by Morris Tarantella

from Zelator Website

The "Then You Certainly Won't Mind Licking Up The Same Amount For Us Right Now" Award:

to L.A. County Health Department epidemiologist Carol Ward, who declared to approximately 400 people assembled at a hearing on malathion at Pasadena City Hall (as reported in the February 16-22 issue of Village View) that:

"Even if a small child went outside to play the morning after a spraying and licked up all the malathion in their [sic] backyard, they still would not get enough malathion into their body to clinically find any health-related problems".

Let's cut the pathetic time-stalling surrounding "debate" on the subject of malathion-spraying, since "debate" is a clear insult to the innumerable men, women and children presently suffering the precise same flu-like symptoms, peculiarly persistent sore-throats, headaches and eye-irritation as a direct consequence of a renewed spraying which most were blithe fully unaware of, or unconcerned about. There is no real debate over the subject, except the tedious formalism required to push by legal means against the immovable power-block of agribusiness and the petrochemical industry (you know, those wonderful producers responsible for bringing you so many other spectacular, cast-of-thousands ecological catastrophes on so many other fronts).

There is no debate, there is no serious question as to the unacceptable hazard of malathion spraying. We aren't really waiting for the returns as Henry Voss and the State Department of Agriculture et al. pretend. What sort of "returns", what further studies does one need ?! It's not a question of weighing the possible "deficits" of malathion spraying against its "relative merits"; there are no such merits. It doesn't do what it's supposed to do in the first place (which is, at bottom, make our ecosystem safe for agriculture)! It is not even in the best interests of those special interests (i.e. Western Growers Association etc.) which insist that there is "no present alternative".

No present alternative to what?

• You mean we don't yet have a better and more efficient way to destroy beneficial aphids, other insects and parasites that would serve to control the Medfly population and maintain the natural balance of the ecosystem?

• You mean we don't yet have a more powerful and effective means than surface water contamination for killing fish and their aquatic-insect food supply?

• You mean we haven't found a better way to decimate the honeybee population, that irreducibly-essential species which is principally responsible of pollination of our crops in the first place?

• You mean we haven't come up with a neater and more refined way of destroying the erosion-regulating ice plant and the Olive Tree than by death-dusting the benign parasitoids that check the proliferation of scale insects harmful to them?

Okay. But until something more lethal comes along to replace it, malathion is doing a terrific job.

Do we need returns other than the single most damning testimony of all, that of the studies concluded on the Saku district of Japan which demonstrate unequivocally that within a one year interval after spraying the specific organophosphate known as malathion in procedures and dosages critically similar to those presently used over the Los Angeles area, more than 10000 citizens of the affected population became permanently blinded or visually impaired?

The Japanese government decisively banned the use of the very stuff we're liberally dumping on ourselves, and most countries of the civilized world have accepted the signs of sweet reasonableness and followed suit rather than pay the clearly posted price in ophthalmological and neurological damage.

What then can "Chief of the Toxic Epidemiology Department of L.A. County" Dr. Paul Papanck possibly be talking about when as on a recent cable public access program he defended malathion as the only presently viable alternative?

What can Robert Atkins, "pest control expert" of L.A. County Department of Agriculture possibly mean when he counsels the obligatory continuation in the judicious application of Ming's death-dust, to avert the unwanted alternative of the poor consumer absorbing the higher cost of every individual farmer soaking his orchard floor with privately-purchased pesticide?

The taxpayer is at this very moment absorbing the cost in any case; and this same taxpayer, in his complementary form as a human being, is absorbing the unacceptable price through his very physiology and that of his children.

On top of all this, the disingenuous argument by such "experts" (merely fronting for the unheard "word" of the anonymous, publicly unaccountable appointee "experts" in Sac) that all the alternatives are in any case petrochemical solutions, and that the "high nutritional quality" of our agricultural products is at stake, is a blatant sham.

Such claims are merely more vile dust, thrown in the eyes of a public which isn't encouraged to know the content of official studies that have clearly shown for decades that the nutritive content of domestic agricultural products has steadily declined below acceptable levels with the use of ecologically addictive, petrochemical additives.

