Presumably it was either Fox News or someone at Hillary Clinton's campaign who only just discovered that many of the sermons from Jeremiah Wright, the pastor who converted Barack Obama from atheism to Christianity were video recorded and are available online. Having seen them, they want everybody to see them, because it is 100% clear to them that the man was insane. They also take it for granted that when you hear what the man had to say, you'll also conclude that the man was insane. And, in fact, judging by Friday's news cycle, they were right about this; even Barack Obama himself has claimed that he strongly condemns some of Pastor Wright's statements, and did the rounds of every major news analysis show Friday night to make sure that everybody knows that he doesn't agree with what's on those clips.

I watched a bunch of those clips.

Jeremiah Wright is not insane.

He does, however, know a lot of things that fall under one of the main categories of Forbidden Lore: your own country's historical misdeeds. And by the public's standards, repeated exposure to Forbidden Lore has driven him "insane." As a matter of fact, I've heard nothing so far from pastor Wright that I haven't said myself. Most of it, in this blog. If you have been reading this blog for a long time and paying attention, you should be able to defend every single one of them. None of the history that pastor Wright talked about in those video clips, or that I've talked about in this blog, is particularly secret. The parts that once were, those secrets got "blown" at least a decade ago. Nor is he in any legal trouble for saying them, nor I for writing them, and neither one of us are going to end up in Guantanamo Bay for calling them to your attention. No, what makes these things "forbidden lore" is that they're the kind of things you think, mistakenly, that your newspaper, your TV news shows, your history teacher, and so forth would have told you about if they were true. So they must not be true.

That all those people would have "conspired" to keep you in the dark about history that you really ought to know about if it were true seems implausible to you. And if it were an overt secretive conspiracy involving all the people who ought to have told you these things and didn't, yes, it would be a logically impossible conspiracy. Some people do get obsessed with trying to figure out how such a conspiracy could have really worked, come to really foolish false conclusions, and actually make themselves not just socially insane but actually clinically insane, paranoid psychotic, looking for evidence of the vast conspiracy that made so many people lie to them. But no actual conspiracy is needed, not when everybody in America who counts as "sane" shares one important common interest: they want you to be proud of your country, and they think that means that you have to be proud of everything America has ever done or else you won't be. So if there is anything they know that they know would make you ashamed of your country if you knew about it, they mostly won't tell you. The reason that none of this stuff stays secret is that there still are journalists who merit the name, in America and elsewhere, who think that you can still be proud of America and what it stands for but you need to know this stuff. All of it's seen print, at least once. But the public, who just plain don't want to know it (there's that "forbidden lore" angle again), stayed away in droves, and those who accidentally heard it forgot it as fast as possible, so that they can stay "sane."

One more thing about this caught my attention. Here's one of the things that Senator Obama said about this in his appearance on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Friday night. (If you're looking at the video clip on the Countdown website, which thanks to MSNBC's crappy web design I can't link directly to, it starts at roughly the 4:40 mark, to about the 5:25 mark.)

Now, one thing that I do hope to do, is, to use some of these issues to talk more fully about the question of race in our society. Because part of what we're seeing here is, Reverend Wright represents a generation that came of age in the '60s. He is an African-American man who, because of his life experience, continues to have a lot of anger and and frustration, and will express that in ways that are very different from me and my generation, partly because I benefited from the struggles of that early generation. And so part of what we're seeing here is a transition from the past to the future. And I hope that our politics represent that future.

You know that argument that came up in black America, egged on by right wingers, over whether or not Barack Obama is "really black enough" to represent black America? If Barack Obama thinks that the only black men in America who grew up being called niggers were the ones who grew up in the 60s? If Barack Obama thinks that the only black men who get pulled over for Driving While Black and get patted down by police everywhere they go are those who grew up in the 60s? Then maybe he did grow up in a privileged (and largely outside-the-US) environment. Maybe the man really does need a wakeup call. Maybe he doesn't need to be repudiating Jeremiah Wright. Maybe Jeremiah Wright needs to be repudiating Barack Obama. Maybe Reverend Jeremiah Wright has more call to be ashamed of Barack Obama than Barack Obama has to be ashamed of Reverend Wright.

Because unless he's pandering to white ignoramuses who think that pastor Wright is "obviously insane" to blame the CIA's illegal war in Nicaragua for the crack cocaine epidemic, that he's "obviously insane" to think that the US's own CIA were the ones who originally trained al Qaeda and the Taliban in terrorism and sponsored their terrorist attacks against the then-pro-Soviet government in Afghanistan, that pastor Wright is "obviously insane" to think that Hillary Clinton can't fully understand the indignity of being called a nigger the whole time you're growing up or the indignity of being constantly pulled over and searched by police when you're doing nothing wrong because those things have never happened to her, that pastor Wright is "obviously insane" to think that America will be judged harshly by God for explicitly racist drug war policies, unless the people who think those things are people that Obama is dishonestly pandering to in order to allay their bigoted fears? Then that man needs a good, hard wake-up call. Because if he agrees with white ignoramuses and bigots that those ideas are all "crazy" and that only "crazy people" are angry over them, then I'm not ashamed of Obama for what his pastor preached, I'm ashamed of him for not believing it when he was told.

(Damn it, I didn't set out to be famous for writing about race. Telling the truth about race in America is turning out to be my version of taping bacon to the cat. One of the things that's driving up my in-bound link count lately is the last set of things I wrote about race in America. And in every single blog that linked to it, the commenters on those blogs have entirely justifiably pointed out that none of what I'm saying about race is new, or original, or even particularly controversial to professional historians. It saddens me that so many people think it is. To quote a line from one of my all-time favorite comic book limited series, Steve Darnall and Alex Ross's U.S., when a dilapidated and confused Uncle Sam asks a symbol of black America why he's tormenting him with memories of American slavery and racism, "Because you need to know! That's why! Because you have a tendency to forget these things.")

OK, some of you who are new to the blog may not realize this, and yesterday's entry may have come as an unwelcome surprise to you. See that "Warning: Sanity Hazard: Contains Forbidden Lore" icon? I mean it. I in fact have another icon that I use for when I'm being playful and/or referring to fictional "forbidden lore." When I post something that I know that some people on the Internet just plain do not want to know, and that others may not want to read before breakfast or let their kids see, I use this icon. And the subject of today's entries (and probably tomorrow's, or if not then one not long after that) is one that two centuries' worth of American teachers, editors, parents' groups, politicians, and even professional historians, think that you have no business being interested in. "Boost, don't knock." When studied beyond what they tell you in high school, American history can be a very depressing subject, one that can make it hard for you to remember that other countries have done as bad, and usually worse. That's one reason you aren't supposed to want to know this stuff; it might make you less likely to work for and fight for your country, when needed. Another reason is that most people think that none of this stuff is anything you can do anything about anyway, so why get yourself depressed over nothing? As you might guess, I usually disagree with this analysis.

That being said, if you're thinking of using what I've written here to prove how morally superior the people are where you live, compared to the multi-generational evil of us St. Louisans? You're a fool. Your home town is no better. You just don't know.

Local reporters are doing their job amazingly well, and so the details continue to come out about Cookie Thornton's suicide terrorist attack on the Kirkwood City Hall continue to come out at a very encouraging rate. See St. Louis Post-Dispatch: "Anatomy of a Rampage" (PDF), "Charles Thornton: The legal battles." Former Riverfront Times reporter Randall Roberts, "My Conversation with Charles 'Cookie' Thornton." And one that says about half of what I intend to say when I cover this in more depth tomorrow or the next day, Riverfront Times STLog: "Charles 'Cookie' Thornton: Meacham Park Boils Over." So I think this is the most important thing I can add to the conversation at this point: I can put it in the broader context of history, of US history, Kirkwood history, and Meacham Park history. Then, while we wait to see exactly when Cookie Thornton opened his paving business, and wait to hear why the city singled him out for enforcement of an ordinance that is not enforced against almost any other building contractor, and certainly not in so draconian a fashion and with a total refusal to negotiate, you'll understand why even before I heard the word "Kirkwood" attached to this story I knew that someone from Meacham Park had done it.

