23 Books for Counterculture Conservatives, Tea Party Occultists, and Capitalist Wizards
Part V, Media:
Click here for the biography of media theorist, author, documentary filmmaker, and journalist Doug Rushkoff. I’ve followed his work since discovering him in 2003 courtesy of the Disinformation media company’s books and DVDs. We met in 2005 when he came and gave a talk at Ball State during my undergraduate years. We’ve stayed in touch over the years and he’s remained friendly and encouraging even though I know he doesn’t agree with most of what I write and probably even less of what I edit.
Rushkoff doesn’t fit on either Right or Left. He’s a counterculture intellectual in the tradition of his friend, the late Robert Anton Wilson who also filled himself with ideas from all over the place. And here’s some that I’ve taken away from his books over the last few years and re-purposed for myself.
16. Testament by Douglas Rushkoff
Graphic Novel Publication Date: July 26 2006-August 19, 2008
Official Description:
From the imagination of best-selling author Douglas Rushkoff, one of the most iconoclastic and acclaimed minds of our era, comes a graphic novel series that exposes the “real” Bible as it was actually written, and reveals how its mythic tales are repeated today.
Grad student Jake Stern leads an underground band of renegades that uses any means necessary to combat the frightening threats to freedom that permeate the world. They employ technology, alchemy, media hacking and mysticism to fight a modern threat that has its roots in ancient stories destined to recur in the modern age.
Why Tea Party Occultists Should Read It:
Testament is a 22-issue comic book series published by DC’s mature Vertigo imprint. It’s not yet available as one single volume but perhaps someday this criminally underrated series will be reissued as such and receive the recognition deserved. Currently, four trade paperbacks collect the series of Rushkoff’s juxtapositions between graphic Old Testament stories with a dystopian future narrative. The series argues that the stories of the Bible provide the universal archetypes of our lives. The tales of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses — all the biblical characters — continually reoccur over and over again throughout human history and personal experience. And the more we start to recognize and understand it the more we can make the right choices this time around, hacking the narrative and rewriting the stories so as not to repeat the same mistakes as the Biblical characters who lived and wrote The Story the first time around.
Testament features nudity, profanity, and death, serving up an important reminder that we don’t hear enough: The Bible is really about sex and violence.
Specifically, it’s about the ancient Israelites’ battles with nature-worshiping death cults who practiced human sacrifice and ritualized sex slavery. In the ancient world worshiping Moloch meant throwing a human being — often a child — on the fire. Worshiping Astarte meant paying for sex with one of her priestesses. She literally was the goddess of prostitution. And the Old Testament is just one long story of the Jewish people continually drifting back to idolatry and sex worship. It’s actually pretty embarrassing.
When one understands this then it makes perfect sense why today most self-identified Jews in this country today remain slavishly loyal to the Democratic Party and progressivism while only the more conservative and Orthodox Jews stand with America and Israel against the Islamic Jihad. That’s just the status quo — at any given time vast numbers of Jews will live enthralled to idolatry, denying the transcendent God of their ancestors.
All that’s really changed today are the names of the gods and the rituals. But the fight remains the same against those who treat other human beings and themselves like objects instead of living people created with rights, and dignity, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, “stamped in the Divine Image.”
(Future editions of the list will have more on the subject of slavery, both ancient and modern, as well as abolitionism.)
Why Capitalist Wizards Should Read It:
What is a media theorist with books about internet counterculture, Generation X, and viral media doing writing a comic about the Bible? Jews studying the Torah, and later Christians reading their Gutenberg Bibles, functioned in Western Civilization as the original form of media analysis. Through studying the juxtaposition of the myths, histories, poetry, and wisdom of the Bible we learn a method for how to analyze and understand the world. The more one understands, the more connections one can make, the more value out of nothing one can manifest into existence.
But we must understand that the same magical methods of creation can also be used for destruction. Rushkoff’s next big project after Testament would reveal the capitalist wizards’ natural enemies, those who had learned to use language and writing not to create laws to protect the individual and his property rights, but to subvert them and steal from the fruits of his labor.
In Life Inc. we confront Capitalism’s evil twin Corporatism and learn the secrets of how it functions today…
My first reaction to the list is – wtf?
Depending on whatever it is that is supposed to be the unifying idea here, I might suggest anything from “Futureshock” (a bit dated by of the right genre, I think) to “Lord of the Rings”, and possibly other scifi/fantasy. Also, as object lessons rather than theoretic tomes, “The Music Man” and “Animal House”.
It doesn’t seem to be *quite* limited to purely occult plus political works, but I’ll be diddled what does connect the whole list.
It’s already probably the longest entry I’ve ever seen on PJM.
Here’s the unifying idea:
“My intent with this list is to compile an annotated bibliography of sorts — a collection of books on a variety of subjects and genres that when put side by side can manifest fresh connections and new ways of looking at the world so we as individuals can solve our problems and live happier, more fulfilling lives.”
