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| He who bestirs himself is lost. |
[C]et acte que je dis le plus simple, il est clair que mon intention n'est pas de le recommander entre tous parce qu'il est simple et me chercher querelle à ce propos revient à demander bourgeoisement à tout non-conformiste pourquoi il ne se suicide pas, à tout révolutionnaire pourquoi il ne va pas vivre en URSS.
--André Breton
The simplest Surrealist act consists of hitting the street, revolvers in one's fists, and firing wildly into the crowd as much as one can. He who hasn't felt, at least once, a desire to thus end the petty system of abasement and cretinization in effect clearly belongs in this crowd, with a gun-barrel at his gut.
A footnote adds:
This act I call the simplest, it is clearly not my intention to recommend it from among all others because it is simple, and to look for a quarrel with me about this is like condescendingly asking every non-conformist why he doesn't commit suicide or every revolutionary why he doesn't go live in the USSR.
--André Breton
Getting lost in Mexico City after nobody had turned up to meet him at the airport, Breton famously declared: "I don't know why I came here. Mexico is the most surrealist country in the world". This was in 1938, so he can be excused for not predicting that in 2012, by his own definition, this dubious honor would clearly belong to the United States of America.
This despite the curious time I saw two wild dogs, like something from a film by Buñuel or Jodorowsky, fighting over a severed burro's head in the unpeopled desert somewhere between Monterrey and Matehuala. But that's another story.
For a bit about the Francis Picabia quoted on Breton's sandwich board.
I posted this in response to the recent shoot-out in College Station between the police and one Thomas Cafall (FB page), former resident of Temple and, judging from the photos, quite the gun collector. Recent likes include "I will NOT vote for Obama in 2012" and "FOX News".
ReplyDeleteTemple is a significant part of the Killeen-Temple-Ft. Hood statistical area. Ft. Hood being where Army psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 in 2009, seemingly belying the argument that a well-armed population would the reduce the body counts in shooting attacks/mass murders.
The town was named after Bernard Moore Temple which is oddly evocative of Moorish Science Temple founded by Noble Drew Ali, precursor of the Nation of Islam.
On Feb. 21, 2011 he wrote: "As of March 1st, I will be back in B/CS for good."
On May (Friday!) 13: "I just got a new toy! It's a Russian Mosin Nagant that looks like it might not have been fired in 80 years, but was extremely well preserved. The two big cans above it are ammo. I'll be at the gun range as much as I can... "
On June 7: "No, it's not an AK. It's a Czech vz. 58. Just picked it up today, can't wait to try it out on the range. :)"
According to newser:
Stepdad called him a "a ticking time bomb and "crazy as hell."
Mom: "The minute I saw the TV I knew it was him," said Weaver. "I've been that worried about him." Weaver said she had been estranged from her son for months. "We are just devastated," she said. "He's been very deeply troubled. If you are going to commit suicide, why take all these other people with you?"
Did mum or dad try to do something about it? Just like felons or the mentally retarded, people with mental health issues aren't supposed to be allowed to buy guns. Shocking that someone described so candidly as mentally troubled could have access to so many weapons. And this coming from a gun owner and 2nd Amendment supporter.
Just a few totally random associations....
Sorry to drift further off topic from the OP, but regarding Hasan, he hasn't been convicted (yet). Per Wiki, his trial starts next week.
DeleteI'd recommend reading Michael Hoffman's blog entry on that topic and the comment section below it. Very doubtful Hasan was any more than another in the long line of scapegoats.
Jason, quite right. I should have put "allegedly" in front "killed."
DeleteThat Wiki page included these interesting numbers:
"Hasan has been charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted murder. An Article 32 hearing, which recommended that Charges against Hasan be referred to a General Court Martial, began on October 12, 2010."
That Wiki article is pretty wild. Certainly are a lot of suspicious things going on with this guy. Hard to believe he could have been giving lectures which turned into rants about "infidels" without some kind of official investigation. Lots of oddness going on there.
