Hopelessly Corrupted

The other night I went down a youtube rabbit hole; the kind where you can hardly remember what it was you were searching for in the first place. Having been inspired by a couple of articles that Fr. Longenecker had linked about elephants, in a subconscious way I ended up thinking about the "Pink Elephants on Parade" sequence from Dumbo, later went to youtube and watched the sequence, relived the unsettling, aggressive hallucinations, and alas, I made the mistake of then clicking on a video with a title about Illuminati symbology embedded in the pink elephants sequence.

From there it was hours, well past bed-time, of watching videos about the sexual subliminal messages and innuendo and outright graphic sexual images sneaked into the frames of Disney films and how Disney is a Satanic pedophile racket with secret underground tunnels in which the children that go missing from Disneyland are sacrificed in Satanic rituals and how Walt Disney was - according to them - a 33 degree Freemason.

Of course some of the videos made me laugh outright, so paranoid and stupid were they. And so much of it is just the usual internet rehashing of mostly unverified speculation, or anonymous sources. Others...well, I found them extremely creepy - that is, not the presentation of the videos, but the content itself. My take on Disney has generally been, "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark", but without getting too particular.

The real question for me is not whether Disney is in some deep way corrupt with a disturbing darkness, but how far back into its foundations that darkness runs. Was Disney more or less innocent to begin with, but was later, by certain coinciding forces, gradually intercepted by evil agendas? Or was it basically a conspiracy to begin with? Which would mean speculations about Walt Disney himself. Was Walt Disney a 33 degree Freemason? It doesn't seem so, but was rather one of the outlier groups/clubs connected to the Masons.

But then I remembered that Tolkien had a special dislike of Disney, as articulated in letters he wrote. I looked them up. All emphasis mine.

13 May 1937 20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

Dear Mr Furth,

Thank you for the information concerning prospective American publication. Could you tell me the name of the firm, and what are likely to be the financial arrangements?

As for the illustrations: I am divided between knowledge of my own inability and fear of what American artists (doubtless of admirable skill) might produce. In any case I agree that all the illustrations ought to be by the same hand: four professional pictures would make my own amateurish productions look rather silly. I have some 'pictures' in my drawer, but though they represent scenes from the mythology on the outskirts of which the Hobbit had his adventures, they do not really illustrate his story. The only possible one is the original coloured version of Mirkwood (re-drawn in black and white for 'the Hobbit'). I should have to try and draw some five or six others for the purpose. I will attempt this, as far as time allows in the middle of term, if you think it advisable. But I could not promise anything for some time. Perhaps the matter does not allow of much delay? It might be advisable, rather than lose the American interest, to let the Americans do what seems good to them – as long as it was possible (I should like to add) to veto anything from or influenced by the Disney studios (for all whose works I have a heartfelt loathing). I have seen American illustrations that suggest that excellent things might be produced – only too excellent for their companions. But perhaps you could tell me how long there is before I must produce samples that might hope to satisfy Transatlantic juvenile taste (or its expert connoisseurs)?....

Yours sincerely
J. R. R. Tolkien

From a letter, 7 December, 1946:

I continue to receive letters from poor Horus Engels about a German translation. He does not seem necessarily to propose himself as a translator. He has sent me some illustrations (of the Trolls and Gollum) which despite certain merits, such as one would expect of a German, are I fear too 'Disnified' for my taste: Bilbo with a dribbling nose, and Gandalf as a figure of vulgar fun rather than the Odinic wanderer that I think of. ....I am shortly moving to a small house (3 Manor Road) and so hoping to solve the intolerable domestic problems which thieve so much of the little time that is left over. I still hope shortly to finish my 'magnum opus': the Lord of the Rings: and let you see it, before long, or before January. I am on the last chapters.

From an unpublished letter, post-dated 15 July, 1964, Tolkien says of Walt Disney:

"[...] I recognize his talent, but it has always seemed to me hopelessly corrupted. Though in most of the 'pictures' proceeding from his studios there are admirable or charming passages, the effect of all of them to me is disgusting. Some have given me nausea [...]"

In the same letter Tolkien also accuses Disney of being in his business practices "simply a cheat: willing and even eager to defraud the less experienced by trickery sufficently 'legal' to keep him out of jail"; he adds that his own affairs are in the hands of Allen & Unwin ("a firm with the highest repute"); that he is "not innocent of the profit-motive" himself (although "I should not have given any proposal from Disney any consideration at all. I am not all that poor [...]"

