John's final epistle to the anthropologisits

John’s Final Epistle to The Anthropologists: TRADOC at the Climax of the Neolithic Part I: Peeping through a Keyhole, Down upon My Knees We are virtually here to discuss with you something that I would call InTRADOCtrination: Intelligent Design for Retraining the Masses The Mission?: We suggest that it is The Locking-In: The Prison-Industrial Complex, well-documented and contextualized by Angela Davis. In fact, she traces my essay’s central themes. You Say You Want a Revolution? This line over here! The authentic cultural anthropologist’s problem with the militarized US government term, “the way forward”, is in its singularity. JA I do think that anthropology-informed and anthropology-induced reflections upon one’s own cognitive development over substantial life-time-frames can be generally instructive, in spite of proscriptions against “armchair anthropology”; and it can be entertaining, at least to oneself. And that is what I do in this essay. As a result of my own such reflections and ruminations on second-hand (media) information about current events and my contemplations to relate them to my existing framework for what is real, including ethnographic fieldwork, and then, to find a vehicle and a style in which to carry my creation to others, I write as I do; a sort of reflective, sometimes journalistic, JamesJoycean, belles lettres, Sergeant Pepper Round Table inner dialogue style. This is not rocket science, rather this is artistic research; the Rocket Science Symposium is in room number nine. When reading something in the Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual that mentioned the Radical Caucus at the 1967 DC meetings - where I finally met Mead when she introduced herself because she thought surely I was my teacher John Adair's son, as she stood there with her polished forked walking stick and other ethnic regalia – I was again reminded by that article, rich with revelations and references and reports and systematic explanations of the hidden factors; reminded that I am not systematically well-read in the background anti-militarization literature of the current AAA-related ‘radical caucus’; and, being long-disconnected from the professional associations other than WAC, I sometimes think that I must have been blind to what I was being subject to, because I didn’t have a full frame of reference back then; I was peeping through a keyhole down upon my knees. Then, I think back to that 1967 AAA Annual Meetings in Washington DC, where I am documented to have stood at the microphone and said to Dr. Carpenter after his paper on primate studies and the understanding of human war: I think that Dr. Carpenter neglected what I considered to be the main point  brought up by Dr. Holloway, namely that at least “modern war” is often the result of a conscious manipulation of shared symbols by a limited group within the society, perhaps for social, political, and/or economic ends. I wonder why Dr. Carpenter did not respond to this except to say that war was extra-legal. Would he care to comment on this now and also on the implicit suggestion that there is a certain responsibility on the part of anthropologists that goes along with this knowledge? So, I believed that I knew enough to stand at the microphone in a plenum session and get in the face of a leading anthropologist and I had an obvious opinion, an attitude and a smart-ass posture about this small effete issue in the larger frame of serious global problems, but, somehow, I had not linked it all together until the 2009-10 military experiences led me to reading some of the writings of the ‘radical caucus’ literature on Counterinsurgency and COINTELPRO. I wasn’t ready; couldn’t yet get insights from the information. Now, the reflections and memories all have a framework that I did not have when I stood there in 1967; and the importance of that framework is the background topic of this essay. . I am still fitting together this and the 76 years of life and observation inside this same phenomenological system. I find that weaving back and forth between new information on related work in anthropology and other fields and my own memories (dreams?) and reflections, is a very rich and entertaining enterprise. That's why Joan Didion's "Where I was From" was so stimulating; a few years older than me and also from the Central Valley with ties to San Francisco and Southern California, she did an amazing review of the "railroading" of California by those Supreme Somebodies; very well done auto-ethnographic biography by this ‘novelist’. I am currently concerned with the problem of finding a pattern in the larger context of memories of what one did or saw or heard at past times, times passed in a larger context that one no longer is given by one’s elders’ oral history, rather –sometimes explicitly sometimes covertly, subliminally or implicitly – this context, this history, this reasoning is currently given by the “media” – including public “education” which now “teaches” us and our children, mostly through “smart-board” and other digital social media and mass media, about the larger context in which our memories occurred. So, you see, you have memories; but, the context, the meaning, will be supplied.   That’s why I resent Windows 7 reorganizing my file structure! I seem to have a need to tie it all together my own way, into the system that I "inherited" as my worldview; or however that happens. This activity exercises a complex of brain functions that Gregory Bateson believed to be necessary to cultural continuity. I realize that some “science” might contradict my way. Where I Am Coming From Returning to university after Korea, I recall, about 1960, a discussion with a classmate at the University of California at Davis [yes, the friendly, trusting, honor-system honoring, “hi aggie!” campus where you could leave your bicycle unlocked or your briefcase and books laying on the grass in the Quad and find them when you returned, where you never locked your door, the place where the Campus Police were filmed spraying peaceful, seated demonstrators in 2011 with crowd-control chemicals. But, buried under that, I remember experimental beagle dogs confined to concrete “runs” enclosed, top and sides, in storm-fence. They were being exposed to varying, focussed doses of radiation, and the effects were studied through autopsy. And, I think this was just one in a chain of experiments that had been conducted since 1945, to investigate the possible uses of this new power source. It was pointed out to me the gray, narrow “scars”, a discoloration of the hair from black, brown or white to gray, like a scar, one or two inches in length, sometimes on parts of the head, sometimes in different parts of the body. I could only speculate.] This memory, in new context, suggests to me that President Hugo Chavez s suspicion that the improbably high frequency of cancer among socialist leaders in Latin America, especially in the pelvic area for the men, was not simply a skewed sample or some other reason for dismissal of the very idea! Who would do such a thing? And, how? [I can hardly wait for the outcome of the tests on the remains of Yassir Arafat.]. Dave, self-identified as a Southern California Jew, had been in the US Military; but, whereas I had been with the Army’s medical corps, he was in the Marines’ Military Police and later worked as a Yosemite Park Ranger – also essentially an armed Federal policeman. So, given that one’s livelihood greatly forms one’s consciousness, we looked at the same phenomenon differently. He was concerned with the issue of how to protect the Park’s landscape from more visitors than the health of the environment could tolerate. He talked about law enforcement classes in which the concern was how to condition and control the general population in the USA. Seat belts were an early increment of control mindset, and its induced, fear-based compliance mindset. ‘Click it or ticket!’ says the giant signboard. To me, my friend’s prescription seemed like livestock management, a popular interest at our State-owned, land-grant agricultural university, but quite changed from the days when they, the ‘cowboys’ and the cows – including the bulls, roamed the range together until roundup time. It only reflects a trend in the mega-agri-business. Now it is birth, life and death on a meat manufacturing feedlot assembly line. Sidebar: There is a simile in this for the birth, life and death of an academician. He/she is the customer, raw material and the product of the establishment-validated educational corporation from which he/she seeks a “diploma”, a “degree”, her “entitlement” in anthropology to teach that subject at some university. Well, we now have the cow in the killing chamber, diploma in hand, she has paid all the tuition for her degree and is carrying a $70,000 student loan debt, and now we tell her of the prognosis for teaching jobs in anthropology. ... time for tough love: ... Sorry! but, ... [then the electric prod] Say! I just heard of a great opportunity to do applied fieldwork for the Department of Defense. Way above MY salary, starts next month, all expense-paid training; hotel suite, perdiem, car and gasoline provided ... Interested? My friend, Dave, from a middle-class professional family, foresaw a future need for a combination of great control over the behavior of hundreds of millions of people, and the need of fostering the impression that the New Rules were demanded by the People -  a Mandate; and that the rules were democratic and scientific.   That is, he saw a need to “domesticate” the people, to reshape the Frontier Mentality that had served the conquorers well; but it is now time to “educate” them into a corporate-designed, government-monitored mazeway with gates to be opened by correct performance and rewards for following instructions or for achieving assigned goals. So, like me, the Designers have a need to “fit it all together”. But, surely you see the difference between what I am fascinated with fitting together, and that which They want to reduce to Total System Design. I want to control my mind. They also want control of my mind. Seems un-American to me. I mean, “democracy”? Is that democracy? I was a country boy born in a rural dirt-road Los Angeles of Spring 1937, chickens and rabbit pens in the yard, after age 7 raised in rural Kern County in a transient farm workers’ and oil fields workers’ unpaved dusty-roaded, jerry-rigged “development” amidst the oil fields and the yet-unfenced agricultural fields and miles and miles of open alkaline rabbit brush landscape dotted with the abandoned subsistence farms from the 1920s and 30s, an isolated group of pre-hippy home-made houses, with no sewers and no streetlights. After my father died (just before my tenth birthday), I became accustomed to roaming with my dog, King, the still unsettled, semi-desert countryside carrying my .22 rifle – earned by the other kind of “fieldwork”, picking cotton – hunting whatever moved and was edible, visiting the houses and barns and windmills of the widely scattered, always-abandoned subsistence farming attempts – already under the ownership of a few land-empires, an “investment” laying fallow until their plan was ready; private empires such as Bank of America, DiGiorgio Corporation, Gallo Corporation, and other large nodes on the network that designed the railroads to fit their enterprises as well; a twelve-year-old, with a dog and a rifle, unaware of all that, exploring