{"id":191878,"date":"2021-08-16T12:00:49","date_gmt":"2021-08-16T11:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=191878"},"modified":"2025-01-10T15:08:35","modified_gmt":"2025-01-10T15:08:35","slug":"the-houses-of-dead-and-crooked-souls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/08\/the-houses-of-dead-and-crooked-souls\/","title":{"rendered":"The Houses of Dead and Crooked Souls"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cA house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability.\u201d <\/em>
\n\u2013 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There is a vast and growing gulf between the world\u2019s rich and poor.\u00a0 An obscene gulf. If we can read houses, they will confirm this.\u00a0 They offer a visible lesson in social class.<\/p>\n

Houses stand before us like books on a shelf waiting to be read, and when the books are missing, as they are for a vast and growing multitude of the homeless exiled wandering ones and those imprisoned, their absence serves to indict the mansion-dwelling wealthy and to a lesser extent those whose homes serve to shield them from the truth of the ill-begotten gains of the wealthy elites who create the world\u2019s suffering through their avarice, lies, and war making.<\/p>\n

Many regular people want to say with Edmund in Eugene O\u2019Neill\u2019s play, Long Day\u2019s Journey into Night<\/em>:<\/p>\n

The fog is where I wanted to be.\u00a0 Halfway down the path you can\u2019t see this house.\u00a0 You\u2019d never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t see but a few feet ahead.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal.\u00a0 Nothing was what it is.\u00a0 That\u2019s what \u00a0 I wanted \u2013 to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself\u2026. Who wants to see life as it is, if they can help it?<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yet the rich don\u2019t hide or give a damn. They flaunt their houses.\u00a0 They know they are crooks and creators of illusions.\u00a0 Their nihilism is revealed in their conspicuous consumption and their predatory behavior; they want everyone else to see it too.\u00a0 So they rub it in their faces.\u00a0 Their wealth is built on the blood and suffering of millions around the world, but this is often hidden knowledge.<\/p>\n

For many regular people prefer the fog to the harsh truth.\u00a0 It shields them from intense anger and the realization that the wealthy elites who run the world and control the media lie to them about everything and consider them beneath contempt.\u00a0 That would demand a response commensurate with the propaganda \u2013 rebellion.\u00a0 It would impose the moral demand to look squarely at the houses of death with their tiny cells in which the wealthy elites and their henchmen imprison and torture truth tellers like Julian Assange, an innocent man in a living hell; to make connections between wealth and power and the obscene flaunting of the rich elite\u2019s sybaritic lifestyles in houses where every spacious room testifies to their moral depravity.<\/p>\n

The recent news of Barack Obama\u2019s vile selfie birthday celebration for his celebrity \u201cfriends\u201d at his 29-acre estate and mansion (he has another eight-million-dollar mansion in Washington, D. C.) on Martha\u2019s Vineyard is an egregious recent case in point.\u00a0 If he thinks this nauseating display is proof of his stability and strength \u2013 which obviously he does \u2013 then he is a deluded fool.\u00a0 But those who carry water for the military-intelligence-media complex are amply rewarded and want to tell the world that this is so.\u00a0 It\u2019s essential for the Show.\u00a0 It must be conspicuous so the plebeians learn their lesson.<\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s Vineyard mansion stands as an outward sign of his inner disgrace, his soullessness.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s golden towers and his never-ending self-promotion or the multiple million-dollar mansions of high-tech, sports, and Hollywood\u2019s superstars send the same message.<\/p>\n

Take Bill Gates\u2019 sixty-three-million-dollar mansion, Xanadu, named after William Randolph Hearst\u2019s estate in Citizen Kane<\/em>, that took seven years to build.<\/p>\n

Take the house up the hill from where I live in an erstwhile working-class town that sold for one million plus and now is being expanded to double its size with a massive swimming pool that leaves no grass uncovered. Every week, three black window-tinted SUVs arrive with New Jersey plates to join two white expensive sedans to oversee the progress in this small western Massachusetts town where McMansions rise throughout the hills faster than summer\u2019s weeds.<\/p>\n

Take the blue dolomite stone Searles Castle with its 60 acres, 40 rooms, and \u201cdungeon\u201d basement down the hill on Main St. that was recently bought by a NYC artist who also owns seven grand estates around the country that he showcases as examples of his fine artistic taste.\u00a0 \u201cAll these houses have endless things to do \u2014 it\u2019s just mind-boggling,\u201d he has said. The artist, Hunt Slonem, calls himself a \u201cglamorizer,\u201d and his \u201cexotica\u201d paintings, inspired by Andy Warhol\u2019s repetition of soup cans and Marilyn Monroe, hang in galleries, museums, cruise ships, and the houses of film celebrities.\u00a0 Like his showcase houses, his exotica must have endless things to do.<\/p>\n

