Educated Guesswork

I Read It So You Don’t Have To Dept.

My Opinions: Incest and Illegitimacy, by Alfred Jordan
The Negro and the World Crisis, by Charles Lee Magne

Sincerity is a casualty of this Ironic Age. We now are surprised to contemplate that perhaps some advocate of this or that position actually believes the things he or she is saying. This becomes especially true when the positions maintained are so obviously at variance with such outmoded concepts as ‘truth’ and ‘facts’ that even we supposed moderns must look askance at the contortions and deranged statements that are promulgated nowadays in lieu of reasoned argument. But earnestness has its own suasive power, and the passion of belief communicates itself through hardly noticed, almost unconscious stylistic notes that form potent chords of resonance that defy rationality and move audiences in spite of themselves. Such is much conspiratorial thinking, at least in the beginning, before the devotees of realpolitik get their hands on it and massage the life out of the message so that they can spread it more widely to push forward their own agenda. Or, as they say, the most important thing is Sincerity; once you can fake that you’ve got it made. Thus is nonsense ground by political content mills into ‘actionable intelligence’ for the consumption of the donor classes. Maybe.

And there is a place for unreason in political discourse. What better locale indeed exists for ‘sur-rational’ reasoning than the sphere of legal and governmental thinking, where forensic argument has always had its element of emotional appeal? And this explains, by the way, some of the claims of anti-intellectualism upon the American political psyche, as a purely logical approach is often seen as having no ‘soul’, no verifiable human feeling behind the bare facts and the difficult math. We can accept a typo or two if the plea is heartfelt, and keeps our interest, while a long and tedious argument loses our attention quickly, no matter how well thought out.

Before you reach the end of this reading adventure, there will be things you will be able to figure out for yourself. You may ask yourself, “is this author a candidate for the Funny Farm or should I reassess my beliefs in religion?” After all, when we talk about religion realistically, we are stretching our imagination to its outer limits.

Mr. Jordan finds a missing Talking Heads lyric. And points for the correct use of ‘its’; this isn’t a unique example, but nearly so.

But sincerity isn’t enough, as is proven by the delightful My Opinions: Incest and Illegitimacy, written in almost stream-of-consciousness style by one Alfred Jordan. I read this misguided illogical mishmash of pleading and disorganized attacks upon the story of Christ’s birth on the day after Christmas, and found it a wonderful palliative to the worst aspects of the holiday season. We know from the very first page, the author’s ‘Disclaimer’, that we are in the hands of a master. A febrile if not feeble master, but a master nonetheless.

This book was not written to educate or intimidate, but to ENLIGHTEN. The author of this book is neither liable or responsible to any person or groups with respect to loss of revenue caused by physical or mental damage allegedly caused directly or indirectly by the reading of this book.

So there…

To tell you the premise of Incest and Illegitimacy is to undercut the book completely, to wholly miss the point in the wonderful screed. So let me quickly tell you the premise: Jesus had to have a daddy, so that ‘Virgin Birth’ story doesn’t make sense. Therefore those Christians who kept bothering the author are wrong, and should stop asking him for money. Oh, and the real God is the Sun, the Moon, and your Mommy and Daddy. And thanks to my Gramma.

As I say, putting it baldly like that entirely misses the point, which is that this earnest pamphlet is wonderful, no matter how illogical or poorly written or unstructured or just plain wrong it also is.

I can’t ignore or leave out one of the most important links in the chain of life. It is my opinion dinosaurs have been here since the beginning and they are still with us today, in miniature size. I believe we’ve failed to realize their presence and their potential threat. First, what do you think made the prehistoric animals grow to their tremendous size? To me that’s a simple and academic question. Too much food. My question to skeptics is this: what else makes you grow except food and man made chemicals from earth products? To me, again, that’s very simple: how did these prehistoric grow to their tremendous size? A bountiful harvest of human carcasses. You say that ridiculous, they were like elephants, they didn’t eat meat. That’s a very good answer.

