A Coney Island of the Mindless

E. Michael Jones

Fidelity Press

206 Marquette Avenue

South Bend, Indiana 46617

© Fidelity Press 2013

To Peter

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: Old Age

Chapter 2: Henry Miller's Coney Island

Chapter 3: Ginsberg on Wall Street

Chapter 4: Failed Effort

Chapter 5: Dick Zigun

Biographical Note

Footnotes

Preface

What started out as an excursion to the beach ended up being the cultural equivalent of the cautionary tale. When my son Peter and I arrived at Coney Island on our way to the beach, we found our way blocked by 750,000 people, police barricades, and, most formidable of all, mermaids. My son and I had stumbled across the Coney Island Mermaid Parade, "an excuse to go naked in New York City." Given Coney Island's history as "Sodom by the Sea," the exhibitionism of the mermaids was not entirely unexpected, but the decadence was palpable nonetheless. Coney Island was never particularly edifying, but it only became culturally toxic when it became a Coney Island of the mind and amusement became synonymous with vice, to enslave an American populace that could best be characterized as the Coney Island mindless.

E. Michael Jones

South Bend, Indiana

July 2013

I have seen the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think they will sing to me.

T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

America . . .

When will you take off your clothes?

Alan Ginsberg, "America"

. . . Montparnasse is Jewish.

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Chapter 1

Old Age

I turned 65 in May. This makes me officially an old man. Shortly after turning 65 I lost the pants clip that keeps my trousers out of the black greasy chain of my bicycle, and so, for a short time, until I found the pants clip again, I would travel around South Bend, Indiana wearing "the bottom of my trousers rolled," just like J. Alfred Prufrock. To do the Prufrock thing completely, I needed white flannel trousers and a beach. Well, I don't have white flannel trousers, but in late June I was near the beach. In this particular instance the beach where I intended to walk was beyond the boardwalk where Coney Island meets the sea.

In 1609 Henry Hudson discovered Coney Island one day before he discovered Manhattan. The Lenape Indians who lived there called the island "Narrioch," which means "land without shadows," because the island's southeastern orientation allows the sunlight shines on the beach all day long.[1] Coney Island received its name from the rabbits which lived there before their habitat was destroyed, but it achieved its fame as an amusement park. It is certainly an arguable proposition to claim that Coney Island is the home of the most famous beach in the United States.

Like Prufrock, I have grown old. Like Prufrock I even wear the bottom my trousers rolled when I walk on the beach. But life is still full of surprises. Imagine Prufrock's shock, then, when, barely off the D train, he encountered a mermaid in the Coney Island Metro station. Prufrock had stumbled onto the Coney Island Mermaid Parade. There is no fixed date for the Coney Island Mermaid Parade. It can occur at any time on the Saturday closest to the summer solstice in late June. After Hurricane Sandy, there was doubt whether it would ever occur again. The odds of stumbling across it accidentally on the way to the beach were infinitesimally small, which means that this was God's doing not mine.

The Coney Island Mermaid Parade, we are told, "is a lively and welcoming ocean-themed event opened to everyone."[2] Slightly more honestly, one of the mermaids said that the Coney Island Mermaid Parade was, "an excuse to go naked in New York City."[3] The Coney Island Mermaid Parade came into existence in 1983, which is to say nine years after the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade. It came into existence so that the mermaids "can come out as the freaks that we are and feel at home in the world."[4]

All parades in New York became in effect Gay Pride Parades the moment the courts forced the Irish who held the St. Patrick's Day Parade to admit homosexuals to their ranks or not get a parade permit. The Coney Island Mermaid Parade is no exception to this rule, except for the fact that the endorsement of homosexuality, sexual deviance, and exhibitionism was more overt. Over the 31 years of its existence the Coney Island Mermaid Parade has drawn larger and larger crowds. On the day when I attempted to get to the beach at Coney Island approximately 750,000 people had lined the streets effectively blocking my way. When the parade was finally over and the crowd rushed to Nathan's to buy a hot dog, it was the first time I felt threatened by the crush of the crowd since having attended the 34th anniversary celebration of the Islamic revolution in Tehran. The Coney Island Mermaid Parade was the mirror image of the celebration of the 34th anniversary of the Iranian Islamic revolution. As I explained in my e-book Culture Jihad in Tehran, once a year the Iranians celebrate the overthrow of the Shah and the sexual subversion he promoted. Over here, we celebrate sodomy, the triumph of sexual decadence, and the moral corruption of women. Pentheus, the ruler of Thebes, no matter what his faults were, knew that when the women leave their looms to dance naked on the mountainside, the fall of the state is imminent. On the other hand, Michael Mukasey, Brooklyn's Borough chief, announced to anyone who felt offended at the women dancing naked on the boardwalk, "if you don't like it, leave." If the New York Times reporter who interviewed me in Tehran had asked me to give my first impression of Coney Island, it would have been sexualization.

There is an undeniable vitality to New York City. That vitality comes from human labor. When it comes to human labor, the juice bar just west of Washington Square is the best metaphor for the New York labor market. New York City, to mix metaphors a bit, is a huge vacuum cleaner, sucking labor from every part of the United States and every part of the world. New York City is also a huge juicing machine. Like a juicing machine, it sucks the labor out of those who go there looking for work and then spits out the human pulp that is left over when the labor has been extracted. Every human being is the fruit of the union of two other human beings. In a capitalist economy, the man with the most money gets the most fruit. Human labor lines up at the portals of New York City to be juiced. I'm not just talking about the dark-skinned immigrants who take the rich people's children for walks in the park. I'm talking about the woman sitting on the bench next to me in Washington Square telling her story to her friend. Washington Square is a place where people rest on their way to work. The woman sitting next to me is a lawyer at a high-pressure firm who has been "unhappy for 10 years now" because in the process of appropriating her labor the law firm which employed her appropriated her life as well.

