I couldn’t find myself anything to do on New Years’ Eve.  Honestly, my preference runs to something like watching part of the Twilight Zone marathon run every New Years’ Eve and every July 4th on the Sci-Fi network — alone or with a group of sympaticos — which I have done in the past,  and probably will in the future.

I rode from one corner of Portland to another, seeing if such and such a place were open and if such and such another place were open.  Neither were.  At one point in the Tri-Met ride, I looked around and saw that I really had a strong dislike for everybody in my sight.  It was a panoply of hipsters, and a bit of bathroom graffiti struck out at me “Hipster Culture will be shown to be just as vacuuous as Disco was”.  There was a group that especially annoyed me — and one person in the group who did so even more.  It was a studied and carefully crafted geek chic and a strange “too cool for school” pose from a young lad just slightly than I… I don’t know quite how to describe it, and am at a loss of what disparate cultural cues shoved into a blender brings this person to the point he was at that precise moment.
At a different point in time, and with a completely different crowd — one that I liked better, and one that allowed me to shrug the other crowd off and inwardly figure “Well.  Leave them to their fun and I hope they enjoy themselves”–, two slightly high and slightly drunk gay men pointed at about three men in their sight, saying “Hot”.  I am happy to say that I am Hot.  Two people wearing the typical Fare Inspector uniform, but clearly with other duties this day being a “Fare Free New Years”, walked in.  They jotted notes in a notebook, frantically scanning the scene.  This again brought me to a state of annoyment.  Either you see something or you don’t… there is no notetaking for reference.  I am sure they had a mental list of items to take note of.  Interestingly enough, one of them said something to one of the gay men — who immediately obeyed by tossing his cigarette (or was it a joint?  No.  Couldn’t have been.) out the fast-closing door.  A seat immediately opened up, which I jumped at to sit in.  I saw why it was free… there was three beer cans.  I, having had bad experience sitting next to empty beer cans, shoved it out of my seat — contemplating for a second waving at the quasi – authority figures to say “Not Mine!”
I couldn’t figure out what could possibly be happening at Pioneer Square.  Sometimes it is cordored off on New Years’ Eve; sometimes it is not.  It wasn’t this time.  There was a decent sized but not overwhelming number of citizens milling about… I would later learn that one of them was Daniel Lee, all the more reason to have avoided the spot.  The next day I saw that a ball of some sort had been broken into pieces, and silver metal specks were all under the large Christmas Tree.  More power to that.
The rest of the night was all a blur, and just as well that it was.

I say Po-tay-to, you say po-tah-to… and I will be correct in my pronunciation, and you will be wrong.

The plan is being called SURGE AND ACCELERATE: take control over violence in Baghdad, then speed up the handover of territory to Iraqi forces.  […]  Administration officials tell NBC News it will involve sending some 20,000 additional U.S. troops to Iraq.

You say “surge and accelerate”, I say “Escalation”.

Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off!

In 2004, that was roughly John Kerry’s stated position on Iraq.  Which always seemed liable to change if he could get away with a certain shift in public opinion.  “Surge”.  The term hadn’t been concocted yet, but now that it is being used in political discourse, all I can suggest is that one ought to mentally cross out the word “surge” and replace it with “escalate”.  As in:

SURGE!!!!  ESCALATE!!!!

Congratulations to the Iraq Study Group, I suppose.  I’m sure the surge escalation strategy was right there, amongst the menu items that made up their report.

Caller:  The bible says shows that a nation ruled by women is what occurs when God punishes us.

Michael Savage:  We’re running out of time and coming up to a commercial break, but I know the passage well.

[And it’s something about how the Babe equivocates — the babe in Savage’s estimation being George Bush — and is thus taken over by a women — the women in Savage’s estimation being Nancy Pelosi — and the nation goes to Hell.]

Does that sound FAMILIAR?  Huh?  We’ll be right back.

………………..