He wrote "heartfelt loathing" in 1937, only when Snow White had just come out. That loathing went unabated throughout his life, later writing that Disney's works always seemed to him "hopelessly corrupted".

"Hopelessly corrupted"

"Disgusting"

"Some have given me nausea"

Those are strong words. All his words directed towards Disney are relentlessly scathing.

Was Tolkien a prophet?

I think so.

There Be Doughknots

Odious Debt and Asset-Stripping

"One often wonders why governments indebt themselves for so much more than they can ever hope to pay...when they could just as well finance these projects and needs far more safely by issuing the proper amounts of their own local sovereign currency instead?" --Adrian Salbuchi

Time-stamped:

"When a society is perishing, the wholesome advice to give to those who would restore it is to call it to the principles from which it sprang; for the purpose and perfection of an association is to aim at and to attain that for which it is formed, and its efforts should be put in motion and inspired by the end and object which originally gave it being. Hence, to fall away from its primal constitution implies disease; to go back to it, recovery. And this may be asserted with utmost truth both of the whole body of the commonwealth and of that class of its citizens-by far the great majority - who get their living by their labor.

"Neither must it be supposed that the solicitude of the Church is so preoccupied with the spiritual concerns of her children as to neglect their temporal and earthly interests. Her desire is that the poor, for example, should rise above poverty and wretchedness, and better their condition in life; and for this she makes a strong endeavor. ...

"... The foremost duty, therefore, of the rulers of the State should be to make sure that the laws and institutions, the general character and administration of the commonwealth, shall be such as of themselves to realize public well-being and private prosperity. This is the proper scope of wise statesmanship and is the work of the rulers. Now a State chiefly prospers and thrives through moral rule, well-regulated family life, respect for religion and justice, the moderation and fair imposing of public taxes, the progress of the arts and of trade, the abundant yield of the land-through everything, in fact, which makes the citizens better and happier. Hereby, then, it lies in the power of a ruler to benefit every class in the State, and amongst the rest to promote to the utmost the interests of the poor; and this in virtue of his office, and without being open to suspicion of undue interference - since it is the province of the commonwealth to serve the common good. And the more that is done for the benefit of the working classes by the general laws of the country, the less need will there be to seek for special means to relieve them. ...

"... Rulers should, nevertheless, anxiously safeguard the community and all its members; the community, because the conservation thereof is so emphatically the business of the supreme power, that the safety of the commonwealth is not only the first law, but it is a government's whole reason of existence ... " --Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum

Oh, and by the way, the State issuing its own sovereign currency into existence for the common good is a prime example of the State practicing its constitutional right - in other words, doing what it is there to do - and not an example of the State attempting to substitute the charity relief of the Church.

State money spent into existence without debt, and its quantity transparently controlled, is not welfare and is not socialist. It is protecting the common law of man that is money. It isn't even really "regulating" money per se, for the actual quantity of money is up to the wealth that people produce; rather, it is regulating, or upholding, the law that has already been made, just in the same way that any other law needs to be upheld after it is written. When the State forfeits this constitutional right to private banks, who turn it into a system of rapacious usury, by which they asset-strip a nation, then that State's government has become embroiled in that system (pyramid scheme) according to its nature: it becomes endlessly bureaucratic, absorbing the people of the nation into its own embroilment with the usurious powers, those who run the private banks. A tyrannical government is a faceless government, a government in which you find an empty seat, precisely where there is supposed to be a body exercising its proper powers. In the case of sovereign state money, as soon as the government body takes up that seat, that power, it suddenly becomes reachable, answerable, revealed. The issue of money control lies at the heart of the mutual contract that is government, which society has produced.

"Rapacious usury has increased the evil which, more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different form but in the same way, practiced by avaricious and grasping men." --Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum

The Lore of the Rings

Renewal is not, and cannot ever be, something statistical and quantitative. The economy of grace abounding all the more where evil abounds is a challenge to us more than it is a comfort.
It puts a new horizon on our boundaries, just when we had nicely measured wine skins all set out, of the finest leather too. Reactionaries love their goods in contradistinction to evils, so much so, that they often cannot actually enjoy them without the evils somehow nearby; they will do this to the point of fixating on evil at the expense of denying grace. What they cannot stand is their goods in relation to a greater good. They seem to positively hate that. Thus, they don't appear to be above making the greater good into an evil against which they posit their little goods.

