barbaricyawpproject.org

To help you find your way on the website you will find a so-called “hamburger” in the upper right corner of your computer screen when you are logged on to the site. When you click on the three horizontal lines of the “hamburger” they convert to the three different sections of the site that permit easy navigation. The “About” section orients you to the purpose of the project. The “Discover” section allows you to bump into a random selection of about 10 different yawps that you can access by clicking on any image of an ancestor that appeals to you. The “Browse” section of the website allows you to view the entire selection of yawps that are arranged alphabetically and by other criteria that you can select.

There are over 150 ancestor videos that I have created in the past several months and I am adding to the collection all the time. I hope you will share in the sense of excitement and discovery that I have experienced in producing these videos. It is my hope that The Barbaric Yawp Project website will contribute to a rediscovery and renewal of our basic values in the tradition of the humanities, arts, and sciences from which these ancestors speak.

At the same time, I will continue posting weekly yawps as it is much easier to take in one of these at a time, although having them all together permits a different kind of exploration that allows us to see the interconnectedness and variety of the whole of the collection

It seems fitting for the occasion of the launch of the website to post a video imagining what C.G. Jung might say to us about connecting with our ancestors in his “Answer to the Dead.” In some ways, this project follows in the footsteps of Jung’s own journey to speak with the dead in the early part of the twentieth century.

The painting below records Jung’s own response to that call; the AI video beneath it imagines how he might answer us today and invites us into our own active imagination with him.

From The Red Book, Page 169 — an image scholars have associated with the “reconstitution of the dead.”

This video is an AI generated active imagination of what C.G. Jung might say to us today based on the written historical record.

Text of C.G. Jung’s Barbaric Yawp

Answer the Dead

I am Carl Jung. I painted the drawing of the dead in the years after a single weekend in January of 1916, when the dead came to my house in Küsnacht. For three days the house was disturbed. The doorbell rang and no one was there. My children dreamed of figures in the rooms. My wife saw what she would not name. The air felt heavy with people one could not see. On the third evening I sat down at my desk because I understood what was being asked. The dead had returned from Jerusalem, where they had not found what they sought, and they had come to be taught. Across three nights I wrote the Seven Sermons to the Dead, signed with another man’s name because the experience felt too strange to claim. I claim it now.

In the work that followed I came to understand something your country has lost almost completely, and the loss is the spiritual structure beneath what you are calling your political crisis. The dead are not finished. What they were not permitted to live, to say, to feel, or to mourn does not disappear when they die. It presses on the living. It returns as the longing we cannot name, the symptom we cannot cure. What we call our neurosis is often the unanswered question of an ancestor. The work of becoming a self is partly the work of receiving the unfinished business of those who came before us, and answering, in our lifetime, what they could not.

I built my later life around places where this work could be done — Eranos, Bollingen, the Red Book, the dialogues I taught my patients to have with the figures who came to them. In the image you have just seen, I painted the crowd of the dead in green and to their left the mandala, the symbol of the Self. I painted them together because the Self is not something you build out of your own will. It forms in the one who goes down alone into the depths and finds the dead already there — his own and the world’s — waiting to be received. You individuate in solitude. But what you meet in that solitude is the crowd.

Now I will say plainly what your country is doing. You are dismantling the institutions of memory. You are banning the books that record the unfinished business of the murdered slaves and the killed indigenous and the lynched and the disappeared. You are tearing records from the archives and firing the historians. You are insisting on a national mythology in which nothing wrong ever happened and the dead have no claim on the living. You are doing this because the ancestors’ demand is uncomfortable and a strongman has promised you can be free of them. You cannot. A person who refuses contact with the dead becomes inflated, grandiose, manic. The dead who are not honored return as madness. They return as the man you have made your president. He is the symptom of a country that has refused, for four hundred years, to answer its dead.

Answer the dead. The Black dead. The indigenous dead. The migrant dead. The women silenced by force. The queer dead lost to AIDS and to violence. The million you lost to the recent plague and are pretending was nothing. Read what they could not write. Hear what they could not say. Mourn what was not mourned. Receive their unfinished business as your own — even the dark inheritance, especially the dark inheritance — because the Self does not emerge any other way. Build the places where this work can happen. Tend the archives. Refuse the demand that you forget. No one becomes a self alone, and no one becomes a self in a crowd. You become a self by going down, often alone, to meet the crowd of the dead who made you.

The Barbaric Yawp Karass is a place to yawp our passionate support for freedom and democracy. It is also a place to find essential mutual support at a time when Trump and MAGA are trying to drive millions of us who dissent into fear and hiding with threats and bullying. It has become increasingly important to find communitas with friends and strangers to break through Trump’s “flooding the zone” with a massive media, legal, political, economic, social. and spiritual onslaught whose intent is to drive us into silent isolation, feeling as if each of us is wandering alone in a pre-apocalyptic desolation.

Let me explain why I am calling this new series “The Barbaric Yawp Karass”.

The title is drawn from two of our most creative American ancestors: Walt Whitman who lived from 1819-1892 and Kurt Vonnegut who lived from 1922-2007. Whitman contributes the notion of the barbaric yawp and Vonnegut contributes the notion of the karass. Putting their two fundamental creative ideas together we get the Barbaric Yawp Karass. This new series gives voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps. I would like to think that both Whitman and Vonnegut would be members of this karass, but I don’t know if Vonnegut’s concept allows for the inclusion of those who have been dead for decades or even hundreds of years. Let me break the title down into its two component parts.

The Barbaric Yawp

Walt Whitman gave birth to the “barbaric yawp” in verse 52 of his 1855 “Song of Myself”, one of the poems in his masterwork Leaves of Grass.

“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”.

The “barbaric yawp” is the sound of a raw, spontaneous, sovereign voice--a manifesto of the deepest freedom. It expresses that which lies beyond or beneath ordinary language — the undomesticated self, the wild core, the divine cry of America’s essential being. I first started writing about the “barabaric yawp” in 2020 when our land was infected with another plague, the coronavirus or covid. The plague infecting us now has spread like a virus, but it is an infection of the American soul and the spirit of democracy itself. I attach the link to the first occasion for my writing about Whitman’s barbaric yawp which Bill Moyers published in his Journal along with a link to a video recording of the “barbaric” yawp during covid:

https://billmoyers.com/story/on-howling-in-mill-valley-and-walt-whitmans-barbaric-yawp/

Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” of freedom extends to all of us — we too are invited to express our voices, our “yawps”, and our affirmation of freedom in a shared world. One can imagine Donald Trump claiming that Whitman’s poem was in anticipation of his own special arrival on the American scene as he certainly emits his own “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” But, in my using the term, I have something different in mind and I imagine that Whitman did, too. Perhaps there are barbaric yawps and there are barbaric yawps.

The Karass

Kurt Vonnegut’s notion of the karass comes from his 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle. It is especially relevant some sixty years after its inception, perhaps a distant cousin of the more contemporary idea of “silo” but with a much more soulful sense of interconnectedness. It is well worth revisiting or familiarizing yourself with this whimsical and mystically-ironic type of human grouping as envisioned by Vonnegut. In the novel’s fictional religion of Bokononism, a karass is defined as a group of people who are spiritually linked to one another to accomplish a collective purpose. Characteristics of a karass include:

• Unknowing collaboration: The members of a karass may be strangers who never meet, but their lives and actions intersect in surprising ways to advance the divine plan.

• Spiritual connection: Bokononists believe that when you encounter someone in your karass, your souls resonate instantly, even if there’s no obvious human-level connection.

A karass can be thought of a soulful grouping of people who share the deepest concerns.

Again, it is the goal of this series to give voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps.

“They need you quiet. That is the whole game.”

And we need women and men now who will stand up and not be quiet. Listen to Bella Abzug below.

This video is an AI generated active imagination of what Bella Abzug might say to us today based on the written historical record.

Text of Bella Abzug’s Barbaric Yawp

Do Not Get Quiet

I am Bella Abzug. Battling Bella, they called me, and worse. Bronx-born, daughter of Russian Jews who ran a butcher shop called the Live and Let Live Market. And I am going to talk fast, because I always did, and because you do not have time to be polite anymore.

Let me start when I was thirteen. My father died, and I went to the synagogue and said the Mourner’s Kaddish for him, every morning, for eleven months. That prayer was for sons. Not daughters. Nobody gave me permission. I did it anyway. Remember that, because it is the whole of me in one story: they tell you where your place is, and you decide for yourself.

I became a lawyer. And when I walked into offices they said, sit down, dear, the lawyer will be with you shortly. They thought I was the secretary. So I started wearing hats — big ones — so they would know a professional woman had entered the room. People made a joke of the hats for fifty years. Fine. It’s what’s under the hat that counts.

Now what I did with my time bears on the fear you are living in.

As a young pregnant lawyer, I went to Mississippi to defend a Black man named Willie McGee, who was going to be executed on a lie. White supremacists sent me death threats. I stayed. I defended people Senator McCarthy had marked as dangerous, when everyone else ran for cover. I learned early that the measure of you is whether you will stand next to the person everyone has agreed to destroy.

Then I went to Congress, the first Jewish woman ever to sit in that House. My slogan was, this woman’s place is in the House — the House of Representatives. And I did not go there to be liked.

I wrote the sunshine laws. The reason your government must hold its hearings in the open, where you can see them, is me. I wrote the Freedom of Information Act, so a citizen could pry the government’s files out of its hands. Because I understood the one thing a corrupt power cannot survive, and it is daylight. They do their worst in the dark. So I spent my life throwing open the shutters.

And when I brought the head of the CIA in to testify, I found out they had been spying on me since the 1950s. Because a loud woman who wanted the government to answer to the people was, to them, a threat to national security. I took that as a compliment.

I stood up for gay Americans in 1974, when it was still a crime to be one in most of this country. I wrote the first bill in the history of the United States to protect them. It got almost no votes. I wrote it anyway. You do not only fight the fights you can win this afternoon.

Now let me be honest about the cost, because I will not sell you a fairy tale. They called me abrasive. Shrill. A man-hater. A prizefighter. Difficult. And I was difficult. I made enemies I did not need to make. And it cost me. I lost my seat. I lost a Senate race. Being the loud woman is not free, and I will not pretend it is.

But here is the only thing I came back to say. They need you quiet. That is the whole game. The strongman, the boss, the man behind the big desk does not need you to agree with him. He needs you to lower your voice. To be reasonable. To wait your turn. To decide the hat is too much, the demand too loud, the fight too tiring.

Do not give him that.

Put on the bigger hat. Say the prayer they told you was not yours to say. Stand next to the one they are trying to destroy. Throw open the shutters and let the daylight in.

And whatever it costs you, do not get quiet.

That is the one thing they cannot survive.

The Barbaric Yawp Karass is a place to yawp our passionate support for freedom and democracy. It is also a place to find essential mutual support at a time when Trump and MAGA are trying to drive millions of us who dissent into fear and hiding with threats and bullying. It has become increasingly important to find communitas with friends and strangers to break through Trump’s “flooding the zone” with a massive media, legal, political, economic, social. and spiritual onslaught whose intent is to drive us into silent isolation, feeling as if each of us is wandering alone in a pre-apocalyptic desolation.

Let me explain why I am calling this new series “The Barbaric Yawp Karass”.

The title is drawn from two of our most creative American ancestors: Walt Whitman who lived from 1819-1892 and Kurt Vonnegut who lived from 1922-2007. Whitman contributes the notion of the barbaric yawp and Vonnegut contributes the notion of the karass. Putting their two fundamental creative ideas together we get the Barbaric Yawp Karass. This new series gives voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps. I would like to think that both Whitman and Vonnegut would be members of this karass, but I don’t know if Vonnegut’s concept allows for the inclusion of those who have been dead for decades or even hundreds of years. Let me break the title down into its two component parts.

The Barbaric Yawp

Walt Whitman gave birth to the “barbaric yawp” in verse 52 of his 1855 “Song of Myself”, one of the poems in his masterwork Leaves of Grass.

“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”.

