out of ideas which is an absurd supposition with a couple hundred writers on the lot but that they had said what they meant to say.

     It would seem that this part of the series was the primary concern of the MGM executives.  If as John Howard Lawson said, that nothing found its way into a movie unless it was approved by the executives, then this long ten-year persecution of both Burroughs and Tarzan must have come from the top- that is Louis B. Mayer.  Mayer who undoubtedly to the ADL/AJC would then be acting as an agent of the Jewish people, religion, race, species or however they would have it.

     While it is true that 50-60% of the US Communist Party was Jewish the remaining 40-50% weren’t.  Thus the Jewish supremacy was not part of their goal.  Even in the Socialist Homeland of the USSR where anti-Semitism was an actual crime, the Jews were systematically slaughtered by the Central Committee under the direction of Stalin.  Thus the goy Communists had a program of their own differing from that of the Jews.  This became clear and obvious after the establishment of Israel in 1948 when the two factions began to drift apart.  The Left is also immune to charges of anti-Semitism.

     Communism was nothing new in the nineteenth century, it was merely a reformulation of ideals that can be traced back to the dawn of consciousness.  The great Swiss mythologist, J.J. Bachofen, on whom too much praise cannot be heaped, is the earliest student of human consciousness known to me.  Unfortunately with the exception of a volume of excerpts his work has not been translated into English.  The excerpts speak volumes, however.

     Bachofen, very likely the first, recognized that the Matriarchal Age preceeded the Patriarchal Age and the developing Scientific Age but he also discerned an age preceeding the Matiarchal that he called the Hetaeric.  A large number of modern minds have never made it past the Hetaeric.  Thus all four ages of consciousness exist side by side with the five different human species.

     Once again the Top Dog enters the picture.  Which consciousness will prevail?  It will readily be seen that the highest form of consciousness’ the Scienfific- is in the most danger.  One only has to look at the developments in France and Belgium to shudder.

     The modern form of the Hetaeric developed in Medieval Europe with such groups as the Beghards and Bequines, the Anabaptists and the Free Spirits.  These beliefs were incorporated into those of the LIbertines and Jacobins and thence into Communism.  The program may be sloganized as Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.  Like all such organizations the slogan is developed with more malice toward the established order as one moves up the ladder of initiation.

     In many ways the ideas of Edgar Rice Burroughs are not in conflict with the Communists whole ideals do reflect universal longings in one form or another.  Like them he sees civilization as an imposition on the individual.  One of the charms of New York Adventure is the contrast between the natural ‘good’ ideals of the Mutia Escarpment and corruption of civilization.  One’s heart aches for the lost paradise.  Louis Prima humorously summed it up in a post-war comic song:  Bongo, Bongo, Bongo, I don’t want to leave the Congo.  It may be coincidence but then it’s possible the songwriter at least had Tarzan’s New York Adventure in the back of his mind.

     Actually New York Adventure may have had the largest audience of all Tarzan movies.  According to IMDb: Trivia this was the first film shown free to servicemen overseas.  So there’s a good chance that a few millions of all those men in uniform saw the movie for nothing plus the theatre distribution on the home front.

     Now, when the Communists say equality they mean just that, they don’t mean equal rights but no evidences of distinction whatsoever.  Race (or species), income, sex, education or anything else.  The ideal is a page full of rows of zeroes.  Communism is the rule of pure envy, a terror that one may not be able to compete on an equal basis.  On a practical level this translates into the Soviet and Chinese models where the brutal seize power and follow a program of to the victors belong the spoils.  This is because the human mind cannot function in an equal manner.  The Scientific model is beyond the capabilities of the untutored mind.  Hence one has the deplorable state of affairs of today where the scientific  demands of society crumble before the stunted religious expression of the human mind whether it be Moslemism, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism or whatever.  Freudianism has allowed the basic criminality of the human consciousness to dominate.  There is today no criminal attitude that is not dominant or in the process of becoming dominant.  The dormancy of resistance to criminal develpements is nothing less than startling.  The human consciousness seems to be paralyzed.  This naturally would be the end result of equality to the Communist mind.

     The movie Tarzan fits this ideal.  MGM’s Tarzan is quite frankly, stupid.  He is not a commanding figure, but a lovable clown.  His love for Jane allows him to be led by the nose until her counsels become disastrous at which point Tarzan beats her out by mindless violence, never with any planning, always an impulsive knee jerk reaction.  Thus this duncelike Tarzan is always correct over the educated civilized Jane.  There is a subtle message there that Communist writers say they weren’t clever enough to get past the executive censors who we are led to believe wanted such sentiments censored.  I doubt both posits.

     We then get to Communist notions of sex, sexuality and family.  There can be no doubt that Tarzan and Jane were doing what was then known as ‘shacking up.’  Their romance was a version of ‘free love.’  A common access to women is the Communist ideal.  They were opposed to marriage and the ideal of the family, preferring communal living with free access to every woman.  Any notion of female ‘liberation’ always gets down to the notion that every woman should make herself available on demand to any man after the homosexual manner; a guick bang and we’ll see you around.

     Had Cyril Hume had his way there would have been no movie Jane.  He had already written her out in his first draft.  If he had had his way Tarzan would have had a succession of brief affairs.  Wham! Bam! Thank-you Ma’am! and off swinging into the jungle again .  Thus the movie Tarzan would have realized the Communist ideal completely but for reasons that remain unknown.

     One should note that Hume tried to kill Jane off in Tarzan Finds A Son so that Tarzan could live a more libertine existence.  By then the family role of Tarzan, Jane and Boy became established but the writers were always trying to break it up going so far as having a court award Boy to his kidnappers and enslavers.

     As I say, it isn’t clear why the Studio made the decision to include Jane from the beginning.  the Jewish attitude toward women was and is as brutal as that of the goy Communists.  From the White Slavery days to the present Jews have exploited the women of Central and Eastern Europe without either shame or mercy, whether goy or Jewish.  Prostitution of women on the Lower East Side of NYC showed a psychology of complete lack of self respect.

     On the other hand, as intermediaries between God and mankind, Jews feel they are entitled to whatever they want which includes free access to women.  Thus one has the sexual morality of Hollywood.  That morality has been propagated around the world by movies, such as for instance, the Tarzan series.  While you can talk women into any fashion, the women are always the losers, the victims; as Yoko One said- the niggers of the world.

     The psychological damage being inflicted on humans by the brutal approach to living is astounding.  No matter what you tell yourself the effects of evil living are murderous.  You cannot lie to yourself.

     Consider the words of one of Stalin’s mass executioners, G.G. Yagoda as he himself was about to be executed.  Simon Sebag Montefiori: Stalin: The Court Of The Red Czar, pp. 220-223:

     Yagoda told his interrogator:  “You can put down in your report to Yezhof that I said there must be a God after all.  From Stalin I deserved nothing but gratitude for my faithful service; from God, I deserved the most severe punishment for having violated his commandments thousands of times.  Now look where I am and judge for yourself; is there a God or not?”

     Yagod’as plight doesn’t prove the existence of God nor does his ‘punishment’ which was so richly merited and for which deeds he shows no remorse do anything for his victims, but his attitude does indicate the conflict in his mind as he carried out his orders.  The conflict found expression in his need for pornography and violating the innocence of very young prepubescent girls.  Unhealthy mental states always find expression in sexual obsessions.  Once again, look at the world today.  Such perversions male and female are rampant.  And don’t think they aren’t perversions.  The propaganda today that would make you think they’re normal is just the sort of denial Yagoda experienced.

     Some say the Victorian role of woman was negative but I’d rather have a mother who had self-respect than one who was at the beck and call of any scuzbag with a hard-on.

     So, in their subtle way the Tarzan films were anti-marriage and anti-family while being for female promiscuity.

     These ideals were placed in an African utopia, a place that appears on no map, the Mutia Escarpment.  the place is such a parallel universe pilots can’t even see it until they apparently pass through an interface and are suddenlyconfronted by it.  Using what appears to be identical footage the scene is replicated in both Finds A Son and New York Adventure.

     Both Burroughs and Communists are aligned in their views of the evils of civlilization.  Civilization, but not science or technology.  It seems that Tarzan has some Rube Goldberg genius for inventing 1930s technological items like dishwashers, fans, etc.  In fact, for being an inarticulate boob without the ability to use verbs his inventive genius is nothing less than startling.  I don’t believe the MGM Tarzan had even seen a wheel, yet astoundingly he has mastered the concepts of wheels, pulleys and leverage from scratch.  That’s as good as the literary Tarzan teaching himself to read.  Well, Henry Ford was nearly inarticulate too and look how he changed the world.

     Further, the screenwriters, once Boy is introduced, try to break up the familiy.  In Finds A Son one has the bizarre situation where Jane lures Tarzan into an inescapable pit while she, supposedly a mother, gives Boy to the adventurers.

     One may wonder at Hume’s own childhood and upbringing.  Not only is Hume sending Boy off to England, but he attempts to kill Jane off thus completely destroying the family leaving Tarzan alone in the jungle.  Jane takes a spear in the back, square on the spine.  IN the original script she was then dead.  Burroughs politely, even apologetically, explained to MGM that eliminating Jane was not wise as he himself had discovered when he tried to kill Jane off.  After consideration MGM agreed, so that when Tarzan forgives Jane for her betrayal she miraculously recovers.

     Bear in mind that as John Howard Lawson says, nothing went into the script that was not either suggested from above or approved by them.  Compare ERB’s scene with the producer Milt Smith/Thalberg and his scenarist.  That writer was Cyril Hume.  So it is reasonable to assume that the scene was dictated to him.  For whatever reason then, Mayer and his executives wanted the family broken up.

     In Tarzan’s New York Adventure not only is there a threatened abduction but an actual one.  Boy is taken to New York City by his kidnappers.  This time not only is Jane near death but the script leads us to believe that both Tarzan and Jane have died from a hundred foot or so fall when the vine they are swinging on is severed by a Jaconi native.  Thre grass around them is set afire so that they will be burned beyond recognition much as Jane was in Tarzan The Untamed.  Just as Burroughs had a death wish for Jane so, it appears, do the MGM execs for both she and Tarzan.  Fortunately displaying superb equality with his human counterprts the chimp has more brains than anyone else involved rather miraculously rescuing the pair.

     You may argue that this is the story.  Yes, but it doesn’t have to be the story.  Lesser’s stories were quite different.  the stories of each represent subliminal values.  Dream wish fulfillments a la Sigmund Freud.  If I have been the script writer at MGM able to do my own writing the stories would have been completely different reflecting my own psychological interests and needs.  The point is both MGM and the Reds wished Tarzan and Burroughs dead.  Of course, if they had died they wouldn’t have had a movie.