What would Vincent van Gogh say?\u00a0 Perhaps what he wrote to his brother Theo: that the greatest people in painting and literature \u201chave always worked against the grain<\/em>\u201d and in sympathy with the poor and oppressed.\u00a0 That might seem \u201cmind-boggling\u201d to Slonem.<\/p>\n

Such ostentatious displays of wealth and power clearly reveal the delusions of the elites, as if there are no spiritual consequences for living so.\u00a0 Even if they read Tolstoy\u2019s cautionary tale about greed, How Much Land Does A Man Need?<\/em>, it is doubtful that its truth would register.\u00a0 Like Tolstoy\u2019s protagonist Pah\u03ccm, they never have enough.\u00a0 But like Pah\u03ccm, the Devil has them in his grip, and like him, they will get their just rewards, a small room, a bit of land to imprison them forever.<\/p>\n

His servant picked up the spade and dug a grave long enough for Pah\u00f3m to lie in, and buried him in it. Six feet from his head to his heels was all he needed.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Where does the money for all these estates, not just Slonem\u2019s, come from? Who wants to ask?<\/p>\n

Getting to the roots of wealth involves a little digging.\u00a0 Slonem\u2019s castle was originally commissioned in the late 1800s by Mark Hopkins for his wife.\u00a0 Hopkins was one of the founders of the Central Pacific Railroad, which was built by Irish and Chinese immigrants.\u00a0 Labor history is quite illuminating on the ways immigrants have always been treated, in this case \u201cthe dregs of Asia\u201d and the Irish dogs.\u00a0 Interestingly enough, the great black scholar and radical, W. E. B. Du Bois, a town native, worked at the castle\u2019s construction site as a young man.\u00a0 No doubt it informed his future work against racism, capitalism, and economic exploitation.<\/p>\n

Wealthy urbanites flooded this area after September 11, 2001, and now, in their terror of disease and death, they have bought every house they could find.\u00a0 Their cash-filled pockets overflow with blood-money and few ask why. To suggest that massive wealth is almost always ill-begotten is anathema.\u00a0 But innocence wears many masks, and the Show demands washed hands and no questions asked.<\/p>\n

It is rare that one becomes super-wealthy in an honest and ethical way.\u00a0 The ways the rich get money almost without exception lead downward, to paraphrase Thoreau from his essay, \u201cLife Without Principle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since the corona crisis began, investment firms such as the Blackstone Group have been gobbling up vast numbers of houses across the United States as their prices have gone through the roof.\u00a0 The lockdowns \u2013 an appropriate prison term \u2013 have set millions of regular people back on their heels as the wealthiest have gotten exponentially wealthier. Poverty and starvation have increased around the world. \u00a0This is not an accident.\u00a0 Despair and depression are widespread.<\/p>\n

There is a taboo in life in general and in journalism: Do not ask where people\u2019s money comes from.\u00a0 Thoreau was so advised long ago:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Do not ask how your bread is buttered; it will make you sick\u2026 <\/em><\/p>\n

But the super-wealthy do not get sick.\u00a0 They are sick.\u00a0 For they revel in their depravity and push it in the face of regular people, many who envy them and wish to become super-rich and powerful themselves.\u00a0 Of course there are the blue bloods whose method is understatement, but it takes many decades to enter their theater of deception.\u00a0 In many ways, these people are worse, for their personae have been crafted over decades of play-acting and public relations so their images are laundered to smell fresh and benevolent.\u00a0 They often wear the mask of philanthropy, while the history of their wealth lies shrouded in an amnestic fog.<\/p>\n

Yet soul murder includes suicide, and while the old and new moneyed ones \u00a0smoothly justify their oppression of the vast majority, many regular people kill the best in themselves by envying the rich.<\/p>\n

Years ago, I discovered some documents that showed that one of this country\u2019s most famous philosophers, known for his lofty moral pronouncements, owned a lot of stock in companies that were doing evil things \u2013 war making, poisoning and killings huge numbers with chemicals, etc.\u00a0 But his image was one of Mr. Clean, Mr. Good Guy. I suspect this is typical and that there are many such secrets in the basements and attics of the rich.<\/p>\n

But let us also ask where the writers and presenters of the mainstream and alternative media get their money.\u00a0 Although \u201cto follow the money\u201d is a truism, few do.\u00a0 If we do, we will learn that money talks and those who take it toe the line, nor do they live in shacks by the side of the road or rent like so many others.\u00a0 They invest with Black Rock and their ilk and have money managers who can increase their wealth while shielding them from the ways that money is made on the backs of the poor and working people.\u00a0 And they lie about people like Assange, Daniel Hale, Reality Winner, Craig Murray, et al., all imprisoned for daring to reveal the depredations of the power elites, the violence at the heart of predatory capitalism.<\/p>\n

Yes, houses speak.\u00a0 But few ever speak of where their money comes from.\u00a0 Those that are on the take \u2013 which has multiple meanings \u2013 always plead innocent.\u00a0 Yes, I can hear you say that I am being too harsh; that there are exceptions.\u00a0 That is obvious.\u00a0 So let\u2019s skip the exceptions and focus on the general principle. There is a Buddhist principle that right livelihood is a core ethic in earning money.\u00a0 Jesus had another way of putting it but was of course in agreement, as were so many others whom people hold in highest esteem.<\/p>\n