parts of the Earth-Mind where no man had ever gone before. These things and others are part of the background, the absolute upright, against which I can make a comparison to the things happening in the USA and globally, today; drones, i-phones and all. This is a sample of my daily life then, not while at “summer camp”. I think the reality of it might be difficult for many urban/suburban people today to believe was the reality in 1950 California, not alot like the display-window version of “American” in 1950 as presented in the Sunday “funnies”, the suburban neighborhood of Dagwood and Blondie Bumstead, a foreign world to my family’s neighborhood. Ours was rather more like the Dogpatch of Li l Abner, or the world of Huckleberry Finn. Here’s a taste: I could feel the mud squishing up between my toes as I carefully put my weight on the forward foot and moved the right foot forward into position, in the pitch-black darkness, feeling for a place between the narrow fringe of tules lining the bank. I could see the tear-shaped oval of pearly white glowing in the beam of the flashlight in my left hand. One more step and I was close enough and positioned with my left foot forward. I raised my right hand firmly gripping the long wooden handle of the gig, which I had adapted from a broken hoe handle and had seated and nailed the end into the socket of the 25-cent piece of metal with three barbed prongs resembling the trident of the Greek God, Poseidon – called Neptune by the Romans and Shiva by the Hindus – and brought it slowly into alignment with a spot just behind that pearly oval, lowered it down closer above and just behind the white throat of the large bull frog, frozen in the bright beam, unable to see anything around him. We were in Yokuts Tribal Territory, but I didn’t know it then; the Yokuts people being already long-removed to a “Rancheria”. I was gigging frogs from a large branch of the Kern-Friant Dam’s irrigation network that guided water from the Sierra Nevada Mountains to this dry, alkaline area of the southwest San Joaquin Valley to water the lands recently acquired using hook or crook, by the emerging corporate caudillos of California. The frogs were to take home for my mother to cook for us. I was twelve years old. The gunny sack carried by another, smaller boy waiting on the dirt bank above, was now half full, and the skyline was showing the slightest hint of a thin, deep violet silhouette above the angular peaks of the high Sierra Nevada Mountains on the eastern horizon. After gigging this one and pulling it wriggling from the barbs of the gig, and putting it atop the squirming cargo inside the burlap, we called it a night and headed home, the legs all a’dangling down-Oh! By the time we had walked barefoot the several miles back along the levee road that was the right-of-way for the vehicles of the Water Master and the ditch tender, trading off carrying the heavy sack – the sky would then be getting light and we would spend a couple hours in the backyard of my house where I lived with my mother and two brothers in one of the randomly built houses on 50’X 150’ lots in the “development” on someone’s old “homestead” of 320 acres, about ten or fifteen miles, driving on two lane country highways in a neighbor’s 1937 Ford sedan between fields of the irrigated farmland south of Bakersfield, where Tom Joad had hitch-hiked his way in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, the dusty alkali fields captured in the works of the Dust Bowl WPA documentary photographer Dorothea Lange – teacher of my teacher, John Collier, Jr. – who had visited and photographed the lives of the refugees. In our back yard, shaded from the direct heat of the now scorching sun, among the apricot and peach trees around the garden that my father had made before his death, I dispatched the bullfrogs with my hunting knife, severing them just behind the front legs with the help of a hammer to the back of the blade – because there is not enough on the small human-like hands and the front legs to trouble with – then using pliers to pull the slimy skin from the meaty back and hind legs. Finally, washing the froglegs clean in a large, enameled metal basin, I proudly carried them to my mother who was now in the kitchen making breakfast for the hunters. By lunchtime, they’d be rolled in cornmeal and flour with salt and pepper and fried crisp in bacon grease saved by mother in a tuna fish can on the stove, with a flavor and texture that, all would agree, is “better than chicken”. Methodology So, friends, instead of the current fad of massive digital data trawling to create overwhelming tsunamis of information as proof of the minute details of that which is obvious, I find myself satisfied with foraging information here and there, a bit of this a bit of that as needed, but pleased at sitting and staring at my potted Improved Meyer Lemon tree, loafing*, and reflecting upon the relationships between things I already know, and finding the perfect fit for the new stuff, which changes everything; and observing what that change induces in my overall view of what I now understand. It takes a lot of patience and energy to do this. * "loafing", as in, It is almost impossible for a civilized man to form any conception of the degree of intimacy with nature this represents. No civilized man would ever have the patience and energy to loaf in a wild place long enough to catch this subtle rhythm of interactions. [The Background of Religious Feeling in a Primitive Tribe". (Jaime De Angulo, 1926 , Amer. Anthrop. 28: 352-360)] I hope that my contributions also have some other value than my own philosophical pleasure. According to the Club of Rome projections for 2052, that class of human faculty might be leaving the repertory of Homo sapiens as the mind is “externalized”, as did the typewriter become extinct when electronic printing from digital “typewriters” became The Way Forward into Teilhard’s Technosphere; and I finally gave up my Olivetti and my Nagra.   Well, that was a long preface. Now we can begin. First I will show you the pieces. Then I will paste them together. It might seem a bit choppy at first, but then it will gain focus. You’ll get the picture. A Point, a Ground Zero from Which to Reckon The context, background or Absolute Upright, an Ecology of Mind, a bench mark, a mirror for man, something other than yesterday’s news stories on My Yahoo! Home Page from which to measure, as a background against which to portray the State of The USans’ current existence for this essay’s purpose would include something like this: This article emphasizes the basis for my current concern with multiculturalism and, moreover, with the different way that a "primitive" or aboriginal society, collectively and individually views the world and lives in it; compared to a group of individuals many generations uprooted from such societies and absorbed into the workforce and armies of Empire, people who came recently, individually or with nuclear family, to a place for a job, living together separately in an industrially planned, production- and consumption-focussed urban community, each against the others competing for a better foothold, often recently dislocated, colonialized or conquered, in a rapidly increasing world population of humans that is increasingly dominated by industrial age colonialism enhanced and expedited by Information Technology. Speaking for the consciousness of pre-industrialized humans such as I, we aboriginals living beyond the Empire, as represented by the Pit River, or Ajumawi “Indians” of the upper sources of the Sacramento River in northeast California and southeast Oregon, northwest North America, speaking of and for them was Jaime de Angulo, a physician-psychiatrist-turned-anthropologist. He was born in Paris, France in 1887 of aristocratic, expatriate Spanish parents. He graduated from John Hopkins Medical School and then spent several years travelling before settling into a career as a linguist and anthropologist at Berkeley; an “eccentric” contemporary of Edward Sapir, A.L. Kroeber and Franz Boas. He wrote in 1926: I had always wanted to live with really primitive people, real Stone Age men, and see how they thought, and felt. I had read books on primitive psychology, some of them excellent books like Levy-Bruhl's (who, by the way, never left Paris, or so I am told), but I wasn't convinced. All that was too theoretical. Really primitive people, not like the already cultured Indians of the Southwest with their sun-worship, their secret societies, their esoteric ceremonial. But real Stone Age men... Well, these had been it, until a very short time ago. Here was Jack Folsom who was a little boy when the first white men arrived. Was there anything left? How much had they changed? My God, think of it, to pass in one lifetime from the stone axe to wireless telegraphy! Indians in overalls. No, there was nothing picturesque about these Indians, no feather headdresses or beaded moccasins, nothing to delight the tourists about these "digger Indians" in their battered hats and cheap calicos, picking the offal of the whites on the garbage dumps at the edge of town. My Indians in overalls! ,,,, The Indians had to live somehow or other -- they had received a few pieces of land, here and there, from the Government, mostly rocky spots without water, useless -- in the Summer's haying time they could make a few bucks working for the white ranchers -- the rest of the time, who in the hell cared? The sons-of-bitches were no good, liars and thieves, let them all die. (Indians in Overalls, p.12) "Animals are not imbeciles. There is in the life of wild things in a wild setting a multitude of interactions to which the mind of civilized man is not attuned because it is of the necessity oriented to another aspect of mental energy, namely the rational. To understand the psychology of the Pit River people, it is necessary to visualize their extremely intimate contact with the trees, the rocks, the weather and the delicate changes in the atmosphere, with the shape of every natural object, and, of course, with the habits not only of every species of animal but of many individuals. It is almost impossible for a civilized man to form any conception of the degree of intimacy with nature this* represents. No civilized man would ever have the patience and energy to loaf in a wild place long enough to catch this subtle rhythm of interactions. (*”this” being the Ajumawi’s science, the cumulative shared observations through the lens of a unique species of human sensibilities, the summary equations of generations of observations and commentary refined and condensed into collective knowledge and reflections upon millenia of intimate residence in that landscape – east of the south end of the Cascade Mountain Range in the drainage basin that feeds the Pit River and then the Sacramento River of California, beginning at the south end of Goose Lake, in Oregon; primarily high desert and juniper/pine mountain country – as it passes through short and long cycles of repetitive and unique changes, informing the cumulative, collective pre-industrial adaptation of one human community, long living among the other living forces coevolving as a life community within the larger local landscape. As I read him, Jaime’s writings transmit/teach this viewpoint on these peoples.