[MD] The Immanuel E-Manual: Introduction

[John Carl]

"In the waning days of 1968, for some reason never very specific and now
nearly obscured by time, the prime movers from the Dead Center made
arrangements with the Beatles at Apple to send over to London a sampling
psychedeloids.

A kind of cultural lend-lease, heads across the water and all that.

There were thirteen of us in all -- hippies, hoopies and harpies; Hell's
Angels and their hogs; a few seious managers with lots of plots and
proposals ... one prankster without plan one."

Thus begins Ken Kesey's tale of a long ago and far away event which
illustrates, illuminates and elucidates a matter of concern to me, for some
time now, and a matter of concern to all sincere readers of Lila who
comprehend a key theme of that book, a key concern for all time, how to
differentiate between the messiahs and the degenerates and what the hell to
do about this weird phenomena known as "celebrity".

Shudders.

Kesey lights up the subject in in his excellent way, in a book called Demon
Box, a short story collection from which I've quoted before, and our story
takes place next-to-last in the book, leading up to the central point in
that ultimate explanation of being which I've quoted here before.  It's been
a while, tho, so a refresher is needed.   But first, Kesey's take on the
whole celebrity thing:

"I was happy to be getting out of the U.S. That book about me and my Kool
Aid cronies had just come out and I felt the hot beam of the spotlight on
me.  It burned like a big ultraviolet eye.  The voltage generated by all
this attention scared me a little and titillated me a lot, and I needed a
breather from it before I became an addict.   Or a casualty.

*Stand in this spotlight, feel this eye pass over you.  You never forget
it.  You are suddenly changed, lifted, singled out, elevated and alone,
above any of your old bush-league grets of stage fright, nagging scruples,
etc.  Self-consciousness and irresolution melt in this beam's blast.  Grace
and power surge in to take their place.  Banging speed is the only thing
even close.  Drowsing protoplasm snaps intantly to Bruce Lee
perfection--enter the dragon.  But there's the scaly rub, right?  Because if
you go around to the other end of that eye and look through at the star
shining there so elevated, you see that this adoring telescope has a cross
hair built in it, and notches in the barrel filed for luminaries:
Kennedy.... King.... Joplin.... Hemingway...."

*Kesey goes on to describe the trip and the arrival at Apple with his motley
crew, and a confrontation which  takes place between the volatile Angels and
the sneering Brits.  Over a bit of a holiday bird - turkey that is, in the
meaty hands of one "Old Bert".

"whatsye, myte?' Bert had picked up a nice cockney accent in the afternoon
pubs 'That I grabs me a drumstick for the road?"

"Cawn't, I don't think,' the boy answered, nervous and vague.  'Supposed to
save it for after.  The invited..."

'We *are* invited old sport' Bert produced the card we'd been issued.  "And
maybe we ain't staying till later.  *Further*more" -- he jerked a
thick-knuckled thumb over his shoulder, indidcating a place in the past --
"I ain't ate since the airport."

The boy looked at the thumb with all that carbon and grease still under the
thumbnail from reassembling the bikes, and at the leather wristband with its
battered studs, and at the big, vein-laced forearm with those terrible
tattoos of knives and nooses, and it appeared to me that he was about to see
his way clear to advancing Old Bert an early taste of turkey.  But just then
one of the tie-dyed higher-ups sidled by in long muttonshops and a snide
smile.  He was eating a macaroon.

"Don't give it to them, Clayburn,' this colorful creature advised through a
long bony nose as he chewed his cookie.  "I don't care how much chanting
they do." (This "chanting remark, referring to a wholly different odd ball
group that had been haning 'round in the halls earlier)  Then, very
foolishly, he added, "They're nothing but leeches and mumpers anyway."

"What was that myte?' Bert asked with a wide grin, turning slowly from the
turkey to what promised to be juicier fare. 'What did you sye?"

"I said, 'Leecheds and mumpers' ".

POW!  The exectuive went somesoulting backward all the way to the wall,
where he slowly slid down in a pile against the baseboard and lay there,
like a rumpled rainbow.  The room suddenly poarized, all the Englishmen
springing to one side of the carpet to surround their clobbered countryman
in an instant display of British pith, all the Yanks to the other.