“A bountiful harvest of human carcasses.”

Alfred Jordan lets his enthusiasm get far, far away from him, quite outpacing any theme or sense or meaning that he might be wanting to share. And the results are wonderful. The Church of the Subgenius succeeded because they were able to capture well the glib nonsense of the true believer in the truly ridiculous, but even those pioneers might have difficulty keeping up with Mr. Jordan. Every time it seems he may start to outline or underscore a point he wants to make, he goes tearing off on a tangent and chases after the mad bunnies and crazy squirrels romping through the verdant landscape of his thought, leaving us readers reveling in his self-professed inaptness for the work he is trying to create. He has a large chip on his shoulder about the silly stuff he heard at the Christian church he was made to attend, apparently, and he is simply not having it anymore. His enlightenment began, it seems, when he realized that babies come from sexual reproduction: “As an adult, it became obvious to me that all persons, since the beginning of time, have engaged in SEX.” Setting aside his logical fallacy (while it’s true that all persons in history were the product of sex, it is fallacious to say that all humans engaged in the sexual acts, as a moment’s thought will prove), this realization made him determined not to fall once again for a bogus story, as he had previously been taken in by the stories of Santa Claus and the babies delivered by the Stork. Thus when he puts two and two together, he knew that Jesus was the product of … incest. Okay, what?

If you lived in a household where a female became pregnant, and you have not seen or been aware of any outside courtship and there are related males living in that house, what would your common sense prognosis be? Don’t con me by telling me she had a husband. Please for Jesus’ sake now, pay attention, do I have to repeat myself? Keep this in mind; this is a had none, but got one story. We will go into the virgin’s husband’s role a bit later.
****
Let me summarize this WELL-PLANNED CONSPIRACY. The barn was an ideal place to conceive and discard. It was like a hotel for vagrants. A child was conceived in the barn, we can assume it was known in advance that someone would be in that barn, and the child would be found and cared for and could have even been taken for bounty. These same unfortunate mistakes happen today. Being a realist, I honestly believe my speculations and assumptions are a real possibility.

I’m sure he does honestly believe … something, though it’s not entirely clear what that might be. Oh, and remember that remark about Mary’s husband, as he does come back to it, eventually.

Mr. Jordan doesn’t really get into the ‘Illegitimacy’ part of his title, instead spending pages and pages on how preachers just tell good stories so they can take his money. (And I guess we’ve all been there.) He bounces around like a toddler after his first taste of sugar, making connections that don’t exist while always mentioning that he doesn’t wish to cause offense, and that he has no special training in theology or science or indeed anything at all which might enable him to draw the conclusions he makes. (See the dinosaurs quote above.) But I really cannot capture the awesome wonder and glory which shines throughout this little booklet. Every page has its morsel of ungrammatical joyous nonsense. A few quotes here can only give the barest taste of the delicious buffoonery within these pages. Perhaps the crazy factor might be greater in English As She Is Spoke (though maybe not), but for sheer mad sincerity Alfred Jordan has no equal.

I know you have followed our out of this world flyers exploits over the years. Some of our flyers have been as close to the Christians God as you can possibly get and still be alive. Now, that statement is part of the Christian belief. God is in heaven and they regard the sky as being the heavens. I want to establish that fact before I express my opinion. Now this is my speculated opinion which you can answer now or later; it is complicated, “if our high fliers were that close to the Christian God and had this close insight of the heavens personally, why when most ended their high flying careers they excepted regular employment and without supporting the Christian doctrine about God being up there? Don’t these people know they were the close encounters of the third kind nonfictional. Before press time there were no answers.

Mr. Jordan is speaking of astronauts. Oh, and [sic], of course, here and everywhere else.

