Ayahuasca In The Amazon - An Iowa Baptist Is Born Again As A Sexual Influencer, A Tantric Goddess

Jose Miranda Xoclicotl was a curandero, a brujo, and a guide to the spiritual world of The Angel of Death, the spirit visited on those who drank ayahuasca, the potent psychotropic drug that the Jivaro Indians of the Amazon had been taking for years, centuries, and long before discovery by European adventurers. 

Ayahuasca was not only a well-known hallucinogen of the order of peyote and psilocybin but one which had particular spiritual consensual qualities.  Everyone who took the drug reported seeing the same images - a powerful, demanding, inescapably transformative force; a benign/malignant spiritual being who led one into unexpectedly fearsome but revealing realms of consciousness. 

How could this be? asked psycho-scientists who had studied the drug and its effects.  It was one thing for a drug such as LSD to provoke profound spiritual experiences, but to provoke the very same experience in those who took the drug?  What could that mean?  What peculiar and remarkable properties must the drug have?  And didn't universal experience suggest a creator?

Controlled experiments - the most disciplined and scientifically rigorous in Ghent, Belgium - only concurred on the commonality of the experience.  Subjects indeed saw the very same image - a goddess who resembled the Hindu figure, Kali, the goddess of destruction, handmaiden to Siva as he destroyed and recreated the world - but this figure was different.  She was more terrifying even than Kali often depicted as a terrifying harridan, frightening, predatory, and adorned with a necklace of  human skulls. Why, who, what had created, engineered, insisted upon such a thing?

 

It was with that background that Belinda Ames, Iowan farm girl, devout Baptist, respectful daughter travelled down the Napo River to visit Jose Miranda and for once in her life expose herself to something other than the predictable and the ordinary. 

The trip down the river was quick - the current was strong and steady, and the 3HP motor on the dugout was only for the upstream return.  She was let off on a bamboo dock with the farewells and prayers of the Indians who were headed farther down the tributary into the Amazon itself.  They knew where she was going and the fearful stories that had come from the jungle sanctuary of Don Jose, and God's intercession would certainly be necessary, 

It took her hours to make her way down the jungle path to the village, but the directions given to her at Puyo had been good - turning to the left at the fork at the big banyan tree, right where the river 'boils and seethes', and straight under the ferns of St. Peter. 

Don Juan was cordial and welcoming, and as night fell he prepared the ayahuasca, gave it to her to drink, and sat playing a plaintive Quechua melody on his one-string violin. 

She remembered nothing about the night, the experience - that is the practical sense of time, thirst, hunger, fatigue - but when she woke up she felt changed, different.  She thought more clearly, more deliberately, and more decisively.  It was as though the doubts with which she had entered the jungle - about her nature, her sex, her desires - had never existed.  Not that they were gone; they never had been. 

She had not seen the Angel of Death, perhaps because the savvy brujo had dosed her down as he had done with other expectant foreigners.  He didn't want to scare off them and their two hundred pesos and ruin his business. Or because despite the researchers at Ghent and the paisanos of the forest, there was no such unifying, spiritual force behind the drug; and it was simply a powerful, independently active psychoactive agent. 

Whatever it was, whatever the composition of the drug, however the effects took hold, she felt she was a different woman; or rather she was, finally a woman.  Her parents, her church, her colleagues, friends, and neighbors were now irrelevant, supernumerary wannabe influences, confining, limiting, faux advocates of some undefined, wobbly righteousness. 

She slept with the boatman in Misaualli, the Napo River port village where she boarded the dugout for the trip downriver, not her first sexual experience, but the first since ayahuasca.  He smelled bad, had few teeth, and straw mattress was bulky and uncomfortable, but those indecencies were only remnants of her past emotional illegitimacy, quickly overcome.  She came and came again. 

Back in Ames, sitting on the front porch with Alma, Ricky, and Ralph, she had a moment of disorientation.  The jungle, the brujo, and coming thrice under the laboring boatman, Rinaldo were all part of an unsettling emotional broth.  How was she to square that with Iowa, the farm, and her upcoming matriculation?

Whether the drug found some invasive pathway into the DNA configurations of a good girl, or it simply acted to release the genetic sexual energy latent in those X chromosomes, is indefinable.  What is known is that Belinda Ames acquired 'a reputation' - that old fashioned, outdated, patriarchal obloquy - that had nothing to do with her unique, newfound sexuality. 

 

There were many distinct points on the fluid gender spectrum but 'omni-sexual' was not one in bold.  Mentioned only as a footnote it described the desultory and unconcerned, the indifferent, those who merited only mention not recognition. 

Progressives who were responsible for the whole idea of sexual neutrality completely missed the point.  Belinda was not at all indifferent but omnivorous.  Ayahuasca had not enabled random desire, but validated purposeful, meaningful sexuality.  

'A hot ticket', one Deke frat brother said to another, another Yale fool taking Belinda Ames as 'another cunt from Vassar' but missing the point.  Any man man enough to win Belinda's affection would be another Petruchio to Kate the Shrew, savvy, deliberate, and opportunistic.  Romance is not an intervening variable in any sexual equation. 