Kirkwood, Missouri, has several odd historical claims to fame. The oldest of them is the most fascinating one. Kirkwood, Missouri is the world's first intentional "edge city." Like a lot of St. Louis County, it started out its life as a couple of farms and a market, dating back to homesteads first colonized who-knows-when, barely after the Indian Wars had ended in the area. It may not have even had a name; at the time, most Missouri market towns didn't. The city of Kirkwood as we know it happened when a clever railroad engineer named James Kirkwood bought it all up, because he'd figured out a pretty reliable way to get rich. Worked, too. See, here's what James Kirkwood knew: "decent, proper" people all over the world, and in all times, hate big cities. It shows up in sermons from Hesiod's Works and Days to the New England "divines," in folk tales from Scotland to Baghdad, in songs from Homeric odes to World War I era pop music, in dramatic fiction from Aristophanes to film noir. "Everybody knows" that decent, honest, pious, honorable people live on farms. "Everybody knows" that nobody lives in big cities, at least not intentionally, except for corrupt politicians and other thieves, perverted "artists" and other prostitutes, greedy "priests" and other beggars. "Everybody knows" that decent, honest, pious, honorable folk treat the big city as a necessary and dangerous evil, a place to leave for in the morning, do whatever business you have to do, but make absolutely sure that you're safe at home on the farm in the country before nightfall, before the worst of the corruption can infect you.

But in early industrial America, at the beginning of the urbanization, that became logistically dicey. Rich people carved out their own gated enclaves and posted private armies, but the upper middle class and the middle class had nothing. So here's what James Kirkwood did, in 1853: he surveyed the rural area out past the extreme edges of St. Louis, looking for a tiny little farmer's market crossroad. But he needed not just any crossroad; he needed one where the geography was favorable to rail. He wanted a solid-rock ridge line all the way from downtown St. Louis to that intersection, or as near to one as could be found. When he found one, he bought it all up, secured the railroad right of way along that ridge line, and raised the financing to build a rail line out to his newly founded "rural town" of Kirkwood, Missouri. And he marketed the lots there to, and only allowed to move in, the white upper middle class and middle class from St. Louis. That way they not only paid him for their houses, recouping a big chunk of the cost of the rail line, but they paid him every day so that they could ride his train into their jobs in the city, and ride the train back out to their "rural" house, where they kept their families safe from urban perversion and corruption and sickness, being back there in safety themselves by nightfall, or at least by full dark.

It was so obviously brilliant that everybody copied it. Look at a modern-day map of the St. Louis metropolitan area, Missouri side. Come in just a few miles from what is now Interstate 270, to US Highway 67, which is mostly called Lindbergh Boulevard here. Except, not coincidentally, for the stretch of it that is still called Kirkwood Road. What US67, aka Lindbergh, aka Kirkwood Road, is, is the road that used to connect all of those train stations. Every single major suburban town along that stretch of road, from Florissant down to Kirkwood, is centered on one of them. It was an attempt to build one big long ring of lily-white upper middle class and middle class exurbs: no rich people would want to live there, no working class people or poor people or dark-skinned people or (for the longest time) Irish allowed. But none of them was as successful as the first of them, Kirkwood. That's why to this day, the people of Kirkwood cling like mad to that commuter rail station, preserve it at all costs, and keep it as the logo of their community.

Fast forward to 1892. That's when Memphis real estate developer Elzy Meacham, for no reason recorded to history, came up to St. Louis, went out just past Kirkwood, bought up those farms, and founded the all-black settlement of Meacham Park. But it's really not that mysterious. Go look at the article I wrote yesterday about lynching. Now look up the original street names in Meacham Park. It's pretty obvious what Elzy Meacham was thinking. He and his customers were thinking that it would never be safe for black people to live anywhere where the local mayor, and/or the chief of police, and/or the local minister, and/or the municipal judge were white. So he went out to maximum practical business commuting range of what was at the time one of America's farthest west large cities, grabbed some land, and set up a town where black men could raise their families, comfortable in the knowledge that if they built a home, or a farm, or a business, and if they and their families invested money and labor in them, that they would not have it taken away from them by a mob with a noose and various implements of torture, a mob that usually didn't even realize that they were being played by corrupt white officials.

But there was a flaw in that plan, one that may not have been obvious to him. From the country's founding as British colonies in the 1620s up until the year 1888, no African American had ever been given a banking license. Nor were very many given after that. And those African Americans who did get banking licenses have had them yanked away from them, en masse, by corrupt white governments at every opportunity. Without a broad network of black-owned banks, there was no way for an all-black city in the United States to thrive without going hat-in-hand to white banks, and submitting themselves to white city governments and courts. Meacham Park chose to do without. Well, it wasn't entirely a free choice. Nobody in Meacham Park was ever going to get a banking license, and no white bank wants to do business of any kind in an all-black neighborhood. (Still.) Now, it's possible to live without banking. But it's impossible for an economy to thrive without some way for people to pool their savings for investment purposes, for people to take out loans to open or improve businesses, for local craftsmen and businessmen to transfer money to suppliers outside the area and for customers outside the area to transfer money in. So while Kirkwood thrived, Meacham Park stayed, for all practical purposes, trapped in the 1880s. But there are worse fates; they could have been lynched and the survivors run out of the area at gunpoint. And some people are perfectly comfortable with an 1880s standard of living, or else nobody'd still be living in the mountains of Appalachia, the plains of Kansas, or the Louisiana bayou.

Even before Elzy Meacham came to town, the city of St. Louis had been bringing freed slaves up from the rural south to work in St. Louis's factories. But initially, except for the people who bought into Meacham Park, almost none of them were allowed to live on the St. Louis side of the river. They were told that there was no housing available for them at any price on this side of the river, and "encouraged" to settle on the other side of the Eads Bridge, in East St. Louis, Illinois. But that quickly became impractical. Fortunately, James Kirkwood's experiment had accidentally shown the way out of this dilemma. Kirkwood didn't buy into this idea, much, but all of the suburbs north of Kirkwood, the ones that were unsuccessfully trying to copy James Kirkwood's formula, revamped themselves as working class communities. Then the city of St. Louis not-to-gently encouraged the entire working class population of the north half of St. Louis to evacuate to north and northwest county, to make room for all-black tenements. To this very day, if you're black, and you want to live in a neighborhood that happens to be less than 10% black, good luck getting a realtor anywhere near St. Louis to show you a house, or a landlord to admit that there are any apartments for lease. The federal government and private charities have spent thirty years suing realtors and landlords over this, but to this day, St. Louis is near the top of the list of the most segregated cities in America, only barely less segregated than Johannesburg under apartheid. (Reminder: ABC PrimeTime Live's famous and award-winning 1991 news special "True Colors" was shot in St. Louis.)

But population distribution started to change incredibly rapidly, starting when the Supreme Court handed down their famous ruling in the case of Brown v Board of Education, and accelerating like an out of control wildfire after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 put the first real teeth into anti-bigotry law. This set off a wave of mass panic flight, as those all-white working class suburbs were forced to accept black Americans into their neighborhoods and their schools. There's a magic number at which the average American concludes that an area is "all black," around 10%. So as one by one, those neighborhoods passed about 5% to 7% black, each suburb evacuated to the safety of across the county line into what was, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the fastest-growing county in the United States, St. Charles County. Then the federal government got serious about enforcing anti-discrimination law in St. Charles County, which is now up to almost 3% black. And instantly, population growth in St. Charles ground to a halt, and now poor-white-trash Jefferson County is growing as fast as St. Charles County used to be, proving that once they're faced with the prospect of letting more than one black kid into their kid's school, there are thousands of St. Louisans (maybe tens of thousands) who'd rather live in the area that contains about a quarter of the methamphetamine labs in Missouri, maybe around 5% of all the meth labs in the world. They'd rather live next door to a world-famously toxic lead smelter, because they're less worried about what that would do to their property values than to have more than one black family living within half a mile of them.

But almost all of this passed Kirkwood by, thanks to its initial concentration on only allowing in the upper middle and middle class. There simply was no place within Kirkwood city limits to build any affordable housing, and housing turnover in Kirkwood has always been slow. People who grow up in Kirkwood (proper) love it there, with few exceptions. In interviews with TV reporters over the last couple of days, some have gone as far as to compare it to the legendary perfect kingdom of Camelot. Because black America gets its accumulated savings cheated out of it every 20 to 30 years, very few black people could afford to live in Kirkwood, even once the realtors were forced to show them houses there; so few that Kirkwood stayed well over 95% white. And almost all of this passed Meacham Park by, too, even as the rest of the county expanded right around them, because, well, it was Meacham Park: nobody cared about the suburb that time forgot. And that's where things stood, right up until 1990 -- when today's troubles began.

