[1]  In 2005 Dr. Sammy Martinez, PhD, published a monograph that became the talk of readers, punditrizers, thinkers, psychologists, scholars of social science and many other fields of knowledge, and literati around the world, in which he proposed that mj lorenzo, though still alive, might be considered a ‘culture hero’, and asked for the opinion of others. To define his term, ‘culture hero’, Sammy borrowed a quotation from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces where Campbell used the term in a sentence: “...if we could dredge up something forgotten not only by ourselves but by our whole generation or our entire civilization, we should become indeed the boon-bringer, the culture hero of the day – a personage of not only local but world historical moment.” Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), p. 17 of the 1968 Second Edition. A better understanding of the term ‘culture hero’, Sammy suggested, could be obtained by studying Campbell’s book cover to cover, since the concept of ‘culture hero’ was 'both elaborate and very important'. 

To further clarify his term ‘culture hero’ Sammy drew from Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (see Bibliography), which defined a ‘culture hero’ as (1) ‘a legendary figure variously represented as a beast, bird, man, or demigod to whom a people attributes the factors that appear most essential to its existence and culture (as important inventions, the overcoming of major obstacles, the exercise of divine leadership, and the origin of itself, mankind, natural phenomena, or the world)’ OR (2) ‘one that symbolizes the ideal of a people or a group’.

Fifty-five percent of scholars’ responses worldwide agreed with Sammy that mj lorenzo fit the description of a culture hero as defined in Campbell’s book, and also in general, as that term had come to be used in modern scholarly parlance around the world.

The same fifty-five percent who agreed mj lorenzo was a ‘culture hero’ by Campbell’s definition felt mj lorenzo fit the dictionary definition number (2) in its entirety, and also parts of (1), if this latter were parsed to read ‘a... man... to whom a people attributes... important inventions, the overcoming of major obstacles, [and] the exercise of... leadership...’.

As a result of the global polling, on this title page we have taken the liberty of calling mj lorenzo a ‘culture hero’ – we hope not prematurely, or carelessly. To our knowledge, it is the first time in recorded human history that a man or woman while yet alive has been declared by contemporaries to be a ‘culture hero’.

It should be mentioned, however, that the most ardent of the Dr.’s worldwide pundit-following objected to any parsing or watering down of definition (2).

For example, the 'culture hero pundits', a group of mj’s following who were first described in detail in ‘a look at mj’s first book, The Remaking’ (subsections 241-246), went well beyond the ‘tepid’ 55% and accepted every tiny little bit of definition (1) by arguing as follows in a letter to Sammy which they also published online: “Mj lorenzo has been incontestably ‘legendary’, already within his own lifetime, at least since the mid-1970s, as you know. Furthermore, many of his followers, since his first book, The Remaking, have seen him as an eagle and a wolf, but more accurately as a ‘monster’ that was half eagle and half wolf. That most of his closest followers have always accepted that understanding of him, your review of the Fort Providence material in 'a look at mj lorenzo's first book, The Remaking' is evidence: your Subsection 62 in that work refers to the Fort Resolution envelope as an 'awe-ful bird-puppy'; and on the title page of that work you even admit quite openly that a common nickname for the entire Remaking has always been 'the cherished monster bird-puppy'. Going beyond all of this even, everyone has agreed since the early 70s that the 'monster bird-puppy' in question was not just mj's Remaking, but mj lorenzo himself. As for 'inventions', as you and we all know, he invented in The Remaking a paradigm and method for understanding and curing one of the earth’s greatest scourges, the psychological imbalance he called ‘hyperpolarization’, whether the imbalance occurred in individuals, couples, groups, or whole worldwide populations. For these reasons and others, many of the ‘early Remaking pundits’ as far back as the early 70s have seen him as a ‘demigod’, in other words ‘half divine’, in one way or another. They also knew for a fact that he had, by his art (of combining words and images), created single-handedly the crowd of worldwide millions known as ‘mj lorenzo punditry’, who have gone on to impact global geopolitics in a number of large ways. His followers worldwide have become practitioners of his worldview, and they can therefore attribute to him ‘the factors that appear most essential to their existence and culture’ as a global sub-population, a natural diaspora in the many millions. They never have doubted that his ‘leadership’ was ‘divine’, or that he was in the process of ‘remaking’ ‘mankind’ AND ‘the world’. And so, for all of these reasons, we feel that Merriam-Webster's Unabridged Dictionary definition number (2) of  the term 'culture hero' applies to mj lorenzo, not parsed, as some would have it, but in its entirety.”

Other large portions of highly respected global mj lorenzo punditry joined the ‘culture hero pundits’ in this exalted view, either as stated, or with amendments, publishing their positions online and announcing their positions via Twitter, Facebook, the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, The Times of India, The Asahi Shimbun (Japan) and other periodicals around the globe.

However, critics of mj lorenzo and his chief assistant, Sammy Martinez, with 'all their tattered tomfoolery and motley following', complained that Sammy and his pollsters had ‘polled strings’ and thereby ‘created a culture hero out of whole string cloth’. They said Sammy’s mailing list of pollees was 'bought nefariously' from Bill and Hillary Clinton’s foundation and therefore was made up of a ‘collection of rich influential internationalist and one-worlder bootlickers, sycophants and politically-correct-ors’. ‘Proof’ (HA!) of this, they claimed, lay in the fact that mj lorenzo had been for years on the short list for receiving the Nobel Prize for Peace, AND for Literature, BOTH!!! Which to the mj lorenzo debunkers meant, of course, as they were proud to publicize, that ‘the mj lorenzo community’s claim of mj lorenzo’s great cultural heroism was as bogus and hyper-leftist as mj lorenzo himself, and as trumped up as the science community’s claim of global warming’.

