1.  Betty Ann playing the cordovox. Adapted from a photo she used during the early seventies to advertise her musical talent, after she stopped working for Waring and was looking for work on her own.

2.  Betty Ann’s face. Adapted from a facial portrait found in “Fred Waring Presents Year 56: Music Then, Now and Forever,” the Pennsylvanians’ program booklet for their 72-73 concert season, including the 1972 White House Christmas Concert.

3.  Betty Ann lost in maya. Adapted from the same photo used in image #1 above. Paint Shop Pro was used to create an impression of swirling flood waters.

4.  Bill Blackburn in the pulpit of Middlecreek Christian Church (about 1990) in Kresgeville, Pennsylvania (on US route 209 between Stroudsburg and Lehighton). After he quit working for Waring in 1974, Bill finally found a job as executive director of the Monroe County Redevelopment Authority, and then, after a few more years, went to Drew University to get a degree that would qualify him as a minister. Betty Ann made a good preacher’s wife, played the organ, and led the choir. She is seen here at the organ at far left, facing Bill and the choir. Adapted from a photo in the church’s Pennsylvania German recipe book.

5.  The annual Deer Dance at San Juan Pueblo, in northern New Mexico (also known as the ‘Ohkay Owingei Pueblo’) an indigenous Tewa village immediately north of Española (on route 68, the road which goes to Taos). From a magazine-like publication with a title including the words ‘Eight Northern Pueblos’, published in the late 1990s or early-to-mid 2000s, which the Dr. left behind when he left Mexico suddenly in late 2013, fleeing the multiplying and ‘barbaric’, as he called it, cartel violence and the equally 'barbaric' response to it. Apologies to the photographer and publisher, whom we can not cite by exact name, therefore.... – until some day soon, hopefully.

6.  Fred Waring as ‘Beaver Patrol Leader’ in the U.S. Boy Scouts, when he was 13 in 1913. Adapted from the 1966 ‘50^th Anniversary Program’ (Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians: A Photobiography) (see Bibliography), published when Fred was 66. In later years Fred served on the board of the Boy Scouts of America and was active in fostering their mission of producing sturdy, practical and moral young American men. At times he would offer benefit concerts to raise funds for the organization. The caption for this photo in his ‘50^th Anniversary Program’ reads: “Fred was only 10 years old when he and Poley McClintock were allowed to attend Boy Scout meetings. After a long 2 years, when they were 12, they officially joined, wore the uniform and worked for badges. Fred has never lost his belief in Boy Scout training and philosophy. Fred is still a member of the National Council of Boy Scouts.” Over the years Waring’s program booklets and public relations approach to the radio advertising of his concerts pushed and promoted increasingly the Tom-and-Huck-like story of Fred-and-Poley growing up in a bucolic green country burg and joining Boy Scouts together. The tale appealed to the Pennsylvanians’ down-home, old-fashioned and ever more elderly ‘Middle-America’ national audience. Bill Blackburn saw the usefulness of that appeal when he was working for Fred as his ‘public relations director’, and pushed the notion in the program booklets and radio ads which he helped produce. More on this subject may be found in several chapters of Dr. Lorenzo’s second book, Tales of Waring, soon to appear at this website.

7.  Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians in silent-movie Hollywood. During the ‘roaring 20s’, Fred and Poley and Fred’s brother, Tom, still in their 20s, played up their own youthfulness and acted ‘Collegiate’. At this Hollywood theater the playful Pennsylvanians were used LIVE to warm up the audience for the debut of actor Harold Lloyd’s new silent movie, The Freshman, which was also all about college and ‘Collegiate’. From the beginning, even before they got a little more classy (and even semi-classical at times), Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians appealed to college-educated Americans who liked classical as well as good, hearty, classily-presented folksy and popular music, and even good, hearty, classily-presented jazz, church and patriotic music. The photo is adapted from the ‘50^th Anniversary Program’ (Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians: A Photobiography) (see Bibliography).

8.  Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians in Paris in the late 1920s. Still pushing their ‘Collegiate’ image, they were brought back for an extra concert in a spiffier Paris venue than their original one: this time, instead of the bar where Hemingway and his 1920s ‘Lost Generation’ hung out (Des Ambassadeurs), it was the concert hall where Frederic Chopin gave his last Paris concert nearly a hundred years before. It was a ‘command performance’, says the poster (‘by popular demand’ = ‘A LA DEMANDE GENÉRALE’). An American artist’s popularity in Paris, even in the 1920s, rarely hurt his reputation back home (as mj lorenzo learned later). This image was adapted from the ‘50^th Anniversary Program’ (Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians: A Photobiography) (see Bibliography). The cartoon of the band on the poster came from a ‘famous’ John Held drawing of the Pennsylvanians, as the ‘50^th Anniversary Program’ explained. For a while it was used on their concert posters at home and abroad; and later, for various reasons, Fred developed a close artistic and also personal relationship with the USA’s community of newspaper and comic-book cartoonists. A celebrated special room at his Shawnee Inn was covered from ceiling to floor, all four walls, with original cartoon drawings by eminent cartoonists, right on the very wall, a subject explored in several chapters of mj’s second book, Tales of Waring, especially in the chapter, “I Want that Book Stopped.” The room was called “The Cartoonists’ Room” and, if it still exists now, in 2013, it would have to be worth more than the Inn structure; which was still in use in the mid- to late 2000s, when the Dr. last drove by Shawnee-on-Delaware.

9.  Fred and the Pennsylvanians during the 1930s. In demand for college dances and parties, they also did live big-urban-theater concerts, radio (with Ford; Chesterfield cigarettes; and Old Gold cigarettes, as sponsors), and vaudeville; and, by the late 30s, real ‘talkies’, i.e., movies in which you could hear the actors’ voices. Now they were genuine Hollywood movie stars. So they did Broadway shows, including Cole Porter’s “The New Yorkers,” starring Jimmy Durante. By the time they got to Des Ambassadeurs in Paris in 1928 they had a big following on the continent and were considered ‘international stars’. This photo and these comments are adapted partly from the 1966-67 ‘50^th Anniversary Program’ (Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians: A Photobiography) (see Bibliography), and from “Fred Waring Presents Year 56,” Fred’s 56^th year program booklet, which Bill Blackburn put together for Fred’s road-tour year of 1972-73, including the 1972 White House Christmas Concert. Under ‘CREDITS’ in the back of this official 1972 program booklet, Blackburn is named for both ‘Publicity Director’ and ‘Program Preparation’, but his tasks for Fred were, of course, much more varied and unpredictable than that.

10.  Fred Waring’s ‘famous hands’. In later years Fred gave up his conductor’s baton for bare hands, partly because he found he could draw out more explicit emotion and expression from his people using facial expressions and his bare ‘famous hands’, as Bill Blackburn called them. See Tales of Waring, chapter entitled “That Man’s Sitting Out There and Is Gold,”  for Bill’s story about the time he shocked Fred by using the expression ‘your two hands’ to his face. Photo adapted from the front cover of the ‘50^th Anniversary Program’ (Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians: A Photobiography) (see Bibliography). ‘A look at mj lorenzo’s second book, Tales of Waring’, will hopefully be published at this website – www.bruceduvall.com – in 2014.

