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

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

I was reading The Wind in the Willows when I read something that reminded me of the Catcher. It was this:


"What?" cried the Rat, open-mouthed: "Never been in a—you never—well I—what have you been doing, then?"

"Is it so nice as all that?" asked the Mole shyly, though he was quite prepared to believe it as he leant back in his seat and surveyed the cushions, the oars, the rowlocks, and all the fascinating fittings, and felt the boat sway lightly under him.

"Nice? It's the only thing," said the Water Rat solemnly as he leant forward for his stroke. "Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing—absolute nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing," he went on dreamily: "messing—about—in—boats; messing—"

"Look ahead, Rat!" cried the Mole suddenly.

It was too late. The boat struck the bank full tilt. The dreamer, the joyous oarsman, lay on his back at the bottom of the boat, his heels in the air.

This is where a similar word phrasing is in the Catcher:

He wasn't even listening. He hardly ever listened to you when you said something. "I flunked you in history because you knew absolutely nothing." "I know that, sir. Boy, I know it. You couldn't help it." "Absolutely nothing," he said over again. That's something that drives me crazy. When people say something twice that way, after you admit it the first time. Then he said it three times. "But absolutely nothing. I doubt very much if you opened your textbook even once the whole term. Did you? Tell the truth, boy."


Now I admit that there isn't really very much here to give me an "Aha!" So I started looking to see if The Wind in the Willows was a political allegory. I found a review here that shows how it is:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

I just started this book so I can't really comment on it yet.

Have you read The Wind in the Willows and understand the political allegory? How might this book might tie into the Catcher in the Rye as we are discussing this book in this group?

"I hated that goddam Elkton Hills."

This is one over 300.

At first i was very put off with this excessive use of 'the Lord's name in vain and sacrilegious language here:

"You should see old Ossenburger. He probably just shoves them in a sack and dumps them in the river. Anyway, he gave Pencey a pile of dough, and they named our wing alter him. The first football game of the year, he came up to school in this big goddam Cadillac, and we all had to stand up in the grandstand and give him a locomotive--that's a cheer. Then, the next morning, in chapel, be made a speech that lasted about ten hours. He started off with about fifty corny jokes, just to show us what a regular guy he was. Very big deal. Then he started telling us how he was never ashamed, when he was in some kind of trouble or something, to get right down his knees and pray to God. He told us we should always pray to God--talk to Him and all-wherever we were. He told us we ought to think of Jesus as our buddy and all. He said he talked to Jesus all the time. Even when he was driving his car. That killed me. "

Well this week I came across the name of this guy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank...
Who:


During World War II, he was in the Army Air Force, and continued to write lyrics for films and single songs.[2] Loesser wrote the popular war song "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition" (1942) inspired by words spoken by navy chaplain William Maguire. Members of the Western Writers of America chose his 1942 composition Jingle Jangle Jingle as one of the Top 100 Western songs of all time.[13]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prais...

http://www.songlyrics.com/frank-loess...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TUOPvtV...

This will be continued...

Did Salinger suffer from post traumatic stress disorder? Or

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/mag...

Cosmic wrote: "Page 178,179.tried to make me stop, but once you get started, you can't just stop on a goddam dime. I was still sitting on the edge of the bed when I did it,
..."
Sitting on the edge of the bed reminded me of Holden's visit to Spencer.

"Four." I moved my ass a little bit on the bed. It was the hardest bed I ever sat on. "I passed English all right," I said, "because I had all that Beowulf and Lord Randal My Son stuff when I was at the Whooton School. I mean I didn't have to do any work in English at all hardly, except write compositions once in a while."

Bohemian Club

[The Bohemian Club's] symbol is an owl, which has been in use since the first year the Club started. The owl has come to symbolize the wisdom of life and companionship, that allows humans to struggle with and survive the cares and frustration of the world. The owl is found on all Bohemian materials from matchbook covers and doormats to the most elaborate Club publications. For $34.00 you can even own an owl-emblemed sports shirt. A forty foot concrete owl stands at the head of the lake in the Grove. This owl shrine was built in 1929 to serve as a ceremonial site for traditional Bohemian rituals and is used yearly for the Cremation of Care Ceremony.

http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/2015...

Jack London talks about this club in Martin Eden


I think this is significant, given that Sooner gives us a humid of history in hindsight!
The 19th-century idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel famously noted that "the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk"—meaning that philosophy comes to understand a historical condition just as it passes away.[17]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owl_o...