Some things about Nancy Pelosi’s pomp and circumstances — she “cut in line” and broke not the “glass ceiling” but the “marble ceiling” — and a few of her pronouncements — one of which she either said or did not say (and I cannot quite trace it) “I am the most powerful woman in America” — bring to mind a FDR late – October 1936 campaign speech, which goes:

“I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match;  I would like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master.”

Actually, FDR had to stop the applause after “match”, waving out “Wait a minute”.  The reaction from critics of FDR was that this was over the top, and he received a bit of flack for it.  Not that he cared much — what, was New Hampshire going to be swayed over to Alfred Landon at the last minute?

Pelosi.  2 heartbeats away from the Presidency.  A poor public speaker.  I think it’s time to go back and re-read the New Republic’s 2002 editorials warning about Democratic doom when she took over Democratic leadership.

And. So. It. Goes.

One can do whatever they must with these pages. Hell, I don’t care, you have free will… if you read it and decide “Wow! This LaRouche guy looks like a Genius!”, by all means — sign up today!

I have enjoyed piecing this together, and would not have pieced it together had I not. There is something in me that enjoys both the type of flimsy excavation research necessary to piece together that series of LaRouche posts, as well as enjoying this type of topic at hand.

I have not paid enough attention to allegations that LaRouchites killed enemies’ kittens.

Anyhow.

I have access to Lyn Marcus’s Dialectical Economics, published in 1975 by DC Heath and Company — likely LaRouche himself, interestingly enough placed right next to some of Karl Marx’s work (Marcus followed by Marx). Its 400 pages look just as dry and dull as it sounds. It is this type of book that I cannot possibly imagine ever having possessed a dust jacket, lest it lose its anonymous place is a row of books in a musky selling used book store, which is its proper place for perpetuity. I cannot imagine anyone having read it or checked it out of the library in quite a while, though I suppose it has had to have been — there are enough LaRouchites out there, right?

Leafing through it, and after finding the dedication page bemusing (“To my opponents, who made this book necessary.”), and generally a bit confused as a passage here and there don’t strike me as particularly Marxist, I see that somebody has written three rather cryptic inscriptions. “best book in the library 1970 – 1980 Bucephalus Blue Award”. This is a LaRouchite reaching back to antiquity to toss out a reference, I presume. When? I cannot say.

On page 215, we find the “best 2 paragraphs of the decade 1970 – 1980 B. Blue Award”. Wow! How lucky of us that the Buceplus Blue Award has directed us to the two paragraphs of wisdom to found in all the books from the 1970s available at the public library! Here then they are:

Does the increasing productivity of labor as we know it signify that the need for human productive activity will vanish? Will humanity become a daisy-clad mass of strolling Lotus-eaters? Quite the contrary. At first we will have escaped one predicament to encounter one more awesome and demanding. To one who views the matter from that standpoint, we freely concede that man is increasingly to become a prisoner of the effort to meet his new needs for existence. However, from a human point of view, the significance of this fact is at precise odds with that attributed to it by the bestialized hippy of present-day advanced capitalist culture. What human being would wish to become a dog before the hearth? Only the view of oneself as a beast could inspire the hope of freedom from labor. There is no need to worry that man would persist long in the state of bestialization desired by the Mansion Family. He would soon cease to exist. To be human is to locate one’s identity for society in the activity of perfection; to rise to a condition in which that perfection is advancing at a more rapid rate, in which more human quality is demanded of one, in which one increasingly gains social identity because of one’s human powers, is to fulfill everything thant an actually human person could desire.At this point we should recognize that we have struck upon evidence that socialist society is not the final, perfected form of human society. It is merely the beginning of a series of human societies distinct from the bestialized forms from which we now have the potential to emerge. The fact that material existence upon socialist society must have a mediated form, even though that mediation is a classwide institution, is a contradiction within that form. The relationship between universal and cooperative labor also involve a contradiction which is a different facet of the same difficulty. Under socialist society, man has not yet achieved the realization of universal labor-for-itself. We are therefore considering the process by which universal labor as a productive category — as the supercession of cooperative forms of the labor process today — emerges as universal labor-for-itself.

