A tessellation of the plane. And beer.

It all begins with a simple flash of recognition and a sense of poetic resonance.

One the one side of the board, the ebony: Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., respected and renowned Harvard professor.

On the other side, the ivory: Sgt. James Crowley, respected officer and instructor for the Cambridge Police Dept.

More than a classic "town and gown" confrontation, their encounter has been front page news in America for days, and even Barack Obama has stepped into the fray with some ill-considered words--now retracted; in an attempt to be a peacemaker, he's invited both men to the White House to work things out over a nice cold beer.

Now, to deny that racism and racial profiling exist in this country is nothing short of willful ignorance. It would also be naive to think that the election of Obama has somehow eclipsed the very real racial inequalities which the nation faces.

But--gasp!--racial disharmony is not the country's core problem. We propose that stoking racism is a ploy in a great theatrical chess game being acted out by everyone, everywhere, all the time. And lest we forget, the players are not one the board itself, but behind it.

Behinds the actors on both sides of the board there are small bands of extremely wealthy and powerful individuals, families, corporations and organizations. One mouthpiece of these elites cry about the devastating effects raising the minimum wage will have on the economy--a whopping 7 dollars--while defending the practice of looting the profits created by the workers who receive these slave wages in the form of millions of dollars of bonuses destined for the already wealthy. What better way to distract attention from that flow of money than by occasionally lobbing a race bomb?

Race really isn't the issue here. George Bush had no qualms about putting blacks into top positions. To argue that the accomplished Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell were mere tokens is in itself a racist proposition. Whatever personal qualms politicians might have about, say, actually marrying a black person aside, they apparently have zero when it comes to working with people who are willing the take their side in the game. Black Queen, White Queen, ultimately it makes no difference, as long as the money and power keep flowing in the right direction.

The country has, after all, elected our first ostensibly "black" president. In quotation marks because at least half of his DNA comes from a white lineage. Black and white, Americans still seem to be under the spell of the "one-drop" rule.

Now, the poetic resonance of this particular case comes from the names (it's always the names it seems with poor old befuddled Daurade!)

Which brings us back tour opening gambit: Gates and Crowley.

Anyone even dimly aware of occultism will recognize the name Crowley. Our Sargent shares the name with the most famous, accomplished and influential occultist of the 20th century. Aleister Crowley, the great Beast 666 as he liked to call himself: bisexual, drug-addict, alleged spy, occult genius, poet, mountaineer, Moonchild....

Then there's the lovely evocative name "Gates." Crowley was if nothing attempting to open gates between this existence and another. In Magick Without Tears, just to give one example, Crowley speaks of the "fifty gates of understanding" in a chapter entitled "The Black Brothers". In the Enochian system Crowley explored the four Gates of the Watchtowers.

But these examples only limit the field of inquiry. Gates, portals, liminal points of transition. It's all central to the Magickal universe. It's arguably the whole point of ceremonial Magick to begin with.

If one is in any way aware of occult imagery, even on a subconscious level, it's hard to avoid the subtext of the Gates/Crowley conflict as it heads towards reconciliation, and given TV and cinema's seemingly endless parade of occult-inspired fare (no matter how insipid and watered down)--you'd be hard-pressed to find a culturally engaged American who is not on some level aware of occult symbolism.
The old "reconciliation of opposites" played out on the chessboard, the ebony and ivory of the keyboard tinkling out the music of the spheres. "Perfect harmony" as they say, symbolized by the checkerboard pattern on floors and trestle-boards of Masonic Lodges.

The square represents both the physical universe and echos that verse in Revelation (21:15) where the angel who shows St. John the Heavenly Jerusalem "....had a golden reed to measure the city, and the gates thereof, and the wall thereof. (16) And the city lieth foursquare, and the length is as large as the breadth...." And St. John the Evangelist is one of the two St. Johns who are considered the patron saints of Freemasonry.

We are dealing with a conflict being played out in the material world and on another plane, call it spiritual or psychic if you'd like, but it is as equally "real" to the players. They would impose a grid of diametrical opposites in a state of constant warfare upon a land free from such artificial dialectics. They would measure, subdivide and enclose everything. Then pretend to bring us all together over brewskis and patriotic jingoism.

The United States--E Pluribus Unum--"Out of Many, One"--the New World, a modern Atlantis, Utopia. Ever striving not only towards social betterment and self-improvement, but perfection itself. A land and culture where a plastic, deracinated androgyne like Michael Jackson--who destroyed his natural beauty in a quest for an artificial ideal--can be held up as a national icon. Where incremental initiatory systems towards perfection such as Scientology and the Boy Scouts thrive like so many Roman mystery religions--Christianity included. As American as apple pie, that mischievous beguiling apple! We bit whole hog and continue to chew and chew and chew, hoping that we can regain Paradise Lost through rigorous work and a healthy dose of self-help books.

And where a black intellectual and a white cop can sit down with a man who is both black and white and solve the nation's race problem over a glass of beer. To reconcile the opposites, as it were. Hey, we love beer--in vino veritas--but we're not sure it's gonna do the trick. One hand giveth, the other taketh away. Pay no attention to The Man behind the curtain. He's too busy nigger-baiting and pouring salt onto wounded crackers.

This great "beer diplomacy" summit will reportedly take place on July 30th, the day on which 276 years prior the first Grand Masonic Lodge in the US was constituted--in Massachusetts.

Miscellanea:

For what it's worth the term checkmate is an "alteration....of the Persian phrase "Shāh Māt" which means, literally, "the King is ambushed" (or "helpless" or "defeated"). It does not literally mean "the King is dead", although that is a common misconception, as chess reached Europe via the Islamic world, and Arabic māta مَاتَ means "died", "is dead"."

July 30 1971: The first lunar rover was used on the moon during the Apollo 15 mission. It was, in effect, the first car on the moon Incidentally, one of the drivers--James B. Irwin--was a Freemason. On the same day in 1990 the first Saturn automobile rolled off the assembly line.

July 30 is also the feast day of "Saint Abdon and Saint Sennen, illustrious Persian dignitaries of the third century whom the king of Persia had highly honored, were secretly Christian; it was they who had taken up the body of the martyred bishop, which had been cast contemptuously before a temple of Saturn, to bury it at night, with honor. "

And finally, these two men Crowley and Gates, the sun and the moon, these opposing pawns, are in fact, related. Turns out they're both descended from Niall of the Nine Hostages, an apparently very fecund kind of 5th C. Ireland, ancestor of the clan which dominated Ireland from the 6th to 10th centuries....and we all know how them Micks love their beer....