} [Jaime de Angulo, “The Background of Religious Feeling in a Primitive Tribe”] Of course, de Angulo did practice loafing with his Indians in Overalls, and was even accused by Kroeber of rolling in ditches with drunken shamans , and Kroeber warned graduate students not to attend parties at Professor de Angulo’s house. Truly in the tradition of the California School of Anthropology, livin’ the dream, surfin’ out beyond the waves. That gnarl of gnocions, with Jaime’s observations, if thought upon, will make a good larger framework in which this article will find a meaningful benchmark from which to determine our current, shared societal trajectory and to plot our navigation, if we can take control of the rudder. How to Think about It: Designing Mind So, let the above, about the world of aboriginal peoples, and the world of 1950 rural San Joaquin Valley of California, act as the frame, the absolute upright, a benchmark from which we can measure our current position and trajectory. Let me focus the above portrayals of aboriginal, pre-enclosure worldviews on a comparison to our own current society by referring to commentary by Gregory Bateson, who called himself a biologist but who was (ac)claimed as an anthropologist – from an English aristocratic background, his father, Sir William Bateson, a biologist, was an associate of Huxley, Darwin, Wallace and all that – who became a naturalized US citizen during middle-age. Bateson observed the US population, including the highly educated, to be long on the brain functions that have to do with creativity and innovation, but short on those that tend to transmission of traditions, rote memory, accumulated shared cosmology and shared sense of societal identity, local unity, values and worldview; in other words, those faculties that continue the cumulative transmission of a society’s culture. (Personal Conversation 1977.) My opinion is that this gestalt of the USans’ mind, which Gregory describes, is designed by Intelligent Design. I am not speaking of God, but of something else that is here and now and has long dogged the masses of peoples who are left in chaos and desperate, without means to survive, after conquest and dispossession. They can perceive no alternative other than to work for the Empire. Drinkin' rum and Coca-Cola Go down Point Koomahnah Both mother and daughter Workin' for the Yankee dollar It's a fact, man, it's a fact Rum and Coca-Cola Rum and Coca-Cola Workin' for the Yankee dollar This includes you and me. This designing process, its on-going processes and experimentation in planning and execution, and the identity of the Intelligent Designers is what I will now excavate and bring into some general clarity. Anyone who gets troubled by paranoid visionaries with Sergeant Pepper writing styles and too many collateral links should disembarque now. Classmates and Lessons in Leavenworth As I sat in the Fort Leavenworth Human Terrain System (HTS) classes on various topics related to how the wars will be fought in this [note: Roman! Numerals] XXI Century after the Romans crucified an Aramaic-speaking, dissident leader of a People’s Uprising in Palestine – currently an everyday event with Israel representing the Pontius Pilate, I reflected upon my surprise at how many members of the class, both in uniform and in civilian clothes had worked in various aspects of “intelligence” (spying) and “public information” (ideological indoctrination). Paul Ryan would have fit right in; but he already had a good job. It began to become clear that – though it was centrally controlled and top-down – there are no institutional nor corporate boundaries to the military “intelligence collection” and indoctrination, including the related activities of active, purposive ‘mind-shaping’ (their term). The Brothers in Arms for the global militarization of “information and training” within Training and Doctrine functions included major universities – e.g.: Stanford, Chicago, Brown, Harvard, Yale, U of Nebraska ..., worldwide corporations like NCR, IBM and Dell, GE and RAND Corporation, McDonald-Douglas; private contracting anthropologists and we HTS cadets, relative to average workers with our qualifications, were all living ‘high off the hog’ on government funds, not just scavenging the pig’s feet thrown to us from the Lord’s Table ... ... funds that were taxed from the USA Peoples for a program to develop an Iron Dome control of Human Terrain both domestic and foreign. Like Egyptian Pharaohs’ slaves, the tax-paying citizen is paying for and constructing one’s own final enclosure, Pharaoh’s property. Among the cadets and instructors in my cycle were a Dominican – an Army career intelligence technician, an Anglo career soldier and former reporter/editor for Stars and Stripes, a refugee Pashtun from Los Angeles with a philosophy MA degree, a native West African with an MA degree in linguistics, an Anglo female private “anthropologist” contractor who worked to promote Hollywood films with overseas investors now teaching “Ethnographic Method”, two other anthropology Ph.D. instructors with specialties in network analysis, one at RAND, the other – I think – at MacDonald-Douglas, a self-identified Zionist Jew from small town Nebraska with a masters a.b.d in History and a passion for creating battlefield strategies with toy soldiers; a Trinidadian Indian New Yorker anthro with a status Ph.D. from England with research in the urban illegal drug market society; a married woman from Mississippi with an MA in Medieval French History and a passion for dressage (a Mitt Romney favorite sport); a colonel in TRADOC doing his PhD thesis at Armed Forces University whom my writing suggests was an embedded provocateur; a retired general from some non-combat specialty; ... ....everybody was plugging into the Department of Defense funding designed to manage the Human Terrain, globally. We were like fish in a deep-sea trawler’s net as we took the generous chum money and found ourselves caught in The Mission. The Military Mafia And the background is a network of Brothers in Arms who worked together to ‘clear and hold’ this niche in the United States’ Federal Budget terrain, and who also controlled the curriculum. After all, they were the only ones in the negotiations who controlled the buttons. Yes, THOSE buttons, just like in Egypt! Administrations, Congresses and Court Judges come and go, but the military is the river of power that runs through it. Behind them stands the Supreme Something from which the appearance of power flows. No, I’m not talking about the Supreme Cybernetic System, the label that Bateson has given to the God Function, in his epistemology, his own metaphor. To qualify for the exceptional money offered – even in the training program of the US Army’s Human Terrain System, these men and woman had worked in or advised every aspect of the government. Many had worked directly in the military branch, serving in functions ranging from Special Ops snipers to INTEL Technicians, and some had worked for the strings-attached funding for such functions in all branches of the federal and even local government – Forest Service, Park Service, Department of Interior, municipal, State and County police with embedded military interests ... all having National Security functions in case of emergency, both constructing news releases and gathering intelligence globally and among the US civilian population. And of course many had worked for, subcontracted from or are still on the payroll of private corporations such as RAND, IBM, GE, NCR, etc. who get their lion’s share of DoD-funded contracts, with wink-and-smile competition between the myriad of US military veteran-owned corporations who are assured of a cut – like my sub-contractor, CLI, or the prime contractor BAE, from which CLI had been opportunistically spun off during an ethics violation that caused BAE’s temporary disbarment – they were all connected by the safety net of the Brothers in Arms, Inc. We see among them those buying editing power over the media; not only the Conservative media, but also the Progressive media – even backhand funding of Hollywood films such as Zero Dark Thirty – and the common acknowledgment among these men and woman that “If you control the media and you say it is true, it is true.”; and the acceptance of the government’s claim that this is the nature of the War on Terror, we have to work extraordinary renditions to The Dark Side while keeping US citizens fat, happy, resigned to the call for Austerity, living in the spun net of delusion and in full support of taxes to pay the immediate and future monetary costs of the Global War on Terror; The Long War. Senator Robert Byrd got it right in his speech to Congress, dissenting against the invasion of Iraq through deceit of the People, President Eisenhower warned us about it half a century earlier. But, just to be sure all the USans are happy and not resisting nor dissenting, from Kansas to Hollywood, We are Watching You! And, we USans have our secret methods of marking unidentified men as drone targets! So? Everyone makes a mistake now and then; one can’t be too careful, you know. It’s all there, ... er ... I mean HERE, in the USA, which includes, or is included in Israel – proteksia – fruits which we, the “flotsam and jetsam”* of professional anthropology were greedy to harvest – coercion and threat of violence, the Stockholm Syndrome and massive “detention facilities”, if needed. Sidebar: The Flotsam and Jetsam of a Discipline in the Throes of Death and Rebirth *I rather liked how a commenter on Zero Anthropology’s recent HTS article used this phrase to describe me and my anthropologist compañeros HTS Cadets; brothers, arm-in-arm with the military, pigging out on the outstanding compensation. His description of us as “flotsam and jetsam” matched my own biographical sketch for ZA, where I begin by saying I had washed up here on the coast of California in a big storm. The big storm was my Year with the Military (the Fort Irwin Whistle Blowing Caper and the Leavenworth Double Agent Caper) and a few personal-life developments that washed me out to sea. Washed-up, flotsam and jetsam of the anthropology market place where universities offer the degree and cut the faculty; like you, we flotsam are!, trying to stay afloat in the capitalist economy where the decline in the utilization of anthropologist UHUCUs in the emerging global, capitalist socio-economic system will move us all into the waste basket of Teilhard’s Technosphere, is now near the ‘bottom of the barrel’. This while a new “anthropology” is being born from the behaviorist-designed New World Order University (NEWOU) and into its own “operant conditioning chamber”, or Skinner Box. Just a little reprogramming of the younger but old-viewpoint anthropologists, such as in the HTS cadet training at Leavenworth, all mixed in with groups of battle-hardened troops, and the old-fashioned anthropologists are stripped of their notion of The Mission, and are given The True Mission, the American Mission, ... ...and their anthropology will be revolutionized! (weaponized, trivialized). ... and if they complete their retraining, then they are qualified to sit on a throne in the Virtual UHUCO Super Market “Anthropologist” Shelf until a budget space on a project, or “mission” is liberated. Of course; they will have a Right to Work in the mean while – for example, flipping burgers, or driving cab – in fact, it’s either sink or swim for food, shelter and medical care there on the shelf. Whatever you can do to support our troops in the mean while. Sorry, only applied anthropology work, embedded with the troops or working in the data