Towers Of Babel:
Why The NSA’s Stored Data Is Already Obsolete
By Winsip Custer, Commentary for CPW News Service
Empires rise on the dominant language that has helped propel
them to prominence. The Greeks used
Greek. The Romans used Latin. Spain used Spanish. If there is a canonical language for the
world today it is, thanks in part to the success of the British Empire,
English. When the thirteen colonies beat England in the American Revolution and
War of 1812, then eclipsed the British
Navy and essentially took over the policing of the empire Britain had created
the English language’s dominance was guaranteed….for a while.
In Saudi Arabia British Petroleum took a back seat
to ARAMCO, the Arab American Oil Company.
Then came OPEC whose oil ministers generally speak English as well as Farsi. In the Orient the British treaty with China was appropriated by New
England Brahman opium trader, Caleb Cushing.
America's New England power elites controlled an ever widening empire
that rode the shirt-tails of the British ships and canon power and their unique language.
Great Britain had its canonical authors with
William Shakespeare at the top of the list, but a uniquely American list
had emerged on this side of the Atlantic.
Among that list's leading gatekeepers is Yale’s Harold Bloom. Bloom wrote in The Western Canon: “We are
destroying all intellectual and aesthetic standards in the humanities and
social sciences in the name of social justice. Our institutions show bad faith
in this: no quota are imposed upon brain
surgeons or mathematicians.”
That should be taken to mean that a quota system regarding the admission of students into the humanities and social science programs. Those programs still make up the educational core that protects and defends the nation's prevailing myth. Science and mathematics are culture neutral. The humanities are not. With the advent of the rise of applied sociology a very sophisticated and subtly propagandized image of the national myth can inform, transform and mesmerize the masses. From the printed page to the silver screen to the high definition television panel we see the evolution of applied sociology in the manipulation of mass media that even in time of starvation and death, Joseph Goebbels believed in the mimicking Hollywood with a German language retelling of the British story of the Titanic that would seal the split hull of the sinking Nazi battleship.
In gatekeeping the American literary canon while
proclaiming its demise, all from the basilica of Western power, enlightenment and
secrecy, Yale University, Bloom reveals the real issue: Language and storytelling protects the
empire’s mythology. Whoever controls the
mythology controls the empire. Mark Twain could appear to plumb the depths of the Connecticut Yankee's benevolence in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but he is still circumscribing the myth. Abolitionists were not necessarily racial egalitarians. Civil Wars may be fought on one premise, but be motivated by something altogether different. Bostonian, George Luther Stearns, a "secret six" backer of John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, stood to make a fortune from the sale of lead from his mines to the munitions manufacturers.
Empires fade. They have definable life spans. The
canon of each empire’s literature is determined by the dominant storytellers’
popularity….not necessarily among the masses who must earn their place among
the power elites who define the canon and protect the dominant myth. The canon is beatified by the empire’s
academic and literary community, but they are always an extension of the elites'
power and influence who use the language as a type of mystic defense of their privilege
atop the societal heap. Now we are told that nationalism is gone and a coming world order will replace it, but enforced with what weapons? No, not new novels like Last of the Mohicans or Moby Dick or Blood Meridian. With bullets and lead. It has been widely reported that FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Administration has stockpiled over 1.4 billion hollow point bullets and shotgun shells that have essentially no use in a military theater. Forbes Magazine carried Ralph Benko's article about it on March 3, 2013. They are also stockpiling the bullets that are interchangeable with all NATO forces. The failure of the U.S. to incorporate the defunct Soviet Union into a new paradigm when the essential reason for NATO's creation had evaporated, suggests that the new world order has at its core a fascist focus like that shared by the business plotters of the 1930's....Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, John Burroughs, Charlie Lindberg, Prescott Bush, John D. Rockefeller and others.
Harold Bloom laments the injustice imposed on the
gatekeepers of the myth comparing them to brain surgeons and mathematicians who
are not under the pressure to churn out the proper storyline to each new
generation in a form that continues the dominant mythology. In fact, science and mathematics use an
entirely different language. That language,
as we shall see, is myth destroying, but the myth is being fiercely managed. The brightest and best young writers are systematically managed away from or toward the desired properline according to their malleability. As with Hunter S. Thompson, by the time they figure it out it's too late and their clarion criticism is always a swan song.