11.  Ike Eisenhower’s quarters when a young junior officer at Fort Logan, Denver, Colorado, 1924-25. Also the Victorian mansion where Dr. Lorenzo lived with Dlune, Freddie and Nico from 1976 to 1980, after the army base had become Fort Logan Community Mental Health Center. (Housing was part of the Dr.’s pay when he worked at the mental health center as staff psychiatrist and served as president of its medical staff.) Photo taken in October, 2013, by Dr. Lorenzo, just as leaves were turning colors (which got reflected in some of the windows). The house is backlit by a setting sun. White sign reads: FIELD OFFICER’S QUARTERS BUILT 1889, and below the sign’s sketch of the house, FRIENDS OF HISTORIC FORT LOGAN. Red letters state: FREE BROCHURE: PLEASE TAKE ONE. The sign below reads ‘Riverside Soccer Club’. For years the old parade grounds in front of the house, now a beautiful green lawn covering several square blocks and ringed with big century-old trees, have served for a children’s soccer league’s playing fields, where as many as ten or twenty games at once may occur during Denver’s afternoons and weekends. The brochures explain the history behind various sprawling late-Victorian army mansions from the 1880s still left standing nearby. Most of them in 2013 were being used for addiction treatment. And in that year, too, Dlune Lorenzo was still telling the story of the day in the late 70s that members of President Eisenhower's family drove by, trying to find the Victorian their father and grandfather, Ike, had lived in. The actual address of the house in this photo is 3742 W. Princeton Circle. (Fort Logan lies at W. Oxford and S. Lowell, in the southwest corner of Denver alongside the veterans’ cemetery, the latter being marked on most maps as ‘Fort Logan National Cemetery’.) The Fort Logan museum brochure claims that Ike lived at 3732, but Dlune always said, since the day she talked with the Eisenhower family, that it was her house, 3742. The house is now a museum, designated a ‘historic landmark’ (along with the Molly Brown house and similar famous old Denver mansions and gathering places) on the Colorado Register of Historic Properties, and also as a ‘Denver Landmark’. Incidentally, the spacious old kitchen also serves in 2013 as headquarters for the soccer club. On the ground, against the dark green wooden frame of the sign, leans a 1976 oil painting of the house by Anders Garp, an important Swedish family member of Dlune’s, when he visited the Lorenzos at Fort Logan in 1976.

12.  “Full Varmint Quire.” Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians around 1966. Adapted from a photo in the ‘50^th Anniversary Program’ (Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians: A Photobiography) (see Bibliography). Fred, Betty Ann and Chorus are in the center, with band to either side. Everyone is caked in the swirling river-flood mud of maya except the Grand Mud Maker himself, Fred Waring, and ever-lovely Betty Ann. Both of them were originally shown in more maya mud than anyone else, but the ‘mud’ has been digitally cleared away from the two of them by The Photo Doctorer (Dr. Lorenzo) to make them shine, and to emphasize the point that Fred always seated Betty Ann right next to The Conductor: front and center, cordovox-in-her-lap, just as in a Raphael painting of Madonna-and-Child, with Fred playing the part of Raphael, the Grand Art Maker. Unless one chooses to see Fred as a counterpart to ‘Child’. And a Jungian art analyst like Dr. Lorenzo could and did see several possible unconscious archetypal formats functioning in the intense and complex Fred-Betty Ann friendship at once, or constantly coming and going over time, namely: father-daughter; mother-son; Mary-Christ; Demeter-Dionysus; Egyptian princess mother-Jewish Moses baby; Holy Father-Holy Mother; and God [the Father]-Madonna; likelihoods all of which, combined, the Dr. felt helped explain why Bill Blackburn complained so endlessly about all the ‘B.S.’ he had to wade through to salvage Betty Ann for their own sacred marriage relationship. B.S., i.e. ‘bullshit’ being the perfect denominator, since alluvial MUD, as any earthy farmer since the beginning of time has comprehended, is composed of bull shit, cow shit, calf shit, horse shit, and every kind of waste imaginable, animal, vegetable and mineral, all ground to fine particles and spun together by turbulent flowing water, then left in the sun to dry into a paste and a hard cake of revitalized soil which is perfect, once mollified with water and air, for growing new life.

13.  Joey’s guru in traditional Indian guru garb. From a photo (source unknown) of Guru Maharaj Ji (birth name Prem Pal Singh Rawat; but also known as ‘Maharaji’ and ‘Maraji’) in the Dr.’s own photo collection. Probably when Maraji was in late teens or early twenties.

14.  Joey’s teenage guru teaching truth. From an official photo of Guru Maharaj Ji (see #13) in The Living Master: quotes from Guru Maharaj Ji (Denver, Colorado: Divine Light Mission, Inc., 1978). Because this book was published in 1978, the young guru here could not be older than 21 (since he was born in 1957) (and 1978 minus 1957 = 21); but in truth, though his manner appears mature, his face looks younger than 21, maybe 15-17, which might be his more likely age here.

15.  Fred Waring’s big Birthday Party bash for President Eisenhower in 1953. See footnote #4 in the chapter entitled ‘Ike!’. Separate photos show Ike saluting the big hundred-dollar-a-plate crowd; then dining; and finally cutting the birthday cake. And ALWAYS with his beloved Mamie at his right-hand side. The image is adapted from a single full page of the ‘50^th Anniversary Program’ (Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians: A Photobiography) (see Bibliography), two copies of which Bill Blackburn gave the young Dr. Lorenzo in 1974 to help him in preparing ‘the book’ they had agreed would be about the Blackburns’ life with Fred Waring.

16.  Dr. Lorenzo in 1985, the year his Mrs. Nixon’s Legs was stocked in the biggest and best U.S. and international bookstores by a highly regarded New York publisher. From a photo in the Dr.’s own collection.

17.  The author, mj lorenzo, age 3 (1946), with father, mother and Big Sis, in front of the Methodist parsonage in Pleasantville, New Jersey, where his Uncle Thom was pastor. It would be 3 more years before Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians would appear on Sunday night TV every week and become a fixture of mj lorenzo’s early artistic, cultural, religious and political education. Adapted from a faded color photo left to mj’s sister by their parents, or by their Aunt ‘Ottie’, Rev’s older sister (who was Uncle Thom’s poetess preacher’s-wife).

18.  Young Dr. Lorenzo in the early 1970s, about the time he interviewed the Blackburns and obtained the material around which he would structure his second, third and fourth books. From his own collection.

19.  The Dr. in 2002 in Chacahuapan ('Chockawhoppin'), Michoacán, México, in the dirt back patio of the 3-room house he rented for 45 dollars a month next to the Tin Can’s mother’s (whose trees are coming over the wall). It was his second year of ‘retirement’ (from practicing psychiatry), during which he spent a large part of his time writing home about his new life, in carefully crafted email-newsletters to friends and family called The Chockawhoppin Post. The t-shirt reads: “100% from Michoacán. 1999. Export Quality. One of a kind.” All apparently referring to the marijuana leaf (the state of Michoacán’s chief export after avocados, papayas, crystal meth and illegal aliens), if not to the wearer of the shirt, who bought it in Pátzcuaro (see the Dr.’s Mexican picture stories, Our Lady and the Tin Can, and The Tlahualiles of Sahuayo, at this same website, for more on Pátzcuaro). Photo taken on the Dr.’s digital Sony Cyber-shot DSC-S75 camera by eighteen-year-old José, his daily house helper in 2002, since The Tin Can had landed a construction job in Pátzcuaro. This photo was later lent by mj to a prominent southern Colorado newspaper, The Pueblo Chieftain, to be used to accompany the article described in the chapter, “Four Famous Points.” The color photo won a Pulitzer along with the article and headline, “Locally Renowned and Beloved Psychiatrist Dr. ‘mj’ Lorenzo Divulges Own Mental Disability and Mind-Shrinking Cure.” It created a sensation, partly because one of Pueblo’s two chief industries (and primary places of work opportunity) for nearly a century had been its Colorado State (Mental) Hospital, and because the Dr. had been working there as psychiatrist for years and was known in town; and also because marijuana at the time was still illegal in Colorado; and the thought that a respected doctor-psychiatrist at the sacred Colorado state psychiatric hospital in the proud old city of Pueblo might have used it (as headline and t-shirt brazenly imply, incorrectly, we hope) was even more scandalous. In fact, the ‘mind-shrinking cure’ was the guru’s ‘Knowledge’ and meditation, not pot; and the ‘mental disability’, or part of it (or, at the very least, PLAIN PROOF OF IT) must have been Dr. Lorenzo’s lending a picture of himself like this to a big local newspaper.