This is not, then, nor has it ever really been, a "debate". One could say that it is actually just another manifestation of the given power structure disingenuously using the forum of debate to stall any intermittent opposition which may randomly filter through its blanket propaganda coverage; one could say then that the "contention" over malathion spraying is once again answerable to the reductio ad absurdum of short-sighted profit motivation. And indeed to a degree and in any given case this is partly true. But it must be recognized that there is at the same time something much more inexplicable going on here. At the same time it has to be admitted that we're standing before the countenance of a greater mystery.

For it is only too apparent (if bewildering to the powers of explanation committed to rational motive) that those who officially uphold the virtue of malathion spraying, having even more access than the general public to the damning information, nonetheless persist in the face of their own toxification and that of their children; even going on the motivational assumption of sheer self-interest, it is well-known even by these public promulgators that the safety of the relatively well-to-do isn't ensured merely by virtue of the fact that the target areas for spraying tend quite curiously to concentrate on the less affluent districts, since they must also realize their statistical vulnerability in the long-range due to the drift of "toxic wind" and ultimate, communal sharing of the tainted food-product.

(Should you find the demographic differentials related to zones of spraying "class-coincidental", you may be unaware that both Disneyland - the secular religion of choice - and the Crystal Cathedral - the entertainment-religion of choice - were both granted immune-status by the state for otherwise being in the designated compass of the spray-zone).

Since, then, the very beings who defend this malathion "method" (perhaps because they stand to profit by it) are also equally vulnerable to its mortal complications and in an even better position to be aware of that fact, we have to reconnoiter; we have to take another look.

Even the explanation of self-serving in the ordinary, greed-and-profit sense isn't enough to account for the sheer irrational fervor and indeed demented glory with which the malathion-apologists stoutly close ranks in the face of every reasonable dissuasion! There is something else going on here, something below the surface of every reasonable and conventional interpretation tending to collect around the standard, motives of self-interest.

We may begin to glimpse the deep character, the subterranean -indeed ehthonic- nature of this mystery (which is, in its ultimate aspect, exactly what we're confronting) by marking that the organophosphates of which malathion is currently the most notable member were originally developed by the military for purposes of chemical warfare; the efficacy of organophosphates is located in their profoundly toxic effect on the immune and nervous systems. Does this begin to sound familiar?

According to the report of Michele Sampogna (also in the February 16-22 issue of Village View) the military has already done the extensive toxicological studies and examinations we're allegedly "waiting for" in the sacred halls of the sad-Sac capital, and the diagnoses were all perfectly satisfactory in consonance with military purposes: a Department of the Army study from '76 shows conclusively that behavior can be significantly disrupted at low dosages of malathion; and indeed a '69 report by the Annals of the NY Academy of Sciences anticipated the military finding by years in concluding that limited low-dose malathion exposure was capable of producing changes in EEG (electroencephalogram) patterns lasting as long as three months, without the kind of additive reinforcement we are delivering to our systems with repeated exposure. (Cf. the Mind/Brain Behaviors article re brain-wave patterns on page 15 of this issue).

Depredation to the immune system is a familiar refrain; indeed the notorious HIV virus associated with AIDS and related maladies is considered an opportunistic bug (developed through what source?) that takes full advantage of the large-scale, long term weakening of the immunological response generated down the decades through a systematically decayed environment.

A general populace weakened at the very foundation of its health, is the most vulnerable kind of populace; the long term decrease of the health-curve is also directly associated with the dimming of vital magnitudes of attention necessary for the maintenance of social and intellectual alertness, the proper development and maintenance of the minimum faculties of mind, of critical awareness etc.

(Consult again our T-Bird review of Wizard of Oz in Issue 2, September '89, and consider in relation to that "pesky Medfly" -as it's so hypocritically called - the words of the wicked witch of the West, i.e. "send my insect ahead to take the fight out of them").

Indeed the general psychological malaise that fuels this mysterious assault, while not comprising the actual cause, is based on an equation that has "caught on" in a mindless sweep of the overall populace, i.e. the equation that implicitly trades the proper valuation of one's irreplaceable physical immune patterns for the abstract or coldly ideal "immunity" which money is supposed to purchase. This psychic abstraction, this cancerously autonomous outgrowth of the normal and reasonable functions of the conceptual mind, has taken such fierce hold of the general imagination that it reigns without question and with irrational insistence even amongst those who aren't and never will be in a position to satisfactorily test the proposition.
 