"Anybody else," Bert asked the group glaring at us from across the room,
"thinks we're leeches or mumpers?" -- in a challenge so specific that
everybody knew it would have to be answered of none of the home team would
ever be able to look the statue of Admiral Nelson in his steely eye again.
I took off my watch and put it in my pocket.  The music stopped.  The two
factions tightened and gathered, ready for the rumble.

It was into this smoldering scene, right between the these two forces about
to clash, that John Lennon came, in a red Santa Claus suit and a silly white
beard.

"Awright then," he said, not loud but very clear, and reaonable and
unsmiling, that thin, bespectacled face pale yet intensely bright, polished
by more time spent beneath the blast of that high-voltage beam than any face
I have ever seen, the thin hands coming out of the white fur cuffs to hold
back the two sides of the room, like Moses holding back the waters --
"That's enough."

And it was.  The rumble didn't erupt.  The party went on.  OO blah dee.

He was something.  When he said "peace" even the warring angels listened.


Kesey goes on to talk about the event his passing stirred up around his
farm, many years later - visitations from three Dickensian ghosts around the
time when Howard Cosell interrupted a monday night football contest with the
rather weirdly inappropriate comment " Yet, however egregious a loss might
seem to either side at this point in time we must never lose sight of the
fact ... that this is only a football game"  A very un-Howard-Cosell-like
thing to say, Kesey thought at the time, and I was watching that night as
well and remember thinking the same thing.  After a few moments of silence,
Howard announced that John Lennon had been shot and killed outside his
apartment in New York.  A week later, Kesey has to deal with a very strange
character who shows up at his farm, a character who gives him the willies,
through and through.  One who, when he drops him off at the freeway to send
him packing, gives him that feeling of the crosshairs on the back of his
head.

The story ends with Kesey and Dobbs entertaining Hunter Thompson, some time
later who is up to do one of his Gonzo gigs at the behest of the University
of Oregon's School of Journalism.  They stopped at a bar to help him get his
wheels turning in preparation for his upcoming lecture -- his "wiseman riff"
he called it -- and they talked of John Lennon and this new generation of
the dangerous dissapointeds.  Thompson mused that he didn't understand why
it was people like Lennon they seemed to set their sights for, instead of
people like him.

"I mean, I've pissed of quite a few citizens in my time," the good doctor
let them know.

"But you've never disappointed them," Kesey told him.  "You never promised
World Peace of Universal Love, did you?"  He admitted he had not.  They all
admitted it had been quite a while since any of them had heard anybody talk
such Pollyanna pie-in-the-sky promises.  "Today's wiseman," Hunter claimed,
"has too much brains to talk himself out on that kind of dead-end limb."

"Or not enough balls," Dobbs allowed.

They ordered another round of drinks and mulled awhile on such things, not
talking, but all thinking--privately, as they sipped-- that maybe it was
time to talk a little of that old sky pie once more, for all the dangers of
dead ends or cross hairs.  Else how are we going to be able to look that
little bespectacled Liverpudlian in the eye again, when the Revolutionary
Roll is Up Yonder Called?

That's the conclusion of Kesey's story, but just the beginning of mine.  For
truth is, we need messiah's, we humans.  We just do.  And if we can't be
that, then we oughta at least figure out how it works, how we recognize them
and help them to be.  Zuni Brujo's, hanging by their whatevers, authors and
poets and dreamers.

As one such poet/dreamer has said:

"Sometimes you can see your own society's issues more clearly when they are
put in an exotic context like that of the brujo in Zuni. That is a huge
reward from the study of anthropology. As Phaedrus thought about this
context again and again it became apparent there were two kinds of good and
evil involved.

The tribal frame of values that condemned the brujo and led to his
punishment was one kind of good, for which Phaedrus coined the term "static
good." Each culture has its own pattern of static good derived from fixed
laws and the traditions and values that underlie them. This pattern of
static good is the essential structure of the culture itself and defines
it.  In the static sense the brujo was very clearly evil to oppose the
appointed authorities of his tribe. Suppose everyone did that? The whole
Zuni culture, after thousands of years of continuous survival, would
collapse into chaos.

But in addition there's a Dynamic good that is outside of any culture, that
cannot be contained by any system of precepts, but has to be continually
rediscovered as a culture evolves. Good and evil are not entirely a matter
of tribal custom. If they were, no tribal change would be possible, since
custom cannot change custom. There has to be another source of good and evil
outside the tribal customs that produces the tribal change."