Her troubles began, she tells her friend, when a new partner joined the firm. The new partner felt that every client had the right to a legal brief the very next day, no matter how complicated. His advent at the firm meant that the then young lady lawyer began a series of 18-hour days which have continued to the present. She would get home at midnight and have a cheese sandwich just before going to bed for the five hours of sleep that would allow her to be at her desk the next day at 6:00 AM.

"One night," she told her friend, "I came home at midnight and was eating my cheese sandwich on the sofa when I burst into tears." Because of her hours she had not gone to a party in months; she had not met anyone as a result; as a result, she had not gotten married; she had not had children; now she was in her mid-40s and it was too late to have children. The New York Labor Juicer had sucked her dry. Paul Krugman recently opined in the New York Times that the capitalist labor machine is so efficient that it continually generates unemployment. As an alternative Krugman proposed a wage for everyone, whether they work or not. Not infrequently economists claim that technology makes labor obsolete, but this is clearly not the case with the 40-year-old lady lawyer sitting on the bench next to me. By allowing herself to be exploited by putting in the hours that ruined her life, she put at least two other lawyers out of work, and the surplus value which she and the two phantom employees who never got hired created went into the pockets of the partners who juiced her life.

So what happened to the two lawyers, never hired, who would have allowed this lady to lead something approximating a normal life? They most probably sold their labor at a lower price, most probably doing something they were not qualified to do, bumping someone else out of a job, and so on down the labor food chain until we reach the pool of the permanently unemployed whose role in life is to keep wages low for everyone else. In order to keep this permanently unemployed mass of human laborers from turning revolutionary, as it threatened to do a the recent Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, the state provides, as it did in the ancient world, bread and circuses. Amusement, in other words, is the flip side of the exploitation of labor I have just described. The amusement park came into being when the industrial mobilization of labor reached its peak, which is to say during the last decade of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century, which was of course the time when Coney Island reached the apogee of its fame. "Coney Island," we are told, "took America from the Victorian Age into the Modern World."[5]

Taking its cue from the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, Coney Island became a shrine to the wonders of the technological age. The railroad, which from the time Nathaniel Hawthorne immortalized it in the 1840s had become the prime artifact announcing the dawn of a new era of unlimited progress, got combined with the need for amusing the laboring masses during their limited free time when the first roller coaster was born on Coney Island in 1884.

The other technological breakthrough that made Coney Island the temple of the technological age was the incandescent light bulb. Luna Park, which was decorated with hundreds of thousands of light bulbs, was described as "an electric Eden."[6] Because its amusement parks were made of paper, plaster, and lathe, they frequently burned to the ground. By 1910, which is to say, one year before Dreamland, one of the big three Coney Island amusement parks, burned to the ground, Coney Island's aura was visible 30 miles out at sea. "When it was at its most popular, it perfectly reflected its culture. . . . Part of that was the excitement of electricity."[7]

The final technology, the one that enabled amusement better than any other and simultaneously doomed Coney Island as its locus, was the motion picture camera, which was invented in 1896. By the time Coney Island reached its heyday, 450 motion pictures ran simultaneously there 24 hours a day. The first pornographic film made its debut one year later.[8]

Given man's fallen nature, recreation, which is necessary to the human spirit, is forever slipping into amusement, and amusement is forever slipping into vice. No place on earth demonstrates this trajectory better than Coney Island, which was traditionally known as "Sodom on the Sea."[9] From the moment of its inception, when steam trains and ships were bringing sweltering New Yorkers there for respite from the summer heat in the 1860 and '70s, it was "a well known fact" that the picnics there were "arranged for the sole benefit of pickpockets, prostitutes, and swindlers."[10] Coney Island became a refuge from normal life. The freak shows, which always had a salacious tinge to them, preached against normality in the essential sense of the term. Coney Island preached progress, but there was no telos to human action. There was "no morality that said you had to be this way or that way." Life "was a perpetual circus."[11] Coney Island, as a result, became "a suburb of Sodom" where "scenes that shock and disgust" corrupted young people of both sexes.[12] One of the first motion pictures ever made was "Sea Waves at Coney Island." It was followed by "Cake Walk on the Beach," a film "throbbing with physical passion," at least according to the standards of the time.[13]

Soon the eroticism of the peep shows slopped over into the amusements themselves. The mechanical horse ride at Steeplechase Park became popular because it gave young men "a chance to hug the girls. Girls like it because it gave them a chance to be hugged."[14] Even more sexually overt was the "Blowhole Theater," which greeted the young men and women as they left the Steeplechase ride. Flanked by a clown and a midget at the exit, women were forced to walk over a jet of air which blew her skirt up around her waist in front of hundreds of voyeuristic spectators who had been provided benches by the ride's owner. After the woman became an unwitting victim to the owners' desire to profit from the voyeurism of the masses, "The audience shrieked with laughter and waited for the next victim."[15]

Al Lewis, who would go on to fame as Grandpa in the TV series The Munsters, worked at Coney Island as a youth. His experience there taught him that "Every nation needs escape from respectability." But more sinister forces were at work. The technology of the railroad, the light bulb and the moving picture allowed Coney Island to became a laboratory in which something more sinister would be developed, namely, the technology of controlling large masses of people through the manipulation of their passions. The amusement park would provide the model for amusement as a form of control which would be perfected in the period following World War II, when Coney Island had fallen into a period of terminal decline. Democracy got re-engineered at Coney Island. The proponents of that re-engineering claimed that "here you will find the real interpretation of the Declaration of Independence,"[16] and they may have been right. By the beginning of the 21st century, the Coney Island Freak Show had become the main explicator of tolerance, freedom, and the American Way.

