Today I saw a Nazi driving a lowered, silver BMW with chrome-tinted windows. The bumper of the 740i had a single sticker on it — a blue rectangle with three yellow, left pointing arrows. He was maintaining the speed limit, making it difficult to make out the particular gold basketweave BBS wheel type, but I was pretty sure they were style 5S. There was a blip of red on each rim as it rolled, which I took for some kind of sticker. It could have been some driftcar related overbranding, but it also could have been a swastika. Even in West Michigan, overt fundamentalist fascism is generally frowned upon. This is a very polite, conservative community; people mumble-pray at McDonald’s before eating their cowflesh McMuffins — even when they are by themselves. As the BMW passed me I wondered how difficult it might be to unmask its drivers, to get them to admit not just what they think, but to study how they came to these ideas. (Did they choose them as adults or were they bred into them at the dinner table?)
This American Life was running a story about another conservative zealot, one who had proudly confessed to his crimes. On Nov 4, 1995, Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin was walking down a set of stairs to get into his car after a successful political rally in Israel, when he was shot twice in the back by Yigal Amir,1 a 25 year old Israeli Tea Party Patriot. In the two decades since, the Israeli public have been driven rightward and a whisper of conspiracy has grown into iron myth by the very people Amir gave voice to. “It’s the prerogative of the conspiracy theorists to never have to answer questions, just to raise them” the narrator opined. The license plate on the 740i read PANZ3R and as I turned onto my street I started thinking about how many Germans thought that their tanks were loaded with blanks — that the entire war was slipped into memory by sneaky British pickpockets?
We are what we wear, what books we own, what cars we drive; interconnected bits of information, dissolving in atmosphere.2 We know and remember the things we touch and smell together, the things we hear that happen to match up with the things we read. We are masters of our domain every time we recognize that our ambitions and skills and industries are extinguished as they crash into flaw. Some failures are crimes, but others virtue.
When Siegfried Knemeyer was escaping Berlin, he ditched his BMW3 as he approached a group of British soldiers.4 He would eventually be captured hiding under a nearby bridge. This lack of Nazi-corporate-car strategy spared him, at least immediately, from being recognized for the senior officer that he was. After a brief imprisonment, he returned to Germany, worked for the French and then for the US Air Force. “Dynamic Max” went from being the commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, and technical adviser to Hermann Goring, (where he planned to bomb New York City with radioactive sand) to being the technical director of Wright Field in Dayton — helping the US to design the B52 bomber and achieve supersonic flight. When he died, a few days after my fifth birthday, he left a 1977 E23 sedan in his Yellow Springs driveway. His glovebox contained a few tattered maps, a BMW owner’s manual, 1st and 2nd class Iron Crosses, a Front Flying Clasp and an award from the US Department of Defense, pinned to the front page of the March 26th issue of the New York Times.
His denim blue ribbon was embroidered with white stitches running its three inch length down to a folded triangle that held an 8mm diameter yellow metal jump ring. A small tube-shaped bail connected the loop to a soft edged, cast, octagonal bronze medal with a background filled with 13 debossed stars. The center supported a bas-relief forearm in profile starting on the bottom leg of the octagon, pointing up to a fist that closed around three arrows, pointing west. “DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE” circumscribed the front of the medal. The back showed an open topped wreath that held the dedication “Awarded to Siegfried Knemeyer for Distinguished Civilian Service.” SK’s name was machine engraved, while the remainder of the lettering was in the wax pattern when it was burned out of the mold and filled with an orange alloy of copper and tin.
The sketch for that medal, and for the illustration on page A11 of the issue of the New York Times it was found on, were both made on a prototype of the first consumer graphics tablet, Apple Model No. A2M0029, which was released to the general public on April 12, 1979.5 While the wired black stylus could be a little awkward to use, the 94 colors and 40 brushes included with the optional Utopia Graphics Tablet System software allowed users to create “intricate designs, brilliant colors, and animated graphics”6 with ease. A fifty-year-old architect in Los Angeles took some time away from cutting and folding paper models to sketch yellow rectangles with pixelated holes on his first generation tablet — noting that the 280 by 192 picture element grid was big enough to have 18 to 36 pixels per window. He imagined young men and women reading law a few miles from where he studied chemical engineering and took his first architecture class, twenty-five years earlier. Maybe some of them would change their majors too. He drew staircases with pixels as steps, jutting out diagonally from the facade, with a row of jagged perpendicular cylinders. He dreamed of erecting buildings that wrote plastic software for progressive people.