Tears And Flapdoodle, A Holiday Party, And Crying In The Eggnog Over Donald Trump

Veronica Peoples had given more to the black man than most white liberals - she had been the Dean of the Philosophy Department at _____, a black land-grant college.  She had gotten tenure at the school during the days of Martin Luther King, the heady years of black-white cooperation, the Summer of Love, and the promises of racial integration, had stayed in place despite the growing demand for black 'totality', she had been a tireless supporter of the black cause.  

Now in her approaching old age and a bit at sixes and sevens since her career of doing the right thing was over but liberal juices still ran in her veins, she turned to pottery and volunteering.  For the first she had no talent, but like everything else she did, she invested a huge amount of energy and commitment.  The rack of cups, pots, and bowls she put on display in her modest suburban home should have been an embarrassment; but her friends, all of the same can-do liberal enthusiasm, saw latent talent there. 

'Now that is a marvelous piece', said one, pointing to a misfired vase in which Veronica had placed a spring of holiday holly. 

'Oh, that's nothing', said Veronica smiling and inwardly delighted at the comment.  Pottery meant so much to her as memories of her deanship faded, and as her love for her students became part of a warm, comforting past.  She smiled at thoughts of the high cackle of LaShonda and Demetria in the lunchroom; the pimp-walking Pharoah and Na'Richter Evans, and the open-mouth stare of her pet project, Letitia Brown, an intellectually challenged student invited to attend the university to round out its diversity profile but who turned out to be a perfectly sweet, angel of a girl. 

'I've had a good life', Veronica said. 

Volunteering was another anodyne to her sadness and feeling of emptiness; and now that Donald Trump was in office, the need for organized opposition was never more urgent.  The man was a moral reprobate, a misogynist, racist, and fool - a running dog as Maoist Chinese politburo used to call American capitalists - and every day he added to the misery he heaped on the poor, the black, and the disadvantaged.  

 

Veronica had known nothing but liberalism since her earliest days.  Secure and insulated in the liberal colleges of her school years, professor at one of these same institutions, and finally administrator at ______, she cannot be faulted for her innocent and very passionately felt progressivism.  Yet at the same time, it was surprising for such a mature and not unintelligent woman to have the most reflexive sympathy for any and all liberal causes and the most horrendous antipathy to anything right of Samuel Gompers and Al Sharpton. 

So, the Christmas open house she hosted was to be much more than a time for holiday cheer.  It was to be a gathering of the willing - academics, non-profit retirees, community organizers, and members of the Peace, Women's, Gay, and Environmental movements of the nation's capital.  It would be a heady affair, a closely-knit brother- and sisterhood of the committed, a jamboree of likeminded assurance and validation of long years of reformist struggle. 

Veronica made special quince tarts, Swedish canapes, hummus minibites, and garnished the smoked salmon with beluga caviar.  She knew that the salmon-and-caviar might send the wrong message - a bit plutocratic - but it was so good that she could hardly keep herself from devouring all of it before her guests arrived. 

 

Of course there were no Christmas decorations in the house - the invitees included Jews, Muslims, and nonbelievers - and the music playing in the background was one of Bach's decidedly non-religious pieces, but 'festiveness is as festiveness does', Veronica always said, and the guests themselves would generate the holiday spirit. 

After an hour or so when all the guests had arrived, Veronica tinkled her dinner bell for attention and said, 'I think it would be fitting to remember those who have suffered in this year of misery, and I have asked Fenwick Lent to read from his latest collection of poetry - one we all hope will be published by Scribner's in the coming year.  Fenwick, if you please...'  

The clink of classes and silverware quieted, Fenwick straightened his collar, brushed a stray thread from his jacket, cleared his throat and began: 

Mercy me, said the little black girl by the well 

Tumult and misery abound in the fell

The light in the vale, cherished but pale

Is the way to promise, from hill to dale...

 

That was the only beginning, and Fenwick went on for what seemed an eternity reading his treacly, rhyming elegy to the suffering and the destitute.  The one or two outliers - Sunday football husbands getting drunk on Lambrusco - thought it was a joke. The guy couldn't be serious, but the more he read, the more Veronica's guests nodded in approval.  When he finally finished, they surrounded him and gave him hugs.  'No one could have said it better', said one. 

Fenwick's poem opened the floodgates of political sentiment.  Somehow the images of the poor and hungry that Donald Trump had tossed in the trash like 'the crusts of stale bread' invoked by the poet, brought up the bile, the intemperate hatred, and the venomous acrimony felt by each and every one of the guests nibbling the last crumbs of Veronica's quince tarts - except for one football husband, soggy with sweet wine who startled his neighbor when, through a mouthful of rice crackers and brie, he said, 'Bullshit'. 

The white people at the gathering made a big fuss over a busty black woman in an Easter hat who had done something noteworthy or other.  They had so few occasions to socialize with black people, that this could go on their unwritten resumes.  She didn't give them the time of day, preferring to squirrel herself in a corner with a sister and talk 'black shit' as the football husband remarked after catching a snippet. 

Veronica was delighted at the turnout, the appreciation at her table, the poem, the camaraderie, and the good cheer.  'I must do this again next year', she thought, although at her age next year was only a supposition not a guarantee. 

Ooh La La - Why Can't Americans Be More Like The French, Sophisticated Sex Instead Of Just Rutting?

Americans have sex just as much as anybody else - men and women rut in the cornfields, behind the barn, in boardrooms, bathrooms, and the back of cars.  It's just that it all seems so, well, tacky. 

