The Game Theory of Life in The Village

" So we then move on you see to another possible response, not repentance, but that of resignation :

"I quit The Game, I won't play it." 

There are all sorts of ways of doing this but basically this is an aristocratic posture, 

"You ordinary mortals with all your Desires, and all your Involvements are deluded - You Get attached to Things.

But there are a certain minority of Us, Who are above it all. 

And since We've resigned, We're not going to follow This now. " 

This as I say is an artistocratic, [be aware]  that it may be aristocratic in two ways : 

There's the aristocracy of the Hindu Sannyasi the people outside and above caste 

and there's also the aristocracy of the actual aristocrat - I get so mixed up with my British and American pronunciation on this - but 

The Aristocrat who comes on with the position of always being bored, who has complete sangfroid, who is imperturbable 

Kaiser Ling's study of this mentality is marvellous in his book of Europe the essay on Hungary portrays the rightly he calls the grand signeur. 

He always identified himself as a type disrobe the grand familia cannot be saved,  who could always be always rise to the occasion under any social circumstances whatsoever, without trying to do so or without apparently trying to do so.

In other words if he goes to the Opera wearing blue jeans he will somehow make it apparent that everybody else is improperly dressed.

This is a very interesting type of person you know there was an essay written by someone whose name I can't remember in the Centennial Review which contrasted the Attitude to Time of the

aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; 

It said The Aristocrat lives in The Past because his ancient forbears have achieved everything and his very by the fact of his birth in his existence he has nothing to strive for and he somehow I never need overdo it - he's always cool.

The Bourgeois on the other hand feels that it's necessary to arrive 

and he's always striving for The Future

Whereas the aristocrat lives in  The Past, on the other hand, 
The Proletarian lives in The Present because he doesn't care about his reputation, and he just lives.

And so of the three bourgeois The Sucker 

because the formula is always cheated because, well, it's going to come someday, see, you're going to get it - even your money when you pull it out of your pocket,  there says on it 

"Promise to Pay" 

- watch out for that!

It's poverty and the bourgeoisie use the news on from the whole the whole economy is the United States being the great bourgeois country is in a state of expectancy of feeling happy, not on what you have but on what is going to come 

The Aristocrat is happy on what has happened, these great achievements of the past mean there's nothing left to do except sort of glory in it.

The Proletarian wants it right now, see and they often get it; 

About the poor bourgeois, my uncle once said 

The Poor have it given them 

The Rich have it anyway so 

The Middle Classes do without

So both the aristocrats and the sannyasi have resigned.

Now, the more interesting of the two types is Acosta Sonia who Resigns From The World Game, let me review for you the role of the sannyasin in Indian culture you know there are four castes because 

The Priests or Brahmins  

The Caste of Warriors and Rulers called Kshatriya  

The Caste of Merchants called Vasia  

and The Caste of Workers called Shudra 

And to belong to a caste means that you are in  the state called grihastha, which is 'Householder' that is to say you are One Who is Involved in The World, you are engaged in what is called loca Sandra and loca means The Well, Sandra, upholding, upholding the going on of The Great Illusion and so you are playing for money for position for status, for success and hoping above all that you could win - You can beat The Game.

But it's supposed in the same Culture that every Man who attains the age of 45 or so, who has now a grown son to take over his work, will quit the game, will resign and so, when you come to be at age you're supposed to move from the state of grihastha, 'Householder' to vanaprastha which means 'Forest Dweller'.

You Give Away All Your Possessions 

to Your Son, 

You Change Your Name, 

You Take off All Your Clothes and Go More or Less Naked, 

because you have  

Abandoned Status.

So in spite of the fact that he has no status, he is however respected in the culture for being an Upper Outcast, whereas The Aborigines of the Indian Peninsula are Untouchables, The Lower Outcast and The Upper Outcast always mimics The Lower.

For example Buddha had his disciple wear ochre robes, because ochre robes were worn by convicts. 

So in the same way if today, in San Quentin, they all wear blue jeans with special kind pants and a kind of a blue denim jacket and this could well become the uniform of a new kind of sannyasi in The Western World 

and to some extent this is happening.

So this guy says 

"The Game is Not Worth The Cap, 
The Richer I Get, The More Miserable I Get"

Mo' Money, Mo' Problems.

You know how this is, you think that your problems may be monitored and you get more money.

What do you do then we've got enough money, you start worrying about your health and you can never never stop worrying about that 

Or if you're not worried about your health you worry about politics, if somebody's going to take your money away from you, worried about taxes, about Who's Cheating You.

And so a person who goes through all that he's finally 

"I don't think The Game's worth it, 

I'm going to resign."

And so Resignation or Renunciation --

 

The difference from Repentance is that it hasn't got the same kind of passion in The Resolve, that 

 

The Repentant Person Feels He's Wrong,  

Who Made a Mistake, Has Committed Sin 

and  

Wants to Get Better 

 

about the renounce first didn't concerns of that country he knows that better progress whether moral or material is an illusion and you have to understand this when you approach for example the study of Buddhism I think one of the most withering remarks I ever heard, from an oriental, he was Japanese he said once he was 

"Never forget that whereas Jesus was the Son of a Carpenter, Buddha was the son of a King" 

You know Wow! Take that! 

And it's choose it is something always about about that this is not the this is easy to see which Christianity historically was the protest of the slave class again if the Roman, establishment Buddhism was different it was the abandonment of position by an aristocracy  - 

 

That 

'We've done it. We've seen it all we've had it so now we check out and We will be therefore we will resign from all games' 

 

and if you follow this attitude to an extreme you're going to make because it all goes to the centre the same discovery that is made by the person who follows repentance to an extreme.