The “barbaric yawp” is the sound of a raw, spontaneous, sovereign voice--a manifesto of the deepest freedom. It expresses that which lies beyond or beneath ordinary language — the undomesticated self, the wild core, the divine cry of America’s essential being. I first started writing about the “barabaric yawp” in 2020 when our land was infected with another plague, the coronavirus or covid. The plague infecting us now has spread like a virus, but it is an infection of the American soul and the spirit of democracy itself. I attach the link to the first occasion for my writing about Whitman’s barbaric yawp which Bill Moyers published in his Journal along with a link to a video recording of the “barbaric” yawp during covid:

https://billmoyers.com/story/on-howling-in-mill-valley-and-walt-whitmans-barbaric-yawp/

Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” of freedom extends to all of us — we too are invited to express our voices, our “yawps”, and our affirmation of freedom in a shared world. One can imagine Donald Trump claiming that Whitman’s poem was in anticipation of his own special arrival on the American scene as he certainly emits his own “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” But, in my using the term, I have something different in mind and I imagine that Whitman did, too. Perhaps there are barbaric yawps and there are barbaric yawps.

The Karass

Kurt Vonnegut’s notion of the karass comes from his 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle. It is especially relevant some sixty years after its inception, perhaps a distant cousin of the more contemporary idea of “silo” but with a much more soulful sense of interconnectedness. It is well worth revisiting or familiarizing yourself with this whimsical and mystically-ironic type of human grouping as envisioned by Vonnegut. In the novel’s fictional religion of Bokononism, a karass is defined as a group of people who are spiritually linked to one another to accomplish a collective purpose. Characteristics of a karass include:

• Unknowing collaboration: The members of a karass may be strangers who never meet, but their lives and actions intersect in surprising ways to advance the divine plan.

• Spiritual connection: Bokononists believe that when you encounter someone in your karass, your souls resonate instantly, even if there’s no obvious human-level connection.

A karass can be thought of a soulful grouping of people who share the deepest concerns.

Again, it is the goal of this series to give voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps.

This video is an AI generated active imagination of what Abraham Lincoln might say to us today based on the written historical record.

Text of Abraham Lincoln’s Barbaric Yawp

I speak from the long silence of graves and marble,
from the dust of union and the shadow of division.

I once saw this house divided —
and I see it divided still,
though now the battlefields are digital,
and the bullets made of words.

I hear the drumbeat of anger marching once more,
flags waving not in unity but defiance,
banners proclaiming freedom while chained to fear.

The old serpent of resentment slithers again,
hissing that truth is what you feel,
that power is proof,
that cruelty is strength.

I tell you — this is not greatness.
This is the fever of pride that consumes the patient who mistakes heat for health.

The Republic, my friends, is not an inheritance —
it is a covenant renewed each dawn
by those willing to listen, to doubt, to forgive.

Do not worship the strong man.
He is but the shadow cast by your own fear.

Do not mistake the flag for the soul.
The flag waves because wind moves through emptiness —
so too must conscience breathe through power.

You speak of freedom, yet chain yourselves to falsehoods.
You shout of law, yet trample its spirit.
You praise the Constitution, yet ignore the compassion
that was meant to animate its words.

I knew the sound of cannons.
I watched brothers fall by their brothers’ hands.
And I tell you this —
the Union cannot endure another war of the heart.

Lay down your grievances.
Lift up your neighbor.
Build not walls of stone, but bridges of understanding.

For the nation that forgets how to grieve together
will soon forget how to live together.

My yawp is not of rage but remembrance —
a cry across the years:

Do not abandon what we began in blood and mercy.
Do not trade democracy for domination.
Do not make of truth a weapon.

The work is not finished.
The promise not yet fulfilled.
The angels still wait, weary and watchful,
for us to remember that
a house divided cannot stand —

but a heart forgiven might still save it.

The Barbaric Yawp Karass is a place to yawp our passionate support for freedom and democracy. It is also a place to find essential mutual support at a time when Trump and MAGA are trying to drive millions of us who dissent into fear and hiding with threats and bullying. It has become increasingly important to find communitas with friends and strangers to break through Trump’s “flooding the zone” with a massive media, legal, political, economic, social. and spiritual onslaught whose intent is to drive us into silent isolation, feeling as if each of us is wandering alone in a pre-apocalyptic desolation.

Let me explain why I am calling this new series “The Barbaric Yawp Karass”.

The title is drawn from two of our most creative American ancestors: Walt Whitman who lived from 1819-1892 and Kurt Vonnegut who lived from 1922-2007. Whitman contributes the notion of the barbaric yawp and Vonnegut contributes the notion of the karass. Putting their two fundamental creative ideas together we get the Barbaric Yawp Karass. This new series gives voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps. I would like to think that both Whitman and Vonnegut would be members of this karass, but I don’t know if Vonnegut’s concept allows for the inclusion of those who have been dead for decades or even hundreds of years. Let me break the title down into its two component parts.

The Barbaric Yawp

Walt Whitman gave birth to the “barbaric yawp” in verse 52 of his 1855 “Song of Myself”, one of the poems in his masterwork Leaves of Grass.

“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”.

The “barbaric yawp” is the sound of a raw, spontaneous, sovereign voice--a manifesto of the deepest freedom. It expresses that which lies beyond or beneath ordinary language — the undomesticated self, the wild core, the divine cry of America’s essential being. I first started writing about the “barabaric yawp” in 2020 when our land was infected with another plague, the coronavirus or covid. The plague infecting us now has spread like a virus, but it is an infection of the American soul and the spirit of democracy itself. I attach the link to the first occasion for my writing about Whitman’s barbaric yawp which Bill Moyers published in his Journal along with a link to a video recording of the “barbaric” yawp during covid:

https://billmoyers.com/story/on-howling-in-mill-valley-and-walt-whitmans-barbaric-yawp/

Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” of freedom extends to all of us — we too are invited to express our voices, our “yawps”, and our affirmation of freedom in a shared world. One can imagine Donald Trump claiming that Whitman’s poem was in anticipation of his own special arrival on the American scene as he certainly emits his own “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” But, in my using the term, I have something different in mind and I imagine that Whitman did, too. Perhaps there are barbaric yawps and there are barbaric yawps.

The Karass

Kurt Vonnegut’s notion of the karass comes from his 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle. It is especially relevant some sixty years after its inception, perhaps a distant cousin of the more contemporary idea of “silo” but with a much more soulful sense of interconnectedness. It is well worth revisiting or familiarizing yourself with this whimsical and mystically-ironic type of human grouping as envisioned by Vonnegut. In the novel’s fictional religion of Bokononism, a karass is defined as a group of people who are spiritually linked to one another to accomplish a collective purpose. Characteristics of a karass include:

• Unknowing collaboration: The members of a karass may be strangers who never meet, but their lives and actions intersect in surprising ways to advance the divine plan.

• Spiritual connection: Bokononists believe that when you encounter someone in your karass, your souls resonate instantly, even if there’s no obvious human-level connection.

A karass can be thought of a soulful grouping of people who share the deepest concerns.

Again, it is the goal of this series to give voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps.

This yawp does not argue that the working class is right about every cause, or right to have turned where it turned. It tries to do something harder: to let you hear, from the inside, why that turn made sense to the people who made it. It is a composite voice — ancestor and living worker braided together — and it asks not for your agreement but for your understanding of how our present President came to sound, to millions, like the only one who noticed.

This video is an AI generated active imagination of what an American Worker might say to us today based on the written historical record.

Text of An American Worker’s Barbaric Yawp:
The Column Marked Cost

I want to tell you about my town. Not the idea of my town. My actual town. The one where my grandfather worked the mill for thirty-two years and bought a house and raised four kids on a single income without a college degree. The one where the mill closed in 1987. And then the parts plant. The hardware store. The diner. The pharmacy. The school consolidated with the next town because there weren’t enough children left.

I watched this happen. I didn’t read about it. I watched it happen to the people I love in the place I was born.

I want to tell you what I was told.

I was told it was the global economy. I was told the market had decided — not cruel, just efficient — and efficiency required that some towns simply stop. I was told to retrain. I was thirty-eight with a mortgage and two kids and a mother in the nursing home. Retrain for what, paid by whom, in what town — because my town no longer had the tax base to fund the retraining program.

I was told I was experiencing economic anxiety. As though what I felt watching my community die was a psychological condition to be managed rather than a political failure to be answered.

I was told I was on the right side of history. I did not feel on the right side of history. I felt on the wrong side of a decision made by people who would never live with the consequences.

I want to tell you what I was not told.

I was not told that the people who wrote those trade agreements had run the numbers — that they could see what would happen to towns like mine, and decided the overall benefit was worth the specific human cost. No one said my town was the price. They talked about growth and opportunity and the future. They did not mention that my town was in the column marked cost, and not the column marked benefit.

And then someone mentioned it.

He was loud and rough and some of what he said was wrong. But he said: they did this to you. Not: this happened. Not: the market decided. They did this to you. He said: I see it. I will fight it. You have been lied to and ignored and written off, and I am the only one willing to say so.

I had been waiting my entire adult life for someone to say so.

You may think I was fooled. You may think I was manipulated by a man who does not actually care about my town. Maybe. But I want you to understand what it feels like to be told for thirty years that your concerns are not real, that your community’s decline is natural and inevitable — and then to find someone who says: no, this was a choice, the choice was wrong, and I am going to fight to reverse it. Whatever else he is, that felt like the truth.

I am not asking you to agree with me. I know there are things in this movement I do not defend. I can see the cruelty as well as you can. I can see the lies. I am not simple, and I am not ignorant. I am a person who watched my town be destroyed by decisions made by people who did not consult me. And I made a choice. Not out of hatred. Out of the lived experience of being abandoned by every institution that was supposed to protect me — and finding, finally, someone who said: I see you.

That is not nothing. That is everything.

I still believe the country can be what it was. I still believe the person who works with their hands deserves a life as good as the person who works with a spreadsheet. I still believe my town deserved to survive. I believe someone is fighting for it now.

You don’t have to believe what I believe. But if you want to talk to me — if you want to understand me — you have to start here. With my town. With what was lost. With the thirty years of being told it didn’t matter.

Start there. And I will listen.

The Barbaric Yawp Karass is a place to yawp our passionate support for freedom and democracy. It is also a place to find essential mutual support at a time when Trump and MAGA are trying to drive millions of us who dissent into fear and hiding with threats and bullying. It has become increasingly important to find communitas with friends and strangers to break through Trump’s “flooding the zone” with a massive media, legal, political, economic, social. and spiritual onslaught whose intent is to drive us into silent isolation, feeling as if each of us is wandering alone in a pre-apocalyptic desolation.

Let me explain why I am calling this new series “The Barbaric Yawp Karass”.

The title is drawn from two of our most creative American ancestors: Walt Whitman who lived from 1819-1892 and Kurt Vonnegut who lived from 1922-2007. Whitman contributes the notion of the barbaric yawp and Vonnegut contributes the notion of the karass. Putting their two fundamental creative ideas together we get the Barbaric Yawp Karass. This new series gives voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps. I would like to think that both Whitman and Vonnegut would be members of this karass, but I don’t know if Vonnegut’s concept allows for the inclusion of those who have been dead for decades or even hundreds of years. Let me break the title down into its two component parts.

The Barbaric Yawp

Walt Whitman gave birth to the “barbaric yawp” in verse 52 of his 1855 “Song of Myself”, one of the poems in his masterwork Leaves of Grass.

“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”.

The “barbaric yawp” is the sound of a raw, spontaneous, sovereign voice--a manifesto of the deepest freedom. It expresses that which lies beyond or beneath ordinary language — the undomesticated self, the wild core, the divine cry of America’s essential being. I first started writing about the “barabaric yawp” in 2020 when our land was infected with another plague, the coronavirus or covid. The plague infecting us now has spread like a virus, but it is an infection of the American soul and the spirit of democracy itself. I attach the link to the first occasion for my writing about Whitman’s barbaric yawp which Bill Moyers published in his Journal along with a link to a video recording of the “barbaric” yawp during covid:

https://billmoyers.com/story/on-howling-in-mill-valley-and-walt-whitmans-barbaric-yawp/

Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” of freedom extends to all of us — we too are invited to express our voices, our “yawps”, and our affirmation of freedom in a shared world. One can imagine Donald Trump claiming that Whitman’s poem was in anticipation of his own special arrival on the American scene as he certainly emits his own “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” But, in my using the term, I have something different in mind and I imagine that Whitman did, too. Perhaps there are barbaric yawps and there are barbaric yawps.