Emmanuel de Rochefoucauld-Fargues' mistress, chief counsel to the Serbian ambassador, former model, and country representative to the International Court of Justice, met him every Tuesday and Thursday at their shared pied a terre in the 7th, a spacious apartment on Rue Vaneau overlooking the garden of the Prime Minister's residence, appointed in Louis XVI, fresh flowers placed in Lalique crystal vases by the concierge, fire lit in the fireplace, and a bottle of Moet Chandon by the bedside. 

'Bonjour, Monsieur, le Conte', said the concierge, opening the door to the apartment and the garden as she heard the familiar footsteps approach.  Tuesdays and Thursdays were special days for her.  Not every Parisian concierge had the privilege of caring for an aristocrat and his charming lover, and she did everything she could to make their brief stay as welcoming and accommodating as possible. 

Emmanuel was indeed a Count, one of a long line of both Rochefoucauld and Fargues aristocrats.  His great great uncle, the Viscount of St. Anselm-sur-Laye, a vast property in the Dordogne, had written the authoritative book on Flemish history; and his grandfather was a much decorated officer in the French Army, a hero at the Battle of the Bastogne. 

 

His lover, Teodora Milic, was one of the most beautiful women in Paris, the envy of even the most sophisticated women of the city.  She was tall, authoritative, and dressed in the most elegant couture. She was well-known in France but even more so in the European Community where her work with the ICJ was noted for its particular legal rigor and steadfast nonpartisanship. 

Everyone in the 7th, Paris's most sought after arrondissement, knew both her and the Count, nodded to them on the street, and greeted them warmly at La Mirabelle, the small neighborhood Michelin starred restaurant on Rue Foche. Many also knew the Count's wife, a beauty in her own right, board member for the Musee du Grand Palais, and professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne. 

This was the way sexual affairs should happen, arranged discreetly but never hidden - affairs of incidental love but carried out with taste and allure.  There was something aristocratic about the Rochefoucauld-Milic affair - Emmanuel felt that he was carrying on a cultural tradition even more than enjoying a tryst with a beautiful lover. 

As the couple walked down the Rue du Bac to buy ripe pears from the fruitier they were acknowledged by both residents and workmen who tipped their hats as the couple walked by,  This sexual liaison was as much a part of French tradition as Mouton-Rothschild Grand Cru or the Eiffel Tower. 

The affair was about as far from the American experience as can be imagined.  While Americans may be between the sheets as often as the French, they feel they have to hide the fact, make apologies when discovered, pay a pound of flesh to their wives, explain to their children in tearful apology, and fight to keep their jobs. 

Most of the nearly fifty American presidents who have taken office over the course of the country's 250 years have had affairs, trysts, and sexual encounters. FDR's affair with Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd lasted decades.  JFK preferred shorter term affairs with Hollywood stars and international beauties.  LBJ was eclectic in his sexual tastes and counted on the Secret Service to satisfy his sexual ambitions. 

These men and others did their best to hide their sexual interests from the American public who unlike the French did not consider sexual liaisons to be perks of presidential office.  JFK was in fact blackmailed by J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI over his affair with a suspected East German spy.  Hoover would keep quiet about this relationship and those with Marilyn Monroe and other women, if the President went slow on Civil Rights ('The Nigra won't get farther than the crosstown bus will take him if I have any say about it'). 

When Bill Clinton's affairs with various women came to light, American women said that if he cheated on his wife, he would cheat on ordinary Americans.  Once a cheater always a cheater they claimed and deserted him in droves. 

Hundreds of lesser politicians had affairs, were caught, tearfully apologized and were returned to office.  As well as a profoundly Puritanical country, America is a persistently Calvinist one - God forgives sinners if they repent, and repent these politicos did, tearfully begging the public for forgiveness. 

Men in America cheat on their wives, 'working late at the office', taking frequent 'business trips' to Boston and Dubuque, and coming home bedraggled after 'eighteen holes of golf'. When discovered, the sound and fury is relentless.  There can be no give in a loving marital relationship no matter how desultory the affair.

Sex is everywhere in America - on television programs and in commercials, on the covers of magazines, and in provocative, revealing feminine fashions.  If one were to judge by first impressions, America would be the ooh-la-la country, not France; but voila la difference. Sex in America is a smarmy, rutting affair without class or sophistication.  Randy sex in the back of a pickup truck just ain't the same as on silk sheets.

There are of course exceptions - wealth confers a certain sexual license, and as long as a CEO stays clear of his co-workers, he's on his own.  Movie stars, already on everyone's most desirable list are given a free pass when it comes to serial lovers. Black men are supposed to have sex with any woman who comes their way, so they are not held to any Puritanical moral standard; but for the rest of the country, the Walmart greeters, bass boat and gun rack crackers, and nine-to-five salarymen - it's covered up quickies at best. 

'Sexist, privileged white male predatory behavior', say American women observing the French cinq-a-sept liaisons so much a part of Parisian culture; but except for the few chippies from Le Moulin Rouge, afternoon sex is a consensual, shared pleasure.  Women are complaisant lovers and deceitful wives no different from the unfaithful men they sleep with.  A sexual cabal of two, a five-star smorgasbord, a delightful encounter. 