After John Y. McKane, the political boss who ran Coney Island got sent to Sing Sing for corruption, the New York Times claimed that "it remains to be seen whether the keepers of the resort can make their place attractive without vice."[17] By now it should be obvious that the answer to that question had become a foregone conclusion. Coney Island could never break out of the mold in which it had been crated as the proletarian escape valve from capitalism's pandemic exploitation of labor: "By the last decade of the 19th century, . . . Coney Island exploded. A quarter of a million people could be found there on summer Sundays."[18]

Chapter 2

Henry Miller's Coney Island

Before it could fulfill its destiny as a form of mass control, amusement in general and the amusement park in particular had to find their explication at the hands of the intellectuals. On a warm September night in 1909, Sigmund Freud, author of The Interpretation of Dreams, visited Dreamland on Coney Island and contemplated the technological wonders and lusi naturae on display there. One of the people who could have bumped into Sigmund Freud on that September night was Henry Miller. Miller was born in 1891 to an alcoholic German tailor and a Puritanical German mother, whose iron will and regular habits held the family together. Miller, whose name became synonymous with Bohemian sexual excess, never lost the orderly habits he had learned from his mother, not even in the squalor of Left Bank garrets in Montmartre and Montparnasse in the 1930s. By the time he reached his teenage years, Miller had become addicted to sexual vice and regularly visited prostitutes, from whom he contracted two cases of venereal disease by the time he reached his twenties.

At the age of 19, Miller began "an intensely sexual relationship with a woman who was old enough to be his mother,"[19] financed by money his family had saved up to send him to college. In order to escape from the guilt and self-loathing that a sexual relationship of this sort invariably inspired, Miller would get up at 5:30 in the morning and "ride to Coney Island and back on the Bohemian racing wheel which he'd bought from a six-day bike rider at Madison Square Garden."[20] As Sigmund Freud could have predicted, Miller began to cathect that self-loathing on to Coney Island itself, beginning the process whereby it would become a permanent symbol of sexual degeneracy, self-loathing, and cultural disgust.

The result of that cathexis was "a Coney Island of the mind," a cultural virus which would go on to infect the entire nation. The phrase originates, not from the book of poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti which made it famous as part of the Beatnik craze of the 1950s, but from an essay by Miller entitled "Into the Night Life." Miller, in turn, got the phrase from "a line of Freud's which Gottfried Benn said contained the whole of modern psychology: 'Into the night life seems to be exiled what once ruled during the day.'"[21] Miller's surrealistic prose was a combination of Freudian psychoanalysis and Coney Island's Dreamland amusement park. Coney Island became saturated in Miller's sexual disgust:

Everything is sordid, shoddy, thin as pasteboard. A Coney Island of the mind. The amusement shacks are running full blast, the shelves full of chinaware and dolls stuffed with straw and alarm clocks and spittoons. Every shop has three balls over it and every game is a ball game. The Jews are walking around in the mackintoshes, the Japs are smiling, the air is full of chopped onions and sizzling hamburgers.[22]

In Miller's mind, Coney Island had become a symbol of America, corrupt and superficial, but before long, it becomes equally clear that America had become a stand-in for lost innocence, both national and personal, because capitalism goes hand in hand with moral corruption and "creative destruction":

In the oceanic night Steeplechase looks like a wintry beard. Everything is sliding and crumbling, everything glitters, totters, teeters, titters. . . . Where is the war summer's day when I first saw the green-carpeted earth revolving and men and women moving like panthers? Where is the soft gurgling music which I heard welling up from the sappy roots of earth? Where am I to go if everywhere there are trapdoors and grinning skeletons, a world turned inside out and all the flesh peeled off? Where am I to lay my head if there is nothing but beards and mackintoshes and peanut whistles and broken slats? Am I to walk forever along this endless pasteboard street, this pasteboard which I can punch a hole in, which I can blow down with my breath, which I can set fire to with a match? The world has become a mystic maze erected by a gang of carpenters during the night. Everything is a lie, a fake. Pasteboard.[23]

Disgust mingled with nostalgia:

Under the elevated structure, the windows full of pies and hamburgers, the rails swiftly turning, the old sensations, the old memories invade me again. All that belongs with docks and wharves, with funnels, cranes, pistons, wheels, ties, bridges, all the paraphernalia of travel and hunger repeats itself like a blind mechanism.[24]

Confronted with a moral challenge of this magnitude, Miller can either repent or press on. Since Cora, the girl of his dreams, has been lost forever to marriage to another man, Miller takes on the persona of the Promethean liberator, walking along the ocean front, contemplating the beach, which "is strewn with human clams waiting for some one to pry their shells apart."[25]

In order to accomplish his mission of liberation through depravity, Miller would eventually leave his native New York to spend time in Paris, where Bohemia because of the world wide economic crisis, had fallen on hard times in comparison with the halcyon last days of the belle epoque. The dubious fruit of Miller's stay in Paris in the 1930s was the pornographic novel Tropic of Cancer, a succes de scandale that attracted the attention of the tout le monde literaire, including such improbable admirers as T. S. Eliot. Samuel Beckett called Tropic of Cancer "a momentous event in the history of modern writing."[26] In his typically effusive manner whenever pornography was involved, Norman Mailer called it "one of the ten or 20 greatest novels of our century, a revolution in consciousness equal to The Sun Also Rises."[27]

While in Paris, Miller discovered that to be a Bohemian meant becoming Jewish. Montparnasse was Jewish, the transformation had taken place long before Miller arrived, under the auspices of Picasso's dealer Kahnweiler and painters like Modigliani, who introduced himself to the English painter Nina Hamnett when she arrived in Montparnasse as "Modigliani, painter and Jew."[28] As Miller put it in Tropic of Cancer: "almost all Montparnasse is Jewish, or half-Jewish, which is worse. . . . Frances Blake is a Jew or a Jewess. Titus is a Jew. The Jews then are snowing me under. I am writing this for my friend Carl whose father is a Jew. All this is important to understand."[29] By becoming a Bohemian, Miller had become a Jew. In describing his infatuation with the Jewess Tania, Miller writes: "for her sake I too would become a Jew. Why not? I already speak like a Jew. And I am as ugly as a Jew. Besides, who hates the Jews more than a Jew?"[30]