We started simple: cupping our hands to move water from streams to lips. We noticed puddles and ponds, extended and reduced them in size until we could carry our drinks in mugs, bags and pots we brought from bush to cave to plain to metropolis. We needed to sort and identify these public properties, so we projected the patterns we developed for skin, wall and cloth into decoration for hard surfaces (that we painted, hammered and glazed as we conquered matter.) We spelled out our myths, we projected our graphic fears and told our origin lies on objects.
Over millennia, these styles became manners and consumed the vessel — becoming units of commercial trade that turned into noise that flipped into symbols of authenticity.
Why would you consume vastly more energy than is required to produce something?
The modern handmade cup is an asynchronous glyph — a broken, orphaned logo of an idioglossic dialect; a forgotten language masquerading as vernacular. This is precisely why it can be thought of as fine art, why we can map ideas into the labor and the surface that has little shared direction — because it is unnecessary, extravagant, pointless.7 Some things are pushed from enhancement to obsolescence, which later flip back into desirable good — but they are never what they were. We think of ourselves as “modern practitioners of an ancient art,”8 but there are no ancient arts to practice — just their archived objects and the stories we tell about them. Even if we pick up those tools and follow old orders of operation, the clients for that work are extinct. Our reverence is a codpiece, protecting our gems from freezing as we try to “step twice into the same river.”9
People think a storm is coming: something big, wet and biblical. Everywhere you turn there are signs: seven spun golden candlesticks, a dude with seven sawn stars in his hand and some confused people holding onto seven paper crowns with seven sweaty hands. People aren’t reading as much as your semi-literate grandmother remembers; they aren’t as polite as they were when they called each other faggots, broads and papists in the 1950s; and they aren’t as curious and hungry for knowledge as they were when we had those big printed encyclopedias in our studies that were rarely opened. We are coarse, having loud conversations about our relatively minor differences, and we have plenty (of booze.) So obviously, it’s only a matter of time before the rapture.10
On August 18, 1913, the ball had fallen on black a few too many times on a roulette table at the Casino de Monte-Carlo.11 So people started betting on red. After 26 blacks, people kept throwing in cash as red occasionally appeared. They were expecting symmetry — waiting for a crimson flood. But the bank stuck millions of francs in their vaults, because that’s not how probability works. We deserve our gods and games, each helping us choose the right wand, the right spells and waiting for the right moment to use them. And then use them a little differently when we misjudge the moment. And then again, after a little adjustment...
A few months before the roulette balls fell in Monaco, a bell rang in the 300th anniversary of Tsar Mikhail Romanov’s ascension to the throne of Russia. A film, commissioned by the Tercentenary Committee, showed the progeny of Michael I’s military regiments in cylindrical fur hats, parading down churchsteps into the snow, with streets full of neusurfs looking on.12 A camera zoomed in on a vertical banner covered with a painting of each of the twenty tsars and tsarinas that owned Russia from the end of the Time of Troubles and into the world that would soon be plunged into war, 1613-1913. In front of this awkward image sat a rock crystal egg, skinned in cut-ice cracks, in two hollow halves (each rimmed with diamond studded platinum.) It was presented to the fifth richest man in the world, Tsar Nicholas II. This well documented Easter egg, designed by Alma Pihl and constructed in the Faberge workshop (headed by her uncle Albert Homstrom) contained a miniature white gold basket, filled with white quartz flowers, with yellow gold stems and stamens along with more than 3,000 diamonds.13 The Winter Egg cost (the profoundly anti-semitic) Nicholas II 24,600 rubles14 and, in effect, his life.
Until relatively recently, orgies of labor like this were relatively rare and connected almost exclusively to kingdoms and churches. But as the middle classes broke off from the ranks of paupers and aristocracy, their wealth began demanding effervescent baubles — things that would serve as evidence of culture. This patronage allowed increasingly diverse workshops to develop, ones that were a little more loosely knotted to the purse strings of tyrants and popes. • Look at the work of Daniel Brush. While it isn’t quite as detailed or virtuosic as some of the Faberge work, there is more independence and individual virtue in his work. It is the work of a man in a small workshop, making the things that have remained unmade for too long. He developed clients with the means to support this research. This power, to compete with the state and the church on even matters as relatively unimportant as artistic production, is a great force of populist jealousy. We want our greatest minds, money and talents at work for the masses and the articles of their faith, not in the service of minority interests that the rest of us can’t understand or enjoy. We identify with our regents and priests, and disempowered idiosyncrasy just won’t stand. So we stand in line to see the Eggs in museums, in lust with their authority.
