User:Tomdennen

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Dear Fellow Human Beings,

I’m writing this ‘living book’ partly so that I can ask you to help me see the world as it really is, not what I believe the owners of the planet have told us for centuries how they want us to see it - a vehicle-and-house-bound permanent mortgage of our life’s earnings that is now having to be passed on to our great-grandchildren to pay off more wars.

So I need your comments to help improve my world view (and pay the rent - a comment can be in the form of one dollar, sent to )

This is not a Wikipedia effort (fantastic idea) which has been basically vandalized by people who are described below. This comment is more of a personal view of the time during which I have been alive together with some comment on how it looks like it’s being run. Just a point of view. But please help me with it: Talk about your lives – tell me how you interpret the fact that this is your time to be alive, comment on it and maybe it will become, in my friend Tom Kinney’s view ... “an ongoing, evolving, interactive work-in-progress.” So let’s go! Here is the first draft, let’s see what happens:

BIBLE STUDIES FROM THOSE WONDERFUL HUMAN BEINGS WHO BROUGHT YOU THE INQUISITION, THE IRAQ WAR AND EVERYONE’S PERMANENT INDEBTEDNESS TO ‘THE STATE’ ET AL

ONE

THE KLERKSDORP EXPERIENCE INCLUDING THE FIRST OF THE MORRIS DIALOGUES (SOFT ENTRY INTO THE DIALOGUES)

Back in the apartheid years, South Africa was a very strange place. (You have to keep in mind that while human beings are generally not very nice, some of us try to have a little innocent fun while on this earth). I was of course not part of that apartheid thing. I was just a youngster with a couple of semesters in business management sent to ‘turn around’ a branch of a Pickin’ Chicken Roadhouse franchise, in Klerksdorp or ‘Klack’sdrop’, as the local Africans pronounced it, and I treated everyone pretty much according to what was inside their skin - fairly. Pickin’ Chicken was the family business and I was the eldest son, educated by my father ‘at great expense’ as he would often say to his peers, “to carry on the Family Business if he doesn’t ‘Become A Doctor’. “That place is losing money, Tommy,” Dad said to me, “get down there and kick ass until it starts making some.” Hokay Daddy-o! (This was in 1964, hey?) First thing I did was find out who was running the place. It’s never the officers, it’s the Sergeants and I quickly found the top dog: In the esteemed hierarchy of my newfound staff of twenty-seven black Tswana Warriors was a gentleman his peers called ‘The Toasted Elephant’. A very large black manager-type person who used to be called ‘Head Boy’ in the apartheid era, T.E. was in fact a forty-two year old Tswana chef quite happily reigning at the top of what was now my ‘Chef's Ladder, Front-of-House and Chef de Cuisine’ at Pickin’ Chicken, the apex, the chef whose initials were etched into the silver flatware trays that were hung onto the local patrons’ car windows - Afrikaans farmers mostly - and embroidered onto the washroom towels. This old Tswana had the vision, conceived the mixed grill marketing concept in fact, and imbued the whole of the Klack’sdrop Pickin’ chicken roadhouse with his personality, on top of which he was an excellent personnel manager - the staff thought I was gay up there in my flat above the roadhouse with grass and incenses and the I Ching’s yarrow stalks and no woman (I was pining for my Maine State College particle physics lady partner in crime - so TE and the whole staff ceremonially offered me ‘Chunky Charlie’: ”Charlie’s a frou,” they told me.) I couldn’t understand why they were offering me Charlie’s wife. Yes, I did wake up later. So on the surface everything looked good - happy staff, good food, all the stuff fit for making a (small, well tidy) fortune. It didn’t take long to figure out what was wrong: Klerksdorp was mainly inhabited by farmers - Big, Afrikaans farmers whose diet was usually made up of much larger portions of whatever they ate elsewhere than what Pickin’ Chicken actually served. Not Good. Non Sequitur: Good food does not equal Big Food. Imagine offering King Kong a touch of Nouvelle Cuisine? Pickin’ Chicken was modeled on Kentucky Fried with a thing called ‘portion control’ in place which limited the amount of each portion sold as well as helping with inventory and such things. Which made for burgers the size of today’s Wimpy burgers. Very Small Ones, ek se, if you are a large Boer farmer. So I did two things. On the food side, I doubled the size of the burgers so the meat hung out over the side of the (large) roll and introduced a huge mixed grill: three hundred grams of rump, two German bratwurst, French Fries, fried tomatoes, two eggs over once and a coupla other African Toasted Elephant-type things. Well, OK, The Toasted Elephant did that, actually. It seemed no honkies had listened to him up until my tenure and this was such a good idea I thought that I had better start setting precedents around there right away if the job was going to get done properly. Pickin’ Chicken, Klerksdorp, also did not advertise so I next set about finding someone who could do that for me. Morris Lourie. A smallish wiry man, a typically Jewish-looking Jew with black hair, a small beard and a glint of evil humor in his eyes. He never actually wrung his hands but it was now and again somehow implied in the atmosphere around him. “I am the black sheep of the Katz & Lourie family,” he told me, and he was a very funny man which is something I enjoy in people. His crust was made by etching silver trophies so well that he was in demand all over the country. (Apart from creating modeling and advertising portfolios for the local wannabe meisies while I just hung up their clothes, took the pictures and kept quiet). He ‘recreated’ - so as to avoid any copyright problems - a drawing from Mad Magazine for me that depicted a knight in tattered armor with a bent lance, bent shoes and a swaybacked horse. A seriously enough Don Martin deluxe copy that we thought he would never sue us over even if he did actually get hold of the Klerksdorp Herald because it was such a good rendering. (These were still, I think, part of the sanction years when South Africans thought it quite clever - even cute - to ‘borrow’ ideas and such, but we were into the ‘recreation’ of concepts which we considered different from stealing). The headline asked the people of Klack’sdrop to “Come In For A Dragon Burger!” And ‘strue as God, they did! “Large Mixed Grills Now Available!” I’d done my job. Well, that was it! The business was turned around nine months ahead of my deadline with profits to show for it (and a good nine months ahead of the annual audit!) so I was free to play. How? Morris had the answer.

