He is no clown that drives the plough, but he that doth clownish things.

                                       Benjamin Franklin

Poor Richard's Almanac, 1736

"My benefactor explained something very interesting. Forbearance means holding back with the spirit something that the warrior knows is rightfully due. It doesn't mean that a warrior goes around plotting to do anybody mischief, or planning to settle past scores. Forbearance is something independent. As long as the warrior has control, discipline, and timing, forbearance assures giving whatever is due to whoever deserves it."

Carlos Castaneda

The Fire from Within¹

In the autumn of 1648 the Iroquois assembled an army of over 1000 men, mainly Seneca and Mohawk, who were well supplied with firearms and ammunition.  These men spent the winter in the forests north of Lake Ontario so that they might surprise the Huron early in the spring....

Bruce Trigger

The Children of Aataentsic²

Some of Dr. Lorenzo’s pundit following, when punditrating (and punditraitoring) on his fourth book, Mrs. Nixon’s Legs, liked to remind – and audiences could hardly but agree, supporters and critics alike – that the Dr.’s first four books (The Remaking; plus his three books derived from the three interviews with the Blackburns) had been influenced by twentieth century painting, especially by the ‘collage’ technique of composition, as seen in works by Picasso, Max Ernst, Rauschenberg, and so on. The understanding was widespread, especially starting from the day in 1990 when a few of the Dr.’s ‘Sacred Wedding’, or ‘hieros gamos’ pundits, published a little underground web page they called their “Guide to the Dr.’s Fourth Book.” Prior to the ‘Guide’ most 'common taters' (as the Dr. called his commentators) had agreed on three principal points, that: (1) a collage approach to composition dominated some chapters of the book more than others; and (2) some chapters gained from the Dr.’s use of the literary device while others suffered; and (3) the present chapter, ‘Mrs. Nixon’s Legs’, was one of the most awkwardly composed and difficult to read chapters of twentieth century writing because of its ‘over-use of collage’.

But now the web page ‘Guide’ offered a solution to the last of these three problems. It suggested that, just as most people by 1990 could look at a Rauschenberg collage and accept his collage way of looking at the world, enjoying the seeming whimsy in the mix of images and wondering what might have been the connections in the painter’s mind, so then, in a similar way, any prospective reader of Mrs. Nixon’s Legs should first of all, even before reading, adjust to and accept the fact of heavy collage use; and secondly, while reading, not fight the fact that quotes from several important sources ‘kept interrupting’ Bill Blackburn’s story, frequently, throughout the chapter. Heavy collage use was ‘a fact of life’ when it came to this ‘great and important work of 20^th Century American literature’, they said, and could not be undone or gotten around, as they asserted, ‘any more than the steps of a Mexican pyramid could be gotten around if you wanted to get to the top and experience a little of what ancient priests must have felt when standing up there on top’.

The very famous little tale known as ‘Mrs. Nixon’s Legs’ within the book of the same title was not merely ‘worth reading’, as these Remaking and ‘sacred marriage’ pundits said on their web page; it was a ‘godsend’, and should be declared and established by UNESCO to be part of Dr. Lorenzo’s ‘patrimony to humanity’, just as Mexican pyramids had been declared a ‘patrimony to humanity’. And as in the case of a pyramid, where steps were actually unavoidable both structurally and logistically, Dr. Lorenzo’s frequent and varied collaged quotes were ‘structurally and logistically unavoidable and essential’, as they put it, to what he had been trying to accomplish when he published the book in 1985. Which had been: to make a reader comprehend and experience that Bill Blackburn’s story, far from being ‘just’ a story of melodramatic courtship-and-wedding-and-honeymoon, or ‘just’ a story that could inspire lovers anywhere in the world to not give up if they ran into obstacles to loving and marrying, actually could be used to not only inspire a reader to follow the logical steps to self-realization all the way to the top, but to hopefully, as well, take him right to the top while reading, i.e. STRAIGHT TO SELF-REALIZATION, in actuality, AS A RESULT OF READING.

The Dr. and his Legs pundits, they said, had wanted the world to see and experience what he had seen and experienced while hearing Bill tell the tale, just as the ancient priests had built pyramids not just for their own many sacred uses, but also to inspire and guide their people in so many ways toward – AND CAUSE THEM TO ACTUALLY EXPERIENCE, RIGHT THEN AND THERE – A PROFOUND UNDERSTANDING that approached the depth of the priests’ own perception of things.

FOR EXAMPLE, as the pundits claimed: (1) each song mj ‘heard’ or ‘hallucinated’ or ‘thought he heard’ or ‘fictionalized hearing’ – or whatever – during the storytelling interview (for: mj’s pundits speculated constantly over how and why music had so often worked its way into his ‘strange but earthshaking’ writing), ‘each and every song’, they said, had been ‘perfectly appropriate to its place in the story’ and had been put there by mj not just to mesmerize and soothe with intoxicating rhythm and ineffable sound; and not even merely to remind that Fred Waring had been a consummate musical artist and perspicacious sage of fundamental popular Americana culture; BUT ALSO to shed a little light of wisdom and/or insight on some aspect of the particular part of the story Bill was telling right at that moment.

Similarly, (2) the quotes scattered throughout the length of Mrs. Nixon’s Legs that were borrowed from Bruce Trigger’s definitive historical account of the overnight extermination of the whole Huron tribe, had been inserted with specific intent too. They were meant to remind that not only tribes and nations, but even humanity as a whole, was vulnerable to extinction, unless it learned the lessons Bill Blackburn had learned from his own little tribe’s extinction, about how people should and must treat each other if they cared about themselves and their offspring.

Furthermore, said the pundits, (3) the quotes from Carlos Castaneda’s writing had been meant to remind the reader that indigenous peoples of North America had possessed for centuries a fund of knowledge about an effective and peaceful, non-destructive little way of answering to the forces of tyranny right here and now; in the meantime, short of resorting to violence; until a larger and real solution could be found, an eventual big solution that would not threaten the actual physical survival of entire tribes or nations or religions or ideological groups and thereby all of humanity. The author’s quotations from Castaneda had been meant to suggest strongly that Bill Blackburn, when he had – without violence – drastically shocked and discombobulated and weakened tyrannical Fred Waring during the WBAL telethon described in the tale, Mrs. Nixon’s Legs, had drawn on some kind of access to such a fund of knowledge. (The young Dr. already knew about the Huron tribe's 'psychological finesse' from talking with Bruce Trigger during the summer of 1974; but he confirmed it further when he read Castaneda's The Fire from Within in 1984.)

And (4) the quotes from Joey’s young guru, as added on top of such an already very complex and foreign-looking collage mix of elements, had been meant to help a reader comprehend that the author, mj lorenzo, had found a way of peacefully and calmly experiencing all of these various levels of understanding AT ONCE, right during his third interview with the Blackburns. Not only had he seen humanity’s predicament during the interview and seen a possible practical way of saving the human race from imminent self-destruction and virtual self-extinction; but also he had enjoyed, while hearing Bill’s story, the experience of rising above and beyond all of the conflict and all of the psychological tension that the conflict had triggered in him; and he had done so by employing the guru’s approach to discovering inner peace, the guru’s carefully taught meditation.

And when you added all of these collaged factors together, understanding each of the contributing components and remembering that the real and ultimate overall purpose of the chapter (and other chapters equally complex and multi-layered) was far more than to entertain with a good love story: then you accepted the tricky collage technique, endorsed it, and relaxed into it, said the pundits. You enjoyed the reading as much as a priest of Quetzalcóyatl might have enjoyed climbing the many, many steep, high and otherwise utterly exasperating and exhausting steps of a Toltec pyramid, instead of resenting those steps; instead of resenting each quote as a ‘rude jolt out of Mr. Blackburn’s story’, as a famous complaining letter to Reader’s Digest had once described the Dr.’s unusual approach to literary technique, in his popular book, Exactly How Mrs. Nixon’s Legs Saved the White House Christmas Concert.       

“Then, right after I told Fred we were getting married,” Bill said, “I got him on that BAL thing with Bob Hope....  The Special.”

“Right,” said mj. A big pile of star celebrities had done an all-day TV telethon to raise money for the Wilkes-Barre flood victims.³

“W B A L,” said Bill, “in –...”

“BAL-timore,” mj remembered. He had paid attention to past storytelling, just like a good tenderfoot Huron brave was supposed to pay attention, as his answer was meant to show.

“Now, this is where it started, the bullshit 'cause I'm marryin' Betty Ann....  But this is also when I got him back. One time!”

“I remember!” said mj. “I love it!” He groaned, recalling Fred’s downfall. ”But, was it really the only time you got him?”

“Yes,” said Bill. And then, in Chief Joseph style, sage old-man chief, with fitting storyteller pathos, he added: “And it made up for all the others.” He swept the room with his left arm on ‘all’, signifying ‘all’ of the times Fred Waring had stepped so deftly and deliberately on Bill’s manly ego and pride, and Bill had not ‘gotten Fred back’.

Bill had gotten revenge on Fred for spoiling his life-living fun, in other words; FINALLY; in much the same way Bill’s Huron ancestors had gotten revenge on the French Catholic Jesuit priests who had spoiled their life-living fun. (The extermination of the Huron tribe by pandemic and well-planned Iroquois attack with superior firepower, the Huron blamed on the Jesuits; whom they eventually came to see as powerful sorcerers.). Except that: the Huron revenge on the Jesuits had been psychological AND physical. Not only had the Huron tortured endlessly the two famous Jesuit priests that they blamed for the death of their tribe; they had also slowly and protractedly killed them as part of a sacred sacrificial community ritual event, deliberately, via a complexly pre-planned event of multi-layered meaning, not in the least by accident. Whereas, Bill’s ‘revenge’ had been purely last-second, never pre-planned or pre-meditated. And it had been purely psychological: Bill Blackburn never advocated physical violence in everyday human relationships or gave in to any temptation he felt from time to time to ‘punch’ Fred Waring or Clyde Sechler or anyone else ‘in the nose’. His revenge was purely psychological; and it was intuitively spur-of-the-moment.

