Appendix IV:

the Dr. responds to U.S. high school hackers

of

‘a look at mj lorenzo’s second book, Tales of Waring’

In early spring of 2018 a very preliminary and experimental (‘beta’) version of ‘a look at mj lorenzo’s Tales of Waring’ was published on the web at bruceduvall.com, as part of a comprehensive project to uncover and eliminate kinks, and almost immediately – within a week – the beta version was hacked.[1] Every attempt to erase the hacks was met with a vigorous new re-hacking, and this recurred several times, until Dr. Lorenzo and Sammy Martinez and the editorial board decided to leave the hacks in place and maybe comment on them eventually, instead of trying to remove them. The FBI was convinced that the hackers were from a high school somewhere in the USA. Dr. Lorenzo's instinct told him it was someone in Sammy's after-school reading club, but he never confronted them directly.

The Dr. was so upset by the high schoolers hacking the present website, he decided to answer them, finally. They were right in being upset over the mass killings in America, he assured them. He was not upset about their being upset. To publicize their disgust they chose a website dedicated to his writing, a website well trafficked: that made sense to him too. But their hacks broke up the ’unity’ of Tales of Waring and the unity of the website, both, he said. Nevertheless, since the damage was done, he would add to it. (In secret he admitted to Sammy that even without hackers many of his works struggled to maintain artistic and thematic ‘unity’, not to mention the website entire.)

In response to the hacks decrying mass slaughter, Dr. Lorenzo wrote the following piece, but then lost his nerve and decided not to publish it after all.

imagine this:

an American family live in a remote and frightful arctic wilderness, parents and twelve sons, the eldest of whom is a depressed, crazy homicidal and suicidal maniac. every six months or so, over the last three years, this son, first of the dozen in birth order, has killed, by one means or another, one of his junior siblings as they sat together during home schooling with their mother, starting with the next oldest and working down to the seventh oldest. the parents have not reached out for help. they moved to where they live now for 'complete independence and freedom'.

they are in an isolated and remote frontier region of Alaska, a few miles from the border with far-north wilderness Canada, and no one knows of the situation but the family themselves.

the young homicidal maniac’s secret plan has been to kill the remaining family one by one over seven years, and then take the family dogsled to the outside world and kill himself there, leaving a note describing his achievement and winning fame and glory as the only person in history to commit such a fabulous protracted atrocity. before moving to remote Alaska he was made aware of many such killings and since then he has wanted to be the best, most successful and most infamous mass killer of all times. it has become his goal in life.

during the three years of killings the parents have tried to solve the problem in a number of ways. they have counseled their son, first one parent, then the other, then both together. they have tried family meetings, with parents taking turns acting as group leader. some of the sons too have been given turns at leading the group family self-therapy. none of this has helped the eldest son.

they have tried allowing him to watch any satellite TV channel he wants, to play any video game he wants, or to study anything he wants in home school, or nothing if he prefers. he has been freed of chores. he has been locked in his bedroom at times but begs for mercy, promising self-reform, and is released. he is allowed to roam the wilderness with one of the family guns and do whatever he wants. but nothing has changed him and so far he has killed no less than six siblings.

thinking that his motive might be to gain parental attention, or glory in the eyes of the younger children, or maybe even attention from outside parties, the family have tried foiling such a possible design by ignoring him.

they have even tried religion, only to realize that neither parent believed in any religion. neither one believed in the existence of God, let alone a God that could or would help.

nor have they believed in a fundamental set of rules or commandments or laws, let alone ‘sacred’ or ‘holy’ laws by which they should or might live.

basically what they have believed in is survival and ‘freedom’, in the heartless and freezing north, against all odds.

all the same, the parents have declared a set of laws as a constitution for family governance, including ‘no killing’, but nothing has stopped the killing.

they don’t even believe in their own law not to kill, really. they have considered (for about a second) killing their killer son, but killing a son is as unthinkable for them as his killing his brothers, their sons. and they are not very good at thinking. they never have been. they are befuddled, muddled, too upset and distracted to think well and clearly. and, worse yet, they fear the outside world will hear of it and lock them up forever, or take away the remaining children. that was why they moved where they moved in the first place: they no longer believed in modern society, as it had evolved, and wanted to take care of themselves, by themselves.