France has been such a tolerant, libertine place that even the excesses of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former presidential candidate, international banker, and man on everyone's A-list were given a shrug.  When accused of sexual bacchanals, orgies of prostitution, Strauss-Kahn demurred, saying 'How was I to know they were prostitutes?  All women look the same with their clothes off'. 

That sexual ethos is disappearing now that France has become more Muslim, more Third World, more conservative, and more socially backward.  Muslims get around the fidelity thing by having many wives, but in secular France one must do, so only time will tell how the the community reacts. 

Meanwhile Americans are still in the woodpile, the stockroom, and Motel 6, perhaps dreaming of European sophistication and sexual know-how, but happy enough simply to be screwing someone other than their wives. 

Jesus Did Not Die On The Cross - How A Religious Seeker Tried This And That, Better Armed To Meet Her Maker

Christianity believes that Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins, but Islam says nothing of the kind.  The crucifixion never happened because Allah would never let his messenger, the penultimate prophet die at the hands of the Jews.  

 

The Jews and their Roman allies, certainly tried to kill Jesus , say Muslim scholars - a dangerous insurrectionist, traitor, and apostate - and dying a painful death nailed to the cross would be a fitting end for someone who cursed both the Empire and the Kingdom of Heaven, but they were unsuccessful. 

The man who died on Calvary was an unwitting imposter - a Palestinian who looked like Jesus, was a demented brainless fool who had no more claim to divinity than the Man in the Moon; but Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, millennialist itinerants with a hand for verse, storytelling, and poetic license, said that he was the Messiah that the Jews had been waiting for. 

Matthew was considered to be the best storyteller in Judah, and had made a living by weaving tales of myth, legend, fantasy and promise to gatherers from every corner of both Jewish kingdoms. According to the Jewish historian, Josephus, he was unique.  In a fragment from De Rerum Judaica, the Roman translation from the Koine Greek, Josephus wrote:

Jews have never heard such marvelous tales at the hand of a master, told with such panache (ζωηρότητα). Imagine! A man who raises the dead, who makes the blind see, who walks on water, and changes water into wine! A magician!

 

'Why not?', Melinda Bates asked herself when she first heard the Koranic story of the death of Jesus Christ. 

Melinda in sociological terms was a 'seeker', a person convinced that the here-and-now simply cannot be all there is, that there must be a spiritual world above and beyond this one.  The problem was that every religion had a different take on heaven and how to attain it, making the task of seekers a complex, difficult one. 

Religious inquiry is by nature without well-defined parameters - even finding a needle in a haystack is not impossible given enough time and patience, but looking for divinity when all there is to go on is hearsay, myth, legend, and improbably storytelling, is impossible. 

For seekers, the pursuit of truth is as satisfying as the intended result.  Exposure to the 'truths' of Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Mormonism, and storefront evangelism can give one at least a brush with God. 

Tolstoy searched for God his whole life, studying history, philosophy, science, art, and religion and came up empty.  Finally at the end of his life, exhausted by the effort, more confused than ever, he gave up and concluded that if millions of people had believed in God before him, and hundreds of millions believed in him at this very moment, there must be something to the idea.  

Although this conclusion and conviction didn't last - after he wrote his spiritual confessional, A Confession, he returned to his old logical, investigatory ways, and never settled the question.  He gave some hope to the world in the words of his character Konstantin Levin who embraced doing good as the insufficient but only expression of faith he could muster. 

To her credit Melinda took each step honestly and openly.  She entered each place of worship assuming that there she would find answers, and even after years of searching,, she never approached religion with cynicism or skepticism. 

Only once, hooked up with wires, diodes, and terminals at The Washington Church of Scientology, watching the flashing, pulsating lights, and listening to the hums, pops, and whizzes of the machine to which she was attached, did she wonder if the contraption could possibly have any link to God. 

'Once you are clear' said the attendant, 'you will be free to find God, and he will make himself known to you'. 

Getting 'clear' would take time, patience, and some financial investment, but thousands before her had had the expected epiphany. 

Mormonism seemed like a good prospect - Mormons were good, patriotic, simple people of faith - but when she heard that Joseph Smith had been given the holy book of Mormon, then lost it somewhere on his New York farm, she wondered if the foundations of the religion were solid.  The idea that the Lost Tribe of Israel was the Jivaro Indians of the Amazon jungle, and that Mormon missionaries had travelled down the Napo River from Misaualli to the inner reaches of the forest to contact this remote tribe and had been eaten alive by cougars and Amazon panthers along the way was a bit far-fetched and based on nothing more than the songs of a Quechua witch doctor. 

Melinda travelled to India because Hinduism, practiced by over a billion people and one of the world's oldest religions, founded by the Aryans of Mohenjo-Daro in prehistoric times, must have the answers she was looking for.

 

However, despite the image of Hinduism as a meditative, insightful, highly spiritual religion practiced at its most evolved by Himalayan sadhus, she found only the most exaggerated, fanciful, impossibly operatic ceremonies, the wildest tales of epic battles between monkey gods and devils, fanciful notions of reincarnation and rebirth, all assured by the defining, restrictive caste system. 

'Jesus is coming today', said the Reverend Isaiah Johnson, pastor of the Shiloh Church of the Resurrection on MLK Avenue in Anacostia - a recently formed charismatic assembly meeting in an abandoned hardware store.  The pastor was sure of it, for all the signs were there - the storm of the night before, the hail, the forbidding silence after the winds had stopped, all omens and predictors of His coming. 