And a group of more sedate mj lorenzo critics said it was perfectly understandable 'that any man would have liked to feel valued during his lifetime yet had ended up not feeling so', and they 'truly felt sorry for mj on this account', but all of that did not warrant his claiming grandiosely and crazily to be a 'culture hero' on a par with Christ or Buddha. Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christians seemed particularly exercised by such a diabolical claim. But Sammy Martinez, the world's leading expert on authentic mj lorenzo esoterica, felt obliged to reveal that it never had been mj himself who thought he was a culture hero, it had been his followers. Mj, as Sammy reminded, was the one who left his 'The Remaking' in a box in his closet with dirty socks on top of it for years, thinking it was a fleeting literary adventure of little value to the world.

Indeed, it appeared that the author himself, the 'culture hero' as they were coming to call him, in his more sober moments in elder years, was more doubtful than any of his severest critics, of his right to any such designation. The chief reason for this, he said, was that he had devised additional and even more demanding criteria for designating anyone a 'culture hero', beyond the definitions used by Sammy in his global survey. One was that the hero's heart, his joy and misery, his view of the world and life and his experience of same, must be an 'exact replica' of that of his people. He must look at them and see and feel himself. They must look at him and see and feel themselves in him. He called this (1) the criterion of 'representing': the culture hero must be an exact representation of his people: he need only to look at his own reaction to events in order to see his people's reaction. And then, after 'representing' there was (2) 'understanding': he had to be able to look inside himself and understand his own reaction to things, in order to understand their reaction; and vice versa. The third step was (3) 'solving': he need only to solve the culture-wide problem in himself in order that the people might see how to solve the problem in themselves and in the broader culture. Dr. Lorenzo said he felt at times that steps 1 and 2 had been accomplished, maybe, but if so, mostly by some power outside himself, or maybe by sheer animal instinct and human intuition above and beyond his conscious will; but in any case he was uncertain about step 3. And furthermore, there was a step 4, communicating the solution to his people clearly and convincingly, and with enough inspiration to help motivate them to apply the solution, regardless of risk; and he worried that he had failed at this, for, while he had certainly attempted to communicate, and Sammy and his following had certainly helped to spread his ideas, only time would tell if any of this had been sufficient to preserve Western Civilization, or keep the human species from destroying itself in one way or another, or bring and keep peace on earth: these being the three biggest problems, in varied combinations, that various factions of his following, at varying times, looked to him to solve.

 

[2]  Sammy Martinez’ after-school reading club students at Española High have been famous for asking telling questions over the years, right up to today, 2017, even though the composition of the reading group has changed year to year, as freshmen joined and seniors graduated and left the club. By 2017 some of the high schoolers’ best befuddlements, as answered with clarifications from Sammy or the Dr., have been published as a core part of the present multi-volume series, ‘a look at the life and creative artifacts of mj lorenzo’, and have helped draw international attention to the present website of B. C. Duvall where Dr. Lorenzo’a works are being published in ‘study’ or ‘look-at’ form. In December of 2016 Sammy presented to his after-school reading club in northern New Mexico what he called a ‘Beta version’ of the present work, by which he meant a ‘test’ version, to be checked over before publication online of the final version, and it provoked the following discussion at their January 2017 meeting:

 

“Dr. Martinez, I’m having trouble understanding what’s true and what’s not true in the manuscript you gave us to read.”

 

“Hooked on Cocaland?” asked Sammy, for he had handed out other digitally copied manuscripts over the years.

 

“Yes.”

 

“Dr. Lorenzo has always said that he ‘never wrote anything but the truth’.”

 

“But the Title Page of the ‘Beta version’ you handed out says parts of the work or all of it ‘may be made up’!”

 

“An important group of the Dr.’s pundit-following,” Sammy explained, “have always maintained that fiction and truth were liberally mixed in his works because large portions were 'made up', so we included that warning to readers in order to protect ourselves, to whatever extent it might be true. I’ve known the Dr. well for 45 years, and I think it’s the wisest approach. People who write in the genre of historical fiction, for example, DO ALWAYS make things up. And Shakespeare’s history plays were based on actual historical events, for another example, but that does not mean that he did not 'make up' the conversations and certain other things. Who knows if an English King actually shouted in the midst of battle, ‘My kingdom for a horse!’?” Looking at history-writing in the reverse way, all experts on Tolstoy agree that all of the ideas expressed or thought by the character called ‘Levin’ in his fictional novel Anna Karenina represented Tolstoy’s own view of life, and of events in that novel itself, which means that, while the persona of Levin, like the rest of that novel, was made-up 'fiction', Levin’s deeper character was not fiction at all, but more correctly 100% historical autobiography. I could cite millions of examples of blurring of boundaries between ‘true historical reality’ and ‘fiction’ in the most highly respected literary works, if we had all the time in the world. Samuel Clemens' fictional novels, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were both 'based on' his boyhood in Hannibal, Missouri, for example.”

 

“But what’s made up in Hooked on Cocaland?” asked the same kid, who seemed by now to have something on his mind.

 

“Probably the sexual parts,” answered Sammy.

 

“The sexual parts!” said the kid, stunned; for the ‘sexual parts’ were exactly what bothered him. But he couldn’t say that; not yet anyway.

 

(See Afterthought 1, "Sammy on 'fiction' vs 'true historical reality'" for the rest of this discussion.)