The pieces are falling into place faster than I thought. I'm lacking maybe two pieces of information to put Cookie Thornton's suicide terror attack on the Kirkwood City Hall into perspective. Whether I get those pieces or not, no later than Monday, I'll have something to say about it. But before I do, there's one more piece of non-Kirkwood history that will help you understand it better, and I can make that column a lot more concise and coherent if I don't have to explain it in an aside.

If you studied American history prior to about 2000, even if you studied it at the college level, you were almost certainly taught something wrong, because the truth was one of America's last, best-kept secrets. And it has to do with lynching. You see, if you studied before then, one of the things you were told about lynching was that lynching was usually motivated by anger, by hatred, by exaggerated fear of "impurity," by anger over Reconstruction, by irrational over-reaction to minor black crimes. But then a historian made a lucky find, one that unlocked a whole field of study. A set of records, more or less accidentally compiled, gave us a longer and more comprehensive list of lynchings than we had. A very macabre set of records. It turns out that hundreds of lynchings between roughly 1860 and 1950, some of which we didn't even know had happened, had offered souvenir postcards for sale the next day. And among the very few people who knew that, any more, were a few collectors of those grisly souvenirs.

When one of those collections fell into the hands of a professional historian, it opened up a whole large statistical universe of lynching incidents, each of which came with a location, one or more names, dozens or hundreds of faces that can be identified, and importantly, a date. That made it possible to research not just a few lynchings, but hundreds of them, and to compile statistics on what had happened before and after them. And the terrible, but fascinating, bit of secret history turned out to be the immediate aftermath of over half of those lynchings. Over half of those lynchings turned out to involve black men who owned their own successful farms and/or businesses. And the day after the lynchings, those farms and businesses were sold to white neighbors, in closed auctions, for pennies on the dollar, and the surviving real heirs were run out of town. And in a terrifyingly large number of those cases, historians were able to show one or more of the following facts. The buyer was the person who made the initial accusation against the victim. And the buyer was a relative of one or more of the following: the mayor, the chief of police, the local minister and/or the municipal judge.

I want you to get this through your head, and never forget it. Lynching was not a hate crime. Lynching was an economic crime. In cities all over America, the best kept secret of 80 years' worth of white politicians was that if they wanted to steal a black man's property, they could arrange to have that man murdered, take his property for little or nothing, give it to whoever they wanted to have it, and know with 100% certainty that no police officer would arrest them, no prosecutor would indict, no jury would convict, no judge would sentence.



You've heard me go on and on about the American Dream: the discovery, by 1630s Puritans, that irregardless of any spiritual benefit, if you got as much education as you could afford, stayed out of trouble, worked hard, spent as little as possible on pleasures, and invested that money in three and only three things (a home, a business, and education for your kids) that it would make each generation of your family an entire social class wealthier than the generation before. That you could even have things go wrong, along the way, and if you at least tried to follow that formula, you could be very nearly 100% confident that at the very least, you and your children would get to keep what you have. What I did not clearly enough footnote that with is: "Some exceptions may apply." 80 years worth of black men, in many but not all towns in America, learned that this offer was not extended to them. They learned that if they stayed in school, stayed out of trouble, worked hard, bought and improved a home, started and invested in their own business ... some white politician and his less-successful-than-you businessman friend would come along and steal it. And as likely as not, kill you if you weren't willing to let them have it for whatever pittance they offered you, although the thefts continued long after the killings stop. And the courts and the cops still mostly don't care.

Ever since I learned that, I haven't marveled that so many black men have given up on the American Dream, choosing to instead gamble on insane long-shot professions like music or pro sports, or turning to crime. I've marveled that so many of them haven't.

I'm exhausted from having just read the (moderately redacted) 703 page document that has been described by spies, ever since its original compilation in 1973, as "the CIA's family jewels." You may have heard something about it when George Washington University's "National Security Archive" website first found out they were going to get a copy, and you'll probably hear more about it over the rest of this week. It hit the web on Tuesday, where GWU has dedicated an entire "The CIA's Family Jewels" section of their website, including links where you can read or download the 6-page 1975 summary document and the whole 703-page 1973 original document, both of them high resolution document scans in PDF format. (Warning: that full document weighs in at 27 megabytes.)

The context for the document is that in the very early 1970s, disgruntled CIA employees and even more disgruntled congressmen who'd been briefed by the CIA started leaking word to several newspaper reporters that the CIA had gotten itself involved in some pretty ugly operations, things that even the CIA was ashamed of, especially as related to Vietnam. Under increasing pressure from Congress, 1973's CIA director Schlessinger decided to find out just how much trouble, potentially, the CIA was in. He sent out an order to every department in the CIA saying that he wanted a report, as quickly as possible, on every single thing the CIA had ever done that could even vaguely considered to be illegal. He called the resulting internal document, a 700+ page file, the "family jewels," the thing that must be protected at all cost. Of course it, like every other so-called "secret" the CIA has ever had, leaked as well. 15 years ago, having some practice at doing so, the National Security Archive project filed a Freedom Of Information Act request for the whole thing; the CIA finally gave in, more or less admitted that they had very few real secrets left from what was in that file, and declassified almost the whole thing. What they're saying, basically, that they want you to believe is this: yes, we did a bunch of stuff that was illegal. And we were ashamed of some of it. But almost none of it was any big deal, as you can now see. All of the really crazy stuff you've heard us accused of is stuff that the paranoids made up, trying to figure out what we were hiding, but the truth was much more boring. Here, see how boring it is for yourself.

And much of it is. Although there are a few comedy gems. For example, the following two excerpts from a summary of daily meeting notes, pages 285 and 288:



And as you'll hear presumably off and on all day, the document pretty much confirms, or only barely denies, everything that came out in the Church Committee hearings of 1975 and in half a dozen books by ex-CIA operatives or by people who'd interviewed them over the intervening 30 years. In "the family jewels" various CIA employees told the director that yes, they had tried to use Mafia contacts to assassinate Castro and it hadn't worked. No, they say, we didn't assassinate various other foreign leaders, although some of our informants may have without our help or permission. Yes, Nixon did hire an awful lot of ex-CIA agents for the Watergate affair; yes, one of them, Howard Hunt, did ask the CIA for a lot of technical help in advance, some of which they gave him because they thought Nixon had him working on something else; no, the CIA wasn't behind the Watergate break-in. Yes, there was an Operation Phoenix in Vietnam that killed lots of suspected communists; no, the CIA's own employees weren't involved in it. Yes, the CIA did have a guy named Sidney Gottlieb studying mind-altering drugs and testing them on unwitting subjects; no, they had no idea how out of control he'd gotten before they cut him off. Yes, they absolutely did spy on their own US employees, but only after the FBI told them that the FBI wasn't legally allowed to investigate CIA internal security problems. Yes, they did test some of their spy equipment on random Americans, but that's OK because they weren't paying any attention to what those random Americans were actually saying, just finding out of the equipment could actually hear or photograph them. Yes, they did lend technical assistance to US internal law enforcement agencies, but no, it was never the CIA's own people who did US criminal investigations. And yes, their agents who were undercover did have to carry illegally forged state drivers' licenses and illegally forged credit cards (that they never used as credit cards) to prove who they were, but what were they supposed to do?

One that you're guaranteed to hear a lot about because it's guaranteed to catch the attention of journalists: the CIA admits they spied on journalists, too, but only as a final act of desperation in an attempt to find out which of their own people were illegally distributing classified documents. In particular, when they were losing at least one top secret document every couple of days to reporters from the New York Times and the Washington Post and all attempts to spy on their own employees to figure out who was smuggling them those documents came up blank, the CIA risked spying directly on the reporters who were receiving the top secret documents ... only to find out that who they were really getting them from was people inside Congress and inside the White House who had, themselves, received those documents quite legally. That left the CIA with nothing much that they could do about it, so after about a month they gave up in disgust. (That is, of course, the point at which Nixon set up his infamous "plumber squad" to do what the CIA couldn't do, namely run covert operations inside the US against the leakers. But the "plumbers" turned out to be frankly all too dumb to be running covert operations, so they all became unwantedly famous during the Watergate scandal.)