Philosophy cannot be prescriptive because it understands only in hindsight.

When did the U.S. dollar become the world currency?
In the period following the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944, exchange rates around the world were pegged against the United States dollar, which could be exchanged for a fixed amount of gold. This reinforced the dominance of the US dollar as a global currency.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World...

Another out come if WW2.

I am reading Ulysses because i think that Salinger learned how to write two different "stories" simultaneous from him. It is kinda like looking at a Autostereogram:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autos...

Some people will see it but it takes time to retain your focus.

Anyway, I found an allusion to Jane Gallagher in Ulysses. I looked up Gallagher but i was never able to find anything connecting that name to WW2.

This week i think i found the connection.

Episode 10 (The Wandering Rocks) (25 pgs)

Father Conmee began to walk along the North Strand road and was saluted by Mr William Gallagher [literary reference used by Salinger, "Jane Gallenger] who stood in the doorway of his shop. Father Conmee saluted Mr William Gallagher and perceived the odours that came from baconflitches and ample cools of butter. [Was this where Bloom bought his kidneys?]He passed Grogan’s the tobacconist against which newsboards leaned and told of a dreadful catastrophe in New York. In America those things were continually happening. Unfortunate people to die like that, unprepared. Still, an act of perfect contrition.

General Slocum disaster
http://newyorkhistory.info/Hell-Gate/...

"Boy, I nearly dropped dead when he said that. "Jane Gallagher," I said. I even got up from the washbowl when he said that. I damn near dropped dead." The Catcher in the Rye

All told, 1,021 perished out of the original 1,358 who boarded the ship that morning. And over and again bystanders described the unconscionable behavior of a private captain who was said to have watched the horror from the safety of a great white motor yacht without ever lifting a finger or launching a boat to assist in the rescues. "Kept His Yacht Back While Scores Perished: White Vessel's Captain Watched Slocum Horror Through Glasses," the Times headline stated.


From Ulysses:
Those farmers are always grumbling. I’ll just take a thimbleful of your best gin, Mr Crimmins. A small gin, sir. Yes, sir. Terrible affair that General Slocum explosion. Terrible, terrible! A thousand casualties. And heartrending scenes. Men trampling down women and children. Most brutal thing. What do they say was the cause? Spontaneous combustion: most scandalous revelation. Not a single lifeboat would float and the firehose all burst. What I can’t understand is how the inspectors ever allowed a boat like that…Now you are talking straight, Mr Crimmins. You know why? Palmoil. Is that a fact? Without a doubt. Well now, look at that. And America they say is the land of the free. I thought we were bad here. I smiled at him. America, I said, quietly, just like that. What is it? The sweepings of every country including our own. Isn’t that true? That’s a fact. Graft, my dear sir. Well, of course, where there’s money going there’s always someone to pick it up.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graft... political corruption.

History of PALM OIL http://coconutoil.com/palm_oil_history/

The British Industrial Revolution created a demand for palm oil for candle making and as a lubricant for machinery. In the early nineteenth century, West African farmers began to supply a modest export trade, as well as producing palm oil for their own food needs. After 1900, European-run plantations were established in Central Africa and Southeast Asia, and the world trade in palm oil continued to grow slowly, reaching a level of 250,000 tonnes (metric tons) per annum by 1930 (Empire Marketing Board 1932: 117—23; Hartley 1988: 8—23; Lynn 1989: 227—31).

Meanwhile, the invention of the hydrogenation process for oils and fats in 1902 created the possibility of Western employment of palm products as, for example, in the making of margarine. Yet hydrogenation was more useful for liquid oils like groundnut, palm kernel, and coconut oils than for palm oil. After World War II, further improvements in palm oil refining technology and transport methods made it possible to use largely unhydrogenated palm oil in Western food products (Lim 1967: 130—2; Martin 1988: 45—8).

- See more at: http://coconutoil.com/palm_oil_histor...

"Throb always without you and the throb always within."
From:
The whirr of flapping leathern bands and hum of dynamos from the powerhouse urged Stephen to be on. Beingless beings. Stop! Throb always without you and the throb always within. Your heart you sing of. I between them. Where? Between two roaring worlds where they swirl, I. Shatter them, one and both. But stun myself too in the blow. Shatter me you who can. Bawd and butcher, were the words. I say! Not yet awhile. A look around.