Don Juan explained that the interplay of all the five attributes of [psychological] warriorship is done only by seers who are also impeccable [psychological] warriors and have mastery over will.  Such an interplay is a supreme maneuver that cannot be performed on the daily human stage.⁴

BUT, mj worried: had Bill’s purely psychological revenge in this case really ‘made up’ for what Fred had put Bill through psychologically and physically? Fred Waring had almost managed to keep Bill from marrying the woman he had sworn to marry, a form of tyranny that had definite and very serious physical meaning. What WAS a ‘proper’ amount of revenge for that???

Bill rolled on without reflecting, though; because, whether revenge had been sufficient or not, was not the subject.

Bill Blackburn had not been seeking revenge, necessarily, in all truth, at the moment when revenge was meted out. It was more accurate to say that the universe of nature, including especially human nature, had dished out revenge to Fred that day at the telethon; and Bill had merely been at the right place at the right time and with the right attitude, for helping to nurture and mother MOTHER NATURE along a little. And so, Bill’s New Age Religion gospel story proceeded with an ordinary tone of storytelling, not with a dramatic or vengeful tone at all.⁵

“I got Fred a spot on this Telethon, right after I told him we were gettin' married; and the next thing I understood, he's gonna take some of the Shawnee Summer Workshop kids,⁶ because the Pennsylvanians were disbanded for the summer. So: I decided to go down there to Baltimore with them; and I let them know that. And Clyde Sechler and I were at war; so was Fred; Fred wouldn't talk with Clyde; but he knew Clyde and I were at war.”

And inside mj lorenzo's head the glee club could be heard humming very softly and meditatively:

Mmmmmmmmmm-...

“So: Fred never asked me to fly down with him. He was chartering a plane to go to Baltimore. I didn't think anything about it. So I got on the bus. I didn't expect him to invite me on the plane. I got on the bus and here's all these kids. I said, ‘Where's Clyde’?

“They said, ‘Oh, he's flying down with Mister Waring’.

“Well, there was something wrong with this, I knew it right away. I figured, 'Oh, screw it'!

A tenor sang longingly, almost plaintively, while behind him the glee club hummed in harmony:

-mmmm-

Theeee hours I spent with theeeee, -mmm-...

“So off we go on the bus all the way down to Baltimore to rehearse, and we got to Baltimore.”

-mmmmm- deeear heaaaaahrt, -mmmmm-

Fred’s ‘girls’ did a high sweet obligato, warbling in harmony:

M.mm.mm.mm.mm.mm.m....

“I got this real big room for the group because they're kids; and if they were mingling with the big stars it wouldn't be good.

“I went upstairs. They gave me this little circle thing with a red cross in the center, because this Telethon was put together for the Red Cross to raise funds to help those people, the flood victims.

“And they weren't too excited about Fred Waring being there, when I was lining up the deal for him; despite the fact he's from Wilkes-Barre, practically.”

Bill had actually begun that day, in other words, trying to help his outdated boss in every way that he could think to help him; so remote had he been from thinking about revenge as yet; just as his ancestors had really tried hard to get along with the white man at first, only to be done in by white men in the end, as they came to see it eventually (once the few who were left after the disaster learned that the whole tribe and its complex and incredibly beautiful way of life had been wiped out overnight from the face of history). 

On the night of 16 March the Iroquois reconnoitred Taenhatentaron, which, like Teanaostaiae, was protected on three sides by ravines....  [Of] ...the 400 people who remained in Taenhatentaron, only three [Huron] men are reported to have escaped....⁷

“So I found this WBAL badge laying there, which was a plastic –. Says, ‘Official W B A L’.  These other little Red Cross badges were given to all the stars, but they only allowed for so much recognition and so much place. And I always operate: the more weapons you got, the better you are.”

Bill Blackburn, in other words, had been looking for every weapon and every tricky gimmick he could find in order to help his famous celebrity boss. This was the way he helped every boss on every day of the working week, year in and year out. It was his normal lifelong M.O., to perform in that way, for any boss. But his techniques for helping a boss were uniquely his own, of course. They were devastatingly clever and surprising to most U.S. Americans, because they were derived from schools of life philosophy unknown to most U.S. Americans. They came mainly from a school of ‘psychological finesse’ that his Huron tribe had practiced; but also from homespun tricks he had picked up watching his Irish-Protestant Blackburn grandfather work as an all-around ‘man’ for ‘old man Harriman’ in Orange County, New York;⁸ plus from tricks he had collected studying ancient Chinese psychological warfare while in the Air Force in Korea. Few people in the world were as well equipped with tricks of ‘psychological finesse’ as Bill Blackburn.

“So I went over to this woman who was stage manager and I said, ‘Where do I go get my name on this’?

Mj lorenzo recalled it all approvingly, and nodded. But the baby cried, reminding him of Dlune instead, and of Dlune’s wish to hear ONLY the wedding story, a wish which, for some reason, he had forgotten once again.

The glee club hummed meditatively and a bit less softly:

Mmmmmmmmmm-...

“So she said, ‘Oh!  Oh, I got that over here’. So she says, ‘How do you spell your last name’? So she put it on and now I'm walkin' around with this badge. Now I've got authority all over the place 'cause I'm WBAL, and very few of these badges are around, only the director of the TV show and people like this. And I put it on and was sittin' there.”

Bill pantomimed a kind of Charlie Chaplin who spied a fresh daisy lying in the gutter, stooped over like a ballet dancer, picked it up lovingly, brushed it off gently, festooned it en lapel, admired it and spiffed it up, all with devoted facial expression, and finally bore it with proud chest.

Dlune laughed. And Bill deserved it, after all. But Betty Ann did not laugh merely. She raved. She was much more gleefully entertained by her husband than usual. “Oh, Bee-ill, that was beautiful!” she went on, and she was an expert stage entertainer of multiple talent, from Bach fugues to Twin City kitsch, as no one will ever deny; so she had to know what was a beautiful clown performance and what was not.⁹

And who could say how ugly the world might have been, had the Creator wanted it ugly? That was the kind of thing Joey’s guru liked to ponder on tapes. The roses could have stunk like skunks maybe. But no, they were sweet and gracious in their smell, and very beautiful to look at too.¹⁰

A tenor sang lovingly, con affetto, while the glee club hummed harmony softly:

-mmmm-

Aahre as a string of peeeehrls -mmm-...

“Have you heard this story?” mj asked Dlune, “the story when Bill was with Pat Nixon in Baltimore?”

“I don't think so. Is it the wedding?”

“No,” said Bill. “No!  It's building to it.”

Dlune acted indignant. “Bill!!” – and it was mainly just to harass the number one alpha male in the neighborhood, Bill Blackburn, since her husband had just consulted her and lent her some power.

And mj backed her. “Yes, Bill, you said –...”

“Really,” Betty Ann agreed, absolutely loving a gang-up on the Big Chief of the Ranchito as often as possible, even when just a mock gang-up. “See what he does?”

-mmmmm- tooo -mmm- meeeeeeeeee. -mmmmm-

Fred’s girls hummed a sweet high warbling obligato in beautiful harmony:

M.mm.mm.mm.mm.mm.m....

“Well this is one of the all-time classics,” Bill said calmly.

And besides, weddings, one had to admit, whether real or movie, and whether Dlune liked it or not, were always supposed to take place at the end of a good and complete story, only after the real meat of the story was over and put away.

“And it ties right in,” he said, “with what we were talkin' about. This was right after we told Fred, ‘We're going to get married’. And you've got to remember, Fred and I never had a nasty word to each other, period, before this. The Dinah Shore stories and all came after.¹¹  We had little barbs, y'know, but he had never pulled any crap on me. You could feel the tension all over the place, now that she and I are getting married.”

Still before dawn, part of the Iroquois force set out to attack the fortified village of St. Louis....¹²

“It goes in here,” said Bill. “Then comes the wedding.” He looked carefully at Dlune and tried to be playful with her: “I've never lied t'yuh.”

“Just now, Bill,” she said, very much as playfully. “And when you play Liar's Dice.” But she ended up dead serious. “Mj promised we would talk about the wedding tonight.” She tried to play down her disappointment, impatience and frustration, over the way the two men had forgotten her wish; but she could not hide it entirely.

Betty Ann feigned sympathy in the form of clownish feminine exasperation. All men everywhere were slobs morally, as her sigh and expression proclaimed, always breaking their word, always doing whatever they wanted; though she was cute and contained about it. “W'l c'mon, Dlune. Let's go get some wine!”

Mj looked rattled. “We can call you when we get to Mrs. Nixon's legs,” he shouted to the adjacent kitchen.

“Oh, you have to hear that!” Betty Ann said to her slightly disgruntled guest.

“Call,” said Dlune. “We'll see.” The payoff from righteous indignation could be immense sometimes. Control and stature could be won back from tiresomely authoritarian men. And maybe even a little limelight for once.

Eighty warriors remained to fight the Iroquois and with them stayed Father Jean de Brebeuf...¹³

Bill Blackburn was not befuddled at all, however. He knew who was in charge. “SO....” He sighed loudly. “There were four actual dressing rooms backstage. There were two monstrous things, two little ones. And I went up to the stage manager. I said, ‘Where's Mister Waring's dressing room’?

And she says, ‘Oh, well, we're using the communal dressing room. Did you see how we set it up’?

“And they had –. When I tell you they had maybe fifty on each wall in one big super dressing room, fifty mirrors with lights for makeup –.

And they had four top-flight make-up men from Hollywood there.”

-mmmmmmmm-

I caahount them oh-ver, -mmmmmmm-...

“Now the only dressing room I saw was this empty dressing room next to Bob Hope's. So I went back to the stage manager and I said, ‘Listen, Mr. Waring's seventy two’, and everything, ‘and y'know he's tired, he's been goin' through these rehearsals; and they're much different than the younger stars’.

The ‘older ones’, in other words, like this older one, above all, and for example, this Elderly High Priest of the People’s Music, as he was, deserved great reverence; and he had to be set apart and protected from the teeming masses, especially in a country as important as universal history’s most important country, U.S. America. And like any ordinary guy with old-world values, Bill Blackburn had always seen himself as his boss’s ‘man’, the all-around male human underling responsible for looking out for the welfare of his chief when no one else did, just as his father’s father had worked for ‘old man Harriman’, and just as any young Huron brave always deferred and catered to a tribal ‘head man’ in any way he possibly could. No other employee of Fred’s had any idea how to operate in such a fashion.