TWO

THE KLERKSDORP KULTURE KLUB

Klack’sdrop at that time was a rural society with a very peri-urban anxiety in the middle of town - it was a long time ago in a far, far away place that knew shit from big city life. But the ‘Main Manne’ - the Mayor and his cronies - thought that they were important, so important that they formally initiatiated a goal-oriented destination for their cultural aspirations (and another small bridge toward my eventual home): The Klerksdorp Kulture Klub - The KKK. No relation. Oh, yes! Remember now that I was free, educated, unmarried and had six to nine months before any auditors came sniffing around (so long as profits kept coming in). So I hired a manager to look after the actual day-to-day running of the business side of things. He was an impeccably-mannered retired Afrikaans miner twice my age (and size) who insisted on calling me ‘Meneer Dennen’ thus keeping a huge social distance. I kept my day job and sat down with Morris. We conspired. Not against, exactly, but more toward an educational bend for the Klerksdorp Kulture Klub, one might say, positioning ourselves as the off-stage spiritual advisors, developers of the KKK (again, no historical or direct relation). Now the KKK (no relation at all) were all Afrikaaners, mostly Broederbond members, Morris assured me, very stuck-up stuffed shirts, “and so need the occasional reminder” although at the time I didn’t have enough information to ask what he meant by ‘reminder”. The ‘Klub’ consisted of the Mayor, some parliamentarian Mini-Star of Justice or other, the Fire Chief, The inimitable (and sometimes unwilling participant) Postmaster General and other local dignitaries (their wives and the odd brace or three of discreet mistresses) who expressed a delight in chamber music: One of the intellectual and classical persuits one can indulge in without actually having to understand, unlike wine-tasting which is anyway mostly about the language of vanity. Klack’sdrop was, in those days, a sleepy town although the tourist brochures would claim otherwise. The future Nobel prizewinner Desmond Mpilo Tutu was born there in 1931 but this was understandably not during my tenure. Tutu was not either a main feature of the tourist brochures in the apartheid seventies when Morris and myself (and Hennie The Hairdresser and Jannie The Mechanical Machine Mender, two of our other conspirators) were trying to earn a crust there. Gold and some hotels I think were featured in the literature. The Kulture Klub’s monthly meetings did not feature in any brochure because brochures had to be planned a long time before their contents became reality unless they were already there, so the meetings were in fact ad lib and therefore open to change. Morris Lurie, being the evil genius that he is, decided that we should first attempt to measure the intelligence of the KKK members. “How do we do that?” I asked. He told me that he felt, after hearing a story from me about Harvard University’s practice of sending itinerant musicologists and folklore collectors into the field, that the KKK should be exposed to one. I am a great lover of jazz and folk music and at some stage during our long, philosophical conversations of an evening in the Klack’sdrop Hotel Ladies Bar, I had indeed told Morris about the fact that Harvard University has, over some six or seven decades, sent out students to record famous or otherwise locally well-known personalities who were practitioners of provincial humor, folk and other ethnic music and anecdotal history - “Ah heerd y’all hat ta shoot yer dog ‘tother day, Samuel. Was he Mad?” “Waal, he warn’t too pleased about it, Jonathan.” There is famous Caedmon lable recording of Blues musician Huddie J. Leadbetter (known as Leadbelly) compiled by a Harvard musicologist that is nothing more than a thumpin’ foot and a few songs acapella - he didn’t have his guitar with him at the time of the recording - a foot thumping on the floor and a lengthy argument with his wife (who we can’t hear because the musicologist was only interested in Leadbelly and kept the mike away from his woman) which consisted Leadbelly’s immortal words, “Why don’t you just leave me alone?” a non-sequitur to his entire life, I believe. So, armed with this very specific intelligence, morris approached the KKK and told them all about the Harvard musicology project and then let it slip that he had been told that an actual Harvard musicologist was in South Africa and was travelling to Johannesburg from Cape Town “toward the end of the month” - when the Kultur Klub met. He told them - with a straight face, of course - that the man was “possibly” passing through Klerksdorp. In effect, Morris told them, he actually had to pass through the town because of a cultural belief system that we were also constructing in the Klack’sdrop background, the myth that Klerksdorp was ‘The Gateway to Cape Town”. Morris suggested that he could possibly persuade the Harvard musicologist to perhaps spend part of the KKK’s cultural evening (just a few moments at the end of their posted itinerary, not to interfere at all, of course, one understands) just to give a short lecture on some unusual African musical sounds? If he could be contacted in time? If at all? The town’s cultural leaders were more than willing and readily agreed to this unusual visit, believing that anything imported, especially from America, was better than anything local, never for a nanosecond suspecting that Morris was up to no good and in fact they put our “Harvard Musicologist” at the top of their billing at the next KKK meeting. I was horrified, but eventually I accepted it. I believed Morris’ judgement of the KKK. And so this became for me, the culturally (and literally) anonymous roadhouse guy, Morris The Leader, Jannie the town’s business machine Sales, Service, Repair and Maintenance Representative and Hennie, Klack’sdrop’s local Harvard Hairdresser, an edict to assist with the first great and memorable measuring of the Klerksdorp Kulture Klub’s IQ. But you must understand that during the preparation for all this subterfuge, we were lying. And, conservative that I am I thought that this would more than likely get us into a war with the local genteels. I told Morris that we were just pretending to ourselves that we could create the technology that could produce anything like the Weapons of Mass Persuasion needed to go along with the KKK’s self-indulgences and their acceptance of the Harvard musicologist’s existence. But Morris had sold the idea and now we had to produce it, lack of technology notwithstanding. We had to make it exist.