processing labs in crisis situations; no more teaching jobs. The TRADOC advisors have found that anthropologists are vulnerable to enemy combatants’ brain washing and they begin to teach subversive thought to students. Teaching the New Anthropology will be the responsibility of TRADOC and will be conducted via approved video segments like any other training except actual combat, which mandates kinetic training of the physical body. This new anthropologist, in addition to being able to chart social networks, make colorful charts and graphs, mastering the fine art of five-minute PowerPoint presentations and making guesses about Key Leaders look like certain, scientific proof justifying their liquidation, also will be well equipped to do marketing research! more jobs! Yep, anyone todavia working at a university as an “anthropologist” is the last of them apples. Is that OK – to say that? I mean, if they cut the The Blue Angels aerial acrobatics jet fighter show from the DoD Budget, this is real! What’s “real”? asked the Velveteen Rabbit. Will anthropology “die”? There, there, now. There is nothing to fear! The Corporate-Academic Mafia And, the whole proprietary nature of “data” emerges from the same source of the capitalist societally-cultured emphasis on competition over cooperation as foils most attempts at creating collectives in the USA. So, the ethnographer’s field research notes – the “data”, if you want to play “scientist” – becomes a highly protected commodity that aids him/her in The Struggle (his/her personal struggle for personal success) and must be kept from others until he/she/they have taken ownership by copyright publications. One of my first shocks in being a specialist in the Hindu Kush area, where there were, in 1970, only about five living, established (meaning ‘establishment’ and not indigenous) anthropologists with fieldwork there, mostly northern Europeans. When I wrote to ask about the findings of one of these, he drew a clear boundary that made the above very clear to me. This is MINE! You cannot see it, which caused me to remember my daughter during the Terrible Twos, taking a toy from her little friend, Sam, and saying for the first time in her life, “No Sam! Mine!” You see, it is not that he and I are doing this task of building knowledge together. We are competing to be the one who is recognized and compensated for manufacturing a copyright, commoditized product from it. What a loss of potential! Private ownership drives the ship of state. Unchar(i)table Greed. If you think you can escape, try to change mobile phone corporations and use YOUR OWN PHONE in a different service provider; Are you ready for prison? ... and, yes, I am aware that the feds suddenly reversed fields when there emerged strong resistance from high and massively from below. But, the very idea that it had been put into place. The very idea! But, then the Assault Weapons Ban ran into the other end of Resistance, fueled by arms manufacturers and their zealous backers. And, if you still believe that this is really Free Enterprise country, try to start your own local community internet service provider to avoid the commercialization, government spying and the control of the major corporations. Community self-designed internet is being blocked. The profits of great corporations, too big to fail, are soaring while the workers fall further behind the increased costs. However, things are looking up in Detroit, but only for the rich. The citizens are now under the iron fist of a manager chosen by the 1%, and he is kicking ass, the worker’s ass. The People’s ass: “... business leaders here said they had been well aware of the government’s misery — and defiantly moving on in the face of it — for years." It is being demonstrated at this moment in Cyprus, Greece, and soon might be in Portugal, Ireland, Spain, Italy ... (but, it can't happen here!), that our "bank accounts" are not really ours, they belong to the Coalition Forces of Empire. “Everything has sort of been operating on separate tracks,” said Kurt Metzger, director of Data Driven Detroit, a nonprofit organization that tracks demographic, economic and housing trends in the region. “The business and philanthropic communities had basically just decided to go ahead in spite of government.” So, now we know who wears the pants in THIS house! Meanwhile Federally-funded private contractors are building massive “detention facilities” to contain any dissident citizens detected or suspected to be involved in suspicious activities. These citizens are immediately classed as agents of Al Quaeda and “terrorists”, “Islamists” or “enemy combatants” – “commies” have apparently lost status as a security threat and reason for incarceration and defamation. The contractors are allowed to factor into their costs – which YOU pay, citizen – a certain generous profit margin. Well! I mean, this AIN’T SOCIALISM here. Ya hear? Here, it’s called Brotherhood, Family. If you are with us, I’ve got your back. If not, ... best sprout eyes in the back of your head! Then we can aim between the eyes from either side. The Prison-Industrial Complex fits very well with Capitalism lessons. San Quentin inmates are eager to start their own high-tech companies, with abundant human resources to employ, cheap! The prisoners are being taught Entrepreneurship 101. I betcha they would be eager to get a degree in anthropology. They could do their first fieldwork gathering key leader information among their colleague inmates. A captive student body. Yes Sir! The Military-Media Mafia Hybrid Meet Barbara Gall, who wrote an article in the NY Times, declaring, Villagers Take on the Taleban in their Heartland. Suspicious, I read her bios, and, voila, she is quite inside the military: embedded, we say. Carlotta Gall is a reporter covering Pakistan and Afghanistan for The New York Times; she has been based in Afghanistan since November 2001. From 1999 to 2001 Ms. Gall worked in the Balkans, also for The New York Times, covering the wars in Kosovo, Serbia and Macedonia and developments in Bosnia and the rest of the former Yugoslavia. She began her newspaper career at The Moscow Times, in Moscow in 1994, and covered the first war in Chechnya intensively for the paper, among other stories all over the former Soviet Union. During that time, she also freelanced for the British papers The Independent, The Times and The Sunday Times, as well as The New York Times, USA Today and Newsweek. In 1998 Ms. Gall moved to the Financial Times and The Economist where she reported on the Caucasus and Central Asia from Baku, Azerbaijan. She is the co-author with Thomas de Waal, of "Chechnya: A Small Victorious War" ..., also published as "Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus" Ms. Gall was educated in England and read Russian and French at Newnham College, Cambridge. She received a Master's degree from City University, London in International Relations and Journalism. She speaks three languages. As hurricanes and snowstorms are described in the mass media as historic and there emerges a general agreement between major media corporations on the nature of the “real world” – ...as a kind of diversion from work that is called “news, weather and entertainment”; an agreement upon the weaving of reality in stories that present only what TRADOC buys. A communication gap between generations – caused by the use of people as UHUCU rather than as people who own their own labor and who are embedded in extended family and local community – is exploited by the “media” inserting a non-localized, one-on-one communication medium and spreading the word that any child without an iPod is an abused child, a child left behind. [See Rule Number 1 (in Part II) for captured revolutionary forces.] I begin to sense that something else is going on here, in our “media”; something all-encompassing, which Rachael Maddow documents here, just how common is the government’s use of prepared “News” on Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria; and also the suppressing competitive news that contradicts the fictions. The Wisdom of the Elders [Photo, about 1930, seven years before me, outside our home in rural Los Angeles,] Meet my father – trade-mark home-made corncob pipe in mouth, a “half-breed” (French-Shawnee), born near Joplin Missouri, 1870, a long-time hobo, a Wobblies’ (IWW) steel workers’ union organizer in Southern California from about WWI to the late 1930s, veteran of billy-club and rifle-butt attacks by police and National Guard. He had prepared me well with words to describe it when I finally had the eyes to see it: “Jigger” – his nickname for me, “don’t believe anything you hear; and only half of what you see.” he said; and that was before TV and oleomargarine* and before the internet and before iPad and iPod and all the super social media devices we are so blessed with in this free country of ours today. *Yes, I even remember before Oleomargarine, which was another lie, with its little capsule of imitation food color to make it look just like butter as you knead the orange dye from the popped gel capsule through the soft, white, high-cholesterol palm nut grease sealed in the plastic sack until uniform, chill it, and spread it on bread, and ... what a disappointment! But, now I know about palm nut plantations from Indonesia to West Africa that earn $billions for the mega-corporate owners and processors/advertisers/distributors; so it all makes more sense? My father refused to eat it. Pass the butter, please. (Yes, there was a time – long before texting, before TV in every room – when the family ate meals together and communicated without machines, and said, “Please pass the butter”. Read Dagwood and Blondie if you don’t believe me.) The Come-Uppance; The Turning of the Prey So, now that NATO is retreating from the tireless, insistent, fiercely bold attacks of the Afghan resistance, the embedded journalists tell us: As Marines Exit Afghan Province, a Feeling That a Campaign Was Worth It “I think history has proved it was the right thing to do,” General Amos said of the 2009 decision to increase the Marine presence in Helmand. “It doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous. It doesn’t mean it couldn’t turn overnight. But I don’t think it’s going to turn.” Yes, Sir! No Sir! Sir! It’s gonna turn! It’s gonna turn all right, Sir. Sir! It HAS TURNED. It has finally turned on you; ... Sir! ... and so you are leaving, just like the English left twice; like the Russians left. That s the truth of what s happening. YOU now must also go! As Bob Dylan sang about another retreat when another war in another land led to disaster on so many levels: You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast Yonder stands your orphan with his gun Crying like a fire in the sun Look out! the saints are comin' through And it's all over now, Baby Blue. All your seasick sailors, they are rowing home Your empty handed armies, are all going home Your lover who just walked out the door Has taken all his blankets from the floor The carpet, too, is moving under you And it's all over now, Baby Blue. Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you The vagabond who's rapping at your door Is standing in the clothes that you once wore Strike another match, go start anew And it's all over now, Baby Blue. Saying Goodbye to the Occupier, the Afghan Peoples are yet civil to invited guests, just as they were after driving out the British twice, after driving out the USSR; retaining dignity; they say,. Khodahafez! Photo, John Allison, 1969, Maimana, Faryab Province, Afghanistan: A Shia story teller creatively adapting traditional historic narratives to current concerns, providing The Fundamental Principles in traditional poetic orations. Our colleague. Dr. Jamil Hanifi, an Afghan-USan anthropologist, provides us some insights into this image shell: The rituals of battle-ax tabarzin (from the Persian tabar, ax) and verse eulogists (Persian/Arabic maddahan; sing. Maddah from the Arabic maddha, praise). Please carefully note that tabarzin and maddahan are features of Shi’a communities. There are elaborate and rich banks of narratives for these eulogies. Thus, there is a great deal of room for rhetorical creativity and interpretation. The presence of this ritual performance in the Sunni environment of Maimana is very unusual. Also, note that tabarzin/maddahi rituals among Sunni communities, especially Pashtuns, would be out of place. Complicated regional links with tasawuf should also be explored—especially involving the roaming kashkuli mendicants, darwishes, and malangs. Photo, John Allison, 1969: Gate to the Inner Garden, Faryab Province, Afghanistan John’s Final Epistle to The Anthropologists: TRADOC at the Climax of the Neolithic PART II: The New Intelligent Design of Human Society and Anthropology   Nobody in the USA or in the UN has proposed a bill – that I am aware of – for The People to vote on the fundamental topics of our era. We need to discuss such notions as whether we want to be competitive troops in a global, top-down corporate Empire's war, to continue to become more commoditized, depersonalized and uniform although with an exponentially expanding myriad of trivial, “creative”, commercial choices; or to assert our rights to be co-operative communities in our collective society and environment and to face hard choices and harder paths of action to scale back to a sustainable population, self-organized into locally-adapted communities using appropriate technologies, from fingers and thumbs to solar, wind and water. Phosphorescent Fruit Loops anyone? Maybe They think that The Peoples are not properly informed to discuss this – I can’t IMAGINE why! They need to be “educated”?. Or maybe because this is an “extra-legal process”, a “private matter”, where government can control The Masses, but not the corporations, even though corporations have standing as “persons” in the USA legal system. Nevertheless, it appears that THEY, posing as We the People, are well along the way to actualizing a dream of an automated Empire in which UHUCU (Universal Human Capital Units) are almost universal in their work capabilities within a given, but changing skill stratum (currently consisting of executive, clerical, technical, labor) – completely substitutable like Henry Ford’s standard parts, and have no permanent social attachments or “home” environment, having been “raised”, or brooded, in a standard, behaviorist-designed environment, including a digital, group Skinner Box , or “operant conditioning chamber” as Skinner called it when he was raising his infant son alone in one. Thus, it would not be misleading to say metaphorically that We the People are living in a bubble; just as was Truman Burbank in Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, who says, “You accept the reality with which you are presented.” If you have no alternative reality of your own, then you accept. I have one (see Part I); and for better or for worse, I like mine. The reality presented to Khalid Sheikh Mohammad at Guantanamo, who also has, or once had, a reality of his own, might not be so easy to accept. And, as Stephen Colbert points out, perhaps the prisoner’s communications with his attourney being bugged by the CIA is not really so different from our own circumstance. "I can't believe this is happening here! The Internet's true purpose is to bring the world's people closer to each other. The Obama Administration is doing just the opposite. It would be advisable for those of us who have consistently opposed and fought against wars of all kinds to view this "cyber war" as an equally dangerous and distructive threat." How Long has This been Going On? How old is Empire and wars of expansion and colonial domination? Not just tribal disputes in ceremonial dance form, as in Dead Birds, but mass-produced, brutal, dirty warfare conducted by Empire for territorial and material gain, including Human Capital. Empire’s warfare is a premeditated, corporate institutional activity designed for leaving chaos and desperation to be reorganized and utilized under the divine guidance of forum and basilica, the Red and the Black, the carrot and the stick. This is not new. There was reflective planning for management, exploitation and social control of the dispossessed conquered masses among the 4,500 years-old Empire of the Pharaohs, even long earlier – as shown in Turkey’s 11,500 year old Göbekli Tepe site – in some mass societies “liberated” by Empire and this is part of a cumulative, shared information base for all of Empire’s ruling class ever since. The biological connection between the Royals of England, Norway, Denmark, France, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Greece, ... etc., gives some hint of the extent of ruling class networking; but We the (common) People are not privy to gaze into all that, nor are we helped by schoolbook history nor mass media to understand it as a ruling class; national security you know. If they want you to see or to believe something – true or not, the Royals put on a Prime Time show. This video both shows the extension of the Royal Network to include Saudi Arabia and shows that the creation of the Wahabism movement was a product of British intelligence, an internal rift, as the Taleban was created by the US and NATO in Afghanistan. Essentially,” the imperialists’ project remain the same”, descendant of Rome, according to Tariq Ali. “If you want change above, there must be massive movements below.” But, in my opinion more important, a higher prioitry: “Unless an alternative is constructed, the beneficiaries will be the Right”. [sounds like the I Ching.] But, let us also ask whether an “Above” is a necessary part of the solution, other than when the “Above” is Bateson’s Supreme Cybernetic System. Consider this also when constructing Alternatives. The small is beautiful alternative has no Above, just widening layers of collectivity in which leadership emerges as part of a dissipative structure combining the necessary mass or extent of communities needed to address and resolve the issue, then that structure dissipates; is NOT institutionalized as a higher level above local government. Without addressing this, we cannot counter TRADOC. And They are schooled and drilled in it. I am here suggesting that TRADOC officers, staff and contractors – familiar with both the details of the historic broad scope of ruling an empire and the specific battle strategies’ successes and failures accumulated over thousands of years – think about, discuss, debate, design and experimentally revise that now-global “bubble” from the USA’s Fort Leavenworth, Kansas – in their own bubble with virtual hot links for those globally with appropriate security ratings. This is what families and communities used to do long ago; the parents of a community in the role now occupied by TRADOC, planning their own futures. Now it is a multiple choice presented by The Supreme Something. TRADOC – the brains of the operation – has commandeered the rights to design the bubble in which the UHUCU will be billeted in a SHU (MilTalk: “standard housing unit”) and sustained, detained, restrained, retrained and entertained as a “public service” which will be paid for by the same consumer/workers’ taxes dedicated to the Department of Defense; garnished from their minimal wage paychecks if needed, just as the Cypriot peoples’ bank accounts were garnished for their Austerity tax. Certainly the corporate owners will not provide them with their “entitlement”. The Club of Rome (ominous name, ¿que no?), which became widely known upon its publication of The Limits to Growth – the opening shot in the War to Save the World, has presented its projection for the way the world will have developed forty years ahead, 2052. Here’s an excerpt: ... the most radical and unpredictable change will be in the mentality of the majority who will live their lives continually connected to the internet. Many of us already do, but as an acquired habit in adulthood. Growing up with the “externalization” of one’s cognitive capacity through permanent internet contact is another matter. It will change people’s sense of self and their emotional makeup, their basic cognitive orientation, and their coping strategies. And, he points out detailed effects in regard to Education of Children – ... most parents now know that their children will live in a world profoundly different from their own Parents know that they are ignorant about much of the world their children will live in [emphasis my own, but, hmmm, un fait accompli, eh?]. But we can only teach children what we know. A main agenda in today’s pedagogic discourse is teaching children to take responsibility for what they need to learn and know. Vital to NOTE: This is a point at which the system inserts itself to virtually replace the biological parents and the transmission of traditional knowledge and worldview. My! My! I just can’t imagine from where these tabula rasa children are expected to develop criteria for “what they need to learn and know” ... do you have a web address to advise them? I mean, Matrix Revolution deja vu all over again! Always Tracked [and, I add, often tricked; “You can fool almost all the People all the time” under such circumstances.] A Global Reality – a medium without borders, ... a being not from any specific location, which implies a profoundly different notion of self. One’s belonging to a physical place is blurred by one’s belonging to various virtual networks. Oh well, Eric Wolf’s “local unity”, Sapir’s and my “genuine culture” has been evanescing into the cybersphere anyway. Bye bye “genuine culture”! Nuristan will be turned into an exotic Disneyland ski resort and tribal reserve for the rich to enjoy like they once enjoyed Cuba And, talking about the megacity of 2052, ... an environment that is diverse and fluid, without clear borders between locations and without stable social structures and ideologies to give guidance as to how one’s life is supposed to be. It will be an environment with few stable necessities and of open-ended and undefined opportunities. Ah, yes, “no stable frames of reference” – perfect for mind-shaping, but, the opportunities!: gold rush, prime investments, a NEW flavor candy bar; NEW and BETTER Oleomargarine, Fun Island Tours, Michelle Obama Clothes Design Line – Creator and Promoter of Extreme “Individuation”; design your own Avatar Icon and earn points toward a virtual designer wardrobe for your Avatar if you buy one of our monthly special selections. Do I hear a distressed call for an Insurgency! Let me slip into this phone booth. The Real Work and Anthropology Anthropologists’ (and here, let me be clear, I do not include most archaeologists among cultural anthropologists, but, WAC stands out as a laudable exception) real strength lies in their long-term, first-person participant experience in at least one “foreign” community and knowledge of numerous indigenous or “aboriginal” social and cultural worlds; distinct