The Little Prince of Privilege

On the roof of The Nashville Tennessean building, December 4th, 1966, watching the Christmas parade move down Broadway. Photograph by S.A. Tarkington, staff photographer.

How could I ever have defined myself as being the product of the absence of privilege, especially when such a narrative is so essentially self-serving on its surface? It's not always Andover and Yale, let alone the silver serving utensil used, that defines a sense of unspoken privilege manifesting beneath what's seen, under the differing intents of individuals.

Has such a look of world weariness ever been captured on a nine-year-old's face before? Verging right up to the edge of anger and reproach, but before the distortion when a soul goes into hiding, as human pain fears exposure, the expression seems to say, "I have seen cities of white and you show me Shriners and marching bands?" The view before the subject is an abstraction, like a scene of fireworks over Venice by J.M.W. Turner, and the communication between the photographer and subject could be mutable. It means different things just to me now.

I'd never seen this special image of me before, until this week, 43 years after it was made. The care and handling that kept it safe also protected it from my youthful prying eyes, when it would have been misinterpreted. Now it reinterprets me to myself.

I have a strange and powerful memory of that day. I'd gone to pee, in a bathroom that spoke of manly professionalism, the heavy, expensive stalls fitting like filing cabinet metal. That funny knit cap must have felt loose on my head, and I must have been afraid it would fall off into the water when I bent my head to attend to my business, so I took the cap off, and tucked it under my chin pressed tightly to my neck. Then, when I was almost finished going, for some inexplicable reason, I raised my head up and it just fell into the water, ruining it---in my childish view nothing could touch pee or poo and survive. I have no idea what this could possibly mean to a therapist, but it carries the weight of an Aesop's fable to me, like the one where the fist holding the prize won't let go, letting the hand out of the vessel.

Jonathan Pollard, Mordechai Vanunu, Paul Levy, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush

Once the bad news of Bush and post 9/11 America started shaping up, it became an almost unrelenting surge. Old customary notes of compassion, or joy, or just simple awe and wonder at life almost never came up anymore---but, with one or two exceptions.

One of the earliest analysis I read about President Bush that engendered an unequivocally positive reaction in me was called, "The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis," by Paul Levy, which also carried the startling-to-me-then subtitle, "Bush’s sickness is our own." This was empowering, in as much as Levy makes a strong case for our collective responsibility for a cultural field of disease, of which George Bush was but one, prominent, manifestation. By requiring me to do some of the necessary work of recovery, I no longer could just sit by helplessly feeling the victim. For better or worse, I invented the standard bearer persona of StevenWarRan in consequence, and the rest is, well, history.

I can legitimately feel feelings of compassion, understanding, sympathy and love for George W. Bush.

Levy's piece was published on January 13th, 2005, and it is still found at the Baltimore Chronicle & Sentinel website, which I believe, was the original publisher. I highly recommend it to everyone as a 6434-word therapeutic tool. Paul Levy describes himself as,

"a healer in private practice, [who] is profiled in the book Saints and Madmen: Psychiatry Opens its Doors to Religion. Steeped in and inspired by the work of Swiss-German psychoanalyst C. G. Jung, Levy is an innovator in the field of dreaming. He has had over forty articles published on consciousness, dreaming and spirituality, and has lectured about his work at various universities. A Tibetan Buddhist practitioner for over 20 years, he has studied with some of the great masters of Tibet and Burma. Inspired by the Bush Administration, Levy describes himself as "a spiritually-informed political activist." He is currently writing a book about his work. Visit his website at awakeninthedream.com or write him at paul@awakeninthedream.com.

Rereading it again after several years it gives me the same feeling of deep satisfaction I felt when I originally read it. Levy seems to have got it exactly right I should image.

I say all of this by way of a long preamble. We all should work toward maintaining our dignity, our hopes, and our humanity, as we move into whatever the hell it is that is next in store for us. I personally need to be reminded of this often, and give a little extra push to search out the positive aspects to experiences. So what I really wanted to say from the beginning here is, George W. Bush's leave-taking from office in Washington D.C. this week was a dignified, becoming exit that deserves our commendation.

He decamped cleanly, without fanfare, and thankfully, without adding any thing more to our national burdens. I speak specifically about his foregoing of most pardons, for individuals like Scooter Libby, but abstractly, for the rumored hypothetical class of "people who may have done something illegal or wrong while earnestly undertaking their duties in the War on Terrorism."