Now I guess you never have to read or wallow through this goddamned book again or ever. It is done and complete for you.And then there is an Ezra Pound quote the “Bucephalus Blue Award” giver throws at us. “All things are flowing sage Heraclitus says. Yet a tawdry cheapness will outlive our days.” Indeed.

Today, the Democrats take control of two branches of Congress.  Considering the license the President takes with a so-called “Unitary Executive”, I’m always a little unsure how much it matters, but nonetheless there’s a shift somewhere or other.  We all know, because Sean Hannity and the like told us, to be wary of Speaker Pelosi (DOOM DOOM DOOM) and her “San Franscisco Values” (DOOM DOOM DOOM).  Less spoken of is Senate Majority Harry Reid (DOOM DOOM DOOM) and his … wait, let me go check to see where he’s from… okay, got it… “Searchlight, Nevada Values”  (DOOM DOOM DOOM).  Will America be able to stomache Harry Reid and his Searchlight, Nevada values, and once they know the truth about just what these Searchlight, Nevada values are, will they run– not walk — back to the Republicans?  We shall see.

In what has become an annual tradition of prognostications, religious broadcaster Pat Robertson predicted Tuesday that a terrorist attack on the United States would result in “mass killing” late in 2007.

Robertson said God also told him that the U.S. only feigns friendship with Israel and that U.S. policies are pushing Israel toward “national suicide.”

Why does Satan keep talking to Pat Robertson, and why does Pat Robertson keep thinking Satan is God?

xlcr4life Says:

factnet.org Find the discussion page and you will see over 2K posts about the cult with loads of info.

Indeed.  Over 2,000.  It looks like this:

	LaRouche	xlcr4life	401Â	1Â	1-01-07  8:24 am
	Updates, What is going on in the World of Larouche Today?	dave72	122Â	1Â	10-17-06  11:58 am
	My friend wants to get out BUT	swedish_lyn_watcher	8Â	1Â	6-18-06  1:03 pm
	The very long thread, continued	sancho	90Â	1Â	3-30-06  7:56 pm
	LaRouche Part III	sancho	400Â	1Â	2-18-06  5:03 am
	LaRouche Part II	stevengrendon	500Â	1Â	8-26-05  6:25 am
	LaRouche Part I	borisbad	500Â	1Â	6-03-04  11:20 am

Which means you start up a topic about … um… Lyn Marcus and keep going on that same thread for 500 posts.  I can only hope that that college newspaper reporter found her way there, as I hope everything else about that worked out well.  I think I wound up there, in search of “scott’s current email address, (along with a few others) but I can’t quite tell.
At any rate, this site is insane.  Go over and read the posts to garner some information about the mechanics of how the beast works.  There is nothing like the fervor of an ex-cult member, save a current cult member, to the topic at hand — which makes total sense, of course.
I appear to have hazarded correct guesses about a few matters, or have hazarded the same guesses as people who have more of a reason to know.  Example:  Why is he not running for president in 2008?  Well, the old route to money of running for president isn’t working well enough anymore, so it’s time for a script change.

I was at a mall I rarely go to, and needed to use the restroom and relieve my bowels.  So I hurried up some escalators, and into the restroom.  I was alone in the room, and there was something a bit off that I could not quite put my finger on, but I did not dwell on it.

Sitting in the stalls, I became annoyed by the voice of someone who had walked in, talking on a cell-phone.  It was a whiny, teenage girl’s voice, seemed typical of a sort.  For a second I dwelled on that, and then something more profound hit me: whiny teenage girl.

I sat there, embarrassed, thinking if I wait just long enough I could make a gracious and unnoticed break.  I noticed under the stall a woman linger in front of my stall, and my hyper-conciousness imagined her looking askew at my worn shoes — nothing particularly notable about them, but I can’t imagine a woman wearing them.

I knew there was a woman standing in the sink area, and I knew that there would be no gracious exit.  So I just upped and ran, figuring that from a distance I’ve been identified as female before (long hair), so perhaps I’ll be fine.