“I said, ‘Do you have a dressing room there? And after all, he's the musical Howard Hughes, he's so loaded. I'd like to get that dressing room’.

Bill portrayed the stage manager as frantic, a little angry at someone or something: “She whispered, ‘Well, you'd do me a favor if you'd take it! I've been worried about that dressing room all day’!

“T-huh’! mj reacted. Everything had happened so perfectly that day, it seemed to him, that people who didn’t know Bill Blackburn might have thought he had made up such a story.

-mmmmm- eeh-v'reey wuuhonne ah-paaaaaaahrt,

-mmmmmmm..

“But she's only the stage manager, not the producer or anybody, y'see.  So I went down and got a piece of tape, the same that Bob Hope has on his door, and I put 'Fred Waring' on the tape and put it up on the door.” Bill pantomimed Fred Waring’s man doing an admirable, clever thing for his chief. “I'm thinkin', ‘Holychriss thass beautiful’!"

It was a beautiful story and a beautiful thing to retell in this way. Joey’s guru, however, thought the Creator could have done a less bang-up job making the world we lived in, had he wanted. For example, he could have made just a simple white flower and let it go at that. But, instead, he had decided to make gardenias and he had given them that incredible, ‘immaculate’ smell which gardenias generated, and that beauty which gardenias all over the world radiated. And for whom had he done such a thing? he liked to ask. For His children. For His creation.¹⁴

“Now I went downstairs. They've got this big area where they were preparing food and dinner. They had this big bowl of fruit they were cuttin' for fruit cocktail, right? I said, ‘I'd like an iced... bowl sent up to Mister Waring's dressing room filled with that fruit, about the time he arrives’."

Mj blurted a laugh suddenly, because an average man receiving so much kindness might actually die. Too much kindness could kill a man sometimes, and that might become Bill’s revenge.

“I knew exactly what I was doin',” Bill said in answer to the laugh. “It bugged me that they gave me a hard time for that man to be there, it really did.  I was coming to that man's defense in my own way. And when stars see this, when they're around, they figure, ‘Well, Fred Waring's bigger than me’.  They're very impressive, impressionistic, kind of people...”

Impressionable. Easily impressed by external material cues suggesting a man’s relative star importance and wealth and power, as the interviewer understood.

“So up goes a bowl of fruit. And Fred arrives –.” Bill paused. He was preparing mentally for the great Music Man’s entrance.

Fred’s quadri-harmonied glee club sang mezzoforte and ever so sweetly:

Mmmaaahy roooooh-sah-reeeeeeeeeeeey!...   (‘My rosary!)¹⁵

“I mean, it was like this.” Bill put his arms in a circle. And it was inside of another bowl that was iced and it was cut glass 'n all this stuff.”

He sighed wearily. “So I go upstairs, and here comes Fred, and I said, ‘Mister Waring, uh... –.  Where's your suit’?

“And he was snippy.

“I said, ‘I'll show you your dressing room’. Bill was polite and respectful toward the great high priest of American music; just as he had always been right from the first day he had ever worked for the man. Always. Nothing less than this was expected from a clever man who knew the rules that the tribe had established, and knew what was expected of him behaviorally and morally.

“So I took him down to the dressing room. He looks around and he goes –.

“I said, ‘There's a bowl of fruit there for you while you're resting and waiting. Refresh yourself’.

"’When's-the-god-damn-rehearsal!’?”

Petulant as a sour U.S. teen, Fred Waring could have been said to be, all too often.

When's-the-God-Damn-Rehearsal?

Bill paused again.

“I said, ‘Well, I'll go out and look at the schedule and come back and let you know’.

“I gladly did everything he asked of me. I was joyful and strong. And I didn't give a fig about my pride or my fear. I was there as an impeccable warrior. To tune the spirit when someone is trampling on you is called control.”¹⁶

“So I went out and looked at the schedule, and I went back and I told him. He says, ‘Ok’. He says, ‘I'm gonna change’.

“So he pulled his door, and I left. I went down the hall. He came out and he said, ‘What's that big room’?

“I said, ‘That's where everybody else is dressing’.

"’How many dressing rooms are there’?

“I said, ‘Just the two you and Bob Hope have, and these others’."

Bill’s little pauses added suspense, mj noted. They were part of his storytelling design. He paused for a second, then said:

"’God damn it Bill.  Now you embarrass me! I don't want that goddam dressing room, it's gonna be embarrassing. Those other people think I commandeered it. You're makin' me look like an ass’.

“And he went off into a tirade.”

The glee club softened and sang so sweetly it seemed humanly impossible:

Mmaaahy rooooooooh-sah-reeeeeeeeey!...    (‘My rosary!’)

And the first tenors were highlighted on the 'ooh'.

“I said, ‘Well we can change it back’.

“‘Well, I've got my suit in there now’, bla bla bla bla and went roaring off into the blue.

“I was livid.”

Bill shouted to Betty Ann, who was still in the kitchen: “I even called you from there, didn't I?” He waited for her to yell back. “I called you from Baltimore!”

Betty Ann was right there for her man. An invisible healing angel comforted him from the wings: “Yes, you did, Bee-ill!” It was Betty Ann, of course.

And the guru called any and all distraction from ultimate truth: ‘mind’. He said that ‘mind’ was what made people pursue so many senseless things, all the time thinking they were things that they wanted from life, when in fact those things, all of them, were only a great dissatisfaction. And he said that at some point people just had to stop. They had to stop right in the middle of the journey and ask, “What on earth is happening really? What is this journey of life all about really?"¹⁷

“I was so mad I went out to a pay phone. He was after me 'cause I'm marryin' Betty Ann!

“But y'know what this was? This was a master at work, me gettin' him that dressing room, and getting myself this badge. He had this little round badge, right? I could go places he couldn't go. But it was more important for me to go.”

“It's one master,” said mj, “against the other.” He laughed.

“No –,” Bill objected. “But I was workin' for him. I mean truly working for him, I don't mean bein' paid by him, I mean workin' for his good.”

“Oh,” said mj. “I see.” Bill had not been trying to kill the man with kindness. There had been no competition between the two in Bill’s mind: not yet anyway. He had always been working sincerely for the man’s greatest benefit, all those years; because Bill revered himself as sacred, and his job, and his role helping a ‘great man’. Helping a tribal leader, in tribal thinking, was a great and sacred – even religious – role, an important social responsibility and a revered function, a huge status source for an ordinary, earthy high school grad, like Bill.

Why was the world here? the guru liked to ask. People came into the world and didn’t even know why it was here or why they were here. Why was there a universe? Why was there something that people called ‘Lord’? Who was that? And who was the Creator of it all? And what on earth was the thing inside us that made us feel like we wanted to, or had to, ‘become one’ with it all? What was that longing all about, that devout longing to ‘merge’ with it all? What was that?¹⁸

”So I went out there,” Bill said, “and Clyde Sechler was out there talkin' to the band.

And he was sayin', ‘Well, the old sonofabitch doesn't know what he's doin' first place, let us tell you that’! This was just after Fred had said these things to me. And Clyde was putting him down unmercifully to the band, which is the worst thing that can happen.

“I said, ‘Gentlemen, you just heard a frustrated Fred Waring talk. This man is a nothing, a real nothing’.

“What band?” mj asked, thinking Bill was off track.

“They had a house band there, y'know, top musicians flown in from New York. Fred had brought a chorus of his own, but he had to use the house orchestra. And Clyde is gettin' ready to go over this music with the house orchestra and is tellin' 'em, ‘Well, y'know, Fred'll probably do this, but don't worry about it. He doesn't know what he's doing’.

“And I laid into him right in front of that band. I tore him –. I said, ‘The gentleman's name is Waring. He's the number one choral director in the world. This man's name is Sechler. He is the number one nothing in the world’.”

Mj giggled.

“This is true. I mean, I tore Clyde Sechler right down the –. I said, ‘He's so frustrated because Fred tears him apart. Wait till you see Fred and Clyde together. You'll see Fred tear him apart. But the reason for it is, he can't stand a man that can't stand himself. And Clyde can't stand himself because he's a nothing’.

“So I walked o –. I was takin' off on Clyde 'cause I was pissed, I think, but... it just pissed me off that this was the man that flew down with him. Fred's coddling the guy and he's puttin' Fred down. Fightin' everything I'm doing to build Fred up in the public's eye, while I get –!”

‘Crapped on’, as mj understood, by his boss, who was not only the number one choral director in the world (admired and befriended for that reason by Toscanini and Ormandy), but even the maker of two USA presidents, President Dwight David Eisenhower, the general who Americans felt won the Second World War, and Richard Milhouse Nixon.

“So,” Bill sighed, “Fred came out to do the rehearsal. I didn't say anything to 'im. I was on the stage. I was walkin' around.” He sighed. “'Cause I had this badge on,” he laughed at himself loudly, “walkin' all over the place with my clipboard, and everybody's askin' me questions!!”

[The Jesuit priests] ...Brebeuf and Lalemant had been urged to escape at the first alarm, but had stayed behind to baptize those who wished it and to give absolution to the Christians, who appear to have made up the larger part of the defenders.¹⁹

“And Fred was told he had ten minutes to rehearse with the orchestra. Well Fred went into one of these long things. Fifteen minutes went by, and the guy came up and said, ‘Jesus Christ, Bill, we're way behind, we've got a backlog of stars that've gotta rehearse’.

“I said, ‘Give 'im a minute or two’.

“Seventeen eighteen minutes went by and finally, the director went over to him and said, ‘Mister Waring, you were told you had ten minutes. I can't do anything about it’.

“And Fred turned around and said, ‘It's your stage, Big Man’.” Hatefully; as Bill portrayed it. “To me!”

“I didn't say a word, a word. I hadn't –. And off he goes. I had told him, ‘Ten minutes’. It was this kind of crap goin' on all day.”

Okay, the guru would say. Hurrah and great. It’s a great big wonderful world, but what about me? What about the true me?²⁰

The Green Room

“SO,” said Bill: “there was this big room called the Green Room, which is where everybody sits, waiting to go on the show. They had three or four TV sets so people could watch and see who's on, watch the show, these big stars. They had one comfortable chair with these, y'know, the old –, whuddya call these: 'wings'? Wings?”

“Eagle chairs,” mj tried.

“Yes, they're –.”