And I had been reading in the Israeli press about a concerted effort underway from Jews at home and abroad seeking the freedom of convicted Israeli spy Jonathon Pollard by means of a presidential pardon. Supposedly, so many pro-Pollard calls were flooding the White House switchboard in recent weeks they dwarfed every other appeal combined. But the politics of the case, and the probable damage to our nation's security Pollard caused, which can never be publicly known, had America standing up to Israel, if in only this one case.

Phalanxes of the highest-level American security operatives had repeatedly threatened mass resignations should Pollard ever be released from prison, even after decades behind bars for him now. That says a great deal actually.

This reminds me---do you know who is looking very good these days?

Mordechai Vanunu, seen in this image from July 3, 2003 while awaiting his parole hearing at the district courthouse in Beersheva, the shot taken by my newest photographer to loath, Haim Horenstein. (I never said I was perfect.)

Vanunu was the Israeli double-agent who confirmed knowledge that Israel possessed an arsenal of nuclear weapons, thereby he did the worldwide balance of powers some degree of service. The United States certainly didn't want to keep knowledge of the weapon secret from its potential opponents, that's why we used it twice, so why should Israel benefit from an unknown holding?

I forget his story exactly, but he was said to have been caught by utilizing a "honey pot," an attractive female agent who lured him into bed and then a jail cell. It looks to me like she could have had some fun with this duty.

Contrast Vanunu's image with that of Jonathan Pollard's I.D. photograph, from his U.S. Naval Intelligence job, probably taken in October 1984, when he started.

I choose not to try to imagine how Pollard must look today after his long imprisonment, with his first seven years in solitary confinement, for which I feel genuine anguish. But the limited signals we are allowed to receive in the matter would lead me to believe he doesn't resemble the handsome, beaming, healthy visage of a just-pre-release Vanunu.

Read Jonathan Pollard's entry in Wikipedia, to hear of an American Jew from Galveston, Texas who began to "blame [...] hostility directed at him on antisemitism." As "[h]e began to focus on Israel as a place where Jews could be free from attack," according to Joseph Sobran's Territory of Lies, book review in the National Review from June 16, 1989. Sound familiar?

So Bush, contrary to the appalling example set by Bill Clinton, (and I had to get one more dig in here somewhere, folks,) has earned my grudging respect, even if his actions stemmed from an utter lack of political capital---he did the right thing, for the right reasons, as far as I'm concerned, when he could just as well have done the opposite. I latch on to signs of American independence from the influence of foreign governments such as that of Israel's---as the drowning must reach out for life preservers, or the blind...

Bill Wilson, the Co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous

was a genius, but he didn't let that go to his head. In fact, he ascribed assistance in some of his writing to "spirit guides"---higher powers, if you will. I think the proof can be found in the many transcendent passages throughout his important works, which in their power to alleviate sorrow and pain, can be seen in modern terms as "channeled" information of a very high order.

AA, and its many derivatives, have nothing to do with self-help. It is at heart, the purest form of altruism and benevolence known to man, and as such, should be seriously considered as a basis for the new world order we keep hearing so much about. But there are some necessary corollaries, however. Since it is essential to the work (and its divine payback, the "magnificent reality," it leaves as a consequence,) that one must take no public credit for any accomplishments under its guise, as it regards normal ego gratification, it turns some of the basic underpinnings of our current society on their heads.

In his lifetime, Wilson turned down such honors as a doctorate from Yale. He declined, for instance, to let Time magazine name him man of the year, even if using only his first name and last initial, with only a photograph of the back of his head on the cover. (That would have been a brilliant stunt, and I would have bent the rules to see it happen if I were in charge, but, alas.)

Since Wilson was, and remained, a deeply flawed human being, I can just imagine how much these deferrals cost him in psychic pain. He would be delighted to learn after all, that in 1999, Time magazine went ahead and named him in the top 20 of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. (With Albert Einstein making it to number one.) Aldous Huxley called Wilson "the greatest social architect of our century."

It is in that way, organizationally speaking, where AA can teach all of us a thing or two. For instance, it eschews the accumulation of more money or power than necessary to do its work, and this should be a clear foundation stone for our nation's health. It also says that "great love and great suffering are our only disciplinarians."

As a bit of evidence of his foresight, I will quote an obscure paragraph from his work, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, which Wilson wrote in 1952. I say "obscure," because even among devotees, little attention is paid to the end of the book---the "12 traditions," which describe the accumulated wisdom of the group's first 14-years of evolution. The passage is from Tradition Ten, found on page 176 of my sixty-fifth printing. The added emphasis is all mine:

"As by some deep instinct, we A.A.'s have known from the very beginning that we must never, no matter what the provocation, publicly take sides in any fight, even a worthy one. All history affords us the spectacle of striving nations and groups finally torn asunder because they were designed for, or tempted into, controversy. Others fall apart because of sheer self-righteousness while trying to enforce upon the rest of mankind some millennium of their own specification. In our own times, we have seen millions die in political and economic wars often spurred by religious and racial difference. We live in the imminent possibility of a fresh holocaust to determine how men shall be governed, and how the products of nature and toil shall be divided among them. That is the spiritual climate in which A.A. was born, and by God's grace has nevertheless flourished."