Oh, and then there's the big one, and it's the really big one, one that relates to a subject I've written about several times since the more recent story broke: the 1967-1973 version of the NSA warrantless wiretapping scandal. Again, none of this comes as new news, but now it's official. In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson asked if the anti-Vietnam-war movement was controlled, or at least infiltrated, by Russian, Cuban, Vietnamese, and/or Chinese spies. In order to find out, the CIA did many things, many of them quite illegal. They assigned an analyst to build a file, then later a punch-card database, of all known American anti-war organizers, a list that came to about 30,000 Americans in a database called HYDRA. They then set up an operation where the overseas phone cables connected to the US in New York, collecting not the actual content of the calls (that would have been beyond their technological capability) but the originating and terminating number at least, of every call to or from 20 cities that were suspected of being bases for Communist spies, including Ottawa, in a database called HT-LINGUAL. They also photographed the address part of every letter sent from the US to any of those countries, transcribing that data into a file called SR-POINTER. They then ran the HYDRA list against the HT-LINGUAL and SR-POINTER lists to get a list of all overseas contacts with US anti-war groups, MH-CHAOS, and forwarded the phone numbers or addresses of those foreign contacts to the CIA field offices in those foreign cities so their agents could spy on those foreigners to determine if any of them were actually Communist agents. They also used that information to find out which American anti-war groups had meetings planned with groups outside the US, or had any other foreign travel planned, and infiltrated CIA agents into as many of those groups as possible as "bait" so that if, while they were overseas, Russian spies tried to recruit anybody from those groups to spy on Americans, the CIA agents would have a chance to infiltrate the resulting Russian spy rings. After several years, the CIA admitted that the program had not only been pretty illegal but pretty stupid, that it had come up completely blank, and after Nixon's first term they canceled it.

There are several potentially important differences between this and the Bush administration's NSA wiretapping scandal, though, that go beyond the fact that the NSA scandal was (for obvious reasons of technological advancement) bigger. One is that the CIA knew, and never pretended otherwise, that if they came up with actionable intelligence about Americans, it was unusable; that they were never going to be able to take any kind of legal action against any American traitors they found this way. The Bush administration wants to use similarly gathered intelligence to prosecute Americans for support of al Qaeda; the CIA had the more modest goal of cutting off Russian-controlled spy rings at the Russian end. But the biggest difference is that while some of those documents use the same implausible interpretation of the law that Bush uses, that it doesn't count as domestic surveillance if one side of the call or one side of the letter exchange isn't inside the US, when their legal experts told them otherwise they stopped pretending it was legal. From then on, they just hoped to not get caught; unlike Bush, they never tried to make the argument that Johnson or Nixon were allowed to authorize this because the President is above the law. Of course, it does have one interesting point of similarity. Because the hypothetical and much-feared Soviet spy rings inside the anti-war movement were just as much of a fictitious bogeyman as the supposed and equally irrationally feared al Qaeda terrorist cells inside the US, they both turned out to be expensive distractions and tremendous wastes of money and of intelligence resources that could perhaps have been put to better use during a losing war.

So, there. Now we know what they were hiding. Yes, it's bad. Yes, probably some people, almost all of whom are now conveniently dead, should probably have been fired or served brief jail terms. But surely, they'll tell you, none of this stuff was all that sinister, now, was it? No bad intent, no truly awful crimes, just little bitty things that various CIA agents felt they had to do to keep the country safe and were trying not to get arrested for. All the rest of that stuff that you hear about from the crazy paranoids? Nothing to see here, so move along.

Don't believe it.

For one thing, there are already existing declassified records that do a much more thorough job of explaining just how abominable the CIA's brainwashing and mind-control drug program MK-ULTRA was than the half-page note in here. If you pay attention, you can also see that they've redacted the entire 16 page report from the Foreign Resources Division (pages 617-633), and that the partially redacted cover memo pretty much admits that everything they did was illegal, embarrassing, or both; presumably that includes the CIA's now famous "Air Opium" program that funded anti-communist operations throughout southeast Asia by selling heroin to American servicemen in Vietnam and then smuggling more heroin back to America. But more importantly, the document itself ends in mid 1973. If the CIA has deniability about previous supposed CIA assassinations, something I think there's reasonable grounds to be dubious about (if nothing else, we know that the document is lying about Operation Phoenix), known CIA operatives have all but admitted to the late 1973 assassination of Salvador Allende, which is after the date of the report. (That's another of those cases where you either believe in the laws of physics or you believe the official reports. According to the official reports, Chilean president Salvador Allende committed suicide, shooting himself 23 times with his own 10-round automatic handgun, presumably pausing twice to reload.) By definition, the 1973 report has nothing about the 1976 act of US-sponsored terrorism in which CIA asset Luis Posada blew up a Cuban airliner, killing 73 civilians. Nothing about the involvement of ex-CIA agents on both sides of the 1980 "October Surprise" act of treasonous collaboration with Iranian Hezbollah. Nothing about Iran/Contra, nothing about the US's completely illegal war against Nicaragua at all, and that was almost entirely a CIA operation.

The message that the CIA is sending by declassifying this document in bulk is that the 1973 congressional pressure was a much-needed wakeup call to an agency that had previously committed minor unintentional foibles because they hadn't paid enough attention to the law, and that they never again did anything illegal. Don't believe them. You could just about use the "family jewels" document dump as the best example in our lifetime of the strategy that Watergate conspirator John Ehrlichman famously called the "modified limited hang out."

In my famously favorite passage from Arthur Machen's influential short story "The Great God Pan," just before the end, one of two amateur investigators has just uncovered the secret of what it was that was driving young, healthy, wealthy, secure young men to commit suicide on three continents, in a manuscript left behind by one of the suicides. After reading only a few words, the partner says, "Take it away, Villiers, never speak of this again. Are you made of stone, man? Why, the dread and horror of death itself, the thoughts of the man who stands in the keen morning air on the black platform, bound, the bell tolling in his ears, and waits for the harsh rattle of the bolt, are as nothing compared to this. I will not read it; I should never sleep again." The original investigator assures him that it is true, but finishes by agreeing with the sentiment: "Oh, Austin, how can it be? How is it that the very sunlight does not turn to blackness before this thing, the hard earth melt and boil beneath such a burden?"

I think that 30 scientists and researchers from a half dozen or more different fields who gathered in rural France in 1990 to check each others' work must have felt something of that same horror when they found that they could not disprove their mutual finding. It was something that none of them wanted to believe. It was a thought that only one of the 30 of them was willing to confront the implications of, and do further research to explore the implications of. And I'm sure that they knew or at least suspected that no matter how important their scientific finding was, they would be vilified for a lifetime if they made society confront this awful truth, and that was a price that they were unwilling to pay. And see, that, to me, is the fascinating thing, even more fascinating than the awful truth itself. On the contrary, almost all of my friends that I've discussed this with since I read the book have agreed with me that, given the weight of the evidence, the awful truth in question is pretty undeniable, is important to know, and (contrary to what some might think) it is something we can learn to live with the knowledge of. If this knowledge becomes widespread, it may and probably will cause some hardship for some innocent people. But the good to society will, I believe, out-weigh those harms. So no, really, the awful truth that I'm about to reveal to you will seem anti-climactic compared to the dread that the scientists who discovered it felt.

After a several year career as one of the second generation of women to do fieldwork in primatology, Sarah Hrdy and her husband decided to have their first child. She was already in the middle of preparations to shift her career from primatology to a subject that would allow her to do her fieldwork closer to home, with fewer long absences from home, and in a more comfortable setting to raise a baby in, namely evolutionary biology, when it occurred to her (as a mother to be) just out of personal interest to study the mothering patterns of the colony of monkeys she was observing. She knew to expect high infant mortality. Primatologists have known for over a hundred years that baby monkeys and baby apes are at extreme risk from any male other than their father. (As are baby humans.) But Hrdy was startled to discover, when she tracked the mothers of new infants carefully, that infants were at almost as much risk of murder from their own mothers as they were from unrelated male adults. This baffled her for several reasons, not least of which that while there had been a great deal of research into infanticide in primates, nobody had ever reported a case of a female primate killing her own offspring except by freakish accident. The other reason it baffled her was that, as an evolutionary biologist, she could make no sense whatsoever as to how evolution could produce individuals that destroyed their own offspring, especially among such slowly reproducing species as primates. So she contacted a few other primatologists studying other colonies of monkeys and asked them to carefully monitor the actions of new mothers ... and to their astonishment, they observed the same thing.

So she gave a preliminary paper on the subject in 1976, suggesting that more research was needed to explain how this behavior could possibly have evolved in primates, only to be interrupted in mid talk by an audience member, a prominent expert in her field. He stood up, tried to stop her from finishing reading her paper, announced that primate females absolutely do not every murder their own children, and that if she had observed a primate colony in which primate females were killing their own children, it could only be because of something she had done to them; she must have committed some horrible breach of experimental ethics that so deranged these monkeys that she had driven them insane enough to do something that no monkey had ever done before. He then stormed out of the talk and went directly to the scientific press to denounce her for whatever it was that she had done to that monkey colony, so it probably is a good thing that she was already planning on changing fields, no?