the parents, at least, do not appear to be the target of the eldest son, or so they think.

the remaining children do feel targeted, however, and have taken to secretly carrying weapons for protection at times.

the father has refused to hide or lock up the family guns because they might be needed for survival at any moment. same with kitchen and other knives, electric saws and drills, etc.

on this basis the mother has blamed her husband for the murders of the children, but he still has refused to change his behavior and lock up deadly weapons, saying ‘if the eldest doesn’t use our guns, knives, drills, saws or whatever, he will just find some other means, and anyway, it’s your fault that the eldest is a mass and serial murderer, not mine, because when i am away hunting, you allow him to do anything he wants’.

she threatens to remove all lethal weapons from the house herself, but he threatens that if she does, she will be anathema in his eyes and in the hearts of their children, because the family will no longer have the tools readily available which they will need for protecting and feeding themselves at a moment’s notice. she does not want to be anathema in her husband’s eyes, so refrains from acting to protect her children from potential weapons.

she has been outvoted by one against one, in effect.

but it doesn’t matter because in the back of her mind, and far away in a dark corner of her heart, she too believes that son number one, until now, at least, has seemed so determined to kill his siblings, that he would have strangled them if he had found no other way. and she is not about to cut off her own son’s hands.

the five younger children, however, fear their eldest brother and hate their parents for not resolving differences and solving the problem. they have clamored to return to civilization and get help for him and the whole family. they want him locked up.

finally the eighth eldest is knifed to death during home schooling.

besides the killer, four remain alive now, the four youngest boys.

at this point, one day when the eldest is off hunting, the four youngest drug their parents, steal the family dogsled and escape to nearby Canada. they tell their story in a remote Canadian village and ask for asylum. a few citizens of the outpost, with help from the four youngest children, take their guns on dogsleds to find the children’s home.

they discover that the eldest has killed both parents and himself.

while the Canadians’ backs are turned for a moment, the four last sons burn the house down with the three bodies in it.

the four boys return to Canada with their benefactors and are granted asylum in Canada.

‘You shall consecrate yourselves therefore and be holy, for I am the LORD your God. And you shall keep My statutes and practice them; I am the LORD who sanctifies you.

‘If there is anyone who curses his father or his mother, he shall surely be put to death; he has cursed his father or his mother, his bloodguiltiness is upon him....

‘Thus you are to be holy to Me, for I the LORD am holy; and I have set you apart from the peoples to be Mine.’ (Leviticus 20: 7-9; 26; American Standard Bible)

without even thinking of any connection to Becca’s graduation from Pierce College, i wrote the above allegory the night before. then after the graduation, the night after i wrote it, i felt it might be wrong to publish such an allegory, which would offer the bruceduvall.com website hackers and everyone else no solution to mass shootings except total escape from U.S. America, where we lacked holy regard for – and didn’t even have – sacred laws against, or adequate punishments for, flagrant impiety toward family or community (as I had meant the Bible verse to indirectly point out). to publish the allegory in a newsletter, or in any way, seemed unfair to the graduating students and their families, who were full of hope for their futures, and feeling triumph because of their graduations. the hackers had come up with a better solution than i had, maybe. at least it had occurred to them to pray.[2] all i could come up with was self-exile, when in fact the parents or grandparents of many of the graduating students had already thought of that solution, and exiled themselves from some other miserable country in order to come to America, hoping it would respect human life more.

the Pierce College graduation was a moving experience: 4100 students, each with roughly two to ten family members and friends in the audience. such could be estimated from the family/friend bunches sitting near us, each in a distinct group separated by several empty seats from the next bunch, the bunches spread out broadly all over the huge indoor arena with its seats for tens of thousands. we ourselves were eight. and each time a name was announced and a diploma given, about every seven seconds, a family somewhere in the vast stadium-sized Tacoma Dome arena popped up jumping and screamed bloody vicious and ecstatic echo-y approval. the rector announced that 62% of the students graduating were the first in their families to graduate from any educational institution beyond high school. 99.9% were receiving two-year Associate’s diplomas or certificates, and only 0.1%, four-year Bachelor’s. and the students and their families, with so many strange unpronounceable names and exotic faces, were from what seemed like 4100 different cultures around the world.