From:
The Mettle of the Pasture
http://www.archive.org/stream/mettlep...
From Page 232 Allusions in Ulysses: An Annotated List

Joyce quotes this book in a review he wrote: "without us and within us moves one universe that saves us or ruins us for its own purposes."


"Probably one reason that this passage stuck in Joyce's mind is that, in Allen's novel, it occurs immediately after Rowan Meredith's mother has tried to get him to agree to marry Isabel Conyers. Allen describes Rowan's reaction to his mother's imploring: 'No, no, no! He cried, cooking with emotion, Ah, mother, mother!' -and he gently disengaged himself from her arms"(p124) Rowan leaves and Mrs. Meredith immediately realizes that her childish wish that Rowan and Isabel should marry will never be fulfilled. Allen then says,

"we are reminded that our lives are not in
our keeping, and that whatsoever is to befall
us originates in sources beyond our power.
Our wills may indeed reach the length of our
arms or as far as our voices can penetrate
space ; but without us and within us moves
one universe that saves us or ruins us only
for its own purposes ; and we are no more
free amid its laws than the leaves of the for-
est are free to decide their own shapes and
season of unfolding, to order the showers
by which they are to be nourished and the
storms which shall scatter them at last. " (p125)

For me this is significant in reading a book. I imagine when Joyce read his book and came across this section it reminded him of his own union without engaging the church, or getting married. When i read it i didn't get that much from the text. I am woefully ignorant on The Mettle of the Pasture so the allusion was lost on me. I think it is these things that made Joyce remark that he Ulysses is full of Riddles.

For me this is significant because i discovered that Salinger used the same style of impregnating his text with meaning that would not be obvious except to the ones that wanted to study the allusion and literary references.

So when it comes to Gallagher to me this preceded the text that was important to Salinger. X marks the spot but you still have to dig.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-02...

This is about currency and the collapse of the Roman empire. Perhaps there is a lesson in there for us.

In Ulysses Hades the theme as the professor says Joyce's Ulysses

The theme is that "in the midst of death we beget life." Just the opposite of what one might think of when in a cemetery.

What was "born" out of WW2?

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/...

The 1948.

Your funeral’s tomorrow
While you’re coming through the rye.
Diddlediddle dumdum
Diddlediddle…

Ulysses
Lestrygonian

Larry wrote: "What's a McKinleyville?..."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willi...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKin...

"Where I lived at Pencey, I lived in the Ossenburger Memorial Wing of the new dorms. It was only for juniors and seniors. I was a junior. My roommate was a senior. It was named after this guy Ossenburger that went to Pencey. He made a pot of dough in the undertaking business after he got out of Pencey." Chapter 3 of The Catcher in the Rye

I am reading Ulysses "Hades"
https://archive.org/details/Ulysses-A...

When I read this section about Ossenburger and this chapter in Ulysses they just seemed to remind me of each other.

OSS = Office of Strategic Strategies Service.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offic...

Did Salinger work for this department or branch of military?

'en' homonym 'in'

(Ham)burg...https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombi...


Back to The Catcher in the Rye chapter 3

"He made a pot of dough in the undertaking business after he got out of Pencey. What he did, he started these undertaking parlors all over the country that you could get members of your family buried for about five bucks apiece. You should see old Ossenburger. He probably just shoves them in a sack and dumps them in the river. Anyway, he gave Pencey a pile of dough, and they named our wing alter him. The first football game of the year, he came up to school in this big goddam Cadillac, and we all had to stand up in the grandstand and give him a locomotive--that's a cheer. "

Cadillac is made by the same company as a Holden:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holden

Football as war:

Football! Navy! War!: How Military Lend-Lease Players Saved the College Game and Helped Win World War II

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand...!
Staring Little Shirley her first movie.
In the Catcher they reference her as Little Shirley Bean.

Where does the Bean come from?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Bean

Yes, just like Roy Bean, the United States set up shop, judging and punishing the people of Europe.

Hitler went through and stole everything that was worth stealing.

We came through and destroyed Europe. It was literal scorched earth.

So i leave you with these two songs in this one videos from Stand Up And Cheer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pshgQ...

The second one says "We will fight for the Emperor for we are the Roman Soldiers"

Laura wrote: "You know as well as I that it was the aftermath of the WWI settlements. How stupid do you think I am? .."


