But which are which?

[Mark Kohut]

I loved the character mapping......

On Thu, Sep 9, 2021 at 1:43 AM Raphael Saltwood <PlainMrBotanyB at outlook.com>
wrote:

> 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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