Tale 33

Frightening Fred Waring

diagram from Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and Work: A Biographical Memoir, p. 17
showing the many levels of the Unconscious

of each and every individual Homo sapiens
overwritten with notes by Dr. Lorenzo
showing how the levels apply to Carl Jung himself
(see below for larger, more legible version of this diagram)

...insisting you are right and good,

and others are wrong and evil,

does not make you right and good.

Or a saint,

in my religion’s holy scriptures.

                    mj lorenzo

                    Tales of Waring

                   (Tale 33 ‘Frightening Fred Waring’ footnote 10)

The night had worn on. The story of Bill’s ordeal had unfolded gradually up until now, bit by bit: his years working for Fred, a man who had respected no one, seemingly, least of all himself, as his respecting few others seemed to suggest. Bill had laid tale on tale carefully, angle on angle over time; and the un-Bill-like seriousness of tone had persisted hour after hour without letup, many hours now, making the jollity of the early hours seem like last year. Bill’s gravity while storytelling had lasted all this time, ever since the booze stories stopped. It was so unusual for him, that the depth of hidden rancor implied by such a dogged approach had registered with mj, finally. Bill had always been jovial, even uproarious, as if deliberately trying to keep the sometimes dangerously serious young mj lorenzo (who had struggled with depression throughout college and medical school) from slipping back into depression again, rather than have it said that he, Bill, had caused it by some accidental oversight. Bill Blackburn was an expert at commitment to a relationship he considered important.

But this could not have been the whole explanation for why Bill had always been jovial, as the interviewer realized when he’d found time to think about it at last, after the interview. For joviality wasn’t Bill’s style with mj only. He hid negative emotions around other people too, showing only positive. He would have shown some negative emotion around people in general, maybe, had he been more like his father’s family, the Blackburns, who were from Northern Ireland. But he was more like his mother’s people when it came to how, and how much, he allowed himself to show various negative feelings. Almost all of the tribes of the New World had been described again and again by people of European descent as being ‘taciturn’, or ‘stoical’, and as purposely showing outwardly, by custom, few negative traits or emotions, only positive, friendly and good-natured, helpful ones, purposely and deliberately, so that everyone would think of them and remember them, even when dead and gone, as good and likeable people. This was a rule for many if not most tribes encountered in the Americas, North, Central and South, and definitely for the Huron, as The Children of Aataentsic, a classic ethnohistory of the Huron people, helped confirm for mj when it appeared in print two years after this interview, in ‘76.[1]      

Therefore, something must have pushed a button in Bill. That was the conclusion to draw: not this night, but a while back, a button had been pushed, for he had made his decision to quit working for Fred several weeks back. But he was not just fed up or tired of working for Fred, as mj had assumed until now. It was not a minor weariness that he felt, but something more grave. He was angry with an anger that bit and festered and drove him to tell story after story, hour after hour. Several times during the night his anger rose to the surface and he pushed it back down at once, lest it wiggle and explode free, dishonoring him by breaking the tribal rule for manly behavior. That was as much as he was likely to let such a negative emotion as anger show this night, therefore.

But anger was wily and instinct-driven, like a threatened dog, or a two-year-old child denied a toy, and Bill’s true but hidden feeling, anger, on its own and of its own will, as it were, without his permission, was succeeding in escaping around his self-censoring to make itself known to people close to him in a different way: indirectly, rather than directly. It lay behind all his behavior right now. It was the motivator of all his behavior. It was driving him to do big and complicated things he would normally not do. He was going to tell very carefully chosen stories about Fred all night long, willing to go without sleep for twenty four hours. He would have gone for forty eight or seventy two, if he’d had to, to get the depth and conviction of that anger communicated to mj fully and successfully, in story form, by telling his own well-designed stories, sometimes artfully made humorous in order to mask and channel his anger.[2]