At the very end of this screed, the author seems to confess that he didn’t really think about Joseph’s role in the whole birth of Jesus story until someone pointed out the Mary had had a husband (perhaps this is why he leaves out the ‘Illegitimacy’ charge): “For that minute, it dawned on me, that all of my efforts was for nought.” Do not worry; he manages to pick himself right back up and start attacking everything with how it does not make sense, nuh-unhn. It’s pretty typical of his approach, which is to go in five directions at once, forget what he was talking about, and then return to something completely different, such as his very different concept of God in four persons, or maybe two, plus the planets, or the Sun, or, well, if you manage to get your hands on a copy of this delightful book, you’ll see.

Hear me now, if you don’t understand what I’m saying and won’t accept it as being the truth and a fact, you have my permission to call me an idiot and a atheist, and thank you for your time. I asked you earlier to hold my coat. I’m pleading with you now, GIVE ME MY DAMN COAT, I am out of here.

I confess I don’t understand and won’t accept, but I kind of like the guy. He’s cute, and at least slightly self-deprecating.

And you really should see. At the very close of his book, Arthur Jordan makes a prophecy, saying: “Betcha read this book more than once.” I’m sure this prediction will come true, at least in my case. This scatterbrained hodgepodge of unreason left me laughing and enthused, as the Littlest Atheist makes merry with Mary and the whole Christmas story … or something like that.

Quite a different beast is The Negro and the World Crisis, a vicious bit of racist thuggery masquerading as a religious tract. There is no pleasure to be found reading this amalgam of Biblical eisegesis with every common conspiracy idea and hateful thought that you might think we fought WWII to stop, though apparently memories are short. This book, first published in 1970 (only a generation after the defeat of the Nazis), not only makes its bilious and wrongheaded case for the superiority of the white Aryan race—here called the White Nordic Israel Race or the White Adamic People—but also frames its bigotry in the usual antisemitic Jewish Conspiracy theory which is apparently the first refuge of scoundrels. Along the way it makes hash of not only accepted Biblical scholarship and study, but also of all the principles of rational debate; but that’s only par for the course for much conspiratorial thinking.

There is a world of difference between this vile incitement to race war and the wonderfully scatterbrained My Opinions. Though both fall into many of the same traps of fuzzy thinking that make conspiracy theories appealing to both promulgators and those appealed to, the author (I assume that ‘Charles Lee Magne’ is a pseudonym [= ‘Charlemagne’]; no author was listed on the original publication) of The Negro and the World Crisis never for a moment forgets his thesis: that the Negro is an inferior race which is being exploited by evil Jews to foment the destruction of White Christian civilization and usher in the reign of the Antichrist.

Negroes are being manicured and cultivated by the hidden cabala for use as the trigger men to initiate a bloodbath in this country just prior to the establishment and enshrinement of the anti-Christ dictatorship. The exploitation of millions of American Negroes as the front men in the battle of the Ages is but one of many arms of this revolutionary movement that reaches out to control every dimension of our lives as free men today.

Half of the premise of the book, and perhaps one of the least offensive passages. And of course, [sic] and all that, with the misuse of ‘cabala’ just so you don’t miss the point about the Jews.

Unlike My Opinions: Incest and Illegitimacy, which I could have almost quoted in its entirety, I don’t wish to give too many extracts of The Negro and the World Crisis. It is thuggish, it is wrongheaded, it uses fallacious argument, it misquotes Scripture, it twists facts—but so do many screeds that I find much less objectionable. But The World Crisis is suffused with a hate that I have to confess I am at a loss to comprehend. Though the term ‘racism’ is thrown about almost everywhere these days, it is rare indeed (which is a good thing, I think) that one comes across racial hatred in its pure form. And though this counterfeit religious tract purports not to hate the Negro, every word in this booklet goes to underscore the author’s belief in the eternal inferiority of the Blacks. How inferior? Over half of this tract is devoted to ‘proving’ that Blacks aren’t even human at all, but are merely “the head of the animal kingdom of anthropoid apes”. Blacks are merely the apex animal, created by God in this misbegotten interpretation as servants to the White Christian race. And so we are right back to the 1850s, a hundred years after the Civil War seemed to settle this question once and for all.