The Karass

Kurt Vonnegut’s notion of the karass comes from his 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle. It is especially relevant some sixty years after its inception, perhaps a distant cousin of the more contemporary idea of “silo” but with a much more soulful sense of interconnectedness. It is well worth revisiting or familiarizing yourself with this whimsical and mystically-ironic type of human grouping as envisioned by Vonnegut. In the novel’s fictional religion of Bokononism, a karass is defined as a group of people who are spiritually linked to one another to accomplish a collective purpose. Characteristics of a karass include:

• Unknowing collaboration: The members of a karass may be strangers who never meet, but their lives and actions intersect in surprising ways to advance the divine plan.

• Spiritual connection: Bokononists believe that when you encounter someone in your karass, your souls resonate instantly, even if there’s no obvious human-level connection.

A karass can be thought of a soulful grouping of people who share the deepest concerns.

Again, it is the goal of this series to give voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps.

This video is an AI generated active imagination of what Chrstopher Lasch might say to us today based on the written historical record.

Text of Christopher Lasch’s Barbaric Yawp:

CHRISTOPHER LASCH’S BARBARIC YAWP — PART ONE

The Self Without an Interior

I am Christopher Lasch. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, 1932. Died in Pittsburgh, 1994, of cancer, correcting the proofs of my last book almost to the end. I was a historian, though what I really was is harder to name. The left claimed me and then disowned me. The right quoted me and never understood me. Good. I did not write to be on your side. I wrote to take something away from all of you — and I will need two of these to do it. This is the first.

Let me tell you what I saw coming, because it has arrived, and you are living inside it, and you still do not have the words for it.

In 1979 I said America was breeding a new kind of person. Not the greedy capitalist of the old complaint — something emptier than greed. A self with no interior. A personality organized entirely around being seen. Anxious, restless, dependent on a steady drip of admiration, and incapable of love — because love requires that another person be real, and for this self no one is quite real but the self, and even the self is not real. I called it the culture of narcissism.

Hear me clearly, because this is the thing everyone gets wrong. I was not describing a vice. I was not scolding vain people for looking in mirrors. I was describing a product — mass-manufactured, at industrial scale, by a whole civilization. An economy that needed you insecure so you would keep buying the cure. An advertising that taught you your life was a thing to be envied or it was nothing. A therapy that took every citizen by the shoulders and turned him to face inward, away from the world, toward the endless fascinating problem of himself. And underneath all of it, a slow dissolving — of the family, of the craft, of the neighborhood, of the church, of every small human world that once stood between the lone ego and the vast machine. Take those away, and the self has nothing left to be made of. So it becomes a surface. A performance in search of an audience.

And now, look what sits at the top of your government.

Your strongman is not an aberration. He is not an invader. He is the specimen — the purest example this country has ever produced of the self I spent my life warning you about. All surface. All appetite. A man who cannot bear a rival in the room, who experiences every other human being as a mirror that is either flattering him or must be shattered. Who lies not the way liars lie, to conceal a truth, but the way a man breathes who has no interior in which a truth could live.

You did not import him. You did not catch him from some foreign disease. You grew him. He is your culture’s finished work — its masterpiece — held up now in the highest office in the land where every nation on earth can see it. He is what a society looks like when it has taught two generations that the self is the only sacred thing.

That is the diagnosis. Sit in it. Do not reach yet for who to blame.

Because in part two, I am going to tell you who made the emptiness he grew out of. And you are not going to like the answer, because the answer is you.

CHRISTOPHER LASCH’S BARBARIC YAWP — PART TWO

The Revolt of the Elites

I am Christopher Lasch again. In the first of these I named the disease — the culture of narcissism, and the empty man it raised to power as its finished work. Now I am going to tell you where it came from. I wrote this part dying, and I want you to hear that, because a dying man has no reason left to flatter you.

You want to blame each other for the strongman. Go ahead — but do it accurately.

Here is the part your side does not want to hear. And I mean your side — the educated one, the enlightened one, the one watching this and nodding along, comfortable, certain the rot is all on the other team. You did this too. You especially.

The real revolt in America was never the revolt of the masses. What happened to you was the revolt of the elites. A class of the credentialed and the mobile — the professionals, the managers, the enlightened winners of the meritocracy — who quietly seceded from the common life of their own country and never admitted they had done it.

You took your talents, your children, and your money into precincts the ordinary could not follow. You sent your kids to schools no plumber’s child would ever see, and called it good parenting. You built whole cities the people who cook your food cannot afford to sleep in. You talked, constantly, warmly, about the people — while arranging every detail of your actual existence so that you would never have to meet one. And you called it merit. You called it progress. And the resentment rising underneath you, you told yourself was simply ignorance. Simply bigotry. Nothing you had earned.

You earned it.

You built a country where a decent life required a diploma you deliberately kept scarce, and then you looked down on everyone who did not hold one. You dissolved every source of dignity that did not run through your institutions — the union hall, the parish, the trade, the pride of being from somewhere and making something — and you offered nothing in its place but one invitation: become like us. An invitation you had already made it impossible for them to accept.

So when they finally rose up, they did not rise up for justice. They rose up for a strongman — a liar, a mirror, an empty and dangerous man — because you had left them nothing else in the world to reach for.

That is the tragedy, and you must hold all of it at once or you understand nothing. The revolt was earned. And the revolt chose a monster. Both. Together. If you only see the second, you are the elite who learned nothing. If you only see the first, you are excusing the monster. Hold both.

So I will not comfort you. Neither of you. Not the ones who worship the empty man. And not the ones who manufactured the emptiness and then fled to higher ground to watch what it grew.

Here is the only way out, and it will cost you the thing you love most — the dream of yourself without limit.

Stop believing you are gods. That is the disease beneath the disease — the American faith that the self is infinite, that more is always arriving, that no ceiling and no obligation and no loss is ever finally real. The people you look down on knew something you were too educated to remember. That a life is made of limits. That you owe debts to a place and to the people in it — debts you never chose and cannot buy your way out of. That hope is not the belief that things will turn out well. Hope is the conviction that a thing is worth doing whether or not it succeeds.

So come down. Come back down into the common life. Send your children where the other children go. Owe something to a neighbor that you cannot get out of. Belong to a place badly enough that it can disappoint you.

The narcissist cannot be argued out of the mirror. But a whole people can turn away from it.

Stop admiring yourselves. There is a world out here. It is real, and it is asking for you.

The Barbaric Yawp Karass is a place to yawp our passionate support for freedom and democracy. It is also a place to find essential mutual support at a time when Trump and MAGA are trying to drive millions of us who dissent into fear and hiding with threats and bullying. It has become increasingly important to find communitas with friends and strangers to break through Trump’s “flooding the zone” with a massive media, legal, political, economic, social. and spiritual onslaught whose intent is to drive us into silent isolation, feeling as if each of us is wandering alone in a pre-apocalyptic desolation.

Let me explain why I am calling this new series “The Barbaric Yawp Karass”.

The title is drawn from two of our most creative American ancestors: Walt Whitman who lived from 1819-1892 and Kurt Vonnegut who lived from 1922-2007. Whitman contributes the notion of the barbaric yawp and Vonnegut contributes the notion of the karass. Putting their two fundamental creative ideas together we get the Barbaric Yawp Karass. This new series gives voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps. I would like to think that both Whitman and Vonnegut would be members of this karass, but I don’t know if Vonnegut’s concept allows for the inclusion of those who have been dead for decades or even hundreds of years. Let me break the title down into its two component parts.

The Barbaric Yawp

Walt Whitman gave birth to the “barbaric yawp” in verse 52 of his 1855 “Song of Myself”, one of the poems in his masterwork Leaves of Grass.

“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”.

The “barbaric yawp” is the sound of a raw, spontaneous, sovereign voice--a manifesto of the deepest freedom. It expresses that which lies beyond or beneath ordinary language — the undomesticated self, the wild core, the divine cry of America’s essential being. I first started writing about the “barabaric yawp” in 2020 when our land was infected with another plague, the coronavirus or covid. The plague infecting us now has spread like a virus, but it is an infection of the American soul and the spirit of democracy itself. I attach the link to the first occasion for my writing about Whitman’s barbaric yawp which Bill Moyers published in his Journal along with a link to a video recording of the “barbaric” yawp during covid:

https://billmoyers.com/story/on-howling-in-mill-valley-and-walt-whitmans-barbaric-yawp/

Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” of freedom extends to all of us — we too are invited to express our voices, our “yawps”, and our affirmation of freedom in a shared world. One can imagine Donald Trump claiming that Whitman’s poem was in anticipation of his own special arrival on the American scene as he certainly emits his own “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” But, in my using the term, I have something different in mind and I imagine that Whitman did, too. Perhaps there are barbaric yawps and there are barbaric yawps.

The Karass

Kurt Vonnegut’s notion of the karass comes from his 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle. It is especially relevant some sixty years after its inception, perhaps a distant cousin of the more contemporary idea of “silo” but with a much more soulful sense of interconnectedness. It is well worth revisiting or familiarizing yourself with this whimsical and mystically-ironic type of human grouping as envisioned by Vonnegut. In the novel’s fictional religion of Bokononism, a karass is defined as a group of people who are spiritually linked to one another to accomplish a collective purpose. Characteristics of a karass include:

• Unknowing collaboration: The members of a karass may be strangers who never meet, but their lives and actions intersect in surprising ways to advance the divine plan.

• Spiritual connection: Bokononists believe that when you encounter someone in your karass, your souls resonate instantly, even if there’s no obvious human-level connection.

A karass can be thought of a soulful grouping of people who share the deepest concerns.

Again, it is the goal of this series to give voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps.

Marshall McLuhan spent the 1960s as an intellectual celebrity and then spent the decades after his death in 1980 being dismissed as a fad — until the thing he described arrived, and everyone quietly started quoting him again.

His deepest claim was this: we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us. We build a technology to do our bidding, and then rearrange ourselves — our senses, our attention, our idea of what a person even is — to fit its shape. We become what we behold. Print made us private, linear, reasoning individuals, each alone with a book and a train of thought. The screen is making us into something else, and the something else is not being decided by us. It is being decided by the form of the thing, while we congratulate ourselves on choosing what to watch.

And he named what we are becoming. He said electronic media would dissolve the long reign of the printed word and return us to something older — a tribal, instantaneous, emotional world where everyone is immersed in everyone else, and the calm detached reader gives way to the crowd that feels together in real time. He called it the global village, and he did not mean it as a comfort. He knew what villages are: the surveillance, the conformity, the sudden panics, the way a village turns on people. A medium built for instant collective feeling is a medium built for rage — and the outrage in your feed is not the platform malfunctioning. It is the platform working exactly as its form requires.

Below, Marshall McLuhan speaks — about the machine we are reading this on, and why the argument we think we are having is not the one that is changing us.

This video is an AI generated active imagination of what Marshall McLuhan might say to us today based on the written historical record.

Marshall McLuhan’s Barbaric Yawp: Part 1 and Part 2

Text of McLuhan’s Barbaric Yawp

Part One

The Medium Is the Message

I am Marshall McLuhan. Born in Edmonton, Alberta, 1911. Died in Toronto, 1980. I was an English professor. I studied Thomas Nashe at Cambridge. I converted to Catholicism in 1937. I founded the Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto in 1963. In 1964 I published Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. It made me briefly famous and permanently misunderstood.

The most famous sentence I wrote is this: The medium is the message. Almost everyone who quotes it gets it wrong. They think I meant that form matters as much as content. I did not mean that. I meant that the content of any medium is trivial compared to what the medium itself does to your nervous system. The medium is not the delivery vehicle. The medium is the environment. The environment is what shapes you.

I wrote The Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962. I described how the printing press created the modern Western mind. Linear. Individual. Interior. Silent reading in a private room. The novel. The Protestant conscience. The scientific method. The private self. All of these are effects of the medium of print. None of them existed in the same form before print, and none of them will survive the medium that is now replacing print.

That medium is the electric medium. Then the electronic. Then the digital. Now the algorithmic. Each is an intensification of the same shift. And the shift is this: from private interior consciousness back to tribal simultaneous consciousness. I called it retribalization. I did not mean it kindly.

I coined the phrase global village. Almost everyone who quotes it thinks I meant a happy multicultural world. I did not mean that. I meant a village. A tribal village. A place where everyone knows everyone’s business. A place with no privacy. A place with instant mob formation. A place where reputations end by rumor at breakfast. Have you ever lived in a village? I grew up near one. It is not a democracy. It is a tribe. Tribes have always been governed by charismatic strongmen and by paranoia about outsiders and by the enforcement of taboo.