When science and mathematics fudge their analysis
the scam may not be immediately apparent. Wall Street hedge fund investor, Bernie Madoff, took thousands of investors
into his confidence. Some knew with only a few hours of mathematical analysis
that Madoff was a pyramid sitter and ponzi schemer benefiting Madoff. When the scheme was more widely exposed the losers were
anxious not to be seen as greedy, money grubbing social climbers who got what
they deserved by not listening to the voices of reason.
On the other hand, when Nobel
Prize winning economist, Robert C. Merton, son of Columbia University’s leading
sociologist and “Father of Applied Sociology”, Robert K. "Merlin" Merton, was shown to
be the author of the mathematical jargon that justified the “credit
default swaps” or “derivatives” market that tanked the U.S. economy in 2008,
the voo-doo nature of the mathematical language was not immediately verified by his own teacher, Paul
Samuelson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ronald Reagan's Budget Direct, David Stockman, deemed Merton's new language a freaky form of eco-Yiddish with an incomprehensible drawl. The mythical and mystical formulations were a fraud and a scam, but they
protected the dominant irrational myth and were celebrated by the nation's Wall Street and Washington power brokers who used
the mythology, as have all cultures, to protect those sitting atop the thrones
and pyramids of power as they continue to wage their war on the gullible.
Alfred
Nobel’s primary language was not English, but Swedish. The organization he founded beatified Merton's mythology in every language. That beatification was not based on the rational core of scientific and mathematical analysis and description, but upon the mythologized mumbo jumbo of the elite's own ghetto-ized power jargon. Nobel's name invoked another
universal language upon which civilizations also rise and fall: Decibels and flying earth. Shredded metal and explosive projectiles. Where this language is invoked people join the chorus like children singing a Gregorian chant they have never heard.
As empires
expand they roll on the roads and rails of mythology and storytelling in the
dominant language. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark
Twain, Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Ernest Hemingway and Jack London provided the storyline for the American myth even when their work is not beatified by Bloom. Montezuma and Geronimo did likewise for their followers who used peyote and other herbs to help improve their receptivity, much as the China Traders used opium and an ever changing array of interpretation enhancers. In each case the mythologizers were simultaneously riding the rails
and laying them. There were women
writers as well.
Harper
Lee would write in the same state of Mississippi where William Faulkner and
Tennessee Williams defined Southern literature and in the same hometown as Truman
Capote. Her To Kill a Mockingbird laid
out the jagged edges of racial discrimination and class distinction just at the
Civil Rights Movement was taking shape.
In New York she was befriended by the Browns whose connections to
the literary and industrial power elites helped her to lose her Southern twang. They celebrated her literary
accomplishments by adding her name to literature taught at Harvard, Dartmouth, Columbia, Brown and the other Ivy League citadels, but the elevation also derailed Lee's ambitions. As quickly
as she appeared to join the ranks of the beatified, she disappeared to Long
Island, New York, not far from the Northeastern Sistine Chapel of the Canon’s American literary
Vatican, Harold Bloom’s beloved Yale University.
Pearl S.
Buck was also from the South and the East: West Virginia, yes, but also
the Far East. Her parents had ridden
the rails to the Pacific, sailed to China, where she experienced first-hand the
sheathed spear point of American imperialism….sheathed in the soft covering of Americanized
Christian evangelism. Returning to
America, The Good Earth in hand, she disassociated herself with the
Presbyterian Church of which CIA Director, Allen Dulles, was a part as had been
his cousin, Avery Dulles. Converting to Catholicism, Avery became the first
U.S. Cardinal to skip the office of Bishop. When the North Vietnamese Roman Catholic political families were exported to the South where they established their new order, Pearl Buck's concerns were validated. Avery's Dulles' cousin's political position had no obvious connection to his rapid ecclesiastical ascent except that the Church is masterful at assimilating the various dialects of all social classes and is not above the use of power politics to advance its own agenda.
If the earth was good, informed in part by the Gospel her father
proclaimed, Buck believed we had no place in destroying it or its people
however different they may appear in skin tone and eye shape. Power elites who
gained their position and status by military prowess don’t like to hear this criticism,
which clearly threatened Buck’s inclusion in the canon, though she did win a
Noble prize from dynamite maker, Alfred Nobel.