Sodom by the Sea suffered the fate of its biblical namesake more than once. Dreamland, as we have already mentioned, burned to the ground in 1911, two years after Sigmund Freud's visit. After World War II, the "creative destruction" continued apace. Luna Park burned down in 1944, reopened briefly and then closed forever two years later. Robert Moses hated Coney Island's noise and squalor and vowed to clean it up with the high rise buildings which the Beats, taking their cue from Miller, condemned as part of the "air-conditioned nightmare" that America was on its way to becoming at the time. With decay came a kind of efflorescence. Coney Island experienced its greatest influx of visitors on Friday, July 4, 1947, when 1,300,000 New Yorkers, or one fifth of the entire population of the city, went to the beach. Three years later, in spite of the ongoing decay, or perhaps because of it, Bettie Page began her career as the world's most famous pin-up model by simply walking along the boardwalk on Coney Island, where she was discovered by a full-time cop and part-time photographer by the name of Jerry Tibbs.[31] Bettie Page would go on to pose for some 20,000 photos before she succumbed to the psychosis which playing the role of sexual icon eventually engendered.[32]

The beach will always attract people on a hot day, but the amusement park era was rapidly drawing to a close:

After World War II, contraction began seriously from a number of pressures. Air conditioning in movie theaters and then in homes, along with the advent of automobiles which provided access to the less crowded and more appealing Long Island state parks, especially Jones Beach State Park, lessened the attractions of Coney Island's beaches. Luna Park closed in 1946 after a series of fires, and the New York street gang problems of the 1950s spilled into Coney Island. The presence of threatening youths did not impact the beach-goers, but discouraged visitors to the rides and concessions which were staples of the Coney Island economy. The local economy was dealt a severe blow by the 1964 closing of Steeplechase Park the last of the major amusement parks.[33]

Then the real catastrophe occurred. Shortly after World War II, the literary Jew boys discovered Miller and made him, and by extension Coney Island, the stylistic paradigm of modern American literature. Coney Island had been weaponized by becoming "a Coney Island of the mind." Karl Shapiro, who could serve as the classic example of one of New York's literary Judenbuben, suggested that he and Lawrence Durrell should "'put together a bible of Miller's work' to be substituted for the Gideon Bible in every hotel room in America."[34] This is, of course, precisely what happened — if not literally then certainly substantively. Sexual decadence became the new Bible, and every parade became a gay pride parade in one way or another.

By the time, Lawrence Ferlighetti published his book of poems A Coney Island of the Mind in 1958, Coney Island had become a symbol of decadent sleaze, and that was precisely why the Judenbuben liked it so much.

When Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Sephardic Jew who grew up in New York, issued a book of poetry entitled A Coney Island of the Mind in the mid-50s the transformation was complete. Lifting the title of his book from Miller's description in his Freudian, surrealist essay "Into the Night Life," Ferlinghetti's poetry was simply Miller's prose splayed across the page in ways that disguised its lack of meter. Under the auspices of Ferlighetti and Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer, the island where the Dutch used to hunt rabbits became:

'… a kind of Coney Island of the mind, a kind of circus of the soul.' Indeed both Miller and Ferlinghetti hit on the idea of letting go, of giving in to your senses. They suggest we should embrace the chaos of the carnivalesque, the overstimulated bawdiness of the burlesque. And they evoke moments when we may have no choice otherwise.[35]

Ferlinghetti used Miller's style as a cover for Jewish blasphemy. In one of his poems from A Coney Island of the Mind, he describes Jesus Christ on the cross as:

Him just hang there

On His tree

Looking real Petered out

And real cool

And also

According to a round up

of late world news

from the usual reliable sources

real dead.[36]

A Coney Island of the Mind is the mechanism which reduces everything human and/or sacred to something freakish, campy, and ultimately dismissible:

This life is not a circus where

the shy performing dogs of love

look on

Yet gay parading floats drift by

While cakewalkers and carnie hustlers

All gassed to the gills

Strike playbill poses

And stagger after every

Wheeling thing

While still around the ring

Lope the misshapen camels of lust

And all us Emmett Kelly clowns

Always making up imaginary scenes

With all our masks for faces

Even eat fake Last Suppers

At collapsible tables

And mocking ourselves

In saw dust crosses

And yet gobble up at last

To shrive our circus souls

The also imaginary

Wafers of grace.[37]

The main force driving Miller's reputation among the Jewish literati in New York was Tropic of Cancer, Miller's pornographic tour de force describing his life among the lice-ridden whores of Paris during the 1930s. The Jew Boys from New York City had unilaterally declared Henry Miller the new literary Messiah. Miller "took off at the place where Hemingway ended."[38] Henry Miller, Norman Mailer continued:

has influenced the style of half the good American poets and writers alive today: it is fair to ask if books as different as Naked Lunch, Portnoy's Complaint, Fear of Flying, and Why Are We in Vietnam? would have been as well-received (or as free in style) without the irrigation Henry Miller gave to American prose. . . . With the exception of Hemingway he has had the perhaps the largest stylistic influence of an 20th century American author.[39]

Mailer is, of course, right. At some point during the second half of the 20th century, American literature ended up in the garbage can largely because of Henry Miller and his Jewish acolytes. Allen Ginsberg's poetry reads like a bad imitation of Henry Miller's prose. It has the same unfortunate combination of sexual deviance taking refuge behind high moral indignation, as when he wrote in the poem of the same name: "America when will you be angelic?/When will you take off your clothes?"