Europe has made things difficult for Jews so long as the idea of Europe has existed, but pogroms in Russia, sanctioned by the Tsars and the Russian Orthodox church, were the standard bearer for the nineteenth century phenomenon. Jews were believed to drink the blood of Christians, specifically children. Men of letters wrote, portmanteaued and distributed variations of this blood libel through The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,15 using it as proof of a conspiracy that “the fundamental feelings animating the Talmudic spirit are an overweening ambition to dominate the world, an insatiable lust to possess all the riches of those who are not Jewish, and a grudge against Christians and against Jesus Christ.”16 On October 8, Mendel Beilis went on trial, accused of killing a Christian child and baking his blood into a Passover matzo — with the full prosecutorial zealotry of the Russian empire in Kiev. The ‘Black Hundreds’ passed out a leaflet that “the yids have tortured Andrusha Yushcinsky to death!” Priests, drunks and thieves testified against Beilis, a local bricklayer. He was found not-guilty (but was not found innocent to the true believers of the libel who later called the bars rumored to be made from human tallow at Auschwitz Beilis Soap.17 )
How can we know how much Christian blood a person-of-interest has consumed? First we will have to differentiate between those people who were simply born to Christians, those who were baptized as Christians and those who are leading Christian lives. Some metaforensic chemists would insist on a finer pathologic gradation, between Western and Eastern Orthodox churches, Protestant denominations and Christian cults of the New World, but god’s soldiers don’t always have that kind of time at their gun range shopping mall. For the sake of demonstrating a basic blood libel titration workflow, at least a liter of blood must be taken from the subject and precisely 10ml of this analyte is carefully added to an Erlenmeyer flask. A sterile serological pipette, containing a PZ reagent, is slowly measured off until the analyte begins glowing gold.18 The volume of the reagent is measured and a concentration calculation is performed.
A concentration of more than 1000 INRI cells (tsarocytes) per five million red blood cells (erythrocytes) indicates a Christian who is likely in the midst of a crusade with sword in hand. These people are to be given provisions and sent back to do battle with Satan and nonbelievers, statim. Measurements between 700 and 1000 are the real deal; they are often wealthy heirs to industrial fortunes that underwrite missions and superPACs to promote Young Earth creation, patriarchy and other family values in public schools. Formal apologies should be given to each of these subjects accidentally caught up in the system. Tsarocyte levels between 500 and 700 are consistent with your garden variety pamphleteer, but will sometimes indicate latent rapture magnetism. Give them crackers and 300ml of purified christ serum. Counts between 300 and 500 generally make up the religious laity, but also their priests. The counts would be higher, but the ministerial class is fond of opening up their veins in front of television cameras anytime one of their flock is injured by being reprimanded for calling someone a faggot. They require no remediation; they are routinely re-infused with spirit cells every time they tell someone they are a Christian. Below 300 INRI cells and we have a serious problem. These are either lapsed Christians, those who were never baptized, people who voted for Barack Obama, or patriots whose NRA memberships have lapsed. Quarantine them and contact the Ministry of Ministries immediately to start a support ticket.
Results of greatest concern, however, are the INRI3 cell counts. When a Christian is martyred, their soul is immediately pressed into action; transforming each of their tsarocyte cells into viral markers.19 The RNA polymerase catalyzation process is retranscribed, turning INRI1 into INRI3 — recognizable by a characteristic guanine horn on each carbon3 nucleotide. A count of below 100ppm is usually caused by simple cross contamination; the blood of dead Christians that might have been accidentally ingested after having been picked up on discarded weapons, or having been accidentally mixed into hamburger made from the unsaved. Between 100 and 200 INRI3 cells generally indicates that there is occasional blood consumption of older Christians, probably as they prayed in nursing homes. Between 200 and 300 and you’re probably dealing with a serial ‘vampire of the righteous.’ Between 300 and 400, and they have at least occasionally poured the blood of children who were ritually slaughtered while having been forced to recant the divinity of their savior. And above 400 INRI3 units indicates that the subject has recently bathed in a solution of aborted fetal tissue and holy water and may, at any moment, transform into someone who refuses to genuflect in the presence of a yellow ribbon. Any of these indications require the technician to call Kirk Cameron on his hotline at the Corporation for the Elimination of Vice within two business hours. Videotape of the immediate executions, corpses of the subjects, their personal effects, serology reports and form 07SL, must be transferred to the local Kroc recycling center in approved Glad® bags. Any biohazardous remains can be sterilized with stale hosts and prayer.