I sped from the inoffensive light pink walls of the woman’s room to the inoffensive light blue walls of the men’s room to wash my hands.  And it was there that I identified the “bit off” of my restroom experience.  As well the fact that there were more stalls in the ladies’ room.

I have given Lyndon LaRouche more sustained thought than I ever thought I could, and now I am coming close to the point where I can exile him out of my head for a good little while.  I’m almost done, except for some additions to add to the previous 8 chapters of the story.  I am going to have to figure out where to slide his work on behalf of lowering the standard operatic tuning pitch to A=432.  In 1989, The “Schiller Institute” rented Lisner Auditorium and put on perfermances of scenes from “Aida,” “Don Carlos,” “Rigoletto” and other operas sung slightly and consistently off-key, off-key compared to the standard pitch of A=440.  A bill was pending through the Italian Parliament, urged on by LaRouche, to to make A=432 the mandatory pitch standard for all Italian music schools, opera houses, orchestras, public radio and television and other musical organizations “in any way subsidized by the State or public agencies.” Use of tuning forks, etc., that do not conform to this standard would be punishable by fines ranging from 100,000 to 1 million lire (approximately $75 to $750) and “confiscation of the non-standard object.” — (that’s a cut and paste job from The Washington Post explanation on what the hell is going on here.)  Opera Fanatic Magazine published a 14 page article that accused LaRouche of cherry-picking Verdi’s 19th century settlement on A=432 as the universal standard pitch.

And thus went the most placcid controvery LaRouche ever involved himself in.  I presume that the students who attend LaRouche’s “cadre schools” are taught to sing from the A=432 pitch.

Hey!  Cadre Schools!  You know about those things, don’t you?

As for the LaRouchites being “surprisingly tuneful”, they are. And, they do practice their singing at LaRouche Camp, aka Cadre Schools… When I attended one of these cult like weekend getaways, I saw them practice endlessly. That’s pretty much all they did the one day I stayed. They where practicing from like 8 in the morning to 12, then there was this “representative” who would give a class on Schiller or Plato (one of those) for 7 (SEVEN!) hours, then they where singing again… All they sing is opera and Negro Spirituals for some fucking reason. And don’t even think about talking rock and roll music in front of them, to them, or in “The House of LaRouche”, you may as well fart in their faces cause they find it highly offensive. And I am not kidding that when they sang the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” they changed the lyric of “my eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the lord” to “my eyes have seen the glory of the coming of LaRouche”! That was so creepy! For a moment I thought ‘o Lord, they’re gonna feed us apple sauce or Kool-aid laced with arsenic once they’ve brainwashed us all’…

Oh, I almost forgot to mention that they hold these “cadre schools” which is a trip they take up to the mountains for a weekend full of “enlightening, earth shattering ideas”. Anyway, my pal dragged me to one of these once and all they do is talk about the golden ration, the doubling of the square, the British royal family (it’s so funny, they claim the queen is a drug smuggler lol), and all these conspiracies and how Larouche is the only one who can make a difference. After this cadre school, I NEVER wanted to know about them ever again and I along with five other people took off. When they started talking about rock music, one of the members said that he had hoped they’d make John Lennon’s day of assasination a holiday, we said screw it and drove off in my car. One guy tried to stop us and told us “if you leave, you will have the deaths of hundreds of palestinian children on your conscience.”

It is part of Lyndon LaRouche’s 1999 innovation in creating the “LaRouche Youth Movement”, an organization that plucks college students out of college and puts them to work for Lyndon LaRouche and … his movements.  Anecdotally, the first sighting I ever had of LaRouchites — in the physical flesh — were two elderly and one late – middle aged people hawking LaRouche pamphlets on the edge of a college campus, the words “New Sex Scandal!  Alan Greenspan is Screwing the Economy” draped over their card-table.