Israel was designed for the present controversy, by English aristocrats who got to write the history books after World War II. America is in great danger by allaying herself to an experimental theocratic anomaly of just 60-years standing. Israel has no other objective reality, no basis in collective thought or aspiration or word.

(Jews would be hard pressed to prove a chain of title to dominion over any part of the Middle East---although they lived safely there in great numbers, empowered amongst the Arabs, for centuries, before they asserted their inner Talmudic warrior chest-thumping passions. I think their beef should be with Rome actually. Sue for damages from AD70, if you must. And Jews might realize, much of the world does not find their literature at all holy---let alone universally binding. And while I'm at it, thanks a lot for reviving a dead language too, that's been real useful.)

Israel's supposed Genesis, the German holocaust against the Jews in the 1930's and 40's, has been misremembered, misapplied, and misused, in many cases fabricated in both detail and outline out of whole cloth, in order to work toward false, nefarious, arbitrary and selfish ends, by Jewish leaders who have kept their populace under such constant traumatization they now suffer from extreme group paranoia. That collective illness now threatens the very core survival of the planet.

I am disgusted with the abysmal acting seen in these Israeli poses. Look at this Reuters image by Eric Gaillard:
The caption tells us, "Israelis take cover before a rocket fired lands in Beersheba, at the funeral of Israeli soldier Alex Mashavisky, January 7, 09."

That coat over your head is a no-go, dear. So is shielding your face with your hand honey; or turning to kneel against the wall---that's not for everywhere. This is all so stupid it is beneath contempt---more so because Beersheba is 40 Kilometers away from Gaza, over twice the distance any Hamas rocket had ever traveled prior to December 27, 2008, when the miraculous appearance of the new and improved !Wonder-Hamas! rocket, smuggled in a year earlier during the breach, we are told, but left unused, then missed in all the jet strikes---so they could get an Israeli kill, with three more on the 29th! Oy!

Don't you think that whatever can be smuggled into Gaza beyond Marlboro's and cooking oil and a goat or two, happens with the approval, if not at the actual behest of, Mossad? It's clear to me that since Egyptian intelligence chief Suleiman does all the regular negotiating between the parties, he is in a functioning role.

See US-funded program fails to stop smuggling through tunnels at Egypt-Gaza border by Anna Johnson and Omar Sinan of the Associated Press, January 7, 2009 here

"Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit stressed that the tunnels were not a new problem, but he denied that weapons were being smuggled.

"The tunnels have always been there. We have been trying to control them. But the tunnels are there because the crossings are closed and there is a siege and there is starvation," he told Al-Arabiya television earlier this week. "Those who say they are being used to smuggle weapons and equipment are deluded. Weapons are coming through the sea."

See how he cooperates with reality being imposed by Israel, in attempting to justify an answer for what he takes at face value and may assume to be true: that Hamas is in receipt of weapons Israel truly wishes they didn't have---by naming the sea as a route. But others in the international arms community know the truths held in balance between all the arms-manufacturing, and arms-procuring states---as the quartet negotiates what other nations can, and can not do. If China has been manufacturing munitions in the same hand-held, 120-mm caliber as Hamas legacy rockets, but having twice the range, increased lethality, and improvements to so-called "aiming," (ha, ha, ha, ha,) it could only be at the special behest of the master Israel, in service of its own agenda. That is Israel's total battlefield dominance, or total false-flag reality in you will, a concept which has now been busted wide open, so hopefully, it may never work again.

Israel manufactured the four civilian deaths that gave cause to her latest episode of Palestinian slaughter, killing over 1,300 Palestinians, including as many as 400 still innocent, if Jew-hating, children. You do understand what I mean by "manufactured" don't you? It means Israel does the killing itself. Nicely orchestrated, with composed images from all the killing sites via the controlled media of Haim Horenstein and Edi Israel and their likes. Reports and files and such.

This is a very pretty photograph, with a nice diagonal line of composition, and good hair, but it means absolutely nothing! It is bereft of any truth! It's only value is to serve as false public relations.