Hitler did blame it on that but he was wrong in blaming it on the German Jews. There were German Jews as well as others that supported Hitler. They had to because their money was tied up in Marks. I don't really have a figure, but i am basing it on The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss

He write that his father was a banker (owned a bank). He supported Hitler winning because his investments were in Marks and in the countries that Germany occupied. But also he did not support the Zionist. He did not say why.

Maybe there was more than one faction of Jews in the world?

The family lost their fortune and had to sell their bank to the Deschutes bank.

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

I am sorry but this is really not my area of expertise.

Laura wrote: "This actually refers to a few posts back. The strong possibilty that the powers that be were planning WWII long before Hitler came to power seems to have little to do with whether or not he was a b..."

I don't know what Hitler's IQ was. But I suppose, JFK had too high of IQ.

He was a great speaker and he was providing the German people with a scapegoat for their economic demise.

What/who do you think was the cause / responsible of the economic demise of Germany?

Dave wrote: "Cosmic wrote: "Laura wrote: " If I combine that with the accepted interpretation of that 1939 Renoir movie and some personal experience I get this. Hitler was supported by other non-German interest..."

That is interesting.

I am from the South (Tennessee). When I moved to the Northeast, (Philadelphia and Boston), I was surprised that there were Daughter's off the Revolution. We (in the South, in my opinion), did not identify ourselves as much with the Revolutionary War as with the Civil War. But we also don't have Revolutionary War reenactments, since they were not fight in the South.

It doesn't mean we are not related to Royalty, but why my paradigm saw this as an exception rather than the rule.

Well i think Salinger and Thoreau have a lot in common. They probably would sit down together over some herbal tea.

Laura wrote: "However, you have sidestepped answering whether or not it is okay for the federal government to impose any tax. I consider that a bigger issue. Methodology comes second...."


It doesn't matter what i think. This is a thread about breaking the code to The Catcher In The Rye. So this is off topic.

If I were doing this I would speak of JDS' revelations of WWII, and avoid getting into the Revolutionary War, WWI, the history of the banking system, or the tax system.

Yeah, well then i wouldn't have learned about the flag that the revolution was fought over was little more than the East India Trading Company, or that a federal bank was put in place and then unfair taxes were again imposed on a people's that thought they had fought against that. So the war was a fraud. And to me that is more Salinger message. WAR is a Racket.

You also sidestepped the "chicken or the egg" riddle which is phony, unless you are taking the position that human beings will never fight each other unless tricked into it.

How do you think Henry David Thoreau would answer that?

Thank you for asking these questions! Made more sense it comes to the phrase "crazy cannon."


Laura wrote: "the whiskey tax, do you believe that the federal government has no right or need to tax?.."

The Whiskey Rebellion, also known as the Whiskey Insurrection, was a tax protest in the United States beginning in 1791, during the presidency of George Washington.

The tax was resisted by farmers in the western frontier regions who were long accustomed to distilling their surplus grain and corn into whiskey. In these regions, whiskey was sufficiently popular that it often served as a medium of exchange. Many of the resisters were war veterans who believed that they were fighting for the principles of the American Revolution, in particular against taxation without local representation, while the U.S. federal government maintained the taxes were the legal expression of the taxation powers of Congress.

If yes, I'll disagree but not argue as it boils down to opinion and finance."

I agree with the farmers in this case. Because they did not use cash. They had a system of barter and thus they could not pay their "taxes". The land was mountainous, because we are talking about the Appalachia, which was west. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appal...

Because the land was hilly they could not grow a lot of corn. Turning it into whisky was a way to create more value when they didn't have a lot of land. See The Education of Little Tree
The whiskey excise was immediately controversial, with many people on the frontier arguing the tax unfairly targeted westerners.[14] Whiskey was a popular drink, and farmers often supplemented their incomes by operating small stills.[15] Farmers living west of the Appalachian Mountains distilled their excess grain into whiskey, which was easier and more profitable to transport over the mountains than the more cumbersome grain. A whiskey tax would make western farmers less competitive with eastern grain producers.[16] Additionally, cash was always in short supply on the frontier, so whiskey often served as a medium of exchange. For poorer people who were paid in whiskey, the excise was essentially an income tax that wealthier easterners did not pay.

The main objection to the whiskey tax was that it was taxation without (local) representation, exactly what they'd just fought the Revolutionary War to stop.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisk...

The President, Directors and Company, of the Bank of the United States, commonly known as the First Bank of the United States, was a national bank, chartered for a term of twenty years, by the United States Congress on February 25, 1791. It followed the Bank of North America, the nation's first de facto central bank.