20.  Logo and key for this ‘look’ at mj lorenzo’s fourth book, Exactly How Mrs. Nixon’s Legs Saved the White House Christmas Concert. The White House is about to be plastered to kindling by a Paul-Bunyan-sized axe, whose handle reads: “Bless this HOUSE O Lord We Pray,” emphasis on ‘HOUSE’, a Waring song mj had understood from age 6 to be referring to the entire USA and all of the peoples and trappings it housed, NOT JUST TO THE physical WHITE HOUSE AND SOME INCIDENTAL AND TEMPORARY EGO-DRIVEN PRESIDENT dwelling within it. The logo appears at the bottom of every web page making up this work, ‘a look at mj’s fourth book’, at the present website; and also at the top of some pages; and always serves, as well, to guide the reader ‘ahead’ or ‘back’ through the pages of the work; or all the way back to the www.bruceduvall.com homepage. It is also part of the collage entitled ‘White House collage’ at the top of the chapter, “The Exasperating ‘White House Tape Scandal’ Fiasco.” (See #26 below.) The logo was designed by the Dr. and was intended to convey, he said, the feeling shared by too many Americans that the people who perennially promised to keep America and the planet ‘safe’ and who sang songs like ‘Bless this House’, often seemed to be, at the same time, a trigger-happy, bullying bunch who posed a threat to the peace and future of the country and humanity; whether out of ignorance; short-sightedness; a tendency to put selfish, egotistical private or party interests ahead of the common good of all humanity; or due to some other human failing. The logo was also meant to represent a related but slightly different visual concept: namely, the ‘axe’ described in the same chapter, the axe which was about to swing straight into Nixon’s mouth and head, and terminate him and his presidency, the axe which, instead of suffering it to end him, he ‘bit’ as one ‘bites the bullet’, grabbing it between his teeth, and then RAN from the White House in ignominy, axe-in-mouth, so to speak.

21.  Bill Blackburn as ‘Mr. Frog’, the frog-suitor who is the protagonist of an American southland swamp folk ditty, “Mr. Frog a-Courtin’ He Did Ride.” A ‘sword and pistol’ hang by the ‘silver stitches’ of his ‘sky-blue breeches’, all sewn in and dangled there by Dr. Lorenzo’s computer art, when he designed the joke for this ‘look at his fourth book’. Mr. Frog, with shocked red pop-eyes and his hands in air, appears a little hysterical about his marriage prospects. The song, as performed by the Pennsylvanians, was a classic Waring hit, classy yet folksy with shouting, stomping, hootin’ n howlin’, and even a deep frog croak straight into the mike from the group’s perennial Clown Number One, Poley McClintock. As such, the folk song, and others of its comic and rustic musical class, always served as an earthy counterbalance to the graver moments of a Waring concert, such as the highfalutin and high-sounding patriotic, religious and mad-passionate-love numbers, all of these being, by contrast, the songs of ‘important’ people who more often took themselves quite seriously, like Fred’s audience and Fred.

22.  RE-ELECT NIXON IN ’72, a presidential campaign button which helped Nixon win a second time and live in the White House just long enough to be hung by the proverbials for concealing his own staff’s break-in to Democratic Party headquarters. The button’s picture should have served as the President’s prison mug shot, said the Dr.; but Vice President Ford succeeded Nixon as the Constitution required, and pardoned him quick! – saving the nation from more acrimony. And Nixon retired to San Clemente in peace and disgrace.

23.  Poley McClintock grins and scolds a canary in a diminutive cage, as adapted from a photo in “Fred Waring Presents Year 56,” program booklet for concerts of the 72-73 concert season, including the 1972 White House Christmas Concert. In keeping with his usual role as comic sidekick to An Important American Icon, Fred Waring, simple Poley is acting The Clown. Dr. Lorenzo feels that the canary in the cage was Poley himself, and the finger was Fred's directing him to: now sing this! now sing that! now sing with a frog voice; now give me some sleigh bells. Now you have to go home until next year because you are drinking and ruining concerts too much, and you cannot return next year unless Yvette comes out on the road with you to keep you from drinking, for which I'll pay her! (more details of this story are told in mj lorenzo's second book, Tales of Waring, especially in the chapter, 'How Yvette Got Out On The Road'.

24.  A Toltec pyramid at the Tula ruins (ca. 900-1000 A.D.), where it sits above the modern town of Tula, State of Hidalgo, Mexico, here used by the Dr. to show the ‘steps’ on Bill Blackburn’s ‘non-violent path’ to psychological victory over Fred Waring; who began acting the 72-year-old adolescent tyrant as soon as Bill announced he was going to marry Betty Ann. Image designed by the Dr. in 2013 for the present work, using one of the photos he took at Tula in 2007, on yet another trip with the Tin Can. Each one of the practical ‘steps’ mentioned on the diagrammatic image is described in detail in the chapter entitled, “Mrs. Nixon’s Legs,” the chapter at the top of which the image stands.

25.  Fred Waring’s Shawnee Inn and Golf Course from the air, adapted from an aerial black and white in the ‘50^th Anniversary Program’ (Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians: A Photobiography) (see Bibliography).

26.  'Ike' (Dwight David - later President) Eisenhower and Mamie Doud Eisenhower on their wedding day in 1916 in Denver, Colorado. From the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas.

27.  'Hechizo' (José Guadalupe Hererra Cortez) and the Dr. in late 2011 or early 2012, at Jeanne Niederlitz' beach house in Manzanillo, state of Colima, México. Photo taken by Juan Carlos on Hechizo's (and Judith's) camera. Hechizo popped up only a couple of (colorful) times in this 'look at' mj lorenzo's fourth book, and was therefore anything but a principal character, but he has been honored and remembered with a photo here because he lost his life September 21, 2012 in a vomitously disgustingly barbaric street brawl in the village where he and the Dr. lived outside Morelia, in the state of Michoacán, México; and the Dr. missed him greatly. Hechizo (his nickname, which meant 'magic trick') worked for the Dr. as his FMIH, or Full-time Mexican Impossible Helper, 10 to 6 Monday through Saturday, and 24-7 on trips around Mexico, as here. He took over from the Dr.'s previous FMIH, The Tin Can, in July 2011, when the latter up and got more wacko and impossible than usual and went north on a lam and crossed at Juarez into El Paso and disappeared once again into the USA federal prison system as an illegal alien, knowing full well as he should have, and must have, since the Dr. had warned him repeatedly, that he would spend ten years in U.S. prison if he ever tried to enter the states again, given his past record. The double fiasco left the Dr. without friendly help in late 2012 and played a part in his 2013 return to live in the states, even though Hechizo's wife, Judith, made a valiant attempt to fill the shoes of the two lost boys. Many pictures of Hechizo may be found in the Dr.'s Mexican picture story, The Tlahualiles of Sahuayo, at this same website, picture-story numbers tla011, -12, -13, -68, -70, and -71..

28.  Titles of 'a look'. An image collage which the Dr. put together in 2007. Each image in the collage represents a specific creative work of his, either a book or a picture story. Each title is connected to its representative image by an arrow. The present 'look at' Mrs. Nixon's Legs and the White House Christmas Concert, for instance, is represented (and linked via arrow) by a photo of Betty Ann McCall Blackburn playing the cordovox.

29.  The ‘White House collage’, which includes the ‘logo’ for this ‘look at mj lorenzo’s fourth book’ (see #20 above) with its axe hanging over the White House; plus a handsome close-up of mj’s parents, Rev and Jo Lorenzo, in 1978; a White House policeman guarding tapes; an outline of the USA; and a marijuana leaf as big as the country. Sammy Martinez showed the collage to his after-school reading club in Española in late 2013 for feedback, and they asked him to drag an explanation out of the Dr. for the pot leaf, which seemed the least obvious for inclusion in the collage. What did marijuana have to do with the White House tape scandal? they asked, bewildered, and almost indignant.

The Dr. responded first in a ‘short letter’ addressed to them, sent via Sammy’s email, which they then forwarded to sister reading clubs in Canada and the USA, and posted on facebook pages in English and Spanish for friends at home and in Latin America (who forwarded it all over the world).

He chided them for ‘asking a graphic artist to interpret his own work of art’. It was ‘almost’ like: “asking Picasso if choosing to paint D. H. Kahnweiler in square blocks meant Kahnweiler was ‘square’.”

But, he wrote: “Since I am not just an abstract artist, but a student and teacher of real life and am trying to keep the human race from annihilating itself; and since you are students of my effort: it is my duty to betray the indignant, close-mouthed Picasso in me and answer your question if I can,” a farce of a clown answer which made Sammy laugh.   