     Now, whenever Tarzan and Jane are visited up there on the Escarpment they are invariably visited by greedy capitalists seeking ivory, gold or riches of one sort or another.  One may take the Escarpment as the Socialist Homeland where everything is equal, simple and perfect.  Anarchy of the highest order.  Civilization is represented by New York City and the circus as the Capitalist Homeland.

     This contrasts the Communist version of a time of human perfection when the need for government will disappear and a perfected anarchy will come into existence.  Freud touched on this problem somewhat in his Civilization And Its Discontents.  Before Freud J.G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough went into the problem extensively while Burroughs dwells on the problem throughout the corpus.  Indeed, in this scene, ERB and the Communists are in agreement, as were many, many people who were discontented with civilization.  Tarzan, Jane and Boy are actually living out the Communist ideal up there in Cloud Cuckooland on the Escarpment.  This fact causes a problem for both executives and Communists, where they don’t coincide, as they are in love with Tarzan ideal also as, indeed, who wouldn’t be?

     While their original intent may have been to ridicule Tarzan into extinction his powerful appeal to the ‘masses’ undoubtedly prevented this.  No kidding, folks, the NO. 1 Commissar in the entire free or enslaved world loved the character.  That must have counted for something in Hollywood.

     So, in a way, the movie Tarzan was a symbol of Communism for the Party faithful, in contrast to the greedy capitalists who invaded Cloud Cuckooland up on the Escarpment much as the Reds invaded ERB’s dreamland of Opar.  There are many conflicts in life as we wander through this lonesome valley.

     It follows then that Communists had no problem injecting Red ideals into whatever movie they chose whether the executives approved each and every scene, as we are told by Lawson, or not.  The Studios themselves were fashioned after the USSR government with the Party leader on top surrounded by a Central Committee that ruled with an iron fist.  The jobs paid so well that rather than lose them one constantly looked to the top for direction.  To err was to be cast into relative poverty blacklisted by every studio.  HUAC didn’t invent the Hollywood blacklist, the studios did.

     Burroughs was essentially blacklisted while MGM played cat and mouse with him until they tired of it in late 1941 or early 1942.

     The War then changed the direction of the game as ERB finally became the war correspondent he had always wanted to be.  No matter what MGM might do, he would always be Edgar Rice Burroughs to his public.

 

RECAPITULATION

1. Communist oppostion probably forced ERB into self-publication.

2.  Tarzan The Invincible his first self-published title attacked the Communists.

3.  The sequel Tarzan Triumphant did the same with a probable covert criticism of the Jews.

4.Trader Horn was released by MGM which somehow led to their signing Burroughs and Tarzan to avenge imagined wrongs.

5.  Completely taken by Trader Horn Burroughs wrote Tarzan And The Leopard Men.  He had premonitions of error in signing away the movie rights to Tarzan.

6.  MGM released Tarzan, The Ape Man turning a cosmopolitan Tarzan into a feral boy.

7.  ERB countered with Tarzan And The Lion Man ridiculing MGM

8.MGM continuing on its program released Tarzan And His Mate but seemed to let the contract lapse.

9.  In this hiatus Ashton Dearholt lured Burroughs into producing his own Tarzan movie.

10.  Driven deep into debt by Dearholt Burroughs was all but bankrupt, now dependent almost entirely on MGM for income.

11.  Burroughs was relieved suspiciously by a man who was most certainly associated with ERB’s enemies.

12.  ERB continued to live at the limit or beyond the limit of his income which was now derived largely from MGM.

13.  Unable to sustain hs life style Burroughs exiled himself to Hawaii where he became a heavy drinker.

14.  MGM released Tarzan’s New York Adventure in which Tarzan is brought within the Law losing his independence much as Burroughs lost his.

15.  MGM sells its contract to Lesser abandoning the series and its interest in Burroughs.

16.  Beginning in 1943 Lesser’s movies are very successful restoring Burroughs’ prosperity.

17.  Burroughs becomes a war correspondent for the duration all but abandoning his literary career as he returned from exile in post-war years dying shortly thereafter.

 

Exhuming Bob Part IX: Chronicles Vol I: Pensees 2

Exhuming Bob

Part IX

Chronicles Vol. I:

Pensees 2

by

R.E. Prindle

 

     I rather admire Bob’s method of integrating his life into history.  He makes himself part of the unfolding plan of historical development.  As some very ancient fellow once said:  The unexamined life is not worth living.  Having posted the rather narrow parameters of his story- that of his signing by Lou Levy and his subsequent redemption of the contract- he fits in most of his intellectual development to the time of the redemption of the contract.

     He does this in an interesting way.  In Chaper 2, The Lost Land, an interesting title in itself, gives the feel of prehistory, he begins by describing how like some insect he burrowed into the nest of Ray Gooch and Chloe Kiel where he lived in parasitic comfort.

     The path to Ray and Chloe’s door is interesting.  First he met Dave Van Ronk, through Van Ronk he met Paul Clayton and through Clayton Gooch and Kiel.  Bob is going to suck off Van Ronk and Clayton to a very large extent also.  Bob describes his hosts as quite eccentric, one might almost say, weird.  As a foreign body in the cocoon he even studies them dispassionately, clinically, one might say.  As one species of another.

     As with the other people he attached himself to they had a terrific record collection and what appears to be a large very eclectic library.  While Bob appreciates the library one feels that he believes the selection of books as odd and weird his hosts.  The library apparently formed the basis of his adult education as he thumbed the books.  This is really the first step in how Bobby Zimmerman became Bob Dylan the songwriter.  Remember he has only a year or so before his career is fairly launched and he no longer has any use for people like Ray and Chloe.  Both appear to have been queintessential Bohemians- or Bohos in brief.

     In this environment Bob provides us with this biographical sketch.  P. 28

     I was born in the spring (5/24) of 1941.  The Second World War was alreadey raging in Europe, and America would soon be in it.  The world was being blown apart and chaos was already driving its fist into the face of all new visitors.  If you were born around this time or were living and alive, you could feel the old world go and the new one beginning.  It was like putting the clock back to when B.C. became A.D.  Everybody born around my time was a part of both.  Hitler, Churchill, Mussolini, Stalin, Roosevelt- towering figures that the world would never see the likes of again, men who relied on their own resolve, for better or worse, every one of them prepared to act alone, indifferent to approval, indifferent to wealth or love, all presiding over the destiny of mankind and reducing the world to rubble.  Coming from a long line of Alexanders and Julius Caesars, Ghengis Khans, Charlemagnes and Naopleons, they carved up the world like a really dainty dinner.  Whether they parted their hair in the middle or wore a Viking helmet, they would not be denied and were impossible to reckon with- rude barbarians stampeding cross the earth and hammering out their own ideas of geography.

     I don’t necessarily agree with the interpretation but one might ask what its intellectual background is.   As bob was writing at the age of 53 of a period he didn’t remember and probably hadn’t formulated his opinions by 1959 he is projecting subsequently obtained knowledge back on his birth as falsified Persistence of Memory.  I admire that.  One has to have order in one’s life.

     Actually if one has read more than somewhat in certain areas the intellectual foundations are more than apparent.  Bob was born Jewish and for four years after his Bar Mitzvah- turning 13- he attended a Zionist summer camp for a month or month and a half in those summers.

     There was a synagogue in Hibbing but it isn’t clear that Bob regularly attended services or was very observant.  As an illustration of what being Jewish means let me cite an ad for the new cable channel called Shalom.  This is the first all Jewish channel.  In the ad or blurb a man is discussing his Jewish education.  He says that they tell you that you will attend a goi school where you will learn to be an educated man.  And then you will also attend this other school where you will learn what it means to be a Jew.  The man says that he already knows what it means to be a Jew-  You suffer.  You suffer.

     Thus at Camp Herzl- the Zionist Camp- Bob spent four summers learning to suffer as a Jew.  Bob didn’t mention Camp Herzl in his book.

     Now, Jewish teaching is that only Jews can rule a just world.  Only Jews are cultured and learned, all others are like ignorant bulls in a china shop- mere barbarians.  The last phrase In the quote from Bob is that the goi leaders were- rude barbarians stampeding across the  earth and hammering out thier own ideas of geography.  This is the exact opposite of how Jews imagine that they would be managing things.

     the notion is that only Jews are capable of creating a just sane society.  This notion hasn’t proven out well in post-WWI Russia, Hungary, and Central Europe or today’s Palestine but facts don’t disturb the notions of ideologues.  We know that Bob is an Israeli citizen and it appears he follows the Party line.  Can’t help himself, really, that was the way he was educated on the Jewish side.

     Then, on pages 27 and 28 bob finds it important to mention Adolf Eichmann.  Now, Bob only has 300 pages to work with here so we may assume he has selected only very key items to discuss.  One could easily write 300 pages without mentioning Eichmann.  I’ve written close to 3000 pages of autobiographical fiction and I don’t believe Eichmann has come up once.  Nevertheless Bob writing of the time at the age of 53 has this to say:

     (Ray worked) also an Omaha slaughterhouse on the kill floor.  Once I asked him what it was like.  “You ever heard of Auschwitz?”  Sure I had, who hadn’t?  It was one of the Nazi death camps in Europe and Adolf Eichmann, the chief Nazi Gestapo organizer who’d managed this, had been put on  trial recently, in Jerusalem….His trial was a big deal.  On the witness stand Eichmann  declared he was merely following orders, but his prosecutors had no problem proving that he had carried out his mission with monstrous zeal and relish.  Eichmann had been convicted and his fate was now being decided on….The State of Israel claimed the right to act as heir and executor of all who perished in the final solution.  the trial reminds the whole world of what led to the formation of the Israeli State.

     Spoken like a true Israeli patriot.  There is no need to defend Eichamnn, the disposal of the conquered belongs to the conqueror without the legal hocus pocus of a trial.  Did anyone believe that the Nuremburg Trial wouldn’t find the defendants guilty?  Why the charade?  There was no exonerting evidence that was going to be considered.  The Israeli State was not even in existence during the Second Wrold War so by what right does the State of Israel act.  None.  Their own will.  Be honest, they wanted to kill this guy, that’s all.  They weren’t even one of the conquerors.  They had nothing to do with the defeat of the Axis.