Reverend Johnson was true to his word, for midway through the service a woman stood up, raised her arms, stepped into the aisle and did a St. Vitus' dance of ecstasy.  'I have found him' she shouted. 'My savior has come', and the whole congregation rose to its feet and in unison shouted 'Hallelujah, praise be the Lord'. 

Melinda was caught up in the frenzy as one after another, congregants made their way down the aisle to the altar, falling on the floor and rolling from side to side, hugging and kissing their neighbors and pointing to the ceiling.  'He has come! He is here!'

Yet no Jesus had appeared to her, and it was unlikely that he would ever set foot in this den of tribal worship excess. 

She went to Jerusalem and rocked and prayed at the Wailing Wall, consulted rabbis from all Jewish denominations, was told to read the Torah for 'all answers are therein', and again disappointed, discouraged, and now after so long, disconsolate returned home. 

'Religion is for the birds', she said once back at her modest home in Bethesda, fatigued but finally resolute.  Her search had taught her one thing - the imaginative,  fanciful, marvelously woven fabulist stories of resurrection, spectral brilliance, reincarnation, Jesus in Montreal, flagellation and flogging on the Prado during Easter Week, the derivative, marvelously inventive sura of the Quran were brilliant, creative, expressions.  Yes, they were all wildly impossible, but who cares?  Religion has always been a matter of faith, and since no religion has any proof of veracity, then anything goes. 

The atheist critic Christopher Hitchens once said 'What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence', and so it was with Melinda Bates.  Her spiritual journey had been an unexpected fantastic ride through one funhouse after another.  

Bass Boats, Gun Racks And The Real Call Of The Wild - Demystifying Nature

'Getting back to nature' has been a nostrum forever, a cure for the patent ills of the city, a remove to a more pure, spiritually healthy respite from the pressures of modern life. People of every era have sought solace, peace, and enlightenment in nature.  They have fled the noxious, morally polluted environment of the city and found calm in forest, glade, meadow, and mountain. 

It hasn't been just poets and philosophers like Thoreau, Wordsworth, Byon, and Shelley who have found the allure of nature irresistible, but entrepreneurs. Environmentalists, speaking of virgin forests as sanctuaries and places of unique beauty and epiphanic power, have generated an enthusiastic demand for the wilderness satisfied by businessmen who see unlimited financial opportunity there.

 

The Ecotherapy Movement - a brilliant scheme developed by canny investors who saw market potential in creating a refuge from the debilitating, corrupting, and destructive urban environment - promised the improvement or restoration of the ‘human-nature’ relationship, aiming to rebalance human lives.  Cities had distorted the psychological, spiritual, and physical balance we once had in an earlier, more pastoral age.

“Ecotherapy” refers to healing and growth nurtured by healthy interaction with the earth…Ecopsychology, the study of our psychological relations with the rest of nature, provides a solid theoretical, cultural, and critical foundation for Eco-therapeutic practice. This perspective reveals the critical fact that people are intimately connected with, embedded in, and inseparable from the rest of nature. Grasping this fact deeply shifts our understanding of how to heal the human psyche and the currently dysfunctional and even lethal human-nature relationship.

Advocates of Ecotherapy recommend the following:

• Inreach: receiving and being nurtured by the healing presence of nature, place, Earth.
• Upreach: the actual experience of this more-than-human vitality as we relocate our place within the natural world.
• Outreach: activities with other people that care for the planet

The movement became wildly popular because it unified spiritual longing, psychological health, and commitment to the environment.  Environmentalists are too outward-directed, and religious ascetics too inward-looking said advocates while Ecotherapy fully integrates the spiritual nature of man with the spiritual nature of the Earth.  

In marketing terms, Ecotherapy found a vacant consumer niche; created a strong brand image which signifies commitment, idealism, and purpose; and developed a sales strategy which includes products, services, and technical support. Perhaps most importantly, like all New Age movements before it, it taps into vast reservoirs of personal insecurity, providing an institutional home which is both alternative and strong.

Early testimonials were elegiac, suggesting an existential transformation, a new lease on life, a serenity and inner peace travelers had only dreamed of.  The cash registers of the movement headquarters in Bayonne, New Jersey - an unlikely place for such a forest enterprise - were ringing. Young and old were signing up for excursions in the Piedmont, the Blue Ridge, Appalachia, the Adirondacks, and the Catskills. 

 

The company could not hire enough docents to meet the demand; yet given the already strong belief in the transformative power of nature, even the most inexperienced guide, if he spoke earnestly about the healing properties of the forest, would satisfy the seekers in his care.  

There is another wilderness however, one populated with game to be hunted, and fish to be caught.  There is no romance in this wilderness, no epiphanic moments, no elegiac poems about spirituality or the Earth. The wild is a practical place, a philosophically neutral place where trails led to nests, dens, and habitat not to enlightenment. This wilderness - the veldt, the savannah, the great plains, and the jungle - has always been there; but only in the recent romantic era has it been revealed as something more than survival. 

Coyote Johnson took a bead on the buck he had tracked through Big Cypress Swamp in northern  Arkansas, fired just as the deer caught his scent, turned, and jumped into the dense trees behind.  'Goddamn it', said Coyote who had stood for an hour in Idle Creek bayou up to the top of his hip boots waiting for a six-point to take the bait, and he could haul home a prize. 