The pot had helped ‘mellow’ him, the Dr. began his ‘short letter’, as he had worked throughout late 2012 and all of 2013 in central Mexico, helping Sammy, in the states, to prepare the present work for publication. It had helped him tolerate life in the Mexican state of Michoacán, a colorful, lovely region of rustic indigenous charm and heartbreakingly gorgeous ancient churches which throughout 2012 and 2013 the Mexicans were ruining. They were growing more disordered socially and ‘barbarically violent’ by the month, thanks to the proliferation of ‘run-amok sociopaths’ among them, ‘crazy criminal cartels and crazy criminal cartel wannabes’, and even crazy criminal OPPONENTS of criminal cartels and wannabes, all of them virtually indistinguishable, one from the other, until, in late August of 2013, he felt it necessary to flee for safety.

Also: pot, he said, had been legalized for enjoyment by the voters of his state of Colorado in the 2012 election. And it had been ‘a big part of the picture’ for his generation since the late 60s and early 70s, when the story told in ‘Mrs. Nixon’s Legs’ took place.

Sammy tacked on an addendum. He told his high-schoolers that the Dr. would sometimes smoke pot in Mexico to ‘get a different angle’ on his writing, some angle – often with a humorous result – which he had not noticed before. Pot, in other words, just as it had the Beat poets and other artists, had helped his creativity at times; so he claimed. And mj’s parents were in the collage, Sammy added, because Fred Waring’s music had been their music; and mj lorenzo had written his Remaking and Waring trilogy, in part, ‘to come to terms with his parents’, and with his parents’ generation, and to move on beyond them, ‘if possible’.

But the reading club students were overwhelmed with the leaf filling the country, even still. Okay and fine, they said to each other on the way home from school. As far as the two doctors had gone. But why should a leaf FILL A COUNTRY AND SPILL OUT OVER ITS EDGES?! Hadn’t his book, The Remaking, shown that Dr. Lorenzo was psychic? And that the ‘Jack’ in him knew things the ‘Mortimer’ in him did not know? Something else was going on.   

So, assuming that the ‘Mortimer’ part of the Dr. had somehow gotten the upper hand on his ‘Jack’ part ALL OVER AGAIN, they found, on behalf of his apparently suppressed ‘Jack’ part, an explanation apart from the Dr.’s. They thought that his country-eating leaf must represent the fact, as they told Sammy, that, starting in the late 60s and early 70s, and more and more with each decade that followed, the American people had ‘waked up’ to the fact that their leaders had fallen into a trap of constantly resorting to war violence to solve geopolitical problems until, by 9/11/2001 and Bush II’s wrongheaded invasion of Iraq in reaction to it, ‘every earthling student of geopolitics’ had grasped that the USA had become ‘empire-creating, warmongering and bullying’ in its dealings with other countries; and younger generations were smoking weed to get relief from the shame, the frustration, and even some fear of immanent large-scale retaliation against the USA. They asked the Dr., via Sammy, if this explained the huge pot leaf in his ‘White House collage’, and the Dr. wrote back in an email which Sammy printed out and copied for them, that:

“Yes! I left that out of my explanation, to see if you could figure it out! And you did! And I am proud of you.”

And so, as a reward for their good work, the Dr. sent Sammy’s reading club a ‘long letter’ which went viral and was quoted on global TV news channels such as ‘International CNN’, ‘Fox’ and ‘BBC International’ in late 2013, after it was published online and read in two hundred countries (just before the present work reached publication). All because Sammy’s students and their friends and reading club affiliates everywhere had loaded it onto facebook pages and pushed it down the line.

Dr. Lorenzo’s Thanksgiving 2013

‘Long Letter’ to Sammy’s High-Schoolers

on:

Friendship  with  Global  Neighbors

Salutations to some of the best mj lorenzo pundits ever! It’s ‘sweet’ to have company on a big endeavor. I hope to see you in Española. Or you are welcome here in Denver while I am here. (I’m not sure where I am going next – or when.)

Thank you for your interest in my book, ‘Mrs. Nixon’s Legs’, and in its story’s significance, including the importance of presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and the lives of Fred Waring, Bill Blackburn, and Betty Ann McCall.

When I heard of your bewilderment, it made me wonder too about a pot leaf as big as a country, and what it might have to do with an axe.

Until I remembered some ways in which a pot leaf might be thought of as dwarfing or eating a country, and some other ways in which the collage may be understood, ways which I will number as I go along.

(1)  Having lived through several of Mexico’s cartel wars between 2000 and 2013, right in Mexico where they were happening, AND JUST BARELY SURVIVED, has taught me how grave the situation is for us here in the states, with respect to those wars next door. As most of you probably understand, the Mexican mafia wars are all about the trafficking of pot, coke, speed and heroin, and who should enjoy the wealth gained thereby; and the childish rivalry is so violent and crazily destructive at times that almost no one benefits. Unfortunately, I am more convinced than ever that both countries MUST QUICKLY make use of the crucial lesson learned from Prohibition (1920-1933), when the American people tried to solve the very real societal problems caused by alcohol abuse, by making the sale and use of alcohol TOTALLY UNCONSTITUTIONAL.

Just like the people who say today that those four drugs, pot, speed, coke and heroin, are too dangerous to be made legal, alcohol ‘prohibitionists’ too were right that alcohol was a potentially very dangerous drug for both individual and society. I could name many individuals who, during my lifetime and before, or even while under my medical care, lost sanity, physical health or life altogether, as a result of boozing in an unwise and destructive way; and left scars on family and society, as a result.

Jack Kerouac drank himself to death, just to mention one of many writers. My own drunk grandfather roughed up my grandmother and Aunt 'Ottie' (when she was 15) on a Saturday night and he died the next morning falling off a ladder he had placed poorly, because hung over from the night before. I got that straight from my aunt ‘Ottie’ a few years before she died. She and her mother, my grandmother, had hidden the ‘routinely drunk on Saturday nights’ and ‘roughing up the ladies’ parts of the story from EVERYONE in the world, including her own brother, my father, Rev (who was fourteen at the time), because in her day you did not talk about such things. And where I was living in Mexico, the fathers of the Tin Can, Martín, and Mega, all damaged their families permanently by drinking heavily, leaving sorrowful emotional scars on their children to be passed on to subsequent generations. The fathers of Hechizo, Tucán, and Jorge all DIED from drinking unhealthily, leaving their kids sad and hurt and half-orphaned. Hechizo, who wished for a good and real father all his life, turned right around and did the same thing his father and grandfather had done. He left two girls without a father when he died at 24 in a Saturday night small-town Mexican street brawl, partly because of his drunk behavior and language. It is unlikely his mouth and manner would have been so offensive as to get him killed had he not been drinking and drugging the night of the brawl. I knew him well enough to say that. And Fred Waring’s own best lifelong friend and comic sidekick in their joint entertainment career, Poley McClintock, injured himself several times falling off the Waring band risers drunk. He practically ruined concerts and recording sessions by showing up stumbling drunk; he lost his job as Fred’s percussionist at least once due to his drinking; and ‘almost died any number of times’ from internal organ damage caused by heavy drinking, as Bill and Betty Ann described in the first Blackburn interview (as related in my book, Tales of Waring). Every one of us in the USA knows stories like these. Alcohol is a potentially very dangerous substance, there can be no doubt.

But life itself is dangerous to ‘sanity, physical health and life’ itself. And too large a percentage of the population WANTS LIFE, for us to make Living Life ‘unconstitutional’ because it is dangerous! That is why banning alcohol never worked in the USA: because too large a percentage of reasonable people in the USA population WANTED and DEMANDED to have it regardless of risks, even including Fred Waring and Poley McClintock. Even the churchgoing Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians, while drinking illegally themselves, routinely performed for illegal-alcohol-trafficking mafia bosses, Al Capone and Bugs Moran, in hidden Chicago locations and speakeasies. The Pennsylvanians were across the street, in their hotel room and drinking illegally there without a doubt, when a few of them including Poley witnessed a part of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, the day the Capone gang mass-murdered the Bugs Moran gang in a multi-machine-gun fusillade, a story Bill tells in Grandfather’s Tomahawk. This DEMAND for alcohol by reasonable people during Prohibition years led to big-time illegal trafficking on too large a scale for anybody’s good. It led to criminal cartels and gangs and their killing rampages and the other childishly dwarfish-souled, anti-social idiocies of the mob; and meanwhile, the country lost all of the income it could have gained from taxing legal alcohol consumption; and it wasted piles of American tax dollars on anti-cartel policing, all in vain.

