Saluting the passing of Peewee Herman and Sinéad O’Connor, two revolutionary performance artists. They weren’t always understood, but time has proven them prophetic. Peewee dropped out of sight after his Blue Movie Big Adventure was a flop, and his thematic content was obscure unless you’d had your favorite bicycle stolen. Then it all rang true.
I threatened to kill the kid who stole mine from Boys Club. Another kid ratted him out. He brought it back, but sadly abused. My “Sting Ray” style, Christmas bike, with 20” wheels, banana seat (no sissy bars), kick back brake and monkey handlebars was never the same. Since then, there’s been many more stolen. It’s their fate, same as one sock in the laundromat.
My Substack essays have been sparse lately, but they are only the visible ice berg of my writing. The Immune Resistance to Propaganda series is unveiling the foundations of immunity to pathogenic propaganda. The unexamined life is immunosupressive, so will return to exploring psychoneuroimmunology and poetry, the Royal Road to the Psyche.
Taking a side trip into the Allergic Reactions to Propaganda series, based on close reading of Allergic: Our Irritated Bodies in a Changing World by Theresa MacPhail, published by Random House this year. She’s a medical anthropologist, from a field that stopped studying primitive societies with no money to plunge into the profitable world of observing and recording systems of the Medical Monopoly. They even pay to be anthropologically analyzed, (not psychologically though).
Her new book is gaining NPR reviews and interviews, so it’s an approved message of MM. Examining the history and culture of medical diagnoses and treatment of allergic reactions over the last century into the 21st, MacPhail illustrates how the brightest minds get captured by continuously reinforced inner propaganda, ceaseless and insidious collective consciousness.
“Jung called the contents of this consciousness ‘generally accepted truths.’ He also pointed out that they are in conflict with the archetypes of the collective unconscious, and between the two exists an ‘almost unbridgeable gulf.’
Only by wrestling with the fallen angels, can we wrest free of our mental chains, our way of seeing and not seeing what’s right under our noses. (Physically impossible without a mirror for self examination.)
“This secret tradition taught nothing less than that‘God himself in his everlasting fires, may be caught like a fish in the deep seas.’ In other words, the fish in the sea is the unredeemed God and the theory of the alchemist allows him to seek the God that lies hidden in matter, or in the dark waters of the unconscious. The secret tradition has to do with redemption of the divine trapped in nature.” * Promises, promises.
Sinéad O’Connor was a warrior prophet, a True Joan of Arc. Burnt on the stake of Mass Media, a Boudicca flogged and raped for defying Rome. Puny Peschi’s threatened slap would have withered his hand, like striking a Gorgon singing Bob Marley’s prophetic War on Saturday Night Live.
Child Abuse by the Church wasn’t challenged then, just as infant inoculation is a Sacred Cow now.
Her Voice triggered piloerection (from goose bumps) my first time hearing Nothing Compares 2U, like First Time I Ever Saw Your Face by Roberta Flack.
Sinéad emvocaled Righteous Rasta with her Sly and Robbie reggae album, an uncompromising, burning Desire for Justice, not heard since Bob Himself. t
The funniest review was in Miami’s alternative free weekly newspaper, an imagined telephone conversation as she called them out of the blue to back her Reggae Album. Kind of like Christmas albums at the time. Mimicking an Irish Tinker accent and the Jamaican patois of Sly and Robbie perfectly, it was brilliant satire. (Some things do disappear from the internet search engines. I should know. My wicked funny satires in the Coastal Post are nowhere to be found.)
I also honor the passing of Dr. Walter Bortz, retired Professor of Geriatric Medicine at Stanford School of Medicine. He wrote several books on Healthy Aging and how to Live to 100 (he didn’t), and graciously wrote a blurb for my first book in the Medical Monopoly series, Save Trillions with Universal Health Care in 2015. “Stephen Simac puts his finger on the pulse of American medicine and on its wallet and finds huge destruction in the mismatch. Save Trillions is a rational fix for a troubled system.”
A thousand words of Allergic to Propaganda will be published Fast and Furious as I organize my notes into thousand word images from my iceberg. It’s not a Mole Hill.
* Jung and the Alchemical Imagination, Jeffrey Raff, Nicolas-Hays, Inc. 2000