     So what does the trial of Eichmann mean?  The Israelis violated all international law by abducting an Argentine citizen without authority or extradition.  If Eichmann was a thug the Israelis were no less so.  Did they feel they had an overriding grievance?  Bully for them.  If they’re interested I’ll send a list of mine which I feel no less passionately.

     And then the State of Israel has appointed itself to act as heir and executor of all who perished.  That’s a convenient right to assign oneself.  I, The Jury as Mickey Spillane said.  What a convenient right.  It doesn’t square with justice but then who among them are objecting.  The Jews were self-righteously against capital punishment in all the other barbaric countries of the world.  But…they would make an exception in Eichmann’s case.  As time would show they would make a lot of exceptions.  Assassination became there mode of operations.

     As I say there is no need to defend Eichmann, if you want to kill him, kill him.  No one will object, but to set aside all the rules, all the laws that separate civilization from barbarism seems a bit extreme.  It does make one question one’s sincerity.

     The trial does fit within the time frame of the novel though, so Bravo! Bob.

      After that little moriaistic lesson for us all Bob brings us up to date on some of his musical influences, which were all excellent and then acquaints us with the foundation of his literary and intellectual education as provided by Ray and Chloe.

     He says he did little reading as a kid.  He also says he was not much of a student.  One gathers then that the talk of the biographers about Bob being on the honor roll was a figment of Mother Beatttie’s imagination.  She was apparently telling them of the Bob she wished Bob had been instead of the Bob that was.  Primarily his own reading considted of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Luke Short and H.G. Wells.

     Good influences all.  Luke Short was also my favorite Western writer, him and Ernest Haycox.  Of course I remember not a shred.  The choice of H.G. Wells is probably represented by Seven Science Fiction Novels  of H.G. Wells.  His reading or Wells probably consisted of The War Of The Worlds, The Island Of Dr. Moreau and The Invisible Man.  The other four didn’t get read very often but I have come to really appreciate The Food Of The Gods and In The Days Of The Comet.  I’m a big Wells fancier myself having read about 90% of a very large corpus, some of it two or three times.  At Bob’s age however I was only familiar with the volume Seven Science Fiction Novels Of H.G. Wells.

     Edgar Rice Burroughs is my forte as my essays on I, Dynamo and ERBzine will attest.  So both Bob’s and my own influences closely mesh.  It is of interest to note that having read Tarzan Bob married a Black woman and installed her in Tarzana.  Burroughs of course founded Tarzana naming it after Tarzan.  Cute.

     Bob goes on to discuss items he read in Ray’s library.  Ray was a pretty interesting reader.  Bob really fell through the rabbit hole when he moved in with Ray and Chloe.

     I don’t feel the need to run through what he read, the reader can check it out himself if he wishes, but Ray provided Bob with a nagnificent foundation in a very short time.  I am impressed that Bob found Honore de Balzac a great writer.  Damn, that Bob does have an unerring nose for the best in both records and literature.  Balzac is one of my favorites too although I’ve only read about twenty volumes of the immense corpus Balzac called the Human Comedy.  If you want to read a really stunning story, a novelette, get The Girl With The Golden Eyes and have your life changed.  Too bad Bob got confused by being forced to try to combine a liberal education with a Jewish one.  I’ve got a Jewish one too, acquired late however, but I scrapped it as useless.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Book II, Pt. 4 Something Of Value

Something Of Value

Book II

Part 4

Edgar Rice Burroughs, Evolution And Religion

by

R.E. Prindle

ERB And The World 1875-1950

Edgar Rice Burroughs

     Edgar Rice Burroughs entered a world he never made on September 1, 1875.  He would have some hand in editing the making of the next century or so.  He seemed a less than likely candidate for such a chore.  He was dealt a tough hand to play by life.  It took him some thirty-five years to learn how to play his hand but once he learned there was no stopping him.  He wasn’t perfect, probably had what we call an abrasive personality, and he didn’t always do the right thing but, then, who does?  He worked hard and he walked his dog with an ample leash.  But in this essay we’re not particularly concerned with ERB the personality but ERB the force.

     ERB’s world was made for him.  It was his job to navigate his way through it.  I have already prepared a view of the world and its history in terms of religion and evolution extrapolated from the writing of Burroughs.  It may be of use to give a bit of the local history that had such a profound effect on his development.

     ERB was born in Chicago.  The Chicago that he was born into was one of the seven wonders of the modern world.  There had been nothing like it seen before, not New York City, not Paris, not London, not even ancient Athens or Rome.  The Iron Chancellor of Germany, Bismark, lamented the fact that he would never get to see ‘that Chicago.’  It is hard to imagine the role Chicago played today.  Chicago was unique, both wonderful and terrible. It may be difficult to visualize but for the Chicago of Burroughs’ youth, to the East was civilization and directly to West was Indian Territory.  The Indian Fighters came direct from the battlefield to the metropolis of Chicago.  I mean, Buffalo Bill had Sitting Bull as one of his performers.  Blows my mind.

     As if to prove its uniqueness Chicago staged the 1893 Columbian Exposition or World’s Fair, the fabled White City.  The White City may be compared to OZ while workaday Chicago was known as the Black City.  You gotta work at visualizing this stuff.   The White City was as audacious as Chicago itself.  It only took fifty years to raise this strange, bizarre and wonderful city out of the muck alongside Lake Michigan and it only took a year to build what was really a spectacular purpose built city of some magnitude.  Even more  mindboggling it s purpose existed for only six months then it was discarded like so much waste paper.  Incendiaries burned this amazing effort to the ground the next year.  Nothing was left of this prodigious effort.  It is truly a crazy world.

     Bill Hillman of ERBzine made a valiant effort to present the wonder of this spectacle especially as it affected the young Edgar Rice Burroughs.  It was a valiant attempt and a worthy one opening my eyes to this wonder in ways they had never been opened before, however as good as Hillman’s effort was it couldn’t come close to the grandeur of the spectacle.

     To have visited this incredible fair for few days, a week, or even two was to have seen nothing.  Edgar Rice Burroughs, then 17, had the great good fotune to have spent the whole summer at the fair.  It was the experience of his life.  The world was on display.  Authentic Dahomean villages with real tribesmen brought  from the jungles for the purpose, authentic Irish villages- of course, there were enough authentic Irish around Chicago to staff those so they didn’t have to be brought over- Arab camps, evolution, religions of the world, scientific wonders, everything imaginable and in real authentic detail with real everything and it was cutting edge.  This was not any Disneyland fake.  It was like traveling around the world.  A diorama of realities.  It blasted through ERB’s existence like a tornado across the Kansas plains.  That was how the author of the Oz series, L. Frank Baum, who was in attendance saw it.  It was a regular tornado that transported him to another world- we’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

     As Editor Hillman pointed out in his series of articles, the White City was a phenomenon of firsts.  Bill didn’t get them all though.  One he missed was that Frederick Jackson Turner, always be suspicious of three name writers, first presented his thesis ‘The Influence Of The Frontier In American History’ at the fair.  The disappearance of the frontier was as important an event in world history as any.  With the arrival of HSII and III on the Pacific shores all sub-species were in direct contact with each other around the world.  The stage for ev0lutionary Armageddon was constructed.

     In its own way 1893 was as important as 9/11/01.  A world change began to take place.  The previous four hundred years of HSII & III domination began to wane.  As usual the avant guard of writers and artists had a glimmer of understanding; the rest kept walking right along as though they hadn’t passed through the glimmer into this new parallel world.

     The writers perceived things differently.  Among the writers were H.G. Wells, Sax Rohmer, Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe and of course Edgar Rice Burroughs.  As it is with artists they began writing in terms of the new reality, perhaps without being conscious that they had abandoned the old.  By the mid-teens and early twenties non-fiction accounts had begun to appear.  Most famous were those of Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard.  Stoddard’s The Rising Tide Of Color pinpointed the issue but after some initial success he was denounced as a bigot and throughly discredited.  It wasn’t like he didn’t know what he was talking about but his message was offensive to certain pressure groups.

     In its own way so were the writings of the great mythographers.  With the exception of Wells they were all political conservatives.  Well’s success came as a mythographer before he declared himself a Red/Liberal in 1920.  From that point, which occurred just as the Great War ended, his novels fell flat although his Outline Of History was a great success.

     Every effort has been made to discredit the mythographers, but their creations have maintained a stunning popularity despite Red/Liberal efforts to destroy them.  Lately the Reds have turned to detournement.  In Well’s case, as a member of the prevailing orthodoxy he has, of course, been idolized and eulogized, but they can’t get anybody to buy anything but his science fiction.

     Perhaps because he tackled the different themes of religion and evolution in an independent manner great effort has been made to discredit Burroughs.  Frontal attacks have failed to this point although perhaps ridicule and detournement will be more effective.  The Disney Corporation may be successful in trivializing the Big Bwana unless we counter with a more effective campaign.

     Many thinkers were presenting scientific bases for the analysis of social and historical trends.  Two of the most prescient were Darwin and Freud of whom I have gone to some effort in integrate into my analysis.  These men presented scientific methods, where were real methods, objective bases not based on the inner world of wishful thinking.  I can understand how Red/Liberals wish to cast their web of wishful thinking over the mind of mankind but I don’t understand the unwillingness of people to see through this fantastic projection.  The reality principle has to take effect sometime.

     Yet these mythographic prophets of reality have been scorned or willfully miscontrued.  If one looks at Burroughs’ work carefully he is functioning as a prophet based on scientific principles that were plausible in his day.  Nothing he or any of the mythographers said has been disproved by further scientific advances.

     Before going into this further let us take a close look at Burroughs’ magnum opus Tarzan Of The Apes.  What he had read in evolution to this time except for Darwin isn’t certain.  In 1933′s Tarzan And The Lion Man he implies he has read Lamarck, Darwin, Mendel and August Weismann.  Lamarck was of the eighteenth century who believed in inherited characteristics.  Darwin published his Origin Of Species in 1859, Mendel wrote his genetic study in 1866 which was rejected by Darwin who eclipsed Mendel until, as the result of Weismann’s studies, he was rediscovered in 1900.  Weismann wrote during the eighties and nineties advancing the theory of germ and soma cells.  It is possible that Burroughs could have been familiar with all four by the time he wrote Tarzan Of The Apes.  Lamarck and Darwin are readily evident.  Burroughs favored the notion of Lamarckian inherited characteristics, which is justly out of favor today.  Thus as an allegory of the ascent of man Tarzan relies heavily on Tarzan’s heritage to explain his sense of his separation from the apes among which he grew up as a feral child.

