Halloween: The Devil's Holiday

Thursday is Halloween. Unlike Christmas and Easter, both of which are now accepted as Christian holidays despite their pagan origins, Halloween has no defense. There is nothing “Christian” about it. With the full approval of their parents, children dress up as ghosts, goblins, and monsters. The parents then allow their kids to knock on the doors of strangers who fill their bags with candy sometimes hiding a razor blade.

According to The New American Desk Encyclopedia, Halloween started as a Celtic festival “to mark the new year, welcoming the spirits of the dead and assuaging supernatural powers.” When Halloween crossed over from Europe to America, brought here by the Irish and Scots, it was draped in Christian disguise by church leaders who promoted it as All Hallows Eve, the night preceding All Saints Day on November 1 which Pope Gregory III (731-741) instituted as a day to celebrate Christian saints. But whether it’s called Halloween or All Hallows Eve, it’s a day devoted to death.

In Holidays and Holy Days, a booklet published by the United Church of God, on Halloween “the souls of the dead were supposed to revisit their homes on this day, and the autumnal festival acquired sinister significance, with ghosts, witches, hobgoblins, black cats, fairies, and demons of all kinds said to be roaming about.”

The practices associated with Halloween are all rooted in the occult. Bobbing for apples is a form of fortune telling, also called divination, an attempt to predict the future. “The first person to bite an apple was predicted to be the first to marry in the coming year.” The jack-o-lantern, the name for the pumpkin with eyes, nose, and mouth carved out and illuminated by candles or flashlights “represent(ed) a watchman on Halloween night or a man caught between earth and the supernatural world.”

Unlike Christmas and Easter whose Christian trappings have tended to obscure their Pagan beginnings, Halloween is associated entirely with the forces of darkness, with witches and bogeymen. It is Satanic.

VISIT MY KINDLE STORE AT AMAZON

Devoted: A book to make your heart grow larger

Angels exist, but they’re less likely to flap their wings than wag their tails.

Dogs are angels. They are the best companions and the most loyal friends. They are our protectors and often our inspiration. Dogs give us more than we could ever hope to give them. If you’re unconvinced, ask yourself this: How many books have dogs written in praise of humans? Now, how many books have humans written about dogs?

Devoted: 38 Extraordinary Tales of Love, Loyalty, and Life with Dogs by Rebecca Ascher-Walsh and published by the National Geographic Society, is one of the finest books by a human to express love and admiration for man’s (and woman’s) best friend.

Keep the tissues handy as you read about dogs that comfort the terminally ill and the abused, perform heroic feats in service to mankind, even rescue their owners from suicide with little more than a look or a brush of a wet nose.

You’ll meet Rosie, a golden retriever “who can’t stand for a kid to be sad, and will go to them to comfort them.” Rosie made history in 2011 when she became the first dog to take the witness stand where she gave support as her teenage owner testified against a rapist. And Effie, a mixed-breed, whose habit of sticking her nose into her owner’s breast was the clue that a large carcinoma, rarely detectable in mammograms, was growing there. K’os, a Neapolitan mastiff, had a nightly habit of visiting the bedroom of a boy whose epilepsy was only diagnosed after the dog’s barking saved him during a seizure.

There are dogs that serve as eyes for the blind, ears for the deaf, and provide friendship to the lonely and brokenhearted.

At other times, the tears may come from laughter as you read about dogs that surf and skydive. Walsh provides informative sidebars throughout explaining the differences between various breeds of dogs, how to care for your dog, as well as dog trivia.

Devoted is a beautiful book on all counts: beautiful stories beautifully written, with beautiful photographs on quality paper. It’s as lovely to look at as it is to read.

“Dogs make our hearts grow larger,” Ascher-Walsh writes. So will this book.

(A modified version of this review was originally published at Amazon.com)

Brian W. Fairbanks

VISIT MY KINDLE STORE AT AMAZON

Jerome Corsi asks: Who Really Killed Kennedy?

Jerome R. Corsi's Who Really Killed Kennedy? kept me reading over three consecutive nights, but for a die-hard conspiracy theorist who has already explored alternative histories of the 1963 assassination, it offers few revelations and fails to acknowledge what may have been the most significant factor in the 35th U.S. president’s death: John F. Kennedy’s decision in June 1963 to issue currency through the United States Treasury, as the Constitution requires, a fearless or foolhardy move that threatened the Federal Reserve’s stranglehold on the economy. Kennedy bravely took on the Mafia and the CIA, swearing to smash the latter into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind, but that may have been child’s play compared to challenging the banking establishment that likely controls both.