Harold
Bloom, as previously noted, has been the primary contemporary vote counter for the beatified elements of
the American literary canon. Bloom would
probably place Cormac McCarthy amid the literary scriptures, albeit, alongside the
Lamentations. Blood Meridian, No Country
for Old Men and The Road are clearly lamentations. When placed side by side with Melville’s Moby
Dick, which is always in the Canon, another lamentation, McCarthy demythologizes the great white whale. It’s money and power that John Joel Glanton
and Judge Holden are chasing like Ahab.
If Holden could back the naive preacher out of town as Glanton had
actually done with Reverend John McCullough, a Presbyterian preacher in San
Antonio, Texas, Pearl Buck would have been Judge Holden’s match.
Not even
Jack London, the Merlin of American machismo, could compare to Buck’s ability
to turn the language into a literary and societal scalpel. London had a
different agenda. Hired by William Randolph
Hearst to spin heartening tales of swashbuckling dominance over human
competitors or savage environments, London’s palate for adventure both decried
the place of Oakland, California’s poor and reveled in their abilities to adapt
and survive. London lubricated the rails
of Leland Stanford’s railroad system. His
stories both drew people West along the Russell’s Pony Express route and since
whatever rises converges, opened to him the good life atop the pyramid he
seemed, like Hunter S. Thompson, to loathe.
London,
not unlike the hired literary gun of Lewis Lapham, Christopher Hitchens, seemed
to be a lone corner man for the fight promoters working both sides of the
ring. He hated the pretensions of power
and privilege and fought like a madman to win their approval.
Writing
for the Socialist Press, March 7, 1916, London said it clearly: My final
word is that liberty, freedom and independence are royal things that cannot be
presented to or thrust upon races or classes.
If races or classes cannot rise up by the strength of their own brain
and brawn, wrest from the world liberty, freedom and independence they never in
time can come to these royal possessions---and if such royal things are kindly
presented to them by superior individuals, on silver platters, they will know
not what to do with them, and will be what they have always been in the past…inferior
races and inferior classes.
Jack
London, of course, missed the fact that Leland Stanford like Henry Ford and
other American industrialists, had often made their fortunes on government
subsidized land allotments for rail routes, highways, ports all fortified by tax payer paid armies and naval
protection.
Jack
London’s Oakland, California, the western terminus of Leland Standford’s
Transcontinental Railroad, would become the future home of the Anglophile Hell’s
Angels motorcycle gang that kick started the literary career of Hunter S.
Thompson with his book Hell's Angels. London, and to a significant
degree Thompson too, celebrated the
blue collar class, wrote to their deepest longings, while in reality betraying vast parts of
them. The Angels phalanxed San Francisco's societal elites defending the playground to the west and north that was as compartmentalized as the boroughs of Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia or New York. Pearl Buck’s vision and sensibilities were not so
myopic.
Jack
London’s wife asked him after he penned the preceding words “What will you call
yourself now? Revolutionist? Socialist?
What? London replied, “I am not
anything I fear….I am all these things. Individuals disappoint me more and
more. And more and more I am turned to
the land.”
The
land. The good land. Pearl Buck recognized it. The Good Earth, from which we all come to use
the tools of whatever language best serves us, but to what ends she questioned? Leland Stanford was serving the New England
power elites whose China trading ships lined the harbor at San Francisco and
Oakland and the last leg of the railroad circling San Francisco Bay was handed
to Stanford by the U.S. Army General who would insure that a Southern rail route
from Savannah to San Diego, laid out in the 1850’s by Jefferson Davis, did not
succeed. Jack London’s macho seal
hunting excursions to Alaska were child’s play compared to the slaughter of
600,000 dead Americans in a Civil War that hid beneath the high moral objective
of the abolition of slavery the race to the Chinese opium, silk, spices, tea and
other markets which our literary forefathers, the British, had previously mythologized.
If the
British royals had circumscribed their fortresses with deep motes, they
insulated their culture with an education in the language of their trades,
religious liturgies, politics and pastimes.