Coyote was frustrated, that was all; for this was what hunting was all about - tracking, baiting, patience, and a true shot.  He made his way to the mossy outcropping where the deer had stood, mapped out his way back to the truck (he knew this part of the swamp like the back of his hand, knew where the alligators liked to sun themselves and where the water moccasins nested) and started back.  If he was lucky he might spot a baby 'gator and have swamp steaks for dinner. 

The swamp, the bayou, and Harper Lake was all the nature he needed - game was plentiful, all places were far from Fish and Wildlife agents, so he could use his own well-practiced judgment on limits, and the weather in this part of Arkansas was never too cold.  His best hunting had been in late November when the wild turkeys and swamp partridges were foraging.  

He had no feeling one way or another about the swamps, the Ozarks, or the Delta of the state - no particular sentiments of spirituality, inner peace, or divine presence.  The blast of his twelve-gauge sent swamp birds flying in flocks above the trees but did not break some holy pact of silence.  Quiet was the essence of the hunt, and the blast from his Herstal Browning meant success or failure, nothing else. 

As he made his way back to his truck, the swamp changed character a number of times - from large, almost lake size open water, to boggy underbrush, briars, and tangles to solid ground and grasses.  Each venue meant different prey - squirrels, swamp rabbits, bobcats, mink, and muskrat. 

Coyote was as at home on the lakes in his district as  on the bayous and in the swamps, and when he was off work he would take his outboard and fish for bass or noodle for catfish.  He hunted and fished alone, not to be more attuned to the mystery of the environment, but for simplicity and practicality.  He had never gotten lost, capsized, bitten, or marooned. 

Nature was never more than this - neither human sanctuary, nor spiritual refuge, nor place of enlightenment. The magical realists, the Shelleys who are in awe of the clouds parting and the snowcapped peak of Mt. Blanc appearing in the morning sunlight; the Thoreaus who find peace and spiritual harmony on their Walden ponds, are dreamers, fantasists, fabulists who if born in a later, modern, urbanized world would more than likely have written of the electronic wizardry of the times, the excitement, the passion of numbers. 

The Ecotherapy entrepreneurs tapped into this particular empathy - Romantic lines of verse, magical insights, and fantastical transformations - and made millions.

A young follower of Ecotherapy from San Francisco had left the city to live in Mendocino County, had been trained in Ecotherapy, and was working as a therapist at a local Nature Wellness Center. She quickly became active in the Environmental Movement, contributing and then volunteering in campaigns to protect the redwoods, estuaries, sea lions, and the deserts.  

When she first heard of Ecotherapy, she knew it was for her.  She was particularly taken with the ideas of a particularly well-known advocate who said:

I am a flower person, a water nymph, a sprite, and a butterfly. I caress and embrace trees.  I taste the waters of springs and brooks. I smell the perfumed scent of meadows and forests. I was once reticent – ashamed in fact – about my desire to express my feeling of intimacy with the natural world; but Ecotherapy changed my life.  Practicing the profession has allowed me to share my experience with others – to guide fellow travelers along the path which for so long was hidden from me. I have become one with nature.

Not only did the Movement extend its reach and influence through canny publicity and media use, but through the evangelism of  its growing staff of engaged and committed therapists. They set the style and tone, and were so convincing in their appeal to both environmentalism and spiritual evolution that the clientele grew by leaps and bounds.

The marketing vision of the founders of the movement was truly canny.  Amidst the hundreds of New Age, alternative therapies in the country, they found the perfect niche – nature-spiritualism-environmentalism.  

The Ecotherapy movement, like most fads in America had its halcyon years then disappeared as though it had never happened; but its offspring are alive and well, and thousands of Americans head off to the woods looking for solace, emotional respite, and peace.  The allure of Nature is persistent, although waning in the days of AI and virtual reality.  When one can pick and choose from any one of an unlimited virtual landscapes in which to travel with an untold number of ideal partners, the real thing - Nature - will quickly lose its cachet. 

For the time being, money is still there for the asking.  National parks, mountain resorts, forest lodges, and lakeside cabins are doing a land office business. 

As for Coyote Johnson, the whole thing passed him by - the Ecotherapy thing, the Nature thing, and the AI virtual thing. He worked hard at his day job, hunted and fished in the swamps on the weekend, and was a very happy camper. 

A Tale Of A Failed Martyr - For A Progressive Willing To Die For A Social Cause, The Time Never Seemed Right

Bob Muzelle had wanted to give his life for a good cause as far back as he could remember.  When he travelled to Alabama and marched across the Pettis bridge with Martin and Ralph, he defied the police to beat him, water cannon him, and sic their dogs on him; but he only got a dousing, a light spray from the jet that hit the Negroes ahead of him. 

 

When he sat-in at a Montgomery lunch counter and waited for the expected abuse from the owner, a police collar, the back of the paddy wagon, and a sleepless night in a foul-smelling jail cell, he got only a hamburger 'on the house'.

Apparently he looked like the owner's son, one of the first American service men killed in Vietnam, so much so that the owner hustled him to a back room and asked him whether by any miraculous chance he had been in the same infantry regiment. 

When he protested outside Angola (Louisiana) prison, demanding the immediate release of Jacoby Martin, accused and wrongly convicted serial killer about to be executed, he expected the Louisiana State Police to charge the protestors, take them as prisoners and lock them inside the prison alongside rapists and murderers. 