      In Burroughs’ story Tarzan comes from the finest hereditary stock of noble Englishmen.  Thus according to Burroughs he inherits a number of moral and mental faculties rather than acquiring them.  There is no mistake that Burroughs considered the English to be the crown of creation.  As a one year infant Tarzan’s parents die while he is adopted by Kala the ape.  Burroughs’ apes are not known to any science perhaps representing the ‘missing link’ which used to be a hot topic.

     The idea of an unknown species of ape falling somewhere between known apes and human beings is not as unreasonable as it may sound.  It was only in 1902 that the existence of the Mountain Ape was confirmed.  The Mountain Apes of the Mountains of the Moon had been rumored for some time before the first specimen was killed and the skin brought back. These are amazing anthropoids.  So, within the context of the times the notion of such apes was not all that far fetched.

     Many wonders were thought to be hidden in Africa.  Even as late as 1920 The New York Herald ran an article seriously considering the notion that dinosaurs still existed in the Congo.  While at this day we may read Burroughs with a very large grain of salt much of what he writes about was discussable as possible fact at the time.

     As Burroughs’ apes are evolutionarily above the monkeys and gorillas they may be seen as the last stage of evolution before the First Born appeared.  Burroughs makes a big point that Tarzan passes through the full evolutionary program on his way to realizing his noble English heritage as a fully evolved human being.

     This theme is also reviewed in his The Land That Time Forgot.

     One of the most difficult feats of Tarzan to accept is the manner in which he taught himself to read and write English without knowing a single phonetic value.  However his ability to do so can be explained in a reasonable manner.

     While reading through John Chadwick’s work The Decipherment of Linear B, Linear B is, of course, the written language of the ancient Myceneans and Minoans, which was a terrific problem until Michael Ventris succeeded in breaking the code, I came across this passage:

     Cryptology has now contributed a new weapon to the sudent of unknown scripts.  It is now generally known that any code can in theory be broken, provided sufficient examples of coded texts are available.  The only method by which to achieve complete security is to ensure continuous change in the coding system or to make the code so complicated that the amount of material necessary to break it can never be obtained.  The detailed procedures are irrelevant, but the basic principle is the analysis and indexing of coded texts, so that the underlying patterns and regularities can be discovered.  If a number of instances can be collected , it may appear that a certain group of signs in the coded text has a particular function, it may, for example, serve as a conjunction.  A knowledge of the circumstances in which a message was sent may lead to other identifications, and from these tenuous gains further progress becomes possible, until the meaning of most of the coded words is known.  The application to unknown languages is obvious; such methods enable the decipherer to determine the meaning of sign-groups without knowing how to pronounce the signs.  Indeed it is possible to imagine (my italics) a case where texts  in an unknown language might be understood without finding the phonetic value of a single sign.

     The task before Tarzan was formidable but he had all the time in the world without any distractions.  I do not mean to say that it would be possible for a feral boy to develop this amazing intellectual ability since the feral children found are quite incapable of learning.  But, in Burroughs’ mind Lamarckian notions of inherited characteristics was foremost so that he believed as did most of his contemporaries and a signficant percentage of the population today that these characteristics were operative.

    As one reads one comes across some remarkable things.  Having just read Alexandre Dumas’ Memoirs Of A Physician I came across a tale somewhat reminiscent of Tarzan’s story.  In fact the similarities of some of the details between Dumas’ book and Burroughs’ are quite amazing although I do not suggest that Burroughs ever read this Dumas novel.

     In this scene a young man named Gilbert has met the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau in the woods where Rousseau is collecting botanic specimens.  Gilbert does not know who he is talking to.

     ‘You can read and write.’  (Rousseau asked.)

     ‘My mother had time before she died to teach me to read.  My poor mother, seeing that I was not strong, always said, ‘He will never make a good workman; he must be a priest or a learned man.’  When I showed any distaste for my lessons, she would say, ‘Learn to read, gilbert, and you will not have to cut wood, drive a team, or break stones.’  So I commenced to learn but unfortunately I could scarcely read when she died.’

     ‘And who taught you to write?’

     ‘I taught myself.’

     ‘You taught yourself?’

     ‘Yes, with a stick which I pointed, and with some sand which I made fine by putting it through a sieve.  For two years I wrote the letters which are used in printing, copying them from a book.  I did not know that there were any others than these, and I could soon imitate them very well.  But one day, about three years ago, when Mademoiselle Andree had gone to a convent, the steward handed me a letter from her for her father, and then I saw that there existed other characters.  M. De Taverny having broken the seal, threw the cover away; I picked it up very carefully, and when the postman came again, I made him read me what was on it.  It was, ‘To the Baron de Taverney-Maison-Rouge, at his chateau near Pierrefitte.’  Under each of these letters I put its corresponding printed letter, and found that I had nearly all the alphabet.  Then I imitated the writing; and in a week had copied the address ten thousand times perhaps, and had taught myself to write.

      This is surely no less fantastic than Burroughs’ story but because Dumas is considered more credible nothing that I know of has ever been said about it.

     In Tarzan’s case Burroughs makes a point of saying that he had a number of children’s picture books so that he could, for instance match the printed spelling of B-O-Y with a picture of a boy.  In this way also he learned that he was not a freaky hairless ape but an entirely different species.  I cannot, of course, defend the plausibility of either Burroughs’ or Dumas’ story but there is a possibility.

     In some ways the notion of inherited characteristics seems as though it could be true.  In the course of evolution the thrust has always been towards more intelligence.  A species once evolved has its range of capabilities and once those are fully developed no further advance is possible in that sub-species.  It is up to the next stage of evolved sub-species or species even to advance to the limits of its capabilities and so on.  Thus it was not possible for Tarzan’s fellow ape, Terkoz, under any circumstances to succeed in Tarzan’s quest.  The necessary intelligence genes were missing.  Even though Tarzan was raised by apes less evolved than himself he himself did have the necessary inherited genetic makeup to undertake the task with some chance of success.  So, in that sense Lamarck’s inherited characteristics did apply.

     It may be argued that Tarzan couldn’t have recognized the signs as language.  In theory he could have.  Whether in fact he would have or whether it would have taken him much longer to break the code than eight years are of course valid realistic objections.  But Burroughs was writing the story so that against all objections there are methods by which it was theoretically possible for Tarzan to do so.

     This is no small point for the story as the story is, as I see it, an allegory of the ascent of man toward godhood.  Burroughs will repeatedly call Tarzan a jungle god.

     He is introduced to the next evolutionary stage when his ape mother is killed by one of the First born.  Drawn into contact with the FB Tarzan passes through this stage in evolution.  I don’t think there can be any doubt that Burroughs considered the First Born an antecedent level of evoltuion to HSII and III.  While some might inanely cry bigotry, mocern science, which was unavailable to Burroughs, has at least proven the plausibility of the position.

     Tarzan then comes into contact with a cross section of HSIIs and IIIs.  To my mind the differences are presented as innate and not a matter of environment or nurture.  Just as Tarzan must realize his noble English heritage because it is his innate nature so these ruffians are ruffians because of their innate nature.  Burroughs seems to be saying that you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

     While withing a particular sub-species I am an environmentalist believing that people beocme what they are for reasons beyond their contro, the majority of mankind, at least those place in favorable circumstances, believe that they are innately better than the rest.  So if Burrughs was srong on this point, as I believe he was, he was in step with the prevailing prejudice.

     Thus under the tutelage of Paul D’Arnot, his French mentor, Tarzan realizes his full potential as a human being uniting the two ‘highest’ branches of what was then known as the White race.  Tarzan can read and write English but not speak it while he can speak French but neither read nor write it.  There’s something going in Burroughs’ mind but I haven’t decided what.  But he tosses off these details in such an offhand manner that all seems so natural there is no reason to note it.

     It must also be remembered that Burroughs wrote at the transition point where for the first time in US history there were more people living in cities than in the country.  The new city dwellers had just reason to long for the rural ‘paradise’ they had just left.  Thus Tarzan having seen all there is to see of civilization snubs his nose at it to return to his beloved jungles and its animals and primitive but honest First Born.

     In a sense then the jungle and the First Born can be interpreted as the farm and the crude but honest farmer.  An idealization to be sure.

     As far as I can see Burroughs was the first novelist, or at least successful one, to treat of evolution by which I don’t mean to say Lost World adventures.  Further he treats with it as established incontrovertible fact at a time when evolution was accpted by few while being rejected by the vast majority.  And I repeat, Burroughs was learned and thoughtful about the subject.  That he was also fanciful is beside the point.

     At the same time Burroughs was offering some serious reflection on evolution he was also presenting some serious thinking on the evolution of religion which is certainly on a par with Freud’s Totem and Taboo.

     Burroughs says and this is seemingly in his hown historical voice that the Dum Dum as practiced by the apes was the source of all social and civil rituals.  As I read Tarzan Of The Apes it seems that Burroughs thinks that Dum-Dums or something just like them really took place.  Of course such round or circle dances are in fact of great antiquity.  Perhaps something just like a Dum Dum did perform a role in the evolution of institutions.

     Following that explanation for the foundation of religious and civil institutions Burroughs goes into a very careful explanation of how Tarzan became the god, Manungo-Keewati of Chief Mbonga’s tribe.  This explanation is very carefully developed.  Burroughs is also very serious and I think believes he has a handle on the truth about the evolution of god.

     As part one of a trilogy on religion Tarzan Of The Apes is followed by The Gods Of Mars and then the Return Of Tarzan.  Gods Of Mars is a condemnation of formal religion with far reaching ramifications.  In Gods Burroughs plays the role of a savior through his character, J.C.- John Carter.  Carter destroys the ancient and flase religion which clearly resembles the Catholic Church, thus being the liberator of Barsoomkind.

     In The Return Of Tarzan he gives a fanciful but reasonable vision of ancient sun worship which would fall somewhere between Munumgo-Keewati and the Holy Therns of Barsoom.

     Thus under the guise of ‘pure’ entertainment the attentive reader can detect a serious attempt to explain evoltuion both special and religious while undermining established beliefs in the manner of a prophet.  It is not necessary to accept it only recognize it.

     I’m sure Burroughs in the light of all the unsetlling discoveries beleives he is a light bringer doing a service for mankind.  I accept him at his own valuation.

     Running through all Burroughs work is an unstated vision of psychology.  One may well ask where this vision came from as Burroughs was not fortunate enough to attend Yale which is two eldest prothers did and which he keenly regretted not having done.  I’m sure the man was reasonably well read in the subject while his views appear to follow rather closely those of his brothers’ partner in the Idaho ranch, Lew Sweetser.