species of shared sensibilities; unique, historically developed weltanschauungen – unified frameworks for perception and cognition. If anyone is qualified to guide the move away from the present Monomaniacal path that is the Intelligent Design of society and “culture” by advisors to Pharaohs and Kings, it is ... [Drumroll and Trumpets!] The Anthropologists! The caution: Not all anthropologists grasp the cognitive substance of culture; for example, Jules Henry, who confused the indigenous Amazonian people – whom he is said to have lived with for a year and whose language he is said to have “mastered”; but whom he studied from a “Freudian Perspective!” – with being in the same predicament as the as the engineered urban industrial society of empire; irrationally guided by their cultures. Henry seems to have supported cultural sterilization and “rational” re-training under professional Freudian tutelage. And, then, when the Critical Mass has Arisen, there is the need of having a conceptually, consensually-constructed alternative whole system, with many autonomous but articulating parts (local communities), and a plan for getting to there from here. Getting to some baseline state such as that called up by Small is Beautiful, or Ecotopia, and other Dreams of Uprisings Past. Or, maybe it is wiser to leave this to Obama and to Intelligently Designed Evolutionary Intervention Processes. Trust them! My Own Metaphor As I read the methodical and well-researched work of the USanthropologists working to disconnect their discipline from the military-intelligence complex, I realize that most of my own writings since 2009-2010 are a look, in the light cast by these radical anthropologists, at the impacts of my recent military experiences upon my own worldview. Being not nearly as well-read in the background literature of the current AAA-related ‘radical caucus’ - some of whom have built careers around this investigation, and long-disconnected from the mainstream professional associations, I sometimes think that I must have been blind to what I was being subject to; being irreversibly(?) sewn into. Somehow, I had not linked it all together until the 2009-10 military experiences led me into reading some of the writings of the “radical caucus” literature on counterinsurgency. Then the reflections and memories all had a larger framework. I am still fitting together this and the 76 years of life and observation inside this same system. I find that weaving back and forth between new information on related work in anthropology and other fields and my own memories and reflections, are a very rich and entertaining enterprise My nightmare of the process, the enterprise that we children of Rome – the collective, tax-paying USan and NATOan society – are now starting, but could still extinguish, is, as I wrote, metaphorically, earlier: It’s beyond Time and Space. It’s lift-off; time for the flames to lift off the marble table top where the spilled ethanol fuel has been consumed, time to hover in a blue aurora borealis of ignited fumes above the shiny alabaster cities for a moment, then flicker out. We each become our individual Avatars; mind is in the Data Cloud; body is no longer necessary, ... but, not to worry, your culture , your heritage, will be virtually there with you – you’ll be issued a body of your choice – except in special assignments, when the Commander will choose your Avatar – at times when Management says you are needed to manipulate the tangible universe that the technosphere has not yet completely automated. [Clearly this was composed soon after the ethanol fuel had been consumed.] Pick Your Favorite Brand At this point, actualizing Jigger’s solution – Small is Beautiful – is not among the options offered for the conscious concern of US citizens by their Guiding Media. What it really seems to boil down to is “Which kind of Empire would you prefer to buy?” and the answer that The People choose “... will determine the nature of the reality you will be presented with”, as Truman Burbank put it; one designed by the People’s mind, or one that designs the mind of each individual UHUCU. The former choice is not available in any of the leading brands of Empire. There are three leading brands of Empire identified in the mass media: There is the Capitalist Christian-Judeo, Democratic, Free-Enterprise Empire, for example, and we USNATOans, including Israelis, all know what it is like to be subject to this Regime. There is a neo-Socialist Empire – especially in parts of Africa, almost all of Latin America, strong political parties or social movements in France, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Scandinavia, Russia and much of Asia; but the socialism option is not as well-discussed in the USA – where it is limited to the Military and their network of contractors, individual and corporate-institutional – as is the Capitalist Empire descendant of Rome, which is falsely labeled as “democracy” (Warning! This product might contain horse meat). Socialism is in fact painted as in cahoots with the Enemy, harboring terrorists and repressing their forcibly subjugated peoples; portrayed as “failed governments” that need an Arab Spring; a “democratic, peaceful uprising” covertly funded, armed and trained by the USNATO, as in The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, which documented the failed coup by the CIA against Hugo Chavez in 2002, a BBC video effectively banned in the USA. Then there is the Islamic Empire – observably tagged as the main enemy, which is a mix of the People of the Book with a People’s Society in which the charging of interest on a loan is forbidden; positioning Islam directly in front of Judeo-Christian Capitalism’s drive to the basket (or to the bank); ... ... but, at the last moment Jesus Christ kicks over their money baskets and the shit hits the fan! Both sides say that The Christ is their own player and the Socialist Camp steps up to point out that Jesus, El Señor, is a Socialist who did not sell his loaves and fishes to the hungry masses listening to him go on and on like Fidel in his prime (which lasted into his seventies), but, like St. Hugo The Baddy, a devout Christian saint, he shared them with his community. It ends in a three-way tie: Free shots for all You Say You Want a Revolution? To set about a “revolution”, we first face a “war of liberation”, which many in the USA are taught to confuse with “revolution”. [The TRADOC counterinsurgency folks have been changing the meanings of things; so, the war of liberation to begin a process of revolution is now thought to be the “revolution”, but has been renamed “insurgence”. You often hear USans say such things as, “Well, it’s been two years since they had their revolution, and I haven't seen any progress.”; ... or, if it is Bush the Lesser ( Arandati Roy 's real-george term) talking, “ ... Ah hain’t seen no progress!”]  Nonetheless, in order for there to occur a societal revolution – a change of paradigm, the members of society must be mentally liberated from their current sequestered condition and encouraged to self-organize. TRADOC is pushing the rugby ball down the field in the adverse direction; if there is a "We" out there, We must push it the other direction.  Nonetheless, in order for there to occur a societal revolution; a change of paradigm, the members of society must be mentally liberated from their current sequestered condition and encouraged to self-organize. Those who are paid to maintain the current condition will not simply yield and say, “Yeah, you’re right. We have been deceiving, cheating and generally oppressing you; so we’ll do everything we can to help you to design and build a sustainable, human-scale, human-paced society. “All our collective resources are at your service. “AND, from now on, we will only tell the truth!” [So, legally speaking, everything before the last phrase, following “AND”, cannot be guaranteed to be true.] Be a Working Man’s Hero; Speak Truth to Power, Go Directly to Jail No, the truth is, ‘one peep outta you and The Stick!’, ... well, just remember what happened to Bradley Manning. As Chris Hedges reports: This trial is not simply the prosecution of a 25-year-old soldier who had the temerity to report to the outside world the indiscriminate slaughter, war crimes, torture and abuse that are carried out by our government and our occupation forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is a concerted effort by the security and surveillance state to extinguish what is left of a free press, one that has the constitutional right to expose crimes by those in power.... Manning has done what anyone with a conscience should have done. In the courtroom he exhibited—especially given the prolonged abuse he suffered during his thousand days inside the military prison system—poise, intelligence and dignity. He appealed to the best within us. And this is why the government fears him. America still produces heroes, some in uniform. But now we lock them up. And, as Arandati Roy said in an interview, which is good advice also for the AAA’s Radical Caucus : “How do you [here, we address The Anthropologists as “you”] argue rationally against these people? [by now you have some hint who I believe are “these people”] We cannot have a conversation with them at this time; we must do what WE [The common People] have to do.” Right! We will face a mortal struggle to take what’s ours, including our own work and our identity as part of family and local community and its products. It won’t be gained by diplomacy or by negotiations and compromises with TRADOC’s agents, unless someone is quietly carrying a Really Big Stick. Do YOU have a Really Big Stick? Compañero Fidel made it clear recently that the war of liberation in 1958 Cuba would have to be fought differently today. The “hidden” and protected headquarters camp in the Sierra Maestra Mountains of Cuba would be vaporized by armed drones within hours of their discovery by satellite surveillance. Now, it is a “battle of ideas”. “Think for yourself, ‘cause I won’t be there with you.” George Harrison singing Fidel’s advice. And, Latin Americans are not only thinking, they are acting for themselves. Latin America has refused to be another Gulag for US Extraordinary Rendition. They have collectively, cooperatively, consensually constructed an alternative framework and made it known to all in nuestra america. Largely due to the Bolivarian Movement that was stimulated and brought to power under the leadership of Hugo Chavez after being tested and incubated in Cuba, the Latin South has begun to think for their Collective self, collectively, communally turning the Monroe Doctrine on its head and excluding the Anglo north from the Community of Latin American and Caribbean Countries (CELAC), just as the Anglos excluded Cuba from the Organization of American States. So, also, must the anthros in consultation construct a mantra, a mind-tool for this Battle of Ideas to win the hearts and minds of the people, to provide them with a clear processual framework for getting from here to Ecotopia; to Small is Beautiful, to begin to develop a sustainable reality, worldview, embedded within the many diverse niches of Earth’s Supreme Cybernetic System. “Now, here’s the plan!” So, there is an enemy whom I characterize as managing our total environment as far as possible. Know thine enemy! So we need good information on The Management. And, that’s where the problem begins; who s really in charge here? If you think