Instead, unseasonal rains poured down on protesters and police alike, sending both for shelter and out of harm’s way.  When the rain stopped, Jacoby Martin had been executed, the police went back to their barracks, and the protesters boarded the busses that would take them back north. 

As he got older, his passionate endorsement of progressive causes increased, and also his desire to make the greatest sacrifice. Images of the monk immolating himself in public square to protest the persecution of Buddhists by the Catholic government of Vietnam were fixed in his mind.  If only he could have the courage and the gumption to kill himself for someone else, for good, for right. 

Yet the marches and protests for abortion, the glass ceiling, and gay rights were little more than jamborees, happy get-togethers of likeminded people, joined in a common cause but on the Mall for camaraderie, collegiality, and friendship.  

There was no deadly serious to the affairs, no do-or-die conviction.  Setting himself on fire for some fagg-t from San Francisco simply was not done.  As much as he espoused gay rights, gay pride, and gay marriage, he found the whole gay thing repulsive; and every time he pictured a buggering, cock-sucking bathhouse, he grimaced. 

When Donald Trump took office the second time and let loose all hell on the American people, innocent Venezuelan fisherman, and Colombian patriots, he felt the old civil rights juices flowing.  Perhaps this was his time.

This bullying, arrogant, power-hungry anti-democratic racist had to be stopped; and the complaisant, deluded, credulous Americans who still supported him needed to be shown how profoundly evil he was. If he, Bob, set himself on fire in Lafayette Park across from the White House and let it be known why he was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, the tide would turn and Trump would be turned out of office. 

On a trial run in the park, he had his doubts.  Perhaps he had chosen the wrong moment for the dress rehearsal, for the only visitors were lunch hour bureaucrats and curious tourists from Iowa.

'Just across Pennsylvania Avenue', said the tour guide, 'is the White House.  The American flag is flying. and our President at this very moment is deciding affairs of state, signing executive orders, and assuring the safety, prosperity, and well-being of the nation...'

What would immolation mean to grocers from Dubuque? Or Walmart greeters from Ames or Prairie City?  He would go up in a pillar of fire only to be seen by rubes from flyover country.  Never, so back to the drawing board. 

Now, Black Lives Matter still had currency, and it was at the time the most heady and potent protest movement going.  Black people en masse were demonstrating for equal rights, justice, and a place in the boardroom and against the police brutality which had been responsible for the murder of George Floyd, for the incarceration of thousands of innocent black men, and the continued waves of oppression and racism by the white population. 

Yet, if Bob were to immolate himself during a BLM protest in support of the black man, black people would cheer.  One more white man incinerated and gone up in smoke. 

Bob was also a committed environmentalist who was convinced that climate change was real and imminent and that within our lifetimes the planet would not longer be livable - unless of course a spanner was thrown into the works of the capitalist engine, that coal-fired furnaces were shut down, thermostats turned off, cars kept in garages, and plastics banned.  

But before that could happen a universal support for such actions would have to be assured; and only with some dramatic image of commitment and purpose - such as Bob's self-immolation - would the movement to protect the earth gain currency and momentum. 

This, then, would be Bob's time - a martyr to Mother Earth, to Gaia, to universal good; but as he looked around, travelled from east to west, engaged ordinary Americans from Bethesda to Chillicothe, he realized that no one really cared - they didn't give a shit, and went about their backyard barbecues, PTA luncheons and Sunday golf games as if there were no climate threat at all, let alone an existential one. 

No, burning himself up on Farragut Square would simply add carbon to the environment, attract a few onlookers, and have no earthly impact whatsoever. 

At this point Bob looked inward. He was the problem, not ordinary Americans.  He was the moral coward, the diffident, indecisive one.  If he had just one strand of moral fiber or one ounce of get-up-and-go determination, he would have been fire, smoke, and cinders long ago.  He was prevaricating, making excuses, dilatory and weak.

He could die for any one of the many progressive causes.  After all, progressivism had a unified structure.  Feminism, misogyny, gay rights, the gender spectrum, open immigration, economic socialism were all conflated, unified, and inextricably linked. Dying for one cause meant dying for all of them. 

And yet, and still...none of the above generated any real existential passion.  Gay men could bugger each other from here to eternity for all most people cared.  Women, as pushy and demanding as ever could make their way easily to the boardroom, and black people after more than a century still mired in the dysfunctional, crime-ridden, drug-addled ghettoes of major cities could stay there for all that mattered.

 

Not only were demonstrations and protests not worth anyone's while, the ultimate sacrifice - giving one's life for others in a good cause - was irrelevant. 

So, Bob was at a moral crossroads, troubled by his craven doubts, anxious to make the final sacrifice, but finding himself waiting for a bus which might never come. 

He wouldn't empty the jerrycans of kerosine or his supply of long-burning matches - that would be too much of a capitulation - but he decided to give the whole progressive thing a second look.  Why weren't conservatives ready to jump on their swords or climb on their funeral pyres?  Where was their existential angst? and why were they enjoying themselves!?

'Time for Florida', said Bob's wife Corinne, a thought which only a year ago would have been anathema, tantamount to a miserable withering away and a slow death.