A stranger would never have seen Bill as angry this night. You had to know him. For someone who knew Bill very well, the hidden anger had reached a point of measurability by close friends, finally, making itself measurable via the depth of determination shown over time, Bill’s patient, protracted, slow but steady, consistent, unwavering determination to expose Fred’s true lack of basic good character piece by piece over a period of time, as the night went by, in the form of convincingly detailed, factual, evidentiary, cool-headed and therefore inescapably convicting stories. Mj could feel and measure the anger increasingly because he knew Bill so well, that he felt it was happening inside himself. He just had not gotten sufficient sense yet of what had caused the anger exactly. That was missing at this point in the night for mj, still; partly because Bill was going about the thing so carefully and at such length that it was taking enormous time for mj to get the whole picture; and partly because mj, the poor boy, was resisting the stories at times, and would hardly grasp the point of any given story of Bill’s for that reason; or would get the point for a second, only to lose it then, immediately, and would flounder ‘in the brine’ all over again, where he had seemed to prefer to be throughout most of the night until now, maybe so as to remain in denial about his boyhood hero, Fred.   

So, on the surface it appeared that mj was playing shrink with his friend, trying to get to the bottom of his conflict with his boss, so the two men could work things out and Bill could go on working for the famous Fred Waring. This accomplished, Bill and Betty Ann and mj and Dlune could then go on living their Fred Waring Fairy Tale, the strange, romantic, old-world kind of fairytale fable of a charmed woods-and-country lifestyle the four of them had been living, all of it very much in the shadow of one important man’s personality, the local lord and nobleman, the beloved and charismatic neighborhood Anglian saint-king named Fredrik de Warenne, or, in plain modern American English, Fred Waring.

All of this was in fact what mj had thought he’d been doing for the last little while, after the booze stories ended, getting to the bottom of Bill’s rancor. But, it was just the visible part of the story; for meanwhile, in the back of mj’s ‘crazy’ mind, a movie had started running, a movie that told a different but related story. It had just kicked in, as a matter of fact, and now as Bill talked and mj tried to listen carefully for Freudian psychoanalytic clues as to the source of the conflict, he would occasionally flash on the destruction of the Huron people, the gory story of how the tribe had been virtually wiped out in the early sixteen hundreds, all the bloody details he had uncovered on his trip to Montreal’s McGill University to meet Bruce Trigger in person and learn about his research into the Huron tribe. Every minute or two as Bill talked, a horror scene would flash by in mj’s mind, and he would dismiss it so as to keep to the assignment of unraveling the history of the relationship between Bill and Fred, so as to pin down once and for all the Freudian source of their conflict.

Mj censored the flash scenes for another reason too, because they were disgusting – even nauseating. The story of the end of the Huron people was a disgrace to the history of 'Christian' Western-world white man. Close to the end, when they were dying at such a headlong rate that tribal chiefs had to admit survival of the tribe at all – as a functioning integral tribal unity – was in question, they tried to explain the horror to themselves. They focused blame on a single Jesuit priest, Brébeuf, who had not been the most understanding or respectful of Huron ways of living and doing things, who had demeaned their values, their religion, and their beliefs. Him they blamed personally for their downfall. They called him in for public ritual trial, traditional style, knowing he would be found guilty and punished according to morbid custom, excruciating, deliberately protracted ritual torture, physical and mental, that adhered to detailed traditional Huron rule, followed by live roasting and basting, all of it done with what the researcher in French Canada, Trigger, had called ‘psychological finesse’. When the Huron were wronged, they meted out revenge with ‘psychological finesse’, Trigger had said.[3]

The French who visited the Huron country were accustomed to wars that were fought for territorial gain or commercial advantage, or because of religious differences. To their surprise, none of these motives played an important role in traditional Iroquoian warfare. The major reason that the Huron gave for waging war was to avenge the injuries that warriors from other tribes had inflicted upon them.[4]

In their treatment of... prisoners the Huron revealed a sinister aspect of the psychological finesse which was an important facet of their culture.[5]

The story of the Huron had little to do with what was going on in the Blackburn living room, as far as mj could see at the time, at least; and yet the festering intermittent mental movie showing flashes of the story in gruesome images would not leave him alone. For these flashes he blamed the concoction he had swallowed twice that night already; and he got mad at Joey and made up his mind to call him the next day and ‘chew him out’.

