The scheduler has been busted, and is not sending emails out on time. I only just now noticed this post. My apologies.
Cover your ears, ladies. I’m about to let loose a PRIMAL SCREAM.
The SCREAM was one of the ideas that burst out of 1970, piercing forward into the new decade. Strangers gathered, many with awesome moustaches, and others with truly hideous handbags, and screamed until their alveoli burst.
They got the primal scream idea from the 1970 book of the same name by psychoanalyst Arthur Janov. His theory was fresh and bold. He said aliens, under the orders of Xenu, Lord of the Galactic Confederacy, abducted earthlings with bad astrological signs into their UFOs, called Thetans, and implanted false memories into their victims. A common vision was of a hairy, smelly woods-dwelling beast with obnoxious pedal extremities. Others saw Gloria Steinem.
Trained “est” technicians conducted marathon scream encounter groups, usually in the nude, in which participants were not released until they had lost at least one of their gestalts. This allowed them to recharge their Reichian bioenergy through the process known as Rolfing (it wasn’t pretty).
The rolfed were awarded mood rings, which (we’re almost done) could be used to extract (some said leech) aquarian vibrations from healthy auras, and it was these vibrations that pushed out the false memories implanted during abductions.
You had to be there.
“Ho ho, Briggs. Very funny. We’ve moved past all that nonsense, though. We now have mRNA vaccines, Disney streaming, and iPhones releases are nearing the magical number 20. Nobody does that stuff anymore.”
Oh yeah? Then how do you explain this:
These are 15,000 ladies, with a few men not too far from that state, at this year’s American Academy of Pediatrics meeting, all of whom have obviously been abducted by Xenu’s minions, screaming as one to “release that energy.”
They did this in full view of the mysterious Dr Glaucomflecken (whom I did not make up).
(A copy of the scream is at Instagram, but I don’t have an account nor know how to embed it; copy two. Please do not get sick. No, really, please do not get sick.)
The Primal Scream was, as you saw, effected. Dr Glaucomflecken, who obviously knew was to occur, girded himself against these emanations with a tinfoil hat, as seen in this screen grab, which I promise is 100% genuine.
The only question was where the emotional energy that was released on an unsuspecting Denver populace went. Theories and rumors are already circulating. Some are reporting Blucifer’s eyes instantly glowed a deeper red. Blucifer is the statue in front of the Denver airport, a status that murdered its sculptor (yes, really).
Quoting from wokepedia “Columnist Brian Kurz argued in The Denver Post that the controversial nature of the piece is precisely what makes it a worthy addition to Denver’s public art collection.” This is what we logicians call a faulty argument. Or one with a hidden premise.
What makes the pediatrician scream even more bizarre was, as Google told me, “AAP advises against yelling and other forms of verbal or physical punishment, which are linked to negative long-term outcomes.” Watch these ladies and see if the develop Glaucomfleckens five years from now.
Lest you think it’s only the Pediatricians, here is a short clip of the Scream Club from Chicago. It’s Twitter, so I can’t embed here. But it shows a row of people looking exactly as you’d suppose, trying to purge their est into Lake Michigan. Do not have the volume up.
I warned us a year ago that we were, metaphorically, heading back into the 1970s. A decade coming after the political tumult and cultural excess of the 1960s, of a not dissimilar kind we have also just seen. (And some say the 1970s was a repeat of the 1920.)
Once you start looking, the parallels can be seen everywhere. Here’s a woman in San Francisco showing a picture of grown people sitting on bean bags and “vibing”. I don’t know what “vibing” is, but the lady said it was to “chill, chat and generate.” Generate what? She never says. Surely vibing is related to the 70s “vibrations”.
Tucker Carlson has had on serious UFOlogists, and even a man who said, as was common in the 1970s, that Satanists secretly controlled Hollywood. A trend. One fellow saw this and forecasted, “Inside 6 months Tucker will be interviewing ‘remote viewers’ – people who claim to tap into broader consciousness and can see things on the other side of the world.”
He thought he was joking. But I say he is right. Indeed, I still think there will be a resurgence of interest in the paranormal.
There may be a renewal of Satanic movies, which were a staple of 1970s cinema. There were a large number of these, among them Satan’s School for Girls (1973), Race With the Devil (1975), The Legacy (1978), The Devil’s Rain (1975), The Omen (1976) and of course the granddaddy of them all The Exorcist (1973). And now (at least) there is Him (2025), about a ball player flirting with selling his soul for fame.