Progressives die hard.  They cannot give up the fight for issues they have invented, lies of fiction and romantic fancy.  Amazon recently published a demographic analysis of consumers of dime store romantic fiction and found that they were overwhelmingly progressive, well-educated women. 

Not surprising when you come to think about it.  Fantasy, romance, and love affairs do not necessarily have to happen in the bedroom. 

Blow It Out Of The Water - Donald Trump Master of Intimidation, A Powerful Weapon In The Diplomatic Armory

Much has been made of Donald Trump's decision to blow Venezuelan drug boats out of the water with neither absolute confirmation of their intent or Congressional approval for military action; but even the most casual observer knows that the President's actions are meant to intimidate Maduro. No international law, no United Nations watchdog, no Council for World Peace can prevent Trump from blowing to smithereens anything that remotely looks suspicious. 

The intent of the threat is not simply a few boatloads of Fentanyl - a drop in the bucket given the illegal supply pouring in to the United States across all its borders - but a clear message for Venezuela and its president - 'I'm coming for you'. 

No one should be surprised at Trump's action.  Clausewitz famously said, 'War is the continuation of politics by other means', and the American president has no qualms of applying the principle in the Caribbean.  Venezuela holds the world's largest proven oil reserves, is a dictatorship, a failed state, and an embittered enemy of the United States; and so any means to remove its President, return the country to a liberal democracy, and open its vast oil fields to American drilling is legitimate. 

'This shit ain't checkers.  It's chess', says the Denzel Washington character in the movie Training Day talking about the fight against the drug cartels, gangs, and Jamaican crewes in the trade - a truism every one on both sides of the law knows.  President Bukele of El Salvador has turned his country from one of the most crime-ridden, gangland, murdering places in the hemisphere to the safest.  

'Civil rights?' he asks critics who challenge his rounding up of MS-13 Mara Salvatrucha gangbangers and locking them up without due process.  'What about the civil rights of millions of innocent Salvadorans who could not leave their houses for fear of getting shot, abducted, or beheaded?  I have given them their lives back'. 

 

Former President Duterte of the Philippines took the very same approach and said,  'Extrajudicial action is necessary when the threat is existential'.  

When he took over the presidency in 2016 The Philippines’ murder rate ranked 13th in the world.  Its rape rate ranked 10th.  The methamphetamine epidemic in the country was the worst in Asia and growing in scope and severity. 

Duterte ran on his tough stance on crime during his tenure as mayor of Davao:

Popular with the locals due to his successful zero tolerance policies against criminals, he earned the nickname "The Punisher". Vigilante groups tied to Duterte are thought to be responsible for the execution of drug traffickers, criminals, gang members and other lawless elements. Over a period of 20 years, he turned Davao City from the "murder capital of The Philippines" to what tourism organizations now describe as "the most peaceful city in southeast Asia," and what numbeo.com ranks as the world's fourth safest place

After election he made good on his promise, rounding up the worst criminal elements of the country and returning it to a peaceful normalcy.  He took the same undaunted approach to the increasing Islamist insurgencies in Mindanao.  

During the period of Chechen and North Caucasian terrorism in Russia, Putin held nothing back to defeat and exterminate those who threated the nation, its polity, and civil structure.  His actions were considered necessary and essential. 

The idea of extrajudicial governance - a heinous, reviled idea reserved only for dictators, anti-democratic autocrats, and corrupt regimes say progressives - is gaining currency.  When combined with a Machiavellian foreign policy - Clausewitz plus self-interested amorality - extrajudicial governance can be an essential political tool. 

The United States lost the war in Vietnam in part because of its naive 'Hearts and Minds' campaign to engage the rural population and convince it of the rightness of American-style democracy.  Meanwhile the Viet Cong won the allegiance of these same villages through intimidation and terror.  The expulsion of the Americans and the reunification of the country would be assured by any and all means. 

The United States defeat in Afghanistan - the Taliban are back in power, thanks in part to the US belief in restricting the conflict to military targets only and sparing the civilian population - should have been a lesson.  Its precipitous withdrawal from Iraq after the toppling of the Saddam regime, allowing for the resurgence of Islamic terrorist groups, was based on the same credulous, naive principle. 

Donald Trump is a political realist and unencumbered by such fanciful ideas such as American exceptionalism or 'hearts and minds'.  He is a student of Clausewitz, Machiavelli, Ho Chi Minh, dynastic China, and Vladimir Putin and an admirer of Bukele and Duterte.  

 

Blowing up drug-running cigarette boats from Venezuela, even at the expense of a fishing vessel or two, is a definitive, unequivocal statement of purpose - the Maduro government is on borrowed time, and soon it will no longer be in power. 'Your time is up', said Trump, and he means it. 

The American Left is up in arms over the President's Venezuela policy.  'We just don't do things like that', they say, preaching diversity, equity, and inclusivity; the absolute right of Islamic religious expression; the unquestioned right of brown and black people to demand legitimacy, power, and wealth; and the coming New Age utopia. 

Of course we do, says Trump, recalling for his opponents the firebombing of Dresden, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the destruction of Tokyo and along with it the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians. 

Not for the weak-kneed and lily-livered; but then again every country has always had its knots of dreamers, the Neville 'Peace In Our Time' Chamberlain capitulation to Nazi horror idealists.  This time around the American president is serving notice both to the American people and the international community.  The gloves are off, victory at any price is back.