Page Palace

Pilgrim, Take Refuge

Narcississtic exclusiuveness can take many forms.
It has many ways of disguising itself.
It can take the form of belief that a small group of people have been redeemed
And that folks in the surviving communities are simply damned.
It can take the form of fanatical obsession with a leader
Whose narcissism is pampered,
Because this narcissism presents the rationale for the followers to assert privilege

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April 19, 1993:
 1:00PM ^(EST)=12:00 noon ^(CST)

So here we are, two pilgrims just traveling through these Appalachian Mountains, waiting for our short orders, and watching the sky come down. Tariko and I are chatting with  the proprietor of the Colonial Motel Café.

We stare at the peacock screen in fascinated horror, as the armored vehicles begin punching holes in the plywood walls and towers of Ranch Apocalypse.

But now, there is something that’s happened which startles the announcer. What can this be — is that smoke, pouring out of the compound?

For 51 days, psychiatrists have warned the F.B.I. about what happens when you confront a narcissist. Has anyone doubted that something spectacular would develop when the gentlemen from the ATF finally did go in to bring out he perfect little Christian Wizard, the man who can tell everyone what to do because he is Jesus Christ?

The ghost of Jim Jones has been haunting the press encampment which has become known as “Satellite City.” Jim Jones had been a respectable preacher, who had done his time on the front lines of the Civil Rights movement, before he had the vision through which he was given a ticket to the exclusive casino where desperate saviors play the game of Being God.

On account of questions asked by concerned relatives, Jim Jones had finally been confronted. The outcome made for sensational photo-journalism, but it was not pretty. It was a public relations disaster for the manufacturers of Kool-Aid. A whole community of narcissists found it easier to drink strychnine than to find answers to the criticisms that were challenging their so-called community of faith.

a

In 1979, the suffering of the world was contained in about 4.5 billion souls. 4.5 billion stories, stories which are all too often cutshort before the lead players ever get a chance to see the rainbow.

The narcissist doesn’t need rainbows. It is enough for him to be the God and Savior of all of the 4.5 billion souls. In his pleasure, their suffering finds its fulfilment and meaning. If literary editors in the Adult World had taken more interest in the poetry with too many modifiers written by the Peace and Love Children when they were on LSD, the Adult Thinkers might have come to realize how much of the tragedy of their own world derived from the barracca of their own sinful messiahs. Messiahs like Howard Hughes, who once informed the Lost Hippie Michael that he was both God and Muhammad.

So let us look at Jim Jones, David Koresh, and Charles Manson. Each of them was, in his own way, a reject from the Peace-and-Love movement. Each of these sinful messiahs stole apples from the Tree of Life, while spurning the need to cultivate the soil of ahimsa so that the garden could be sustained and every one of the 4.5 billion would have a chance to eventually take a bite out of the apple.

Eventually, the Peace and Love movement would enable a few women to give birth to themselves. They became the leaders of a Revolutionary Feminism which taught us, that we can only climb Mt. Purgatory by letting go of our old habits of getting whatever we want by manifesting sins of Powerand Control.

Before we can begin the pilgrimage through Purgatory that shall eventually lead us to the Terrestrial Paradise, we must contemplate, in the swamps that are inhabited by folks whose faith is not strong enough to sustain any real exercise, the reptile whom we are beginning to identify with the Archetype of the False Prophet.

He is possessed, and the consequences of this possession go far beyond the accidental qualifications of ideology and political persuasion. Jim Jones, possessed as he was by belief in the infallible nature of his so-called “divine guidance,” drove California Liberalism to the point of absurdity. Charles Manson had been enabled by California Liberalism, but chose as his model the man whom most liberals believe to have been Satan’s own reincarnation. And now in David Koresh, we finally have a Jesus who can appeal to the Conservative congregations.

Like Charlie and his Angels, David Koresh was a bad lad who got coralled before he had the chance to properly market himself. But we delude ourselves if we believe that the plague has been turned back merely because we have killed or imprisoned the carriers with the most conspicuous symptoms.

We delude ourselves when we fail to see the False Christs who refrain from acting quite so outrageously, but who are able to pull strings that make Baal-Dagon puppets in Washington D.C shake their pitchforks and lash the Senate House with their barbed tails.

a = a

In the clouds high over the ocean, somewhere between Dakar in Senegal and the state of Bahia in Brazil, there lives an angry lady.

Whenever the Yoruba people who live near the mouth of the Niger see this little lady they call her Oya. Oya is the whirlwind that comes down out of the sky, inspiring the sort of fear that can cause the captain of a slave ship to be transformed into a straight  abolitionist preacher. The cowrie in her left hand contains Amazing Grace, but if that don’t work she’s got plenty of thunderbolts slung over the same shoulder.

Now I’m beginning to understand why the hailstones have come down. Oya has seen enough of these Sinful Christs, these little Imperial Wizards whose principal object is to possess women, and who often end up molesting children. The sheriff’s department out by La Verne, California is incidently investigating whether it was legal for Koresh to be doing what he was doing with a 12 year old so-called wife.

How well Oya remembers the days before Women’s Lib, when David’s line used to work. “Hey there babe, I’m Jesus Christ. Come warm my bed, and I will save your soul.” But then, women read in their newspapers and their ladies’ magazines about Sharon Tate and Patty Hearst, and began to ask themselves, in their morning coffee klatches: “My God, are we really that crazy?”