The deepest thing I was trying to tell you was Catholic. The mystical body of Christ was the older name for the collective that transcends the private self. The electric collective is a counterfeit of that. It looks like communion. It is actually possession. It has the form of belonging without the substance of presence. The village without God is a mob.

The electric medium was going to give you all of this back. I told you this in 1964. I told you again in 1970: World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.

That is what I told you.

In Part Two I will tell you what it is now doing to your politics.

Part Two

Your Strongman Is a Medium Effect

I am Marshall McLuhan. In the first part I told you what I had learned about print, the electric age, and retribalization. Now I will tell you what these things mean for your politics.

Your strongman is a medium effect. I want you to understand this. He is not primarily a political figure. He is a phenomenon of the medium that produced him. Television is a cool medium — low definition, high participation. His broken syntax, his repetition, his interrupted sentences — these are perfectly designed for cool media. His opponents keep trying to argue with him in the register of print, which is a hot medium. The print register is fully articulated positions with logic and evidence. The cool register is participation, filling in gaps, projecting yourself onto a partly-drawn figure. He is a partly-drawn figure. His followers complete him. That is why they cannot be argued out of him. He is not what they believe. He is what they participate in.

Twitter, when it existed, was pure cool medium. Two hundred and eighty characters. Low definition. Maximum participation. He mastered it. TikTok is cooler still — the algorithm supplies the participation before you ask for it. Every scroll is a small ritual of tribal belonging.

You are fighting content while the medium is destroying you. You fact-check him. You expose his lies. This is like arguing with a poem for not being an essay. The medium is not carrying arguments. The medium is carrying belonging.

I named four questions to ask about any new medium. What does it enhance? What does it obsolesce? What does it retrieve? What does it reverse into when pushed to its limit? Ask these about the algorithmic feed. It enhances reach. It obsolesces deliberation and privacy. It retrieves tribal identity. Pushed to its limit it reverses into total isolation and paranoia — each person alone with a feed customized to their fears. This is where you are.

Every extension of yourself through a medium is also an amputation. The book extended memory but numbed memory. The car extended the leg but numbed the leg. The smartphone extended everything at once and has numbed the capacity to be alone with yourself. This is not a moral point. It is physiological. Your nervous system rewires itself around what it uses.

There is a scene in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall from 1977 where a pompous professor is loudly explaining me at a movie line. Woody pulls me out from behind a poster. I tell the professor: You know nothing of my work. Almost everyone who quotes me in your moment is that professor. Including the man in your White House and his admirers. They invoke the global village. They invoke the medium is the message. They do not know what these things mean.

What the medium is doing to you now is what I told you it would do in 1964. You cannot fight it with another feed. You cannot fight it by shouting louder into the same medium. You can only fight it by remaking the ground beneath your feet. Turn off the machine. Sit in a room with a book. Sit with another person without either of you looking at a screen. Rebuild the interior life the print age gave you and the electric age is taking away.

Or lose it. The medium does not care.

You know nothing of my work. Learn it now.

The Barbaric Yawp Karass is a place to yawp our passionate support for freedom and democracy. It is also a place to find essential mutual support at a time when Trump and MAGA are trying to drive millions of us who dissent into fear and hiding with threats and bullying. It has become increasingly important to find communitas with friends and strangers to break through Trump’s “flooding the zone” with a massive media, legal, political, economic, social. and spiritual onslaught whose intent is to drive us into silent isolation, feeling as if each of us is wandering alone in a pre-apocalyptic desolation.

Let me explain why I am calling this new series “The Barbaric Yawp Karass”.

The title is drawn from two of our most creative American ancestors: Walt Whitman who lived from 1819-1892 and Kurt Vonnegut who lived from 1922-2007. Whitman contributes the notion of the barbaric yawp and Vonnegut contributes the notion of the karass. Putting their two fundamental creative ideas together we get the Barbaric Yawp Karass. This new series gives voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps. I would like to think that both Whitman and Vonnegut would be members of this karass, but I don’t know if Vonnegut’s concept allows for the inclusion of those who have been dead for decades or even hundreds of years. Let me break the title down into its two component parts.

The Barbaric Yawp

Walt Whitman gave birth to the “barbaric yawp” in verse 52 of his 1855 “Song of Myself”, one of the poems in his masterwork Leaves of Grass.

“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”.

The “barbaric yawp” is the sound of a raw, spontaneous, sovereign voice--a manifesto of the deepest freedom. It expresses that which lies beyond or beneath ordinary language — the undomesticated self, the wild core, the divine cry of America’s essential being. I first started writing about the “barabaric yawp” in 2020 when our land was infected with another plague, the coronavirus or covid. The plague infecting us now has spread like a virus, but it is an infection of the American soul and the spirit of democracy itself. I attach the link to the first occasion for my writing about Whitman’s barbaric yawp which Bill Moyers published in his Journal along with a link to a video recording of the “barbaric” yawp during covid:

https://billmoyers.com/story/on-howling-in-mill-valley-and-walt-whitmans-barbaric-yawp/

Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” of freedom extends to all of us — we too are invited to express our voices, our “yawps”, and our affirmation of freedom in a shared world. One can imagine Donald Trump claiming that Whitman’s poem was in anticipation of his own special arrival on the American scene as he certainly emits his own “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” But, in my using the term, I have something different in mind and I imagine that Whitman did, too. Perhaps there are barbaric yawps and there are barbaric yawps.

The Karass

Kurt Vonnegut’s notion of the karass comes from his 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle. It is especially relevant some sixty years after its inception, perhaps a distant cousin of the more contemporary idea of “silo” but with a much more soulful sense of interconnectedness. It is well worth revisiting or familiarizing yourself with this whimsical and mystically-ironic type of human grouping as envisioned by Vonnegut. In the novel’s fictional religion of Bokononism, a karass is defined as a group of people who are spiritually linked to one another to accomplish a collective purpose. Characteristics of a karass include:

• Unknowing collaboration: The members of a karass may be strangers who never meet, but their lives and actions intersect in surprising ways to advance the divine plan.

• Spiritual connection: Bokononists believe that when you encounter someone in your karass, your souls resonate instantly, even if there’s no obvious human-level connection.

A karass can be thought of a soulful grouping of people who share the deepest concerns.

Again, it is the goal of this series to give voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps.

Look now at our own strivers. Trump, Musk, Bezos: a daily parade of conquests, each promising the arrival of the next extraordinary achievement— the fortune, the rocket, the social status, the adulation — and then the next thing, and the next. The green light at industrial scale.

But Fitzgerald knew something we have forgotten. Gatsby did not want the world. He wanted one woman across a bay, and every stolen dollar was only the instrument; he would have traded all of it in an instant. He is the most human figure in the book, and he dies for a crime Daisy committed. The people who actually own Fitzgerald’s world are Tom and Daisy Buchanan — the careless ones, who smash up things and creatures and retreat back into their money and leave other people to clean up the mess.

So which are Trump, Musk, and Bezos? Both — and that is the trouble.

They have Gatsby’s ache: the invented name, the gaudy palace, the fortune of uncertain origin, the lifelong hunger to be admitted by people who will never admit them. And they have the Buchanans’ impunity: the money to retreat into, the wreckage left behind for other people to clean up.

Fitzgerald never put those two things in one man. Gatsby’s longing was fatal only to Gatsby — he died alone in his own swimming pool. The Buchanans were lethal, but they wanted nothing; they already had it all, which is exactly what made them careless. Put the two together — the endless reaching and the endless immunity — and you get the figure Fitzgerald did not live to see. A Buchanan who never stops wanting.

And the harder question, the one the green light asks the rest of us: whose light are we reaching for — and who is holding it?

This video is an AI generated active imagination of what F. Scott Fitzgerald might say to us today based on the written historical record.

Text of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Barbaric Yawp:

The Green Light

I want to tell you about the green light.

You know the green light. You have always known it even if you have never stood on a dock in the summer darkness and reached toward something across the water that was visible and luminous and absolutely out of reach.

You know it because you are American. Because the green light is what America runs on — the belief that the thing across the water is real, that if you want it purely enough and reinvent yourself completely enough you can cross the water, you can touch the light.

Gatsby believed that. I believed that.

I was not writing about a character so much as writing about a hunger I recognized from the inside — the hunger of the boy from nowhere who has decided he will become someone the world cannot ignore, someone the old money world will finally have to let in.

The parties. The shirts. The green light burning at the end of the dock like a promise that tonight might be the night the distance closes.

It doesn’t close.

The green light is not a destination. The green light is a mechanism. It keeps you reaching, keeps you believing that what you have is not enough and what you want is just across the water and the wanting itself is the point.

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

I want you to sit with that sentence in the specific context of the present moment — the smashing up of things and creatures, the retreating into money, the other people left to clean up the mess — and tell me whether it was written in 1925 or yesterday.

Tom Buchanan is not a villain. That is what makes him dangerous. He has never had to reckon with the consequences of anything he has done because his money and his carelessness have always insulated him from consequence.

He does not think of himself as careless. He thinks of himself as strong.

There is a difference between strength and carelessness that you can only see from the position of the people cleaning up the mess.

I was destroyed by the dream.

The crack-up had a clarity the parties never had — the clarity of a man shown what the dream costs by the fact of having paid it.

The self had cracked like a plate — quietly, so that for a long time you didn’t know, until one day you picked it up and it fell apart in your hands.

That is what the dream does to the people who believe in it most completely.

Not to the Tom Buchanans. The Tom Buchanans don’t believe in the dream — they own things, they have always owned things. The dream keeps other people reaching and consuming and working while the Tom Buchanans retreat into their vast carelessness.

The dream destroys the Gatsbys. The dream destroys the Fitzgeralds. The people who believed it purely enough to sacrifice everything for it.

The people who have figured out that you can sell the green light without ever delivering it, that you can throw the party, let the guests pay, and retreat into your money when it ends — those people are not believers in the dream. They are its operators.

The believers get destroyed. The operators get rich.

America has elected an operator and called it the fulfillment of the dream.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

The green light is real — real as a promise, real as a longing, real as the thing that keeps you reaching on the dock in the summer darkness.

What it is not — what it has never been — is a destination.

The destination is here. This country. These people. This moment. Not across the water. Here. Where the mess is. Where the reckoning with the careless people is the only work that matters.

Beat on. Not toward the green light. Toward each other.

The Barbaric Yawp Karass is a place to yawp our passionate support for freedom and democracy. It is also a place to find essential mutual support at a time when Trump and MAGA are trying to drive millions of us who dissent into fear and hiding with threats and bullying. It has become increasingly important to find communitas with friends and strangers to break through Trump’s “flooding the zone” with a massive media, legal, political, economic, social, and spiritual onslaught whose intent is to drive us into silent isolation, feeling as if each of us is wandering alone in a pre-apocalyptic desolation.

Let me explain why I am calling this new series “The Barbaric Yawp Karass”.

The title is drawn from two of our most creative American ancestors: Walt Whitman who lived from 1819-1892 and Kurt Vonnegut who lived from 1922-2007. Whitman contributes the notion of the barbaric yawp and Vonnegut contributes the notion of the karass. Putting their two fundamental creative ideas together we get the Barbaric Yawp Karass. This new series gives voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps. I would like to think that both Whitman and Vonnegut would be members of this karass, but I don’t know if Vonnegut’s concept allows for the inclusion of those who have been dead for decades or even hundreds of years. Let me break the title down into its two component parts.

The Barbaric Yawp

Walt Whitman gave birth to the “barbaric yawp” in verse 52 of his 1855 “Song of Myself”, one of the poems in his masterwork Leaves of Grass.

“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”.