“Isn't that what they call 'em?” mj tried to help. “’Eagle back’? Something like that.”²¹

“I don't know. I walked into this room, and Fred is in there. He's got all these kids from his Shawnee summer workshop over in the corner.

“And Mrs. Nixon showed up.

And all these stars are in there. And somehow Fred got a hold of her and took her over to introduce her to the kids –.”

“Dlun’!” mj yelled to the kitchen. “Mrs. Nixon!”

The second verse started with the 'girls' heavy on vibrato:

Mm.m.mm.m.mm.m.mm.m...

“And I happened to be over there,” said Bill, steamrolling ahead on the most important story of the night, “and he brought her up and he introduced her to every kid in the group, Clyde Sechler, Pete Keefert, gave 'em big titles, y'know, all the titles: ‘This is my Assistant Choral Director. This is this’.

“I'm standing right there and he comes l-leap’.” A huge parabola of Bill’s arm showed the leap. “He jumped right over me and went to somebody else.”

“M-ptuh!” mj observed, just as the ladies returned, bearing drinks.

Bill stopped to sip a new martini and resumed. “So Mrs. Nixon said,...”

Mrs. Nixon Said

"’And who's this gentleman, with the lovely grey hair’?”

The ladies found their seats respectfully.

Bill waited and then added a tiny additional extra pause, once they gave him their attention. “He says, ‘Oh, uh... he's Bill Blackburn uh... w'l uh... he writes a little for me’. Or somethin' like that.

“Well, at this point that old man just about had it. I almost decked 'im. That was it.”

Mj swallowed a laugh and choked on the wine.

Fred’s glee club voices sounded as rich and mature as they ever got. They produced the roundest, most heartful and heavenly four-part a cappella²² any lover of fine choral music could imagine:

Each hour a peeharl!...

There was a Grand Pause silence, and you could hear the equally perfect echo:

-earl!...

“I was boiled,” Bill said, “’cause I had seen him do this to other people over the years. He'd never even attempted to do this to me before this. And I was thinkin', ‘It's all over this Betty Ann thing. That does it. That –‘ Oh, I was boilin'.”

As soon as Brebeuf and Lalemant were captured, they were stripped and some of their fingernails were torn out....²³

“So I thought, ‘Screw'im. I'm not protecting him or anything. I'm waitin' for the bus to go back, and that's it’!

We know better now. We know that nothing can temper the spirit of a warrior as much as the challenge of dealing with impossible people in positions of power.²⁴

“So, I went outside and I don't know where all the stars an' everybody went.” Bill looked perplexed and a little pained. “I think they were runnin' 'round  tryin' to get close to Mrs. Nixon. 'Cause the whole room emptied out when she left.

“So there was this one big 'Eagle Back' or whateveryacallit chair, and I sat down in it and I took out a cigarette and I was smokin' a cigarette, all by myself in this big Green Room, just thinkin' about all this, y'know.

 [don Juan] ...said that he became convinced he could defeat... [his ‘petty tyrant’]... using only the single realization that petty tyrants take themselves with deadly seriousness while warriors do not.²⁵

“And there was a back door to the Green Room, which I didn't know that it was useable. It looked like it might be a closet or something. The back door opened up and these two Daaa-duh-Daa-Daa Dragnet guys walked in,” Bill laughed, “'n looked around and checked the room out.” He laughed the words: “‘What the hell's this? Is it a raid, or what’?

“And in walks Mrs. Nixon. And this lackey, jumpin' at her every wish, runs over and grabs one of these folding bridge chairs. The room was filled with 'em. He set it out for her. And I sat there really stunned by it, y'know.

“And as she sat down I said, ‘Mrs. Nixon, here’.

Mrs. Nixon, Here

“I said, ‘My God, you must be really tired. Take this, it's the only comfortable chair in the place’."

Each pearl a praaaaayer! sang the glee club richly; and a high tenor held a very high hum: Nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn...

Bill got louder. “I didn't think anything about all this. I really thought nothing about it. When I stood up I just –. It's a normal thing to do, right?

“'N this woman –, y'know, I just felt, ‘Jesus, these people must drive her crazy’. Y'know, I'd hate, I'd hate –.... I'd hate to be in her position.

“I stood up and I gave her the chair.

“And she said, ‘Well, thank you very much’.” Bill portrayed her with utmost sincerity. “She said: ‘You're the first gentleman I've met in here today’!”

Mj tittered. He was in seventh heaven.

[don Juan] ...added that his benefactor's strategy called for a systematic harassment of the man by taking cover with a higher order, just as the seers of the new cycle had done during the Conquest by shielding themselves with the Catholic church.²⁶

Bill laughed too, and he used a softer tone. “I had that famous blue-knit double-knit denim suit on.

“And she said, ‘Are you in a rush’?

“And I said, ‘Well no, I don't really have anything to do’.”

He sounded a little down in the mouth, however.

“'Nshe said, ‘Well, why don't you sit down. Don't let me chase you off. I chase you out of your chair. You seem so comfortable. S'down. You don't hafta leave’.

“I said, ‘Well I don't wanna impose upon you. I know how busy you are and everything’.

“She said, ‘No, please. Please sit down’.

“So I sat down next to 'er, in one of these folding chairs. I set there an' I wasn't gonna say anything. I really –.

“She: ‘Didn't I meet you with uh, Mister Waring’?

“Which shows she's very perceptive, y'know.

“I said, ‘Yes’.

“And she said, ‘You're the writer’.”

Bill sounded bugged: “And I said, ‘I'm not “the writer”’. And I told her what I did. I said –. I laid it out. I was really bugged. I said, ‘I do this...; I write the program up for him every year’s road show; I'm his Public Relations Director; I got ‘im spots in shows; like this one I got for him; I'm his Record Producer’....  I said, ‘He's –, he's mad. I don't –‘.  I said, ‘I don't know what he's mad about, but he's actin' like an idiot’.

“And she says, ‘Well, I know that feeling’.” It sounded sympathetic, the way Bill presented it. “’Mister Nixon when he gets... angered, sometimes takes it out on me."

“Tkuh!” went Betty Ann.

And everybody in the world, said the guru, every single human being who existed was here for one purpose only. Because only one purpose existed for life, and every single time during the history of the universe that Vishnu had incarnated in the flesh and bones of a spiritual master, that master had said the same exact thing about the purpose of life; and it wasn’t about theories, or slogans, or words. It was about an experience, rather, a knowing. It wasn’t about ‘believing’ or ‘having faith’. It was the experience of a knowing, and the experience of that knowing could take you on and on and on.²⁷

“She said,” Bill continued: "’That just means that they –, that you're the people they care for’, and all this stuff. I don't know. Then she said, ‘Y'know, I wanted to tell you that suit... is a beautiful suit’, she says. ‘It's so homey it reminds me of –....’" Bill sipped his drink. "’It's down-to-earth. It reminds me of the farm’. She says, ‘Have you ever been on a farm’?

“I says, ‘Yeh, I was raised on one’.

"’Oh, really? What kind of farm’?

“We're talkin' like this, right?” Bill looked at mj and sighed.

Listen! the guru would say, raising his voice on tape: All of humanity has to stop dead in its tracks and look at it properly: what is the real purpose of every single human being’s life?

“And I told her,” Bill sighed loudly and said with indifference, “‘Y'know, we had cattle and chickens’.

“And she says, ‘Oh, that's it, that –. I wish we did." She sounded excited. “She says, ‘All we had was... fields and fields and fields of wheat. That's all we ever had’.

“So I said, uh –. She asked me about different things about animals 'n stuff. We were talkin' all about farms 'n stuff.

“And suddenly,” Bill lowered his voice and said with suspense, “this man came over and said,” and Bill whispered now: "’Mrs. Nixon, I'm awfully sorry but people are waiting to see you. There's a reception line waiting’.

“And I'm sitting –, just, y'know, like this chair's much bigger so it looks like I'm sitting a little bit behind her, y'know. And he pointed out the line, and she got this funny look on her face as if to say –.... ‘What a drag’.

Mm.m.mm.m.mm.m.mm.m... hummed Fred’s ‘girls’ in two parts, melody and harmony.

“Steve Allen and his wife were first in line. There was a whole line of stars. David Jantzen, Jimmie Stewart, ALL lined up to talk to Mrs. Nixon. This was the official reception line or somethin'. I don't know what the hell was goin' on. Maybe that's why the room was empty. Maybe I wasn't supposed to be in there. I'll never know till the –....”

To still a heaaaaahrt!...  went the glee club.

“So, I said, "Well, these people –." Because it was proper and polite to beg the First Lady’s leave, when giving her back her First Lady space. It wasn’t taught in grade school or at home. You had to know the rule if you had an ounce of half-decent breeding. And Bill Blackburn always tried to do the proper and polite thing with every person he met; big shot or small fry, didn’t matter.

“She said, ‘No no no, no please’.” It was genuine. “’You stay right there’, she said. ‘You don't have to rush’, she said.” And Bill did a Mrs. Nixon saying out of the side of her mouth: "’These sort of things you've gotta do when you're First Lady’."

“Tuhhhh!” Mj lorenzo was tickled to death almost.

“REALLY,” Bill raised his voice. “Her attitude was like, ‘Hang it up, kid’! Tngggghhhheah!”

Finally Bill had showed some fitting reaction to his blockbuster story. It was a cheer of sorts.

Mj chuckled in his throat. He was just as amazed and awed as the first time he had heard the tale in ’73, on one of their Spring Lake fishing jaunts.

And the guru too, like Bill Blackburn, had some startlingly effective ways of making a point, so as to teach you ZAP! what he was getting at. Both could paint incredibly elaborate scenarios sometimes while telling a story, but their goals were opposite, of course. Though they both told stories so as to teach others how to live a better quality life, Bill taught practical techniques for surviving and thriving in a crazy, hard-knock world; while the guru taught a simple, practical method of going beyond the crazy, hard-knock world, to a place of psychological detachment and inner peace. Bill stayed in the world, illustrating adversity and how one person might overcome it and another might not. And the guru would describe really cockamamie situations in history too, famous situations that had put everyone during that epoch on pins and needles; but instead of showing how the situations resolved, he would wait until he had gotten his audience about as entertained and delighted and enthralled with some crazy ass situation as he could possibly get them, and then suddenly he would slip into a parallel universe where none of it mattered any more. He’d yank his audience out of crazy everyday reality into the universe he was teaching, the universe where detachment and inner peace were the constant norm regardless of crazy circumstances.     