The conclusion of the tract is that the Blacks need to all be sent back to Africa, that they will rise up and murder the Whites in America otherwise, that the 14th Amendment was illegally enacted, that Negroes simply don’t have the capacity to reason like—egads, it really is not worth delimiting this nonsense. Briefly, this jeremiad comes from what is usually called an ‘identity’ church, those outfits which tend to see the so-called ‘White’ race as being the true descendants of Israel, and thus every other little thing you learned in Sunday School has to be rewritten. Like what? Oh, like that old thing about the sons of Noah—Shem, Ham, and Japeth—being the fathers of all the various races. (Even Ethel Waters references the ‘curse of Ham’ in her song “Black and Blue”.) Or the idea that the Garden of Eden was somewhere around the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers; our author places it in the Himalayas. Or the doctrine that the entire earth was inundated during the Flood. (Only a smaller region between mountains, next to the Himalayan Garden of Eden, was actually flooded.) Now, setting aside how plausible or true the Biblical stories are, what was the point of Noah gathering up all the animals if the whole earth wasn’t going to be drowned? But I digress. To achieve these miracles of ‘interpretation’, the author has to appeal to a specialized ‘translation’ of the Bible, that of Farrar Fenton, who … just happens to have been a British Israelite.

And what of the original Israelites? You know, the ones who actually wrote the books now called The Old Testament by Christians today? Well, they are relegated to their own not-quite-human status by this author, being descendants of all the nations (except for the Hebrews) mentioned in the Old Testament, as well as “mongrels with the Satanic blood line of other races”. The peoples of Asia get short shrift and almost no mention, save to quote an ancient Chinese Flood narrative in support of his own reinterpretation of Noah.

But the main thing—the only thing—in this book is the identification of all Blacks with animals, beneath contempt and certainly beneath the high civilization of the White man. Indeed, the eisegetical portion of this pamphlet states baldly that in the Bible most mentions of ‘the Beast’ or ‘the Beast of the field’ are specifically talking about the Negro. Once you accept that argument, it is only a small hop to wholesale credence in the very worst of racist theories, such as the notion that Blacks were treated better by their slave masters in the antebellum South than the living standards they have today. (Which lie the author baldly states as ‘fact’.) Or that Blacks are about to rise up and invade the suburbs and kill all the Whites. The book ends with a plea for the reader to prepare for:

the coming day when millions of militant Negroes will move from the inner city ghetto to plunder, rape, kill, and pillage the suburbs and outer city fringe areas of every major American city. Each day now brings us closer to that moment when millions of savage, blood thirsty Negroes will turn belching guns upon White America.

This is by no means the most hateful part of the concluding rant, though even typing this makes me somewhat sick.

So … Why Do I Read These Books?

Well, I usually enjoy reading conspiracy literature and apocalyptic religious tracts; I find them entertaining in their pigheaded appeals to logic and their quite unconscious biases, as well as their pretense of academic rigor. Usually the latter involves plenty of footnotes or citations (as in Great Hoax of the Twentieth Century, *shudder*), or straw man arguments such as the attacks upon the Hamatic and the ‘Cain was Black’ theories by ‘Charles Lee Magne’. And I am sure I take pleasure in my own imagined sense of superiority when I can notice this or that fallacious reasoning, as when I read in The World Crisis a quote from the U.S. Census director that they had underestimated the Negro population by 10%, and then the author claims that this means that Blacks make up 20% of the U.S. population rather than the 10-12% figure usually given.