Just as The Repentant Person discovers that his contrition is phony, The Person Who Tries to Resign 

Will Discover That He Can't, that  -

There is no way of not playing games 

Let's go a little bit then into this Game Theory there are a lot of games that we play and not only the game of 
Can I get One Up on The Universe,  of Pretending That I'm me This Ego, With Its

Name and Its Role, The Man, 

but also we have what I call meta-games, for example the game 

My Games Better Than Your Game,

or The Game 

"I Won't Play With You Because Your Game is Vulgar, Stupid, Banal, Inferior or Whatever." 

One of the most, therefore, effective games in saying My Game is Better Than Your Game is that 

I'm Not Playing Games At All.

You are now at the lowest level we find that in the form of :

You're Not Sincere, I am Sincere 

You are Fooling, I'm not Fooling You and Being Honest with You 

Now, that's a great game and of Resignation is a form of it as to say you are children claim with toys and you haven't ever really woken up to the important concerns of life you haven't reached the dimension of ultimate sincerity all, that is to say Ultimate Reality, and in order to reach it you have to 
Resign from Distractions 

You hear a great deal in the literature about meditation of getting rid of distractions wandering for well I you might ask when you think about all that what are wandering for what are wrong for what shouldn't I be doing with my mind, well they all say actually every day you think about this and then you think about that in your thoughts run on in an undisciplined way from one association to another and you can't keep your mind fully on the job or whatever so you see, you're supposed to announce that because -

 

That's True Reality, all those wandering thoughts they're not about the importance now, What's Important, What should you keep your mind on well, something just as long as you keep your mind on it.

In an instruction one of the Buddhist scriptures says about concentration, 

When they concentrate on a yellow square on the ground, on the burning tip of an incense stick, on your navel, on the tip of your nose on the, centre between the eyes, or anything.

And then the footnote The Commentator adds  

"But not on any wicked thing." 

As you know that commentators the world over, they never have any [sense of humour].

So anything will do just so long as you keep your mind on it, and don't wander, stick to it, so 

 Wandering is Involvement in Games,

by this kind of definition, so then you try to get out can you now get out can you stop competing with other human beings 

In ancient Greek society there was a place in the center of the community called the argon A-R-G-O-N and this was a place for contests where they had wrestling matches and other athletic events because all the men were constantly trying to show who was the better and from this were the agonyax which means these the contest itself held in the argon we get our word agony, the struggle and striving to be superior and a lot of people that you meet among you,  you will recognize this among your friends all the time are not happy unless they are involved in the contest it doesn't matter what it is, so long as they're trying to beat something they're  happy 

And you may say over everything 

“You know can't we just sit around and talk instead of having to play a game, or bet or do something to prove who's the stronger...?" 

I was married to a girl who never was happy unless she was engaged in some kind of combat, when of course I had a game, it didn't look like one,  and so it was a very superior game just because it didn't look like one,  but it was a form of the game, my games that renews so you can't really not-play, you may go through the motions of not playing, but you still are. 

MALEFICENT

....

"But for Adam there was not found 

an help meet for him.

 
And the Lord God caused a deep sleep 

to fall upon Adam, and he slept: 

and he took one of his ribs, 

and closed up the flesh instead thereof; 

And the rib, which the Lord God 

had taken from the man, made he a woman, 

and brought her unto the man. 

And Adam said, 'This is now bone of my bones, 

and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman,

 because she was taken out of Man. 

Therefore shall a man leave 

His Father and His Mother, 

and shall cleave unto his wife: 

and they shall be one flesh.' "

That’s a walloping statement to put in there at the end of those three sentences. The "therefore" comes as somewhat as a surprise, but there’s an injunction there. It’s a good injunction. Man, I tell you, people who don’t do that have a hell of a time in their marriage. This is a good thing to know if you are married, or if you’re planning to get married: We have very strong orientation towards our parents, and for good reason. The injunction, here, is that’s secondary as soon as you’re married, and failure to do that makes your marriage collapse—and you deserve it to collapse, too, as far as I'm concerned, because it’s a reflection of your pathological immaturity and your unwillingness to extract yourself from the talon-like grip of parents, who are a little bit too much on the interfering side. But the injunction…There’s a deep injunction, here. It’s very complicated.

One of the ideas is that the original Adam wasn’t a man: he was more like a hermaphroditic being. In that hermaphroditic being, there was a kind of undifferentiated perfection that was split into male and female. Part of the goal of human beings is to reunite as the singular unity that reestablishes the initial perfection. That’s actually the goal of marriage from the spiritual perspective. Jung wrote quite a bit about that. It’s such a good idea.

I had these friends that went to Sweden to get married. 

They were from Northern Alberta, but both their heritages were Swedish. They did this cool thing as they were being married: they had to hold a candle up between them while they were being married. You think, well, what’s the candle? It’s a source of light; it’s a source of illumination; it’s a source of enlightenment; it’s the candle that you put on Christmas trees in Europe. So it’s the light that emerged in the darkness, in the depth of winter. It’s a symbol of life in darkness; it’s the reemergence of the sun at the darkest, coldest time of the year—which is also associated, symbolically, with the birth of Christ for all sorts of complicated reasons. So the candle’s all that. The next question is, why do you hold it above you? Because what’s above you is what you’re below to. It signifies something transcendent. Why do you both hold onto it? Because you’re both supposed to hold onto the light, right? And you're supposed to be subordinate to the light. You ask, well, who’s in charge in a marriage? Well, the light! That’s the idea. So you come together as one thing. You’re no longer two things. It isn’t what's good for you, and it’s not what’s good for your wife: it’s what's good for the marriage. The marriage is about the combined being, which is the reassembly of the original hermaphroditic being at the beginning of time. That’s the idea, and that’s all packed into these four sentences.