“So up comes Steve Allen and his wife,” Bill said, “uh what's her name....”

“Jayne Meadows,” mj said.

“Yeh. Up she comes. They walk up... an' Steve is, I mean really... bowing his head.

"I think what Mrs. Nixon liked when I jumped up and offered her the chair: it almost put us on an equal level. I was not bowing to her by any means. I was just treating her like a lady, that's all. I wasn't overly impressed that here's Mrs. Nixon... at that moment. I was impressed I was sitting by her, and we were chatting. And what I really was impressed with, was the fact that this lady was talking down-to-earth and she wasn't phony. I always thought of her as a phony.”

The guru might use a story like Bill’s, for example, to show that life in the world never changed, essentially. He might tell about a tyrant who had been a Roman emperor, and then about a tyrant currently described in the media, and observe the fact that while the trappings of ‘mind’ or crazy life and crazy thinking in this crazy world might have changed a little bit over the centuries, for instance in the fact that ancient Romans had drunk wine whereas today we drink martinis, the purpose of life was identical then and now, and that was to go beyond the crazy physical world to a place of inner peace.    

“I said, ‘What do you go through? I betcha sometimes you wish you were back on the farm’.

“She says, ‘You don't know’. She said, ‘I was very excited when my husband became President. But there's never a –, spare moment’!

“She said,” and Bill whispered it loudly: ‘I've got varicose veins since I became –...’"

Mj tittered.

"’...First Lady’."

I’ve Got Varicose Veins Since I Became First Lady

“And she leans over and she's showin' me this.” Bill was louder now.

And his audience was laughing.

Mj was breathless. He was shocked and mesmerized, just as much as he had been when he had heard it the first time.

Bill was loud: “And I'm looking down at the President's wife's legs! She had a varicose vein. She –, she was –.” Bill demonstrated how she had shown him the varicose vein running down her bended leg. “Now this is typical of a woman.”

But poor mj could hardly believe the story, typical or not, even now after two years of being familiar with it. He shook his head as if to say, 'This is not be-LEEV-able’!

Bill sighed loudly: “So anyway –.”

In ab-sence wruuuhng!...   went the glee club.

Betty Ann was affected too, but in a different way. “I could just kick myself now that I didn't do that concert,” she said, “'cause I would've loved to've done it, just to've –...”

“Met Jimmy Stewart,” Bill finished.

She nodded: “...– met Jimmy Stewart. I could just kick myself now for not doin' that.”

“Well, if Fred had invited you that day,” Bill said, “this wouldn't have happened.”

“But then we wouldn't have had this story!” mj protested.

Betty Ann laughed at him like a gleeful child. She rarely laughed so freely. “Yeh, we wouldn't have this wonderful story! This was more fun!” She was so delighted, she must have gotten over feeling put down for being a milktoast.

“Right!” said the one who had wanted to publish the fabulous story, mj lorenzo, at no matter whose expense.

And Betty Ann said to Bill, while glancing also at mj, “You wouldn't have gotten to look at Pat's varicose veins, and –.”

And so, Joey’s guru, if he had told a story like Bill’s, would have used it to show how people were never satisfied. They wanted more than they already had, they wanted something better than they had, but they always wanted the wrong things. In ancient Roman times, for instance, with all their riches from wars, they just went on and on and on, getting more and more ridiculous with their desires. First they wanted a little chariot, and then they had to have it carved. Then they had to ride in the chariot and have it chaired. Next it had to be bigger, then more refined. And then there had to be two horses instead of one, four horses instead of two, and finally spikes on the wheels like everybody had seen in the movie, Ben Hur. And as you were listening to the guru tell such a story, just when you were laughing the hardest at yourself and your silly desires and expecting to hear a description of the bloody chariot race from Ben Hur, the guru would walk out of that movie theater and drop you into the movie he was offering instead, a movie of universal love, a life of loving relationship with him. Suddenly you would remember, with his help, that the ancient Romans had been in useless pursuit of trash, just like their modern counterparts were, the U.S. Americans and everybody in the world like them, including little old stupid you.²⁸

Bill ignored his wife’s dig, and the way it implied that he had looked at another woman’s legs so long, and with so much interest, that he still could not shut up in public about those legs, two whole years later: “The funny part is,” he said, “when she walked in that room she had four or five photographers following her, and they were snapping pictures all the while we were talking.”

They Were Snapping Pictures

“At one point –. I don't know what we were talking about, something about the farm. I thought,” Bill whispered: "’Jesus Christ! Do you realize the pictures they've taken of me with the First Lady? Sitting here candidly? And she's reaching over and touching me?"

Bill’s storytelling never taught useless lessons. He taught humility and disciplined self-control, for example; and these were important things to learn. He taught a proper degree of self-respect and a proper degree of respect for others, and ways of behaving to reflect such respect. Societies needed rules and principles to guide them. Arrogance of the dimension that Fred Waring displayed was dangerous in a world whose peace was as fragile as our world’s peace was. Arrogance in high places like Fred’s high place, could wipe mankind off the face of the globe. But when all of that was said and done; when Bill’s lessons were learned and applied, and your world was still full of sickening arrogance, both in you, and in everyone else, you wished for a way of retreating from that unsatisfying world to a different world that was satisfying. And that was what the guru offered: an alternative world, a new world that you found right inside your own self, surprisingly, a world which blood-pressured Bill Blackburn never mentioned, in fact.

“And when I was leaning over to look at her leg,” he said, “the flashbulbs are flyin'. And I thought, ‘Oh, would I love to get this to show it to all my friends, me lookin' up Mrs. Nixon's dress’!"

Betty Ann had not expected such a remark and she laughed with obvious embarrassment. “Ha! Oh Bee-ill! Ha-haaaaaggh!”

“No, mj.”

This thing was not a joke to Bill Blackburn.

“Y'know, she was sitting like this,” he crossed his legs like hers, “and she says, ‘Well look’! And she lifted her dress enough –, her dress comes over the knee when she's –. She lifted it enough to show this varicose vein right here! And I leaned over to look at it.” He leaned over to demonstrate. “'Cause she was –. Never thinking what I was doing, because she's pointing this out and I, I-I have an ability when I get into a conversation with someone and I'm interested, I don't think about anything or anybody around. I didn't know there was another person in that room.²⁹

“Once in a while it pops in your mind,” Bill corrected himself, “and suddenly it dawned on me I'm lookin' at the President's wife's legs! Y'know, leaning over and –!” He demonstrated one last ninety-ninth time for some weird reason, a definite weird reason, in fact, that mj lorenzo finally understood when he read Castaneda’s The Fire From Within in 1984. For, as Castaneda would help him grasp, finally: Pat Nixon’s legs in that magical moment had turned into Bill’s shield and weapon against Fred Waring’s fury.

Don Juan's shield [against the tyranny of his superior, ‘the foreman’, his ‘petty tyrant’] was the lady who got him the job. He kneeled in front of her and called her a saint every time he saw her. He begged her to give him the medallion of her patron saint so he could pray to him for her health and well-being.

"She gave me one," don Juan went on, "and that rattled the foreman to pieces. And when I got the servants to pray at night he nearly had a heart attack."³⁰

“And they're takin' pictures of it,” mj reminded.

“They're takin' pictures!” said Bill.

“Chuh chuh,” mj chuckled.

“They would never give me a picture of that, I betcha. They'd never send that.”

Mj agreed and he said with a half-smile, raising an eyebrow. “They might send you one, though, before you looked at her legs; or after.”

“W'l anyway. To get back to this.” Bill sighed as if he’d been working overtime and was worn out. “We started meetin' –.... And every time she'd meet Steve Allen or somebody she'd say, ‘Did you meet Bill’?

Did you meet Bill?

“Not 'Bill Blackburn', or 'Mister Blackburn': 'Did you meet Bill!’?”

Mj lorenzo was absolutely beyond even delight.

“This is the thing that really knocked me,” Bill laughed too, and –, and –, or, ‘Bill, did you meet Steve’? Y'know? I said,” Bill was mealymouthed, indifferent: ‘How do you do, how are you’. And they're seeing me sitting next to the President's wife.”

The chorus hummed in harmony: Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm-; and a tenor, painfully, sang: I turn each bead (-mmmm-)...

Bill laughed then shifted to a gear that was louder and more intense: “So here's this thing goin' on and... a whole line of people, one after the other comin' up... scraping and bowing as they walk up. I felt like Prince Philip with Queen Elizabeth f'r chrissakes the way we were sittin' there!”

Mj was barely able to contain the enjoyment.

Unto the eeeeeeeeeehnd! (-mmmmmmmm-)... went the tenor.

Bill sat forward and poised dramatically, as if to crash a pair of cymbals. He used the position often when about to heighten the drama: “I look up, and here's Fred Waring.

“Fred Waring...

“...standing about ninth back in line.” Bill breathed like Fred, showing labor and flushed face, portraying Fred as he faced his crucifixion without one smidgen of an iota of surrender. “Boiling, I mean. He wasn't tryin' to hide it a bit. He was livid. The man was ready to explode!”

The tenor, completely unaccompanied, rolled his 'r':

And there a cr-R-R-raaaaauhoss is huuuuhng!...

“He turned on his heel when he realized it was me sittin' there, and out he went; refused to even come up and say 'Hello' to her!”

Oooo-oooo-oooo! went the glee club.

And mj lorenzo went: “Oh ho-ho ho-ho-hoh, hoh!”

Oooo-oooo-oooo! Fred’s chorus girls, echoing, tried to resolve the chord; and the tenor did something even stranger with it:

Llnooooooo-...

“So I sat there with her for awhile longer; 'cause I was loving that moment! I thought, ‘You got your lumps’! And I thought, ‘Thank you, God. You taught that little man a lesson’!"

On entering Taenhatentaron,... [the French Jesuit priests, Brebeuf and Lalemant,] ...were made to walk between rows of Iroquois warriors and were beaten by them. The Iroquois then proceeded to torture them... in the usual manner....³¹

The tenor, trying to sound holy, got some help from a divine obligato:

Ooooooo-ooooooooooo-oooooooo...