     A very fine article on Sweetser by Philip R. Burger appears in issue #19 of the Burroughs Bulletin, since republished on ERBzine.  Now, Sweetser graduated from Yale in 1889 a little before Freud began his psychological publication and twenty years or more before his books were translated into English.  I doubt that Sweetser ever read Freud, but I can’t say.

     He was fully conversant with a concept of the unconscious and exceptionally well informed on the rule of suggestion and hypnosis.  Whether over the intervening eyars from 1889 to 1920 when he took to the stage as a lecturer he read extensively or whether re reworded his ideas acquired by 1889 I can’t say.  But he had a good grip on the concepts of the subconscious and suggestion including auto-suggestion.

     Burroughs came into contact with him as a 16 year old when he worked on the Idaho ranch in 1891.  Again in 1898-99 and once again in 1903.  Burroughs own views on psychology follows those of Sweetser very closely with add ons from further study.

     If not as systematic Burrughs presents a consistent approach which is as viable as Freud’s but different in the treatment of the subconscious.  Both Sweetser and Burroughs always speak of the subconscious, never the unconscious, while Freud chose to believe in a metaphysical unconscious.

     What I  hope I have shown here is that Burroughs had a fairly mature understanding of life and society when he began to write and which he continued to develop throughout his life.

     While hos own life was lived somewhat erratically his intellectual mooring was much more sound.  It is the latter which is telling for us.

     The importance of his intellect being developed by the time he began writing is that the period of the teens of the twentieth century is when subsequent history took shape.  Just as Burroughs collected the strands of neo-mythographers to give them their new direction so the teens did also for the evolution of the species and religion in both the United States and the world.

     While Burroughs and the other mythogrpahers realized very early that the tide of history had changed it was only by 1916 to 1922 that the concept found expression in an academic manner.

     In 1916 Madison Grant published his The Passing Of The Great Race and in 1922 Lothrop Stoddard published his The Rising Tide Of Color Agains White World Supremacy.  and here comes the division in society that can never be reconnected.  Both Grant and Stoddard are quite serious historians; both are men of good will, both have been seriously defamed by others who object to the resulsts of their investigations.

     These objectors seem to think that their opinion is of divine origin and that any other opinion is not only wrong but evil.  They take a stand not much different fromt he Inquisition and its witch hunting which I have already discussed.  Thus these people want to run dissenters to ground and if not actually kill them at least hurt them so bad or brand them as pariahs that they will shut up.

     A recent example is Richard Slotkin’s Gunslinger Nation.  The book is an attempt to squash writers such as Grant, Stoddard and Burroughs.  The first 225 pages of his mammoth book are dedicated to demonstrating that Edgar Rice Burroughs was a vile ‘racist’ who was influenced by the even more vile ‘racists’ Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard.

     While you can throw away the last five hundred pages of Gunslinger Nation which is inadequately researched and poorly presented, the first 225 pages are fairly interesting if skewed.  A lot of good information of possible influences on Burroughs.  Slotkin’s fine biographical sketch of Buffalo Bill is very informative.

     Slotkin lists a number of Burroughs’ books which he has apparently didainfully skimmed but without any understanding.  If he had read more carefully he ought to have realized that Burroughs’ ideas were fully developed before Grant and Stoddard were issued.  While many of the ideas of the latter writers may have been complementary to Burroughs’ ideas they couldn’t have been formative.

     Further with the customary tunnel vision of the Red/Liberal Slotkin ignores what was happening against which these men were reacting.  Of course he and his contemporaries give this data such a skew as to lack all credibility.

     Like all Liberals Slotkin believes that immigration is a prescriptive right for anyone who wants ‘to share what we’ve made here.’  While not wanting to get involved in immigration quarrels, which are fruitless, I do believe that as I have a right to say who can and cannot enter my home, any country has a aright to say who can and cannot immigrate to their country.  It doesn’t matter whether there’s a good reason or not nor does it matter if rejection is based on the grossest prejudice.  No one has a right to invite himself to your table.  You see why there is no chance of agreement.  So much for immigration.

     Now in Darwinian terms the various sub-species were not only in contact with each other, they were peacefully intermingling in the West and in the West only.  It is important to remember that HSII and III were about to be driven out of Africa and Asia.  The invasive flow was now beginning in the opposite direction only.  While the HSIIs and IIIs had been able to displace the American aborigenes without trouble this was no longer possible anywhere in the world.  The tide against the HSIIs & IIIs had turned.  While the IIs & IIIs  would slowly be expelled from Asia and Africa, Africans and Asians while already in Europe and America would begin to increase their numbers dramatically.

     Today a city of Toronto is 50% what Torontians call ‘visible minorities.’

     Thus while IIs & IIIs began a retreat the other sub-species began an advance into II and III territories while becoming highly organized.  The Eastern European Semites began to arrive in the United States in numbers beginning in the 1870s.  Always politically aggressive, the German Semites formed the B’nai B’rith in 1843.  the American Jewish Committee in 1906 and the horribly bigoted Anti-Defamation League in 1913, the year Woodrow Wilson entered the White House.

     The Great War beginning in 1914 closed off European immigration to the United States but increased the internal migration of the First Born.  It’s an ill wind that blows no one good.  The First Born began to organize on an international basis.  African, Brazilian, Caribbean and American First Born began to act as a unit.  This organization was led by West Indians who emigrated to the United States to agitate.  Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican, personated this most important stage of evolution which has led to the present situation.  At roughly the same time, under the guidance of Semitic Jews, the NAACP- Natinal Association For The Advancement Of Colored People- was formed.

     In reaction to these very aggressive developments the post-Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan was called into existence.  On top of all these unpleasant developments the Bolshevik Revolution succeeded in Russia in 1917.  Thus a whole new paradigm was formed within just a few years in the teens.  Against this Burroughs’ mindset had been formed by the years from 1890-1910.  the new developments sure appeared to him as a bad motorcycle with the devil in the seat.

     The world which emerged from the Great War was much different from that which preceded it.  the balance of world emigration changed, as it were, overnight.  A good harbinger of things to come was The Rising Tide Of Color Against The White World Supremacy by Lothrop Stoddard.  Stoddard’s title was very ill chosen although it represented the emerging reality.  He might better have chosen a more neutral title such as ‘Changing Patterns in World Migration’ or some such.  The book is unfairly characterized as ‘racist’ by its detractors, which it is not.

     Stoddard pointed out the obvious:  that from having been the dominant sub-species the tide had now turned and rather than being a dominant military presence the HSIIs and IIIs had become a minority in a world of sub-species seeking like Darwin’s ratos or cockroaches to drive the others before it.  From having been invaders, Europe and America would now be invaded.

     This is the way of the world:  ;either you’re on the top or you’re on the bottom.  A world of equality is a world away.

     Stoddard was the proverbial voice calling in the wilderness.  The only people taking him seriously were the peoples he was warning about.  Confident in teir seeming superiority the HSIIs and IIIs went about their business as if nothing had changed.

     Not exactly as if nothing had changed because the Bolsheviks continued special and religious battles.  Just as Catholicism was infused with Semitic ideals, through Karl Marx, Bolshevism was a Semito-Red/Liberal religion.

     Of the five sub-species by far the smallest was the Semitic branch; they were and are therefore the most threatened.  In order to hope to exercise world dominion, and don’t think world dominion isn’t the question, the Judaic and Moslem religions were created.  The Jews had the daring to go it alone while the Moslems sought and seek to convert the world to Moslemism within which the Semites are the preeminent holy people.  A nation of priests as the Bible says.

     Thus while it might be possible for the largest sub-species as represented by the Chinese to overrun the world much more effectively than the HSiis and IIIs did, it would be equally possible for the Moslems to convert the Chinese with the Semites taking a position analagous to ERB’s Holy Therns in Barsoom.

     Thus while stymied for the time being in the West Moslems were increasing by leaps and bounds in the East.  They may have looked stagnant from the West but they were dynamic indeed when viewed from the East.

     Having been disturbed in their homeland the Chinese and Japanese Mongolids began sending colonies out wherever they could be received and by this time all space on the earth was fully occupied.  This wasn’t therefore the loud noisy colonization of the HSIIs & IIIs  but a more peaceful infiltration.  A lot of smuggling of small groups into the United States and Canada went on, as it still does.  Large colonies were sent to South America.  Peru passed a Chinese Exclusion Act for much the same reason the United States did.  Didn’t really have anything to do with color, it was that the countries were being taken over by foreign elements.  Japan had colonies in Brazil, Colombia and other South American States.These colonies were designed to retain their ethnic origins so that they wouldn’t assimilate.  I’ve met Japanese from Japan via Colombia who were smuggled across the border from Tijuana.

     Thus on the world scene Darwinian clash of sub-species continued  outside Asia while the Mongolids were successfully expelling the HSII and III invaders from Asian homelands.  This is essentially what the much despised Lothrop Stoddard, Harvard graduate, too, was pointing out.

     In the United States the immigrating sub-species had to disarm the dominant Anglo-Saxon hierarchy.  As pointed out, led by the West Indian immigrant First Born that sub-species was organizing its own conquest of America and Europe.  Their own population was increasing prodigiously around the world.  Even in the face of tremendous immigration into the United States the percentage of First Born has never declined but has increased.  Today in the fact of even greater immigration FB percentages have increased to fifteen percent vis-a-vis HS II and III.

     Under the so-called Gentlemen’s Agreement between the US under TR and Japan the Japanese ‘voluntarily agreed’ to restrict the flow of immigrants.  The US, a sovereign nation, accepted this ‘compromise.’  The early Japanese immigrants had been nearly one hundred percent male.  These womanless men now demanded women so the other half of the invasion in the form of picture brides arrived swelling the Japanese population past double.  The so-called Issei are the first generation born in America.  As their parents paired up at the same time the whole next generation came of age about the time of 12/7/42.  An interesting immigration fact.  Thus by taking advantage of HSII and III goodwill the immigration agreement was evaded.

     So the flow of populations contesting the same territories with the same Darwinian economic needs came into further conflict.

     The Jewish race of the Semites had been poised to transfer their entire East European population tothe United States just as the Great War broke out.  Now with the war over the Semites renewed their plans.  However there had been problems with immigrants from the Central Powers including their Irish allies during the war which sent shivers down the spines of the Anglo-Saxons.  TR himself voiced the fear that the United States had become merely ‘an international boarding house.’  So people do catch on after it’s too late.

