The Tears of Things

The Hundred-Year Lie (With A Description of Strangers To Reason)

The Scapegoat, by Catherine King. (2002/2005, in progress. Photography by Jerome du Bois. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce in any form.) Acrylic and modeling paste on plywood. [Catherine used only mascara brushes as her instruments for creating this artwork. Big detail here.]

by Jerome du Bois

This year marks the 100th anniversary of that persistently pernicious Czarist concoction known as The Protocols of The Elders of Zion, a pestilential black gospel believed as gospel by millions of Muslims worldwide. I don't mean Islamofascist jihadists; I mean the falafel vendor in Cairo, the moneychanger in Damascus, the restaurant owner in Samarra, the machete sharpener in Banda Ache, the imam in Copenhagen, the bookseller in London, the doctor --the high-school teacher --the hookah-bar owner-- in Phoenix, Arizona.

The others who believed and believe The Protocols are statistically irrelevant, though socially significant: Sergei Nilus, the Czarist mystic who first copped the Protocols for a chapter of his book, or Boris Brasol, or George Shanks, the first translators of that poison flower into English. Or Henry Ford, the American Johnny Poisonseed of the Protocols, broadcasting edition after edition for years. And Louis Ray Beam, Jr., American neo-Nazi, evil godfather of "leaderless resistance," and a pioneer of antisemitic BBS systems. I piss on all their graves. (See also many of those featured in Mark Levin's new movie, "The Protocols of Zion.")

In another cultural climate in Phoenix, had we had the support, we would be finishing up by this time our multi-media installation based on the Protocols, which we began in 2002. It had three linked titles:

Strangers To Reason: The Poison Flower: Culprits Of The Protocols

For those interested, make the jump and I'll describe it to you. (And this one we're not giving away. All rights reserved here.)

Back in 2002, we began a large working drawing and collage, based on a winding timeline. This is the copy --vivid and urgent-- we attached to the lower right corner of the drawing in 2002:

IN 2002, MILLIONS BELIEVE A STUPID FORGERY

Make no mistake: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in all of its iterations and variations, is a fraud, a plagarized forgery, a vicious fiction.

The lurid first chapter --a gathering of dark men in a deserted Swiss cemetery in the middle of the night-- for a business meeting-- should have given even the dimmest of wits a clue that we are in fantasyland. But millions of people believe it. See the flags? [Referring to all the national flags in the drawing.]

It doesn't seem to matter that ten dozen articles and at least four books, one just published in 2002, decisively debunk this ridiculous curiosity, or that this debunking began almost as soon as the damned thing was published. Millions of people believe it.

In their heads, in burnt-black rooms in the back of their heads, reason is impotent. A,B, and C don't matter. Lay out all the A-jay, squared-away arguments in the arsenal of logic; sorry, the roar in their heads drowns you out.

The history of the Protocols reveals greasy, heartless aspects of us: humanity has no bottom; hatred obliterates everything; reality is less important than fear.

Most of us will never feel these dark things, much less live them; and for the millions who do, for all you culprits who feed the roar in your heads --including seventeen percent of Americans-- now hear this:

You've burned your ticket. You don't matter anymore --to history, to the human conversation, to the future. Human beings have left you behind. Don't bother trying to catch up.

Then we did research to trace the lineage of The Protocols, making the unearthing and publishing of names paramount. (See The Importance Of Naming Culprits of the Protocols.) Real, actual, individual people invented, promoted, and propagated, and still propagate, this filth. One aspect of our project was to find as many names --publishers, promoters, leaders of student groups, imams, spokespeople for political organizations, authors, lecturers, teachers --the names of persons: the Culprits-- as many as we could collect until 2005.

The names were the core of the piece.

Now, imagine an open, three-walled exhibition space with a ceiling, everything clean and white; wooden floor. The installation has four elements:

1. The Doormats. Copies of the Protocols in many many languages have been taken apart, the pages set side by side, and laminated with clear thick plastic. Each page has a green X on it. These doormats run in a straight path to the center of the room, where they form a circle on the floor. They are meant to be walked on, and in fact there are more doormats lined up against the walls under the other parts of the installation. Arabic, dialects of Arabic, German, English, Japanese . . . every language but Hebrew and Yiddish.