Thus while the publicly-magnified media darlings amongst the wealthy parade the pseudo-immunity and contingent "insularity" of their accounts and their yachts, their properties and their paid panderers, the admiring mass toxified into a stupor of passive consumerist-envy sits oblivious amidst a whirling pall of death-dust and squanders the last sputtering ember of precious attention on that Lotto ticket, dreaming the deep dream of sad identification with the high-stepping Antichrists of this world.

Batcaveat

Remember our September '89 review of Batman, in which we expressed our amazement at the reviewer who didn't recognize why the crowd being poisoned by the Joker didn't simply turn on him? Remember our curiosity at how such willful blindness could miss what was a clear intention of the movie-makers to depict, i.e. that the near-stuporous crowd was so distracted by the paper money floating toward it through the befouled air that it totally failed to notice, and frankly could have cared less to know, just who was manically extinguishing its life through this lethal parade?

Indeed, in consideration of the -largely unremarked-prescience of the Batman film, we should recall what was printed up in our September review re the way in which the Joker pulled off his systematic decimation of the populace... remember?
Remember how it was the synergistic combination of one compound with another that did the trick, in perfect eluding of the linear and reductionist probes of the medical and scientific communities officially anointed to "solve the puzzle"? Remember how it was Batman alone who detected the diabolic, "nonlinear" methodology?

Consider, in such case, that the real hazard of malathion is identified as its synergistic interaction with the pollutants and polycyclic hydrocarbons found most abundantly in the befouled atmosphere of Los Angeles (which, of all places to experimentally spread the carpet of malathion, is therefore the least likely, certainly the least safe, and is unaccountably in the face of just such detractions the most intensified target of concentration!).

By what standard does this make "sense"? Certainly not by the standard of safety, health, the well-being of the greatest numbers.... As a "test population" of another kind, such spraying in the least recommendable area of the state makes more sense. To stop such "paranoid" thoughts, those in charge and those appointed as apologists to shield those in charge should be able to explain to us this "action", this concentrated urban program which is the height of illogic in the context of any genuine good will.


Grin and Bare It

Face it: all the ingredients seem to be here. There must be a reason Batman was the biggest movie of all time.... we have the death dust, the amplification of killing force by synergistic combination with zinc, lead, benzene etc., we have the Mardi-Gras parade distraction of the fool's-dream "Lotto" which contributes virtually nothing to the coffers of education as advertised, we have the deaths-mask/hebephrenic grin of the multiple apologists whose own sickly hue and crumbling countenances belie the upbeat tidings they'd purvey...

With all the ingredients present, does this then imply the semi-paranoiac assumption that there is indeed a Joker, a deliberate sinister intelligence or diabolic purpose orchestrating the whole unimaginable event?

Need we assume then that all this isn't just the combined ignorance and blindered self-serving greed of special interests having a smaller (or more "narrow") version of "the good" functioning as the particular carrot in front of their runaway cart? but instead must we subscribe to the unthinkable thesis that behind all this lurks a malevolently comprehensive intent, a genocidal will ?

Should this idea seem simply unacceptable if on no other grounds than that it generates cold wild fear in the pit of the stomach, and an animal's uncomprehending terror at the sudden gratuitous presence of some unidentified predator lurking in the once-homey woods, well then we should at least be more aware than we are of a confirmed psychological truism that has gotten under-credited in recent years since we've become fashionably less "Freudian"; but ol' Freud had a point in his discovered principle regarding the existence of a "Death instinct", Thanatos, which was the functional and contemporaneous counterpart of Eros or the Life instinct.

How soon we forget (or want to forget) that the death instinct healthfully held in proper balance with the life instinct as the simple domesticated principle of elimination, organically operating in unison with the "pleasure principle" of assimilation serving Life can grow anomalous, take on a runaway independence precisely like cancer cells with just the slightest tilting of the balance toward an inertial or retrogressive trend. Yes, the principle of Thanatos can become so practically autonomous, given the proper conditions, that as a psychological reflex it can seem virtually personified. It can seem to take on the deliberateness and purposive drive of an actual personality, a self-consciously willful agent.

Thus if we want to preserve ourselves from the vertiginous possibility that there is indeed some literal personality planning all this ecological and immunological mayhem with cyanic malevolence simply for the sake of it, we may take a better look at the explanation afforded through the standard psychological model built upon a presiding principle, i.e. that of Thanatos.
We can suppose that, past a certain point of "accidental" toxicity the invisible shift in ratios through the balanced biochemistry of our systems induces a silent and subtle downswing in the proportion of Eros to Thanatos.