But there comes a point, as in that South Park episode when Token watches the video tape, when it’s just not fun any more. And though even then I can often find some interest in watching just how dishonest authors craft their insidious arguments (as in the Butz Holocaust revisionist book mentioned last paragraph), I have to admit that The Negro and the World Crisis not only left a bad taste of bile, feces, and gangrene, but that it also made me very sad, that less than two score years after Hitler’s defeat such racist twaddle could be espoused not only under color of the Bible but also beneath the mantle of the Founders and Heroes of the United States. Don’t get me wrong, the issue of race and how our leaders looked (and look) at the place of Blacks in America is fraught, and often nuance is not the right approach at all. But the combination of blatant hatred of Blacks with the hoary Jewish World Conspiracy theory was deeply disheartening, especially when wrapped up in the Aryan myth that has proven so apocalyptically destructive already.

So why read such bilge at all? First of all, I am omnivorous and catholic in my reading, and it’s not as if I don’t have other hateful or racist or just plain wrong books or tracts in my library. From “The SCUM Manifesto”, that of the Unabomber, to The Turner Diaries, I have not excluded on prima facie grounds many things from my reading list. Secondly, I believe in the principle of ‘Know Your Enemy’, as well as the (related, I think) ideal of ‘Know Thyself’. By reading viewpoints with which I disagree, I not only familiarize myself with their arguments and thus can arm myself against them, I also learn to identify logical flaws in such—which has the additional advantage, perhaps, of permitting me to recognize when I am engaging in the very same self-serving unreason.

But it is true that this last racist screed was almost too much even for my jaded sensibilities. I almost did not include the cover image of the hateful Negro and the World Crisis rant in my ‘book report’, so obviously offensive is it. However, it demonstrates not only the viciousness but also the insincerity of our nasty publisher. The title purports to give the reader insight into a thorny issue of the day, while the pictures of the smiling Blacks on the cover have obviously been chosen to appeal to or to suggest a belief in the inferiority of Negroes. (By the way, the original cover of this work featured only a drawing of an angel with a long horn standing upon the United States.) How different from the earnest addlepated writing of My Opinions and its honestly bad cover design is this virulent attack upon an enormous portion of the human race. We have to ask ourselves in the case of The World Crisis whether the author believes all, most, or any of the terrible things he is saying.

Reading The Negro and the World Crisis may give a present-day reader a sense of déjà vu. The appeals to incipient rioting in the cities, to a predicted attack of the suburbs by angry or armed socialists or tools of the communists may be from either 1970 or 2020. Reading this vile rant makes me sad, as I said, sad to see how little we learned not only from Vietnam, but from World War II, from the Civil War, from every single lesson which history seems to have given us. Reading this rancid turd from a racist cloaca (my edition purports to be published by the New Crusade Christian Church in Hollywood, founded by a one-time bigwig in the American Nazi Party), reveals just how close to the most gangrenous prejudice is much modern coding of racist ideas. The fear of blacks ‘invading’ the suburbs (many already live there, and have for at least as long as I lived there), the appeals to our ‘exceptionalism’, and the no longer overtly stated paranoia against miscegenation and mongrelization are not found only in this screwed up tract of hate.

I am glad that I read My Opinions: Incest and Illegitimacy first; its wondrous illogic gave me strength to endure the other book. I will undoubtedly re-read Mr. Jordan’s nonsense again, and am sure I will enjoy it wholeheartedly. I doubt very much I shall reread The Negro and the World Crisis, and fear that its putrid taste will linger for quite a while. I can only hope that reading its inhumane words will help me to notice the same stench in modern arguments when the same unreasoned appeals to hatred are made, as they will be, again.

Those who hate Christianity (I’m sorry here, I’m putting words in their mouths; they might only say that they “don’t care for it”) may point to the hatred engendered throughout history by the Catholic and other Christian Churches, as well as the wars religion has always seemed to foster. I shall decline to point out that the largest mass murders of the Twentieth Century were either in the name of atheistic principles (such as those directed by Stalin or Mao) or were attacks upon religious people. I shall only say that I have known many fine Christians as well as many fine atheists (Are we capitalizing that yet?), and religion or the lack thereof is not the enemy; inhumanity is what we must always be on guard against, both in the world at large as well as within our own hearts.