The Brotherhood of Satan (1971) had what became a staple plot, one which echoed Carlson’s show. A family vacation goes awry in a faraway village after the innocents realize the village was run by a cult of Satanists hunting kids for their rituals.
The other side of that Dark was Light. Take the classic 1973 film The Boy Who Cried Werewolf, potential winner of over thirty Oscars, in which we meet flowery dressed peace-sign wearing “Jesus freaks.” Freak was a sort of good word in 1973, like sick is today. The Jesus People Movement gave us, inter alia, Godspell and the lyric in mega-hit song “Convoy” by HW McCall:
Well, we shot the line
We went for broke
With a thousand screamin’ trucks
And eleven long haired Friends of Jesus
In a Chartreuse microbus
We haven’t seen a resurgence of this behavior. Yet. And might not in the same way, given how much “migration” has changed the makeup of the population. But look for it or something like it, some new religious fervor.
Disco is already back. I don’t know who or what form the Harlem Globetrotters will take. But everybody’s favorite was Meadowlark Lemon.
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“Looks like we got us a convoy.”
The decade the music died.
I have to say, that disco song was better than 99.44% of the dreck that’s being produced today.
Back in the 1970s, a Chinese woman named Jiang Qing was married to a senile Chinese dictator named Mao Ze Dong. Jiang and a group of political insiders took the reins of power and plunged their country into a disastrous “Cultural Revolution”. The group came to be known as The Gang of Four.
Unlike the current United States, China had the political will to try and convict the conspirators.
How’s that for an historical parallel?
A family vacation goes awry in a faraway village after the innocents realize the village was run by a cult of Satanists hunting kids for their rituals.
Hmm…Sounds like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
In college during the 70’s, it would get cold enough to freeze the Iowa river that passed through the UofI campus. After a snowstorm, I struck out along one of the bridges and saw some brave soul had ventured out onto the river and engaged in some creative writing. One side of the bridge had “Save the Whales” and the other said, “Disco Sucks”. Truly, signs of the times.
Briggs, you are the master of hard-boiled, surreal, precise, colorful, expansive poetry masquerading as cultural commentary. You are our age’s Ezra Pound. The linked video, “Awesome Moustaches”, on the return of the 70s, featuring, unknown to me, Benson Boone, had me dying laughing. Brilliant. That young man is a real talent. I pray the beast doesn’t ruin him. You are the Benson Boone of Statistical Poetry — Shoeless Bill Briggs — aging flawlessly into a rarified vintage, and amusing us all, generously, with your delightfully intoxicating insights. Thanks pal, I sincerely appreciate it.
To follow up, on screaming — in 1986 I fell off a turnip wagon, blond and blue, in New York City and quickly acquired, or was acquired by, a girlfriend. Said girlfriend encouraged me to see her therapist, and who was I to decline a new adventure in the Big City? — especially when suggested by my sexy new squeeze. On the big day I arrived outside the building, 3rd street just off 6th, a six story loft building occupied entirely by my new advisor, an crotchety old gray crone, obese, who met me at the door, admitting me to a filthy entry piled with junk. She lead the way to an elevator piled with ancient newspapers and magazines which took us to the second floor, stuffed with the flotsam and jetsam of centuries, such that only a narrow walkway was open to conduct the naive country patient to a healing session with the ancient city quack therapist.
I should mention there were hypodermic syringes here and there, which I was given to understand were deployed in injecting the local rescue cat population, perhaps eighty or more cats on the floors above — this being a six story loft building — for injecting the various diabetic cats with insulin. So you see it’s funny I am going to get “treated” by a crazy hoarder cat lady in Greenwich Village, a follower of Wilhelm Reich, advocate of primal screaming to overcome those perverse social inhibitions that were preventing one from experiencing powerful orgasms, which are, supposedly, the secret to spiritual perfection.
So I practiced screaming, and also roaring like lion, which was sort of fun, but also made me feel ridiculous, roaring like a fool in a dank, trashy loft on instruction from an obese cat lady. Funny in a New York eighties sort of way. There might even be something in the basic premise, but really I’d rather be able to scream like Luciano Pavarotti, or Mario Lanza. Far more therapeutic. That girlfriend went away, as did the Reichian therapist cat lady, leaving only wonderfully bizarre memories of a unique time and place.
I didn’t come here for ~two months. Then I come back and … *shit’s gotten weird, son.* o.O At least The Class is still ongoing. I need to start following it.