There were other, nonnegotiable conditions for the establishment of the First Bank of the United States. Among these were:[citation needed]

That the bank was to be a private company.

Hamilton's bank proposal faced widespread resistance from opponents of increased federal power. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and James Madison led the opposition, which claimed that the bank was unconstitutional, and that it benefited merchants and investors at the expense of the majority of the population.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First...


[So the people still didn't have representation. And the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_... flag and the
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_... were conspirators together. I believe it was by design.

How did history repeat itself?

The Federal Reserve System‍—‌also known as the Federal Reserve or simply as the Fed‍—‌is the central banking system of the United States. It was created on December 23, 1913, with the enactment of the Federal Reserve Act, largely in response to a series of financial panics, particularly a severe panic in 1907.

We resisted a national bank after the civil war. But in 1913...
The Federal Reserve System considers itself "an independent central bank because its monetary policy decisions do not have to be approved by the President or anyone else in the executive or legislative branches of government, it does not receive funding appropriated by the Congress, and the terms of the members of the Board of Governors span multiple presidential and congressional terms."

The House voted on December 22, 1913, with 298 yeas to 60 nays, and the Senate voted 43–25 on December 23, 1913.[143] President Woodrow Wilson signed the bill later that day."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feder...

[Do you think that was a bit sneaky doing it so close to a holiday? They don't tell us what the vote count was.]

After the sinking of seven US merchant ships by submarines and the publication of the Zimmermann telegram, Wilson called for war on Germany, which the US Congress declared on 6 April 1917.

Included among these were the Federal Reserve Act, Federal Trade Commission Act, the Clayton Antitrust Act, and the Federal Farm Loan Act. Having taken office one month after ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment, Wilson called a special session of Congress, whose work culminated in the Revenue Act of 1913, reintroducing an income tax and lowering tariffs.

The Sixteenth Amendment (Amendment XVI) to the United States Constitution allows the Congress to levy an income tax without apportioning it among the states or basing it on the United States Census. This amendment exempted income taxes from the constitutional requirements regarding direct taxes, after income taxes on rents, dividends, and interest were ruled to be direct taxes in the court case of Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co. (1895). The amendment was adopted on February 3, 1913.

[First comes a central bank then comes the Revenue Tax, and then comes the DEBT..WAR DEBT that is. A blank check paid for twice by the American people. Paid for once by human lives and limbs. Then paid for by again by human toil.

is righteous to be against the people who profit from war if they are the same people who paid for or caused it in some other way. But, just suppose a war just happened because two entities hated each other. Would it be wrong for someone who made war supplies to make a profit?"

This sounds like the chicken and the egg riddle.

Wars are organized. They cannot just happen. They are planned. In the event of WW2 it was so blatant that it was called a Phoney War:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone...

A good reason for Holden to use that word a lot.

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...


Are the ducks representative of the banks, the military vehicle or both?
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Laura wrote: "Maybe you can correct me, but for now, since we're focusing on monetary motivation with which I concur, I don't understand how the British gained from the Revolutionary War. Whatever that East India company was doing after the war it could have done the same things without one. UK lost tax revenues and paid military expenses; largely salaries.."

Well if you have watched The Secrets of Oz I think you can see what they got. They got a compliant public. Now instead of rebelling against taxes they think they own the country and are willing to pay. The colonist exercised the same kinds of harsh taxing the British did https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey.... Definitely not a government that was working families r the people. Just the sort of thing that the West India Trading Company would be doing to people that stood in their way of resources.

I have read the The Idiot in a while, but it comes to mind about how people think about land and war.

I am not really interested in figuring out other conspiracies. I am interested in figuring out what Salinger may have known and hinted at in The Catcher. It is like a game. Even if i don't figure it out exactly like Salinger meant it, with the internet i have been able to learn a lot about the "rest of the story" as Paul Harvey put it.

I figure if they can put a man in power they can take him out.

A good book on this might be Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship

Laura wrote: "Cosmic;
You have my head swimming. I'm losing track of where you're going with this as it relates to The Catcher. If you want to make the conversation broader, fine with me. Please just indicate wh..."

I am making the connection between the expression 'crazy cannon' of the revolutionary war and the flag that that war was fought for. If you are puzzled it is because it looks like a crazy war. Where we might have been led to believe we were fighting against British rule and yet remain under it's influence by the East India Trading Company. It appears to me a farce.