“So then,” said Bill, “when I went outside the Green Room after the reception line, after all these people had seen me with Mrs. Nixon and I had this WBAL badge, as the director did, the producer did, people like this, I went outside and Fred Waring was there and I went up and I said, "Uh, how did everything go in rehearsal?"

And years later Dr. Lorenzo would refer to this maneuver of Bill’s as ‘Nail number one’.

"’You know’.” Bill’s Fred Waring was snippy. “You were there’," Fred said.

“We were talkin' like this, and David Jantzen was the first one to walk up to me. Says, ‘Bill, what time am I supposed to go on? Can I get this thing straightened out? Nobody seems to know anything’."

The glee club was forte now, with tenor obligato, sublimely, throughout:

...(-ooooo-) Oh meh-moh-reeees! (-ooooo-)...

“So I said, ‘Helen, Helen...’ and she'd come over. I said, ‘This is Mister Jantzen. This is Helen. She's our –‘."

...(-oo-oo-oo-) That bless and buuuuuhrn! Mmmmm!

(oooo-oo-oo-oooo-oooo)...

Mj was glowing like a high beam headlight.

Bill laughed along with him: "’She's our stage manager’. I said,” politely: “‘Oh, did you meet Fred Waring’?”

‘The second nail’ was what the Dr. called this touché in later years.

Did You Meet Fred Waring?

(as asked of the ‘stage manager’, who had never met Fred Waring)

Bill finally let off a long, straining, ecstatic throaty croak, enjoying a real Mr. Frog Prince moment.

Many Huron were present who in the past had been taken prisoner by the Iroquois and been adopted by them. These Huron played a leading role in torturing the Jesuits, whom they regarded as sorcerers responsible for the ruin of their homeland. Their animosity against Brebeuf was particularly evident in their taunting of him. In addition to the usual torments, the Huron amused themselves by repeatedly pouring boiling water over the priests in mockery of baptism....³²

Bill was thrilled to the marrow with his million-dollar story, finally: “Jimmy Stewart came over.” And the world’s last Huron storyteller gave in to his own uproar finally: “And he talked to me too, just like Fred wasn't even there!!X#$!” Bill almost cried, he laughed so hard: “They were all trying to get themselves coordinated! It was mayhem backstage, total mayhem, and they thought, ‘Well, this is the guy’.” The tone Bill used portrayed great relief on their part whenever they saw him: “’He must be the producer. He knows everything. 'Cause he wouldn't've been sittin' with the President's Lady’!! They didn't go to anybody else. They all came to me. And Fred Waring said, ‘Where did you meet these people’??? Fred’s tone was bewildered in the extreme.

“I said, ‘I told you I met a lot of people’!!"

The ‘third nail’, by Dr. Lorenzo’s calculation.

Mj laughed so hard at that one he looked on the verge of a fit of epilepsy: @$$#@XX@$!!

Don Juan said that timing is the quality that governs the release of all that is held back. Control, discipline, and forbearance are like a dam behind which everything is pooled. Timing is the gate in the dam.³³

And his friend’s laughter pushed an even bigger button this time in Bill: “I really socked it to 'im!  KHA KHA KHA KHA KHA KHA KHA KHA KHA chah, the damn fool didn't see what was going on!”

Mj laughed to beat the band, and even sobbed.

“And he was standing there. He literally, mj –; he was... befuddled by this whole thing. He couldn't handle it. When Jimmy Stewart would say hello to me before he'd say hello to Fred, and he knew Fred. They had been together that afternoon.”

Continuously enraptured, the high unaccompanied tenor went at it:

Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooo-...

“They'd walk up and say, ‘Bill –‘; and I'd say, ‘Did you meet Fred Waring’?

The ‘spear in the side’, as Dr. Lorenzo loved to call that one for the rest of his life, every time he gave a lecture on Mrs. Nixon’s Legs.

Did You Meet Fred Waring?

(as asked of other celebrities who knew him perfectly well)

“Oh, I knew damn well he knew Fred Waring, they were talking, walking down the hall!”

Mj tittered and sobbed with real tears of pandemonium in his eyes. He was headed for distraction.

“Every big star that came over to see me, I said, ‘Oh, Hi’!"

....(-oooooooo-) Oh bar-ren gaaaaaain! (-oooo-)... (Oh barren gain.)

“And they'd ask me a couple questions. I'd settle it for 'em. I knew who to ask. I had called this girl every time. I'd say, ‘Helen? What time does Mister Stewart go on, and where does he enter, stage left, or stage right’?”

Glee club and high tenor went:

....(-oo-oo-oo-)

Annd bit-ter, loaaaaaaawss! (oooo-oo-oo-)   (And bitter loss...)

Mmmmmmmmm!

(oooo-oooo)...

Bill started winding down, finally: “And Fred's standin' there watchin' all this action goin' on around us. And every one that came over, I'd say a second time, ‘Did you meet Mister Waring’?"

The ‘thirst-quenching vinegar sponge’, according to Dr. Lorenzo.

And anyway, mj lorenzo was laughed out of all the laugh that had been in him. A whimper hardly was left in the poor boy: “Mm- tkhuhh, hah!”

Because of his stoicism, Brébeuf became the object of intensive torture...³⁴

“Oh he got pissed by all this and stormed off. I never saw him again for two weeks. And we went to a Shawnee Press Banquet, and we're invited to sit at his table. We're sitting at the table, Betty Ann and I, talking about a lot of things. Somehow I brought it up, somethin' about Mrs. Nixon.

“He said, ‘Oh... did you meet Mrs. Nixon’?"

Did You Meet Mrs. Nixon?

“Remember that?” Bill asked to corroborate this barely believable piece of shabby tidbit.

Betty Ann nodded assent.

“I said, ‘Oh, yes, I met her. Don't you remember’?"

With piano accompaniment now, the glee club was loud:

I kiss each beeeeead!...

"’Oh-yeh’, Fred said. He was curt. And he went on to somethin' else and he said,” with a curious tone: "’What were you talkin' to her so long about’?

“I says, ‘Mostly you’."

And strive at laaaaaaast! to-leeeearn!...

“Now the first thing that struck this man in his head –. I know him. And Betty Ann will vouch for this. He was being rotten to me that day. Was I telling her the truth about him? You could see it come over his face. Was I putting him down in Mrs. Nixon's eyes? And panic struck him.”

Young doctor mj lorenzo screeched with satisfaction.

"’WHAT about me’?" Fred asked. The tone was suspicious.

Tooo kiihss thuh CROAA-, sang the tenor and then swelled and swelled with the glee club.

...-AAaaaaaaaaAAWSS!!

"’Just in general’,” Bill said indifferently. “I wouldn't answer his question. It was driving him berserk. I loved every minute of it 'cause I was –...”

‘The kiss of death’ was what the Dr. called this move of Bill’s forever after.

The glee club and tenor did a grand, protracted descending vocal glissando:

SWEEE-EE-EE-ee-e.e.e.eeet-heaaaaaaaahrt!

“At that point I almost made up my mind that that was the end of it for me with Fred. 'Cause I'd watched him do this to other people. F'r no reason whatsoever he just starts doin' this. And, I'm not the type that's gonna sit back and take that bullshit. And yet I could think about it only so much for two more years. I needed that job.”

The chorus girls did a warbling, faint, harmonized obligato, resolving the chord finally:

Mm.m.mm.m.mm.m.mm.mmmmmmmmmmmm-...

And Bill lit a cigarette and sounded angry, or close to it: “After that, from that point on, every once a week or something it was happening. For two years, until last week when I finally quit working for him. I went over to the Dining Room one day during rehearsals when the Pennsylvanians came in. There was this lady who had come up from New York to interview him. And he called me over. He said, ‘Bill’.

“I went over.

“He said, ‘This is... Margaret’ so-and-so, or whatever. ‘Margaret, this is Bill Blackburn and he's my uh... Pseudo Public Relations Director’.

“I said, ‘That's right, Margaret. What do you need but a Pseudo Public Relations Director for a Pseudo Star’?"

Girls hummed very, very softly, -mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm! while men sang: Tooooo kiiihisss!...

“And off Fred went into the horizon boiling mad.”

"Self-importance can't be fought with niceties," don Juan commented when I expressed my concern....³⁵

“Mm-phuh,” observed the interviewer.

“And I thought everything was going to get better. It didn't get better! I thought, ‘Well, Fred and Poley are just protecting Betty Ann’. Well it got worse, didn't it?”

“Yeh,” Betty Ann confirmed.

Now the men hummed and the girls oooed, while the tenor sustained a very high note: Thuh croaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-...

They were almost back in Minisink Hills again, the four of them. And the baby too.

“It's a wonder I didn't hit Fred Waring that day. I was livid. Remember when I came home?”

“Oh, I've seen him pull stuff like that,” said Betty Ann, essentially minimizing Fred’s tyranny, abstracting it into an impersonal generality.

“And the funny thing is, I had gained everybody's respect down there as Fred Waring's all-around man. They didn't know whether ‘Public Relations Director’, ‘Manager –‘; they all respected me. When he comes in and pulls that, he's hurting him, not me. He's hurting HIM.”

-aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-...

Mmmmmmmmmmm-...

“Because they knew I was a damn good man. They had to know this because I was –.” He snapped his fingers. “I had everything cookin', everything happening. And he was pullin' this dumb petty shit.”

-aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-...

oooooo-ooooooo...

“I'll never forget that!” Bill said soberly.

-aaaaaaaaawss!

