“Personality is persona, a mask…The mask
is magic…Larva means mask; or ghost…it also
means mad, a case of demoniacal possession.” –
Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body
July 20, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - Walk the streets in the
United States and many countries these days and you will
see streaming crowds of people possessed by demons,
masked and anonymous, whose eyes look like vacuums,
staring into space or out of empty sockets like the
dead, afraid of their own ghosts. Fear and obedience
oozes from them. Death walks the streets with people on
leashes in lockstep.
That they have been the victims of a long-planned
propaganda campaign to use an invisible virus to
frighten them into submission and shut down the world’s
economy for the global elites is beyond their ken. This
is so even when the facts are there to prove otherwise.
It is a clear case, as Peter Koenig tells Michel
Chossudovsky in this must-see
interview, that is not a conspiracy theory but a
blatant factual plan
Who can wake the sleepwalkers up in this
cowardly new world where culture and
politics collude to create and exploit
ignorance?
Fifty-five years ago on this date, August 20, 1965,
Bob Dylan released his song “Like
a Rolling Stone.” It arrived like a rocking jolt
into the placid pop musical culture of the day. It was
not about wanting to hold someone’s hand or cry in the
chapel. It wasn’t mumbo-jumbo like “Wooly Bully,” the
number one hit. It wasn’t like the pop pap that
dominates today’s music scene. It wasn’t Woody Guthrie
in slow time.
It beat you up. It attacked. It confronted you.
Maybe, if you were alive then, you thought Dylan was
kidding you. You thought wrong. Bitching about his
going electric was a dodge. He was addressing all of
us, including himself.
Still is. But who wants to hear his recent “Murder
Most Foul” and read Dylan’s scathing
lyrics about the assassination of JFK, the killing
that started the slow decay that has resulted in such
masked madness. “And please, Don’t Let Me Be
Misunderstood,” he tells us in capital letters for
emphasis. Exactly what all the mainstream media have
done, of course, and not by accident.
There are no alibis. “How does it feel/To be on your
own/with no direction home/A complete unknown/Like a
rolling stone?”
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It was in the mid-1960s when confidence in knowing
where home was and how to get there disappeared into
thin air. If you left mommy and daddy, could you ever
get back from where you were going? Who had the
directions? Absolutes were melting and relativity was
widespread. Life was wild and the CIA was planning to
make it wilder and more confusing with the introduction
of LSD on a vast scale. MKUltra was expanding its scope.
Operation Mockingbird was singing so many tunes that
heads were spinning, as planned. The national security
state killers were in the saddle, having already
murdered President Kennedy and Malcolm X as they
sharpened their knives for many more to come. The peace
candidate, Lyndon Baines Johnson, had been elected nine
months earlier with 61.1% of the popular vote and went
immediately to work secretly expanding the war against
Vietnam. War as an invisible virus. Who knew? Who,
but a small anti-war contingent, wanted to know? War
takes different forms, and the will to ignorance and
historical amnesia endure. War is a disease. Disease is
weaponized for war. In 1968 Richard Nixon was elected on
a “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War and then ramped
it up to monstrous proportions, only to be reelected in
1972 by carrying 49 out of 50 states.
Who wants to know now? The historian Howard Zinn
once said correctly that this country’s greatest problem
wasn’t disobedience but obedience.
What’s behind the masks? The lockstep?
On the same day that Dylan released “Like a Rolling
Stone,” Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, just back
from a “fact-finding” trip to Vietnam, recommended to
LBJ that U.S. troop levels in Vietnam be increased to
175,000 and that the U.S. should increase its bombing of
North Vietnam dramatically. This was the same McNamara
who, in October 1963, had agreed with JFK when he signed
NSAM 263 calling for the withdrawal of 1,000 military
personnel from Vietnam by the end of 1963 and the
remainder by the end of 1965. One of the moves that got
Kennedy’s head blown open.
Poor McNamara, the fog of war must have clouded his
conscience, confused the poor boy, just like Secretary
of State Colin Powell holding up that vile vial of
“anthrax” at the United Nations on February 5, 2003 and
lying to the world about weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq.
Powell recently said, “I knew I didn’t have any
choice. He’s the President.” How “painful,” to use his
word, it must have been for the poor guy, lying so that
so many Iraqis could be slaughtered. Of course, he had
no choice. These war criminals all wear masks. And have
no choice.
Masks, or demonic possession, or both. You?
Also in that fateful year 1965, far out of sight and
out of mind for most Americans, the CIA planned and
assisted in the slaughter of more than a million
Indonesians, led by their man, General Suharto. This
led to the coup against President Sukarno, who two years
earlier had been on good terms with JFK as they worked
to solve the interrelated issues of Indonesia and
Vietnam. Their meeting planned for early 1964 was
cancelled in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
And the politicians and media luminaries came out in
their masks and told the public that communists
everywhere were out to get them.