All of these sentences have a tremendous history of interpretation associated with them. It’s just endless, and that's one of the lines. It’s also an antidote to the idea that women taken out of men—which is also the reverse of the biological process, by the way—makes women, in some sense, subordinate to men. That is not built into this text. I don't see that, at all, as built into the text.

There’s something else that’s associated with it, too. The reason Sleeping Beauty goes to sleep is because—you have to remember what happens. She has parents who are quite old, and so they're pretty desperate to have a child—like so many people are now. They only have one child—like so many people do now—and they don’t want anything to happen to this child. It’s a miracle, and there's only one of them, and she’s the princess, and so we’re not letting anything around her. 

They have a big christening party, and they invite everybody, but they don’t invite Maleficent. 
Maleficent is The Terrible Mother; She’s Nature; She’s The Thing That Goes Bump in The Night; She’s The Devil Herself, so to speak, and she’s everything that you don’t want your child to encounter.

So The King and ueen saying, well, we just wont invite her to the christening…It’s like, good luck with that. That’s an Oedipal story, right? the Oedipal mother is the mother who devours her child by overprotecting him or her, so that instead of being strengthened by an encounter with the terrible world, they're weakened by too much protection. And then, when they’re let out into the world, they cannot live. That’s the story of Sleeping Beauty, and that's what the king and queen do. They apologise to Maleficent when she first shows up. 

They have a bunch of half-witted excuses why they didn’t invite her. 

'We forgot'—I don't think so. 

You don't forget something like that. And she kind of makes that point: you don’t just forget about the whole horror of life when you have a child. 

You might wish that it might stay at bay, but you do not forget about it. 

The question is, do you invite it to The Party? 
And The Answer is, it bloody well depends how unconscious you want your child to be. 

If you want your child to be unconscious, well, then you have the added advantage that, maybe, they won’t leave home. 

You can take advantage of them for the rest of your sad life, instead of going off to find something to do for yourself. 
And then, of course, you can take revenge on them if they do have any what would you call impetus towards courage, that you sacrificed in yourself 30 years ago, and that you want to stamp out as soon as you see it develop in your child. 

That's another thing that would be quite pleasant.

That's what happens in Sleeping Beauty. 

Well, none of this is pleasant, and nothing that happens in that story is pleasant. 

Sleeping Beauty is naive as hell. 

They put her out in the forest and have her raised by these three goody-two-shoes faeries, that are also completely devoid of any real potency and power. There’s nothing maleficent about them. 
And then she falls in love so badly with the first idiot prince that wanders by that she has post-traumatic stress disorder when he rides off on his horse. 
That’s what happens. 

And then she goes into the castle, and she’s all freaked out because she met the love of her life for like five minutes, for God’s sake. That’s when the spinning wheel—that’s the wheel of fate—pops up, and she pricks her finger. 

They tried to get rid of the wheels of fate, with their pointed end, but she finds it, pricks her finger, and falls down, unconscious. Well, she wants to be unconscious, and no bloody wonder. 
She was protected her whole life, and she’s so damn naive that her first love affair just about kills her. 
She wants to go to sleep and never wake up, and so that's exactly what happens. 

And then she has to wait for the prince to come and rescue her. 
Well, you think, how sexist can you get? 

Seriously, because that’s the way that that would be read in the modern world—it’s like, she doesn't need a prince to rescue her. 

That’s why Disney made Frozen, that absolutely appalling piece of rubbish.

You can say, well, the princess doesn’t need a prince to rescue her, but, you know, that's a boneheaded way of looking at the story. 

The prince isn’t just a man who’s coming to rescue the woman—and, believe me, he’s got his own problems, right? 

He’s got a whole goddamn dragon he has to contend with. The prince also represents the woman’s own consciousness. Consciousness is presented very frequently in stories as symbolically masculine, as it is with the logos idea. The idea is that, without that forward-going, courageous consciousness, a woman herself will drift into unconsciousness and terror. You can read it as, well, the woman who’s sleeping needs a man to wake her up. Of course—just like a man needs a woman to wake him up. It’s the same damn thing: that’s the dragon fight in Sleeping Beauty. But it’s also the case that, if she’s only unconscious, all she can do is lay there and sleep like the sleep of the naive and damned. She has to wake herself up and bring her own masculine consciousness into the forefront so that she can survive in the world. Of course, women are trying to do that like mad, but that's partly what's represented in a story like that. That’s partly what’s implicit in this idea: unless the woman is taken out of man, so to speak, then she isn’t a human being: she’s just a creature. That’s partly what’s embedded in this story. So you don’t want to read it as a patriarchal…You don't want to read anything that way, really. I won’t bother with that. But, really, we can do better than that.

"Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh."

The other thing about Marriage —

This is really worth knowing, too, and I learned this, in part, from reading Jung. 

What do you do when you get married? That’s easy : You take someone who’s just as useless and horrible as you are, 

and then you shackle yourself to them, 

and then you say, "We’re not running away, 

no matter what happens." Yeah. 