     After a hundred years of unrestricted immigration, a golden period worldwide actually well worth study, the opponents of immigration carried the day severely restricting immigration if not closing the door completely.

     This action enraged the Judaic race of Semites who considered it their go-given right to go where they wanted when then wanted and whether a country wished to receive them or not.  But there is more than way to skin a cat.  The Anti-Defamation League whose ostensible purpose was to prevent defamation wherever it might occur began a defamation campaign against anyone with an independent point of view that conflicted with their own in any way.

     The ADL was lined up with the Communist?Red/Liberal Coalition.  The combinatin effectively split and weadened the HSIIs and IIIs putting the subspecies at war with themselves, something like Cadmus throwing a stone among the indigenous peoples setting them against each other until they killed each other off making the Semitic conquest of Boeotia easy.  Divide and conquer.

     Led by the ADL whith its ever potent charge of anti-Semitism the Liberal coalition opened war on any dissidents.  The idea was to discredit anyone whether they were concerned or merely passive who didn’t follow their program.  Prime targets were Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard and Edgar Rice Burroughs.  ERB made himself conspicuous when in reaction to the Bolshevik revolution he sent around a draft of the Moon Maid which in the original version was apparently little more than an expose codemning the Bolsheviks.

     Stoddard and Grant who were competent scholars and men of good will were nevertheless characterized as hopeless bigots and anti-Semites thereby being easily disposed of.  By the end of the decade they were neutralized and by the end of the thirties disposed of.  Quite naturally the Liberal coalition denied any involvement.

     As the thirties dawned there were major activities affot.  In Asia, Japan which deeply resented HSII & III penetration, began a campaign to drive them out.  Talk about the tail wagging ghe dog, their plan was to conquer Asia from Japan to Australia in the South, and India in the East.  It staggers the imagination.  Yet it was no less than England had done with the same population. But, different measures for different times.

     When TR said ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick’ the audacity of the Japanese plan which required a very big stick was beyond their powers of execution.  Nevertheless they first invaded Manchuria and then China itself.

     In Europe, in reaction to defeat and the Judeo-Communist threat the Nazis under Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 which did not bode well for the world.  In the United States also a disaster as big as Hitler and Nazis occurred when Franklin Roosevelt was elected President.  That did not bode well for the United States.  The world was then primed for the big explosion.

     Perhaps because of the concept of Manifest Destiny under which the Red/Liberal tide was supposed to roll over the North American continent, jump the Pacific then race across China and Asia to return again to America in an unbroken wave of triumph the Red/Liberals looked upon the Chinese as a swell people who would offer no resistance to their goals, indeed, embrace and forward them.  Thus in some sort of Disney fantasy China was seen as complicit in the Liberal design.

     FDR was one devious son-of-a-gun.  As the good guys were being attacked by the Japanese bad boys Roosevelt took it upon himself to aid the Chinese with American wherewithall.  It would have been better to let the two combatants exhaust themselves and keep our ‘limitless’ resources to ourselves.

     Remember that the Japanese hatred of the West was caused when the United States forced them out of their seclusion at gunpoing thereby emasculating them.

     Now Roosevelt was trying to thwart their ends by disgorging America’s wealth on China.  If you free your mind from false moral assumptions you wll see how stupid this was.

     As an American I can do nothing but deplore Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor but as a psychologist and analyst I can see nothing but its inevitability as the result of the US’s inconsiderate actions.

     The Japanese simply had to try to put a stop to American aid to China.  Whatever the proof may be that FDR knew of Pearl Harbor before hand, if he didn’t know he was provoking such an attack he was denser than any man has a right to be which I don’t think he was.

     In Europe the situation was intensified when the Communists elected sympathizers to most government who then formed a Popular Front against the Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Spain.  The Roosevelt administration was a Popular Front government.  On the religious front it was competition between Communism and established faiths.

     To all appearances the Judeo-Communists had the Axis surrounded.  Even before Hitler was elected the Jews of the United States were working hard to subvert him.  Assassination attempts had already taken place.  When FDR was elected, as with all Popular Front governments the Jews urged the United States to take first strike action against Germany.

     As part of this program in the United States the Judeo-Communists demanded an Un-American Activities Committee by which unamerican meant non-Judeo Communist.  In 1938 they succeeded when the House Un-American Activities Committee was created.  To their disappointment the chairmanship escaped them going to a member who corrected believed that Communists were a bigger threat than Nazis.  This infuriated Roosevelt.

     When was was declared in Europe the American Judeo-Communists were for intervention.  They changed their tune after the German-Soviet pact then changed back again after the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

     As can be plainly seen what is at stake here are sub-special interests rather than national ones.  On 12/7/41 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.  All the sub-species were at war.

     The War fatally weakened the HSIIs and IIIs much as the percipient Lothrop Stoddard had predicted.  In the aftermath of the War HSIIs and IIIs were expelled from Asia.  Although preifly garrisoned with American troops there was no other action taken against Japan other than that they were set on their economic feet.

     In 1948 the HSIIs and IIIs were driven from India.

     In 1948 the Judeo-Semites occupied Palestine.

     In 1948 the Chinese Communists were clearly going to be victors in China thusputting the Chinese squarely at odds with the West.

     While for a few years the United States was in the enviable position of arbitrating world affairs, it chose to favor the non HSII and III subspecies over the ‘colored’ peoples thus further weakening HSIIs and IIIs.

     When Edgar Rice Burroughs died in 1950 there had been little happening in his literary and business affairs for a decade.  The only thing keeping the Burroughs literary legacy alive was his continuing popularity with the masses.  You and me.  But they could find few editions of any of the corpus to buy.

     From 1945 to 1963 there was little of his literary oeuvre that was available although demand continued strong.  For some strange reason ERB, Inc. refused to issue titles.  Then in 1963 publishers seized on expired copyrights and the second boom in Tarzan began.  Once more his message contained something of value for his readers.  Let us now begin Book III of Something Of Value which cover the period from 1945 to 9/11/01 and the closing of the old dispensation and the beginning of the new.

The Age Of Aquarius was dawning.

Exhuming Bob 2-2 Detourning The Folks

A Critique

Exhuming Bob 2-2

Detourning The Folks

     Greil Marcus has written of detournment extensively especially in his Lipstick Traces.  The French word means hijacking, rerouting or diversion, or in other words changing the direction of the flow or meaning.  Thus one strips an object of its familiar values and replaces them with others but leaves the object intact.  In a conflict of cultures the question becomes who will assign the values or meanings to objects and words.

     I will use as a starting point for my purposes here H.L. Mencken of the twenties.  The values into which immigrants migrated were those of the Anglo-Saxons.  From the immigrant viewpoint the Anglo-Saxons detourned their languages and cultures attempting to replace them with English and Anglo-Saxon values.  The inevitable result was that immigrants felt that they had been devalued and demeaned.  So it is no wonder that having recovered some balance by the end of WWII they fought back by attempting to detourne Anglo-Saxon culture in their favor.

     This is nowhere more apparent than between the Jews and Angl0-Saxons.  No matter whether you place the conflict between the Old Dispensation or the New Dispensation the Jews always view themselves as a separate, independant and potentially dominant culture.  Hence the drive is always first for autonomy and then detourning the host culture to reflect Jewish laws and customs, hopefully making Hebrew the official language.  To Jews, like Greil Marcus and Bob Dylan then ‘freedom’ means the replacement of the Anglo-Saxon law and culture with Jewish law and culture with the Jews as arbiters of the fate of what become essentially subject peoples.  The Jews can never be ‘free’ no matter how unrestrained they may be so long as they are subject to others legal and social systems.  This is the central problem the United States and the West refuse to face.  The same is true of the Semitic Moslems.  It is the purpose of Moslems to detourne Western culture for a Moslem Culture.  It is quite simple.

     By the time H.L. Mencken was making his rise Anglo-Saxon pride was at its maximum.  I haven’t been able to determine whether Mencken was Jewish but he allied himself with the Jews making common cause with them.  The approach naturally was to defame Anglo-Saxonism.    Mencken naturally chose the least sophisticated  Anglo-Saxons to represent the whole.  Thus he went to the mountain folk of Appalachia and the hill country all along the Line.  He began to ridicule these people as representative of all Anglo-Saxons.  I mean, he was mean; he was vicious; his Jews caused a huge fuss for much less criticism or in their terms- defamation.

     Expanding the arena, using these rural folk as their model the Communists then picked up on these people with the least possibility of education as the example of Anglo-Saxonism.  In 1932 and 1933 following Mencken’s example Erskine Caldwell, a Communist writer, published two mammoth best sellers, Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre.  These books were especially mean and vicious making Mencken look laudatory in comparison.  Perhaps using Mencken and Caldwell as inspirations a Jewish cartoonist by the name of Al Capp created the L’il Abner comic strip in 1934.  This strip also ridiculed Anglo-Saxons but in a less demeaning manner that not only didn’t offend the majority but actually pleased them.  There were some few of us who saw through the sham but there was nothing obvious enough that the majority could see.

     Capp would be convicted on a morals charge late in his career that effectively ended his influence.  The motif was carried forward on television in the series Archie Bunker.

     Now, the Anglo-Saxons used to represent the whole were the custodians of the Folk music that was so revered by the New York City Jews of the late fifties and early sixties.  So you actually have Jews imitating Hillbillies.

      The vilification the Mountain Folk endured actually shamed the city Anglo-Saxons causing a dichotomy in their character.  They rejected the Mountain Folk as representing all Anglo-Saxons.  This is made quite clear in Caldwell’s novel when his urban relative throws his rural cousins out of his house and tells them to never come back.  Something like a son testifying against his father.  The Liberal-Conservative split was given a difinitive form.

     The Mountain Folk formed what Greil Marcus calls the Weird Old America.  After the Roosevelt administration was elected and the New Deal was established as a continuation of the Wilsonian New Democracy Jews flooded back into Washington as under Wilson.

     During the twenties as radio became a reality and recording technology became more widespread and available a number of Mountain Folk and/or White Trash as they were alternately known, recorded their distinctive music in their own voice.  Nor was this music ill received, many of the recordings were huge sellers according to the standards of the times while some like Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family became very successful recording acts.  Thus what was known as Hillbilly music until 1954 came into existence.  For whatever reason whoever controls these things thought the term Hillbilly was insulting so the various rural flavored musics were grouped under the term, Country and Western.  Hicks are hicks to me whatever you call them,  Hillbilly or Country, I’ve been called worse.  Having ancestors that came down from the Kentucky hills I have no objection to my Hillbilly ancestry.