Figures, ledgers, charts: these are data imprints for those with a mistaken notion of the hermeneutic of continuity. The mistake lies in thinking that a hermeneutic must necessarily be equivalent to slow, incremental development. Thus, if anything is jolting and rapid it must be discontinuous, a rupture. This is false. Take from nature, the cross-section of a tree's rings:

Some trees of course are more generally and continually round, from their inception to their death. If anyone would like to imagine the Church as a perfectly smooth, cylindrical bole without deep flutings and corriscated bark, then good luck with that fantasy. The point is this: you can see that from the center, the rings begin more or less concentric, easily identifiable emanations in their relating to each other, both looking back and looking ahead. But even then there are little differentiations occurring, which later on become more and more pronounced, until, behold, there is one ring that quite suddenly, from the one preceding it, looks radically different; it is veering with velocity off the concentric course; it looks like rupture, except that it is not, because it is in continuous fluence with the previous rings. It carries into itself all those previous differentiations in concentricity.

To misinterpret that radical-looking emergent ring is to misinterpret all the rings previous. The main thing is that it is going ahead, it is going forward. The point is not the shape but the thrust. Not the shape the tree is making but the inner thrust of the tree. To have that, is to be in continual connection with the life of the tree from its very beginning. That is tradition.

Title: Hearing Restored

Medium: Oil on canvas paper

Size: 12 in. x 9 in.

Quantitative Easing

"Q.E. (Quantitative Easing) does not distribute money across the broad economy. It just feeds cash into the top 1/10 of 1%: the biggest banks." 

Time-stamped

 "...it would be regarded as idiotic." --James Robertson

We need state money without debt

 Still absolutely nails it here:




Amen and amen.

Snappy

Try not to understand the need for
small dogs to bark - upon friend or foe,
mattering not: there is one I know
that I've been passing for four years
on and off, the low fence between us:
by rote sight and smell, would they not
supply the mutt enough to know me?
On days when I catch him silent,
him deciding not to bark, but content
with his head down on his king's cushion,
aware of me passing and letting me pass,
I turn and extend my hand with benevolent
gesture, cooing and beckoning kindly enough,
and he flings himself into immediate alarm,
barking his chestnut brain to a fine and dandy duff,
and I sigh, roll my eyes, and continue on, remembering
he will let you pet him, and begrudgingly at that,
only when his owner is present.
How can you get inside the mind
of such critters - the reasons
for his snotty button nose, snorting anxiety
and fierceness according to his kind, his pincher mouth snapping:
is it like a neurotic king, fearing his throne
will be supplanted?
What is the strange attachment
that keeps them so riddled through?
Is it a dim extension of the behavioral
habits of the owner? That would be
an uncharitable assessment - and untrue.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton owned such a one;
nasty to the maid, a vociferous snapper,
who after snapping, would flee to his master
and from that great bulwark would look out with
insolent gloating, as though to say, "Just try it,
just try and kick me like a football through the door
into the neighbour's front yard - I'd like to see you try."
Max Beckmann and his Quappi
kept one also. I don't know what this all means.
But Lord help me if I ever own one,
and Lord help you too. And Lord help the snappers
with a mistaken sense of size,
ejecting their internet canards
in an anonymous bundle of white curly fluff
like an eighteenth century pompadour
powdered wig of the court
that hides their rat-like forms;
critics of Francis, boors of the net,
instead of truth, put across this pet;
insular, freakish, wound-up little snappers
with a hidebound, intransigent God complex
the likes of which to make Nietzsche look sane,
tuned only to their excellent guardianship,
blind to how their solemnity's inane,
like the little barkers that are suffered,
who bark at those aboard the barnacled barque,
especially at the helmsman, steering them to harbour.