And love knows no limit to its endurance, and no end to its trust and no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. And it still stands when everything else has fallen.³⁶

“I had spent six months in that house and in that period of time I had exercised the four attributes of warriorship,... [don Juan explained.] ...Thanks to them, I had succeeded. Not once had I felt sorry for myself or wept in impotence. I had been joyful and serene. My control and discipline were as keen as they'd ever been, and I had had a firsthand view of what forbearance and timing did for impeccable warriors. And I had not once wished the man to die.”³⁷

...Brébeuf became the object of intensive torture and died the same afternoon.... Those who tortured Brébeuf were nevertheless impressed by his fortitude and, once he was dead, they roasted and ate his heart and drank his blood in order to acquire his courage.³⁸

The guru had yet another trick for getting his point across. He would talk about the way people discussed their physical life, saying that if their heart stopped, they would stop, or if their lungs stopped, they would stop. But what, he liked to ask, was the one thing that, if it went, everything would go, heart and lungs and everything else included? People didn’t understand the answer to that question, he suggested, and that was the whole problem, the real reason they hadn’t found true happiness. They thought circulation kept them going, or they thought oxygen. But if you dissected a dead body, the heart was still there, and the lungs and everything. Then what was the one most important thing that was really missing from a dead body, he wanted to know. Once a person understood the answer to that question, he said, they would understand the secret behind the kind of ‘Knowledge’ he was teaching.³⁹

And young Mortimer Jack Lorenzo, M.D., Half-Baked Psychiatrist and Barely-Cooked Raw Author, by this point in his life was just about ready to track down the guru so as to take him up on that offer. Mj had carved a cadaver and performed autopsies and wanted to ask the guru straight to his face: what was the one most important thing that was really missing from a dead body?

Because, with all due respect, of course, he thought maybe the guru had gotten sidetracked and stuck in his beautifully circular thinking, or something, during his enlightening discourse; because it seemed to mj that Joey’s guru had never come out and just answered the question clearly on the many tapes Joey had sent him in the mail.

¹  Carlos Castaneda, The Fire from Within, p. 29. On page 18 Castaneda’s ‘Don Juan’ explains to Carlos that there are actually ‘five ‘ attributes of what he calls the psychological discipline of “warriorship”: “Usually, only four attributes are played,” he went on. “The fifth, will, is always saved for an ultimate confrontation, when warriors are facing the firing squad, so to speak.” The basic four ‘attributes’ of ‘warriorship’ are: discipline, control, timing and forbearance.

²  Bruce G. Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660, p. 762.

³  As the result of a stalled hurricane, the Susquehanna River flooded in 1972, causing damage and suffering in the city of Wilkes-Barre in northeastern Pennsylvania.

⁴  Castaneda, op. cit., p. 18. See also footnote 1 above.

⁵  Mj lorenzo’s ‘Remaking’ and ‘Legs’ and other pundits ‘loved’ this aspect of their hero’s ‘Legs’ story: the “revenge that ’just happened’ because Fred Waring ‘deserved it’.” They made a fuss about it in letters to the San Francisco Jung Library Journal, and also at the 1990 Summer Writer’s Workshop at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. They likened it to ‘Karma’; and they said that it ‘fit’ with mj lorenzo’s ‘philosophy’ that nature itself was the ultimate absolute ruler and arbiter, and would avenge itself on anyone who abused it. What they meant, of course, was that Fred Waring had ‘abused nature’ by abusing one of its creatures, never asking nature for forgiveness first. Fred never asked permission of nature the way Native Americans used to always ask, humbly, and religiously, before they would kill a deer for food or take one of nature’s other precious creatures for whatever sacred purpose. Waring was therefore an ‘aberrancy’, ‘Mortimer-style’, they said. Or more correctly, maybe some part of Waring respected nature, probably; but the part of Waring that thoughtlessly abused Bill was a counterpart to the part of mj lorenzo which mj called ‘Mortimer’ (as described painstakingly in his The Remaking), which was equally and similarly ‘aberrant’ and disrespectful of his own true earthy human nature, ‘Jack’. Mj’s pundits loved this part of the ‘Legs’ story so much they constructed a formula by which to remember it, “KARMA = nature repays the poor wretch of an S.O.B. who abuses nature.” They had the formula printed on t-shirts and wore the t-shirts in classrooms, while teaching philosophy as professors at Penn and other respected high-level schools around the world.

⁶  Singers and conductors of church and school choirs from all over the country would pay to learn Fred Waring’s amazing techniques for extracting impeccable sound from a chorus of voices, at workshops at the old falling-down Castle Inn (which Fred had bought and remodeled into a work headquarters) in Delaware Water Gap near Shawnee, Minisink Hills and Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, during the summer months when Fred was not on the road touring with The Pennsylvanians. At times, such as in this case, if he needed singers during the summer months when the Pennsylvanians were officially disbanded, he would draw them from the Workshop. Most Workshop participants were young.

⁷  Trigger, Op. cit., p. 762f passim.

⁸  Details of Bill Blackburn’s Native-American (Huron) and Irish-Protestant background may be found in mj lorenzo’s third book, My Grandfather’s Tomahawk, which recounted the events of the second interview with the Blackburns. Bill’s father’s father had worked for the famed railroad magnate and financier, Edward Henry Harriman (1848-1909), as his all-around ‘man’, his right-hand round-the-clock helper in the old style, the Old World style of, approximately, more-or-less, lord’s squire; a relationship which barely existed in the USA any more by 1972, when Bill was still trying to practice it here (in the story he was telling) for the benefit of Fred, his boss; but a kind of relationship which still very much existed in old-fashioned Mexico as recently as 2013, where mj lorenzo, ‘retired’ from practicing medicine but still working overtime as a writer, had to learn to understand and practice it as employer, in order to get the kind of personal, intimate in-house help he needed to survive and thrive in poor old-fashioned (meaning medieval) rural Mexico. The Harriman estate and the farm on which Bill grew up were near the towns of Harriman and Arden, and near the present Bear Mountain State Park, in New York’s Orange County. Bill was baptized in the ‘old Harriman chapel’, as he told the Dr. once, ‘near Arden on old route 17’. A ‘look at’ mj lorenzo’s third book, ‘My Grandfather’s Tomahawk’, will be published eventually at the present website.

⁹  After mj and Dlune moved with baby Freddie to Colorado in 1975, Bill and Betty Ann created a two-person clown troop and show called ‘Christian Clowning’. And the Dr. always said that this constituted ‘proof’ that they ‘knew’ what good clowns they could be.

¹⁰  The Living Master: quotes from Guru Maharaj Ji, Denver (Divine Light Mission, 1978), p. 5. This particular quote is from an event during which Maharaj Ji spoke to some of his world-wide following in Malaga, Spain, on March 26, 1978.

¹¹  Bill’s main argument for Fred Waring’s having been a tyrant in general, and especially having become abusive toward him, Bill, specifically, ‘after’ Bill and Betty Ann had announced their wedding plans, he had presented during the first Blackburn interview; and mj lorenzo had thus included these stories in his second book, Tales of Waring, including the ‘Dinah Shore Story’ (which was in a chapter of that same name in that book), the story of how tyrannically and childishly Fred had acted toward Bill the day Fred was on Dinah’s afternoon TV talk show.

¹²  Trigger, op. cit., p. 763. By using these quotes from Trigger (in such a controversial way), which recount the destruction of the Huron tribe, Dr. Lorenzo was attempting to draw a parallel between the revenge meted out by the Huron upon the powerful white French Jesuit priests whom they blamed for the destruction of their Huron tribe, and the revenge meted out by half-Huron Bill upon powerful white man Fred Waring, whom he accused of trying to humiliate him and nearly preventing his marriage to Betty Ann. Many critics saw the author’s handling of Bill’s stories as ‘far-fetched and ridiculous’, but mj lorenzo’s pundit backers defended it, as described at the opening of this chapter. While they admitted mj’s writing approach was ‘avante-garde’ in both psychological logic and literary style, they defended it as ‘entirely readable and enjoyable’, ‘once your heart was in the right place during reading’. The author himself likened the experience of reading ‘collage’ in his books to experiencing a Christian mass, a ritual which was likely to offend, bore or drive to distraction anyone who was a stranger to it, while it comforted and fulfilled the hearts of those who sought it out on a regular basis as spiritual sustenance. More discussion of this subject may be found in the present work, in the first chapter of Part II, “The Exasperating ‘White House Tape Scandal’ Fiasco;” and also in question #16 of the closing chapter of the present study, entitled:

and yet another kind of propundity’s

‘look at’

mj lorenzo’s fourth book:

Exactly How

Mrs. Nixon’s Legs

Saved the White House Christmas Concert

including

exactly

how

to study seriously and maybe even ‘look’ at

and meditate upon

and celebrate

and understand

as well (almost) as any blankety-blank XY#!&#X! or whatever kind of PUNDIT

Dr. Lorenzo’s ever-popular

(and uncannily intuitively brilliant) and lucid (and ‘luminous’?)

and even funny (some days) (depending on one’s mood)

fourth book

¹³  Ibid.

¹⁴  The Living Master, p. 5.

¹⁵  “The Rosary,” a song by Ethelbert Nevin and Robert Cameron Rogers, can be found on Decca’s ‘Deluxe 2-Record Set’, “The Best of Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians,” record 1. A rosary is a set of beads with a cross in the middle; and the word 'rosary' also means the prayer which is said, using the beads and cross as guide. The beads and cross serve as a physical reminder and organizer of the prayer sequence. Each object, bead or cross, represents and reminds of a step in the total prayer. The lyrics of the song are: “The hours I spend with thee, dear heart, are as a string of pearls. I count them over, every one apart, my rosary. My rosary. Each hour a pearl. Each pearl a prayer to still a heart in absence wrung. I turn each bead unto the end, and there a cross is hung. Oh memories that bless and burn, oh barren gain and bitter loss. I kiss each bead and strive at last to learn to kiss the cross. Sweetheart. To kiss the cross.”

The Dr. explained to Sammy Martinez once that he chose the song for this chapter because the Telethon was the first time the reader would get to see Fred after Fred heard (from Bill) that he was about to ‘lose’, as he felt, his beloved Betty Ann to Bill. Fred grew up Protestant (Methodist), not Catholic, but he liked and understood the song or he would not have recorded it. Probably he liked it because the poetry of the lyrics used the famous Catholic rosary beads as a graphic metaphor for the painful process of losing a deep love, a painful experience Fred had borne several times in his lifetime.. In Catholic symbology, ‘kissing the cross’ meant ‘accepting’ a loss and the tortured heart it had produced inside you.

