Cosmic’s Comments (group member since Jan 17, 2014)

Cosmic’s comments from the Breaking The Code To The Catcher In The Rye group.

Phoebe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebe_(...
"radiant, bright, prophetic"
I think prophetic or a prophet might be her role in The Catcher In the Rye.
Weatherfield
Could this have something to do with controlling or manipulating the weather in order to give their side an advantage in battle.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/atmosphe...

“Weather manipulation through contrail formation … is in place and fully operational.”

Case Orange cites publicly available material that shows geoengineering has been ongoing for “at least 60 years.” Used as a weapon of war in Hamburg by the UK during World War II, it was also used in the Vietnam Conflict by the US. Controversy over its use, revealed by investigative reporter Jack Anderson, spurred Senate hearings in 1972. During those hearings, military officials denied the use of cloud seeding technology. Later, a private letter from Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird admitting that his testimony was false surfaced. He, again unbelievably, claimed he didn’t know what was happening. [9]

Caulfield In David Copperfield mentioned in the first sentence of this book we have mention of caul. A caul is a veil that was born over the face of a newborn.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caul

We will investigate more about how Hamburg as we discuss The Catcher, but for right now lets just focus on how Phoebe has been prophetic...

http://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/ch...

From page 2 in The Catcher in the Rye:

Where I want to start telling is the day I left Pencey Prep. Pencey Prep is this school that's in Agerstown, Pennsylvania. You probably heard of it. You've probably seen the ads, anyway. They advertise in about a thousand magazines, always showing some hotshot guy on a horse jumping over a fence. (1) Like as if all you ever did at Pencey was play polo all the time. I never even once saw a horse anywhere near the place. And underneath the guy on the horse's picture, it always says: "Since 1888 we have been molding boys into splendid, clear-thinking young men." Strictly for the birds.

(1) http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equita...
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Show_h...

"In over fences classes (classes in which the horse and rider jump obstacles), the competitor rides over a course of at least six jumps (usually more). "

"A good show hunter must possess an excellent jumping form... The horse should not be lazy with its lower legs, but should tuck them under its forearm as it clears the fence, clearly bending its fetlocks and knees. The horse should not throw its body or legs to one side, but should stay perfectly straight over the fence. A good show hunter should show a great bascule, or roundness over a jump."

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polo

"Polo was at first a training game for cavalry units, usually the king's guard or other elite troops. It is known in the East as the Game of Kings."

To jump over fences:
http://dictionary.reverso.net/english...
To cause to leap over an obstacle,, as for a horse to jump over a hedge.

Fences are used to keep others out. Pencey Prep is an all boys school.  At Pencey they teach you how to avoid such obstacles. They are not really very clear-thinking or splendid as they say in their ad but they don't have to be, because they are entitled.
The ad would have you believe that the horses they will ride are thoroughbreds.  But what happens if you don't go to Pencey Prep.  What kind of horse might you get stuck with in the game of life?  Or if you are a girl? Or if you are not in the right cliche? Or you don't have the "right" temperment (Quiet chapter 3 about Harvard School  Undiversity)?
Or are not the right "class" to rule? .

This is answered in the last chapter (view spoiler)[ (hide spoiler)]
The Catcher in the Rye:

Yes." "Go ahead, then--I'll be on this bench right over here. I'll watch ya.".... she went and got on the carrousel. She walked all around it. I mean she walked once all the way around it. (It is round like a roulette wheel)Then she sat down on this big, brown, beat-up-looking old horse. Then the carrousel started, and I watched her go around and around. There were only about five or six other kids on the ride, and the song the carrousel was playing was "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." It was playing it very jazzy and funny.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WbQuYgPr...