THREE

OSCAR-LEVEL CREATIVITY IN KLERKSDORP

I told Morris that there was no such thing as a ‘white’ lie - even in South Africa. (The best puns are largely unintentional). “Why are we doing this?” I asked. “I want a watertight, philosophically sound and original reason for this anti-social behavior that is going to get us into such dwang.“ Morris: “Because it’s fun.” Well, that would have to do. Hennie the Harvard Musicologist had had one of his girls cut his hair into a very passable American brushcut, and on the evening in question, stood up there in front of the entire town’s cultural elite and played an Oscar-winning part with a slightly Southern Memphis, Tennessee accent. Morris and I had written the script - a series of nonsensical but onomatopaeic word and sentence structures -‘Hondamopedacalidooshinchallah!’ - that described the sounds Hennie the Harvard Musical Stage Actor was playing on his locally Serviced and Maintained Broadcast-quality tape recorder. Sounds that Morris, Hennie, Jannie and I had recorded earlier at various times during quiet periods of the month. Mostly in the local railway station’s toilet on Sundays. Throwing a 44-gallon steel drum around in it with all the water taps fully on to synchronised toilet flushing makes sweet if slightly cacophonic music. Hadeda screeches mixed with atonal guitar riffs punctuated the evening. Music to some may seem arbitrary, but this was classic stuff: You, the reader can picture it although we never thought the KKK would be able to. I mean African / American steel drums mixed with hadeda sqwawks are rare. And, finally, the sound of cement being poured onto shutterboard from a great height transfixed the three hundred KKK Illuminati. I know, because the last few rows of them kept turning around and shushing us: Shushed me, Morris and Jannie as we ineffectually tried to stifle the giggles. “Well,” said Morris later, “it just goes to show you how much these chaps know about ethnic music.”

FOUR

SOME TIME AFTER KLERKSDORP, LEAFING THROUGH THE DA VINCI CODES

It is worth remembering that in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus declared: "Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword." (Matthew 10:34). Then, quoting the prophet Micah, he intoned:

For I have come to turn "a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law-a man's enemies will be the members of his own household." Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” - ibid

“I am surrounded by priests who repeat incessantly that their kingdom is not of this world, and yet they lay their hands on everything they can get.”