Miller knew he was spewing cultural poison when he wrote Tropic of Cancer. What he only came to understand later is that this poison was seen as a valuable commodity because it anesthetized its readers to the extent of their depravity:

One reason why I have stressed so much the immoral, the wicked, the ugly, the cruel in my work is because I wanted others to know how valuable these are, how equally if not more important than the good things . . . I was getting the poison out of my system. Curiously enough, this poison had a tonic effect for others. It was as if I had given them some kind of immunity.[40]

Eventually the Judenbuben from New York City, Miller's Tropic of Cancer, and the work of epigoni like Ferlighetti and Ginsberg combined to overturn the nation's obscenity laws. One day after Ferlighetti heard "Howl" for the first time, he wired Ginsberg a telegram saying: "I greet you at the beginning of a great literary career." It was the same line that Emerson had sent to Walt Whitman after the former had read Leaves of Grass. The reaction of the police was anything but flattering. In 1956 San Francisco police confiscated copies of "Howl" and Shig Murao, the bookstore manager, was arrested on obscenity charges. Ferlingetti went on trial, but was eventually acquitted thanks to the efforts of Jake Ehrlich and the American Civil Liberties Union, the Jewish organization that was then in the forefront of striking down obscenity laws. The judiciary followed the ACLU's lead on the matter. Judge Clayton W. Horn declared that "Howl" was not obscene, and Ginsberg was acquitted in October 1957.[41] In 1964 the United States Supreme Court declared that Tropic of Cancer wasn't obscene either.[42]

What followed was moral deregulation not just in sexual issues, but across the board. The prime beneficiaries were the Wall Street Usurers. The Jewish-led sexual revolution, which began when Hollywood overturned the essentially Catholic production code over a two-year period of time beginning with the release of The Pawnbroker in 1965 and ending with the release Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1967, found its culmination in the de-criminalization of abortion in 1973, but the point of sexual liberation was ultimately economic. The culmination of the sexual revolution was the Monetary Control Act of 1980. The decriminalization of usury which occurred with the passage of the Monetary Control Act of 1980 was only the logical extension of the wave of moral "liberation" which began with the sexual revolution. Greider sees the same connection when he writes:

For some years, American society had been engaged in an era of moral liberation. . . . The Catholic sin [sic] of abortion was legalized. . . . Moral inhibitions that had held authority for centuries were abandoned. Old notions of sinfulness were redefined as largely private matters, no longer subject to public regulation. . . . In this climate of moral change, American finance was also liberated to do what had once been forbidden. This sin of usury was legalized by an act of Congress.[43]

Unlike the reaction to abortion, which would propel Ronald Reagan into the White House in 1980, there was no controversy surrounding the decriminalization of usury. The same rhetoric would be applied to both liberations: "Lending money at ruinous rates would now be regarded, like sex, as a 'victimless crime,' a private act between consenting adults."[44] Since the traditional moral condemnation of usury was always at odds with the dynamics of capitalism, which was always state-sponsored usury, any erosion of morals was going to be good for capitalism. Viewed in this light, the sexual revolution can be seen as the first phase of a plan of moral deregulation whose ultimate goal was freeing the capitalist system of the last vestiges of moral restraint. With the passage of the Monetary Act of 1980, that goal was achieved. The moral poles had been reversed:

Creditors were now portrayed in the political debate as the victims, the virtuous citizens who were exploited by the political interference. Borrowers were described as morally suspect. . . . The original social contract implied by the concept of usury — the obligations of wealth toward the needs of others — was inverted. The congressional debate described a new political obligation: the savers must be set free, free to seek the highest rate of return on their money.[45]

Once the Fed started paying over 20 percent on T-bills, usury statutes became meaningless because the entire economy had to follow the Fed's lead. Banks which borrowed from the Fed at record high rates had to charge their customers even higher rates to make a profit. In Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country, William Greider claims that "the moral offence" involved in usury "was profit without work. The usurer sold time, which belonged only to God."[46] But by the 1980s, the religious terminology was all on the side of the usurer. When Paul Volcker and other defenders of usury referred to their attempts to return to the pre-Keynesia era of hard money, they invariably referred to "suffering" of the salutary sort that took place in "purgatory." Hard money was the "old-time religion" that needed to be brought back to pay for the Keynesian binge. According to David Stockman, Reagan's director of the Office of Budget Management, "The president would say to us: 'We've been on a binge for 30 years. This is the price you have to pay'"[47] according to the "old time religion."

Greider claims that "The payment of interest was the core of the capitalist dynamic — it mobilized idle wealth for productive enterprises,"[48] but in pointing out the errors of the usurers, Greider often can't distinguish between the Ten Commandments and the golden calf, as when he writes:

The advocates of gold relied upon divine authority to enforce this natural order. If humankind pledged obedience to God's indestructible metal, it would be rewarded with eternal assurance of stability. Both doctrines, gold and monetarism, were expressions of pre-modernist fundamentalism, simple and certain moral formulas for life, and their certitude had deep appeal, especially in anxious times.[49]

If the gold standard is orthodoxy, then Keynes can certainly be described as a heretic, but the terms are deceptive because the real orthodoxy in both moral and economic matters preceded the gold standard. Greider fails to grasp the paradox at the heart of Keynesianism when the claims that Keynes and his followers:

claimed that men and women could responsibly manage human affairs for themselves. They were rationalists who dismissed the "old-time religion" and its false moral commandments. Universal human pleasure, Keynes announced, did not require a requisite measure of Calvinist pain. It required the application of human intelligence.[50]

Human intelligence may or may not be able to bring about "universal human pleasure" (whatever that means), but it can only bring about a sound economy through the application of practical reason, which is to say universal norms which proscribe anti-social behavior like usury.

Advocates of the real "old time religion," like St. Antonino of Florence, would counter Greider's argument by saying that usury on loans was the antithesis of productive investment (and charity), because, unlike equity investments, there was no shared risk on a loan. Even the guardians of the rentier class understood this fact. Fed Governor Charles Partee pointed out "the fundamental difference between equity and debt" when he claimed that: "You are not required to pay a dividend to stockholders if your profits are down. But if you don't service your debt, you go bankrupt."[51] This fact would become painfully apparent during the leveraged buy-out frenzy of the 1980s, when equity got exchanged for debt on a massive scale with devastating consequences for America's manufacturing sector, as one corporation after another failed because it had been saddled with more debt than it could sustain.

In 1984, at the height of the LBO frenzy, US corporations turned $72 billion in stock shares into debt.[52] Much of that money got siphoned off into exorbitant fees for the managers of the deals. Next to nothing got invested to make the companies more productive. It was one more instance of usury facilitating the looting of American labor.