So she quietly continued her study, working behind the scenes with other researchers while she directed her own studies towards less controversial animals, such as insects. Eventually she discovered something that appalled even her with its simplicity. Not only do mothers sometimes kill their own children, they are almost never insane when they do so. On the contrary, for a mother to murder her own child is an evolutionary adaptation without which our species would not have survived some of the environmental and social disasters of the past. What's more, the actual reasoning behind this is so simple that a straightforward simple equation in four variables is sufficient to provide a reliable estimate of the probability that any particular mother will murder any particular infant: the age of the mother, whether or not this child is the gender that the mother wanted (which, itself, turns out to be easily and universally predicted based on only two variables, the mother's social status and the predicted reliability of the food supply), the child's birth weight (and to a lesser extent other indicators of long-term viability), and her estimate of whether or not attempting to nurture this particular child will only get both her and the child killed. When she took her early estimates for this equation to the 1990 conference, she discovered that epidemiologists studying SIDS, primatologists studying infanticide (following her 1976 tip), historians digging through old records to try to quantify infanticide throughout the ages, criminologists and social psychologists trying to come up with statistical models to predict mother-on-child infanticide, and anthropologists trying to statistically analyze what variables are most consistent with cultures that have high versus low rates of infanticide, had all independently discovered the same equation. And from her viewpoint as an evolutionary biologist, Hrdy demonstrates that any sane, healthy, normal, intelligent mothers who weren't capable of coldly murdering their own infant children almost certainly had no surviving descendants at all to be our ancestors during some of the species-wide threats that have been demonstrated to have happened from the fossil record and from studies of rates of genetic drift.

I mention SIDS. One of the researchers, she says, was an epidemiologist who, in the process of trying to quantify his hunch, initiated a study in which social workers and police very, very intensively interviewed and background checked a long string of crib deaths that had been explained away as unexplained random respiratory failure. It turns out that his equation was able to predict, with high (but not absolute) reliability, which infants had actually been the victims of homicide or malign neglect. If the infant was a boy when the mother wanted a girl or vice versa, if the infant was born weighing less than 8 pounds, or if the mother was in any kind of economic or physical danger if this child survived, then the baby was doomed. His final estimate, from that initial study, was that seventy five percent of all SIDS cases are actually homicides. But, he admitted, just acknowledging this possibility puts us in an awful dilemma. To catch the 3 out of 4 women whose babies suddenly die that were actually murderers, we have to treat all SIDS cases as potential homicides, therefore piling yet more heartbreak and tragedy on the 1 out of 4 who just randomly went through the worst tragedy any family can know, the sudden and unexpected death of a beloved child. Even using the predictive equation to narrow the field of homicide investigations, we'd still be casting a very scarily public accusation of homicide on an uncomfortably large number of grieving mothers.

I also mention social psychology. The central tenet of the field of social psychology is that if under a given situation, all or nearly all individuals will engage in the same unwanted behavior, then there is less to be gained by stigmatizing those individuals and lauding the ones who don't than by studying the situation with an eye towards changing it. And you can see in a heartbeat how that applies here: if infants are at extreme risk whenever one or more of three variables are present, then we can reduce the rate of (massively under-reported, intentionally under-investigated) maternal infanticide by decreasing the economic and evolutionary pressures behind gender preference, by providing mothers with as much economic assistance and physical protection as it would require for them to feel safe providing for this baby, and by intensify supervision for the first several months of life of mothers of infants who are born weighing less than 8 pounds or looking otherwise sickly. But addressing the issue in this way, and looking into the roots of the equation that predicts maternal infanticide, makes social psychologists confront the queasy implication of all of their work: if it's that sane and natural for them to do this awful thing, if this awful thing is so hard to resist, how can we justify stigmatizing and punishing them? And if we can't, then how can we live with ourselves having just (the historian points out) joined the 85% of all known historical societies, up to and including Christian western Europe as late as the late 19th century, that socially tolerated infanticide any time in the first couple of days after birth? There's pro-choice, I mean, and then there's being so pro-choice as to join the ranks of societies that have denied the humanity of a breathing infant up to 48 hours old ... are we willing to go there? Or to at least show understanding and compassion and tolerance towards societies that did or that do? The anthropologists at the conference were especially terrified of releasing their research findings, because they knew that the accusation that a society or tribe kills children has been used to justify no shortage of genocidal invasions.

I cultivate a readership that's willing to think the unthinkable, so perhaps most of you are still baffled by what part of this spawned such a terror of confronting their own research findings that 29 out of 30 scientists who discovered it immediately and without any external pressure moved to suppress their own research findings. Frankly, good -- I distrust that impulse, too, and think that we are always better off knowing the truth than not knowing it. But as you go about your day, remember this: research shows that your own mother consciously or unconsciously considered murdering you in your crib, off and on for at least the first 48 hours after your birth and not improbably for the whole first two weeks of your life, maybe even the first two months. And if your mother was under 30 when she had you and you were born male in a poor family or female in a wealthy family during times of economic hardship, or weighing less than 8 pounds, or at a time when your mother thought that her own chances of survival would improve if you didn't survive so (for example) she could get pregnant by her new husband more quickly or so she could return to work more quickly, you very nearly didn't make it. And she would have gotten away with it, too, because mothers have traditionally had along list of potential murder weapons ready to hand, from handing you over to caretakers or adoption agencies even if she knew they had a 99% chance of killing you, to smothering you with a pillow, to switching you to infant formula that she knew was diluted with unsafe water, to declining to lift a hand to save you from some mortal peril. And because "everybody knows" that mothers don't kill their own children, nobody would have questioned her about it. Have a nice day!

Picture this.

It's 1990, and a group of 30 scientists have met in the most deliberately out-of-the-way place they could, hoping that nobody will notice that they're meeting. Unlike most international scientific conferences, this one is desperately trying to avoid publicity, for now. Those 30 scientists come from a wide variety of fields, including evolutionary biology, primatology, anthropology, criminology, mathematical history, social psychology, and epidemiology. They have been brought together by the conference organizer because they all have one thing in common: at some point in the past, they have attracted negative attention by announcing, at some prior scientific conference, that they had noticed evidence of a phenomenon that couldn't possibly be true. For some of them it was a literally career-ending moment, but most of them have spent the intervening years trying to figure out whether or not they really did see what they think they saw. When they could no longer hope to disprove the evidence of their senses, some of them devised scientific hypotheses and set out to test them. And on the day of that conference in 1990, each of them presented a brief working paper, laying out their research findings so far, to see if anybody else had made the same discovery.

And they had. Working from all those different directions, from entirely different data sets, these 30 scientists had all stumbled upon the same scientific discovery. It was a ground-breaking discovery; if anybody had ever noticed this before, they had kept it to themself. And it was of critical importance to each and every one of those fields of scientific study, because understanding this discovery, and working through its implications, was visibly and obviously going to lead to more breakthrough advances in each of those fields. The combined impact of those advances in human scientific understand could already be seen to be likely to make tremendous changes in our daily lives, for the better.

29 of those 30 scientists withdrew their papers from publication, at once. They demanded that their names not be used with regard to the resulting scientific finding. They issued only a weak consensus statement, phrased as literal wishful thinking, saying that it would be a good thing if scientists were free to pursue and publish any true scientific finding without any fear of punishment. Why would scientists on the brink of a major new scientific discovery go to the trouble of spending years researching something, then weeks or months preparing a paper on the subject, then travel to the middle of rural nowhere to present their findings to each other, only to do this when it turned out that other scientists were able to independently verify their experimental findings? I can only conclude that it is because they were hoping against hope that they were wrong. They didn't go to that conference in hopes of having their experimental findings verified. They went there hoping that there would be at least one scientist among the 30 of them who would see what was wrong with their research methods, and reassure them that the truth that they'd discovered wasn't real.

The 30th scientist continued her research, and started working on a book that came out 9 years later. Her name is Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (not misspelled), and the book is Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species. And I am not, for now, going to tell you what the scientific finding was, although her account of the much-denounced 1976 paper, and the 1990 conference, are on pages 293-296. Note those page numbers. Even though it's the central and most important scientific finding in her book, she takes 290 pages to prepare you for it. She takes long enough to set it up, in fact, that I am absolutely certain that no professional book reviewer actually made it that far. I remember the reviews for this book, and as with another big brick of a book that everybody claimed to have read but I'm convinced (for the same reasons) that nobody did, Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae, I am 100% convinced that no professional reviewer read past the end of chapter 2, because the really interesting stuff in this book, the really important and shocking parts, didn't make it into any of their reviews. When newspaper reporters stuff the only interesting fact in a story so far down that it's below the fold, or after the jump, it's called "burying the lede." In her book, Hrdy buries the lede so deeply that almost nobody but me seems to have actually found it yet.