The same dynamics apply today to marijuana, cocaine, amphetamine and heroin bans. Too large a percentage of the population DEMANDS these drugs, to ban them successfully and without dire consequences for American and Mexican society. For this reason, even though they are of course as dangerous as alcohol or more dangerous, there is no alternative left: all four must be legalized like alcohol was, and closely controlled by the government, starting with pot, the least potentially harmful of the four. All four should be carefully licensed and monitored, just as the sale and use of alcohol has been since the lifting of the constitutional ban called ‘Prohibition’ in 1933; and probably within fifty years of doing so, just as occurred with the legalization of alcohol sales and use, and the understanding of its abuse, including DUIs, the sale and use of not just pot, but even speed, coke and heroin will have been rationalized and socialized to a tolerable level. That would weaken the Mexican and global cartels considerably, just as it drove America’s Sicilian and Irish mafias of the 1920s and ‘30s out of the illegal-alcohol business, and encouraged them to find legal ways of getting along in the world; which they did, eventually, moving to Las Vegas gambling casinos for the most part, a lawful business.

While living in Mexico, it embarrassed me that destruction of the social fabric there was due partly to my own country’s ignorant and backward insistence on keeping very popular drugs illegal, and also, at the same time, by my own countrymen’s demand for those very same illegal drugs at any cost, even if it destroyed a neighbor country’s moral and social fabric; AND ALL IN THE FACE OF THE LESSON WE SHOULD HAVE LEARNED FROM OUR OWN HISTORY. That is why the ‘War on Drugs’, after forty years of attempting to win it (even while illegal trafficking and its consequences have continued to grow only WORSE, never better), has to be declared a miserable failure AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, just as its older sister, Prohibition, was declared a miserable failure by the voters of so many states, when they voted in 1932 to repeal the Prohibition amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Back then it took the American people only 13 years of useless Prohibition to finally WAKE UP. And yet the expensive and useless ‘war on drugs’ has dragged on for forty years and more! The sooner the world understands these simple social dynamics, the better off everyone will be. Without legalization and careful monitoring of pot, speed, coke and heroin, it is only a matter of time before the nearly-failed-state chaos of Mexico, as caused by its incessant disgusting wars among competing cartels and wars between government and cartels, will spread to our USA cities and towns in some form we can only barely imagine right now, just as the disgusting crime sprees of the Sicilian and Irish mobs burst upon the USA in the 1920s and 30s in ways that shocked the nation, and became part of the collective traumatic memory for that reason.

Is there anyone half-educated in the USA who has not heard of Al Capone and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre?

That is the reason: our joint traumatic memory of it. Our collective PTSD from it.

He who learns nothing from history is ‘doomed’ to repeat it, as they say.  

The ‘War on Drugs’ was devised by President Nixon, and remains in 2013 as blind, foolish and ‘doomed’ to failure – and even as dangerous to our future – as the War on Alcohol, called ‘Prohibition’, was; and as breaking into the Democratic Party headquarters (by Nixon’s men) and covering it up (by Nixon) were; and as Nixon’s privately waged secret unconstitutional war against Cambodian rice farmers was.

So that’s another reason for the enormous leaf, which is not just bigger than the White House, but even so big that it creeps outside the U.S. borders, north and south: it may be seen to represent our ego-driven blind refusal to learn from the mistake of Prohibition and other traumatic U.S. policies, and represent the fact that such ego-driven stubborn refusal will axe us to death; just as Nixon’s ego-driven blind refusal to learn from the mistakes of common criminals axed his Presidency to death.

These are some of the thoughts that were rattling around in my psyche, apparently, about the time I put the ‘White House collage’ together, some less consciously than others, some of which I had ‘forgotten’ or mislaid until you encouraged me to search and come up with them.

Just remember, though, that no matter how many ‘explanations’ for this collage I might find, YOU may find more; because art expresses unconscious as well as conscious contents, and the more abstract and collage-like the art, the more unconscious its contents may be.

And maybe that's why a couple more explanations occurred to me only now..

(2)  With all due respect, considering your time, which I know is precious to busily partying high school students, I would like to add another possible interpretation of the axe in the collage as it relates to pot, a dead ringer of an ‘interpretation’ which you will owe me a nickel for, the next time I see you. And that is, that: the axe (or hatchet) was used with great dexterity and efficiency by Temperance Union ladies (and men) in pre-Prohibition days. Fred Waring’s mother and father were ‘temperance’ ‘nuts’, as Bill Blackburn told the story in Tales of Waring (in the chapter, “He Must Have Been Some Child”). They would take their children to temperance meetings and the whole family would sing the anti-alcohol ‘temperance’ songs. Part of the reason Fred Waring knew music and choral harmony as second-nature, was that he had grown up on his family’s singing these four-part temperance hymns, at home and elsewhere. They would practice the songs at home and perform them in public as a semi-professional family act. And, after singing themselves into a semi-divine trance with temperance hymns and ditties, perhaps with groups like the Waring Family egging them on, women leaders like the famed Carry Nation, along with other women of the Temperance Union and related Prohibitionist groups, would pull on their black rubber boots and pile out of a church and down a street, axes and hatchets in air, into a bar full of boozin’ men, where they would calmly hatchet the big wooden barrels to bits, maybe while preaching for a minute; then would slosh away calmly through the liquor and beer as it flowed over the barroom floor ruined. (Check the 2006 Encarta articles, “Carrie Nation,” “Temperance,” and “Mob Wrecks Gin Joint,” which are illustrative, and even essential for our basic life education in the USA.)

It is easy for me to imagine the scene because, like Fred Waring’s parents, my own parents, Rev and Jo, were conservative Methodist ‘T-totalers’, ‘teetotalers’ meaning that they did not touch a drop of alcohol their whole lives; and they bought property in Ocean City, New Jersey, in the 1940s, NOT in bar-infested Atlantic City on the next offsfhore island to the north, because the smaller island of Ocean City was a ‘dry’ Methodist town where bars were forbidden by law, and to which teetotalers were flocking. And when they rented out that house to beach vacationers, and people left the place littered with beer bottles and liquor puddles, my mother would deplore the sickening stench of stale booze that knocked us over when we – she and I – arrived and opened the door to clean up. I’ve never forgotten that unpleasant smell. And her reaction to it helped brand on my nervous system a moral disgust with excessive, slovenly boozing.

John Calvin, the famous man who tried to ‘reform’ the 'Roman' Church of Western Europe, and on whose understanding of the Bible my parents' way of living was largely based, himself drank a little wine every evening. But disorderly excessive drinking, to every Calvinist generation since the theologian’s day (early to mid 1500s) has been taboo because it is not piously sincere. It brings out an alternate character that is not the usual person. And in John Calvin’s world, the only ‘you’ permitted is the TRUE AND SINCERE PIOUS YOU. Plays, pomp, parades, shenanigans, hair-dos, make-up, fancy dresses, etc., etc., are all insincere. They are pretend, not the real you, and therefore were disallowed in Calvin’s Geneva and have been as well in subsequent copy-cat communities, like Dissenter-and-Puritan New England, Quaker and Pietist Pennsylvania, and Presbyterian back-country America. Pious reverence for the Heavenly Father, which is the sine qua non of Christian living in Calvin’s theology, allows of sincerity alone, and nothing fake. How can you fool the Lord? Trying to do so by changing your personality or putting on airs is irreverent toward God, or, to use Calvin’s word which changed the world: ‘impious’.  

And, as I've tried to show elsewhere in my writing on numerous occasions, after a concerted lifelong effort to understand myself and my people as deeply and rightly as possible, I am firmly convinced our modern USA behavior as a nation can often be traced back to those believers among the super-pious Protestant sects that escaped persecution in Europe and founded and peopled the thirteen colonies. They left a permanent mark on the character of the U.S. American people even down to our generation, via their theologies and founding documents and founders' notions of what kind of nation of people we were trying to be.
 