     The Anglo-Saxon dichotomy was such that those who were shamed by Communist efforts had an extreme aversion to Hillbilly or Country music that they considered ignorant while professing to admire the Blues simply because it was performed by Blacks even though the intellectual content was well below that of Hillbilly music.

     Nevertheless the Hill Folk were the custodians of the old English folk traditions.  Folk music was then separated from Hillbilly music and approved on that basis.  Thus after the Roosevelt administration was installed in an effort to counter the Depression certain cultural programs were developed.  One involved the attempt to preserve the quaint customs and music of the Hill Folk and the rural Blacks.  These two peoples were treated as anthropological specimens on the same level as Tobriand Islanders and others.

     The New Deal of the Roosevelt administration was a direct continuation of Wilsonian New Democracy.  It was as though they’d never been gone.  With the creation of a huge new bureaucracy Jews came flooding back into Washington as they had in the two Wilson administrations.  In many if not most cases these people were the ones sent out to deal with our homegrown anthropological specimens as Superior to Inferior.  Sort of a domestic Peace Corps.  Yes, they did profess to revere the music of these simple folks.

     So Folk Music always had an honored place in Anglo-Saxon cultivated circles perhaps spurred to some extent by the ‘field’ recordings of the New Dealers.  Folk played a prominent part in popular music from the end of WWII on.  Foremost practioners of the genre were the Almanac Singers and their successors The Weavers.

     A key member of both groups was Pete Seeger.  Pete was both Jewish and Red.  This was a bad combination during the post-war anti-Communist reaction.  While making hits of a number of Leadbelly songs under Seeger’s guidance The Weavers had a major success with the Jewish melody Hava Nagila.  It was a catchy tune.  I liked it.

     Capitalizing on this success The Weaver’s under Seeger’s guidance concocted a ‘folk’ tune called Song of the Sabra celebrating Jewish ‘pioneer’ efforts in Israel.  Apparently the Sabras were some kind of hobo outfit that sat around campfires and ate stew a lot.  Thus the effort to detourne American Folk Music began.  The Song of the Sabras was so egregiously promotive of Israeli/Jewish interests that the song caused a big reaction.  If I remember correctly it was staged at least once on a TV version of the Lucky Strike Hit Parade.  That’s where I got the camp fire bit as Pete roasted his weeny and sang.  Whether it was an extra or supposedly in the Top Ten I can’t remember.

     Somewhere about then Seeger and The Weavers were found to be subservice giving a bad name to Folk Music as long as the genre lasted in 1966  or ’67.  The Weavers disappeared from the air waves.  However at least one member would be instrumental in guiding the musical direction of the Kingston Trio.

     Folk music continued strong between the demise of The Weavers and the emergence of the Kingston Trio both as popular music and ‘purist’ Folk.  The greatest of them all was Lonnie Donegan who had a successful career in the US and a tremendous impact on the British scene from England to Australia as Skiffle Music.  Josh White, Odetta, Harry Belafonte, Terry Gilkyson and the Easy Riders among others, one might add Mitch Miller, had many memorable folk tunes competing equally with Rock and Roll if not its superior.  If one considers the Presley Sun recordings objectively they also can be seen as Folk or highly influenced by Folk.  After all Elvis was known as the Hillbilly Cat.

     The Kingston Trio with their Tom Dooley that was an actual sensation in 1958 sort of broke the taboo against Folk music although the Kingstons were plenty subversive.  The great Chad Mitchell Trio emerged at this time also as an even more politically subversive group but also with a popular sound and enough bite to defuse Dylan’s claim to have introduced serious lyrics into popular music.  The Chad Mitchell Trio is probably running neck and neck with the Kingstons as my favorite folk groups although Terry Gilkyson along with the Pozo-Seco Singers are right behind them.  The old Seekers from Australia are hot stuff too.

     So that brings us up to Grossman’s Gate of Horn in Chicago of ’58 and the founding of the Newport Folk Festival in ’59 as well as Dylan’s entry into the New York Folk Scene in ’61.

3.

     After WWII the Jews had introduced the raw form of multi-culturalism designed to replace the Anglo-Saxon model of society with the Jewish.  With the election of the Irish Catholic John F. Kennedy it appeared that the Anglos had been defeated. 

     The next phase of the Jewish program was put in place.  The thing was to detourne or hijack American culture. 

     Detourning Folk music was part of it.  The study of Dylan concentrates on the New York City East Village group that was virtually Jewish with its specific outlook.  Actually the Folk scene was very diverse and different in its emphasis in each locale.  Bob would focus the entire Folk movement in himself.

     Boston with the Mel Lyman family and Jim Kweskin Jug Band, Geoff and Maria Muldaur was quite different from NYC.  The strictly commercial LA scene with Randy Sparks’ New Christy Minstrels had its own flavor.  In San Francisco Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter and others had credentials that easily matched those of Dylan.  The whole San Francisco Sound was Folk based.

     The top bands like Kingston Trio, Chad Mitchell Trio and semi-pop groups like the Brothers Four and the Christy Minstrels really carried the banner for folk.

     And then there was the Country or Hillbilly faction that was considerable.  Great old tunes like Jimmy Brown The News Boy were Country smashes.  Hank Snow recorded a passel of old Folk songs like Nobody’s Child.  New murder ballads appeared for people who like that sort of thing that were fabulous like Snow’s Miller’s Cave  and Lefty Frizzell’s dazzling The Long Black Veil.  It would be years before it was known that Veil was newly written and not an old Hillbilly song.  If you compare the Kingston’s  Tom Dooley with Frizzell’s Long Black Veil you can’t tell the difference.

     A word about Harry Smith’s  Anthology Of American Folk Music that Greil Marcus and Bob Dylan revere so much.  The collection is a very small selection of songs culled from a huge mass of material that just happened to fit Harry Smith’s personal psychosis.  Anyone going over the same mass of material could select an entirely different selection of songs that reflected their own personal outlook and would be just as ‘authentic.’  I mean, I heard The Cuckoo and I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground over the radio decades ago as a kid.  I was signally unimpressed.  I never called in to hear either again.  So as far as being some authentic voice of America I rather think the collection reflects Jewish and Communist ideals. 

     What is the message exactly of ‘I wish I were a mole in the ground, I would burrow until I brought that mountain down.’

     It that isn’t a call to detournement I don’t know what is.  So Harry Smith is Harry Smith and welcome to him but I have my own agenda.

     So Dylan left his old life behind to begin a new life in New york City but with an old agenda.  His secret agenda was to detourne American culture.  Of course the word ‘detourne’ was unknown in America at that time.  I have to thank Greil Marcus for adding that very useful word to my vocabulary.

     Bob started out detourning Woody Guthrie.  Within a couple months he had hijacked Woody’s life.  Clinton Heylin believes that even the Guthrie persona was second hand having been detourned from Jack Elliot who had of course detourned it from Guthrie.  Boy, there was another stone bore I never could listen to, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot.

     Dylan more or less confirms this in his Chronicles Vol. I.  I’m copying a quote from Chronicles as noted by Jim Kunstler in his excellent review of Bob’s memoir:

http://www.kunstler.com/mags_dylan.html

     Quote:

     “You’re trying hard, but you’ll never turn into Woody Guthrie,’ (John) Pankake says to me as if he’s looking down from some high hill, like something has violated his instincts.  It was no fun being around Pankake.  He made me nervous.  He breathed fire through his nose.  ‘You’d better think of something else.  You’re doing it for nothing.  Jack Elliot’s already been where you are and gone.  Ever heard of him?’  No, I ‘d never heard of Jack Elliot.  When Pankake said his name it was the first time I’d heard it.  ‘Never heard of him, no….’ Pankake lived in an apartment over McCosh’s bookstore, a place that specialized in eclectic, ancient texts, philosophical political pamphlets from the 1800s on up.  It was a neighborhood hangout for intellectuals and Beat types, on the main floor of an old Victorian house only a few blocks away.  I went there with Pankake and saw it was true, he had all the incredible records, ones you never saw and wouldn’t know where to get.  For somone who didn’t sing and play it was amazing he had so many….Pankake was right.  Elliot was far beyond me….I sheepishly left the apartment and went back out in the cold street, aimlessly walked around, I felt like I had nowhere to go, felt like one of the deadmen walking through the catacombs.  It would be hard not to be influenced by the guy….He was overseas in Europe, anyway, in a self-imposed exile.  The US hadn’t been ready for him.  Good.  I was hoping he’d stay gone, and I kept hunting for Guthrie songs.”

     Unquote.

     Of course the US hadn’t been ready for Elliot.  One Guthrie was one too many.  Who needed a Guthrie detourned by another Jew?  Let the English have Elliot.  But that didn’t stop Bob from detourning both Guthrie and Elliot when he got to the Big Apple.  He followed Elliot around studying and copying his mannerisms.  Elliot should have painted on his guitar the slogan:  This machine kills copycats.

     Well, no matter Bob learned his error when he learned another Guthrie copycat wasn’t needed in NYC but Bob had mastered a style, a persona on which he could build.  That was more than he had had before.

     Pete Seeger and the Jewish busybodies were busy fomenting discord in the South.  Already knee deep in the Big Muddy Seeger was encourging others to write political diatribe songs.  The path was clear and Bob met a girl named Suze Rotolo.  Rotolo worked at CORE.  She then encouraged Bob to write ‘politically relevant’ songs.  Well, what are you going to do but go with the flow, swim with the current? Bob didn’t like the topical songs though.  You have to give him credit for good sense there.  He wrote literary style lyrics that talked around the political issues without dealing with them directly.

     Now there were songs that other voices could sing.

     As a lyricist Bob was not a tunesmith so he merely borrowed tunes from old ballads and other people.  In other words he detourned Anglo-Saxon folk tunes grafting on Jewish sensibilities.  Heylin gives a perfect example in an exchange Dylan had with Martin Carthy in England.  Carthy showed him the old English ballad Greensleeves.  Bob dutifully learned the song.  Then he went away for a few weeks.  When he came back he collared Carthy and played him Greensleeves.  Here’s your Greensleeves he said.  Then he played the tune set to the words of Girl From The North Country.  Thus he detourned tune after tune to his own Jewish sensibilities.

     Now things were heating up on the Jewish revolutionary front.  The so-called Free Speech Movement was being launched at UC Berkeley.