finding Usama bin Laden was difficult, ... Meet TRADOC TRADOC is the central hub for coordinating the training and indoctrination of not only military personnel, but of the entire US population, and, by extension the population of all that they hold sway over; starting in a strong “advisory” position to the Executive Branch of US Government to assure all the President’s Cabinet and policies are well-informed by the military’s perspective on national security interests. I believe this is the substance of the claim that Fort Leavenworth is ‘the intellectual center of the US Military’. TRADOC TRADOC, the Heart of Darkness, is The Dark Side, the hidden heart and mind of the Pentagon. Early in January, 2013, before Obama’s second inaugural speech, The US Military took the President into the Pentagon and examined him; his fitness to be President. It’s beginning to feel alot like Egypt! The moment of clarity is when you realize that the domain of the Training and Doctrine Command is not just the physical training and ideological informing of the USA military, but the in-forming, the in-doctrine-nation of the entire nation, and, in cooperation with the European Union, all of NATO and subordinated (“allied”) nations. There are no boundaries, unless there is organized resistance! As the then-young Arandati Roy said in 2003: “The US says it can do whatever in Hell it wants. And that’s official!.” At the top of the pyramid of command, not within it, is the “bubble” of the inner circle of the ruling class as described by Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson in a debate on Democracy Now in which the Colonel lays out the intentional duplicity of the information given to the US peoples and to the NATO peoples through the media. Related, a friend writes: actually, Like Ray Davis, who was arrested by the Pakistan Government, Bob – here now in Albuquerque – was US Marine acting as faux State Dept employee in covert war in Laos.. Also notice according to Wiki  TRADOC trains "foreign "  international soldiers, citing TRADOC manual. (however) In searching that manual, using term foreign OR international, nothing comes up.  WHY? Went to what I think was place wiki quotes and find TRADOC schools conduct 2,734 courses (81 directly in support of mobilization) and 373 language courses. The 2,734 courses include 503,164 seats for 434,424 soldiers; 34,675 other-service personnel; 7,824 international soldiers; and 26,241 civilians.[1] now reads: TRADOC scope and scale TRADOC has more than 25,000 Soldiers and 11,000 civilians working daily to accomplish our mission. We have 32 schools, and we train more than 500,000 Soldiers a year. Our footprint spreads throughout the continental United States at 20 different locations, and we provide the senior commander on 13 of those installations.  (You, John, you said that your work is) Unweaving the web of "formation of USan consciousness" well said. Mine being as function of (doing the same with the) atomic bomb rather than TRADOC.   But objective same, different worker and soldier ants serving the queen. Do ants and bees have dissidents? That was my friend, Erich. We live in the same asylum. Yes, the one about which Shel Silverstein did his cartoon, “Now Here s the Plan”. As an example of another reach of TRADOC’s role is in planning and reporting upon strategic military exhibitionism – also called “war-games” or “joint training exercise”, and then harvesting the Public Information spin from any tense responses it generates. The current example is the account of the US with South Korea in their annual Combined Forces War Games rehearsal, both make clearly threatening scenarios about “change of regime” in North Korea and perform actual armed exercises near North Korea, as described by a Korean American in an interview on Democracy Now. It superficially resembles the two tribes of Dani warriors brandishing spears and shields, dancing toward each other, then back as portrayed in the Dead Birds film; but this Dance of Death is in a mega-scale, nuclear/digital era, in an entirely different class of phenomena; and the stakes on the table are global, and the choreography is not culturally shared between opposing sides, ... or is it? Here’s Looking at YOU, Kid, in an Intelligently-Designed World? The human-constructed world in which people such as Truman Burbank will receive training and indoctrination is, itself, designed to optimize and reinforce the effects of that training, including everything from news to stop-signs and seat-belts to social security numbers and standardized “education”. The ultimate Behaviorist Industrial Psychologist’s dream: Total System Design. We the uprooted, dispossessed of a “civil society”, wards of Empire, iPod in hand, are meekly following the orders, the temptations, the media-stimulated appetites, the warnings and the signs as we march through Satan’s temptations and dangers into the Brave New World Order under our own cognizant volition – if the state of USans’ consciousness can be called cognizant of anything not received in the media, so begging the question whether his volition is truly his/her volition ... ? – leaving a world without having truly seen it from a fully human perspective; the deeply collective worldview of a historically deep, geographically long-stable society, genuine culture, bye-bye!: Just blindly following virtual orders? That’s Dumb! Marching to the shower room. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage Rage Against the Dying of the Light. As the Beatles finally decided to confront the Bullies in the bicycle chase in A Hard Day’s Night: “Let’s go back and get’em!” The first rule I learned – both during my actual military service 1956-1959, or during my 2009-2010 HTS training, required video classes that we had to complete before going on to the next; videos about what to do when captured – The First Rule is to try to escape as early in the prisoner processing process as possible. Well, I never was captured in Korea, but, soon after arriving back at Fort Lewis, outside Seattle and Tacoma in Washington, on the Northwest Coast of North America, and being marched in a line to duty in the Motor Pool, washing muddy trucks with power hoses, I stepped back and flattened myself against the corner of a warehouse as the line marched around the corner – several others stepping in with me as the line marched on; then we all lit out at a run back to the barracks, changed into civvies and headed into Seattle! Temporarily liberated. “Think for yourself, ‘cause I won’t be there with you.” What will be/was Lost; What might be/is Gained? One of the most remarkable leaps “forward” in this respect, toward termination of aboriginal societies, local unity, and genuine cultures, has been the universal spread of social media and the applications of the Information Technology devices to manage one’s personal and “social” life, and to provide one with fast-breaking “news” and instant communications from whomever. Thus, an ethnically self-generated taxonomic framework for reality – based on cumulative, shared, organic, individual perceptions within a local cultural frame of reference, socially evolved over thousands of years – is replaced for the uprooted, occupied and relocated populations by the information technologists’ frameworks that are designed for machines communicating with each other about Empire’s program priorities in ASCII characters. No fully present smell, no color, no form, no taste, no vibes, man! is this alive? or what? Whoa! Let’s loaf awhile, just vegetate and tune in to the surroundings in alpha mode (loafing mind) and ponder this. "Animals are not imbeciles. There is in the life of wild things in a wild setting a multitude of interactions to which the mind of civilized man is not attuned because it is of the necessity oriented to another aspect of mental energy, namely the rational. To understand the psychology of the Pit River people, it is necessary to visualize their extremely intimate contact with the trees, the rocks, the weather and the delicate changes in the atmosphere, with the shape of every natural object, and, of course, with the habits not only of every species of animal but of many individuals. It is almost impossible for a civilized man to form any conception of the degree of intimacy with nature this represents. No civilized man would ever have the patience and energy to loaf in a wild place long enough to catch this subtle rhythm of interactions. (de Angulo, p. 353) And notice how this resembles Gregory Bateson’s message at the end of this essay, “Bateson argues that Occidental epistemology perpetuates a system of understanding which is purpose or means-to-an-end driven. Purpose controls attention and narrows perception, thus limiting what comes into consciousness and therefore limiting the amount of wisdom that can be generated from the perception. Additionally Occidental epistemology propagates the false notion that man exists outside Mind and this leads man to believe in what Bateson calls the philosophy of control based upon false knowledge.” I do believe, however, that the current phase of Empre's Counterinsurgency movement has addressed that concern by focusing the new digital technology upon the cognitive colonization of the UHUCU. The UHUCU Management Problem In Part I, I referred to a classmate at the University of California at Davis who had been in the Military Police and later worked as a Yosemite Park Ranger – also essentially an armed policeman, who foresaw the need for a mass society management program. Now, fifty years later, I am moved by my recent learning about TRADOC to understand that this was all well advanced by then; universities were offering programs with scholarships and work-study jobs, jobs for graduates with societal management skills; the CIA and FBI were expanding their list of occupational skills, COINTELPRO was taking shape, career opportunities were opening up. The chain of command between all levels of government was being linked up, from local to county, to State, to Federal. But, other than Defense, the Federal level seems to be in exploitable chaos. What’s above the Federal Government? Reporters this morning uncovered the fact that while 40,000 or more people were outside the White House asking for his attention about Keystone XL, President Obama was playing golf with oil and pipeline executives in Florida. There appears to be a massive coordinated apparatus that subsumes industries, communications, invincible military might, the wealth of the richest, and the elected and appointed governments. The media documents and analyses this, “as advised”. Approximately Ike’s ‘Military-Industrial Complex’; now complexly desarrollado. Perhaps the appearance of chaos is fostered as a smoke-screen to obscure this? The “enemy” appears to have We The People, each and all, completely surrounded, subsumed. However! Do keep in mind that, given our Truman Show situation, we have no way of knowing whether this representation of the government-corporate-military junta as omniscient and omnipotent is true or false. And, yes, I do think that the general trend toward legalizing cannabis is part of the program for cultivating a more docile herd; but could backfire; don’t forget the origins of the word, “assassin”. Of course, if you control the hashish supply, you probably control the assassins? Leave no turn unstoned. Hillary Clinton, in her final appearance, her resignation speech, Secretary of State, looking alot like Gabby Giffords appearing in Congress after her recovery , tells us the world is “a safer place” I note that she emphasizes “The Mission” that the US elected government is carrying out. The Mission, of course, is a military term, not a religious term, in this case, ... ...and this Mission Creeps hand-in-hand with the religious ones; trying to supplant local worldviews using this carrot and The Stick if necessary. [Ah, good! Another example of syntactic ambiguity: Is the word “Creeps” a noun or a verb?] The Mission Creeps. At that point in the video narrative about the meaning of OZ National Monument, which is playing on the Big Screen in the Interpretive Center’s Theater - required education before  one enters the Castle for his tour, the little boy – his name is Bradley Manning –  walked up to the big, black curtain and pulled it completely back, ...   