The torturing of a prisoner took place inside the longhouse of the village’s principal war chief. It began in the evening and, while it might last one or several days, it was necessary for the prisoner to die in the open air at sunrise, since the sun was the special witness of the fate of warriors. In addition to being an act of blood revenge, the prisoner’s death was viewed as a sacrifice to the sun.[6]

Bill said, "I think my big problem with Fred is, he's frightened. And that sounds awful, but I'm just trying to explain it to you, if possible."

A vision of Betty Ann in the mirror hit mj lorenzo, shocking his nervous system. She was wickedly intimate in a skimpy short red negligee tastefully chosen from a respectable store, no doubt, but ‘sinfully’ sultry since worn to entice Bill into scenes; and mj lowered his stare so as to busy himself with his tape recorder, as if it had just turned into a serious Sears basement reject and screamed out to him with desperate pleas requiring immediate attention; yet at the same time, he did manage, while fiddling with it, to blurt out his ‘best line of the night’, as the critical press said later.

"He's probably more frightened than ever since you got married!"

It was as if Betty Ann had just wakened him from a deep dreaming stupor with a hot iron poker; for he should have gotten the point long before. All of the evidence all night long had pointed to Bill’s courting and marrying Betty Ann as the one and only thing that had changed Fred’s attitude toward Bill.

That very point, a point which Bill and she had tried and failed all night long to drive home with storytelling of such art that it deserved the highest storytelling-art awards, Betty Ann had finally driven through every millimeter of mj’s thick skull, just this minute, right to the very soft spot meant for grasping such a point without a single word having to be uttered, and in a way never to be forgotten again, maybe; hopefully.

Betty Ann disappeared and coughed from the distance of what seemed the bathroom, then re-entered with a touch of her usual cuteness mixed with a late-night dab of negligee-modeling schmaltz in the mirror.

It was Miss Fred Waring Fairy Tale herself, the real perpetrator of the Fred Waring fairy tale in which poor mj lorenzo had gotten so trapped and bewitched, betwixt and between, that he had forgotten the importance of all of his carefully ‘remade’ personal values, after all that hard work to carefully ‘remake’ those values three years back. SHE was the real explanation for why the crazy seductive Fred Waring fairy tale had lasted as long as it had, and also for why it was dying now, sadly, before his eyes. SHE was the person poor Fred had been trying to impress with his music all those years. Why had he not seen this before?

"Bill, I'm goin' to bed." She laughed toward mj.

He thought about glancing up but decided to study the tape before it exploded. It was acting up really nastily, to judge from his behavior.

Apparently, he had never been around much when Betty Ann had gone to bed before. It could hardly have been her usual beddy-bye routine, he assumed, this impossibly red negligee; not that he had ever seen before, anyway. That was for sure. He would have remembered, if he had seen anything like this. So she must have done it to knock them both over; purposely; just to prove that a matter which men could debate a lifetime away, trying to heroically understand with utmost sincerity, a woman could clarify in a second without a word.

"Betty Ann," Bill said. "Wait up for us. We won't be that long."

"I have to get up at seven to get Mark ready for school." She cleared her throat and waited a little uncomfortably for something, standing halfway across the living room from him, closer to mj than to her husband.

Mj turned the recorder off and on stupidly. "K-hunch! Fwha-ack!"

"Wake me up in the morning, too," Bill said in a cute, solicitous, hubby-playing way. "I'll come down and we'll make Mark dress up and be ready to go to school, all-right?"

"Mm." She sounded weary.