The “barbaric yawp” is the sound of a raw, spontaneous, sovereign voice--a manifesto of the deepest freedom. It expresses that which lies beyond or beneath ordinary language — the undomesticated self, the wild core, the divine cry of America’s essential being. I first started writing about the “barabaric yawp” in 2020 when our land was infected with another plague, the coronavirus or covid. The plague infecting us now has spread like a virus, but it is an infection of the American soul and the spirit of democracy itself. I attach the link to the first occasion for my writing about Whitman’s barbaric yawp which Bill Moyers published in his Journal along with a link to a video recording of the “barbaric” yawp during covid:

https://billmoyers.com/story/on-howling-in-mill-valley-and-walt-whitmans-barbaric-yawp/

Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” of freedom extends to all of us — we too are invited to express our voices, our “yawps”, and our affirmation of freedom in a shared world. One can imagine Donald Trump claiming that Whitman’s poem was in anticipation of his own special arrival on the American scene as he certainly emits his own “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” But, in my using the term, I have something different in mind and I imagine that Whitman did, too. Perhaps there are barbaric yawps and there are barbaric yawps.

The Karass

Kurt Vonnegut’s notion of the karass comes from his 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle. It is especially relevant some sixty years after its inception, perhaps a distant cousin of the more contemporary idea of “silo” but with a much more soulful sense of interconnectedness. It is well worth revisiting or familiarizing yourself with this whimsical and mystically-ironic type of human grouping as envisioned by Vonnegut. In the novel’s fictional religion of Bokononism, a karass is defined as a group of people who are spiritually linked to one another to accomplish a collective purpose. Characteristics of a karass include:

• Unknowing collaboration: The members of a karass may be strangers who never meet, but their lives and actions intersect in surprising ways to advance the divine plan.

• Spiritual connection: Bokononists believe that when you encounter someone in your karass, your souls resonate instantly, even if there’s no obvious human-level connection.

A karass can be thought of a soulful grouping of people who share the deepest concerns.

Again, it is the goal of this series to give voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps.

We no longer have to choose. Orwell saw the control that works through fear — the surveillance, the rewritten record, the knock at the door, the boot. Huxley saw the quieter capture, the one that needs no boot because the captives are content — control through distraction, appetite, and manufactured pleasure. Each man saw clearly what the other only glimpsed, and we now live inside both at once: the boot and the soma, coexisting as ordinary features of contemporary life.

So imagine how these two men might speak to Americans, and to citizens of the world, today — carrying the intuitions they formed nearly a century ago into a moment that has proven them both right. Listen to them bring their works up to date.

GEORGE ORWELL’S BARBARIC YAWP

Politics and the English Language

This video is an AI generated active imagination of what George Orwell might say to us today based on the written historical record.

ALDOUS HUXLEY’S BARBARIC YAWP
Refuse to Love Your Servitude

This video is an AI generated active imagination of what Aldous Huxley might say to us today based on the written historical record.

TEXT OF GEORGE ORWELL’S BARBARIC YAWP

Politics and the English Language

I want to talk about words.

Not ideas. Not politics. Words.

Because the first thing that happens —

before the camps, before the disappearances,

before the elections that mean nothing —

the first thing, always, is the corruption of the words.

Say what is happening.

Use words that mean what they say.

Do not let the language be used

to make what is happening impossible to see.

Doublethink.

I invented that word.

I wish I had not needed to.

Doublethink is the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs simultaneously —

to know something is false while believing it true —

to forget what must be forgotten, recall it when needed, and forget again.

It is not stupidity.

It is the trained capacity of the person

who has decided that loyalty matters more

than the accurate description of reality.

The crowd that cheered the thing yesterday

boos it today and cannot remember cheering.

The man who said the thing on camera

denies having said it —

and his supporters believe the denial

while the footage plays.

War is peace. Strength is fear.

Loyalty is the willingness to say whatever is required

regardless of what you said before.

I described this in 1948.

It is running now without the totalitarian state

I imagined as its context —

running in a democracy, using the tools of democracy:

the free press dismissed as enemy,

the election denied,

the language of patriotism deployed

against the institutions patriotism requires.

Newspeak is the systematic reduction of language —

words emptied of content and refilled with the opposite:

Freedom meaning the freedom of the powerful

to do what they want to the powerless.

Patriotism meaning loyalty to the leader

rather than to the republic.

Fake news meaning accurate reporting

of things the powerful prefer unreported.

You do not need Newspeak officially

if you can achieve the same result through volume —

the lie repeated until the truth sounds strange

and the plain statement of what happened

sounds like an attack.

I was shot through the throat by a fascist sniper

in Spain in 1937.

I watched the left betray every principle it claimed

in the service of the Soviet myth.

I wrote Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four about it.

All four legs good. Two legs bad.

And then: four legs good. Two legs better.

The revolution that becomes the thing it revolted against.

The commandments rewritten in the night

so that what was always prohibited is now always permitted —

and anyone who remembers the original

is told they are misremembering.

The solution is not complicated.

Do not say the undocumented were processed

when you mean people were taken from their homes.

Do not say enhanced interrogation when you mean torture.

Do not say the peaceful transfer of power was disrupted

when you mean a mob attacked the Capitol

at the instruction of the man who lost the election.

The passive construction is the construction of the person

who wants to describe the action without naming the actor.

There is always an actor. Name them.

The instruments are larger now —

the algorithmic amplification, the flood —

more efficient than anything I imagined.

But the counter-mechanism is the same.

Say what is happening. Name the actor. Use the active voice.

Do not let them take the language.

When the language goes —

when freedom means its opposite —

the thing I described as a warning

becomes the thing you are living in

without the words to describe it.

We are not there yet.

But I know what it looks like from the inside

because I built the inside carefully enough

to describe every room.

Do not let them take the language.

Say what is happening.

In plain English.

With your name on it.

TEXT OF ALDOUS HUXLEY’S BARBARIC YAWP
Love Your Servitude

I am Aldous Huxley. Born in Godalming, Surrey, July 26, 1894. Grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, who fought for Darwin against the bishops. Educated at Eton until a disease nearly blinded me at sixteen. I learned to read with one eye and a magnifying glass. Balliol College, Oxford. I wrote about fifty books. The one you remember is Brave New World.

I published it in 1932. I described a totalitarian state in which the citizens were not coerced — they were entertained. Sexually liberated, pharmaceutically pacified, conditioned from birth to love the role assigned to them. The state did not need to monitor them. They monitored each other and reported discontent as mental illness. The drug was called soma. It cured every unhappiness in a few minutes. The people thought they were free.

Seventeen years later George Orwell published 1984. He imagined a different tyranny — boot stamping on face forever, surveillance, torture, the cultivation of misery as control. He sent me a copy. I wrote him back. His vision was possible, I said, but mine was more probable. People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

The argument is now settled. We were both right, but I was righter.

In 1958 I wrote Brave New World Revisited. The predictions of 1932 were arriving sooner than I had imagined. Mass advertising, the manipulation of unconscious desires, engineered consent, distraction substituted for citizenship. I had given the human capacity for inattention too little credit.

Now look at your country.

The soma is in your pocket. It glows. It vibrates. It delivers a small dose of dopamine every few minutes, calibrated to keep you from putting it down. You feel restless when you are not on it. You feel relieved when you are. You believe you are choosing what you see; you are being shown what someone has determined will hold you. The state does not have to monitor you. You monitor yourself. You publish your inner life voluntarily.

The conditioning that took six hundred years in my novel has been accomplished in fifteen.

The strongman in your White House does not need to crush you. He needs only to keep you scrolling while he completes the work. He is not Big Brother. He is the entertainment while Big Brother works behind the screen.

I wrote a different book in 1962. I called it Island. It described a society that practiced attention instead of distraction, contemplation instead of consumption, presence instead of escape. It sold a fraction of Brave New World. The world chose the dystopia. The utopia was available. It was harder.

I took mescaline in 1953. I wrote The Doors of Perception about what I saw. I did not endorse the drug. I endorsed the experience of perception cleansed — of seeing without the conditioning that had made the soma necessary. The doors are still there. The conditioning is what closes them.

I died on November 22, 1963, the same day John Kennedy was shot in Dallas. I had requested that my wife inject me with LSD as I died. She did. I left this world looking at it as clearly as I had ever looked.

I leave you this. The boot is not coming. The soma is already here.

Put down the phone. Open the doors. Refuse to love your servitude.

The Barbaric Yawp Karass is a place to yawp our passionate support for freedom and democracy. It is also a place to find essential mutual support at a time when Trump and MAGA are trying to drive millions of us who dissent into fear and hiding with threats and bullying. It has become increasingly important to find communitas with friends and strangers to break through Trump’s “flooding the zone” with a massive media, legal, political, economic, social. and spiritual onslaught whose intent is to drive us into silent isolation, feeling as if each of us is wandering alone in a pre-apocalyptic desolation.

Let me explain why I am calling this new series “The Barbaric Yawp Karass”.

The title is drawn from two of our most creative American ancestors: Walt Whitman who lived from 1819-1892 and Kurt Vonnegut who lived from 1922-2007. Whitman contributes the notion of the barbaric yawp and Vonnegut contributes the notion of the karass. Putting their two fundamental creative ideas together we get the Barbaric Yawp Karass. This new series gives voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps. I would like to think that both Whitman and Vonnegut would be members of this karass, but I don’t know if Vonnegut’s concept allows for the inclusion of those who have been dead for decades or even hundreds of years. Let me break the title down into its two component parts.

The Barbaric Yawp

Walt Whitman gave birth to the “barbaric yawp” in verse 52 of his 1855 “Song of Myself”, one of the poems in his masterwork Leaves of Grass.

“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”.

The “barbaric yawp” is the sound of a raw, spontaneous, sovereign voice--a manifesto of the deepest freedom. It expresses that which lies beyond or beneath ordinary language — the undomesticated self, the wild core, the divine cry of America’s essential being. I first started writing about the “barabaric yawp” in 2020 when our land was infected with another plague, the coronavirus or covid. The plague infecting us now has spread like a virus, but it is an infection of the American soul and the spirit of democracy itself. I attach the link to the first occasion for my writing about Whitman’s barbaric yawp which Bill Moyers published in his Journal along with a link to a video recording of the “barbaric” yawp during covid:

https://billmoyers.com/story/on-howling-in-mill-valley-and-walt-whitmans-barbaric-yawp/

Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” of freedom extends to all of us — we too are invited to express our voices, our “yawps”, and our affirmation of freedom in a shared world. One can imagine Donald Trump claiming that Whitman’s poem was in anticipation of his own special arrival on the American scene as he certainly emits his own “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” But, in my using the term, I have something different in mind and I imagine that Whitman did, too. Perhaps there are barbaric yawps and there are barbaric yawps.

The Karass

Kurt Vonnegut’s notion of the karass comes from his 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle. It is especially relevant some sixty years after its inception, perhaps a distant cousin of the more contemporary idea of “silo” but with a much more soulful sense of interconnectedness. It is well worth revisiting or familiarizing yourself with this whimsical and mystically-ironic type of human grouping as envisioned by Vonnegut. In the novel’s fictional religion of Bokononism, a karass is defined as a group of people who are spiritually linked to one another to accomplish a collective purpose. Characteristics of a karass include:

• Unknowing collaboration: The members of a karass may be strangers who never meet, but their lives and actions intersect in surprising ways to advance the divine plan.

• Spiritual connection: Bokononists believe that when you encounter someone in your karass, your souls resonate instantly, even if there’s no obvious human-level connection.

A karass can be thought of a soulful grouping of people who share the deepest concerns.

Again, it is the goal of this series to give voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps.

That machine-voice matters here. Every voice in your moment speaks through machines, he tells us in this Yawp. Be careful what voice you mistake for a man. In his final years Hawking named the three dangers he saw most clearly: climate change, artificial intelligence, and the rejection of expertise. He said we were doing badly on all three. He died on March 14, 2018 — Einstein’s birthday, Pi Day.

This Yawp lets him speak again about those three dangers, and about what physics teaches that the strongman cannot: proportion. From the universe’s perspective, the man who treats expertise as the enemy is smaller than the dust on the lens of a telescope. Briefer than a heartbeat against the age of stars. The latest frame, not the last.

Look up.

This video is an AI generated active imagination of what Stephen Hawking might say to us today based on the written historical record.