Despite that omission, Corsi’s book is a valuable crash course on the Kennedy assassination, gathering evidence from a variety of sources to summarize what is now known or plausibly suspected concerning the shocking events in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

The characters already familiar to us from Oliver Stone’s 1991 film, and dozens of other documentaries and books (the best of which remains The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease) reappear in Corsi’s pages. They include such now infamous figures as Lee Harvey Oswald who did not act alone and may not have acted at all in pulling the trigger, and Jack Ruby, the nightclub owner with Mafia ties, who did pull the trigger on Oswald, not in a fit of psychotic patriotism, as the white-washed version claims, but on orders from people that both men knew and likely worked with. Allen Dulles, the CIA director, fired by Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, is the chief culprit in Corsi’s view, an amoral son of privilege who had solicited help from Nazis in forming the agency and joined forces with organized crime and foreign assassins to eliminate the president. Also slithering about, certainly involved at least on the periphery, are three future presidents: Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and George H. W. Bush.

Few people today accept the official Warren Commission report, a tall tale that is sure to receive heavy rotation in the mainstream media this year, the 50th anniversary of JFK’s death. In a way, I almost envy those naïve dreamers who continue to believe it. The story of a lone assassin and his magic bullet is a comforting fantasy, far less frightening than the truth. Since the lies are still so aggressively promoted, it’s clear that the Kennedy assassination was about much more than the elimination of one man, and the powerful forces behind it are still in power today.

Jerome Corsi sees the big picture, and connects the assassination to the New World Order, that utopia for corporate and banking interests that will be a prison or death sentence for the rest of us. Read Who Killed Kennedy? Read it and weep - for Kennedy, for your country, and for yourself.

Brian W. Fairbanks

VISIT MY KINDLE STORE AT AMAZON

JFK: Liberal or Conservative?

In his inaugural address in 1961, John F. Kennedy, who at age 43 was the second youngest man elected to the U.S. presidency, spoke of the torch being passed to a new generation of Americans. Nearly three decades later, when 46-year-old William J. Clinton took the oath of office, we had all seen the black-and-white photo of a teenaged Clinton shaking hands with JFK. To democrats, it seemed symbolic of further torch passing. In reality, it was a handshake and nothing more.

History is written by the victors. Sadly, JFK’s assassination prevented him from joining that club. With his death, the historians took over, distorting the man and his legacy. When the handsome Irishman isn’t portrayed as a lecherous bed-hopper who turned the White House into a brothel, he is held up as the embodiment of modern liberalism.

In JFK, Conservative, Ira Stoll makes the case that the 35th president’s true heir was not the democrats that followed him as commander-in-chief (Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Clinton, and Barack Obama), but Ronald Reagan who, like Kennedy, opposed oppressive government regulations, favored tax cuts to boost an ailing economy, stood firm against Communism, and held a deep religious faith.

In his lifetime, Kennedy rejected the “liberal” label. As a newly elected Senator in 1953, he told The Saturday Evening Post that he was “not a liberal at all,” adding “I’m not comfortable with those people.” A friend, Washington columnist Joseph Alsop, remembered Kennedy as regarding “those people” with “Genuine contempt. He really was – contemptuous is the right word for it.” Nor did liberals think highly of him. In 1958, Eleanor Roosevelt told a TV reporter that she would do all she could to prevent a “conservative” like Kennedy from winning the democratic presidential nomination.

Kennedy did win the nomination, and went on to face his republican opponent, vice president Richard Nixon, in a series of televised debates. Unfortunately, the debates are remembered less for what the candidates said than for how they looked.

“I don’t believe in big government,” Kennedy told the American television audience. The democrat and supposed liberal who, in producer Don Hewitt’s view, “looked like a young Adonis,” also took a hard line against Communism, warned of criminal control of labor unions, and vowed to prevent Red China from gaining admittance to the United Nations. Nixon, plagued by five o’ clock shadow and a pool of perspiration on his lower lip, promised higher salaries for government employees, expressed a need for more taxes, and warned that Kennedy’s support for the opponents of Fidel Castro was “dangerously irresponsible.” As Nixon related in his memoirs, “Kennedy conveyed the image – to 60 million people – that he was tougher on Castro and communism than I was.”

Free trade and tax cuts took precedence over liberalism’s pet issues during the Kennedy administration while the later presidency of “conservative” Richard Nixon was characterized by wage and price controls, the first presidential visit to Moscow, and the opening of relations between the U.S. and Red China.