That’s perfect, because then 

you don’t get to run away. The thing is, 

if you can run away, you can’t 

tell each other The Truth --

If you tell someone The Truth about You 

and they don’t run away, then 

they weren’t listening. 

If you don’t have someone around who can’t run away, then you can't tell them the truth. That’s part of the purpose of the marriage. It’s like, I’ll bet on you, and you bet on me. It’s a losing bet—we both know that—but, given our current circumstances, we’re unlikely to find anyone better.

Two things that come off of that…You know, people are waiting around to find Mr. or Mrs. Right. Here's something to think about, man, and to put yourself on your feet: if you went to a party and found Mr. Right, and he looked at you and didn't run away screaming, that would indicate that he wasn’t Mr. Right, at all. It’s like the old Nietzschean joke: if someone loves you, that should immediately disenchant you with them. Or it’s the Woody Allen joke: I never belonged to a club that would take me as a member. That's a very interesting thing to think about.

You’re going to shackle yourself to someone who’s just as imperfect as you are. Then the issue is, you might be in a situation where you can actually negotiate. You might think, well, there's some things about you that aren’t going so right, and there's some things about me that aren’t going so right, and we’re bloody well stuck with the consequences for the next 50 years. We can either straighten this out or suffer through it for the next five decades. People are of the sort that, without that degree of seriousness, those problems will not be solved. You’ll leave things unnamed, because there's always an out. It’s the same thing when you're living together with someone. People who live together before they’re married are more likely to get divorced, not less likely. The reason for that is, what exactly are you saying to one another when you live with each other? Just think about it. 

"Well…For now, you’re better than anything else I can trick, but I’d like to reserve the right to trade you in—hah—conveniently, if someone better happens to stumble into me."

Well, how could someone not be insulted to their core by an offer like that? 


They’re willing to play along with it, because they're going to do the same thing with you. That’s exactly it: 
"Yea, yea…I know you're not going to commit to me, so that means you don't value me or our relationship above everything else. 
But, as long as I get to escape if I need to, then I'm willing to put up with that." 

That's a hell of a thing.

You might think, how stupid is it to shackle yourself to someone? It’s stupid, man. There’s no doubt about that. But compared to the alternatives? It’s pretty damn good. Without that shackling there are things you will never, ever learn, because you’ll avoid them. You can always leave, and if you can leave, you don't have to tell each other the truth. It’s as simple as that. 

You can just leave, and then 

You don't have anyone 

You can Tell The Truth to.

Jordan Peterson's Analysis of Sleeping Beauty

"Jung was profoundly affected by Nietzsche and Freud. Those were his two main intellectual influences—I don’t think one more than the other. He split with Freud on the religious issue. That was what caused the disruption in their relationship. I think it’s an extremely interesting historical occurrence. It might be of profound significance.

Freud believed that the fundamental myth of the human being was the Oedipal myth. The Oedipal myth, from a broader perspective, is a failed hero story. The Oedipal myth is the myth of a man who grows up, but then, accidentally, becomes too close to his mother, sleeps with her, not knowing who she is, and, as a consequence, blinds himself. 

There’s a warning in that story about human development gone wrong. 

I think that Freud put his finger on it extraordinarily well. 

Human beings have a very long period of dependency, 

and one of the things that you do see in clinical practice is that many of people’s problems are associated with their inability to break free of their family. 

They’re consumed by the family drama. 

They can’t get beyond what happened 

to them in their family. 

They’re stuck in The Past. 

That’s equivalent—symbolically speaking, you might say—to the idea of being too close to Your Mother — of the boundaries being improperly specified. That happens far more often than anyone would like to think. 

As I said, Freud thought that it was a universal.

Jung had a different idea. His idea was that it wasn’t the failed hero story that was the universal human myth: it was the successful hero story. That’s a big difference. It’s seriously a big difference. The successful hero story is—remember in Sleeping Beauty…You may remember this, in the Disney movie…The evil queen traps the prince in a dungeon. She’s not going to let him out until he’s old. There’s this comical scene where she’s down in the dungeon, he’s all in chains, and she’s laughing at him, telling him what his future’s going to be like. She’s quite evil. She paints this wonderful picture of him being freed in like 80 years and hobbling out of the castle, getting on his horse that’s so old it can barely stand up, and him with grey hair. She recites the story of his eventual, triumphant departure from the castle as an old and decrepit man. 

She has a great laugh about it. 

It’s nice. It’s a real punchy story. 

It’s really something wonderful for children, that story.

The Prince gets free of the shackles, and the things that free him are three little female fairies. It’s the positive aspect of the feminine that frees him from the dungeon. It’s very interesting and accurate from a psychological perspective. It’s the negative element of the feminine that encapsulated him in the dungeon, and it’s the positive element of the feminine that frees him. The evil queen is not very happy, when he escapes. You may remember that she stands on top of her castle tower and starts to spin off cosmic sparks. She’s quite the creature, enveloped in flame, and then she turns into a dragon. And then the prince has to fight with her, in order to make contact with sleeping beauty and awaken her from her unconscious existence. It’s a brilliant representation of the successful hero myth. He doesn’t end up staying in an unholy relationship with his mother, let’s say. He escapes, and then conquers the worst thing that can be imagined, and is ennobled by that. As a consequence, he’s able to wake the slumbering feminine from its coma. That’s a Jungian story, and that’s the story that he juxtaposed against Freud.

Freud thought of religious phenomena as part of an occult tide that would drown rationality. That’s why Freud was so vehemently anti-religious. Jung thought, 

"No, that’s not the case. There’s something 

profound and central to the hero myth." 