Thoreau wrote: \u201cIf you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications.\u201d<\/p>\n

The truth is that for most people, work, if they can find it, is drudgery and hard, a matter of survival. The late great Studs Terkel called it hell and rightly said that most jobs are not big enough for people because they crush the soul, they lack meaning.\u00a0 And behind all ledgers of great wealth lie crushed souls.\u00a0 This reality is so obvious and goes by many names, including class warfare, that further commentary would be redundant.<\/p>\n

A few years ago, I visited Mark Twain\u2019s house in Hartford, Connecticut.\u00a0 It is advertised as \u201ca house with a heart and a soul.\u201d\u00a0 It is not a house but a mansion, and it was an ostentatious display in Twain\u2019s time. Similar or worse than Obama\u2019s mansion on Martha\u2019s Vineyard today.\u00a0 It has no soul or heart. \u00a0It was built with Twain\u2019s wife\u2019s family money.\u00a0 Her father was an oil and coal tycoon from upstate New York.\u00a0 Twain reveled in opulent respectability.\u00a0 He lived the life of a Gilded Age tycoon, an American magnate. It is not a pretty story, but the Twain myth says otherwise.\u00a0 Not that he catered to popular tastes to please the crowd and his domineering wife and that he lived in luxury, but that he was a radical critic of the establishment.\u00a0 This is false.\u00a0 For he withheld for the most part the publication of his withering take on American imperialism until after his death.\u00a0 He committed soul murder.\u00a0 But his mansion impressed his neighbors and his humor distracted from his luxurious lifestyle.\u00a0 His house still stands as a cautionary tale for those who will read it.<\/p>\n

Baudelaire once said that in palaces \u201cthere is no place for intimacy.\u201d\u00a0 This is no doubt why in people\u2019s dreams small, simple houses with a light in the window loom large.\u00a0 Bachelard says, \u201cWhen we are lost in darkness and see a distant glimmer of light, who does not dream of a thatched cottage or, to go more deeply still into legend, of a hermit\u2019s hut.\u201d\u00a0 For here man and God meet in solitude; here human intimacy is possible.\u00a0 \u201cThe hut can receive none of the riches \u2018of this world.\u2019\u00a0 It possesses the felicity of intense poverty; indeed, it is one of the glories of poverty; as destitution increases, it gives access to absolute refuge.\u201d<\/p>\n

He is not espousing actual poverty, but the oneiric depths of true desire, the dreams of hope, reconciliation, and simple living that run counter to the amassing of wealth to prove one\u2019s power and majesty. A humble house of truth, not a mansion of lies. This, to borrow the title of William Goyen\u2019s novel, is \u201cthe house of breath\u201d where the spirit can live and pseudo-stability gives way to faith, for insecurity is the essence of life.<\/p>\n

There is such a hermit\u2019s hut where the light shines.\u00a0 It is the tiny cell in Belmarsh Prison where Julian Assange hangs onto his life by a thread.\u00a0 His witness for truth sends an inspiring message to all those lost in the world\u2019s woods to look to his fate and not turn away.\u00a0 To follow to their sources the money that greases the palms of all the so-called journalists and politicians who want him dead or imprisoned for life, who tell their endless lies, not just about him, but about everything.<\/p>\n

The house of propaganda is built on unanimity.\u00a0 When one person says no, the foundation starts to crumble.\u00a0 The houses of the rich dead and crooked souls, erected to project the stability of their bloody illusions, start to crumble into sand when people dissent one by one.<\/p>\n

Soon the fog lifts and there is no hiding any more.\u00a0 At the end of the path, you can see the vultures circling overhead as their prey go running out of their mansions in terror.<\/p>\n

Sing Hallelujah!<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Edward Curtin is a widely published author and a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>. His new book is <\/em>Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies<\/a> \u2013 His website: Behind the Curtain<\/a> – email: edcurtinjr@gmail.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Obama\u2019s Vineyard mansion stands as an outward sign of his inner disgrace, his soullessness. Trump\u2019s golden towers and his never-ending self-promotion or the multiple million-dollar mansions of high-tech, sports, and Hollywood\u2019s superstars send the same message. Take Bill Gates\u2019 sixty-three-million-dollar mansion, Xanadu, named after William Randolph Hearst\u2019s estate in Citizen Kane, that took seven years to build.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":108249,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[232,550,555,562,626,610,1624,2198,996,2060,1213],"class_list":["post-191878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-capitalism","tag-corruption","tag-elites","tag-finance","tag-greed","tag-inequality","tag-mafia","tag-post-capitalism","tag-poverty","tag-profits","tag-super-rich"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191878"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191878\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":284705,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191878\/revisions\/284705"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}