And so: the pot leaf and axe over the White House can be seen to represent a kind of originally ‘pious’ and well-meaning, but in the end over-zealous and senseless, too-puritanical ‘War on Drugs’ or ‘War on This’ or ‘War on That’, a kind of 'war' and warring attitude which, when put in practice and taken too far, comes to threaten the fabric of society and even friendship among nations.

(3)  And too: the axe hanging suspended over the White House, also very importantly, represents the people around the world, including some Americans, who want to see the USA brought to its knees; and it also represents the way in which many Americans often react to such people..

Americans as individuals, ALL of us, instead of using our military and money to bully to death our would-be America-crushers and America-criticizers, need to get to know these people personally, and well. We should talk and live with them, and even learn to like them (though not all of the things they do); for, in a fragile, ideology-crazed, nuclear-powder-keg-gy world, the strong-arm approach to ANYTHING is extremely dangerous in the short term; and is just as doomed in the long run as the Roman OR ANY OTHER Empire’s attempt to dominate the planet; just as totalitarian Nazi and Soviet attempts to dominate the planet were doomed from the outset. For, most of humanity wants nothing but democracy these days, having had a good and substantial taste of it by now.

And bullying is anything but democratic. It is, in truth, the undemocratic laying of the will of one party upon the back of another, just as ‘Taxation without Representation’ was the undemocratic laying of the will of the English crown upon the back of the American colonies, without offering colonial America the slightest representation in their own English Parliament; and just as American slavery was the undemocratic laying of the will of American slave-owners upon the backs of the African slaves they ‘owned’, in order to get rich quick using their free bullied slave labor, without offering them a say in the matter, ever; or even recompense: just a see-through wood plank pickaninny shack with a leaky tarpaper roof, and some dusty grits to eat, and some rags to wear; and some several lovely stripes to be tattooed on their backs, permanently by a whip, if they mentioned the barest ‘But-what-about-meee???!!’.

The axe, therefore, represents even those ‘very patriotic’ Americans – or so they deem themselves, and so they may appear to be, at first, like Nixon (and other presidents from time to time) – who want to use American power to accomplish whatever they want around the world and at home, whenever they want it, whether by stealing, by breaking and entering, by unconstitutional use of military might, by illegal spying and subterfuge, or by dirty economic manipulation, so as to ‘KEEP AMERICA FIRST’; an egotistical, even sociopathic approach to the planet which could easily be understood by any thinking person as not only anti-democratic, but even anti-human-rights, i.e., contrary to the most basic guiding principles of the American constitution and the ideals on which our country was founded:

So wrote Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. And he was right, as we agree. Very few people have contested the rightness of those words: if ‘any form of government’ does not serve just ends, the people suffering under it can change it, ‘alter or abolish’ it and form a new government.

President Eisenhower even expanded the notion that ‘all humans are equal’ to mean that ‘all nations are equal’, or, more specifically, that we, the USA, should treat other nations as ‘our equals’: “....This world of ours... must... be... a proud confederation... of equals,” is how he put it in his Farewell Address to the American people televised live in January, 1961, just as Kennedy was taking office.   

Tell me! How can anyone argue that THAT INFAMOUS LITTLE JUNTA of George Bush the Younger’s, his infamous ‘neo-cons’, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, when they invaded Iraq in America’s name, and using American military, with the permission of Congress whom they had DUPED (by telling conservative Republican leader Dick Armey behind closed doors that the Iraqis had developed ‘NUCLEAR SUITCASE BOMBS!’, a bald lie), had ‘derived’ their ‘just powers’ from the ‘consent’ of the Iraqi people to ‘govern’ them in this bullying ‘Form’? More likely it will forever be comprehended that Bush II’s military-invasion approach to ‘governing’ Iraq, his invasion of their country in order to ‘govern’ them, his ‘Form of Government’, that is, as Jefferson put it: his way of ‘governing’ the Iraqis immediately ‘became destructive of these ends’, namely the ends of ‘Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness’. ‘Life’: because American troops and bombing killed so many Iraqis, and our war-caused destruction of their infrastructure, their resulting inability to access water, food and energy, killed so many thousands more. ‘Liberty’: because the Iraqis were being dominated by a foreign power, YOU AND ME, without their consent, not ruled by their own leader or leaders. And ‘Happiness’: because nearly every Iraqi who has ever been asked about this invasion, after the fact, has expressed bitter unhappiness about the American invasion and the RUINATION of their comparatively happy previous daily life which our invasion then caused: all in the name of ‘finding weapons of mass destruction’, which never existed, and in the name of eventually ‘setting up a democratic government’ in Iraq, when the people were crying for electricity and water above all else. Was it morally right to force one’s way in, from outside, FOR WHATEVER REASON, STATED OR HIDDEN, and rob people of their ‘unalianable rights’? It was a cynical contradiction in terms.

When the French helped us win the American Revolution we were a weak and infant nation like Iraq was when Bush II invaded it in our name to ‘help’ them; and yet the French, with their greater experience of nation-building, did not just invade and force their bullying will on us. They treated us as equals and consulted in private with ALL of the highest brass of the American revolution, and their every involvement had the stamp of approval of our newborn nation’s congress.

The American Revolution was in truth a civil war too, just like the many conflicts we stick our noses in around the globe today, just as Iraq was experiencing when Bush II invaded it in our name; for there were many ‘loyalists’ in America who wanted the colonies to remain ‘loyal’ British colonies. But American rebel forces from all thirteen colonies pulled together and their leaders declared independence from Britain. It was a fait accompli, and now the newly declared independent nation had to defend itself against those, including the British crown and the American ‘loyalists’ who sided with the crown, who questioned its right to have done such a cocky thing. And when the French, who hated the English, sided with our rebels during the civil war that ensued, called the ‘American Revolution’, and when they entered our colonies with troops to help those rebels, they did so NOT FORCEFULLY, but with the full backing of all of the Independence leaders from north to south, from Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson to Massachusetts’ John Adams to Pennsylvania’s Benjamin Franklin.

When a French captain, the Marquis de Lafayette, came to Philadelphia and respectfully offered his services to the colonies in the full light of day, he was made a major general in George Washington’s ‘Continental’ army ‘by special resolution of Congress’, as Encarta puts it, and served at the side of Washington the first year. Lafayette then went to France and came back with naval and land forces. And at the end of the war while a French naval blockade prevented British escape, effectively trapping them on land, Lafayette led a land force of several thousand Frenchmen who fought alongside ten thousand or so American revolutionaries to help bring down the British army fully and finally, all of this with the approval of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, who were eminent statesmen and the most prominent leaders from every one of the 13 former colonies, which were now ‘states’ of the United States. (See Microsoft Encarta articles, “Marquis de Lafayette,” “American Revolution,” and “Siege of Yorktown.”)

No such consensus of Iraqi leaders EVER welcomed, sanctioned, monitored or channeled our invasion of their country, nothing even close.

It has been – and will continue to be – understood, that WE, in the United States of America – in (1) attempting to ‘govern’ and police the planet by war and subterfuge; by (2) replacing heads of state and governments in other countries at will via killer USA CIA operatives; by (3) killing powerful leaders in other countries by using drones; by (4) supporting with money and military power friendly dictators who are anti-democratic; by (5) entering by ground and air and taking over, as in Iraq; by (6) financing guerrilla wars, as in Latin America; and by (7) doing all of this usually without the full democratic permission of those countries to be so ‘governed’ – VIOLATE THE PRINCIPLES OF OUR OWN FOUNDING DOCUMENTS, including the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. All over the world we are considered imperialist hypocrites, as I know from talking to my young friends in Mexico and Colombia, none of them hardened ideologues, just average ‘developing-world’ kids.

By OVER-use of American power, certain people among us who consider themselves exceedingly patriotic in the best sense could be seen to be actually spelling the ‘doom’ of America, or something close to it. And so, the hymn-singing axe over the White House ALSO represents those admittedly very patriotic people; especially since the handle sings “Bless this House.” While singing love songs to God and Country, certain military-wielding Americans among us are actually more likely to axe the country to chips of beer-barrel tinder, than to render it lovelier and more durable.