The internalized toxicity gradually translates out as degenerative brain-wave patterns, unhealthy ratios of metabolism and consequent psychological Change with a progressive fascination for the inert, the mental taxidermy of arrested motion, the psychic formaldehyde of perfectly predictable and reliable rigor-mortis... In this way we can assume a general unconscious "possession" by the spirit of Thanatos without resorting necessarily to the unthinkable; and this preserves our ability to contemplate the whole subject in the full measure of its mind-boggling irrationality.
 

Lords of Thanatos

We must tell you from the initiated perspective, however, that in the higher orders of psychic organization the principle of Thanatos has its quite conscious representatives and embodiments. As you have learned to a degree through our essays (...Positive/Negative Realms Beyond This World Issues 3-4, October-November '89 etc.) the higher and more uniformly integral dimensions of being to which both positively and negatively oriented personalities (of a sufficient threshold degree of organization about their respective poles) can graduate, establish the functional basis for linking the given consciousness-system to the affective unity of an organizational Archetype or comprehensive, psychic value; this is why things seem to polarize out into what we of this lower-dimensional, admixed undergraduate zone tend to identify as the "oversimplifications" of Good and Evil etc.

Far from being oversimplifications, these archetypal patterns comprising the character and quality of the respective worlds existing through the higher dimensions, offer a very efficient and comprehensive means of ordering the particular functions with which the principals in question must work so as to assimilate the further "lessons" of their density.

Thus in the higher Negative realms of 4th and 5th density, for example (corresponding respectively to our Astral and Mental realms) the beings of that polarization personify the principle of Thanatos and purvey their collective influence, where they are able, amongst the vulnerable realms functionally "below" their station such as ours.

The reason this is necessarily so, has to do with the fact that the higher densities of existence above ours are more "conscious" (i.e. intrinsically more conscious, for our own 3rd density has the potential for being aligned with variably-more-or-less Consciousness). Being more conscious, they are more comprehensive, and tend to resolve all diversity of perception into a compassing unity (or operative Intent of totalizing character).
 

Cabal Access

There is, for example, a reason why we often seem to detect the approach to a more constitutionally paranoid, conspiracy-riddled domain whenever we near the subject matter of "occult" or higher-dimensional studies. This tendency-of-perception has served as the basis of much humor, and much discrediting, with respect to the topics of "secret orders", "occult societies" etc. (cf. the most recent book of Umberto Eco regarding the Order of the Knights Templar, or the classic Illuminati series of Robert Anton Wilson that anticipates Umberto's work by nearly two decades).

The source of the persistently "conspiratorial" sense, however, can be located in the fact that as we approach "occult" subject-matter we approach, at least indirectly, the domain of the Astral which is the operative source of most "occult" matter, the studies of (especially Western) secret societies etc.

And the Astral, to uninitiated consciousness particularly, induces a "paranoidal" apprehension owing to its higher and deeper unity, the fact that it functionally draws things of diverse perceptual nature into the common bond of conscious resolution, subsuming everything to the atmosphere of a Single suprapersonal Intent.

The vague or acute paranoia often felt by those who smoke hashish or marijuana is indeed attributable to the subtle "leaking in" of Astral magnitudes of consciousness, causing things to imperceptibly organize and conspiratorially unify through the psychic and symbolic quickening which accompanies the more inclusive ranges of awareness.

This received sense of paranoia has its active counterpart, however, in all those forms of Consciousness functioning in and from the higher planes which support a unitary and comprehensive outlook.

When a unitary and comprehensive outlook seems to be looking in on us in our unaccustomed state of heightened or vivified receptivity, we feel a disconcerting awareness, an overriding consciousness somehow posed over against our ordinary and less intense fragmentalism of cognition; yet the active aspect of such an awareness integrated into the higher-density values of overt Void-unity, actually does function with an informing Intent and pervasive purpose which is overwhelming and disconcerting to the ordinary 3rd density levels of consciousness.