Jungian clinical work is, essentially, the awakening of the hero myth in the analysand—in the client, in the patient—to conceptualize yourself as that which can confront chaos, and triumph. That’s associated with the ennobling of consciousness and the establishment of proper positive relationships between male and female. I’m a skeptical person. I’m a very, very skeptical person. I’ve tried, with every trick I have, to put a lever underneath Jung’s story, lift it up, and disrupt it. I can’t do it. I think he was right, and that Freud was wrong—I mean, I have great respect for Freud. I think he got the problem diagnosed very, very nicely.

Human Reclamation

THOR

I don't even like Banner.

(bad impersonation)

"I'm into numbers and science and stuff."

HULK

Thor go. Hulk Stay.

THOR

Fine. Stay here. Stupid place.

It's hideous, by the way :

The Red, The White - 

Just pick a colour.

"We had quislings, just like the real thing, but winterized. We had these Human Reclamation units, pretty much just glorified animal control. 

They’d do their best to dart any quislings we came across, tie ’em down, ship ’em to rehabilitation clinics, back when we thought we could rehabilitate them. 

Ferals were a much more dangerous threat. A lot of them weren’t kids anymore, some were teenagers, some full grown. They were fast, smart, and if they chose fight instead of flight, they could really mess up your day. 

Of course, HR would always try and dart them, and, of course, that didn’t always work. When a two-hundred-pound feral bull is charging balls out for your ass, a couple CCs of tranq ain’t gonna drop him before he hits home. 

A lot of HRs got pretty badly smashed up, a few had to be tagged and bagged. The brass had to step in and assign a squad of grunts for escort. If a dart didn’t stop a feral, we sure as hell did. 

Nothing screams as high as a feral with a PIE round burning in his gut. The HR pukes had a real problem with that. They were all volunteers, all sticking to this code that human life, any human’s life, was worth trying to save. 

I guess history sorta backed them up now, you know, seeing all those people that they managed to rehabilitate, all the ones we just woulda shot on sight. 

If they had had the resources, they might have been able to do the same for animals. Man, feral packs, that freaked me out more than anything else. 

I’m not just talking dogs. Dogs you knew how to deal with. Dogs always telegraphed their attacks. 

I’m talking “Flies” : F-Lions, cats, like part mountain lion, part ice age saberfuck. Maybe they were mountain lions, some sure looked like them, or maybe just the spawn of house cats that had to be super badass just to make it. 

I’ve heard that they grew bigger up north, some law of nature or evolution. I don’t really get the whole ecology thing, not past a few prewar nature shows. 

I hear it’s because rats were, like, the new cows; fast and smart enough to get away from Zack, livin’ on corpses, breeding by the millions in trees and ruins. They’d gotten pretty badass themselves, so anything tough enough to hunt them has to be a whole lot badder. 

That’s an F-lion for you, about twice the size of a prewar puffball, teeth, claws, and a real, real jonesing for warm blood. 

That must have been a hazard for the sniffer dogs. 

Are you kidding? They loved it, even the little dachmutts, made ’em feel like dogs again. 

I’m talking about us, getting jumped from a tree limb, or a roof. They didn’t charge you like F-hounds, they just waited, took their sweet time until you were too close to raise a weapon. 

Outside of Minneapolis, my squad was clearing a strip mall. I was stepping through the window of a Starbucks and suddenly three of them leap at me from behind the counter. They knock me over, start tearing at my arms, my face. How do you think I got this? 

[He refers to the scar on his cheek.] 

I guess the only real casualty that day was my shorts. Between the biteproof BDUs and body armor we’d started wearing, the vest, the helmet . . . I hadn’t worn a hard cover in so long, you forget how uncomfortable it is when you’re used to going soft top. 

Did ferals, feral people that is, know how to use firearms? 

They didn’t know how to do anything human, that’s why they were ferals. 

No, the body armor was for protection against some of the regular people we found. I’m not talking organized rebels, just the odd LaMOE,5 Last Man on Earth. 

There was always one or two in every town, some dude, or chick, who managed to survive. I read somewhere that the United States had the highest number of them in the world, something about our individualistic nature or something. 

They hadn’t seen real people in so long, a lot of the initial shooting was just accidental or reflex. Most of the time we managed to talk them down. 

Those we actually called RCs, Robinson Crusoes— that was the polite term for the ones who were cool. 

The ones we called LaMOEs, those were the ones who were a little too used to being King. King of what, I don’t know, Gs and quislings and crazy F-critters, but I guess in their mind they were living the good life, and here we were to take it all away. 

That’s how I got nailed. 

We were closing on the Sears Tower in Chicago. Chicago, that was enough nightmares for three lifetimes. It was the middle of winter, wind whipping off the lake so hard you could barely stand, and suddenly I felt Thor’s hammer smash me in the head. 

Slug from a high-powered hunting rifle. I never complained about our hard covers anymore after that. 

The gang in the tower, they had their little Kingdom, and they weren’t giving it up for anyone. 

That was one of the few times we went full convent; SAWs, nades, that’s when the Bradleys started making a comeback. 

After Chicago, the brass knew we were now in a full, multithreat environment. It was back to hard covers and body armor, even in summer. Thanks, Windy City. 

Each squad was issued pamphlets with the “Threat Pyramid.” It was ranked according to probability, not lethality. 

Zack at the bottom, then F-critters, ferals, quislings, and finally LaMOEs. I know a lot of guys from AG South like to bitch about how they always had it tougher on their end, ’cause, for us, winter took care of Zack’s whole threat level. 