Kennedy’s politics were influenced, Stoll believes, by his spiritual beliefs. The author argues that religion played a bigger role in Kennedy’s life than we’ve been led to believe. In his inaugural address, Kennedy said “the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.” Two of Kennedy’s aides, Kenneth O’ Donnell and David Powers, remember that “Kennedy was a more deeply religious man than he appeared to be or wanted to appear to be.” If he did not always live a Christian life away from the prying eyes of the media, he did something else when no photographers were present: he prayed and attended church services.

“The informing spirit of the American character has always been a deep religious sense,” he once said. Kennedy also quoted Alexis de Tocqueville: “Where there is no respect for God, can there be much for man?”

There’s little question that the definition of “liberalism” has changed in the five decades since JFK was in the oval office. It could be argued that liberalism once meant protecting the minority from the majority and letting the individual flourish. Now, the respect for man that de Tocqueville spoke of has been replaced by respect for mankind which, for today's leftists, is a collectivist stance that ignores the individual and defines everyone according to race, gender, economic class, and sexual orientation. Everyone is now part of a separate group that eyes with suspicion the group to which they don’t belong. And each group wants to know what their country can do for them, not what they can do for their country.

That is not the America that JFK, Conservative, or even JFK, the liberal of an earlier era, bravely led for too short a time.


VISIT MY KINDLE STORE AT AMAZON

Chief Executive of Death

Nat Hentoff, the liberal journalist who was let go from The Village Voice several years ago, generally avoids hyperbole, but he told an interviewer that Barack Obama is the most dangerous president in history. Even George W. Bush, he says, wasn’t particularly evil. He was led along by nefarious forces in his administration. Obama IS the nefarious force. For many, “Obamacare,” officially known as the Affordable Health Care Act, is the equivalent of a lethal injection. If you’re too old or too ill to contribute (financially) to society, your life is not considered valuable enough to save. Hentoff, now 88, believes that Obamacare could hasten his death.

For the moment, Obamacare is on hold. The House of Representatives voted to “defund” the program last week, but even its most ferocious opponents acknowledge that this “train wreck,” as majority leader John Boehner calls it, won’t be derailed for long. It’s here to stay, like it or not.

I don’t like it.

The Senate wrapped Obama’s present to the American people on Christmas Eve 2009. The humongous health care package is one that the country cannot afford, does not want, and will benefit insurance companies and politicians much more than those in need of medical care. The decision to pass Obamacare on the morning of Christmas Eve is intriguing. It was December 22, three days before Christmas, in 1913, that a weary Congress, eager to break for the holidays, passed the Federal Reserve Act. This unconstitutional act gave control of the American economy to the bankers who can manipulate the country’s fortunes as they see fit, creating inflation or deflation, and plunging the U.S. into a depression if they choose. As Congressman Charles A Lindberg, Sr., the father of the legendary aviator, said, “From now on, depressions will be scientifically created.”

And so they have been.

How will Obamacare affect the country?

Millions of Americans presently uninsured will now be covered, or so Obama and his minions tell us, whether they wish to be or not. Enrollment in the program is mandatory. Those who refuse to enroll will be fined and possibly jailed. The elderly and those with the most serious health conditions will suffer because younger people, those who supposedly “contribute” to society, will receive treatment first.

Worst of all, Obamacare gives the government one more area of our lives to control. This is a dictatorship in the making, and most people are too clueless to see the signs. They will still fail to see the signs even as they are microchipped, which few people are aware is an eventual requirement of Obama’s program. When told that this could very well be the mark of the beast warned of in the Bible’s Book of Revelation, they’ll just chuckle and dismiss those who worry about such a thing as kooks, weirdos, conspiracy theorists, and religious fanatics. They’ll laugh, and laugh, and laugh - all the way to Hell.

Once Obamacare takes effect, Hell may be right here in the United States of America.


VISIT MY KINDLE STORE AT AMAZON

Bob Dylan paints Another Self Portrait

Another Self Portrait, volume 10 in Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series, focuses on one of the less celebrated periods in the man’s fabled history, the years 1969-1971 when he released Nashville Skyline, Self Portrait, New Morning, and a two-disc Greatest Hits collection padded out with newly recorded versions of previously unreleased material. The countrified Nashville Skyline came in for its share of criticism. What was the deal with that mellifluous voice, so unlike the scratchy sound for which Dylan was famous? And what gives with a song as simple as “Country Pie” (“Oh me, oh my, I love that country pie?”) from a songwriter who later took the credit for killing Tin Pan Alley with personal and sometimes mind-boggling adventures in the surreal like “From a Buick 6” (“I need a steam shovel, mama, to keep away the dead”)?