Read the following caption:

An Israeli woman and her two children take cover during a rocket attack near Kfar Aza, just outside the northern Gaza Strip January 7, 2009. The woman came to meet her husband, an Israeli army officer currently serving on the Gaza border. Rockets exploded as they were waiting for him. Israel postponed on Wednesday a decision on whether to order its armed forces to storm the Gaza Strip's urban centres, an Israeli official said, citing Egyptian- and French-led efforts to secure a truce with Hamas. REUTERS/Baz Ratner (ISRAEL)

Can that be true! Do Jews take gentiles for fools, really? Officials would allow a mother with her two young children to meet her soldier/husband/father, directly next to the boundaries of a war zone, on January 7? As though it were an iffy neighborhood in Boston and one needed to be careful? What complete idiots they are in charge of such a psy-ops affair! Fuck them all!

Fake! Fake! Fake! Fake! Jáccuse! C'est vrai!

May I suggest, that when a rocket-attack warning signal is sounded, remove yourselves from the top stories of any multi-story buildings. Indoors or out, go quickly to the southern, or eastern, portion or side, (depending on your position relative to Gaza,) of any building, structure, artificial or natural device, or man-made construction, there to rest, in the sheltered, leeward side of what has to be the most consistently omni-directional line of attack in the entire history of armed clashes.

About a rocket's ability to sometimes pierce through reinforced concrete, when previously seen example after example, we note that the rockets most often don't adequetly even destroy their own structural bodies and tail fin assemblies---is a matter you will have to take up with your trusted leaders and authorities. Good luck.



This is what Israel has been reduced too! Faking carnage with a dying dog's blood! How dare they kill over 1,300 Palestinians on the back of this (wounded) animal's blood!

"An Israeli police officer kneels over a dog that was badly injured after a rocket landed in the southern town of Sderot, Israel on December 30, 2008. (GIL COHEN MAGEN/Reuters)"

Of course, the sort of rage I am expressing will only make a Jew gloat, since it serves the larger agenda, their must-needs, and fail-safe, operative gestures and plans. A self-fulfilling prophecy: antisemitism rearing its ugly head, on its cue. So be it.

Jews desperately need a 12-step program of recovery in order to reenter the honest community of man they think they've bested. But they were busted on 9-11, in both New York City and Arlington, and they were busted again with Bush and the neo-cons and the Christian freaks in Iraq; now they're busted in starting their own trumped up war based on a maliciously faked cause of action. Is the holocaust a total Jewish fabrication too? Is that where we are headed? The cesspool of lies stagnating within Jewish minds giving off what they spew out so, simply boggles my poor little potato-eating Irish head! Oh dear me! Will the Jews even leave any oxygen for me to breathe, I wonder? Oh poor, pitiful me!

CIA Special Adviser for WMD in Iraq Charles Duelfer, Senate Armed Services Chairman John Warner and Major General Keith Dayton

Photo by Mark Wilson

Can you believe that John Warner and Elizabeth Taylor were ever married, even for a moment? Just look at the Vulcan eye sockets. Oh, I forgot. She's Jewish. That explains it.

Add this image to your study carrel. General Dayton is the man teaching Palestinians in the West Bank how to subdue their countrymen the American way---with police brutality! I like the way he poses all innocent-like next to those other two horrors. Defend me from the horror of these three!

(Why doesn't Getty just shut me down, I wonder? Hmmm...)

The Israeli Security Fence

It's strangely beautiful in its way. I can't help but think it's insane---but then again, who am I to judge? I'm struck by how very small the overall dimensions are, 29 kilometers here, 15 miles there. A casual friend of mine is a Knight of the Order of St. John, or some such. He paid an official visit to Israel last year to deliver a check from New York intended to purchase one of those special, small-sized ambulances, which are used in the narrow streets of the Old City of Jerusalem. I wasn't sure of his politics, so I carefully broached the subject of the security fence to ask him what he thought. He is a thoughtful man, and he went quiet for a moment and then said, "I think it may signal the end for Israel." I guess in person and up close, the "fence," if you will, carries a quality of failed resignation about it. But on the map, all those little excursions looking like oil stains, of a people trying to eke out some more hectare of dusty Promised Land.

And such a big destabilizing effect comes across the planet from that old center of power. I will admit, I'm starting to feel a little manipulated by the Palestinians, and how they got up to speed in that game is very curious. Of course, Jews remain the masters of perception. Trouble is, I don't believe a single word they say. They've lost all credibility in my camp. I think they should all move here to Long Island, but they can't have it cheap! They have to pay market rates, and I know that will kill them! But it's my one small contribution. Then Jerusalem can be mandated as an internationally controlled city.