When Congress enacted the Monetary Control Act of 1980, "State usury laws — which prohibited interest rates from rising above acceptable levels — were unilaterally suspended by act of Congress." The suspension of usury laws would prove to be a disaster for small businesses and the working man, but the high interest rates it allowed proved to be a boon for the banks:

The Monetary Control Act of 1980 represented a major tax cut for the banks, totaling many billions of dollars. When the new rules were fully phased in, the member banks would be freed of nearly $14.5 billion in reserve requirements — money that they could then invest at market rates.[53]

The real winners were the big banks, which because of reduced reserve requirements now suddenly had billions of their assets freed up at precisely the same time that the government was paying unprecedentedly high interest rates. Needless to say, many of the legislators who passed the Monetary Control Act of 1980 profited from it financially. The banks contributed generously to the campaigns of their congressional supporters, but beyond that more than one-fourth of the Congressmen who passed the bill had a direct financial stake in the outcome. Ownership of stock in financial institution among congressmen "exceeded their holdings in manufacturing, law, arms, or oil and gas."[54]

On January 20, 1981, Ronald Reagan was inaugurated President of the United States, and on the same day, the Iranian hostage crisis ended. The link between the two events was not coincidental. The Reagan campaign had bribed the imams to prolong the hostage crisis as a way of embarrassing Jimmy Carter and winning the election.

Ronald Reagan then set out to implement the same economic theories that Paul Volcker was implementing at the Fed. "Reagan," according to Greider, "was the first modern president who could fairly be labeled a monetarist. He was a disciple of Milton Friedman's."[55] He knew, therefore, that another word for driving down inflation was increasing unemployment. As a result, it didn't take Reagan long to declare war on labor. When 13,000 members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization walked off the job on August 3, 1981, Reagan was handed his causus belli on a silver platter. That afternoon, Reagan announced that the strikers had 48 hours to return to work or face termination.[56] After courting the union's support during the 1980 presidential election campaign and commiserating with them over their long hours and low pay,[57] Reagan responded to PATCO's strike by turning the power of the federal government against the union, firing 11,000 strikers and ordering the Justice Department to indict 75 of the union's leaders. A federal judge complemented Reagan's work by imposing fines of $1 million per day for the duration of the strike. Faced with government fire-power of this sort, the strike collapsed; the union was ultimately decertified, and a warning went out to organized labor that the New Deal was officially over:

By the 1980s, the New Deal reforms that protected labor and agriculture had already lost their effectiveness. . . . Labor unions . . . had also lost much of their power to control access to jobs. Corporations, facing their own cost squeeze on profits, had discovered how to escape the wage demands of organized labor. They simply moved the factories away from the unions. Manufacturing jobs were relocated first, from the industrial North the underdeveloped South, where willing workers accepted lower wages and the absence of union protection. Next, the jobs were moved overseas to low-wage countries around the world.[58]

Widespread acceptance of Friedman's Chicago School economic theories enabled the American government to attack labor in the United States, just as it had enabled the attacks on labor that immediately followed the installation of Friedmanite dictatorships in countries like Chile and Argentina. Caught in a crossfire between the Fed and the White House, labor lost all of the gains it had made during the Keynesian/New Deal era. From the Friedmanite perspective, the war on inflation and the war on labor were two sides of the same coin. As a result of declaring war on inflation, "Volcker wanted wages to fall, the faster the better. In crude terms, the Fed was determined to break labor."[59]

Chapter 3

Ginsberg on Wall Street

In The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State, Benjamin Ginsberg told the '80s Wall Street story from a slightly different perspective. According to Ginsberg, "It apparently did not go unnoticed in executive suites across the country that virtually all the takeover specialists and their financial backers were Jews."[60] Both Martin and Charlie Sheen played characters which were identifiably Catholic in Wall Street, but Gordon Gecko was never identified as a Jew even though all the "rapacious leveraged-buyout kings of the 1980s" were overwhelmingly of the Jewish persuasion. Or, as Ginsberg puts it in Fatal Embrace,

Such Jewish financiers as Saul Steinberg, Victor Posner, Carl Icahn, Nelson Pelz, the Belzberg family, Sir James Goldsmith and others were among the leaders in hostile takeover efforts. Of the major actors in the area of corporate takeovers, only two — T. Boone Pickens and Cincinnati-based Carl Lindner — were not Jews. Jewish arbitrageurs —Ivan Boesky came to be the most famous — became major factors in the acquisition of huge blocks of stock, easing the way for takeover attempts. Jews pioneered program trading that, among other things permitted corporations to aggregate excess revenues in their pension funds that could then be employed for other corporate purposes.[61]

Ginsberg claims that the Reagan Administration arranged this "marriage of convenience" largely to pursue foreign policy goals and then reneged on the arrangement when it became politically inconvenient. Be that as it may, junk bonds were a Jewish invention because:

The parvenu Jews saw the incredible possibilities inherent in the junk bonds that established firms disdained. The Jews honed the art of risk arbitrage, another field snubbed by WASP Wall Street.[62]

In what was an unprecedented reversal of political roles,

the Jewish financier enjoyed the blessing and protection of the Reagan administration. The administration courted the financiers and protected them from a hostile congress.[63]

The Democratic Party was the traditional political home of the Jews, who earn like Episcopalians but vote like Puerto Ricans, but because the Democrats were beholden to the unions, they could not ignore the wreckage which leveraged buyouts were causing in the economy. They could also not ignore the anti-union bias of the PE firms or the toll in lost jobs lost they were causing. The toll was enormous indeed. Just two years of corporate takeovers, those which took place between 1985 and 1986 wiped out "one-fourth of the corporations that had been listed in the Fortune 500" and the jobs of everyone who worked for them.[64] And in 1986 it looked as if the worst was yet to come. As a result the Democrats turned on the Jews, or as Ginsberg put it:

Many of Reagan's opponents in the Democratic party and the liberal media understood that it was the de facto alliance between the administration and the Jewish financiers that made sufficient money and credit available to fuel economic expansion despite the huge budget deficits that would have otherwise diminished the availability of capital to private concerns. . . . By attacking the activities of the Jewish financiers, Democrats hoped to disrupt Reagan's economic policies, which were damaging their own constituents.[65]

When it became apparent that the Reagan administration could not protect its Jewish financiers, they were cut loose from White House protection and began turning on each other. Dennis Levine, "a managing director at Drexel Burnham Lambert and a close associate of many of the major Jewish financiers . . . agreed to cooperate with federal authorities and led investigators to Ivan Boesky. Boesky, in turn, led prosecutors to a number of others, including, most importantly, Michael Milken."[66] After Milken was indicted, Drexel Burnham Lambert was forced into bankruptcy, and the whole leveraged buy-era came to an abrupt end as criminal investigations became "weapons in partisan warfare."[67]

By 1987 it was clear that the government felt that it had to intervene. In October 1987, the same year that Wall Street appeared in the nation's theaters, House Ways and Means committee chairman Dan Rostenkowski closed the last big leveraged buy-out loophole, causing the Dow Jones Industrial average to fall 23 percent, the largest one-day decline in the history of the stock market. By 1989 nine Congressional hearings were planned on the impact of leveraged buyouts. At this point the bad news was undeniable: "Of the 25 companies that from 1985 to 1989 borrowed $1 billion or more in junk bonds to finance their own LBOs, 52 percent, including wallboard maker National Gypsum, eventually collapsed."[68]

Chapter 4

Failed Effort

Ultimately, Rostenkowski's effort to reign in the leveraged buyout kings failed. During the 1980s, Congress "considered taking bold action," but "In the end no major changes were made."[69] In The Buyout of America: How Private Equity Will Cause the Next Great Credit Crisis, Josh Kosman tells us that "In the early 1990s the LBO kings disappeared from public view,"[70] but the change was more semantic than financial. The change "from leveraged buyout to management buyout to private equity . . . was really a marketing concept."[71] The Fed's willingness to keep the cheap money spigot turned on insured that predatory take-overs would continue, no matter what they were called. Banks were now competing with each other to get LBO business.

There are other reasons why this issue did not get resolved. One was because of the connection between Private Equity buyouts and demographics, or as Kosman put it, "State pensions . . . needed higher returns to pay all of the soon-to-be retiring Baby Boomers."[72] Pension managers needed higher returns because their clients were retiring, and younger workers were not replacing them. By 2006, 51 of 64 state pensions were underfunded, compared with only 25 in 2000. "From 1997 through 2007, the $24 billion Employees Retirement System of Texas had seen a 17 percent fall in active members and an 85 percent rise in retirees."[73]

Sensing that he had the upper hand over the pension fund managers, Henry Kravis starting flying them to KKR headquarters in his private jet and tying up their money in long-term contracts that benefited KKR. Because demographics were upside down, Kravis could take advantage of what Kosman characterizes as "a huge pool of investment money competing for opportunities."[74] Pension funds were practically begging PE firms like KKR to take their money, and people like Henry Kravis were only to eager to oblige, often tying up pension fund money for a decade into the future, even as returns began dwindling. Kravis knew that he had the pension funds by the short hairs, largely because of the cheap money which Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan continued to make available at public expense. Greenspan's collusion with the plutocrats is just one of many ugly stories which comes out in the private equity saga. If the Fed had raised interest rates to where they were in the early '90s, the pension fund managers could have bought T-bills, and predatory middlemen like Kohlberg and Kravis would have been eliminated from the equation. Instead, Greenspan chose to act in their interest by keeping the cheap money spigot open.

Chapter 5

Dick Zigun

Dick Zigun founded the Coney Island Mermaid Parade in 1983, long after anyone in his right mind could consider a novel, much less a poem, obscene but just as the leveraged buy-out frenzy was reaching a peak on Wall Street. Zigun was born in 1953, raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut, hometown of P.T. Barnum, and received an MFA from the Yale School of Drama and many NEA grants.[75] Zigun was raised an Orthodox Jew, but he now describes himself as an agnostic. His deconversion from Judaism began when he attended Expo '67, the world's fair in Montreal. Zigun, who would go on to become the un-official mayor of Coney Island, recognized the religious implications of Coney Island-like exhibitions early on. He described the world's fair in Montreal as "a mind-blowing experience." The interviewer from the Jewish Forward then described the effect of Montreal's Expo '67 on his religious views:

Thanks to Expo's state-of-the-art science and cutting-edge technology, religion no longer had any traction for him. Prayer and praise didn't make sense. Despite good relations with his family, gatherings became difficult when they centered on Jewish rituals and on synagogue attendance.[76]

Zigun is described as "married to a pop musician from Lagos, Nigeria," but the gender of Zigun's wife or "wife" is not specified. In certain ways, of course, it doesn't matter anymore because all of us are now Jews and homosexuals, and even if we aren't really, we're expected to act the parts. We're all supposed to emulate people like Dick Zigun, who found his true vocation in corrupting the morals and the mores of the American culture which has treated him so well. Who could not, after all, be envious of Zigun's political clout and the fact that he can count on the support of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, as well as generous government stimulus packages to implement what he calls "amusement park socialism."[77]

Is it surprising that "amusement park socialism" has a distinctly Reichean, sexual-revolutionary tinge to it? No, not at all. Nor is it surprising that "amusement park socialism" is compatible with the most ruthless form of capitalism, which is to say, Jewish capitalism. The two have been bedfellows ever since Jacob Schiff gave Trotsky a ship laden with gold and told him to put it to good use in overthrowing the Czar.