Aspiring authors from the lower ranks could ascend the power elites’
castles and pyramids, but Melville could not reveal that the great white whale was as specific as the opium from Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India
that made Caleb Cushing, the Cabots, Lodges, Roosevelt’s, Delano’s, Russell’s
and other who controlled the mythology, wealthy. Some who made the ascent, like Sylvia Plath, could not stomach the contradictions and without Buck's healthier ego simply checked out.
When author
Hunter S. Thompson was riding with the Hell’s Angels in Jack London’s Oakland across
the bay from the city where Mark Twain said “the coldest winter I ever spent
was a summer in San Francisco,” he knew that he was crossing the mote. When he danced among the Red Woods in the
Bohemian Grove or flew on Air Force One amid the journalists where he had been
invited in like an honorary plebiscite sitting atop a Mayan or Incan pyramid to
observe the secret rituals and sacrificial offerings, his education continued. Before his death he would rip the lace curtains off of the windows of the empire's slaughter house. He employed his significant skills to describe one who
could see the horde on the bank including those souls that the Hell’s Angels rejected
as unworthy and as one who had learned the true identity of the castle dwellers beyond on Nob Hill
or up the Napa Valley near London’s Valley of the Moon. There was really not that much difference among them
all. The only difference was that their
image was modified by the use of the prevailing language and the myth into which,
like cotton candy at a carnival midway, the myth was spun into a colorful, eye-pleasing
cocoon.
Like Pearl
Buck’s epiphany and London’s longing to be a part of the land which the
language of science and mathematics now tells us is being rapidly degraded,
Hunter Thompson shredded the cocoon when he wrote:
We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world, a nation of
bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not
just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our
hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us. No redeeming
social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or we’ll kill you. Who does vote
for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having
all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking
half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George
Bush? They are the same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for
refusing to kill gooks. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious
in the American character. They are the racists and hate mongers among us; they
are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis. And I am too old
to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them.
If Thompson was correct we would expect that our most cherished beliefs have been a sham. Had he figured it out and taken a Plath-like exit? The center core of the power elites inner circle will tell us through simple observation. In the wake of Hunter S. Thompson's epiphany they will have circled the wagons even more tightly around the prevailing myth.
Yale's Harold Bloom will have endorsed a new university where the cocoon can be carefully reconstructed. Not among Connecticut Yankees, but in the South where the first chief legal council to the KKK, Albert Pike, built the first temple of a movement that bifurcated the Free Masonry of George Washington and his friends and led it in a new direction that not even Nathan Bedford Forrest wished to follow. Pike's movement had come from the homeland of the mother tongue where Germanic tribes blended with the Viking into the roots of the Norman dialects. That Southern city would also be the eastern terminus of a Transcontinental Railroad that William Tecumseh Sherman had destroyed in order to guarantee that the Order's order flowed through the Cushing's and Russell's bank accounts like oil flowing through Cushing, Oklahoma. Bloom's new project would likely be led with someone with connections to Blackwood's Magazine, the Edinburgh publication in the highlands of the Anglophile heartland and for which Pike had been a leading writer. The new Ralston University for which Bloom is a founding patron and where Stephen J. Blackwood is the new president in Savannah, Georgia fits the bill nicely.
"Impossible," some will say. Bloom's family is Orthodox Jewish. Yes. Askenazi Jewish. Likened to the Joseph tradition rather than to the Moses tradition. The first builds pyramids the later dismantles them in favor of a legal system of justice, equality and freedom. Had Cushing, Jefferson Davis and Judah P. Benjamin followed the Moses tradition along which George Washington was walking when he freed his slaves in 1799 there would have been no America Civil War and the world would be a much different place. Utopia? No, but better and the language we use to describe what it is we are would not be as cryptographic.
While Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Robert Witt and others address the nation
to allay fears that the National Security Agency’s data mining of American’s
spoken and written languages is not violating our freedoms, history is laughing
out loud. The volumes of communication
that are being sucked like a vacuum cleaner into massive storage banks is becoming as
obsolete as Greek or Latin. A new
language may re-mythologize our perceptions, but the language of science and
mathematics strips us naked and shows us for what we truly are…..creatures of
the good mother earth to which we will all return and perhaps much more quickly than our myths recognize.