Her husband was obviously feeling something for red-negligé-ed Miss Fred Waring Fairy Tale, yet surprisingly he seemed glued to his chair. She was not getting a kiss tonight for some reason, if that was part of her implied, hesitant, standing-there-waiting, beddy-bye question. The reason for his not getting out of the chair was unclear at the time too, but mj’s later research suggested it could have been caused by a Huron custom Trigger described in Children of Aataentsic:

The sacred nature of what was about to happen was emphasized by the orders of the headmen that no one in the village should engage in sexual intercourse that night...[7]

"I'll help you, Betty Ann," he said reassuringly and cutely. They were inventing a new act on the spot. It was a performance full of cues that only the two of them recognized. They were juicing up a routine not meant for general audiences, and so they were pasting it over at the same time.

'Crrrack!'

...and that, while torturing the prisoner, everyone should behave in an orderly and restrained fashion...[8]

"Yeh. Don't stay up too long," she said in the same kind of playful, cutesy, playmatey-boo tone he was using. "You won't be able to help me." And with the way she intoned ‘help’, using a slightly underplayed comic screech, she reached out to the gallery again, reminding the gallery that they were never fully forgotten, even during scenes of such nonsense that the stage play seemed designed for some other audience. In fact the hint of a comic screech said more than that, mj realized suddenly. It said, “Look at me NOW, mj. I want you to look at me NOW.” She hardly would have entered the room looking at him and laughing, if she had not wanted him to look at her. But mj was not about to look at Betty Ann NOW; though she was a good friend of his; not the way she was dressed right then, or not dressed, rather; and not with Big Chief Huron of the Ranchito right there watching him, monitoring every twitch and eyelash bat.

"Well you go ahead," said Daddy Bill. Enough nighty-night now. "And I'll be up in a little while. All-right?"

"Yeh, mj. I've gotta go to bed." She was addressing him now, super-drugged Dr.-Shrink Mortimer Jack Lorenzo.

Mj was surprised and raised his head to look straight at her nonchalantly. "Ohh!"

That old tape must have made him forget she was in the room somehow. How could it have happened?

"I'm sorry,” she said. “I've got to get up at seven."

Mj yawned like a jackass waking up after a long winter’s nap. "Bye now," he offered helplessly.

He would never make a Lancelot. That was clear.

"I'll be up in a little while, Bett," Bill scooted her off; one more time; still gently, of course, but for good this time, hopefully; because it was high time the men of the tribe got down to some very, very serious tribal business. You could hear it in his voice.

"OK." She got his drift this time; and left.

...and should burn only his legs at the beginning....[9]

Bill resumed without dropping a second. He was just as serious as mj had ever seen him. And details like this were getting through to mj with their message. It was all further evidence of the depth of Bill’s rancor.

"The thing that happened with Fred and I –: Paul, his son, and I discussed it tonight. Paul says, 'He's frightened of you, 'cause when he talks to me, makes his excuses to me, I have no answer. Takes me three days to figure out where he was lying, come up with facts’.

"But when Fred sits and talks with me, I say, 'Now wait a minute, hold it: fact one, fact two, fact three!' And I hit him immediately, and he can't handle this."

"Mm huh," mj agreed. He could see Bill doing that. He was a whip when wheeling and dealing, no matter who. And he could see Fred thinking Bill impertinent for correcting him, because it was not coming from the President of the United States. Only the President, and not ALL presidents, either, could beg to differ with Saint-King Fredrik de Warenne and be pardoned for it; because Fred saw himself as that high up, status-wise, in the Metaphysical Hierarchy of BEING, or something, so high, that he was right by definition, always, or at least ought to be treated as right by definition, always.

"And he likes being on very sure... territory," Bill said, likening the Pennsylvanians’ workplace to the outback of North America that the English, French and Natives had realized they must share somehow: the ‘territory’.

"Mm huh," said mj. He had not put it together yet, in other words, the tone said.

He was a little lost still. Or lost again. In that territory.

"Even to the point where he is saying these things,” Bill went on, “and these people that work for him don't believe it, but they say 'OK!' 'cause they're frightened of their jobs."