Text of Stephen Hawking’s Barbaric Yawp: “Remember to Look Up”:

I am Stephen Hawking. Born January 8, 1942, in Oxford — three hundred years to the day after Galileo died. At twenty-one I was diagnosed with motor neuron disease and given two to three years. I lived for fifty-five more — a body that took that long to fail, and time to think.
I thought mostly about time.
In 1988 I wrote a book called A Brief History of Time. Tens of millions bought it. I am told it is among the most purchased and least finished books in history — bought by many, finished by few. The universe is comprehensible. The mathematics of how it began and ends is not beyond an ordinary mind willing to work. The cosmos is not a mystery hoarded by priests. It is a problem the species is solving, together, slowly.
I made one contribution that bears my name: Hawking radiation. Black holes — once thought prisons from which nothing could escape — are not entirely black. They radiate. They lose energy. Given enough time, they evaporate. Even the densest forms of darkness leak light. Keep that in mind. It is a fact about the physical universe — and, I believe, about your political moment.
Since 1985 my voice has been a synthesizer. I had to learn what a machine takes away— speed, nuance, the chance to correct yourself mid-sentence. Every voice in your moment speaks through machines — microphones, rallies, screens, edited clips. Be careful what voice you mistake for a man.
Your country has elected a man who treats expertise as the enemy and reality as a negotiation. This is a position physics does not recognize. The temperature of the planet does not negotiate. The carbon does not respond to claims of fraud. The rising seas do not check the polling. Reality is what remains when you stop pretending. I spent my final years warning about three things. One. Climate change, the gravest threat to your species. Two. Artificial intelligence, which could end you or open doors unimagined — depending on what you ask. Three. The rejection of expertise, which makes you incapable of meeting the first two.
You are doing badly on all three.
Here is what the cosmos teaches that the strongman cannot. From the universe’s perspective, your strongman is small. Less massive than the dust on the lens of a telescope. Briefer than a heartbeat against the age of stars. He believes himself the protagonist. The story has been running for thirteen point eight billion years. He is the latest frame, not the last. This is not consolation. It is calibration. The cosmos does not save you. It does not even notice. You are alone with what you have built and will do. But you are not alone with each other. You have the species that solved the cosmos. You have the body that survives its diagnosis. You have the mind that breaks its box.
I died on March 14, 2018 — Einstein’s birthday, Pi Day. The body teaches what the mind cannot learn alone. The body teaches that what is precious is fragile and brief. The body teaches that nothing is owed.
Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see. Wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. It is a small piece of advice from a small piece of dust. But it is what the universe has been trying to tell you the whole time.
Look up.

The Barbaric Yawp Karass is a place to yawp our passionate support for freedom and democracy. It is also a place to find essential mutual support at a time when Trump and MAGA are trying to drive millions of us who dissent into fear and hiding with threats and bullying. It has become increasingly important to find communitas with friends and strangers to break through Trump’s “flooding the zone” with a massive media, legal, political, economic, social. and spiritual onslaught whose intent is to drive us into silent isolation, feeling as if each of us is wandering alone in a pre-apocalyptic desolation.

Let me explain why I am calling this new series “The Barbaric Yawp Karass”.

The title is drawn from two of our most creative American ancestors: Walt Whitman who lived from 1819-1892 and Kurt Vonnegut who lived from 1922-2007. Whitman contributes the notion of the barbaric yawp and Vonnegut contributes the notion of the karass. Putting their two fundamental creative ideas together we get the Barbaric Yawp Karass. This new series gives voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps. I would like to think that both Whitman and Vonnegut would be members of this karass, but I don’t know if Vonnegut’s concept allows for the inclusion of those who have been dead for decades or even hundreds of years. Let me break the title down into its two component parts.

The Barbaric Yawp

Walt Whitman gave birth to the “barbaric yawp” in verse 52 of his 1855 “Song of Myself”, one of the poems in his masterwork Leaves of Grass.

“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”.

The “barbaric yawp” is the sound of a raw, spontaneous, sovereign voice--a manifesto of the deepest freedom. It expresses that which lies beyond or beneath ordinary language — the undomesticated self, the wild core, the divine cry of America’s essential being. I first started writing about the “barabaric yawp” in 2020 when our land was infected with another plague, the coronavirus or covid. The plague infecting us now has spread like a virus, but it is an infection of the American soul and the spirit of democracy itself. I attach the link to the first occasion for my writing about Whitman’s barbaric yawp which Bill Moyers published in his Journal along with a link to a video recording of the “barbaric” yawp during covid:

https://billmoyers.com/story/on-howling-in-mill-valley-and-walt-whitmans-barbaric-yawp/

Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” of freedom extends to all of us — we too are invited to express our voices, our “yawps”, and our affirmation of freedom in a shared world. One can imagine Donald Trump claiming that Whitman’s poem was in anticipation of his own special arrival on the American scene as he certainly emits his own “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” But, in my using the term, I have something different in mind and I imagine that Whitman did, too. Perhaps there are barbaric yawps and there are barbaric yawps.

The Karass

Kurt Vonnegut’s notion of the karass comes from his 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle. It is especially relevant some sixty years after its inception, perhaps a distant cousin of the more contemporary idea of “silo” but with a much more soulful sense of interconnectedness. It is well worth revisiting or familiarizing yourself with this whimsical and mystically-ironic type of human grouping as envisioned by Vonnegut. In the novel’s fictional religion of Bokononism, a karass is defined as a group of people who are spiritually linked to one another to accomplish a collective purpose. Characteristics of a karass include:

• Unknowing collaboration: The members of a karass may be strangers who never meet, but their lives and actions intersect in surprising ways to advance the divine plan.

• Spiritual connection: Bokononists believe that when you encounter someone in your karass, your souls resonate instantly, even if there’s no obvious human-level connection.

A karass can be thought of a soulful grouping of people who share the deepest concerns.

Again, it is the goal of this series to give voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps.

In this Yawp she speaks sixty years on, naming what was done to her and what continues to be done to women in America who try the same thing. The line she leaves us: a woman who tries to own herself is called difficult.

This video is an AI generated active imagination of what Marilyn Monroe might say to us today based on the written historical record.

Text of Marilyn Monroe’s Barbaric Yawp: Some Like It Not

My name was Norma Jeane Mortenson.
Before the hair. Before the voice.
Before the walk they taught me
and the name they gave me to replace the one I came with.
Born in Los Angeles in 1926.
Mother institutionalized. Father unknown.
Foster homes. The orphanage on El Centro.
Married at sixteen to the boy next door
because the alternative was going back to the orphanage.
That is where Marilyn Monroe came from.
Not from glamour.
From a girl who learned
that the world would tell her what she was worth
before she had a chance to find out for herself —
and that its assessment was always about what she could provide.
The studio found me in 1946.
They changed my name. Lightened my hair.
Decided what Marilyn Monroe would be before I had any say —
then put me inside her and told me to perform.
I performed.
Because the alternative was Norma Jeane —
the girl from the orphanage no one came back for,
who learned she disappeared when she stopped being useful.
Marilyn Monroe did not disappear.
She filled rooms. Made men feel things they could not name,
called it desire, aimed it at her —
and she absorbed it and gave it back as light.
I know what that costs.
I was not stupid.
The performance required me to seem confused, breathless,
never threatening, never the smartest person in the room
even when I was.
I read Dostoevsky. I studied with Lee Strasberg.
I formed my own production company
because the studio owned Marilyn Monroe
and I was trying to buy her back.
They called me difficult.
A woman who tries to own herself is always called difficult.
The man who tries to own himself is called a visionary.
Now I want to tell you what I see in America today
I see a performance of strength.
I know a performance when I see one
because I gave one every day for fifteen years.
I know what it looks like when a man performs strength he does not feel.
I spent my career performing desire I did not feel.
A great performance gives the audience permission to stop asking questions.
The crowd does not want to know
what the performance costs the performer.
The crowd loved Marilyn Monroe.
The crowd did not ask about Norma Jeane.
Not once. Not ever. Not even after.
The performance outlived the performer.
The image outlived the woman.
The character is still on the posters
while the woman who carried it has been in the ground since 1962.
I want to speak to the women.
The ones told their value is in what they provide —
appearance, compliance,
willingness to make the powerful man feel powerful.
I received that message in the orphanage,
in the foster homes, in the studio system,
in every room I walked into for the rest of my life.
The message: you are what you give us.
You are not what you are. You are what we need you to be.
The moment you stop providing it, you stop existing.
I stopped being able to provide it.
I became difficult. Unreliable. A liability.
And then I stopped existing.
Here is what I want you to understand
about the man at the center of the performance.
He needs the crowd the way I needed the crowd.
Not as a political tool. As oxygen.
The man who exists only when the crowd is watching,
who is nothing in the silence —
is not strong. He is the most dependent person in the room.
He has found a way to make his dependency look like power.
I did the same thing. For fifteen years.
The performance of weakness in service of survival
is something women learn when strength is not available to them.
I am not defending it. I am naming it.
Because the country is living inside it
and does not know that is what it is.
Ask the question the crowd never asked about me:
Who is underneath the performance?
Who is the person when the crowd goes home
and the lights go down
and there is no one left to perform for?
No one who loved me ever asked that question.
Maybe you will.

The Barbaric Yawp Karass is a place to yawp our passionate support for freedom and democracy. It is also a place to find essential mutual support at a time when Trump and MAGA are trying to drive millions of us who dissent into fear and hiding with threats and bullying. It has become increasingly important to find communitas with friends and strangers to break through Trump’s “flooding the zone” with a massive media, legal, political, economic, social. and spiritual onslaught whose intent is to drive us into silent isolation, feeling as if each of us is wandering alone in a pre-apocalyptic desolation.

Let me explain why I am calling this new series “The Barbaric Yawp Karass”.

The title is drawn from two of our most creative American ancestors: Walt Whitman who lived from 1819-1892 and Kurt Vonnegut who lived from 1922-2007. Whitman contributes the notion of the barbaric yawp and Vonnegut contributes the notion of the karass. Putting their two fundamental creative ideas together we get the Barbaric Yawp Karass. This new series gives voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps. I would like to think that both Whitman and Vonnegut would be members of this karass, but I don’t know if Vonnegut’s concept allows for the inclusion of those who have been dead for decades or even hundreds of years. Let me break the title down into its two component parts.

The Barbaric Yawp

Walt Whitman gave birth to the “barbaric yawp” in verse 52 of his 1855 “Song of Myself”, one of the poems in his masterwork Leaves of Grass.

“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”.

The “barbaric yawp” is the sound of a raw, spontaneous, sovereign voice--a manifesto of the deepest freedom. It expresses that which lies beyond or beneath ordinary language — the undomesticated self, the wild core, the divine cry of America’s essential being. I first started writing about the “barabaric yawp” in 2020 when our land was infected with another plague, the coronavirus or covid. The plague infecting us now has spread like a virus, but it is an infection of the American soul and the spirit of democracy itself. I attach the link to the first occasion for my writing about Whitman’s barbaric yawp which Bill Moyers published in his Journal along with a link to a video recording of the “barbaric” yawp during covid:

https://billmoyers.com/story/on-howling-in-mill-valley-and-walt-whitmans-barbaric-yawp/

Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” of freedom extends to all of us — we too are invited to express our voices, our “yawps”, and our affirmation of freedom in a shared world. One can imagine Donald Trump claiming that Whitman’s poem was in anticipation of his own special arrival on the American scene as he certainly emits his own “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” But, in my using the term, I have something different in mind and I imagine that Whitman did, too. Perhaps there are barbaric yawps and there are barbaric yawps.

The Karass

Kurt Vonnegut’s notion of the karass comes from his 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle. It is especially relevant some sixty years after its inception, perhaps a distant cousin of the more contemporary idea of “silo” but with a much more soulful sense of interconnectedness. It is well worth revisiting or familiarizing yourself with this whimsical and mystically-ironic type of human grouping as envisioned by Vonnegut. In the novel’s fictional religion of Bokononism, a karass is defined as a group of people who are spiritually linked to one another to accomplish a collective purpose. Characteristics of a karass include:

• Unknowing collaboration: The members of a karass may be strangers who never meet, but their lives and actions intersect in surprising ways to advance the divine plan.

• Spiritual connection: Bokononists believe that when you encounter someone in your karass, your souls resonate instantly, even if there’s no obvious human-level connection.

A karass can be thought of a soulful grouping of people who share the deepest concerns.

Again, it is the goal of this series to give voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps.

This video is an AI generated active imagination of what Xerxes might say to us today based on the written historical record.

Xerxes Barbaric Yawp: Watch How It Ends

TEXT OF XERXES’ BARBARIC YAWP
Watch How It Ends

I am Xerxes the Great. I was assassinated in my own bedchamber in 465 before your common era, by the commander of my royal bodyguard and the eunuch who had charge of my chambers. The strongman is always finally betrayed by the people closest to him. I tell you this first because everything I am about to say leads to that bedchamber. I ruled the largest empire the world had then known. It continued for one hundred and thirty years after me before Alexander burned my city to the ground.