I am sure that such notions, even if unconsciously, must have helped generate the composition of the collage.

During my twelve and a half years living in Mexico I have observed a trend toward more and more anti-Americanism. During my whole LIFETIME, in fact, the trend has been slow but constant, not so noticeable when in the USA, but mostly observable and directly experienced whenever I leave the country. In 1965 when I first traveled in Europe, my travel buddy and I were embraced and practically idolized by Europeans wherever we went, for we had just saved them (twenty years before) from German warmongering and dehumanized tyrannical totalitarianism. By 1998 when I traveled to Europe with my sister, Europeans treated us not so meanly, nor so affectionately, but more or less indifferently. And by 2001-2013, when I lived in Mexico, the initial delight of the Mexicans over the presence of Americans gradually gave way to a kind of sour lack of welcoming, as the USA increasingly used its power around the globe to bully other countries and ‘govern’ and police them from afar, by direct force and by a thousand indirect and devious methods. Bush Jr.’s invasion of Iraq especially damaged our fragile friendship with Mexico. None of my young Mexican friends in Mexico liked it. Some even lionized Osama Bin Laden. Bridges over highways throughout the state of Michoacán, where I lived, were painted “BUSH FUERA DE IRAQ.” BUSH GET OUT OF IRAQ!

Living in Mexico ALWAYS WITH MEXICANS, and never with Americans, forced me to think about these things more than I might have, had I retired in the states; or in a colony of American expats in Mexico, like Ajijic or San Miguel. And some of what I learned seems to have made its way into this collage.

By constantly bullying our neighbor nations around the globe in one subtle or obvious way after another, we are more likely to spell our doom. If you want a healthy and happy and peaceful neighborhood you can’t bully the neighbors on your street, right? Just because you have access to great power, you can’t threaten them with it. You have to make an effort to get to know the people on your block as equals, and personally, and well, and even learn to like them, no matter how hard it may feel at first; and then you must find out what THEY want from your friendship, not just what YOU want; otherwise, eventually, they will be certain to gang up on you and retaliate when you are sleeping in your bed at night. That’s why President Kennedy, though he may have made a certain few major mistakes, when he devised the Peace Corps had a magnificent and critical idea; because in such a ‘Peace Corps’, real individual caring Americans of all ages could learn about a given country in training camps and then go and live in their assigned country down on the ground with live earthy people of that country, with some educated knowledge of the people, their language and religion, and with the publicly stated true and authentically ingenuous aims of (1) helping them in any small but meaningful way that might be found; and of (2) getting to know them personally very well ON THEIR OWN TURF (which is essential: on their own turf); and (3) learning to like them no matter how hard it might seem at first. This notion that we can send our military to Afghanistan or ANY country IN MILITARY UNIFORM WITH TANKS AND BOMBS AND HIGH CALIBER AUTOMATIC WEAPONS AND NUCLEAR WARSHIPS AND MISSILES ALL READY TO FIRE ON THEM FROM NEARBY AT A SECOND’S NOTICE and call it a ‘peace’ mission; or that we can send money, men and matériel for destroying the pot, coca and poppy crops our dirt-poor neighbors in other countries raise and sell to house and feed the families they love, and call destroying their livelihood ‘foreign aid’; and that meanwhile, we can still expect to win respect, devotion, and good will points from them, just by trying to be nice to the people that our uniformed soldiers occasionally run into in those countries; is absurd, and even dangerously ignorant! People in other countries are actually FAR more street-wise than we are, all too often, unfortunately for us. Street-wise people are hip to hypocricy in their neighbors.

Right in the little neighborhood where you live, would your neighbor consider it a friendly, friendship-building act? If you called your uniformed and heavily armed police to enter their yard and sit and stay there, to ‘protect’ them and ‘be nice’ to them, and ‘keep them from harming themselves’???!!! Would you want your neighbor to do that to – (or ‘for’) – you?

The French never pulled such a trick on us! When our Revolution was over, and we had won, they went home! And when Lafayette returned to America a few years later for a visit, he was given a ‘hero’s welcome’.

When was the last time Americans got a ‘hero’s welcome’ anywhere but in America?

Wasn’t it when we got to Paris in August of 1944????????? Seventy years ago!

And we have been in scores of confrontations since then, all over the globe, with plenty of opportunities to have received a ‘hero’s welcome’ if the people had felt we deserved one.

Usually people recognize a real hero when they see one. It’s an instinctual reaction. The Parisian women climbed up on the tanks and trucks with flowers and champagne and kissed our soldiers when we liberated Paris from the Nazis. They wined and dined and bedded our boys for days.

Occasionally it might be necessary to enter another country by force to defend ourselves or our allies, I admit. And we might not always be fully appreciated. But my argument is that we are resorting to the old dog tricks of invasion and gross violence ever more frequently, and in some cases, with execrable judgment and deplorable brute insensitivity.

So: it is more Peace Corps that we need, not more WAR Corps.

If we only knew people better, we would be less likely to make bumbling mistakes in dealing with them.

It’s not just radical extremist Muslims who are tired of American neo-imperialism.

After 400 years living next door to our immediate neighbors to the south, the Mexicans, we still do not ‘know the people on our block’, at all, let alone ‘well’, or ‘on their own turf’; or think of them as ‘equals’; nor do we particularly ‘like’ them, either, ‘despite how hard it may seem at first’; or care ‘what THEY want from the friendship’. To name one thing out of many, again and again our immediate neighbors on the south side have BEGGED us to PLEASE stop the heavy illegal flow of ARMS from our yard to theirs, from the USA to Mexico, where they immediately fall into the hands of dangerously violent cartels, who use them to weaken the Mexican federal and state governments and create more social Banana-Republic havoc. We have not raised the barest tiny fifth finger to help them in the way they have asked. Instead, we’ve bought them MORE arms to fight THOSE arms; and demanded that they do us another thousand favors; OR ELSE we will not even do that much to help.

Yet: during our Civil War when we needed heroin and morphine for wounded soldiers, they were RIGHT THERE! Immediately! They did it! Mexicans grew poppies in Mexico and produced narcotics for our Civil War doctors and nurses to give to our soldiers who were in severe pain.

And they’ve tried to exterminate their cartels at our request. And they once let us use Mexican territory as a remote base from which to fight the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. They’ve done this and they’ve done that, and always with a smile, for they are life-loving and death-defying, and they love to party with anyone who comes along. And yet we have done nothing to stop the illegal flow of arms from our country to theirs.

If termites from your property invade your neighbor’s and weaken his house again and again, and he constantly calls the exterminator and asks you to do the same, but you do nothing again and again, are you a good neighbor?

Mexicans are big partiers, it’s true. But they also love revenge.

Native Americans of the San Juan Pueblo, ancestors of some of you in Sammy’s reading club, drove out the Mexicans once upon a time. They fled from the Rio Grande Valley. But when they came back decades later, they came back with a vengeance.

We are not good neighbors of Mexico, or other countries either, and it will come back and bite us. The axe in the ‘White House collage’ tells us that. We’ll send them our military in emergencies, or blankets after disasters. But when they ask for something specific, we keep doing what we’re used to doing, and what makes us feel good at the moment, and ignore their desperate specific request.

I could go on and on, but I hope you see the point by now.

I’ll just try a few last special ‘shock and awe’ rhetorical guns to show you what OVERKILL is, and to zap the point home for good, making it lodge in your brutalized and harangued brainstems forever, hopefully.

(4)  The hymn-singing axe hanging suspended over the White House is our extremist-Calvinist Puritanical American over-reaction to problems. The temperance ladies axed beer barrels. The War on Drugs axes (and burns) pot crops. And the USA’s military-industrial complex axes so-called ‘undemocratic’ and ‘dangerous’ trends inside the borders of other nations. But all of these are over-reactions to problems that could and should be settled in more reasonable, respectable, respectful, civilized and patient ways.

The axe represents the idea of using surgery to solve a medical problem.