Each time they asked that question, the Hurricane Woman would smile. And as she smiled, a little bit of hurricane would find its way into the hearts of women who are getting political, because they know that the time has come on this earth for some sort of change.

Janet Reno doesn’t want to admit that the Hurricane Woman was standing over her shoulder when she gave out the order that set the tanks rolling, late on that April morning when the littlest Imperial Wizard was mixing up his last batch of messianic elixir. Now whatever it was, that little wizard’s elixir could totally enchant the hearts of his devotees, to the degree that his Patriarchal bucks were willing to be celibate for the glory of their Fearless Leader.

Now it may be that this elixir was only made from honeyed words, and the desire of the Wizard’s pet bucks to become lords in Heaven. Maybe, if that Wizard were living in Pakistan or India, and working with material that is accustomed to being celibate — but this guy’s in the state reputed to be the very wildest of all of the untied ones.  So I’d be willing to wager that the propane tank that was barricading the door of David Koresh’s commune in Waco, Texas, had at one time or another been the container of something psychologically volatile.

The smoke is rising up from Ranch Apocalypse. Now, didn’t those women say that was what was going to happen, when the Feds actually did go in to confront that narcissist?

But look now – Oya has drawn her bow. Janet Reno might try to hide it from the Religious Right, but she is from Florida – and Florida has become, more or less, this Hurricane Lady’s second home, when she is trying to get away from the internal politics of Nigeria. Oh what has the little Imperial Wizard done, to get on the wrong side of Oya?

Because Oya is turning all of her Black Chickens loose, David Koresh is well on the way to becoming a footnote to one of her liturgies. The Imperial Wizard Raga shall recount Oya’s role in raising all the ladies, to speak with the voice of the hurricane against little mountebank lizards who go about torturing the women and the children, simply because, in the ‘90's, the Federal Marshall will get you if you hang a Black man on a tree.

How much medicine did it take, David Koresh, to keep your congregation from being haunted by Oya’s voice? Who taught you the way to manage a crowd by distilling one more batch of Adolph’s philosophy? If you want to witness signs and wonders shoot up – or go out that door and surrender, and you will betray me three times when you go into rehab.

Whatever it was that David was distilling, the batch must have been secreting flammable vapors. As soon as the tanks of the National Guard began to batter the plywood walls of the compound, those vapors which had been distilled in a desperate effort to chase away reality burst into flame.

a = a

“I tried to tell the FBI my favorite Texas ghost story,” Oya bends down to whisper to me, as the waitress in the Colonial Motel Café pours coffee and serves my BLT and Tariko’s Denver sandwich.

“It’s too bad the FBI did not want to hear my ghost story,” the Lady of Dark Storms continues. “It might have helped them understand just what was missing in the old Vernon Howell who now was being presented to the world as David Koresh.

“To get to the point, my favorite angel in Waco was hanging around in a spot of Heaven, looking down on the White Baptist Church of that city. I had just given him permission to play a nasty trick on the City of Waco. He’d been a poor boy who’d grown up on nothing but floggings, so it seemed only right, now that Ed Lippman had become an angel, that he should have the right to offer a like-kind-exchange to his home town.

“Ed Lippman took some floggings from which he never recovered when he was working on the Texas Prison System chain gang. His back got sprung so badthat even after several operations, he still had to walk with a cane.

“Ed Lippman’s road just took him from one big flogging to the next. He finally ended up in the surgical ward at Folsom State Prison in Repressa, California. The poem that he wrote there declared that he was in too much pain to even care if the nurses did have pretty legs.

“I was the Eagle, and I was the Serpent, and I was the dark cloud that opened so that the sun could shine through. Through the inspiration that came when I flogged his back with terrible muscular storms, this career burglar and chain-gang inmate was beginning to write poetry of a rather decent sort. By the time the jailors were willing to let him go, he’d found himself a small-press publisher and an audience among the San Francisco Beats.

“Unfortunately, the pain in Ed Lippman’s back gave him an addictive appetite for pain-killers. Which made it very easy for the pusher from the Aryan Brotherhood to quiet him by giving him enough pain-killer that he never came down from the trip. The Marin County Coroner decided that he needed to investigate, But after all twelve poetic notebooks had been locked up, there was no need for any further investigation. Ed Lippman’s voice had been silenced; the California Social and Health Services sent the manuscript back to his illiterate relatives in Waco, along with a note denouncing Second Coming Press as a Marxist conspiracy.

“His work had not gotten published, and Ed Lippman himself was on the way to Hell. But as he wandered along in the company of the Damned, he happened to meet up with a Black angel. The Black angel had been a Reggae singer in my Islands. I had first met this man when he had fallen into a trance; forever after he had been my devotee.

“I asked the Black Angel what he thought of Ed Lippman, and the Rastaman replied that Ed Lippman did not have one lick of common sense, but he did have plenty of soul.

“I had enough information; I ordered the train to be stopped. The twelve poetic notebooks were gone, but the ghost of Ed Lippman would have his revenge upon the town of Waco, Texas. But now the time has come for a word from our sponsor. And so, if you want to hear the rest of the story, you must tune in to the next episode of Page Palace.

a

Michael met Mr. Hughes on a train. Hughes, who claimed to be a Sufi, also encouraged Michael to imagine himself as Jesus Christ. The report is credible, because in the summer of 1968, no one who had not seen Hughes would have imagined him as an aging hippy with long shaggy hair.