2. The Green Wall, the Woman, and the World. Standing against the far wall is a foot-thick green false wall just slightly smaller than the wall itself. It is pierced by hundreds of holes, 3 to 6 inches in diameter, and covered with black speaker cloth. Voices, sounds, and music emanate from these holes. (Not loudly; one must lean close to each opening. More on these below.)

A green swirl of cast plastic rises from the top of the green wall like smoke, and coalesces on the ceiling into the form of a giant green gowned woman floating near the ceiling at the center of the room. (A 3D model based on Catherine King.) The woman is reaching down with her right hand and grasping the stalk of an ugly, prickly purple flower, whose thousands of tenacious roots overwhelm the Earth, a detailed relief globe suspended in the exact middle of the room, directly over the circle of Doormats. The root system is not random; they divide and divide until tendrils disappear in the exact locations where the Protocols thrive.

3. The Poison Flower. On the left wall is mounted a six-by-twelve foot electronic screen, framed in purple and touch-sensitive. It is basically a sophisticated development of the timeline drawing, showing the snakelike purple stalk (drawn by Catherine King) growing and branching from left to right, from circa 1905 to circa 2005. All the culprits we could find will be named and/or pictured there, at the moment they surfaced as promoters of the Protocols. Press the name for a pop-up window describing the person's part in keeping the Poison Flower alive; links within the window will pop up windows in other parts of the Flower, showing the flow of its poisonous sap.

4. Strangers To Reason. On the opposite wall: Another six-by-twelve foot screen, framed in purple, but not touch-sensitive. This is simply a well-defined outline of a spread-out world map, in muted lavender, magenta, and purple, every known border clean, country names neatly labelled, as one sees in real Situation Rooms.

The screen is connected to a nearby computer-and-printer hookup. The computer's sytem is dedicated to monitoring hundreds of thousands of internet spiders and webbots, each with a single mission or question: Who is talking about the Protocols, when, and where? Chat rooms, blogs, jihadist sites, Aryan sites, anything they can legally intercept. As soon as a robot finds an answer, it sends the data back to the computer, which displays it, the printer prints it on continuous paper, and then the screen lights up with a color-coded dot. All of this in real time, and all being recorded. We anticipate, unfortunately, a lot of activity. Some of the dots will be displayed permanently: a booksite, for example, with the Protocols in its inventory (as, for example, Wal-Mart online was offering, until September 2004.)

Features include the ability to rerun the changing map displays under different conditions, and over selected spans of time. The color-coding refers to various categories of culprit, including anonymous chuckleheads from Skokie and the neo-hajis with their muj on in Paris, as well as imams in mosques in West Virginia and Michigan and on and on . . .

Now, let's track back to the Green Wall and its speakers. As we mentioned, each opening will play a continuous loop (which can be rewound with a button) of many parentheses --snatches, pieces, bits, schmatte-- of Jewish culture from circa 1900 until around 2005. Not just Einstein, Freud, and Marx (or even the Marx Brothers.) We mean everything from Klezmer music, to bits of Poconos comedy, to rabbi's tales, to diary excerpts of wartime survivors, to spoken recreations of articles by Fritz Gerlich and the Poison Kitchen, to testimonies of immigrants, to quotes from Holocaust survivors and Schindlerjuden, to music by the Gershwins, Rogers & Hammerstein, and every Tin Pan Alley Jew we could find. (Henry Ford said that "jazz was a Jewish invention." What a feckless fool. But the Jews can rip it up with the best of the rest. [Update: And when I say schmatte --originally "a rag or worthless thing"-- I certainly don't mean that; I mean ordinary voices, regular people.])

On the adjacent wall, next to The Poison Flower screen, hangs a large photo of the Green Wall, with numbers printed over the various openings, and a master list printed next to it showing what is playing where. Smaller, handheld versions of this piece, for the viewer's convenience, will be available to hand-carry around.

And that about covers our developed version of a crude drawing that began in 2002. Again, this isn't a giveaway idea. This is ours. We want to realize it.

As for Catherine King's Scapegoat, above: Although it applies here, it is part of another so-far-only-imaginary installation called Polytheism, a large section of which would be a looming, haunted room called Mecca's Cave Before Mohammed, filled with at least three hundred and sixty five gods, goddesses, and beings in between.

Ah, the good old days, before Islam ruined the world.

May all the true righteous ones, Jewish or not, who defend the defenseless and the innocent dead, live on, and on, until time without boundaries.

Posted by Jerome at November 18, 2005 01:00 PM | TrackBack