Maybe I'll talk about the actual scientific finding tomorrow. (To that end, if you've read the book or know the finding in question, don't spoil the surprise for the rest of the readers in the comments to this entry, please.) I'd like to thank whoever it was that recommended to me that I read this book for having given me the most vivid example of the nature and mechanisms of Secret History and Forbidden Lore that I have yet seen in my lifetime.

A throw-away remark, with link, in an article on Slate.com Thursday lead me to a documentary video podcast that was on Current.TV, that's available on their website. Interestingly enough, here's the thing that I noticed about it: it's a video meant to under-cut the Bush administration's stance on torture, but in one regard, it actually strengthens the Bush administration's case. The video I'm talking about is called "Getting Waterboarded." (I was going to embed it in this journal entry, but LiveJournal doesn't support Current.TV as a video source.)

In the video, Harvard post-grad student and military veteran Kaj Larsen shows us lengthy excerpts of his own voluntary waterboarding at the hands of two anonymous US Army experts on coercive interrogation, the same people who have been waterboarding suspected terrorists for the Bush administration back when (according to then White House counsel, now US Attorney General, Alberto Gonzalez) it was supposedly "legal" for them to do so. Over parts of it we get picture-in-picture interviews with various civil libertarians and human rights campaigners who argue that there is no way to call waterboarding anything other than torture, and its use under any circumstance anything less than both a violation of US law and a crime against humanity.

But here's the part of it that interested me. Before the interrogators start in on him, Kaj Larsen mentions that he underwent waterboarding as part of his training in the military. And that he only lasted about two minutes, which is what the professional interrogators said they would expect, namely, that almost nobody lasts more than 2 minutes. Even though they show, in the video, that it is physically impossible for any of the water to make it into the lungs, and that some air makes it into the lungs at all times, the physical sensation is identical to that of the lungs filling up with water and being unable to draw in air; people panic and give in after no longer than they can normally hold their breath. But in this video, Kaj Larsen more or less effortlessly lasts for 22 minutes, eleven times longer than is normal. (The video above is only a smidgen over 10 minutes, but if you doubt that 22 minute number, the uncut version is also available on Current.TV's website, as a link off of the page linked above.) And while the video does a pretty good job of demonstrating that this is in fact torture, that he was in pretty severe pain and that he felt like he was going to die that whole 22 minutes, and therefore does a pretty good job of disproving the Bush administration's argument that if it isn't causing serious physical injury it can't be torture? It also, by the fact that it goes on for 22 minutes demonstrates exactly why the Bush administration wants to screw over Jose Padilla, and the supposed al Qaeda 14 down at Guantanamo Bay.

Some of you may remember me head-desking over one of the Bush administration's claims in the Jose Padilla case. One of their motions to suppress any kind of a civilian trial for Jose Padilla was that it was impossible to prove, for example, anything regarding his claim to have been tortured while in custody, without giving away secret information. What secret information? The details of his torture. But this video shows exactly why they don't want that information out there in a generally accessible form. Because it equally clearly shows that because Larsen knew the physics of waterboarding, and had had a taste of it beforehand, he only quit at the 22 minute mark because he'd taken enough abuse to prove his point. If he'd been at all motivated to do so out of patriotism, loyalty to a cause, personal loyalty to his fellow soldiers, or religious fervor, he could probably have held out indefinitely. In fact, the longer it went on, the easier it would have gotten; eventually the body would have learned that it couldn't possibly have been drowning, and the reflex would have worn out. And you can see the frustration on the part of the interrogators when, at around the 5 or 6 minute mark, they ran out of pre-filled water containers to torture him with, and were increasingly desperately having to improvise ways to keep the rag in his mouth soaked. Given that waterboarding is a torture technique that can be used in something rather akin to total safety to the victim (I wouldn't recommend it on people who were severely unfit or who already had breathing problems), if torture were at all effective at protecting this country, then all hell would break loose if the enemy were to learn how easy it was to train their operatives to withstand waterboarding.

Torture isn't effective at protecting this country. This is something that every real expert on interrogation has said, over and over and over again. Therefore it severely demeans the torturers, turns them into inhuman monsters devoid of empathy who will be turned loose on American soil once their tours of duty are over. It also demeans our nation in the eyes of every decent person in the world both here and abroad, and gives our enemies one of their most potent recruiting tools imaginable, namely proof that they're fighting an inhumanly monstrous enemy. I'll not deny that, and anybody who says otherwise is both painfully stupid and sick in the head. But I do have to say this: you can see, right here with your own eyes, why the Bush administration has gone to such great lengths to keep these technical details in the realm of Forbidden Lore.

Starting in 1888, somebody (and we still don't know who) in England started sending orders to a small printer in Belgium who was willing to print pornography to print 6 private copies of his own book, purely for himself. He sent it over in chunks of roughly 200 pages, as he was done editing them, to have it professionally typeset and attractively printed and bound. Once the final, 13th volume was in hand in 1894 that publisher, Auguste Blancart, unscrupulously printed a few copies for quiet, illicit sale to only the wealthiest porn collectors. Nobody knows for sure how many copies, but later porn catalogs would claim that there were no more than 25, total, in the whole world, presumably counting the six copies sent to the author himself. And as rumors leaked out that this book existed, it became a global obsession for not just porn collectors but bibliophiles in general.

The original complete set sold for the equivalent of more than $6,000. But you should think of that as the starting price; desperate collectors who have found out about copies at secretive private auctions have paid tens of times that much or more. Porn publishers almost immediately set out to satisfy the world's craving for this one desperately secretive book that was completely unlike all others, by grabbing random chunks of text from porn in other languages, translating it into English, and publishing it as forged copies of the book. Others got ahold of partial sets, abridged those further, and published those as "complete" editions. And somehow, one of the actual complete sets made its way to the Kinsey Institute's library in the 1970s, where the Kinseys initially failed to appreciate just what a rare treasure they had. Other original copies have been secreted away in vaults for over a century, kept away from the prying eyes of the public and their existence only disclosed to those that the owning institutions felt could be "trusted" to know that the text existed. For most of that time, institutions that owned it had to keep this fact a secret: even countries that legalized other porn banned My Secret Life, up until at least the mid to late 1970s. This book was feared above all other porn because of its unique power to destroy everything that both the religious and the scientific world held sacred.

When I read about the history of this book from its publication date to the present, in Steven Marcus' The Other Victorians, it struck me that My Secret Life is the Necronomicon of pornography.

My Secret Life is an autobiography. Yes, almost all pornography from that time claimed to be autobiographical. But the sex, and the rest of the life, recorded in My Secret Life is completely unlike either the sex described in scientific manuals of the time, and even more completely unlike the sex described in pornography of the time. It consists of entirely realistic sex. Over twenty six hundred pages of realistic sex. You see, "Walter," the pseudonymous author whose identity remains a much-debated secret to this day, was raised as a perfectly ordinary member of the British upper-middle-class. It was mildly unusual for a boy of his time to keep a diary, but not unheard of. It was, we are given to understand, not even vaguely unusual for a very young boy in such a household to have his first sexual experience with one of the servants. And it is probably entirely routine for teenage boys who keep diaries to write down in their diary a complete account of their first sexual experience. But what set Walter apart was that out of that experience, he took away two things that nobody else did. First of all, he dedicated his life, then and there, to having sex with as many women as was humanly possible, whatever the cost to his wealth, sanity, or health. Secondly, he swore to himself that each and every time, as quickly as he could return to his diary, he would write down every relevant detail he could remember. And remarkably, he did both of those things, exactly.

He matured into a small fortune, and spent it all on seduction and prostitutes. After some serious poverty, he inherited a larger fortune, and quickly spent all of it on prostitution and seduction. He then married into money, and resolved to lay off the chasing tail for good. He had already learned that the medical texts of his time were wrong, that his active sex life was actually improving his health and sanity. And he truly loved his wife. So he resolved to teach her to love sex as much as he did, and to settle down to enjoying sex every day with his beautiful, loving wife. This lasted less than two years, before he couldn't take it any longer ... he started taking the household money and spending it, discretely, on mistresses and prostitutes. When he got free of his wife, he shortly thereafter inherited a much larger fortune. He determined to learn from his experience to spend this fortune more carefully, so that it would last him until his health finally did wear out from old age, but he still had enough left to travel all of Europe, determined to find out just how much of the rumors he'd heard about French brothels and Austrian brothels and so forth were true, and to find out if prostitutes and loose women from other countries were any different from the ones back home. And the whole time, he kept filling up locked diaries and storing them carefully.