All the kids kept trying to grab for the gold ring, (makes me think of )and so was old Phoebe, and I was sort of afraid she'd fall off the goddam horse, but I didn't say anything or do anything. The thing with kids is, if they want to grab the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off they fall off, but it's bad if you say anything to them. When the ride was over she got off her horse and came over to me. "You ride once, too, this time," she said. No, I'll just watch ya. I think I'll just watch," I said. I gave her some more of her dough. "Here. Get some more tickets

"Okay. Hurry up("irrational exuberance")Alan Greenspan, though, now. You're gonna miss your ride. You won't get your own horse (house, retirement) or anything."
"The thing's starting." She ran and bought her ticket and got back on the goddam carrousel just in time. Then she walked all the way around it till she got her own horse back. Then she got on it. She waved to me and I waved back. Boy, it began to rain like a bastard. In buckets, I swear to God. All the parents and mothers and everybody went over and stood right under the roof of the carrousel, so they wouldn't get soaked to the skin or anything, but I stuck around on the bench for quite a while. I got pretty soaking wet, especially my neck and my pants. My hunting hat really gave me quite a lot of protection, in a way; but I got soaked anyway. I didn't care, though. I felt so damn happy all of sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around. I was damn near bawling, I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth. I don't know why. It was just that she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going around and around, in her blue coat  and all. God, I wish you could've been there.

From page 2 this will be the focus of this discussion:
Where I want to start telling is the day I left Pencey Prep. Pencey Prep is this school that's in Agerstown, Pennsylvania. You probably heard of it. You've probably seen the ads, anyway. They advertise in about a thousand magazines, always showing some hotshot guy on a horse jumping over a fence. Like as if all you ever did at Pencey was play polo all the time. I never even once saw a horse anywhere near the place. And underneath the guy on the horse's picture, it always says: "Since 1888 we have been molding boys into splendid, clear-thinking young men." Strictly for the birds. They don't do any damn more molding at Pencey than they do at any other school. And I didn't know anybody there that was splendid and clear-thinking and all. Maybe two guys. If that many. And they probably came to Pencey that way

Pencey Prep just makes me think of a juvenile name for Princeton University.  Another thing that makes me think this is a reference to Princeton is that how it relates to the debut novel This Side of Paradise of F. Scotts Fitzgerald http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_S.... 
"Amory Blaine, is an attractive Princeton University student who dabbles in literature. The novel explores the theme of love warped by greed and status-seeking."

In this quote from This Side of Paradise I think that we can see some of the intertextuality that Holden  uses to describe Pencey Prep.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/805/80...

" Do you remember that....you brought Burne Holiday from Princeton to see me? What a magnificent boy he is! It gave me a frightful shock afterward when you wrote that he thought me splendid; how could he be so deceived? Splendid is the one thing that neither you nor I are. We are many other things—we're extraordinary, we're clever, we could be said, I suppose, to be brilliant. We can attract people, we can make atmosphere, we can almost lose our Celtic souls in Celtic subtleties, we can almost always have our own way; but splendid—rather not!"

Right before this paragraph is this :
" You went to war as a gentleman should, just as you went to school and college, because it was the thing to do. It's better to leave the blustering and tremulo-heroism to the middle classes; they do it so much better."

(Why do middle class  do it so much better?  Read to the end of this discussion and I think that Fitzgerald will explain..)

I think that Salinger is saying that school is a path that orchestrate where they are going to be in the world.  It sets them up.  I used to live in a town where there were several boarding schools that advertised in the back of National Geographics.  I knew  a couple of teachers that taught there.  We talked about the parents that sent their children to these universities and why.  One of the things that surprised me, maybe because I was very young, was that one of the main reasons for sending your children to these schools was for the connections that your children would make that would become life time connections.  These  parents were not just educating their children they were providing them with clout, connections.

John Taylor Gatto talks about the advantages of aa Prep school education in this video series:
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=11g9Tnmv...

" When life gets hold of a brainy man of fair education," began Amory slowly, "that is, when he marries he becomes, nine times out of ten, a conservative as far as existing social conditions are concerned. He may be unselfish, kind-hearted, even just in his own way, but his first job is to provide and to hold fast. His wife shoos him on, from ten thousand a year to twenty thousand a year, on and on, in an enclosed treadmill that hasn't any windows. He's done! Life's got him! He's no help! He's a spiritually married man."
."