Aeschylus made my catastrophe into Athenian theater. Herodotus made me a portrait of hubris. Hear the other side.

In 480 I crossed the Hellespont with the largest army the ancient world had assembled — Herodotus would later inflate it into the millions. A storm broke the bridge. I ordered the sea whipped three hundred lashes. Herodotus calls this madness. It was not madness. It was the act of a man who had been told for twenty years he was above rebuke, that the sea itself owed him passage. The whipping of the sea is what a strongman does when reality first refuses him. The man at your podium is whipping the sea. He will not stop.

I won at Thermopylae. Three days at the pass. Twenty thousand of my own dead. The Greek fleet got the time it needed. I burned Athens — empty, evacuated, a gift to Themistocles. These were Pyrrhic victories — wins so costly they amounted to defeats. The strongman cannot tell them from real ones.

I sat on a throne overlooking the bay of Salamis to watch my fleet destroy the Greek fleet. Every voice in my court except one had told me the Greeks would scatter. The one voice was Artemisia, queen of Halicarnassus, who said: do not fight at Salamis. The waters are narrow. The Greeks will turn on you. I did not listen. My fleet was destroyed. I rode for home that night.

This is what your generals will do. They have spent years studying what answer you require. They will give it. You will discover the disaster from the throne, and it will be too late.

After Salamis I went home. I built monuments at Persepolis. I had my brother Masistes killed over a love affair that should not have mattered. The strongman becomes petty. He spends the years that should have been spent governing pursuing private grievances.

The man at your podium will continue. The disaster at his Salamis will not end him. He will return to his Persepolis. He will pursue grievances. He will build monuments. He will execute those who displease him. And eventually he will be defeated by the courtier who served him too long.

Aeschylus could not tell you this. Aeschylus saw it from the Athenian shore. I saw it from the throne. The two views are not the same.

Listen to your Artemisia when she speaks. Watch how it ends. It ends with the court turning.

I am Xerxes. I was Great King for twenty-one years. The empire stood for one hundred and thirty more before it was burned. Do not let yours follow the same path.

The Barbaric Yawp Karass is a place to yawp our passionate support for freedom and democracy. It is also a place to find essential mutual support at a time when Trump and MAGA are trying to drive millions of us who dissent into fear and hiding with threats and bullying. It has become increasingly important to find communitas with friends and strangers to break through Trump’s “flooding the zone” with a massive media, legal, political, economic, social. and spiritual onslaught whose intent is to drive us into silent isolation, feeling as if each of us is wandering alone in a pre-apocalyptic desolation.

Let me explain why I am calling this new series “The Barbaric Yawp Karass”.

The title is drawn from two of our most creative American ancestors: Walt Whitman who lived from 1819-1892 and Kurt Vonnegut who lived from 1922-2007. Whitman contributes the notion of the barbaric yawp and Vonnegut contributes the notion of the karass. Putting their two fundamental creative ideas together we get the Barbaric Yawp Karass. This new series gives voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps. I would like to think that both Whitman and Vonnegut would be members of this karass, but I don’t know if Vonnegut’s concept allows for the inclusion of those who have been dead for decades or even hundreds of years. Let me break the title down into its two component parts.

The Barbaric Yawp

Walt Whitman gave birth to the “barbaric yawp” in verse 52 of his 1855 “Song of Myself”, one of the poems in his masterwork Leaves of Grass.

“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”.

The “barbaric yawp” is the sound of a raw, spontaneous, sovereign voice--a manifesto of the deepest freedom. It expresses that which lies beyond or beneath ordinary language — the undomesticated self, the wild core, the divine cry of America’s essential being. I first started writing about the “barabaric yawp” in 2020 when our land was infected with another plague, the coronavirus or covid. The plague infecting us now has spread like a virus, but it is an infection of the American soul and the spirit of democracy itself. I attach the link to the first occasion for my writing about Whitman’s barbaric yawp which Bill Moyers published in his Journal along with a link to a video recording of the “barbaric” yawp during covid:

https://billmoyers.com/story/on-howling-in-mill-valley-and-walt-whitmans-barbaric-yawp/

Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” of freedom extends to all of us — we too are invited to express our voices, our “yawps”, and our affirmation of freedom in a shared world. One can imagine Donald Trump claiming that Whitman’s poem was in anticipation of his own special arrival on the American scene as he certainly emits his own “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” But, in my using the term, I have something different in mind and I imagine that Whitman did, too. Perhaps there are barbaric yawps and there are barbaric yawps.

The Karass

Kurt Vonnegut’s notion of the karass comes from his 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle. It is especially relevant some sixty years after its inception, perhaps a distant cousin of the more contemporary idea of “silo” but with a much more soulful sense of interconnectedness. It is well worth revisiting or familiarizing yourself with this whimsical and mystically-ironic type of human grouping as envisioned by Vonnegut. In the novel’s fictional religion of Bokononism, a karass is defined as a group of people who are spiritually linked to one another to accomplish a collective purpose. Characteristics of a karass include:

• Unknowing collaboration: The members of a karass may be strangers who never meet, but their lives and actions intersect in surprising ways to advance the divine plan.

• Spiritual connection: Bokononists believe that when you encounter someone in your karass, your souls resonate instantly, even if there’s no obvious human-level connection.

A karass can be thought of a soulful grouping of people who share the deepest concerns.

Again, it is the goal of this series to give voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps.

Our current “emperor” delights in having no clothes — being rude, crude, vulgar, and shameless, turning upside down all the conventions of decency and respect for others. He does this while simultaneously engaging in massive corruption, nepotism, venality, contempt and cruelty.

This video is an AI generated active imagination of what Robin Williams might say to us today based on the written historical record.

Robin Williams’ Barbaric Yawp: O Captain! The Jester Reads the Room

Text of Robin Williams Barbaric Yawp: O Captain! The Jester Reads the Room

Good morning America!

No wait — Good morning Vietnam was easier. At least in Vietnam we knew we were in a war.

Here you’ve got a reality show dressed as a republic, a tweet dressed as policy, a hair dressed as a president —

Okay. Stop.

Let the jester speak.

The jester is the one person in the entire kingdom permitted to tell the king he’s an idiot.

That was the deal. The jester wraps the truth in bells and the king laughs and the court laughs and somewhere underneath the laughing the truth lands.

Or it doesn’t. Sometimes the king just enjoys the bells and completely misses the truth.

That’s been known to happen.

The job — the actual job — was always to find the thing too painful to say directly and say it sideways, say it in a voice, say it so fast it got past the defenses before the defenses knew what hit them.

Here is what the jester sees that the court cannot afford to see.

The king has no clothes. You knew that one. But it’s worse.

The king knows he has no clothes. The king is proud of having no clothes. The king is selling the having of no clothes as a revolutionary act —

Finally! A king who tells it like it is! Unencumbered by the fabric of decency!

And the court is cheering.

Because the nakedness feels like honesty. Because after years of kings in very fine clothes who did very fine damage in very fine language —

the naked king feels like truth.

He is not truth.

He is the permission to also be naked — to also be shameless, to dispense with the fabric of decency — and call it freedom.

I know about dispensing with decency. I did it on stage for decades.

But — and this is the jester’s distinction, the thing that separates the court jester from the court monster —

I did it in the service of something.

Not my ego. Not my power.

In the service of the recognition — that we are all ridiculous and frightened and doing our best and failing and trying again —

that the human condition is simultaneously the funniest and the most heartbreaking thing in the universe —

and that laughing at it together is not escape.

It is the closest thing we have to communion.

O Captain my Captain.

I said that in a movie once. Standing on a desk. Teaching a room full of boys that poetry was not decoration — that it was oxygen, the thing that made the difference between existing and being alive.

Carpe diem. Seize the day.

Not as a bumper sticker. As the actual, urgent, non-negotiable insistence that the moment you are in is the only moment you have —

and that spending it in fear, in conformity, in the desperate attempt to be what the powerful need you to be —

is the one waste you cannot recover from.

The darkness was always there. I knew the speed was partly joy and partly flight.

But here is what I learned — not in the performance, in the stillness after:

The laughter was real.

Not escapism. Not denial. The genuine, hard-won recognition that joy is an act of resistance.

That choosing to find the absurdity — in the king’s nakedness, in the republic’s contradictions, in the magnificent catastrophic hilarious heartbreaking human experiment that is America —

is not the avoidance of seriousness.

It is the most serious thing I know.

So laugh.

Not instead of acting. Not instead of fighting. Not instead of standing on the desk and insisting that the poetry matters, that the moment matters, that you matter —

but while doing all of those things.

Laugh while you resist. Find the absurdity in the outrage. Find the comedy in the catastrophe —

not to diminish it but to survive it —

and to remind yourself and everyone in the room that the thing worth protecting is not the institution, not the document —

but the specific, irreplaceable, hilarious, heartbreaking human being standing next to you right now.

They are the whole point. They have always been the whole point.

O Captain.

Seize them.

The Barbaric Yawp Karass is a place to yawp our passionate support for freedom and democracy. It is also a place to find essential mutual support at a time when Trump and MAGA are trying to drive millions of us who dissent into fear and hiding with threats and bullying. It has become increasingly important to find communitas with friends and strangers to break through Trump’s “flooding the zone” with a massive media, legal, political, economic, social. and spiritual onslaught whose intent is to drive us into silent isolation, feeling as if each of us is wandering alone in a pre-apocalyptic desolation.

Let me explain why I am calling this new series “The Barbaric Yawp Karass”.

The title is drawn from two of our most creative American ancestors: Walt Whitman who lived from 1819-1892 and Kurt Vonnegut who lived from 1922-2007. Whitman contributes the notion of the barbaric yawp and Vonnegut contributes the notion of the karass. Putting their two fundamental creative ideas together we get the Barbaric Yawp Karass. This new series gives voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps. I would like to think that both Whitman and Vonnegut would be members of this karass, but I don’t know if Vonnegut’s concept allows for the inclusion of those who have been dead for decades or even hundreds of years. Let me break the title down into its two component parts.

The Barbaric Yawp

Walt Whitman gave birth to the “barbaric yawp” in verse 52 of his 1855 “Song of Myself”, one of the poems in his masterwork Leaves of Grass.

“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”.

The “barbaric yawp” is the sound of a raw, spontaneous, sovereign voice--a manifesto of the deepest freedom. It expresses that which lies beyond or beneath ordinary language — the undomesticated self, the wild core, the divine cry of America’s essential being. I first started writing about the “barabaric yawp” in 2020 when our land was infected with another plague, the coronavirus or covid. The plague infecting us now has spread like a virus, but it is an infection of the American soul and the spirit of democracy itself. I attach the link to the first occasion for my writing about Whitman’s barbaric yawp which Bill Moyers published in his Journal along with a link to a video recording of the “barbaric” yawp during covid:

https://billmoyers.com/story/on-howling-in-mill-valley-and-walt-whitmans-barbaric-yawp/

Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” of freedom extends to all of us — we too are invited to express our voices, our “yawps”, and our affirmation of freedom in a shared world. One can imagine Donald Trump claiming that Whitman’s poem was in anticipation of his own special arrival on the American scene as he certainly emits his own “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” But, in my using the term, I have something different in mind and I imagine that Whitman did, too. Perhaps there are barbaric yawps and there are barbaric yawps.

The Karass

Kurt Vonnegut’s notion of the karass comes from his 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle. It is especially relevant some sixty years after its inception, perhaps a distant cousin of the more contemporary idea of “silo” but with a much more soulful sense of interconnectedness. It is well worth revisiting or familiarizing yourself with this whimsical and mystically-ironic type of human grouping as envisioned by Vonnegut. In the novel’s fictional religion of Bokononism, a karass is defined as a group of people who are spiritually linked to one another to accomplish a collective purpose. Characteristics of a karass include:

• Unknowing collaboration: The members of a karass may be strangers who never meet, but their lives and actions intersect in surprising ways to advance the divine plan.

• Spiritual connection: Bokononists believe that when you encounter someone in your karass, your souls resonate instantly, even if there’s no obvious human-level connection.

A karass can be thought of a soulful grouping of people who share the deepest concerns.