‘Sure territory’ meant this: that the manner in which the French, English and Natives shared territory on the continent must reassure each and all, security-wise, somehow. That’s how ‘sure territory’ came into use. Fred was a rich Englishman. He was of English descent and felt most safe around people just like him, rich and powerful, prestigious people he understood. Whereas he did not know what Bill was going to do next, because Bill behaved differently, and Fred had never taken the trouble to get to know Bill. He never felt ‘on sure territory’ with Bill Blackburn because he had never reached the point of understanding him correctly; and that was merely because, of course, he had never made the darn effort to get to know him and understand him as a man at all, as an equal, a human being, at all; just as the Jesuits in the 1630s had never tried to get to truly know and understand the Huron as equals and human beings, at all. They kept looking down on them as lesser beings in the Metaphysical Hierarchy of BEING, a hierarchy which existed only because the Western world had created it out of thin hot air, right out of their whacked imagination.[10] The Jesuit priests kept belittling the Huron, judging them, and despising them as lesser beings. Bill was going to try Fred and find him guilty of all this, therefore. In fact, he was going to try, convict, and punish Fred, all three things simultaneously, in a single drawn out ritual act this very night, a carefully structured ritual act that had already begun hours ago, as a matter of fact; and would end at sunup; just as the Huron had tried the Jesuit priests in a long, night-long ritual ordeal of psychological and physical torment, knowing the whole time that the superior-acting priestly Frenchmen were guilty to start with. Or maybe one should say not ‘try’, or ‘tried’,  but ‘fry’; and ‘fried’.

Which frying ended with death at sunup – from ritual torture.

The Jesuits... were exasperated by the way in which these [Huron] men would approve of their teachings, and sometimes even ask for more instruction, but then refuse to renounce their old ways.... The older men, who were most knowledgeable about Huron beliefs, explained them to the Jesuits, and must have been offended when Brébeuf repeatedly used such occasions to censure and ridicule what they were saying. The Huron reminded the Jesuits that they had different customs and should respect each other’s beliefs... The Jesuits did not realize that the Huron approved of what they said from a sense of politeness which they expected the French to reciprocate.[11]

It was also announced to what headmen the main parts of his [Father Brébeuf’s] body would be given after he was dead [from their ritual torture of him].[12]

Dr. Lorenzo’s perennial critical press, as expected and on schedule, had a field day with ‘such far-fetched if not psychotic abuse of the scientific literature’.

The Dr. defended himself in a letter to Sammy Martinez and his high-schoolers, Sammy’s stellar reading club in Española, New Mexico, many of whom were half- or full-blooded Native American. And Sammy at once distributed the letter to Dr. Lorenzo’s worldwide following.

As tension mounted toward the end of the interview, a movie ran in my mind, in the background, as if a documentary movie had been left running on TV, but I was busy with other things and not exactly watching. On this TV-like screen in my mind, I heard lines from the Huron research, and saw scenes of the Huron dying as a nation, tragic events in ugly detail, like their torturing the Jesuit priests with ‘psychological finesse’, as the researcher called it, using their standard (because traditional among all of the Iroquoian tribes) so-called ‘ritual torture’. The mental screen would flicker and I’d see an image gruesome and upsetting, and I’d run to Freudian interpretations of Bill Blackburn’s relationship with his boss, Fred Waring, for comfort and sanity, because that was more familiar ground. Days later it hit me that the movie had flashed images and whole sentences at me starting at about the beginning of what I later called Part IV of my book, during Bill’s story that I eventually called “Frightening Fred Waring.” Later still I wondered if some version of the movie might have been playing in Bill’s mind as well, maybe explaining his ardor for prosecuting the case against Fred until I judged everything the way he did.

My research on the demise of the Huron must have disturbed me more than I’d realized. It was a disgrace. I wanted to forget it, but Bill’s constant attack on Fred’s essential basic  moral character forced the movie up from my unconscious, I think, into my conscious mind.