Every child," said Amory, "should have an equal start. If his father can endow him with a good physique and his mother with some common sense in his early education, that should be his heritage. If the father can't give him a good physique, if the mother has spent in chasing men the years in which she should have been preparing herself to educate her children, so much the worse for the child. He shouldn't be artificially bolstered up with money, sent to these horrible tutoring schools, dragged through college... Every boy ought to have an equal start."

No," said Amory, shaking his head. "Money isn't the only stimulus that brings out the best that's in a man, even in America."
.
"....Did you ever see a grown man when he's trying for a secret society—or a rising family whose name is up at some club? They'll jump when they hear the sound of the word. The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We've done that for so long that we've forgotten there's any other way. We've made a world where that's necessary. Let me tell you"—Amory became emphatic—"if there were ten men insured against either wealth or starvation, and offered a green ribbon for five hours' work a day and a blue ribbon for ten hours' work a day, nine out of ten of them would be trying for the blue ribbon. That competitive instinct only wants a badge. If the size of their house is the badge they'll sweat their heads off for that. If it's only a blue ribbon, I damn near believe they'll work just as hard. They have in other ages."

Perhaps you knew him. His name was Jesse Ferrenby. He was killed last year in France."
"I knew him very well. In fact, he was one of my particular friends."
"He was—a—quite a fine boy. We were very close."
Amory began to perceive a resemblance between the father and the dead son and he told himself that there had been all along a sense of familiarity. Jesse Ferrenby, the man who in college had borne off the crown that he had aspired to. It was all so far away. What little boys they had been, working for blue ribbons—

There were only about five or six other kids on the ride, and the song the carrousel was playing was "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." It was playing it very jazzy and funny. All the kids kept trying to grab for the gold ring, and so was old Phoebe, and I was sort of afraid she'd fall off the goddam horse, but I didn't say anything or do anything. The thing with kids is, if they want to grab the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off they fall off, but it's bad if you say anything to them.

Pencey Prep is located at a ficticious town called Agerstown,PA.

I would like to suggest that Agerstown, Pennsylvania is play on the word Hagerstown, MD and Chambersburg, PA. One is spelled similarly to Hagerstown and the other is in Pennsylvania. Agerstown is not a place in Pennsylvania.

They were both in the civil war and were treated differently. One paid a ransom and one was razed ... how might that relate to World War 2. 

Hagerstown's strategic location at the border between the North and the South made the city a primary staging area and supply center for four major campaigns during the Civil War. In 1864, Hagerstown was invaded by the Confederate Army under Lt. Gen. Jubal Early. On Wednesday, July 6, Early sent 1,500 cavalry, commanded by Brig. Gen. John McCausland, into Hagerstown to levy a ransom for $200,000 and a large amount of clothing, in retribution for Federal destruction of farms, feed and cattle in the Shenandoah Valley. McCausland misread the amount, instead collecting $20,000. This is in contrast to neighboring Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, which McCausland razed on July 30 when the borough failed to supply the requested ransom of $500,000 in U.S. currency, or $100,000 in gold.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagers...
Under the Civil War catagory.

What is a ransom?
Ransom is the practice of holding a prisoner or item to extort money or property to secure their release, or it can refer to the sum of money involved.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ransom

What is restitution?
The law of restitution is the law of gains-based recovery. It is to be contrasted with the law of compensation, which is the law of loss-based recovery. Obligations to make restitution and obligations to pay compensation are each a type of legal response to events in the real world. When a court orders restitution it orders the defendant to give up his/her gains to the claimant. When a court orders compensation it orders the defendant to pay the claimant for his or her loss.

Is Salinger referring to the reparations?



http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German....

It is interesting to read who got what, and what they got.

" According to the Yalta Conference, no reparations to Allied countries would be paid in money. Instead, much of this value consisted of German industrial assets, as well as forced labour.[4]"


In March 1947, an estimated 4,000,000 Germans were being used as forced labour.[3].  http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced...