but then it occurred to me that part of the screaming – at least unconsciously, if not consciously – might have been from the fact that each student graduating had survived two or four years in a school where she or he, at any moment, might have been the victim of DDMSI, a blood sport recently popular in the United States, Diabolically Demented Mass Slaughter of Innocents. a number of school shootings have occurred in the Seattle-Tacoma area in the last few years. in fact, we ourselves – while just sitting there listening to Elgar’s eye-watering Pomp and Circumstance March and watching score after score after score of students process regally into the arena from the wings, dressed in flowing floor-length maroon robes and weirdly distinguished late-medieval university-student mortarboards with gold tassles on their heads – even WE might have been grenaded, bombed, gas-poisoned or assault-rifled and mowed down, maimed or killed and left in a bloody pile by a diabolically demented mass slaughterer of innocents.

all of us entering, from babes to grannies, even Bible-memorizing 95-year-old Uncle Eddie, a veteran of World War II, had been subjected to a search of pockets and bags for guns, grenades, bombs, electric saws, lethal chemicals, and knives, for that very reason: even he or any one of us might be a diabolically demented mass slaughterer of innocents. who knew? do we know ourselves well enough to be sure we are not? we can get darn mad about stuff sometimes.

not only had the students survived the academic tests and classes, they and their families and friends had survived the graduation ceremony, all of us in fact, including me, Uncle Eddie, my cousin Marilyn, Becca’s ridiculously screaming boyfriend, her mother and father, without being senselessly killed en masse by someone practicing that very popular and violent public sport called DDMSI, Diabolically Demented Mass Slaughter of Innocents.

the sport Americans invented which has proven one more time that Americans are clever indeed. we think of things nobody else has ever thought of! in Mexico, for example, there has NEVER been a school shooting, even with all the high-power rifles everywhere.

what a society to get a degree in! the USA, the cleverest, the 'greatest country in history', the 'first unchallenged global superpower', top dog on the planet with freedom of religion, and even freedom from religion.

it was a reason to scream and cheer, i guess.

so maybe it would be alright to publish the tale of the twelve brothers after all.

i don’t know.

i’m still thinking about it.

hearing that the Dr. was reneging on publishing the above piece, students in Sammy’s after-school reading group went behind Dr. Lorenzo’s back and spread it around northern New Mexico. so Sammy and the Dr. decided to publish it here, too, after all.

Becca's father Dan, and her grandfather, who to Dr. Lorenzo is 'Uncle Eddie'
contemplate the atmosphere of Mt. Rainier in Washington state during a 7/23/2018 hike near Sunrise visitor center
95-year-old Eddie can't see it because of blindness, but he can feel it with his heart
partly because he has known the mountain since early boyhood
thanks to his parents' driving him there on cross-country summer camping trips
from New Jersey in the 1920s and 30s
and thanks to their letting him hike its trails
 and slide on his seat down its glaciers and snowfields

"Uncle Eddie," says Dr. Lorenzo, "is one of the very few people I know
who believes there are life precepts which are SACRED,
and has lovingly taught his family those sacred values by word and example.
Needless to say, no one in his family has become a Diabolically Demented Mass Slaughterer of Innocents,
but if one of them began to approach any degree of impiety toward what was sacred,
Eddie would know what to do
and would act quickly, yet kindly.
I've seen him do it."

---

[1]  The hacks are in 3 locations and show a logical progression as far as thinking and significance are concerned. All are identified with red ink. The first hack is on the title page of the present work. The second is on the title page for Part I, and the third, close to the end of Vishnu's Pulse. The editors have changed the hacks from black to red, to alert readers that they are not part of the Bruce Duvall publication, “a look at mj lorenzo’s second book, Tales of Waring.” But our editors and webmaster/publisher have never been able to erase or change the content of the hacks. Every time they did so, the hacks were re-done immediately.

 

[2]  In the red-lettered text hacked into the title page for Part I, the high school hackers included a prayer, to which Dr. Lorenzo added a couple of his own lines in black letters. These lines the hackers allowed to remain.