All of them, or at least a nice chunk of them, also seem to be written by people who in the final analysis are uncomfortable with pure ideologies. This makes them “independent” books, too, which ties into your theme of improving one’s life and taking charge.
just a note: the angel and the demon on donald ducks shoulders? are from the Shepherd of Hermas. The Shepherd of Hermas is a non-canonical, but still recognized as Christian text from the early fathers of the church. They,too, are wrestling with truth, and the divine, in the same piece of real estate.
the shepherd of hermas, and most of the early church fathers are more well-known in the orthodox church. this would be greek orthodox, russian orthodox, and so on.
as well, the pre-nicene council churches- the syriac, and so on- would sound similar but not the same in their formulations. these churches suffered persecutions before rome even became a christian empire.
st anthony shows up mostly as reference for odd painters. his writings are still published. you might like. his writings and his biography- the biographer was trying to sweeten him up.
for pure oddness, really, you cannot go wrong with an orthodox church.
Like the concept, but this is incomprehensible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-prime
Dave,
You have made 2 of the first 5 comments. They are answers to comments to the effect that you have produced 19 pages of GodKnowsWhat.
Your first is, “Here is the unifying idea (delivered in gibberish).”
Your second, in answer to the word “incomprehensible,” is a link to a bizarre (is that your purpose?) Wikipedia page.
Are you attempting to communicate?
And succeeding with some of us. Dave is pointing to Korzybski’s notion that the state of being verb is a semantic trap: aclay1 says it “is” incomprehensible — but then someone else might come along who finds it perfectly comprehensible. So the assertion that it “is” incomprehensible is mistaken, but a statement like “I find this incomprehensible right now” would not be.
Correct. Many thanks, Charlie.
E’ is brilliant.
I am happy to read that Korzybski was an admirer of Wittgenstein’s. Their work appears to complements one another nicely.
RObert Heinlein, interestingly, was very involved with General Semantics, and at least ran in the same circles in LA as the OTO, Golden Dawn, and such.
It’s fun to see Crowley get his day here. So many of the occultists I know, and many of the liberals too, tend to think of his ideology as nothing but “yeah man, we can whatever we feel like.” In reality he had many conservative leanings, albeit coming to the same conclusions through alternative pathways.
And he was always a huge proponent of setting goals and working very hard to achieve them, not just waiting for someone else to take care of you. My favorite quote is another one from Magick Without Tears where Crowley was admonishing a student for being lazy and coming up with all sorts of excuses: “To advance—that means Work. Patient, exhausting, thankless, often bewildering Work. Dear sister, if you would but Work! Work blindly, foolishly, misguidedly, it doesn’t matter in the end: Work in itself has absolute virtue.”
Anyway, fascinating and eclectic mix of books, and I look forward to catching up on all of them, thought at the pace I’m going it’ll take me five years. Thanks for putting it together!
I may never finish this 19-paged article, but if nothing else I must note my thoughts on the statue of Disney & Mouse: a caption reading, “Someday, Mickey, all of this will be yours.”
Of related interest, there is a campaign to vote for Aleister Crowley for President going on this year:
“We realize that Aleister Crowley is dead. And British. And, moreover, not running for office. Nevertheless, we believe that the most effective vote you can cast in 2012 is one for Aleister Crowley.”
More at http://ac2012.com
Anyone who’s really interested in this stuff should read the Illuminatus trilogy. Bob Shea and Bob Wilson were both friends of mine, and they new amazing amounts of this stuff.
I believe Antti P. Balk’s latest, “Balderdash: A Treatise on Ethics” also covers many of these same topics (and people):
http://www.amazon.com/dp/9525700402/
I’m sorry, this is just silly.
Yeah, that was my thought, too.
But, don’t cede the field (don’t seed the feeled), because they’ve been writing in stone again, since the early 90s –and that one-world thingie is immune to negative results. Our world in terms of time is a light skiff running on the surface of a very deep pagan sea.
“They have failed to reveal one new truth, but have succeeded in repeating all the old errors,” so said William Blake, a countercultural icon, about the followers of another, Swedenborg.
Counter cultures come and they go, or as “firesign say” there’s a seeker born every minute.
As a veteren of the ashram industrial complex, I have learned there is an inherent contradiction in the “commoditization of cool,” or huckstering the Path.
Occultism is escapist obscurantism; flashlit faces in the pretend dark.
Everyone believes something but I believe you can learn more about “counter culture” from the Beatles and the Dead.
Or Orwell and Burgess.
Stay skeptical, my friends.
This was a thought-provoking and meaty article. I can see why it might be too much for some, but I enjoyed it.
Pushing people out of their comfort zone once in a while is a good thing. If I hadn’t been pushed a couple of times, I’d still be the kneejerk liberal my parents and teachers programmed me to be.
Good job, Mr. Swindle
Thank you very much. I look forward to more of your feedback as the series continues.
More drivel from Swindle. Get a life.
As an atheist and a fan of indie rock and Wes Anderson and Akira Kurosawa movies, along with being a video game and comic book nerd (most of my wardrobe is t-shirts advertising either superheroes or old 8-bit nintendo games), I think I classify as counterculture conservative. Although, mostly I’d just refer to myself as a skeptical nerdservative.
Yes, you qualify. Welcome. Perhaps in the future I’ll have to add books for Nerdservatives. Any suggestions?