Or could he be referring to the "the blood for goods"

Rudolf Israel Kastner[2] (1906 – March 15, 1957) was an Austro-Hungarian-born Jewish Zionist activist journalist and lawyer. He became known for facilitating the 'Blood for goods' proposal which was supposed to help Jews escape Nazi-occupied Hungary during the Holocaust. He was assassinated in 1957 after an Israeli court accused him of having collaborated with the Nazis.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf...

Or maybe it was other countries that were spared bombing because they paid a ransom...but I could not find anything to prove that.

Maybe someone else has an idea?

Chapter 1 page 1 and 2
D.B. is Holden's older brother.  He is in Hollywood.  It isn't too far from this crumbly place.

He has a Jaguar.

(See comment below)

He wrote a book of short stories, The Secret Goldfish.  The best one in it was "The Secret Goldfish"..  It was about this little kid that wouldn't let anybody look at his goldfish because he's bought it with his own money.  It killed me..  Now he's out in Hollywood, D.B. being a prostitute.

He bought the fish but at the museum of natural history the Eskimo fishes, or works for his fish.




D.B.stands for be Deutsche Bank.   Banks take money that other people work for and they use it (in secret, perhaps) to create more wealth.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsc...


During the war, Deutsche Bank incorporated other banks that fell into German hands during the occupation of Eastern Europe. Deutsche provided banking facilities for the Gestapo and loaned the funds used to build the Auschwitz camp and the nearby IG Farben facilities. Deutsche Bank revealed its involvement in Auschwitz in February 1999.[23] In December 1999 Deutsche, along with other major German companies, contributed to a US$5.2 billion compensation fund following lawsuits brought by Holocaust survivors.[24][25] The history of Deutsche Bank during the Second World War has been documented by independent historians commissioned by the Bank.[22] 


http://www.amazon.com/Deutsche-Bank-N... Which is written from their own files.



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In Chapter 16 there is a scene of a family coming out of church:

"They looked sort of poor. The father had on one of those pearl-gray hats that poor guys wear a lot when they want to look sharp. He and his wife were just walking along, talking, not paying any attention to their kid. The kid was swell. He was walking in the street, instead of on the sidewalk, but right next to the curb. He was making out like he was walking a very straight line, the way kids do, and the whole time he kept singing and humming. I got up closer so I could hear what he was singing. He was singing that song, "If a body catch a body coming through the rye".

So I looked up rye.  " It serves as the main bread cereal in most areas east of the French-German border and north of Hungary."  " On the side of the Axis Powers, Hungary also suffered great damages in World War II. "

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_P...

" They described their goals as breaking the hegemony of plutocratic-capitalist Western powers and defending civilization from communism.[1]"  (interesting that the first picture is from "Zoo Street" and Phoebe goes toward the zoo...remember?  before she get on the merry-go-round.

So I believe that The Catcher in the Rye is about catching men before they went to war and died...Like the Allies...I mean Allie

UPDATE MARCH 10,2014:
The place Rye is mentioned in this short story by Ring Lardner, referred to on page 18 of The Catcher In The Rye, called
"There Are Smiles." I think it was originally from his 1929 book "Round-Up," but it's also in "The Best Short Stories of Ring Lardner." I was able to find the story online. Here's a link:

http://www.unz.org/Pub/LardnerRing-19...

This note is to add to the discussion. Maybe this is a pointer to the idea that yes, it is a place to die.

Many people read the The Catcher in the Rye and questioned the validity of this being a classic. It at first appeared to me that if you want to get into the cult area just throw a few cuss words and sex scenes and an adolescent ad bingo you can't go wrong. But even this does not explain the "point". What was the point of this novel? Why was Salinger so passionate about writing it for 10 years? Who was it written to?

I purpose that this book is an allegory about war, power and money.

Seems these things have a lot in common. Salinger makes a case in the Catcher that wars are created to make billions and to change territories and to wield power over masses and to kill, of course.