Thus where we begin to detect the tell-tale sense of "conspiratorial meaning" in approaching "Rosicrucianism" and "Masonic" subject matter etc., we are in fact sensing the presence of an overriding Design, a far-connecting Purpose which efficiently proceeds from the Intelligence of a higher-density Being (and which, in Its reflection upon 3rd density low-integration consciousness, takes on the subtly reverberant sense of a "furtive", hidden manipulation masking its magical connection of impossibly-disparate events and elements).

Here then is no "evidence", no testimony or data that you can take with you in your next "debate" at the state capital. Initiated understanding can't furnish you anything of "merit" in the confines of what's culturally and "scientifically" acceptable, so for practical purposes we must maintain the life-affirmative end of the malathion argument as if we were dealing with reasonable and knowable magnitudes. But we are not, and you know that we are not.

We are indeed receiving more than just an incidental "push" from a purposive and single if hidden intent allied with the principle of Thanatos, and so quite consciously -even gleefully- taking up (as pure personification) the "cause" of Thanatos-in-itself. With this form of pervasive (if invisibly-operating) consciousness there is no "other" objective, something of self-oriented interest which the employment of that principle serves. The personality of Thanatos is sufficient to itself, and constitutes its own diabolical justification.

No, there is no further "hard data" of an acceptable kind that we can hand you on your thankless way to Sac for the millionth time, but we can "let you in" on the real secret re the actual and mysterious depth, the incomprehensible extent of the dementia we can give you practical insight into the actual magnitude of the difficulty, and the real Reach of the instigators.


They Really Do Live

There is indeed an alliance with Thanatos of a quite conscious and supernormal type originating from the "Astral" sphere of things, just as there is an alliance with Eros/Agape of an equally conscious if benignly oriented type taking its point of departure from the unific clarity and comprehensiveness of the Higher Realms.

And you need to know the actual magnitude, the true measure and proportion of the "problem", for otherwise you'll sell the issue short from the ordinary low-level perspective and fail to take proper account of the necessary factors involved, thereby remaining essentially "unarmed" no matter how many facts you have gathered to your bosom. In order to be on equal footing with the true "dimensions" of the dilemma, you must understand that in a very real and functional (if insidiously invisible) sense, the Evil Bugs in this scenario are not the Mediterranean fruitfly.

Initiated understanding can't give you any more "hard data" of the conventionally acceptable type, but it can certainly suggest to you that you ought not accept such conventional data as the limit of your comprehension. When you come to the source of initiated understanding, you do so in expectation of a knowledge that can give you a more comprehensive view of the terrain, one which you may not be able to use to persuade the state legislature but which you can certainly employ to personal benefit.

So for what it's worth, initiated understanding can let you in on the actual extent of the "damage"; it can apprise you of the real urgency of the situation, though no "authority" of proper standing will ever listen to you fortified with this kind of data: yes the malathion poison is a wholly negative influence, it is as bad as all that and more, it has no redeeming features, it is Deathshead in a dark helicopter being dumped on your children's heads regularly, and it is combining with atmospheric toxins not only in the conventional "chemical" sense; it is forging an elemental compound which distorts the etheric "curtain" patterning your very life-centers.

You're being systematically "de-pranaized", and the surplus of deleterious positive ions accumulating through your glands and nodes is only physical stress-symptom of a multidimensional mayhem being perpetrated on us all.

You can't take this in evidence to Sacramento either, we suppose, but...

• Have any of our readers noticed a very curious phenomenon appearing lately (right after the most recent malathion-spraying) in the sky?

• A peculiar phenomenon of a partial or total rainbow-like halo appearing around the sun, or occurring in fast-travelling sections in parts of the sky at variable distances from the sun?

• Has anyone seen this odd, vaguely metallic quasi-"rain-bow" phenomenon which is strong in the dull-to-intense orange red and yellow spectrum, tinged slightly with violet at the opposite range and peculiarly lacking the middle green range?

If few have seen it we wouldn't be surprised, for stranger still to tell this odd rainbow-harbinger can virtually only be seen when wearing sunglasses! Without sunglasses it is all-but-invisible so that while, as happened to us, we stood pointing up at the sky not too long ago through tinted lenses at an obvious oleaginous band widely wrapped around the sun, several joggers passed by and, looking up toward where we pointed, saw nothing.

This was during a dry Santa Ana condition. Has any of our readership encountered the published "Fatima" predictions, warning of the future changing of the atmosphere through pernicious chemical combinations of an irreversible character?

Do any of our readership remember the Hoffman glasses in They Live ?!