Years later, the LaRouchites started to become more a lot more seen and herad on campuses across the nation.  And they are, in bulk, college drop-outs.  The LaRouchites that you see today are, in the main, products of the “LaRouche Youth Movement”.  It’s an interesting little tweak, particularly seeing as they have no memory of LaRouche’s entry into public conciousness through the 1980s.  Presumably a lot of things are simply re-assorted from previous LaRouche techniques, and I’m guessing that there is a lot of the under-current that pops through this odd little “Ask the Boston Globe” letter from 1980 proving there’s nothing new under the sun:

From “Ask the Globe”, Boston Globe, 11-8-1980:

Can you give me an address for former US Labor Party cheif Lyndon LaRouche, who entered several state primaries last spring as a Democratic candidate? My dauther has been working for him for several years but has stopped writing home and I am trying to locate her. — JM

I can get to the explanation for the “LaRouche Youth Movement’s” genesis from something a LaRouchite recently blogged.  I’ll take the word for it.:

The decision by the 80-year-old Lyndon LaRouche, the leading scientific and political figure of our age, to form an international youth movement, as an absolutely essential instrument for the success of his efforts to turn the United States, and the world, back from the abyss of a New Dark Age, has raised new, fascinating questions about the role of youth movements in history. Clearly, as LaRouche himself has said, like revolutions, not all youth movements have been positive forces for mankind. But there is one leading example of an indispensable youth movement which did play a positive role: That youth movement was that of the American Revolution itself.

Understand that Larouche wrote in his 1979 autobiography “If a small group not only accurately assesses the nature of this lawful course of [historical] developments, but is able to chart the merging course of events, that relatively small group can exert an unusaul influence upon larger groups.”  It all starts to gain a similar repetitive cadence.  The Cadre Schools are just another adjustment of “ego-stripping”, with what I imagine the vision of the various LaRouchites running for school board positions, a return to the “classics”, which in this case is largely focused on the mystical properties inherent in Doubling the Square.  (Interesting progression of links when you google “Double the Square”.)

The techniques are faintly familiar.  Park yourselves on college campuses and cast your net.  Plan a Day of Disruption where a horde of LaRouchites attend lecture classes and disrupt it to the LaRouche agenda.  And take students who express interest or curiositity to the cadre schools.

I have to admire LaRouche’s timing.  The LaRouche Youth Movement was right there in place to take advantage of the post 9/11 era and ensuing Bush Era.  I have listened to a local LaRouchite on the radio — to his discredit, Clyde Lewis interviewed one a couple of times.  He made sure to interject that “The government committed 9/11.”  I have asked a LaRouchite why he took this cause.  He provided an answer of figuring out the world’s problems, not getting anything good at school, recognizing the upcoming economic crisis, and awkwardly stuffed in “the government committed 9/11” — in a manner that suggested he wanted me to take offense, which I did not.

You can move on from there right into the “Neo-Con Agenda”.  After all, didn’t you know about the PNAC Document and the call for a “Pearl Harbor type event”?

In large areas, the Bush Administation was making it easy for them.  The LaRouchites charged Bush with being an empty-headed puppet of the real man in charge — the evil Dick Cheney.  Who can disagree?

The Weekly Standard, National Review, and other conservative magazines now had a handy rhetorical device to bludgeon critics of the march to War in Iraq: You sound a lot like Lyndon LaRouche with your crazy conspiracies.  (There are historical precedents: such was the case with Iran — Contra.)  It can be spun further in any direction — Prescott made business deals with the Nazis, you know.  (For the record, I do not know whether this is the case or not.  A LaRouche publishing house published a book saying as much.  And more credible newspapers have reported as much.)  The implication being… hereditarily speaking, of course…

The blockbuster trilogy of pamphlets in the “Children of Satan” series could be peddled in the corners of war protests.  The name has stuck well. 

It was in this political environment that Jeremiah Duggan was coaxed into the cult, and met his suspicious death. 

WHEN Erica Duggan picked up the phone, her blood ran cold to hear her terrified son crying: “I’m in deep trouble… I’m frightened.”  Hours later, Jeremiah Duggan was found dead on the hard shoulder of a busy dual carriageway in Germany.  Police concluded he had committed suicide. But his family refuse to accept that verdict, insisting the talented 22-year-old student was hounded to death – or even murdered – by a sinister cult.