It was Self Portrait, however, that stood out like a bloated stomach in Dylan’s discography, especially in 1970 when we were unaware that Knocked Out Loaded and Down in the Groove were still to come. Like 1966’s Blonde on Blonde, it was a two-record set. Unlike that indisputably brilliant album, the one with “Visions of Johanna,” “I Want You,” “Just Like a Woman,” “Rainy Day Women #12 &35,” and whose final side was devoted to one song, the 11 minute, 20 second “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” Self Portrait was . . . strange.

Self Portrait wasn’t strange in the same sense that Blonde on Blonde was, with its title that seemed to have been arrived at in a moment of possibly drug-induced whimsy (as were song titles like “Temporary Like Achilles”), but . . . strange.

The man who killed Tin Pan Alley was resurrecting it by singing “Blue Moon,” the Rodgers and Hart standard. There were other covers, too, the first Dylan album since his 1962 debut to feature songs he had not written himself. Some were even more surprising than “Blue Moon” – commercial songs (the horror!) that had already been hits for the Everly Brothers (“Take a Message to Mary,” “Let It Be Me”) and even Simon and Garfunkel (a version of “The Boxer” done up as a wacky duet between scratchy-voiced Dylan and Nashville Skyline Dylan).

Some tracks had the kind of syrupy strings that might have sounded right on an album by Jim Nabors (TV’s Gomer Pyle was one of Dylan’s label mates at Columbia Records) or the Johnny Mann Singers, but not one by the man who gave us “Like a Rolling Stone” and “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).”

And the whole shebang opened with a Dylan original called “All the Tired Horses” whose only lyrics (“All the tired horses in the sun, how am I supposed to get any ridin’ done?”) were sung by a female chorus.

Released in June 1970, Self Portrait was greeted with surprisingly good sales (reaching #4 on Billboard), but contempt from the critics. Just about every Dylan fan knows the opening line of Greil Marcus’ review in Rolling Stone, so there’s no need to repeat it here. I’ll repeat it, anyway: “What is this shit?”

Dylan answered that question several times through the years. His most detailed and probably most honest response was given to the same magazine’s Kurt Loder in 1984. Simply put, he hoped to alienate his more fanatical fans and turn their sometimes parasitic admiration elsewhere. There is not now, nor has there ever been, a musical artist with the kind of following that Dylan attracted at his peak. His most obsessive fans were not content to listen to his records, hang his poster on the wall, or throw their undergarments on stage during one of his then infrequent concert appearances. His fans included the likes of J. Weberman, a self-styled “garbologist” who picked through his trash and harassed him in the press, demanding he get with the counterculture’s program (speaking out against Vietnam, writing more anthems for the “Movement,” etc).

Unlike Mick Jagger and even unlike the Beatles, with the possible exception of John Lennon, Dylan was not just a songwriter, musician or singer (his voice was too unconventional for that title, anyway). He certainly wasn’t anything as common as an “entertainer.” He was a seer possessing forbidden knowledge, a prophet with a clear view of what was ahead, and a judge who saw through all the world’s hypocrisies. In short, he was a man who had good reason to want to run and hide, or, to paraphrase one of Nashville’s Skyline’s best songs, to throw it all away.

Those were strange days, indeed, a period of such confusion, of so many upheavals in culture and society, that it was hoped that somebody somewhere had the answer and could sort it all out. To many, that somebody could only be Dylan. His every new 33 and a third record was greeted like a stone tablet delivered from on high, but where was the message, the mantra, the guideposts to wisdom in the seemingly haphazard collection of odds and oddities that was Self Portrait?

Coming to the original Self Portrait now, it’s doubtful that anyone would ask “What is this shit?” It’s a Dylan album, one of 40 or so that he’s released in a career that now spans half a century. Why, there’s even a Bob Dylan Christmas album with his somewhat gargle-voiced takes on “Winter Wonderland” and “Silver Bells.” Self Portrait isn’t Bringing It All Back Home or Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde on Blonde or Blood on the Tracks, but it wasn’t meant to be either. It’s Self Portrait. I happen to love it. This latest addition to The Bootleg Series is Another Self Portrait. Except for the cover painting of a guy who looks more to me like actor Chad Lowe than Bob Dylan, I love this one, too.