I've actually read Hoffman's Ft. Hoodwink articles about this event. I'll go back and look into them. That this College Station event occurs the day before Hasan (i Sabah, assassin?) is scheduled to go on trial for an event that went down just across town is also odd. I'll have to go back and re-read Hoffman's take on it, it's been a while.
How did you get to know Hoffman's work, btw? I have very mixed feelings about him; although he's undeniably a brilliant and provocative writer, some of his beleifs are rather off-putting. I still always read his newswire, though!
Got into Hoffman accidentally - links via blogs, etc. Although he has his biases which can be offputting at times, I haven't found any instance where he's been completely off base. Perhaps others have. Regardless, "Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare" has to be one of the best books written on public ritual and synchronization. His application of Downard's "Revelation of the Method" is brilliant. Would that he would concentrate more of his work on this subject matter.
DeleteRegarding Hasan, I saved a couple of other comment threads from other non-conspiratorial news/blog links in which gun enthusiasts comment that no one of Hasan's level of training and weaponry could have even remotely hit as many people as he did - at a military base no less AND in a theater where sodliers were being "processed". These were made at the outbreak of the incident, when there were reports of multiple shooters. Now, those reports have disappeared and not a single news group asks any questions along that line - the Official Version is accepted without doubt. It's only later in the "Revelation of the Method" when the information is thawed and these anomolies are revealed that people suddenly remember. The "initial reports of multiple shooters" is so common that it's probably an important ingredient in the Scapegoat Ritual.
Yeah, SSandPW is a classic, but it tends to fly around all over the place. It's almost as if he wasn't sure he'd get another chance to write a book on the same themse so he stuffed it with as much as possible. There are ideas he could have developed on every page! I do like the book a lot though. To be honest, I see the idea of a cryptocracry orchestrating ritualized events as....off. There is something to it, but it's almost as if it's a process that works of its own accord, rather then as something manipulated by a group of plotters. The Revelation of the Method is a brilliant theory and again, I think it's applied on a regular basis by various factions within business, government, media. I'm just dubious about an over-arching cryptocracy. I honestly don't think they could pull it off. I'm not explaining myself very well, just woke up!
DeleteI can't speak about Hasan at any length, but the idea of multiple shooters is intriguing, an element of "conspiracy theory" since JFK. Just before I moved to France, there was an industrial accident, a local chemical plant exploded, injuring thousands. Several people called in from various parts of Toulouse and reported an explosion and the media started to report that several bombs had gone off in Toulouse. Which was false, it's just they got so many disparate reports it seemed as though that is what had happened. (There are suspicious aspects to this story, actually, but that's another day).
My point is, that in the confusion and noise, people hearing this at different angles with different echoes from different vantage points....I've heard loud noises, including gunfire and been totally unsure of the direction it came from....well, taking that into account, maybe multiple shooters are reported because the media reports anything just to be on the air first. They can say there are reports of multiple shooters and if they're wrong, make no retraction---they didn't say there were multiple shooters, only that multiple shooters were being reported...
The confusion and noise, the nature of TV media to be first on the airwaves with "news"....couldn't this in fact be what's going on? Not an ingredient in a ritual but a result of something else entirely?
It's a question which I have asked myself over the course of several posts spanning years, so it's difficult to sum it all up in one comment. You and I probably differ on the fundamentals a lot more than we agree, actually. Still, as I said before, feel free to write something up for LoS!
One final thing, is that it's simply become a given among a certain part of the population that any mass shooting is some staged event. When I get into "synchromystic" musings I'm not looking for the signs of ritual stagecraft, but the links which make explicit the mental process of association that allows us to assign "meaning" to what we perceive. My take is that these words of "twilight language" feed into further events, creating a seeming relationship, but which are more a reflection of our shared culture, the "collective consciousness" if you will, working more along the lines of the weather than as the result of some kind of master plan.
Which is not to deny events can be manipulated and exploited, I'm just much more cautious about the extent. Anyway, this was probably not a wise subject to tackle before coffee!