Yeah, sure, and replaced it with another one: winter! 

What do they say the average temperature’s dropped, ten degrees, fifteen in some areas?

6 Yeah, we had it real easy, up to our ass in gray snow, knowing that for every five Zacksicles you cracked there’d be at least as many up and at ’em at first thaw. 

At least the guys down south knew that once they swept an area, it stayed swept. They didn’t have to worry about rear area attacks like us. 

We swept every area at least three times. We used everything from ramrods and sniffer Ks to high-tech ground radar. Over and over again, and all of this in the dead of winter. 

We lost more guys to frostbite than to anything else. 

And still, every spring, you knew, you just knew . . . it’d be like, “oh shit, here we go again.” 

I mean, even today, with all the sweeps and civilian volunteer groups, spring’s like winter used to be, nature letting us know the good life’s over for now. 

Tell me about liberating the isolated zones. 

Always a hard fight, every single one. 

Remember these zones were still under siege, hundreds, maybe even thousands. 

The people holed up in the twin forts of Comerica Park/Ford Field, they must have had a combined moat—that’s what we called them, moats—of at least a million Gs. 

That was a three-day slugfest, made Hope look like a minor skirmish. That was the only time I ever really thought we were gonna be overrun. They piled up so high I thought we’d be buried, literally, in a landslide of corpses. 

Battles like that, they’d leave you so fried, just wasted, body and mind. You’d want to sleep, nothing more, not eat or bathe or even fuck. 

You’d just want to find someplace warm and dry, close your eyes, forget everything. 

What were the reactions of the people who you liberated? 

Kind of a mix. The military zones, that was pretty low-key. A lot of formal ceremonies, raising and lowering of flags, “I relieve you, sir—I stand relieved,” shit like that. 

There was also a little bit of wienie wagging. You know “we didn’t need any rescuing” and all. I understand. 

Every grunt wants to be the one riding over the hill, no one likes to be the one in the fort. Sure you didn’t need rescuing, buddy. 

Sometimes it was true. Like the zoomies outside of Omaha. They were a strategic hub for airdrops, regular flights almost on the hour. 

They were actually living better than us, fresh chow, hot showers, soft beds. It almost felt like we were being rescued. 

On the other hand, you had the jarheads at Rock Island. They wouldn’t let on how rough they had it, and that was cool with us. 

For what they went through, bragging rights was the least we could give them. Never met any of them personally, but I’ve heard the stories. 

What about the civilian zones? 

Different story entirely. We were so the shit! 

They’d be cheering and shouting. It was like what you’d think war was supposed to be, those old black-and-whites of GIs marching into Paris or wherever. 

We were rock stars. I got more . . . well . . . if there’s a bunch of little dudes between here and the Hero City that happen to look like me . . . 

[Laughs.] 

But there were exceptions. 

Yeah, I guess. Maybe not all the time but there’d be this one person, this angry face in the crowd screaming shit at you. 

“What the fuck took you so long?” 

“My husband died two weeks ago!” 

“My mother died waiting for you!” 

“We lost half our people last summer!” 

“Where were you when we needed you?” 

People holding up photos, faces. When we marched into Janesville, Wisconsin, someone was holding up a sign with a picture of a smiling little girl. The words above it read “Better late than never?” 

He got beat down by his own people; they shouldn’t have done that. 

That’s the kind of shit we saw, shit that keeps you awake when you haven’t slept in five nights. 

Rarely, like, blue-moon rarely, we’d enter a zone where we were totally not welcome. In Valley City, North Dakota, they were like, “Fuck you, army! You ran out on us, we don’t need you!” 

Was that a secessionist zone? 

Oh no, at least these people let us in. The Rebs only welcomed you with gunshots. I never got close to any of those zones. 

The brass had special units for Rebs. I saw them on the road once, heading toward the Black Hills. 

That was the first time since crossing the Rockies that I ever saw tanks. Bad feeling; you knew how that was gonna end. 

There’s been a lot of stories about questionable survival methods used by certain isolated zones. 

Yeah, so? Ask them about it. 

Did you see any? 

Nope, and I didn’t want to. People tried to tell me about it, people we liberated. They were so wound up inside, they just wanted to get it off their chests. 

You know what I used to say to them, “Keep it on your chest, your war’s over.” I didn’t need any more rocks in my ruck, you know? 

What about afterward? 

Did you talk to any of those people? 

Yeah, and I read a lot about the trials. 

How did they make you feel? 

Shit, I don’t know. Who am I to judge those people? I wasn’t there, I didn’t have to deal with that. 

This conversation we’re having now, this question of “what if,” I didn’t have time for that back then. I still had a job to do. 

I know historians like to talk about how the U.S. Army had such a low casualty rate during the advance. 

Low, as in compared to other countries, China or maybe the Russkies. 

Low, as in only counting the casualties caused by Zack. 

There were a million ways to get it on that road and over two-thirds weren’t on that pyramid. 

Sickness was a big one, the kinds of diseases that were supposed to be gone, like, in the Dark Ages or something. Yeah, we took our pills, had our shots, ate well, and had regular checkups, but there was just so much shit everywhere, in the dirt, the water, in the rain, and the air we breathed. 

Every time we entered a city, or liberated a zone, at least one guy would be gone, if not dead then removed for quarantine. 

In Detroit, we lost a whole platoon to Spanish flu. The brass really freaked on that one, quarantined the whole battalion for two weeks. 

Then there were mines and booby traps, some civilian, some laid during our bugout west. Made a lot of sense back then. Just seed mile after mile and wait for Zack to blow himself up. 