Roughly half of the cuts here are alternate takes, demos, or unreleased songs from the sessions that produced the original Self Portrait and its follow-up, New Morning. The 1969 Isle of Wight concert is represented with versions of “Highway 61 Revisited” and “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” performed with The Band. George Harrison turns up a couple of times, once to add his guitar to the unreleased “Working on a Guru.”

Surprisingly, an unreleased take of “Spanish is the Loving Tongue” is the only acknowledgement that there once was an album titled Dylan, a hodgepodge of covers and outtakes assembled from Self Portrait and New Morning rejects that Columbia issued in 1973 after Dylan briefly left the label for Asylum Records. Never released in the U.S. on compact disc, it’s really not bad, and I thought that someone, perhaps Dylan himself, might have wanted to start rehabilitating its reputation here.

© 2013 Brian W. Fairbanks

VISIT MY KINDLE STORE AT AMAZON

On Elmore Leonard's Rules: "Avoid Detailed Descriptions of Characters"

One of the late Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing is to “Avoid Detailed Descriptions of Characters.” As an example of how to describe a character without getting bogged down in details, he quotes Hemingway: “She had taken off her hat and put it on the bed.”

That’s it. That’s sufficient, too, at least for me.

Whenever an author starts describing a character in detail, he usually does so in a passage resembling what Leonard calls “thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.”

Sometimes detailed descriptions serve a purpose, as in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep where Philip Marlowe describes his attire when making his first visit to General Sternwood:

"I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them."

This was Chandler’s way of letting the reader know that his private detective hero was paying more attention than usual to his dress when visiting a wealthy client (“I was calling on four million dollars”). In describing the “dark blue clocks” on his socks, Marlowe was almost mocking the care he was taking to make a good impression.

Chandler doesn’t go on and on and on, however, the way some authors are prone to do.

There may be readers who find detailed descriptions helpful in visualizing a character, but I find it dictatorial, an attempt to make me see the exact image that the author sees which is not really possible no matter how vivid the description. Since my introduction to Marlowe came through movies, I always see Humphrey Bogart, the Marlowe of the 1946 film version of The Big Sleep, when reading Chandler. Sometimes, it’s even Elliott Gould from 1973’s The Long Goodbye. These images did not originate with Chandler or in my own imagination, but from Warner Bros., Howard Hawks, and, in Gould’s case, Robert Altman.

When reading fiction, I usually have an image of how a character looks from the moment he is introduced. When I read, I enter what is almost comparable to a dream state. My subconscious mind takes over and sometimes produces a mental picture whose origin I cannot trace. Maybe I’ve taken the nose or chin of someone I once saw, and a forehead from someone else, and constructed a collage that becomes a person who did not previously exist. More often, I’ll cast an actor already familiar to me from movies or television in the role. This can sometimes be a problem.

When I read Ayn Rand’s Altas Shrugged in 1979, I saw Lindsey Wagner, then the star of TV’s Bionic Woman, as Dagny Taggart, the heroine. She seemed right for the part. She was beautiful and looked smart. As Hank Rearden, however, I got an image in mind of actor Paul Benedict who played a supporting role on The Jeffersons, a popular sitcom of the time. I didn’t consider him right for the role at all, but he came to mind for some unknown reason and it was an image that I couldn’t shake. I had him locked in as Rand’s steel magnate throughout the book's 1,168 pages. I guess that I didn’t have the heart to fire him.

An author who describes his characters in too much detail violates another of Leonard’s rules, to be invisible, to get out of the way of the story and its characters, and conceal the fact that a writer is writing: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” Not every writer wants to be invisible, though. “If you have a felicity for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you’re after, and you can skip the rules.”

That kind of writer is likely fond of what Leonard quotes John Steinbeck as calling “hooptedoodle,” stuff that shows off a writer’s skill with words, but may intrude on a story.

There is no “hooptedoodle” in 10 Rules of Writing. To call it lean is an understatement. It’s not really a book, but an essay, a short one, spread out over 92 pages with illustrations by Joe Ciardiello. Its total length is roughly equal to the “First Forward,” “Second Foreword,” and “Third Foreword” in Stephen King’s On Writing, a book that violates Leonard’s second rule, to “Avoid Prologues: They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword.”

King can be excused. His book appeared in 2000, a year before Leonard’s essay was first published in The New York Times.

© 2013 Brian W. Fairbanks

VISIT MY KINDLE STORE AT AMAZON