Nor is it surprising that the Coney Island Mermaid Parade would begin at the height of Wall Street's leveraged buyout craze. Ten years after the advent of feminism, law schools were churning out women who would throw themselves voluntarily into the capitalist volcano in exchange for narcissistic fantasies that would console them in the absence of children and fulfilled lives. Abortion weaponized a whole generation of women. When the feminist lawyers woke up the fact that they had ruined their lives irrevocably, Dick Zigun was on hand to turn them into mermaids.

Just in case there is any doubt left in anyone's mind about the Jewish role in this trajectory of cultural decay, Joe Biden announced in mid-June that the Jews were behind gay marriage, the latest manifestation of cultural decadence. Two days after Prufrock watched the mermaids dance naked on the Coney Island boardwalk, the Supreme Court of the United States overturned the Defense of Marriage Act. As we have come to expect, the Jewish press bragged that this act of antidemocratic cultural terrorism was orchestrated by Jews, in particular Jewish women, led by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg:

It's probably not an accident that the four Justices who were most critical of DOMA are all either women or Jews — and in the case of Ginsburg and her colleague Elena Kagan, both. It is, however, a total coincidence that the plaintiff in the case, Edith Windsor and her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, are also both Jewish women. And it may make no substantive difference in the end: the vote that matters in the case belongs to Anthony Kennedy, a committed Catholic who nevertheless has written the Court's opinions in the two major gay-rights decisions, 1996's Romer v. Evans, which invalidated a Colorado ballot measure voiding gay-rights laws, and 2003's Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down laws criminalizing sodomy in the 13 other states where they remained on the books.[78]

As Pentheus discovered a long time ago, as soon as the women leave their looms and dance naked on the mountainside, the state is doomed. The same fate applies when mermaids dance naked on the Coney Island boardwalk.

Biographical Note

E. Michael Jones, Ph.D., editor of Culture Wars magazine, is the author of many books, some of which are available for Kindle, including:

Abu Ghraib and The American Empire

Assassins and Character Assassins: Spielberg's Munich

Benedict's Rule: The Rise of Ethnicity and the Fall of Rome

Culture Jihad in Tehran

Escape From Globalism: Meditations While Rowing Down the Danube

Jewish Nazis

L'affaire Williamson: The Catholic Church and Holocaust Denial

Lejzor and Fiszel Sing the Blues: Chess Records and the Black-Jewish Alliance

The Logos of Architecture and Its Opponents

Niggas in Denial: Pimping the System and The System of Pimping

Protectors of the Code: The Christmas Day Abortion Clinic Bombing

Requiem for a Whale Rider

Travels with Harley in Search of America: Motorcycles, War, Deracination, Consumer Identity

Footnotes

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coney_Island

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BPMCCTNvQA

[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BPMCCTNvQA

[4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BPMCCTNvQA

[5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0nsK1vitMg

[6] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0nsK1vitMg

[7] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0nsK1vitMg

[8] http://redux.com/view/post/3126653/World-s-First-Ever-Porn-Film-1897

[9] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0nsK1vitMg

[10] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0nsK1vitMg

[11] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0nsK1vitMg

[12] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0nsK1vitMg

[13] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0nsK1vitMg

[14] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0nsK1vitMg

[15] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0nsK1vitMg

[16] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0nsK1vitMg

[17] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0nsK1vitMg

[18] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0nsK1vitMg

[19] Jay Martin, Always Merry and Bright: The Life of Henry Miller (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1978), p. 25.

[20] Martin, p. 27.

[21] Martin, p. 294.

[22] Henry Miller, The Cosmological Eye (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1939), p. 248.

[23] Miller, p. 248.

[24] Miller, p. 250.

[25] Miller, p. 248.

[26] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropic_of_Cancer_(novel)

[27] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropic_of_Cancer_(novel)

[28] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montparnasse

[29] Norman Mailer, Genius and Lust: A Journey through the Major Writings of Henry Miller (New York: Grove Press, 1976), p. 20.

[30] Mailer, p. 20.

[31] http://bettiepagepix.com/

[32] http://www.findadeath.com/Deceased/p/bettiepage/bettiepage.htm

[33] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coney_Island

[34] Mailer, p. 3.

[35] http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/the-circus-in-your-soul

[36] Lawrence Ferlighetti, A Coney Island of the Mind (Norfolk, CT: New Directions Books, 1958), p. 32

[37] Ferlighetti, p. 32.

[38] Mailer, p. 16.

[39] Mailer, p. 5.

[40] Mailer, p. 17.

[41] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Ferlinghetti

[42] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropic_of_Cancer_(novel)

[43] William Greider, Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987),  p. 170.

[44] Greider, p. 170.

[45] Greider, p. 171.

[46] Greider, p. 172.

[47] Greider, p. 420.

[48] Greider, p. 173.

[49] Greider, p. 420.

[50] Greider, p. 420-1.

[51] Greider, p. 662.

[52] Greider, p. 662.

[53] Greider, p. 162.

[54] Greider, p. 163.

[55] Greider, p. 354.

[56] http://eightiesclub.tripod.com/id296.htm

[57] http://eightiesclub.tripod.com/id296.htm

[58] Greider, pp. 451-2.

[59] Greider, p. 429.

[60] Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 197.

[61] Ginsberg, p. 192.

[62] Ginsberg, p. 193.

[63] Ginsberg, p. 193.

[64] Ginsberg, p. 193.

[65] Ginsberg, p. 195.

[66] Ginsberg, p. 196.

[67] Ginsberg, p. 197.

[68] Josh Kosman, The Buyout of America: How Private Equity Will Cause the Next Great Credit Crisis (New York: Portfolio, 2009), p. 13.

[69] Kosman, p. 195.

[70] Kosman, p. 29.

[71] Kosman, p. 29.

[72] Kosman, p. 29.

[73] Kosman, p. 126.

[74] Kosman, p. 127.

[75] http://www.coneyisland.com/coney-island-circus-sideshow/cast/dick-zigun

[76] http://forward.com/articles/177125/coney-island-impresario-richard-zigun-plans-comeba/?p=all

[77] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl2eQfcixAo

[78] http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/128154/the-jewish-women-in-the-doma-case