Dark horse and dead cattle

We live in a political world, love don't have any place
We're living in times when men commit crimes
And crime don't have a face

I never like to disagree with Bob Dylan, but I will here, about a couple of things.

It's not a political world, it just looks that way. Politics merely dresses the set. Like the curtains, tables and chairs promoting the illusion of freedom, which Frank Zappa said hid the brick wall at the back of the theatre. And that reminds me of another set, from the film Dark City. The hero has spent half the movie searching for "Shell Beach," which he believes will solve the mystery in which he finds himself. Shell Beach proves an illusion; nothing but a fading poster on a brick wall.

If you've seen the film, you know the solution to the mystery is found behind the wall.



And Dylan got it wrong here, too: crime does have a face. High Crimes, even. We know the faces of the perpetrators; they're well known. That they are rewarded rather than punished does not render them anonymous.

Here's a story from Sunday night that makes Dylan's mistakes several times over:

Woodward Calls Cheney a "Serious" Dark Horse for 2008 Run for White House

A trial balloon for a Cheney for President run in 2008 is being launched by a surprising source, Washington Post star reporter (and White House insider) Bob Woodward.

Appearing on Chris Matthews' NBC talk show on Sunday, Woodward labeled Vice President Cheney "a serious dark horse candidate." He said that with "a number of people" going for the GOP nomination, "a guy named George Bush might come out and say 'What about Dick?'"

Woodward observed that "there's a serious vacuum right now," with Senators Frist, Brownback, and Allen leading the field, some say.

There may be a precedent for this. Cheney, who was put in charge of finding a suitable VP candidate in 2000, ended up getting the nod himself.

Why, after all this time, should Woodward be considered a "surprising source"? Woodward has been an insider all his life. A conservative insider, even; hardwired into military intelligence. He adapted his Wheaton commencement address from Barry Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative. After hearing Woodward speak in class, his Yale political science professor called him a "crypto-fascist." Woodward went to work as a Pentagon briefing officer. (In The Secret Team, Fletcher Prouty - who himself had been a briefer - writes that "one of the most interesting and effective roles is that played by the behind-the-scenes, faceless, ubiquitous briefing officer," who has "almost daily" access to executive power.) One of Woodward's tasks, which he denies, was to brief Alexander Haig.

Watergate is regarded as a conspiracy that failed, and which established, for all time - his record of the past 30 years notwithstanding - Woodward's credentials as a hardnosed and even liberal journalist. But the public story contains a good deal of spin, which spins away from Washington's intelligence community. And that seems to have been the intention of Woodward, the Spook. (This takes us beyond the scope of this post; I'll refer you to Jim Hougan's Secret Agenda and Colodny and Gettlin's Silent Coup for more on Watergate's - and Bob Woodward's - hidden history.)

Cheney, the "Dark Horse." If politics mattered in America - hell, if American politics were real - this would be laughable. But Democrats were laughing last Fall, too, as George W Bush stammered and chicken-danced and melted through three debates with a mystery box strapped to his back, and still won. He has the lowest approval of any second term president. Homer, on last Sunday's Simpsons, called him "Commander Cuckoobananas." The exit polls - well, you know where I'm going.

The Bush/Cheney election, and its re-election, were massive and in-your-face frauds. The Emperor has no votes. And even those who can see it generally behave as though they can't. Will they act differently when "Dark Horse" Dick Cheney assumes executive power in his own right? That's a campaign poster on the brick wall. Take a pick axe to the wall, and see what's behind it.

Here's something I didn't know until recently: Dick Cheney visited Roswell, New Mexico on October 24, 2000. A few days before, there was this local story:

Mysterious Mass Death of Cattle in New Mexico

Twenty-four cattle were found dead under mysterious circumstances in Roswell, New Mexico on Thursday morning, October 19, 2000.

"Rancher Marcelo Macias doesn't know what happened to his herd of cows, but he knows he's out of a lot of money."

"Macias said 24 cows died mysteriously last week at his farm."

"The cattle were all healthy when he checked them at midnight Wednesday (October 19, 2000) but by early Thursday morning (October 19, 2000) nearly half of his herd lay dead."

Maybe our politics are not very well informed by literary devices like pathetic fallacies. Maybe dead cattle are just dead cattle. (Dead squid, too, like those noted in a comment yesterday, that "hundreds of dead large squid" had washed up in Orange County, California, as Bush made his likely unconscious allusion to the cephalopodic Cthulhu.) But mysterious cattle deaths and mutilations appear to be one of those junctions where black magick and UFO phenomenon meet. They seem, in part, to be ritually prefiguring. (Remember that the night before the murder of Father Alfred Kunz, who threatened to expose a Satanic cult of paedophiles in the Catholic Church of Wisconsin, a cow on a nearby farm had its throat slashed and blood drained into a pail, its hind legs cut through, and its genitals removed.)

I don't know about Roswell. But Dick Cheney carries about him the frisson of High Weirdness and cultic bruatality. In April 2001 Cheney was asked if he had been briefed on UFOs. He replied "Well if I had been briefed on it, I'm sure it was probably classified, and I couldn't talk about it." Rather than lie he prevaricates, and sends the message that he's an insider. And, of course, much deeper than Woodward.

If Cheney becomes president in name, and if he lives so long, he will see in, and see out, 2012. Are you prepared for that?

Linda Moulton Howe reports an interesting abduction case from Colorado in An Alien Harvest, her study of mutilation and UFO phenomenon. A couple were driving north of Denver the week before Thanksgiving in 1980. The husband, who had worked as an Air Force launch control officer, reported a "cerulean blue light" surrounded the car, and they lost track of time. Under hypnosis, husband and wife both recounted how they were then beckoned aboard something by a tall figure in a blue robe with high collar. They felt unable to resist. Once on board they were separated: the woman had a vaginal exam (she was, though she didn't know it at the time, a month pregnant), and the man had his mind probed. He felt his thoughts stripped out his head: "I've got it, but they've got it, too. Got the whole thing. They've just pulled everything right out of me!"

He fell silent for several minutes, and then began to speak in a whisper, saying his mind was being put back. But something had been added:

There's more to it than anybody knows. There's more to life, more to the world. There's more to everything than anybody knows. More dimensions, things co-existing. There are other dimensions...more than three dimensions. Everywhere, it all works together. Everything co-exists. There's different dimensions we can't go into.

Welcome to Shell Beach.