Actually, Roosevelt kept before him, every time he spoke on radio, a large sign with a wise saying attributed to the man who won the Bad Ass Hog Calling Contest in 1923. The sign said:
YOU'VE GOT TO HAVE APPEAL AS WELL AS POWER IN YOUR VOICE. YOU MUST CONVINCE THE SWINE THAT YOU HAVE SOMETHING FOR THEM.
Unfortunately, Roosevelt was assassinated by a disgruntled office seeker in 1937.
The Communists found an equally loyal servant in 1948, however, in the famous General Douglas MacArthur, who was a military genius with one fatal flaw: he had an ego so large that only by contemplating the mathematical definition of infinity could anything so limitless be imagined.
MacArthur completed the Communization of Unistat in return for having his picture put on pennies, nickels, dimes, dollars, postage stamps, paintings in every public place, G.I.-issue condoms, the ceilings of barber shops, Mount Rushmore, the Sistine Chapel frescoes (advising God during the Creation), all government documents, the chief balloon in all Macy's parades, in place of the test pattern on TV screens, marriage licenses, dog licenses, and in various other places that he thought of frorn time to time.
A brave and patriotic senator, Joseph R. McCarthy, attempted to expose MacArthur's government, which was staffed entirely by card-carrying Communists. (The Communists carried cards because, with so many conspiracies going on at the time, it was the only way they could identify themselves to one another.) The senator was smeared by the press, censured by his colleagues, and hounded to an early grave.
"Ike" Eisenhower, a popular Western film star of the period, contributed to McCarthy's demise by making a national tour supporting the President.
"I don't know anything about politics or military strategy," old "Ike" would tell audiences, his face full of stupid sincerity. "But I know General MacArthur is a smart man and a tough man and can outfox the Commies every time."
Like almost everybody else, "Ike" thought the Communists had taken over Russia, not Unistat.
One of the most insidious things the CIA Communists did when they took over Unistat was to change the Constitution.
The original Constitution, having been written by a group of intellectual libertines and Freemasons in the eighteenth century, included an amendment which declared:
A self-regulated sex life being necessary to the happiness of a citizen, the right of the people to keep and enjoy pornography shall not be abridged.
This amendment had been suggested by Thomas Jefferson, who had over nine hundred Black concubines, and Benjamin Franklin, a member of the Hell Fire Club, which had the largest collection of erotic books and art in the Western world at that time.
The Communists changed the amendment to read:
A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms shall not be abridged.
All documents and textbooks were changed, so that nobody would be able to find out what the amendment had originally said. Then the Communists set up a front organization, the National Rifle Association, to encourage the wide usage of guns of all sorts, and to battle any attempt to control guns as "unconstitutional."
Thus, they guaranteed that the murder rate in Unistat would always be the highest in the world. This kept the citizens in perpetual anxiety about their safety both on the streets and in their homes. The citizens then tolerated the rapid growth of the Police State, which controlled almost everything, except the sale of guns, the chief cause of crime.
THE BACHS' BOX
The Wilhelm Friedemann Bach Society was in the same downtown Washington building as the Warren Belch Society and the Invisible Hand Society, but Clem Cotex never thought much about them. He assumed, as did everybody else who noticed the name on the building directory, that the W. F. Bach Society was just a group of musicologists.
Nothing could have been further from the truth.
They were also trying to find out "what the hell is really going on."
This odd fraternity had named themselves after W. F. Bach not just for his music, which was superb, but for his effrontery, which was even more superb. Wilhelm Friede-mann Bach, one of the twenty children of Johann Sebastian Bach, did not have the easy and immediate success of his brothers, Johann Christian Bach and Carl Philipp Eman-uel Bach. In fact, because he was original and because he had to compete with the other three Bachs (already well established in the esteem of music lovers), Wilhelm Friedemann was neglected for a long time and might have ended his days in poverty and obscurity. But W. F. Bach was not the sort of man to take defeat easily. He hit on a plan which caused his music to be played everywhere, and made him quite a bundle of Deutschmarks, even though people were still saying he was the least important of the Bachs.
Wilhelm Friedemann had simply sold his compositions, one by one, as newly discovered work by his father, J. S. Bach.
Of course there had been art forgers and music forgers and even novel forgers both before and after W. F. Bach, but he had raised the philosophical ante on the bothersome question "If a work of art cannot be distinguished from a masterpiece, is it not a masterpiece?" or, in the vernacular, "How important is a Potter Stewarting signature, anyway?"
The original members of the W. F. Bach Society were people who had owned some magnificent Van Goghs back in the 1960s. Then one traumatic day, they did not own any Van Goghs at all. They owned El Mirs.
El Mir was the most talented painting forger of that time. His Van Goghs, Cezannes, and Modiglianis were totally indistinguishable from "the real thing," whatever that is. It was widely believed, after El Mir was exposed by another forger named Irving, that many masterpieces still hanging in museums were El Mir's work. Indeed, El Mir insisted on that, regarding it as the cream of the jest.
Some said that these El Mirs still hung in museums because the experts had not yet found any way to distinguish them from "real" art. Others said that the experts, once aware of El Mir's work, could distinguish it from Van Gogh's or Cezanne's or Modigliani's, but would not do so, because they had authenticated the fakes originally and did not want anybody to know that they had been fooled.
Blake Williams, Ph.D., had purchased a very fine El Mir, under the impression it was a Van Gogh, after the great success of his popularized book on primate psychology, How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes. Williams was then in the midst of his first phase synthesizing General Semantics and Zen Buddhism, and he immediately recognized what was really going on when identifiable El Mirs were everywhere falling in value after the great Expose.
It was a glitch, he decided.
He called together a small group of people who also owned identified El Mirs and begged them not to believe that they had been deceived.
"A signature," he told them earnestly, "is not an economic Good in itself, like gold or land or factories. It is only a squiggle given contextual meaning by social convention."
He went on like that for nearly an hour. He spoke of the differences between the map and the territory; between the spoken word ("a sonic wave in the atmosphere") and the nonverbal thing or event which the word merely designates; between the menu and the meal. He quoted Hume, Einstein, Korzybski, and Pope Stephen. He dragged in the latest theories in perception psychology, Ethnome-thodology, and McLuhan's version of media-message analysis.
He reminded them that Carlos Castaneda had studied Ethnomethodology with Garfinkle before studying shamanism with Don Juan Matus, and he assured them, as a professional anthropologist, that anyone who has the power to define reality for you has become a sorcerer, if you don't catch the bastard real quick.