Bill knew the Huron story, I feel strongly, but in his own way. As a kid he’d gone to the local library where he grew up in Orange County, New York State, and read books on the Huron and other Native American tribes. His favorite Indian hero was Chief Joseph, leader of the Nez Perce tribe in Oregon, whose pathetic tale he knew in storyteller detail. He told me all this during the second interview a few months after the first. But he didn’t say much, that second night of interviewing, about the gruesome end of his mother’s people. Prior to the research by Trigger, nobody talked about it, and I didn’t feel comfortable telling him the details I had uncovered. The sad and ugly events in Trigger’s painstaking research would never have appeared in the old public library books Bill had read. But he knew something about it, I feel. Not rationally, necessarily, or even consciously, I mean. His mother’s family, or she, dropped hints, or stories, no doubt, from time to time throughout his life.

Years later I finally did what I had been thinking all along I should not do, ever, and I bounced my conviction off Bill, delicately. I told him that I’d suspected that he’d reacted to Fred as a ‘red man reacting to a white’. He laughed and nixed the idea.[13] I didn’t argue. But I didn’t agree either. The suspicion had been born in me a few days after the first interview, and had grown into a conviction over time, especially after the second interview, and even more after Trigger published his final results in ’76 on the death of the Huron as a functioning tribe: gradually I came to believe that Fred’s tyrannical traits had provoked a racial, or ethnic, rancor in Bill Blackburn that ran too deep for him to elucidate or eradicate. It was too deep for him to recognize, even.

Racial distrust and resentment are learned, generation to generation, via channels often difficult to identify. I won’t argue evidence pro and con here, Sammy. I’d like to discuss it the next time I come to Española. But Bill was proud of his Native American heritage, consciously, and knew a fair amount about the Huron in particular, as I discovered when we did that second interview a few months later. There was significant evidence that he thought and operated as a Native American in certain ways. Somewhere inside, at some level, deep in his DNA maybe, or lodged in a view of the world planted in him somehow by his mother, perhaps in the mysterious, nonverbal, nonrational way mothers teach children certain information absolutely essential for their well-being, Bill knew the story of his mother’s people, how they had dealt with white interlopers, and how they had come to an end. Every summer growing up he was exposed for weeks at a stretch to some of the older men left from the Huron tribe and all of their tales, when his mother took him to see their Huron relatives. It is difficult to imagine they would not have told him of the demise of the Huron as a tribe, their disintegration to the point where they could no longer function as a Native American tribe in their wonted and traditional way. Bill was naturally brilliant and curious and would have asked; because he loved to delve into the real history, the real skinny behind the vague outlines of popular memory. Just in the way he had studied Fred Waring’s history, he must have studied his own, but even more ardently.   

Bill was far more proud of his mother’s heritage than his father’s. It came out in that second interview.

The researcher, Bruce Trigger, published the story of the demise of the Huron in book form two years later in two big fat hardback volumes of morbid, scientifically sound, ethnographic historical detail from original French Jesuit and other source documents, including the personal diaries of Fathers Brébeuf and Lalemant, the two Jesuit priests the Huron and Iroquois tortured and roasted to death – Brébeuf was later sainted – just the kind of information I had discovered on my trip to McGill in Montreal in 74.

I lied. I said I would not argue with you that racial rancor might be transmitted unconsciously. But I just remembered a diagram in a Barbara Hannah book[14] which I’ve kept in mind since I first came across it years ago. Her diagram can be taken as a summary statement of the views of Carl Jung in particular, and the Jungian School of Analytical Psychology in general. All of Jung’s theories on universal human psychology were based on empirical results derived from empirical studies, not on conjecture. Therefore, the diagram is most likely quite scientifically accurate.

As you can see from the diagram, and as you probably know from experience, many of our personal memories (letter A) are conscious. Family memories (letter B) may lie dormant until they resurface at a family reunion, for example, when they become conscious again, and people sit around telling stories of parents and grandparents and beyond. Tribal and 'clan' memories (letter C) jump out during critical tribal (or clan) events. National and/or Ethnic (D, E) memories also exist, but at a deeper level yet, and are mostly provoked to consciousness when circumstances impact the entire ethnic group or ‘race’ or 'nation', e.g., during a war, or when there is heightened tension between two races or nations.