Only problem is, mines don’t work that way. They don’t blow up a human body, they take off a leg or ankle or the family jewels. That’s what they’re designed for, not to kill people, but to wound ’em so the army will spend valuable resources keeping them alive, and then send ’em home in a wheelchair so Ma and Pa Civilian can be reminded every time they see ’em that maybe supporting this war isn’t such a good idea. 

But Zack has no home, no Ma and Pa Civilian. All conventional mines do is create a bunch of crippled ghouls that, if anything, just makes your job that much harder because you want them upright and easy to spot, not crawling around the weeds waiting to be stepped on like land mines themselves. 

You couldn’t know where most mines were; a lot of the units that set them during the retreat hadn’t marked them correctly or had lost their coordinates or simply weren’t alive anymore to tell you. 

And then you had all those stupid fuckin’ LaMOE jobs, the punji stakes and trip-wired shotgun shells. 

I lost a buddy of mine that way, in a Wal-Mart in Rochester, New York. He was born in El Salvador but grew up in Cali. You ever heard of the Boyle Heights Boyz? They were these hard-core LA bangers who were deported back to El Salvador because they were technically illegal. 

My buddy was plopped there right before the war. He fought his way back up through Mexico, all during the worst days of the Panic, all on foot with nothing but a machete. He didn’t have any family left, no friends, just his adopted home. 

He loved this country so much. Reminded me of my grandpa, you know, the whole immigrant thing. And then to catch a twelve-gauge in the face, probably set by a LaMOE who’d stopped breathing years before. Fuckin’ mines and booby traps. 

And then you just had accidents. So many buildings had been weakened from the fighting. Throw in years of neglect, and foot after foot of snow. Whole roofs collapsed, no warning, whole structures just tumbling down. 

I lost someone else like that. She had a contact, a feral running at her across an abandoned auto garage. She fired her weapon, that’s all it took. I don’t know how many pounds of snow and ice brought that roof down. 

She was . . . we were . . . close, you know. We never did anything about it. I guess we thought that would make it “official.” I guess we thought it would make it easier in case something happened to one of us. 

[He looks over at the bleachers, smiling at his wife.] 

Didn’t work. 

[He takes a moment, a long breath.] 

And then there were psych casualties. More than anything else combined. 

Sometimes we’d march into barricaded zones and find nothing but rat-gnawed skeletons. I’m talking about the zones that weren’t overrun, the ones that fell to starvation or disease, or just a feeling that tomorrow wasn’t worth seeing. 

We once broke into a church in Kansas where it was clear the adults killed all the kids first. One guy in our platoon, an Amish guy, used to read all their suicide notes, commit them to memory, then give himself this little cut, this tiny half-inch nick somewhere on his body so he would “never forget.” 

Crazy bastard was sliced from his neck to the bottom of his toes. When the LT found out about it . . . sectioned eight his ass right outa there. 

Most of the Eight Balls were later in the war. Not from the stress, though, you understand, but from the lack of it. We all knew it would be over soon, and I think a lot of people who’d been holding it together for so long must’ve had that little voice that said, “Hey, buddy, it’s cool now, you can let go.” 

I knew this one guy, massive ’roidasaurus, he’d been a professional wrestler before the war. We were walking up the freeway near Pulaski, New York, when the wind picked up the scent of a jackknifed big rig. 

It’d been loaded with bottles of perfume, nothing fancy, just cheap, strip mall scent. He froze and started bawlin’ like a kid. Couldn’t stop. He was a monster with a two grand body count, an ogre who’d once picked up a G and used it as a club for hand-to-hand combat. Four of us had to carry him out on a stretcher. 

We figured the perfume must have reminded him of someone. We never found out who. 

Another guy, nothing special about him, late forties, balding, bit of a paunch, as much as anyone could have back then, the kinda face you’d see in a prewar heartburn commercial. 

We were in Hammond, Indiana, scouting defenses for the siege of Chicago. He spied a house at the end of a deserted street, completely intact except for boarded-up windows and a crashed-in front door. He got a look on his face, a grin. We should have known way before he dropped out of formation, before we heard the shot. 

He was sitting in the living room, in this worn, old easy chair, SIR between his knees, that smile still on his face. I looked up at the pictures on the mantelpiece. It was his home. Those were extreme examples, ones that even I could have guessed.

A lot of the others, you just never knew. For me, it wasn’t just who was cracking up, but who wasn’t. 

Does that make sense? 

One night in Portland, Maine, we were in Deering Oaks Park, policing piles of bleached bones that had been there since the Panic. Two grunts pick up these skulls and start doing a skit, the one from Free to Be, You and Me, the two babies. I only recognized it because my big brother had the record, it was a little before my time. 

Some of the older Grunts, the Xers, they loved it. A little crowd started gathering, everyone laughing and howling at these two skulls. “Hi-Hi-I’m a baby.—Well what do you think I am, a loaf’a bread?” And when it was over, everyone spontaneously burst into song, “There’s a land that I see . . .” playing femurs like goddamn banjos. I looked across the crowd to one of our company shrinks. 

I could never pronounce his real name, Doctor Chandra-something.7 I made eye contact and gave him this look, like “Hey, Doc, they’re all nut jobs, right?” 

He must have known what my eyes were asking because he just smiled back and shook his head. That really spooked me; I mean, if the ones who were acting loopy weren’t, then how did you know who’d really lost it? 

Our squad leader, you’d probably recognize her. 