everybody s mobile network crashed (Jesus cheers and claps his hands in Heaven)... and a vision appeared unto him and to all present; and the Angel spoke, saying unto the small boy standing there with his slingshot: “... and in The People, united, is hope, is the source of all budgets and political power....” And, reflecting, the little boy turned to the audience, thrust his fist skyward and shouted: We ARE The People! Allah Hu Akbar! with each Palestinian imprisoned or killed; with each and every drone strike in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Mali ..., from the swelling volume of the voices and number of places from which the crescendo arises: WE are The People! Allah Hu Akbar! The Greenpeace Tree Huggers strapped in a tree high in the air of the Northwest Coast of North America’s Redwood forest community, trying to Save Strawberry Rock, to prevent a timber corporation’s clear-cut of a People’s forest sanctuary; Canada’s First Nations taking a stand to save the Earth; the Bolivarian Revolution as the Legacy of Hugo Chavez; linking the out-reaching hands of Julian Assange, Raul Castro, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier, Evo Morales, Daniel Ortega ... and Rafael Correa: We are The People! Allah Hu Akbar! As Andy Goldsworth says in his video recording, Rivers and Tides of his transient earthworks as a stone construct collapses while the tide approaches, “This is my work, you know? Too many unknowns.” He explains how the Lords of Empire who ruled Scotland, moved the people off their lands to make room for sheep; and how the land today is greatly influenced by the habits and needs of sheep that were a commercial investment of the Lords. We are those sheep; and, boy, do we have shepherds! I just tried to follow a link in Wiki to get to a page described in the William Lederer page, “Government by Misinformation (Excerpt from Lederer’s Nation of Sheep), but, when clicked upon leads us to one of the TRADOC-designed dead ends: Ever feel you're in the wrong place 404 (Page Not Found) Error If you're the site owner, one of two things happened: 1) You entered an incorrect URL into your browser's address bar, or 2) You haven't uploaded content. If you're a visitor and not sure what happened: 1) You entered or copied the URL incorrectly or 2) The link you used to get here is faulty. (It's an excellent idea to let the link owner know.). We are Entering our Final Ascent This boiling global swell of humanity, reaching the climax stage of its tool-based Culture, the “Neolithic”, which we inhabit here and now – not like the climax stage of Redwood forests as an ecosystem in stable balance - attempts lift-off. Allah Hu Akbar! You say you want a Revolution? “This is my work, you know? Esto es lo que hago. Too many unknowns.” Ecological anthropology and cybernetics; An Axe is Something to Be I include this section because what we need now is not more information, but a plan for changing the direction of our own society, beginning with changing one’s own mind before Someone does it for you. This summary of Bateson’s thought might provide or stimulate a realistic model for thinking about what can be done by a union of anthropologists who want to “change the world” (better first change your mind, instead). Gregory Bateson played on both sides of the political ideology net. He was a RealAntropologist who had best intents within the reality of what he considered to be the practical limits of his influence and to be the probable trajectory of future human societal control options as human population increase came to be a tipping point for the critical global ecology-management problem. I think his writings, along with Edward Schumacher’s, make a good beginning toward an organized resistance, re-education and reversal response to the current Empire’s efforts to enclose its UHUCUs with finality; a movement organized and occupied by anthropologists and others getting together an organized, loving, counterpunch. It was Gregory who brought attention to the un-recognized wisdom of Jaime d’Angulo’s works during the Whole Earth Catalog era. I include this excerpt from Wikipedia s essay on Gregory Bateson because, as Gary Snyder wrote at the end of his own poem, entitled Ax Handles, inspired by helping his son carve a new handle for an old ax-head whose handle had broken, the model was not far away: It’s in Lu Ji’s Wen Fu, fourth century A.D. “Essay on Literature” – in the Preface: “In making the handle of an axe By cutting wood with an axe The model is indeed near at hand.” My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen Translated that and taught it years ago And I see Pound was an axe, Chen was an axe, I am an axe And my son a handle, soon To be shaping again, model And tool, craft of culture, How we go on. As a mentor, Gregory Bateson, also an axe, provided us with a model for a thought-handle for the task we face: In his book Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Bateson applied cybernetics to the field of ecological anthropology and the concept of homeostasis.[19] He saw the world as a series of systems containing those of individuals, societies and ecosystems. Within each system is found competition and dependency. Each of these systems has adaptive changes which depend upon feedback loops to control balance by changing multiple variables. Bateson believed that these self-correcting systems were conservative by controlling exponential slippage. He saw the natural ecological system as innately good as long as it was allowed to maintain homeostasis[19] and that the key unit of survival in evolution was an organism and its environment.[19] Bateson also viewed that all three systems of the individual, society and ecosystem were all together a part of one supreme cybernetic system that controls everything instead of just interacting systems.[19] This supreme cybernetic system is beyond the self of the individual and could be equated to what many people refer to as God, though Bateson referred to it as Mind.[19] While Mind is a cybernetic system, it can only be distinguished as a whole and not parts. Bateson felt Mind was immanent in the messages and pathways of the supreme cybernetic system. He saw the root of system collapses as a result of Occidental or Western epistemology. According to Bateson consciousness is the bridge between the cybernetic networks of individual, society and ecology and that the mismatch between the systems due to improper understanding will result in the degradation of the entire supreme cybernetic system or Mind. Bateson saw consciousness as developed through Occidental epistemology was at direct odds with Mind.[19] At the heart of the matter is scientific hubris. Bateson argues that Occidental epistemology perpetuates a system of understanding which is purpose or means-to-an-end driven.[19] Purpose controls attention and narrows perception, thus limiting what comes into consciousness and therefore limiting the amount of wisdom that can be generated from the perception. Additionally Occidental epistemology propagates the false notion that man exists outside Mind and this leads man to believe in what Bateson calls the philosophy of control based upon false knowledge.[19] Bateson presents Occidental epistemology as a method of thinking that leads to a mindset in which man exerts an autocratic rule over all cybernetic systems.[19] In exerting his autocratic rule man changes the environment to suit him and in doing so he unbalances the natural cybernetic system of controlled competition and mutual dependency. The purpose driven accumulation of knowledge ignores the supreme cybernetic system and leads to the eventual breakdown of the entire system. Bateson claims that man will never be able to control the whole system because it does not operate in a linear fashion and if man creates his own rules for the system, he opens himself up to becoming a slave to the self-made system due to the non-linear nature of cybernetics. Lastly, man’s technological prowess combined with his scientific hubris gives him to potential to irrevocably damage and destroy the supreme cybernetic system, instead of just disrupting the system temporally until the system can self-correct.[19] Bateson argues for a position of humility and acceptance of the natural cybernetic system instead of scientific arrogance as a solution.[19] He believes that humility can come about by abandoning the view of operating through consciousness alone. Consciousness is only one way in which to obtain knowledge and without complete knowledge of the entire cybernetic system disaster is inevitable. The limited conscious must be combined with the unconscious in complete synthesis. Only when thought and emotion are combined in whole is man able to obtain complete knowledge. He believed that religion and art are some of the few areas in which a man is acting as a whole individual in complete consciousness. By acting with this greater wisdom of the supreme cybernetic system as a whole man can change his relationship to Mind from one of schism, in which he is endlessly tied up in constant competition, to one of complementarity. Bateson argues for a culture that promotes the most general wisdom and is able to flexibly change within the supreme cybernetic system.[19] Main Points to Take Away Tariq Ali: “If you want change above, there must be massive movements below.” “Unless an alternative is constructed, the beneficiaries will be the Right”. JA: “Let us also ask whether an “Above” is a necessary part of the solution, other than when the “Above” is Bateson’s Supreme Cybernetic System that some call Gaia? Consider this also when constructing Alternatives. The small is beautiful alternative has no Above, instead ecotopian communities have widening layers of collectivity in which leadership emerges as part of a dissipative structure combining the necessary mass or extent of communities needed to address and resolve the issue at hand, then that structure dissipates; does not institutionalize itself as The Above, and normal local community life continues. . And, as Arandati Roy said in an interview; good advice also for the AAA’s Radical Caucus : “How do you [here, we address The Anthropologists as this “you”] argue rationally against these people? [by now you have some hint who I believe to be “these people”] We cannot have a conversation with them at this time; we must do what WE [The common People] have to do.” Come down to earth and adapt with, co-evolving with, not dominating over God’s emerging plan. And, for a hint about what that might be, I send you, al capo to Tariq Ali’s fundamental guidance. It’s Now or Never.