And species (Homo sapiens) memories, though universal among members of the species (the entire human race), usually remain quite unconscious, because they are deeper yet. These memories (which in fact are not words but images, as in dreams or visions) Carl Jung called ‘archetypes of the collective unconscious’, and they come up in dreams, religions, the arts, national symbols, etc. They are harder yet to stimulate into awareness, out of the depths of the unconscious, but when the entire species is under attack, or under important consideration for whatever reason, they too may surface in dreams or visions, especially in persons well tuned and highly sensitive to threats to the entire species, people like Sammy and me and a lot of our readership or 'following', such as the ‘early Remaking pundits’ and the ‘culture hero pundits’.

Only a few people on the planet at any given moment may be tuned in to the needs of the entire human race. Christ was an example. Buddha, another. Most people, most human individuals, are tuned in to the needs of self, or interest group, or family; some are aware of the needs of the tribe, or subcultural group, or ethnic or racial group. Sometimes generations may pass without anyone taking up the cause of the entire mass of humanity, and when such people do appear, as in Jesus’ case, for example, often they are shouted down by the group, or family, or tribe or ethnic clan or race, as being too loosely focused, unwisely humanitarian, foolishly idealistic, and worst of all, not focused enough on the immediate acute needs of the local group. But often these advocates of Homo sapiens persist in their endeavors on behalf of humanity at large, especially when their deepest motivating instincts tell them to do so. For, if the very existence of the entire human race is threatened and mankind perishes, so do local race, ethnicity, tribe, subculture, clan, family, local interest group, and even the individual, meaning – : YES: you and me, baby.

One way to look at Tales of Waring in about as tiny a nutshell as you can find anywhere, is to see Bill and Fred, both, as fighting for self, family and tribe; while I, though I was barely even heard, was fighting to preserve the interests of BOTH sides. I wasn't aware during the interview of this rationale for my behavior, or even afterward for many years. But I think the culture hero pundits may have gotten it right once again, when they said a few years ago that at some deep unconscious level – maybe at the level of species-preservation instinct – I recognized that to side with Bill, while it might feel good, was unfair to Fred. And vice versa. But, to help preserve BOTH men and their points of view for posterity – at the very least, in my book – was better for the human race as a whole, in the long run. If we erased Fred from species memory because of his execrable imperfections, we would erase knowledge of how we went beyond him to something better – if we ever did. And the same for Bill.

Or do.

One of the powers of Homer's Iliad lies in its trick of reminding us constantly of the execrable, shameful, hugely tragic, egotistical selfishness of the wounded pride of poor, characterologically imperfect Achilles – by describing detailed gory death after detailed gory death of his own comrades in arms, largely due to his refusal to fight. Likewise, there is a good reason the Jews preserved the memory in their scriptures of heroic King David's reprehensible treatment of his next door neighbor, husband of Bathsheba, Uriah the Hittite, whom David decided to put in the front ranks of a battle he knew would be deadly, because he wanted Bathsheba for himself.

There must be some good reason why the New Testament preserves the account of how The Bride of Christ, his beloved 'church', went to rot right from the beginning. Paul spends half of his letters remonstrating (over their errors) with new church congregations he himself founded; and John in Revelation regales the errors of congregations in city after city after city.

In other words, the species is preserved in part by a careful recounting of past errors. Many species in the plant and animal kingdoms preserve right in their DNA the unconscious memory of the ways in which other species can kill them.

In the case of the human species, a major threat exists from the human species itself, and universal education as to how; and why; and in what form that threat lies within our own breasts and brains, is essential to our survival as a species.