It’s tough being on your own. It hurts to think too
much. Or think for yourself, at least. To obey an
authority higher than your bosses. “I was tricked” is
some sort of mantra, is it not?
You never turned around to see the frowns on the
jugglers and the clowns
When they all did tricks for you
Dylan was lost and disgusted when he wrote the song.
His own music sickened him, which, for an artist, means
he sickened himself. He had just returned from a tour of
England and was sick of people telling him how much they
loved his music when he didn’t. He needed to change.
What else is the point of art but change? If you’re
dead, or afraid of getting dead, you aren’t going to
change. You’re stuck. Stuck is dead. Why wear a mask
if you know who you are?
Knowledge, or more accurately, pseudo-knowledge or
mainstream media lies, is a tomb “the mystery tramp”
sold to us, a place to hide to avoid pain and guilt.
I have read more books than anyone I know. It
sickens me.
I know too much. That sickens me.
I sicken myself. All the news sickens me.
I know so much no one believes me.
As Francesco Serpico once told me: “It’s all lies.”
Of course. Dylan and Serpico are blood brothers.
Only art tells the truth. Real art.
Not bullshit pop art. Some say “Like a Rolling
Stone” is about Edie Sedgwick, “the girl of the year” in
1965 and one of Andy Warhol’s superstars. Perhaps to a
degree it is, but it’s far more than that. It’s about
us.
Poor Edie was poisoned by her wealthy family at a
young age and barely had a chance. She was an extreme
example of a rather common American story. People
poisoned in the cradle. Thinking of her got me thinking
of Andy Warhol, the death obsessed hoarder, the guy who
called his studio “The Factory” in a conscious or
unconscious revelation of his art and persona, his wigs
and masks and the hold he has had on American culture
all these years. Isn’t he the ultimate celebrity?
Warhol once took my photo on a deserted street. His
and my secret but this is the truth. West 47thStreet
on an early Sunday morning, 1980. I guess he thought he
was doing art or collecting images for his museum of
dead heads. When I asked him why, he said I had an
interesting face. I told him he did too, rather
transparent and creepy, but I didn’t want to capture
him. He was a ghost with a camera, a face like a death
mask, trying to capture a bit of life. I told him I
didn’t give him permission to shoot me, but he turned
and walked away into the morning mist. The shooters
always just walk away in pseudo-innocence.
I then went down the street to the Gotham Book Mart
that was my destination and asked James Joyce why he had
written “The Dead,” and Joyce, secretive as ever, quoted
himself, “Ed,” he said, “Think you’re escaping and run
into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way
home.” Now that was direction.
Only those who know how to play and be guided by
intuition are able to escape the living tomb of
so-called knowledge; what Dylan called, lifelessness.
But that was from “Desolation
Row,” released as the closing track of Highway
61 Revisitedon August 30, 1965. The only acoustic
song on the album. Slow it down to make the point
another way. “Like a Rolling Stone” was the opening
track.
Do you feel all alone or part of a masked gang
roaming the streets incognito? Miss and Mr. Lonely, does
that mask help? How do you feel?
Desolation means very lonely. From Latin, de,
completely, solare, lonely.
Does that mask help? Do you feel alone together now,
one of the crowd?
Do you really want to know about desolation row? It’s
here. It was here in 1965, too. Only the true lonely
know how it feels to really be all alone.
The Umbrella People, those who some call the deep
state or secret government under whose protection all
the politicians work, say they want to protect us all
from death and disease. They are lying bastards who’ve
gotten so many to imitate their masked ways. They can
only sing a mockingbird’s song.
Listen to real singers. Dylan has arched the years,
as true artists do. Who has paid close attention to what
he said this year about the assassination of President
Kennedy in his song, “Murder Most Foul”? Or were many
caught up in the propaganda surrounding corona virus,
and rather than contemplating his indictment of the U.S.
government and its media accomplices, were they
contemplating their navels to see if a virus had
secreted itself in there. Viruses lurk everywhere, they
say, and the corporate media made certain to circulate a
vaccine about the truth in Dylan’s song. This is normal
operating procedure.
We are on still on Desolation Row.
“Take Off the Masks.” That was the title of a book
by Rev. Malcolm Boyd
that I reviewed long ago. He was a gay priest who
decided that his mask was a lie. He came out into the
light of truth. He had guts.
It is time for everyone to take off the masks. Escape
from Desolation Row by seeing what’s going on behind our
backs.
Listen to Dylan, long ago – today:
At midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do
And they bring them to the factory
Where their heart attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row
Praise be to Nero’s Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
Everybody’s shouting
“Which side are you on?”
Distinguished author and sociologist
Edward Curtin
is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on
Globalization. Visit the author’s website
here. - "Source"
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