When he got into his middle 60s and began to slow down a little, it occurred to him to go back and finally re-read his first several diaries. And for reasons he himself couldn't explain, not even to himself, he decided that this material desperately needed to be preserved. He did know this much: he had reached a stage in his life where, by now, he ought to have the wisdom and maturity and experience to understand why he had done the things he did, and more importantly, why he had felt some of the things he had felt while doing them and afterwards. And he didn't. But it occurred to him that we might. So he edited all 2600+ pages of the history of his sex life, including the seduction or purchase of over 1200 women from over 40 countries over the course of roughly 50 years, explaining the parts that he did understand and documenting the parts that he didn't -- and left it carefully hidden in plain sight for us to find.

Very few people have actually read the whole thing. Aleister Crowley owned a copy (are you surprised?) and claimed to have read it, but had nothing interesting to say about it so his veracity is reasonable to doubt. Marcus, a veteran of Victorian literature on salary with nothing better to do, did read it, and documented that if nothing else it stood a good chance of changing Dickens scholarship forever. Many of the characters and incidents that Dickens scholars had assumed were whimsical over-the-top fantasy have very close parallels in My Secret Life, only with fewer euphemisms. You see, part of Walter's obsession extended into wanting to understand the economics of sex in his lifetime. He always documented scrupulously exactly what he spent on sex. And when he could, which was often, he asked the girls and women he gave money to what they were going to do with the money. He wanted to know how they lived, what other jobs they had and what those jobs paid, what their living expenses were, everything having to do with that aspect of their lives. He also was obsessed with knowing why they were so willing to have sex for money, and not just so he could use that information to get better prices, and he documented each woman's separate answers. Scholars still argue over just how much to trust My Secret Life, but it's a wealth of lifestyle, history, and economic details that are recorded nowhere else in any other form.

I think that Marcus also came to understand, from studying it, why so many people were terrified at the prospect of people reading this book. You see, part of the arc of Walter's life was that before he even reached the age of 30, he realized that if what he had been told his whole life about sex was true, he should have been dead, or at least crippled and feeble-minded, already. Furthermore, knowing female sexuality in a way that no other man of his time could have, it also became clear to him that virtually everything he had ever been told in his life, by legal or scientific or religious experts on sex, about women's sexuality was just as false. That left him with no moral yardstick at all.

A fair comparison can be made to DARE and the War on Drugs. Kids are told that all drugs destroy your mind, sanity, and health, and are all fiercely addictive. We tell them this, I'm convinced, because we know that if you told them the truth about sliding scales of risk and random factors and slippery slopes, nearly all of them would (because of the built-in malfunctions of the adolescent mind) miscalculate risk and get themselves killed. So we lie, and tell them that everything is more instantly deadly than even the worst of it is. They work up the nerve to dabble in the safest stuff, and find out that dabbling in the safest stuff was perfectly harmless. And a large number of them then go on to huff deadly inhalants or get themselves hooked on heroin, and a small but still uncomfortably large number of them end up dead of drug overdose. They were left with no way of knowing which of the risks they were warned about were true, and guessed poorly.

So when, for example, some time around 1880 Walter became obsessed with the idea of deflowering a pre-pubescent girl, he completed the tricky negotiations to find a woman so desperate for money that she would sell her daughter's virginity to him, and that woman helped him hold down her 12 year old girl while he forcibly raped her. This, he documented, left him feeling that he had done something awful and unforgivable. And he had. But he had no language or concepts to explain to him why what he did was bad, and ample social and experiential data to explain why it shouldn't have been. He knows that something he knows about reality must be in error, but with no basis for comparison and nobody to discuss it with who wasn't lying to him, equally mistaken, or both he has nothing he can do with this information other than leave it for us to analyze and decode. And that is why people and places who tolerated all other porn were terrified of My Secret Life. The thought of a million, or a hundred million, or a billion people performing the same experiments that "Walter" did and then openly discussing those experiments terrified them beyond all rational comprehension.

And, you should not be surprised to find out, the whole thing in its entirety is available on the Internet for free. (Clearly uploaded via optical character recognition; it's completely strewn with the kind of typos that OCR software makes.) Just as the Necronomicon would be, if it had been real. It's up to us to figure out how we're going to live in a world where anybody who wants to read Walter's experiences and wonder about whether or not to replicate the experiment cannot be stopped from doing so.

The ultimate internal publicity stunt in This Film is Not Yet Rated comes 2/3rds of the way through the movie, when director Kirby Dick assembles the movie up to that point into finished form and submits it to the MPAA to be rated. This is a gesture calculated to piss them off, because almost the whole film up to that point is devoted to the hiring of a lesbian private detective agency whose surveillance and social engineering pay off by revealing the MPAA's most closely guarded secret, namely the current year's membership of the Film Rating Board. He submitted, even knowing that they were going to come gunning for him out of spite if nothing else, so that he could stand in front of the appeals board and document that process. That pays off, too; despite their determined efforts to protect their privacy, he manages to "out" all 12 members of the appeals board, too.

And while it is not the most entertaining part of the movie (that would be Ka-Chew! Productions' animated bits), nor the most compelling, these collective "outings" or revelations do turn out to be what I think are the most important part of the movie, the part that best explain exactly what's wrong with the movie ratings system in the US and why it turned out the way it has. You see, the first thing he documented is that the MPAA is flat-out lying about who rates the movies in the first place. The MPAA's website says this about the Film Rating Board:

"There are 10-13 members of the Board who serve for periods of varying length. ... There are no special qualifications for Board membership, except that the members must have a shared parenthood experience, must be possessed of an intelligent maturity, and most of all, have the capacity to put themselves in the role of most American parents so they can view a film and apply a rating that most parents would find suitable and helpful in aiding their decisions about their children and what movies they see."

... and almost every word of it is a lie. In 2005 there were, documented, exactly 9 members of the Board, not 10-13 of them. As for shared parenthood experience, at least two of them have no kids, and almost all of the members who do have kids, their kids are grown adults in their 20s and 30s, not the "age 4 to 15" that the MPAA has always said their Rating Board's members' kids were. And as for their ability to "put themselves in the role of most American parents," that's the most interesting thing of all: a less representative board you would be hard pressed to assemble. Seven white people and two Asians, and all of them at the high end of upper middle class or the lower end of wealthy. The "14 to 18 members" of the appeals board turn out to be twelve: two motion picture studio executives (talk about conflict of interest when they're rating independent films!), eight executives from the major movie theater chains, and permanent ex-officio representatives from the National Council of Churches and the American Council of Catholic Bishops. According to the MPAA, the ex-officio clergy representatives are supposed to be silent observers; according to an anonymous insider from the appeals board, they participate fully in the appeals deliberation process and do vote. Nor is the anonymous tipster the only evidence we have for the latter; the one time we hear a vote count from the appeals board it was 9 to 3, which can only have been possible if both clergymen voted. So, yeah, everything about the process is built upon a lie.

But here's the most important implication of the lie, to me. It's not that they're lying, but that what they're covering up is this: the board that decides what films kids can and can't see is judging them on very specific standards of both race, religion, and social class. These decisions are being made by 21 white and Asian upper middle class southern Californians, all of whom know each other socially. Two of them are even next-door neighbors. And the director found out, to his shock (and to mine initially, although I think I've figured it out) that the appeals process specifically doesn't allow you to cite any previous film's scenes and/or rating as a precedent for why your film should be treated the same. The board and the appeal board are reserving the right to judge all films by one and only one standard: does it make a white upper middle class late middle aged Catholic or mainline Protestant southern Californian uncomfortable to think about the possibility of a child seeing this movie? If you're a black parent, whether you'd want your kids to see it or not is irrelevant. If you're Hispanic, same. If you're a gay or lesbian parent, your standards are not interesting to them. If you're a poor or working class or middle class parent, your concept of what kids grow up already exposed to and knowing about never factors in. In fact, oddly enough, the two biggest denominations in this country that still threaten film boycotts, the Southern Baptists and the Assemblies of God? They don't get consulted, either, and why guys like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and John Ashcroft and Donald Wildmon are okay with letting the hated National Council of Churches and Catholic Church be the official representatives of organized professional Christianity on the film rating appeals board and not people more aligned with their own viewpoints and perspectives strikes me as a fascinating question. (It's entirely possible that they don't know this yet.) And why is this? Rather obviously, if you know your religious history of the USA, it's because the Episcopalians and the Catholics are socially acceptable churches among the old-money upper and upper-middle class.