Years later, in 2018, the Dr. reviewed his letter above and added a thought which he asked the editors and publishers of the present work to add here:

It just occurred to me that the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. Presidency may be viewed as an example of national interest attempting to shout down interest in all humanity. Obama and Hillary Clinton and the Democrats could be seen as having represented (whether perfectly or not) the latter, all humanity, for they were willing to temporarily risk sacrificing some degree of national interest for the long-term sake of humanity at large (including their own nation, by the way), in certain instances, as with international trade agreements, international climate accords, nation-to-nation migration issues, etc.; while Trump and the Republicans could be seen as having represented (whether perfectly or not) purely selfish national interest NOW, forgetting the common interest of humanity; Trump and his supporters wanted to ‘make America great again’, and put ‘America first’, regardless of the needs of other nations. The Democrats would have defended their own generosity toward other nations as likely to benefit their nation more in the long run than the ‘selfish America-first’ tactic. And the Republicans would have defended their nationalistic ‘selfishness’ the way a father would argue his need for ten beers after work: “I know it costs money. I know it seems selfish. But if the father is not happy, who else in the family (of nations) will be?” In other words, Trump and his following are saying: the only solo and virtually unchallenged global superpower in history, the United States of America, has to make itself happy before it can worry about any other nation’s happiness. Once we are operating perfectly, then we might get generous again, toward other nations. Maybe.”

But yes. Exactly. How long will it be? Can a family (or family of nations) function healthily if the parent (or parent nation, i.e., the nation which considers itself everybody else’s Big Daddy & Mommy) continues to feed itself without caring about the stomachs of the children???

“Those ‘children’ ain’t children!” the Trumpites will respond. “They can feed themselves. Make them figure it out on their own, and stop feeding them the food off your plate. If you keep pampering them, they’ll never grow up!”

“If we help them now, they will help us in the future,” the liberal Democrats will respond. “They’re adults, yes, of course, you’re right. But they are not as advanced in education or know-how and wherewithal as we are.”

These are two opposite approaches to surviving and thriving. One says: doing what is best for all will be best for us. The other: doing what is best for us will be best for all.

There must have been a good reason the United States launched the 'Marshall Plan' to reconstruct Europe after we bombed it to bits in World War II. The Marshall Plan was long-term strategic thinking, doing good for humanity, a kind of generous good, though costly, which after a number of years, would redound to our glory and improved well-being.

If we go back to Barbara Hannah’s model, and my comments to Sammy and his high-schoolers, we’ll see that focus on humanity at large, at the expense of focus on self, will tend to emerge from the Unconscious as an issue when humanity at large is threatened. Similarly, focus on the nation at the expense of the whole of humanity will occur when the nation is threatened. So, I would take it to mean that when both worries are a focus, as now, something out there must be threatening both the nation and humanity at large. Unless someone on one side or the other is raising a false alarm.

And that is exactly what each side is claiming of the other. The conservative ‘America-First’ Trumpites say that the Liberals’ claim of ‘global warming’ (for one example) is a false and unscientific claim, because the 90-95% or more of the world’s scientists who agree that it is a true claim are all 'lying' or 'wrong'. And the 'liberals' say that the claim of the 'America-First Trumpites’ that unchecked immigration is destroying the country, is a false claim; because in fact countless business owners maintain they cannot run their important businesses successfully without the labor provided by a relatively free flow of new immigrants.

Maybe what people are forgetting, in the shouting back and forth, is that a threat to humanity is a threat to every nation, including one’s own. And therefore we should be concerning ourselves with both issues: (1) threats to humanity; and (2) threats to our own people; rather than trying to choose between the two issues, so as to decide which side to be on. That is always the problem with ‘hyperpolarization’. People lose sight of the fact that BOTH sides may have valid concerns. And that has been my preoccupation ever since I wrote The Remaking in 70-71.

It was my concern the night of the first interview with the Blackburns too, of which the present book being ‘looked at’, Tales of Waring, was the result. I was trying to save two men who had it in for each other. It was like trying to save the United States and the Soviet Union from doing each other in, during the 'Cold' War, when an all-out 'Hot' War would have pulled down not only those two masses of humanity and all of their allies around the globe, but would have pushed humanity at large close to or beyond the edge of extermination, as President Eisenhower himself said, and as Winston Churchill agreed.

When I failed at saving the Bill-Fred friendship physically, our family fairy tale was pulled down, and died. Fred was gone.

Now what?

Write a book.

Writing – and art of every kind, in fact – helps figure things out.