     As I mentioned Jews could never be ‘free’ so long as they were merely part of a dominant other culture.  So ‘Freedom’ meant to them detourning the dominant culture so that their own law and culture was supreme.  Freedom for the Jews meant slavery for everyone else.  Thus we have Greil Marcus in the bleachers cheering his heart out at Free Speech rallies for ‘freedom.’  There were many of us in the bleachers much less enthusiastic.  But then we weren’t Jewish and we weren’t clear as to what was going on.

     Dylan as a Jew came to Berkeley to play where he was received as a hero by his fellow Jews.  Both must have been aware of what they were doing.  Jerry Rubin was the sparkplug whether Greil Marcus slyly disagrees with him or not.

     The revolt at Berkeley soon spread to Columbia and the rest of the Ivy League and across the country where it meshed with Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

     Dylan himself progressed from his political associations to Another Side of Bob Dylan in which he worked out his own personal problems in a Jewish social context in highly symbolic language.  The lyrics are complex, poetical and not easily understood.  the concept of ‘Freedom’ plays a prominent role.

4.

     Freedom as the idea of a complete lack of constraints developed in the latter half of the twentieth century.  Prior to this ‘freedom’ meant to be free so long as your own freedom didn’t conflict with the freedom of others.  Latterly it has taken the meaning that others be damned so long as one can do what one wants.  This entails the related notion:  consequences be damned.  Consequences won’t be damned so if one does the crime one must do the time.  I suppose the notion is that if you can run fast enough you can avoid the consequences.  I don’t know if one can but some have done a very presentable job of it.  Mao was one, Dylan is another.  Of course there was that one little incident at Redwing that didn’t work out too well but since then it has been fairly smooth sailing for Bob and he may leave the building without suffering too many serious consequences. 

     Now, in order to be free one has to dominate everyone else.  If one is obligated to an other then one isn’t free according to this latter day interpretation of ‘freedom.’  In that sense in the entertainment industry Frank Sinatra was as free as anyone has ever been.  The man need only place a call to anyone elses wife and she would leave her husband’s bed and run over and give Frank a blow job and there was nothing the husband could do about it.  This is no joke.  Sinatra could have anyone beaten up with impunity.  When he was offended by President Kennedy, Kennedy was shot.  There are those who maintain Frank had a hand in it.  Never been proven but there are reasons to so believe.  Frank Sinatra had ‘freedom’ while he escaped the most serious consquences dying in bed a very old man.  Alone and despised perhaps but then one can’t escape all the consequences.

     So while limiting himself to a field in which he could be successful Bob has perhaps been the most ‘free’ of the Rock ‘n Rollers.  He never took on Frank however and if he had he would have discovered the limits of his ‘freedom.’  Although Albert Grossman may have limited Bob’s ‘freedom’ somewhat I find it interesting that Bob came out at least even in his brush with the current Hollywood hard-on, David Geffen. 

     Now, Bob wasn’t so free that he could achieve his goals without leaning on or being dependent on others.  However to compensate himself he destroyed, trashed whoever and whatever he had used as stepping stones to achieve his ‘freedom.’  In the pursuit of his freedom he became a very vicious and nasty man.

     There is no reason to believe that at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival he wasn’t trashing the whole Folk scene that he had used to get him to the launching pad of his Rock ‘n Roll dream.

     The arguments about how or who brought Folk Rock into existence may well be interminable.  The fact is that both Folk and Rock at the time were stagnant.  Whether the music died in that corn field in Iowa in 1959 or not the big labels had pretty well tamed the music of the fifties.  Columbia had separated Dion from the Belmonts and had him singing standards to syrupy instrumentals.  Ruby Baby was his last great effort before Columbia detourned him.  Safe teen acts and emasculated falsettos dominated the airwaves .  By late 1963 and early 1964 the Folk ethic had worn out as Folk groups dressed in loden green pull overs and sang like the Brothers Four.  Even the emasculated and detourned version of   Michael Row The Boat Ashore couldn’t prop up Folk for long.

     So musicians had to be searching for something different if not new.  Folk Rock was as new as anything while the electric blues served as different.  Thus as the middle sixties came in one had Folk Rock, the electric blues and rough sounding garage bands like the Seeds.  Oh yes, that was another development temper tantrum teenagers screaming ‘I don’t want to be like anybody else.’  Not to worry. 

     Folk rock would have or did develop without any real help from Bob.  He already had electric recordings out so that if he didn’t want to stick it in their ear he could have done an acoustic set at Newport and let his electric side take its natural course.

     I’m not so sure even then that electricity was the problem.  Personally I welcomed the electric Bob.  I was glad to see him leave the Folk stuff behind.  I was on the West Coast but I didn’t run into many or any people who were emotionally involved.  Even Greil Marcus doesn’t seem to be put out by the change.

     I think you had to be emotionally invested in Bob the protest singer.  When that fellow in Manchester cried out Judas I would have to think that his problem wasn’t an electric guitar but the fact that Bob seemingly betrayed the political stuff he had been singing.  He had pandered to the protest crowd and now he wasn’t letting them down easy.  He was turning his back on them.  Rathr than being the standard bearer of spokesman for the generation that he had let them believe he was he now trashed everything they believed in.  They had given him his and now he didn’t need them anymore.

     His whole career was based on trashing his believers.  Not that I understood any of this at the time.  I didn’t even know about it and if I had I wouldn’t have cared.

     Positively Fourth Street was his ‘kiss my ass’ song to all those Folkies he had used and abused and now abandoned.

     An interesting aside that could use closer examination was his visit to Carl Sandburg in 1964.  All the biographers assume that Carl Sandburg snubbed Bob because he hadn’t heard of him.  Maybe, I can’t say but it is significant that Sandburg was a folksinger himself or, at least, he sang folk songs.  While Bob and Greil are enthusiastic about Harry Smith Sandburg himself had published his American Songbag in 1928 and then followed it up in 1950 with a new collection.  Unless he was brain dead in ’64 there is little reason to believe he hadn’t maintained his interest in folk into the sixties and kept up with it.

     After all the Christies were doing a number of songs from the 1928 Songbag so Sandburg must have experienced great satisfaction that everything he had been hoping for had come to pass.  I don’t know his singing style, and he did publicly perform the songs, but I suspect it was more Christy style than the cacophony of Bob.

     I don’t think it improbable that he in fact knew exactly who Bob Dylan was, had probably heard him on record and/or the radio and fully detested him,  so that when he opened his door and found Bob Dylan, let us say the folk devil himself, standing there he just froze.  It would be nice to know exactly what was said.  I think it unlikely that he would have been familiar with Paul Clayton but as Clinton Heylin suggests if he had dropped the needle into the groove there is little doubt which record would have been played through.

     If Sandburg had shown any preference for Clayton at all for any reason, manners for instance, there is little doubt that that sealed Clayton’s fate with Bob.

     If It’s All Over Now Baby Blue was a put down of Clayton which seems likely then the odds are that it was resentment over something that was said or done at Sandburg’s is the reason.

    That would have been added to the fact that Bob had stolen a couple tunes from Clayton that required the trashing of the man in ’64 to cover up the evidence.  One can’t hold it against Bob that Clayton committed suicide, after all, we’re all big boys here, but he must certainly have contributed to a deteriorating mental state.

      The trashing of Joan Baez also at this time doesn’t require further comment in this place.  Suffice it to say that Bob had taken hers to keep with his and now it was her turn for the circular file.  It is hard to believe Bob didn’t enjoy what he was doing amidst the flashing gongs on the road to ‘freedom.’

     In ’66 Bob’s mind broke.  He had what used to be called a nervous breakdown.  In his terms a motorcycle accident.  There was a long recovery period of several years.  I certainly  don’t hold the nervous breakdown against him.  He was pushing too hard.  Even if he had been straight he would have become distraught, but under the influence of what all his biographers agree were monumental amounts of drugs washed down with quantities of alcohol it is a wonder if not a miracle that he lasted as long as he did.  Apparently he was driven to complete the sound in his head and vomit out all his rage accumulated up there in the North country before he cracked.

     When he went down he went down hard but in pleasant enough circumstances.

     Why he came out isn’t clear unless it was to trash his fans.  It didn’t take much for me to catch on back then but then on the first hearing of Blonde on Blonde I realized he’d ridden his board all the way to shore.  From there he would have to start all over again while he would never catch a wave like that again. 

     Bob still had a lot of past to bury though.

     He achieved this in spectacular fashion in 1975 on his Rolling Thunder tour as an overseer on his very own Maggie’s Farm.  The tour mayby be considered as a vision of Plantation Bob.  And he was a sadistic overseer too.

     As Heylin points out the shows were over four hours long while Bob may have been on stage only a few minutes to a half hour or possibly a little more.  Thus his cast of characters were slaving on Maggie’s Farm while Maggie or Bob showed up from time to time to make sure his darkies were singing as they slaved.  A very good joke.  If you step back and look at it the gig is pretty transparent.

     Now, Dylan asked people if they were for it.  As the only ‘free’ man in the group Bob had no trouble in getting his victims to come on board his ship that had just come in.  The performers couldn’t have been paid much if at all.  The payroll and expenses of such an extravaganza couldn’t have been recouped at all.  If there was any money left over it went into Bob’s pocket.

     Bob reached way back in the past to bring Ramblin’ Jack Elliot aboard.  Bob owed Elliot a lot so the old man had to be trashed.  McGuinn was brought along because he had traded on Bob’s talent or else had done such sparkling versions of Bob’s songs that he had made Bob look bad.

     Phil Ochs wasn’t allowed to come along not because Bob had pity on his fragile mental state but simply because Bob didn’t owe him anything.  If he had had reason to trash Ochs you may be sure he would have.

     One may guess that he was already finished with Sara, his wife, as he not only allowed her to come along to witness his degenerate behavior but actually cast her as a prositute in his movie Reynaldo and Clara.  One just doesn’t allow the mother of one’s children much less a woman one respects to play a prostitute.  I find it unforgiveable while Sara took him for much much more than thirty-five million if Heylin and Sounes are correct which is pretty good wages of sin.

     As if that wasn’t enough Bob brought along his old inamorata Joan Baez to confront his wife, Sara.  Gratuitously cruel and unnecessary so I suppose Bob was attempting to trash his entire pre-1975 past.  Like a snake shedding his skin he was attempting to begin a new existence.

     Here his Frankist upbringing rose up to bite him because you can’t pour out that quart and half of evil.  As Bob said you can change your name but you can’t run from yourself.  Bob wasn’t released and one can never be released, only the truth can set you free.  You have to come to terms with yourself and acept things as they were and are.  Even then your freedom is conditional; at best you are only out on parole.  You can’t trash reality.

End of Exhuming Bob 2-2