On another occasion the Dr. and Sammy were talking about the fact that Bruce Trigger, in Children of Aataentsic, had said that each individual Huron brave, as in many New World tribes, had his own personal ditty to sing when he needed comfort and moral/spiritual support. And the Dr. explained that he had envisioned this ‘ditty’, ‘My Rosary’, as Fred’s song to sing as he walked the painful path of losing Betty-Ann’s attention and devotion to him, and especially as he suddenly faced and underwent his unforeseen ‘crucifixion’ by Bill at the Telethon. Sammy mentioned all this in a TV interview; and The New Yorker magazine ‘crucified’ mj lorenzo for such ‘methodical madness’, as The London Times put it; but his pundits fired back with as many big crucifying guns as they could find, including rebuttals by respected thinkers in The Guardian, the Paris Match and Der Spiegel, and a rude ‘crucifying’ critique of everything about The New Yorker magazine in Rolling Stone, most of which propounded the following argument: that mj lorenzo had ‘by now’ attained a level of fame and intelligent readership which belied 99% of the ‘crucifying’ negativity about him that emanated from ‘literary’ ‘critics’. The Miami Tribune then nailed the Stone. It likened this ‘cavalier attitude toward any criticism of oneself, one’s ideology or one’s favorite writer’ to the way a Latin American dictator thought. One such dictator wrote The Tribune an excited note about how much he loved the most recent Spanish translation of The Remaking, and especially mj’s crazy bizarre bout on the psychiatry inpatient unit. The strange and seemingly non sequitur comments of the dictator’s in The Tribune regarding mj’s first and most philosophically important work, The Remaking, made it big in Latin American internet chat rooms and caused a change of ruling party in that dictator’s country, by bloody coup. Whereupon the Secretary General of the United Nations called upon mj lorenzo to speak at a widely publicized UNESCO symposium on World Peace; and when he spoke, the Dr. told them the story contained in the present paragraph, starting with the innocent event described in the first sentence, his conversation with Sammy about Trigger’s Children of Aataentsic. And he concluded his speech, broadcast globally on an international cable news network, by reading the final summarizing paragraph from Trigger’s Children of Aataentsic, perhaps the most beautiful paragraph in Trigger’s whole incredible 850-page book, which went as follows:

“The Jesuits who undertook to convert the Huron were intelligent men who were prepared to forego comfort and safety in order to save mankind from eternal damnation. The suffering that their policies brought about was an unintentional consequence of their efforts to convert the Huron, even though the Jesuits later seemed to regard these sufferings as worthwhile, or at least far from being in vain. There are, however, more general reasons why attempts such as this to effect coercive change frequently turn out badly. It is recognized as a truism that the consequences of people’s actions often end up escaping them, since every undertaking has repercussions upon a vast number of unsuspected relationships within a society. [Here Trigger referenced Jean Paul Sartre’s Search for a Method, p. 47, where Sartre made such an observation.] Because of this, actions may have the opposite effect from what was intended. When those who are involved come from different cultural traditions, the dangers of misunderstanding and miscalculation are multiplied, and well-intentioned actions frequently prove disadvantageous, if not disastrous, for all concerned. As a mixture of creativity and destructiveness, all men, no less than the Huron and Jesuits, show themselves to be Aataentsic’s children.” Trigger, op. cit., p. 850.

And for good measure, Dr. Lorenzo, at the very end of his UNESCO speech, tacked on Sartre’s exact words as referenced by Trigger: “...the consequences of our acts always end up by escaping us, since every concerted enterprise, as soon as it is realized, enters into relation with the entire universe, and since this infinite multiplicity of relations goes beyond our intention.” Jean Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, New York, Vintage, 1968 (Knopf, Random House, 1963), p.47.

After the UNESCO speech a Fox Cable News commentator suggested that the Dr., nearing 70, ‘must be senile’ since, by publicly calling upon Trigger and Sartre so as to emphasize a warning against the ‘infinite unexpected consequences’ of personal action, the Dr. was essentially embracing ‘nihilism’. ‘Logic, therefore’, said the commentator, called upon the Dr. to renounce everything he had ever said or done in his life, beg forgiveness for it all, and hope to undo thereby the many negative results his ‘rabid ragged thinking’ had produced, and would produce, over the years. Such a renunciation was about ‘the only conceivable action left to mj lorenzo’, which the commentator ‘could or might ever heartily support’.

Sammy Martinez and the early Remaking pundits retaliated further. This time they found the money to buy a single page in the Sunday New York Times, and they published and signed there the following rebuttal in large print:

We do hereby solemnly swear our joint condemnation of the effort by a Fox Cable News Channel commentator to mislead the public by deliberately obfuscating the meaning of mj lorenzo’s UNESCO Peace Conference speech.

The Dr. was hammering away at one of his usual core lifelong points: that when one nation or people attempts to ram its will down the throat of another nation or people, the more different the two peoples are, and the less they understand each other, the more probable it is that the coercive action will produce negative consequences for all, up to and including annihilation of the human race.

As example we offer President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. In those years the American and Iraqi peoples had little knowledge or understanding of each other. Therefore there was a high likelihood that the coercive effort would go astray. And it did.

Along with the Vietnam War and the Secret Bombing of Cambodia, this second U.S. invasion of Iraq produced primarily horrible consequences for both peoples and little if anything of redeeming value for anyone on the planet.

Worse yet, it left the USA looking like those nations in history, such as Nazi Germany, whose aggression has been founded on selfish appetite; since none of the unselfish, altruistic, ‘humanitarian’ excuses Bush provided as rationale for invasion turned out in the end to have been valid, as even George W. Bush himself admitted at the end of his presidency, when he confessed that his invasion of Iraq had been ‘a mistake’.

Worst of all, this inexcusable USA mistake, this senseless and exceedingly costly large-scale invasion of a major country on the other side of the globe, ratcheted up international tension, hate and revenge so drastically that it did in fact, without doubt, move the human race a giant leap closer to possible self-annihilation.

signed:

Sammy Martinez

the ‘early Remaking pundits’

the ‘culture hero’ pundits

etc., etc.

The Fox commentator responded to this on his famous show. It was ‘proof’, he said, of the Dr.’s ‘senility since birth’, that, throughout his entire life, he had ‘never been able to think about any more’ than one ‘silly’ and very negative thing, the likely imminent destruction of all of humanity. And his ’ever-increasing Doomsday-ism negativity with ever-increasing age’ ‘demonstrated’ the kind of ‘paranoia’ and ‘depression’ that frequently ‘afflicted and disabled’ ‘the elderly and infirm’.

This provoked the Dr. to such an extent he sent the famous commentator a rare personal email (to the email address which the Fox News commentator routinely advertised during his show) asking if the ‘eminent commentator’ thought, too, that the revered writer and English prime minister, Sir Winston Churchill, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and Nobel Prize for Literature, both, had been ‘equally senile’ when, at the ‘decrepit old age of 74’, he had asserted in his six-volume history of the Second World War, in the first few pages of the first volume, The Gathering Storm, that “It was not until the dawn of the twentieth century of the Christian era that war began to enter into its Kingdom as the potential destroyer of the human race... It is established,” Churchill wrote two pages later, “that nations who believe their life is at stake will not be restrained from using any means to secure their existence. It is probable – nay certain – that among the means which will next time be at their disposal will be agencies and processes of destruction wholesale, unlimited, and perhaps, once launched, uncontrollable.... Mankind has never been in this position before. Without having improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination.” Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Volume I, The Gathering Storm, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948, pp. 38-40 passim.

Was it equally ‘senile’, ‘paranoid’ and ‘depressed’, questioned Dr. Lorenzo in the same email, when Republican U.S. President Eisenhower at age 63, in his first inaugural address (Jan. 20, 1953), warned the world that “Science seems ready to confer upon us, as its final gift, the power to erase human life from this planet.” ???? (Compare p. ii of the present work, the ‘Frontispiece’.)

This might have quieted the argument, said many, had the Dr. not sent Sammy a copy of this email (to the famous Fox commentator); for Sammy then forwarded the Dr.’s email to tens of thousands of mj lorenzo’s worldwide readership, especially to the Dr.’s sharpest Remaking and Legs pundit following. The reaction in Russia was particularly astonishing, and debate worldwide was still snowballing at the time of publication of the present work on the World Wide Web in 2013.

¹⁶  Castaneda, op. cit., p. 26. Don Juan, a shaman, seer and curandero of the Yaqui tribe in Mexico’s state of Sonora, is addressing Carlos, instructing him in the techniques of dealing triumphantly with a ‘petty tyrant’, someone who abuses power and tyrannizes you in a personal, work, or other relationship.

¹⁷  The Living Master, p. 5. Words spoken while addressing his followers at a get-together in Miami Beach, July 31, 1977.

¹⁸  Ibid.

¹⁹  Trigger, op. cit., p. 763.

²⁰  The Living Master, p. 5.

²¹  ‘Wing chair’, most likely: “an upholstered armchair with high solid back and sides turned at such an angle that they provide a rest for the head and protection from drafts —  called also draft chair, lug chair,” as the dictionary defines and explains. Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. Copyright 2003 by Merriam-Webster, Inc. Version 3.0 (for computer).

²²  For a glossary of musical terms please see Appendix 1.  Many Waring arrangements required that the chorus sing ‘a cappella’ at certain points, meaning without any kind of instrumental support. Only the very, very best choirs have ever been able to sing a cappella without immediately falling into cacophony.

²³  Trigger, op. cit., p. 763.

²⁴  Castaneda, op. cit., p. 19.

²⁵  Ibid., p. 24f.

²⁶  Ibid., p. 27.

²⁷  The Living Master, pp. 32; 37; 39; 95.

²⁸  Ibid., pp. 90, 92.

²⁹  It was at such a point as this, in a story, that Bill was at the peak of his storytelling technique. He had already slain his audience with the mention of the First Lady’s varicose veins in this intimate atmosphere; and one might have thought that this should have delighted an audience sufficiently. But now he drove the emotion home with detail after mind-boggling detail, right at the very peak of his most important story. He lingered so long in the delicious moment that mj’s emotion started to approach ecstasy.

³⁰  Castaneda, op. cit., p. 27.

³¹  Trigger, op. cit., p. 763f.

³²  Ibid., p. 764.

³³  Castaneda, op. cit., p. 28.

³⁴  Trigger, op. cit., p. 764.

³⁵  Castaneda, op. cit., p. 14.

³⁶  I Corinthians 13:7,8.  J. B. Phillips translation of The New Testament.

³⁷  Castaneda, op. cit., p. 29.

³⁸  Trigger, op. cit., p. 764, passim.

³⁹  The Living Master, p. 12 (Here Guru Maharaj Ji is describing his own personal experience of Knowledge to his followers in New Delhi, India, in November, 1972.)