But which are which?

[Raphael Saltwood]

To your lesser point - the Westerns largely missed me. Bonanza was on past my bedtime. Watching the catchy intro to “Branded” in the guest room at my grandparents’ house (“what do you do if you’re branded - and you know you’re a man…where-EV-er you GO for the REST of your LIFE…something”) my grandma came in and changed the channel…for reasons of her own to which I was not privy…and walked back out…I didn’t change it back…

I did catch the episode of the Real McCoys where the kid told Walter Brennan he didn’t want to be a farmer. It was sad, the grandpa was all excited about it & was relating how at that age he himself had grown his first salad…

Tom Mix - his last name was a verb!

Bezos
Jobs
Musk
Thiel
Gates
Zuckerberg

Can we map them to Chums?

There were only 5 Chums.

Toss out Thiel, he’s a dick.

Gates’s moralizing on the private property nature of software nudges him towards Noseworth territory?

Musk - Kind of a rascal, like Chick Counterfly?

Bezos - with his overarching Heinlein vision like the man who sold the moon, put him in as Randolph St Cosmo?

Pugnax - Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus, inventors of Dogecoin?

Zuckerberg - the machinic countenance he gets teased for jibes with Miles Blundell in his reverie mode?

That leaves Jobs to be cognate with Darby Suckling, as the occasional foil for Noseworth/Gates (“Suckling!”) to berate and also watch out for, like when Microsoft stepped in with money to save Apple?

Attributions are tentative.



Cagliostro the Impossible wrote:


Are those the sound of revelers on the streets? It seems I've been under the spell of some dark enchantress. The words to write have failed me. Her alluring poison seems to have exhausted itself for now. I can feel the cool breeze again, as the soft wind of autumn whispers my name. I remember leaving Los Angeles sometime ago, '70 or '71, was it? Does anyone remember when Tom Mix shed a tear for the dead Wyatt Earp?
Joseph Tracey wrote:
"If one were to name names and map the chums onto current history, one might think of Bezos, Jobs, , Musk, Thiel, Gates and Zuckerburg who have sailed into the stratosphere of wealth and influence on the technopowers of software and electronics. Frequently thay were introduced to the public as brainy boy wonders ala Tom Swift. They made useful and potentially democratizing tools, but more and more they get big contracts as spies, weapons guidance and security sytems for capitalism and empire. Despite sordid connections to global violence and ecodevastation these technologies have aquired mythic status as the key to a better world."
I think this is a brilliant statement. I've never thought of the Chums in the context of the US Tech Barons. Consider this passage in American Sphinx The Character of Thomas Jefferson by Joseph Ellis:
"The second wave, really a series of waves, struck between 1890 and 1920. In 1890 the census of the United States revealed that the frontier phase of American history was over. (Frederick Jackson Turner's influential essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History.") Then the Census of 1920 reported that for the first time the majority of American citizens lived in lived in urban as opposed to rural areas."
There is this passage in ATD (pg.10):
"Beneath the rubbernecking Chums of Chance wheeled streets and alley-ways in a Cartesian grid, sketched in sepia, mile on mile. "The Great Bovine City of the World," breathed Lindsay in wonder. Indeed, the backs of cattle far outnumbered the tops of human hats. From this height it was as if the Chums, who, out on adventures past, had often witnessed the vast herds of cattle adrift in ever-changing cloudlike patterns across across the Western plains, here saw that unshaped freedom being rationalized into movement only in straight lines and at right angles and a progressive reduction of choices, until the final turn through the final gate that led to the killing floor."
The Chums of Chance are the divine intercessors represented as gods & goddesses in Homeric epics, or any epic… kouroi of their time, fleet messengers/guides on the order of Hermes the Psychopomp…they’ve been reincarnated / transfigured into 19th Boy Scout orWandervogel movement Aeronauts attending the World Colombian Exposition in Chicago in 1893…in Judeo-Christian, even Islamic, world they are angels with all the associated hierarchy… having arrived at a particular time in history, the veritable killing floor of Rationalization, the historical dielectric in action… where science & industry or technology are increasingly forming tangible reality, during the rupture of 20th Century Mathematical Physics, i.e. Relativity & Quantum Theory… In a Spenglerian sense this is where the the Megalopolitan triumphs over the Provinces in the Culture/Civilization organism of Faustian Western Man,the frenzied heights before the decline... Also period of Decadence in Art... The riot, or near riot when Stravinsky premiered The Rite of Spring (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP42C-4zL3w) or Huysmans's La Bas... The art of Nicholas Roerich... The Theosophy of Blavatsky and Crowley enters the Golden Dawn...
Spiritual Intercessors, or in the age where God is Dead, and religious iconography & symbols turn into Pop Culture.
I fear we find ourselves being lead into the shadows, amongst the dying & the dead, by a twisted insane cybernetic consciousness whose a strategic matrix, or a social utility function whose parameters no longer correspond to empirical reality.


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