Today:

Almost four years after Jeremiah’s death Germany’s highest court looks set to order a fresh investigation, a breakthrough for Erica’s campaign to find the truth behind her son’s death.

And it goes on from there.

I get the feeling that America entered the 1990s assuming that LaRouche was one of those cultural items that could just be left behind as an artifact from the previous decade… a curious pop culture figure to be sure, but an antiquity nonetheless.  He was in prison, after all, and was not coming out anytime soon — admittedly not much brain space was occupied by an awareness of LaRouche — and even that small allotment of brainsapce was going to fade away to take on other inconsequential items.

As a whole, the 1990s were rather lean years for LaRouche.  The career path lacked any forward momentum.  He had successfully moved from a cult leader off the fringes of the New Left in the 1970s to a cult leader off the fringes of mainstream electoral politics in the 1980s.  He had achieved a sort of notoriety.  And then he reached his peak, and the novelty of his curious place in electoral politics and street theater simply wore off.

So it is that a Simpsons reference is the most important moment in LaRouche’s 1990s era.  The Simpsons has accomplished an amazing saturation where it is easily referenced.  Recently a local alternative newspaper, The Portland Mercury, had the cover blurb for a story on landlord – tenant issues: “Now Pay the Rent!  You Must Pay the Rent!”, probably a direct parody of something else (instead of what I took as a general parody of ham-handed community theater), but most easily identified from The Simpsons.  In LaRouche’s case, you notice that the Washington Post’s 2004 piece on Jeremiah Duggan starts  off immediately by referencing The Simpsons.  The scene is from a Treehouse of Horrors Halloween episode, and has Homer Simpson yelling, “Oh, no! Aliens, bio-duplication, nude conspiracies… Oh my God! Lyndon LaRouche was right!”

Granted, LaRouche continued on his path.  An election campaign in 1992, notable because he was in prison, and also because Ross Perot had borrowed his perchance for running half hour informercials replete with charts.  There was a meeting with George Bush and a LaRouchite that went like this:

LaRouchite shakes hands, does not release grip: “When are you going to release the files on Lyndon LaRouche?”
George Bush:  “He’s in jail.” 
LaRouchite:  “Yeah, and you’re holding him political prisoner. 
(secret service leading LaRouchite away)  Bush:  He’s in jail where he belongs.

That was part of the LaRouchite campaign against Bush where they waved pictures of brocilla and had the words “Hey George!  Eat It!”  Bemusing enough.

An election in 1996.  And one in 2000.  A delegate the DNC had to deny in 1996 from his home state of Virginia, and an eye-opening and staggering 22 percent vote total for Arkansas in 2000 (past the point where the primaries mattered much).  The Democratic Party learned to accept the occasional elected state representative or meaningless nominee as sacrificial lamb to higher office.

Politically, he set himself up in opposing Gingrich — creating a Legislative Dictatorship.  Opposing Clinton’s impeachment — which was a plot by  “The British and the rest of the international financial oligarchy to install Al Gore as president.”  (Why the British and the rest of the international oligarchy preferred Gore to Clinton, I do not know.)  He rallied against Alan Greenspan, and therein lies the trouble: it’s not a particularly sexy figure to push up against to attract a following.  (Whatever the merits or detriments of Alan Greenspan’s tenure, and admist an era where he was essentially knighted, he has his detractors that could conceivably be wormed through to LaRouchite conspiracies.)

Undoubtedly, Larouche’s donors continued to send him the maximum allowed under law, something that has been the norm through his political career.  And while there weren’t many economic downturns to crow about as prelude to the great Economic Disaster, he did get to crow when mainstream media outlets published articles alleging the CIA with being involved in the introduction of Crack into Los Angeles.  But overall, he didn’t come up with an innovation for his cult until 1999, and his innovation didn’t really pull himself forward until the Bush Era and after 9/11.