- Napoleon Bonaparte

Following the departure of the historical Jesus, the flesh-and-blood Jesus who walked among men way back then, talked to them and performed miracles for them, loved them, fed them and was remembered by them, it is common cause that because of the nature of power, virtually everyone in the powerful “religion business" would have immediately set about moving the gods back into a remote heaven, behind locked doors to which the priests alone held the keys. A vital clue to this agenda lies in the Lord's Prayer itself. The commonly accepted English translation of the first line goes, "Our Father, who art in Heaven...", yet an examination of the original Aramaic reveals that this is very possibly a deliberate mistranslation of, "Our Father, which art everywhere..."

First interlude (I’ll explain later) James Madison, fourth President of the United States, died in 1836. Despite attempts by Christians to re-write the history of the United States Madison was, by his own words, not religious. "Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise. "During almost fifteen centuries,” he said, “has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution. "What influence in fact have Christian ecclesiastical establishments had on civil society? In many instances they have been upholding the thrones of political tyranny. In no instance have they been seen as the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wished to subvert the public liberty have found in the clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate liberty, does not need the clergy."

President George W Bush told Palestinian ministers that God had told him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq - and create a Palestinian State, ‘a new

BBC series’ reveals.

Well, right on, Dubbya.

On December 2nd, 2005 at 3:13 pm Tom Dennen said (on the Cornell University blog website):

I would like to enter the Intelligent design debate. Forty years ago I was turned away from a Harvard course called ‘The Acceleration of the Rate of Change’ because I was not qualified. In order to qualify, the professor asked me to ‘come up with a unique philosophical concept’ which I did and I was accepted into the course. I have been working on the concept since that time and it is central to this ‘Living Book’ which you are, hopefully, still reading. Like most understandable ideas, this one is simple. Originally, I put it in the form of a one-act play with Cain (the farmer) arguing with Abel (the hunter); an argument resulting in Abel attacking Cain who kills Abel in self-defense. The argument is over what the stories Adam left them with meant; and, as in all ‘proper’ debate they agee on the definitions of terms, but argue about where they lead to. Cain is a head-down believer working on a garden and Abel is trying to talk him into “coming out and having some fun, old chap,” rather. Abel argues the conventional biblical set which is that after having been created and given dominion over the planet and then told not to eat of the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve did and were kicked out of Eden, everything is therefore futile and we should accept something Abel, way ahead of his time, calls Original Sin (a concept invented by a chap called Tertullian who coined the actual phrase in the second century AD). Cain argues that any Intelligent Designer, who both brothers accept would have all the attributes of a single God - omniscience, omnipotence and so on - could not possibly have created Eve without knowing that the curiosity He created within her would drive her to the temptation placed deliberately in front of her. “Knowledge is forbidding,” says Cain, “but surely not forbidden.” Cain further argues that in the light of the Designer being supremely intelligent, His Design must have had another intention, now lost to Abel. Cain insists that the flaw in the oral tradiition held by Abel is a simple misunderstanding: “We were given dominion over this planet,” he argues, “and everything in, on and around it, given all the resources necessary to BUILD a Garden for the Designer (or ourselves) without a need to debate whether an uncaused cause exists or not”. The unfortunate and accidental death of Abel from Cain’s self-defence (in my original – successful - attempt to get into a restricted Harvard course called “The Acceleration in the Rate of Change in 1957) results in overwhelming guilt inside Cain which turns him away from his truth and - he believes, forces him to abandon his, and the Human Race’s real mission: To build a Garden of Eden for the All Present One. I think we missed a trick, I think that for the last ten thousand years or so, the one-eyed men have been ruling the kindoms of the blind - us. It’s right now, folks and the acceleration in the rate of change is such the it better wake us up. It’s our watch. It’s our turn to be alive, to be the intelligent protoplasm that works this earth’s soil. Let’s not fuck it up.

Nag Hammadi

The Nag Hammadi scrolls were discovered in Egypt in 1945, and include texts long thought destroyed during the early Christian fight over "orthodoxy". Unlike the canonical Bible which was written long after the historical Jesus died, the texts found at Nag Hammadi include the Gospel of Thomas, written while the historical Jesus was still alive, in which Jesus states that no formal church is needed to be a Christian. Virtually every Christian church has declared the Gospel of Thomas to be heresy.

TO GET TO CHAPTER FIVE YOU NEED TO LIGHT YOUR TAPER WITH TEN BUCKS DEPOSITED INTO THIS ACCOUNT:

Tom Dennen South African POST OFFICE OVERPORT BRANCH ID 460005 ACCOUNT NUMBER 00044856079

Once you've done that, send an email to indeprintersdevil@yahoo.co.uk with the message: taper's been passed on.

After that, of course, you own the first five chapters and can copy and send them to friends on a freeware, shareware basis.

Your ten bucks is, thankyou, my rent and your key to sharing this with your friends.

The next chapters are one dollar each, same address, same rent, folks, I love you, guys, try it.

Tom Dennen, global citizen for blanket sharing.