What does social class have to do with this? There is a school of thought that says that all art in general, and more importantly all popular art and entertainment, should be aspirational, not documentary. It should not show life as it usually is, it should show life at its best. It should not show people at their worst or people doing just okay, at least not as heroes, protagonists, or main characters. The characters in popular fiction that the audience is intended to root for and identify with must, according to this school of though, be people who are characters of extraordinary virtue, hard work, and perseverance. Those who hold this viewpoint believe that it is the responsibility of the artist to give people something to hope for, and more importantly something to look up to, to set their own standards by, to aspire to be as good as. And this is, very specifically, a white middle class and upper middle class view of art.

Take, for example, the documentary about infantry life during the US invasion of Iraq, Gunner Palace. Although it won a PG-13 from the appeals board on literary and journalistic merit, the main nine-member rating board voted it unanimously as an R, for one and only one reason: soldiers in combat say "fuck," "fucker," and "motherfucker" a lot. Some of this is because of combat stress; people who are getting shot at do not devote a great deal of their attention to self-censorship. But considering to what extent it is almost entirely rural, inner city, and working class kids who become infantryman, I recognized the way they talk instantly. In my working class neighborhood growing up, virtually everybody talked like that, virtually all of the time. Some of our parents, the ones who clearly were hoping that their kids might improve their lot in life and make it into the middle or upper middle class, tried to restrain themselves and their friends from using "that language" in front of kids, specifically so that we kids would grow up with speech patterns that would make it easier for us to fit in among the more-restrained upper-middle-class kids if we got a chance to mingle with them socially or at work in later life. Frankly, to "swear like a longshoreman" or "like a truck driver" or "like a sailor" are clichés because that is how working class adults actually talk. And the thought of their own upper-middle-class friends' kids being exposed to language that they might emulate, that might make them sound like they grew up on the fabled wrong side of the tracks, makes the all-upper-middle-class members of the Film Rating Board very, very uncomfortable.

Compare, also, the depictions of sexuality on both the R and NC-17 sides of the line. This film does that, a lot. The best-used filmic device in This Film is Not Yet Rated does exactly what film makers are not allowed to do during the appeals process. It split-screens basically identical sex scenes from over a dozen each of films that were rated R with films that were rated NC-17, so that we can see specifically what it is that makes the white and Asian upper middle class late middle aged raters uncomfortable when they see a sex scene. Sure, there are some sex acts and some levels of graphical explicitness that make them uncomfortable no matter who the characters are and what the movie's about, but that's not the point of the split screen sections of this documentary. What the split screens clearly show is that even when all other details are the same, it's okay to risk children seeing things with their parents if the characters are portrayed as plasticized or idealized, but becomes unacceptable to show in any mainstream theater if there is even a drop of perspiration showing. And it is okay to show almost any sex act obliquely and from the right angles, but only as long as nobody's orgasm lasts longer than a couple of seconds. What we are seeing here is the classic Victorian upper class fear of "coarsening," of any reminder that human beings are a species of mammal and that like any other animals we have basic biology.

We're also shown something I'd written off as an exaggerated complaint until they showed me so many parallel examples, but it does seem to be that I was wrong and it's true: the white upper middle class late middle aged Film Rating Board believes that it is inevitable that teenage boys have sexual urges, but sincerely believes that no teenage girl has any sexual urges of her own. There are countless examples of teenage boys masturbating in R rated films, and comedies about teenage boys who want to have sex but have trouble finding partners of their own choice are a staple of film making for as long as there have been movies, at ratings all the way down to PG. But show a teenage girl who masturbates, or show any other indication that a teenage girl might also want to get laid, and suddenly the film is in NC-17 territory. In the upper middle class fantasy world, it is essential that their daughters, the future mothers of the upper middle class and the wealthy, have their virtue preserved, so they remain virtuous enough to raise upper middle class and wealthy children. And in their fantasy they think that it's much easier than it is in reality, because in that fantasy all they have to do to keep their daughters from experiencing any sexual desire or feelings of their own is to keep them protected from external influences. Again, it's "coarsening" theory.

For example, Kevin Smith talks about when he was initially told that he couldn't have a scene in Jersey Girl where a woman admits to a male friend that she masturbates twice a day and still get a PG-13 rating. ("What can I say," the character says to her friend when he is shocked by this, "I get bored easily.") In this movie, Smith describes talking about on the phone to a member of the Film Rating Board about that decision. (Among the MPAA's lies: raters' identities are kept secret to protect them from pressure by the studios and film makers. The truth is that film makers at the major studios are practically the only people who are allowed to pressure the raters, and he made this film for United Artists.) He says that what she said to him was, "I was struck, as I was watching that scene, at how uncomfortable I was imagining my 17 year old daughter listening to that conversation." He asked her, "My god, she's 17. Do you really think that your 17 year old daughter doesn't masturbate?" But I'll bet good money that, as a white upper middle class Christian, she thinks exactly that.

The Film Rating Board is also, of course, like most Americans, deeply afraid of Teh Gay, especially Teh Buttsecks, for fear that it might be contagious. The assumption, especially among those "properly" brought up, is that nobody would ever think to do "those things" unless they saw somebody else doing them.

John Waters makes the point closest to my personal point of view in this film, when he says that if the point of the MPAA film rating system is to keep kids from seeing what sex looks like, it's too late to be having that argument. He makes the point, which if I ever get the damned thing done will be one of my central points in my book about the history of "Forbidden Lore," that in the Internet age there isn't a kid in America who hasn't seen harder core pornography than even the things that John Waters likes to watch in private. So what are we left with? Well, if you're a member of the social class that has a monopoly position inside the MPAA, you're left with "aspirational" art theory. They may not be able to control what the proletariat produce for themselves and share among themselves, but they can make sure that the capitalist system only endorses art that shows things that are "better" than that, in hopes that the "better" members of the proletariat will recognize the value of, aspire to, and work to elevate themselves into the upper middle class's spiritual, intellectual, anti-biological world in which men have sex only for antiseptic release of pressure and in which women only have joyless sex a couple of times in their life to produce heirs, just like the glamorous people in the movies do. And that, my friends, is the real point of the MPAA's Film Rating Board.

I have many vices. Considering that at least three of them are, in the opinion in the Social Security Administration, irreparable at this point and sufficient to render me unpalatable to any plausible or reasonable employer, makes that first statement an obvious truism. But alongside my grand and documented major vices, I have many trivial vices, some of which as incurable as my recurring major depression with incomplete interepisode recovery. One of them is this: if a joke occurs to me that I know with reasonable certainty won't be funny, or even comprehensible, to anybody with me, I usually go ahead and tell the joke. Many of these jokes depend on having read the same thing(s) that I've read, and in a world with a publishing industry as huge as the one we have, and a backlist so much huger, what are the odds of this? Nonetheless, the recurring looks of blank incomprehension and periodic glowers of disapproval for my perceived elitism are insufficient to cure me of this vice, because I receive periodic tiny doses of reward for it: when somebody does get a joke that I'm pretty sure nobody is going to get, I feel a powerful rush of gratitude that I have "smoked out" a kindred soul that I might not otherwise have detected.

In the Archon 30 Grand Masquerade costume competition, Pierre and Sandy Pettinger performed a scene from R.W. Chambers' "The King in Yellow" from The King in Yellow. I love them for it, even though it would appear (from the dead silence and stunned incomprehension all over the room) that I was one of perhaps six people in the entire 1000-person audience for that show who actually "got" what they were doing. I am further in awe over the fact that they managed to work into the design of their costumes every single trivial bit of detail we are given about the King in Yellow himself from the fragments of "The King in Yellow" that are in The King in Yellow. They didn't imagine the character the way I imagined him, and I don't hold this against them in the least. The descriptions are intentionally vague and subject to interpretation; their interpretation is in no way inferior to mine and the execution was a joy to behold. Despite the fact that the presentation was completely lost on the audience, I think they quite deserved the Best in Class award they won at their (Master Costumer) level and the minor workmanship award they also won.

I don't really hold it against the audience that so few of them have read enough of "The King in Yello