Long Lens

How prolific are the sides of roads,
tansy-teeming, space-surrounded, full-ways grown;
lank-headed, broaching their own horizons,
tossing nectar-celled tiaras, potent
on the wayside, ditch-side, drive-by,
gravel-eating, house-drowning, bat-playing
greenery of the mountain-watched flats,
pondering the early moon. That sky surprise
on the east's field, freely, has gained,
for the eve-time whispering, pullover trance;
a man seated on his truck's back cradles
a camera's unwieldy, forearm-long lens
on the roof, pylon-wide towards its end.
Protracting this wyrd weed-eye to capture
the full-flushed escapee: bare, the flat face
blushes gold like a ripened field of grain
over the babyish earth - moon, moon, moon,
as a boon of glory we could not take,
but stare we must, stare, and so we wake.

Painting: Stump Culture

Title: Stump Culture

Medium: Oil on canvas

Size: 10 in. x 10 in.

I posted the painting earlier, but knew it wasn't where it should have been, so I went back to it.

Uncle Corky

Proselytism is solemn nonsense

Pope Francis' 10 Keys to Happiness

1. "Live and let live."

2. "Be giving of yourself to others."

3. "Proceed calmly" in life.

4. Have "a healthy sense of leisure."

5. "Sunday is for family."

6. Be "creative" with young people and find innovative ways to create dignified jobs.

7. Respect and take care of nature.

8. Stop being negative. "Letting go of negative things quickly is healthy," he said.

9. "The worst thing of all is religious proselytism, which paralyzes."

10. Work for peace. "We are living in a time of many wars," he said. "The call for peace must be shouted."

Misc.

Have you ever shopped at Wal-mart? The prices are to die for! And thankfully the store practices localism, since they can be found pretty well close to neighbourhoods everywhere. There are two  about a fifteen minute drive either east or south from here. Actually there are three, including the one fifteen minutes north. That saves burning of fuel too. In fact, it's really reductive of carbon footprints because you can do pretty much all your shopping in one go - for accessories, clothes and groceries. They have everything - everything. Some Wal-marts even have a McDonald's in them! They should make a deal with Trader Joe's and incorporate Trader Joe's into Wal-mart somehow. That way fans of Trader Joe's would not need to make two stops, just one. It would also go towards healing their schizophrenia! And it would make for a more global, communal kind of peace: the latte-sucking Libertarian asking where can he find the tzatziki for his fresh-made pita bread will rub shoulders with the wife-beater-wearing fatty asking where can he find the kerosene to deal with the bed bugs under his mattress. Some people make a big fuss about Wal-mart. They say to patronize your small outlets instead, make your wallet cast a vote for the dirty hippies. But Wal-mart is so huge - and you're so puny! It won't make any difference. Think about the money you save by shopping at Wal-mart. That money can then be spent on the movie theater, with popcorn and nachos and coca-cola.

*

I have become very obsessed with fig trees, with growing them, the kinds that will grow here, in the ground. You go around Vancouver and Burnaby you see the fig trees in so many yards, some quite big. There is one that local legend has it is the biggest in-ground fig tree in Canada. No winter protection. I've seen a picture of it. I can believe it is the biggest in Canada. It's huge. There really is a quiet cottage industry of fig growers here in southwest British Columbia, started of course by Italian immigrants.

I've got Negronne, Desert King, Celeste Improved and Uncle Corky's. I still need to get Lattarula, and heck, I'm just going to keep acquiring any and every variety available. Because I'm obsessed. Figs are so damn good.

So is Chilean Guava.

*

How exactly is the Invisible Hand not crypto-communism?

*

A person passed by and said, "That must be a labour of love."

And I forget what I said in response, except that afterwards in the useless recrimination of afterthought, I said to myself, "But you should have answered: a labour of love is the only true labour. Everything else is toil." And I would have sounded so enlightened too.

Then another passed, and said, "That must be tedious." To which I said, "It can be". Except that it was not an honest answer. For as far as the activity goes, I love it while I am resigned to it.

There are many things that do not require patience, so much as they require resignation.

Acrostic Poem: Hyssop

Hwæt! They drowse the air beside the beans,
Yielding heavy, hairy spires to the bees.
Simple, brilliant, modest colour of their blooms
Spreads a dazzling flush when teamed, bush by bush.
Opulence near escapes the eye with these!
Pure as their inner pungence, washing clean!

Desert King

Two Differences

I.

He poured his love upon the plants.
They grew before him in a trance.
When he went upon a trip,
all the plants grew deathly sick.

II.

He tended not, nor ruled a row.
Plants sprang forth without a hoe.
When he came to care and tress,
all the plants gave up their breath.