She was in The Battle of the Five Colleges. Remember the tall, amazon chick with the ditch blade, the one who’d sung that song? She didn’t look like she used to in the movie. She’d burned off her curves and a crew cut replaced all that long, thick, shiny black hair. 

She was a good squad leader, “Sergeant Avalon.” 

One day we found a turtle in a field. Turtles were like unicorns back then, you hardly saw them anymore. Avalon got this look, I don’t know, like a kid. She smiled. She never smiled. I heard her whisper something to the turtle, I thought it was gibberish: “Mitakuye Oyasin.” 

I found out later that it was Lakota for “all my relations.” I didn’t even know she was part Sioux. She never talked about it, about anything about her. 

And suddenly, like a ghost, there was Doctor Chandra, with that arm he always put around their shoulders and that soft, no-big-deal offer of “C’mon, Sarge, let’s grab a cup of coffee.” 

That was the same day the president died. He must have also heard that little voice. “Hey, buddy, it’s cool now, you can let go.” 

I know a lot of people weren’t so into the VP, like there was no way he could replace the Big Guy. I really felt for him, mainly ’cause I was now in the same position. 

With Avalon gone, I was squad leader. It didn’t matter that the war was almost over. There were still so many battles along the way, so many good people to say good-bye to. 

By the time we reached Yonkers, I was the last of the old gang from Hope. I don’t know how I felt, passing all that rusting wreckage: the abandoned tanks, the crushed news vans, the human remains. I don’t think I felt much of anything. Too much to do when you’re squad leader, too many new faces to take care of. 

I could feel Doctor Chandra’s eyes boring into me. He never came over though, never let on that there was anything wrong. When we boarded the barges on the banks of the Hudson, we managed to lock eyes. 

He just smiled and shook his head. I’d made it."

They've Lost Their MINDS...!!

While Kanan continues to struggle with trust issues, the other rebels begin to form friendships with the old clones. 

And when Agent Kallus arrives, all must join together to battle the Imperials.

FULL FATHOM FIVE

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell

Hark! Now I hear them – Ding-dong, bell.

— The Tempest, 

Act I, Sc. II

TACTICAL

KIRK! You Magnificent Bastard, I READ YOUR BOOK...!!

bortaS bIr jablu'DI' reH QaQqu' nay'

Literal translation: 

When cold revenge is served, the dish is always very good

Earliest known print reference: Mathilde (1841) by Eugène Sue

Original French (1782) : 

Et puis la vengeance se mange très-bien froide, comme on dit vulgairement...

The Nightmare on Elm Street

Also Jim Garrison's new book, On the Trail of the Assassins, lays out evidence of the parade-route map on the front page of the Dallas Morning News -- that morning, November 22nd -- showing the parade going straight down Main Street, never indicating any turn onto Houston or then another turn onto Elm. In this context, the top-level Secret Service people would not even be aware of this last-minute change -- because, as of that morning, newspapers were still indicating the parade route would go straight down Main Street. What is your sense of how the Secret Service was fooled. Or, who was somehow involved in this monumental setting up of the ambush site by rerouting the last-minute change in the parade route to accommodate this absolutely essential place to get the car to go slow enough to get a shot in?

Prouty: 

That's a very important detail that Jim Garrison has pointed out. Because, the Secret Service, along with its military assistants, studies the route that the President will travel over in any city -- not just Dallas, any city -- for at least 90 days ahead of time. They study all the idiosyncrasies of that bit of the city: where people could be hidden on a roof, what angle of fire they'd have from certain windows, what speed the car would be traveling at certain corners. And of course they try to reduce corners. They try to go perfectly straight and that's what the map in the paper showed, a straight route right through the city.

It is not Secret Service policy to change a route at the last minute. They've done too much work. If something comes up that causes them to want to change a route at the last minute, they're more apt to change the President's trip entirely -- not even have him stop there. They did that just before the trip to Dallas. It was either a trip to Chicago or a trip to Miami where they had some problem, and the public was told that President Kennedy was suffering from a severe cold and could not make the trip. Well, the Secret Service isn't going to put him in a position where he's doing something counter to their own best regulations. And they have very thorough regulations; they can keep the President alive.

So the fact that the parade route was changed and apparently changed even after the Dallas News had been told what the route was and after they printed a major map -- what was it, about five-six columns of the front page? It was an enormous map on the front page of the paper. And then the route was changed in spite of that. This simply underscores the evidence that elements within the structure of the government, at a very high level, were able to get such things as that route changed. Despite the fact that they had told, for instance, the Dallas News, very shortly before the parade, that he was going to be on another route.

The important point is that, if the Dallas News knew that, the Dallas police knew that, the Dallas sheriff's office knew that, the Secret Service knew that, the military people working on the visit knew that -- everybody else knew that the route went one way -- and then all of a sudden when he made this drastic change around the triangle there and the car slowed to four or five miles an hour, it was a shock to all of these people there. But what is really amazing is you don't hear any of these people talking about that. And maybe hundreds of them were on duty that day and found that their jobs were totally ignored as the car went off on its own somewhere else, and yet there's been no word from them. They've been covered up totally. You see, it works both ways. The place was left vacant of its normal guard, of its normal observation and all that sort of thing; and then the men who were there and saw this happen have been kept from speaking about that ever since it happened. I don't know the witness of any man, from the Secret Service or any other place, who has tried to explain why that change was made. They just leave it hanging in the air like that as though, "Well, it's something we can't account for." It's part of the crime, just like everything else. And Garrison was right to point that out.