A medical problem like an ulcer, for example, should be more rightly treated medically (with medication, proper diet, reduction of stress, proper exercise, etc., etc.), not surgically; but some doctors will want to skip all that and just cut the ulcer and part of your guts out of you to solve the problem QUICK. Standard medical practice considers such an approach, without a fair try of medication, diet and stress-reduction first, ‘injudicious’ and ‘impulsive’; ‘intemperate’; and ‘immoderate’; and a doctor can be sued for it. It’s like amputating a limb that can be saved. Surgical solutions are almost always riskier procedures for the patient’s life and well-being than medical solutions. You might get a tumor out faster by cutting it out with a sharp instrument, but if anything goes wrong, surgery can kill a patient sooner than a medical approach would. So FIRST, you always try the lesser intervention first, the medical approach, the internist’s recommendation; and only if this fails, do you think about surgery. Following this guideline, you cannot be sued. Because you have stuck to your Hippocratic promise, the oath you took when you got your medical degree: ‘ABOVE ALL ELSE, DO NOT HARM THE PATIENT’.

We use the surgical approach when we lock up a pot possessor in prison for two years instead of sending him to drug rehab for six months or a year. Either approach costs taxpayer dollars. But instead of taking a moderate approach and trying to treat him with rehab, we get puritanical and cut him out of our society with a judge’s knife-like behest.

This American axe-like approach to substances and other problems goes back to the days of Calvin’s Geneva, when that otherwise brilliant theologician who ran the town usually perfectly cleverly, John Calvin, would sometimes EXILE people from Geneva for not complying with the town’s new strict Protestant rules and norms, which were difficult at first for many. BUT: those difficult individuals just went to Lyon or other European towns and caused problems there. That was why, in one case, Calvin even went so far as to BURN AT THE STAKE a man who committed the error of coming back to Geneva and criticizing Calvin’s style of thinking and governance all over again. Killing the man solved the problem, in a way; but it caused a bigger problem of  hurting poor John Calvin’s reputation forever, and that of his Calvinist followers, forever. Critics mocked him and called him ‘the Protestant POPE’, or ‘the Pope of Geneva’, which was apt. Because Calvin’s chief and number one complaint about the papacy, from day one and forever and ever in his preaching, letters and written ‘Institutes’, or rules for Christian living, was that above all else we owed our God piety, and the Papacy, in its behavior, had become ‘impious’. And practically everyone agreed, including even some popes!

And so, Calvin had lost the moral advantage he had struggled so hard to gain.

‘Piety’ he had defined as loving God and respecting His commandments, just as filial piety in a household meant loving your parents and respecting their wishes.

And he had tried to set up Geneva as a pious town.

But what was the sixth commandment that Moses received from God on the mountaintop? ‘Thou shalt not kill’! And to Calvin’s mind, all of the New Testament, everything Jesus did, and all of Calvin’s theological understanding of God and Christ and Christian living, ALL were erected on the foundation of the Old Testament, especially on ancient Hebrew sacred law (and the prophets and psalms); and, ABOVE ALL ELSE, on the Ten Commandments. The Bible was a continuum of God’s love and guidance. Correct Christianity, for Calvin, ‘reformed’ or ‘protestant’ Christianity, the kind of religio he taught in Geneva and in his ‘Institutes’, was nothing more than True Judaism in its Fulfilled Form: the Law and the Prophets fulfilled in the Jewish ‘Messiah’, who on God’s behalf forgave human imperfection, including that of the man Calvin burnt at the stake; and even of Calvin himself; if only the two humbly begged His forgiveness.

Poor John Calvin had accidentally axed his own self and his Protestant cause in the shin! ‘Hopefully not irreparably’, as he must have said to himself. He had denied an imperfect fellow human an opportunity to experience God’s heart-cleaning forgiveness.

He’d become a hypocrite. Impious. And his critics had a field day with it.

Killing people was not ‘pious’, said even Calvin himself, because it broke one of the Ten Commandments; and we agree, because killing fellow humans shows little piety and respect for the God who went to the trouble to create life and people ‘in His own image’. If one of God’s human creatures is threatening the lives of your children right now with a weapon, well then maybe you can shoot that someone in the arm or leg, if you have to, in order to keep your children or self from being gravely harmed.

BUT: all too often these days in the United States of America, by trying to solve our problems with a great big axe we end up axing ourselves in the shin. By over-reacting, or by acting impulsively, without patience and moderation, and by using too big and powerful a weapon, one that causes too much ‘collateral damage’ of all kinds, physical and moral, we lose the moral advantage, WHICH IS WORTH TRILLIONS.

When we declared our Independence and chased the Brits out, we stopped with that, once we had succeeded. We remained moderate. Had we chased them across the ocean and tried to kill their king and leaders, that would have been immoderate. It would have been the ‘axe’ approach. But as it was, every nation on the planet (including many British) admired and respected us after our ‘Revolution’. We gained the moral advantage and maintained it. And we then held it for almost two centuries and were held in high esteem as a people right up until the Vietnam War, which is when we first began to lose the ‘moral advantage’.

Yes, Vietnam.

After we won the Second World War, the Five-Star ‘Supreme Commander’, Ike, was ordered to stay in Europe and rebuild the continent which his and everybody else’s warring had destroyed. He led the effort not like a typical victorious army general, though, but instead, and revealing a new kind of Ike, he led according to the pacifist Mennonite Pietist-Protestant moral example instilled in him by pacifist parents and grandparents, the ancient early-Christian idea, taught by Christ himself, of ‘giving water to the thirsty’. Following Ike’s moral lead, we treated our defeated ‘subject’ peoples with great moderation and commiseration, admired by everyone. The Russians raped and pillaged, literally. They locked their conquered countries’ borders, and imposed tyrannical rule, putting people in concentration camps who complained; but we did not. Instead, we REBUILT the countries we had bombed and conquered, and tried to steer them in a democratic direction, letting them elect their own leaders and govern themselves. We even invested our money in their businesses.

Ike DEMANDED the French forgive the Germans and unite with them in a UNITED EUROPE. All Europe reacted in horror! But it worked, partly because we STILL had so many tons of moral advantage. We had won the European war clean and square. Ike was idolized by almost every general he defeated, and by every people and nation. We inspired devotion in our new ‘subjects’. We were believable. We had moral fiber and ‘credit’. We were still respect-worthy. Because, as all could see, we were CONSTANTLY doing ‘the right thing’.

But when it came to Vietnam, twenty years later, we goofed. It was not ‘the right thing’ and we lost international respect and kept going downhill from there.

Moral advantage in war and peace is like a highly emotional bank’s credit rating. Each little infraction weakens your credit rating far more than you could ever think ‘fair’, or ‘rationally warranted’, until suddenly and all at once you have no credit whatsoever. No moral advantage at all. But, on the other hand, every time you ‘do the right thing’, your credit rating zooms skyward, apparently also a bit irrationally.

During the years that I was practicing medicine successfully and making decent money, one credit card of mine, MBNA, to my amazement, raised me gradually, month by month, until it got me up to a credit limit of $65,000 (!) and kept me there for years; not because I borrowed much or often, but because, of whatever little I did borrow, I always repaid every dime within a month. In fact, I seldom borrowed more than fifty bucks in a month on the card, and yet because of my consistent debt-hating behavior, they kept me at $65,000 credit any time I wanted it, even if I should suddenly want all of it at once! 65,000 whole dollars! That’s what I call ‘having moral advantage’.

But, as for the USA these days: recently, unfortunately, by our immoderate impatient intemperance in war and peace, we have lost more and more of our credit; our believability; our moral advantage; our trustworthiness.

And thus the increase in anti-Americanism around the globe.

Thanks for keeping the conversation going on my favorite subject: how to stave off self-extermination of the human race. And I wish each of you tremendous success in every little thing. You are lucky to have Sammy Martinez right there at your side, day in and day out, and year after year, 34/7/365/even to eternity! Use him! Get every lick of talent and wisdom out of him you can. Change your reading club meetings to weekly, not monthly! Don’t let him off easy! He loves the challenge like I do.

Happy Thanksgiving!   –   11/28/13   –   from your friend