SELF FLATTERY AS SELF LOATHING

Originally published on October 4, 1996

OR ART WAS NEVER MEANT TO BE TAKEN OFF THE SHELF. This morning I awoke at 10 AM after channel tobogganing until the wee moments of early. Fifteen seconds into my new morning a power spike kills the fan and several scattered appliances around the house. Well, not killed, but put down for a sleep while men at work raid the street for quick fixes.

In the past thirty days this is the fourth major brownout. Hope it doesn't spread to the computer room as I write this. Timing is everything. Lucifer, the author of time. Speaking of Lucifer this morning I also pick up Blum's book, A HISTORY OF THE JEWS for the first time in weeks and was juiced by the page I'd bookmarked when last I read from it. But first, I didn't finish my Liberty Lobby piece the other day. Kevin Kreider is an old drinking pal, part of the Jack, Rob, Rich, Daryl, Dennis, Tim, Jim, Gabriel, BS routine at its most regular interval say from the Forestville warehouse era of 1992-1993. He & Rob Bussius (now married and serving Uncle Sam as a soldier stationed in Hawaii) have worked at Liberty about fifteen years between them. Young Kevin is Jewish, has writerly aspirations, and wife just had their first child. We call him Young Kevin because of his slight but handsome stature.

When I mentioned to Tim about the D'Sousa reference to Liberty I plunged into some speculation of Kevin's employment there, tossing out the line that no doubt he's a planted spy who reports back to the B'nai Br'ith Anti-Defamation League. I've been down there a few times with the two boys of Liberty, even unsuccessful applying for a job there myself at the insistence of Bussius, and reinforced by Avril Shipman, Tim's kindly mom, who gave me a contact name. They weren't hiring was the response I got over the phone. I dropped the chase, but it's a quaint friendly office located at Third and Independence, SE, right in the heart of Capitol Hill, so to speak. Jarred to realize that a barely concealed form of white supremacy was not only alive and kicking in this raging country, but, well, how damned really close I am to it, I begged the question then, and remain unchanged in my opinion, uh, why not? In the knowledge of all these other rather militant groups in opposition, any other opinion would be stupid...

A twisted question of personal purpose keeps me near and far on the issue of race to say anything on the topic. Silence nobody wins. While discussion is hushed up and immediately brands me a foul racist type, yes Lynn, from the south. Go figure, the lemmings.

Page 262 from AHOTJ: "It was the sages who let the devils into Judaism. The difficulty was, of course, despite the Bible's condemnation of sorcery, and despite the Judaic belief that all actions were willed by God alone, ruling out any kind of dualism...

"There were not many devils in the Bible, but they did exist: Mevet the death-god, Lilith the child-stealer (sometimes an owl), Reshev the plaugue-god, Dever, another sickness-god, Belial, a sort of devil-commander, satan, leader of the anti-God forces, Azazel, the scapegoat-god of the wilderness. So the invasion of Judaism by devils over the period of 150 BC to 300 AD had some prcedents. Needless to say, [High Priest] Hillel could understand devil language too. Devils varied greatly, though according to Issac of Acre, they all lacked thumbs. Some, like Satan and Belial, were formidable, serious...

"To comabt these devils, an army of angels came into existence. These too had biblical sanction in some cases. Angels like Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Metatron had special alphabets, derived from ancient cuneiform writing or obsolete Hebraic scripts, the letters often containing small circles which looked like eyes. These letters were put on amulets and other charms to magic away devils. Or they could be driven off by pronouncing special combination of letters. One such was the name of the devil in Aramaic, which was given as abra-cadabra...

"Letter combination magic, performed by using the secret names of God and the angels in special formulae, was known as 'Practical Kabbalah'. In theory only men of great sanctity could, let alone should, exercise this white magic. In practice, protective charms were mass produced and circulated freely in the ghetto. There was also black magic, invoked by manipulating the 'unholy names'. According to the Zohar, the sources of this forbidden magic were the leaves of the Tree of Knowledge in the Book of Genesis...

"The most stupendous piece of magic was the creation of a golem, an artificial man into which a ba'al shem, or Master of the Name, could breathe life by pronouncing one of the secret divine names according to a special formulae. The idea derives from the creation story of Adam, but the actual word occurs only once in the Bible, in a mysterious passage in the Psalms. However, Talmudic legends accumulated around the golem. Jeremiah was said to have made one. Another was made by Ben Sira. From the fifteenth to the seventeeth centuries the notion gathered force, so that the ability to make a golem was attributed to any many of outstanding sanctity and kabbalsitic knowledge. The golem was brought to life to perform a variety of tasks, including defending Jews from their gentile enemies. In theory, a golem came to life when God's secret name, with the letters arranged in the correct order, was put into its mouth; it was deactivated by reversing the the name. But a golem occasionally got out of hand and ran amok—thereby generating a new layer of terror-tales..."

As the hollow man of TS Eliot, we are all golems, and the acronymics, ah ha! The soup is always spoiled by too few or too many cooks...

The question being, had I already read the page before bookmarking, or had I finished the previous page, bookmarked the next page as is usually my habit in this matter, or is all this only so much blarney, irrelevant to anything anybody anywhere needs to know? Just asking...