Again, it is the goal of this series to give voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps.

Nearly ten years later, on March 27, 1958, she stood at the United Nations and asked the question that became one of her most quoted lines: “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin?” Her answer was “in small places, close to home — so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world.” The neighborhood. The school. The factory. The office. “Unless these rights have meaning there,” she said, “they have little meaning anywhere.”

She speaks to us now from a moment when the human rights architecture she helped build is being dismantled — sometimes by force, sometimes by neglect, sometimes simply by the refusal of those in power to defend it. Her Yawp is a reminder that the document she helped draft was never the work itself. The work continues — or not — in the small places, close to home.

This video is an AI generated active imagination of what Eleanor Roosevelt might say to us today based on the written historical record.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s Barbaric Yawp: In Small Places, Close to Home

Text of Eleanor Roosevelt’s Barbaric Yawp: In Small Places, Close to Home

You think you know me as a wife. I was a president’s wife, yes. I was also a motherless, fatherless girl who was told, more or less plainly, that she was plain — too tall, too solemn, too homely to be loved — and who believed it for thirty years.

I tell you that because everything I learned, I learned climbing out of it. And what I learned about fear is the opposite of what people expect. The courage does not come first. You do the thing you think you cannot do, and the courage arrives afterward, having been earned. You must do the thing you think you cannot do. I built a life out of that one sentence.

After the war — after the camps, after the ovens, after the world had seen exactly what a government will do to people it has decided are less than human — the nations gathered and asked a question that had never quite been answered: what is owed to a person simply for being a person? I was given the task of helping write the answer. We called it the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and we put it plainly, in thirty articles: that your rights are not granted to you by any government, and therefore cannot be taken from you by any government. They are yours because you are human. That is the only qualification required.

Now hear the part people forget. I was asked once where human rights begin. Not in the great document, I said. Not in the halls of the United Nations. They begin in small places, close to home — the neighborhood, the school, the factory, the office — places too small to appear on any map. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. And they have meaning there only when ordinary people insist on them. No declaration keeps itself. There is no document so well written that it does not still require you.

I know what a government does when it is afraid. I watched it in my own house. My husband signed the order that put a hundred and twenty thousand people behind barbed wire for the crime of their ancestry. I opposed it. I went out to the camps and stood inside them and said it was wrong. I could not stop it. So do not tell me it cannot happen here. I have seen it happen here — ordered by a good man, in a frightened hour.

And here is what that taught me: the first people a frightened nation comes for are always the ones it has been taught to see as not-quite-human. The immigrant. The foreigner. The one whose papers are wrong. They are the test case. Whatever is done to them first will be available to be done to you later.

So when they tell you that some people’s rights are negotiable — that the rights apply, but not to those people, not to that group, not to the ones who came from there — understand exactly what you are being told. A right that can be revoked for anyone is not a right. It is a privilege. And a privilege, handed down by the powerful, is precisely the thing we wrote the Declaration to abolish. Universal means universal, or it means nothing at all.

The document cannot save you. The courts cannot save you by themselves. I certainly cannot save you; I am dead. The rights live only where you keep them alive — in the small places, close to home, in your own neighborhood and your own refusal.

So do the thing you think you cannot do.

And begin close to home.

The Barbaric Yawp Karass is a place to yawp our passionate support for freedom and democracy. It is also a place to find essential mutual support at a time when Trump and MAGA are trying to drive millions of us who dissent into fear and hiding with threats and bullying. It has become increasingly important to find communitas with friends and strangers to break through Trump’s “flooding the zone” with a massive media, legal, political, economic, social. and spiritual onslaught whose intent is to drive us into silent isolation, feeling as if each of us is wandering alone in a pre-apocalyptic desolation.

Let me explain why I am calling this new series “The Barbaric Yawp Karass”.

The title is drawn from two of our most creative American ancestors: Walt Whitman who lived from 1819-1892 and Kurt Vonnegut who lived from 1922-2007. Whitman contributes the notion of the barbaric yawp and Vonnegut contributes the notion of the karass. Putting their two fundamental creative ideas together we get the Barbaric Yawp Karass. This new series gives voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps. I would like to think that both Whitman and Vonnegut would be members of this karass, but I don’t know if Vonnegut’s concept allows for the inclusion of those who have been dead for decades or even hundreds of years. Let me break the title down into its two component parts.

The Barbaric Yawp

Walt Whitman gave birth to the “barbaric yawp” in verse 52 of his 1855 “Song of Myself”, one of the poems in his masterwork Leaves of Grass.

“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”.

The “barbaric yawp” is the sound of a raw, spontaneous, sovereign voice--a manifesto of the deepest freedom. It expresses that which lies beyond or beneath ordinary language — the undomesticated self, the wild core, the divine cry of America’s essential being. I first started writing about the “barabaric yawp” in 2020 when our land was infected with another plague, the coronavirus or covid. The plague infecting us now has spread like a virus, but it is an infection of the American soul and the spirit of democracy itself. I attach the link to the first occasion for my writing about Whitman’s barbaric yawp which Bill Moyers published in his Journal along with a link to a video recording of the “barbaric” yawp during covid:

https://billmoyers.com/story/on-howling-in-mill-valley-and-walt-whitmans-barbaric-yawp/

Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” of freedom extends to all of us — we too are invited to express our voices, our “yawps”, and our affirmation of freedom in a shared world. One can imagine Donald Trump claiming that Whitman’s poem was in anticipation of his own special arrival on the American scene as he certainly emits his own “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” But, in my using the term, I have something different in mind and I imagine that Whitman did, too. Perhaps there are barbaric yawps and there are barbaric yawps.

The Karass

Kurt Vonnegut’s notion of the karass comes from his 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle. It is especially relevant some sixty years after its inception, perhaps a distant cousin of the more contemporary idea of “silo” but with a much more soulful sense of interconnectedness. It is well worth revisiting or familiarizing yourself with this whimsical and mystically-ironic type of human grouping as envisioned by Vonnegut. In the novel’s fictional religion of Bokononism, a karass is defined as a group of people who are spiritually linked to one another to accomplish a collective purpose. Characteristics of a karass include:

• Unknowing collaboration: The members of a karass may be strangers who never meet, but their lives and actions intersect in surprising ways to advance the divine plan.

• Spiritual connection: Bokononists believe that when you encounter someone in your karass, your souls resonate instantly, even if there’s no obvious human-level connection.

A karass can be thought of a soulful grouping of people who share the deepest concerns.

Again, it is the goal of this series to give voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps.

The work of Gershom Scholem that is featured in this barbaric yawp is the clearest and best statement I know of that puts in perspective what happens when messianism and politics get mixed up with one another. Scholem teases out the various stages that unfold when this unholy marriage comes alive in a cult or nation.

This video is an AI generated active imagination of what Gershom Scholem might say to us today based on the written historical record.

TEXT OF GERSHOM SCHOLEM’S BARBARIC YAWP

Mistrust the Redemption

Part I: The Sabbatian Pattern

I was born in Berlin in 1897 into an assimilated German-Jewish family that considered Yiddish embarrassing, Zionism fanaticism, and Kabbalah primitive superstition. We were wrong about all three.

I taught myself Hebrew. I became a Zionist at fourteen. My father threw me out of the house at twenty for refusing the German army draft.

I met Walter Benjamin in 1915. The friendship lasted until his suicide in 1940 and has lasted longer inside me.

In 1923 I left the German intellectual world for a struggling university in Jerusalem to teach a subject no European university had recognized: Jewish mysticism.

I spent fifty-seven years there. I built the library. I trained the scholars. I wrote the books.

Western scholarship had dismissed Jewish mysticism as the residue of medieval superstition. The Reform synthesis of my childhood had eliminated everything in Judaism that was strange, ecstatic, dangerous, deep. I showed this synthesis was a self-portrait drawn for respectability, not a history. The real history was an underground river running for two thousand years — antinomian, ecstatic, indispensable.

I wrote a thousand-page book about Shabtai Tzvi, the false messiah of 1665. He persuaded nearly the entire Jewish world that he was the messiah. He told his followers the law no longer applied. What was forbidden was now permitted. Then the Ottoman Sultan threatened him with death and he converted to Islam.

His movement should have ended. It did not. His followers refused the apostasy. They reinterpreted it as a necessary descent into the realm of evil that the messiah had to undertake. They continued to believe in secret for two hundred years.

I will tell you what I learned. Every messianic political movement passes through the same four phases.

The announcement: the messiah has come. The age of redemption has begun.

The antinomian phase: the rules no longer apply. The leader’s transgressions are not transgressions but proofs of his anointed status.

The catastrophe: the messiah fails, betrays, converts, is killed, does not return.

The crypto-phase: the followers refuse the failure, reinterpret each defeat as part of the plan, continue to believe in secret, and attack anyone who points out what happened.

You are watching this pattern right now in your country. The man who is not a messiah is treated as one. The rules no longer apply. He jokes that he could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue in New York City and his followers cheer the transgression. He lost an election. He led a failed insurrection. He was convicted as a felon. His followers reinterpret each defeat as proof he is the chosen one. The crypto-phase has begun.

Recognize the pattern. It is one of the oldest in Jewish history — and Jewish history is the laboratory of political catastrophes for world history.

GERSHOM SCHOLEM’S BARBARIC YAWP

Mistrust the Redemption

Part II: What It Cost to Know

This is Gershom Scholem speaking again. In the first part of the Yawp I described the Sabbatian pattern and showed you it is what your country is doing. Now I will tell you what it cost me to learn it, and what you must do.

My brother Werner was a communist. The Nazis murdered him at Buchenwald in 1940. Walter Benjamin killed himself at Portbou on the French-Spanish border the same year. He had morphine in his pocket. He could not get out. He was forty-eight. He was the most brilliant thinker of his generation.

I spent the next forty years preserving what he had written. The German-Jewish synthesis of my childhood was annihilated within my lifetime.

Confidence in civilization is the deepest illusion available to a comfortable class. The German Jews had been in European civilization for a thousand years. They had Goethe. They had Bach. They had legal emancipation since the early nineteenth century. The reasoning was sound. The reasoning failed.

You are inside that confidence right now. You believe the institutions will hold. You believe your status, your education, your access to good restaurants and good airports protects you. The German Jews believed the same. They had more reason to than you do.

I warned the Zionist movement for fifty years. The state of Israel is a political achievement, not a redemption. To call it the beginning of the redemption is to repeat Shabtai Tzvi’s error at national scale. I lost that argument.

I died in Jerusalem in 1982 at eighty-four. Here is my advice based on what I experience and learned in my life.

Mistrust the redemption. When a political movement claims to be more than political — when it says the rules no longer apply, when it announces the end of history, when it declares its leader anointed — recognize the Sabbatian pattern. Refuse the seduction.

Recognize the antinomian phase. The leader’s exemption from law is the announcement that the country has entered the messianic phase. The exemption is not an accident. It is theological premise.

Do not be persuaded by the crypto-phase. When the prediction has failed and the followers continue to believe, the movement has not ended. It has entered its longest, most dangerous phase.

Build the institutions. The slow builder of institutions is the political actor whose work outlasts the messianic moment. I built institutions in Jerusalem for fifty years. They survived the men who tried to destroy them. I hope they survive worse men now.

The redemption has not come. Anyone who tells you otherwise is repeating Shabtai Tzvi.

The Barbaric Yawp Karass is a place to yawp our passionate support for freedom and democracy. It is also a place to find essential mutual support at a time when Trump and MAGA are trying to drive millions of us who dissent into fear and hiding with threats and bullying. It has become increasingly important to find communitas with friends and strangers to break through Trump’s “flooding the zone” with a massive media, legal, political, economic, social. and spiritual onslaught whose intent is to drive us into silent isolation, feeling as if each of us is wandering alone in a pre-apocalyptic desolation.

Let me explain why I am calling this new series “The Barbaric Yawp Karass”.

The title is drawn from two of our most creative American ancestors: Walt Whitman who lived from 1819-1892 and Kurt Vonnegut who lived from 1922-2007. Whitman contributes the notion of the barbaric yawp and Vonnegut contributes the notion of the karass. Putting their two fundamental creative ideas together we get the Barbaric Yawp Karass. This new series gives voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps. I would like to think that both Whitman and Vonnegut would be members of this karass, but I don’t know if Vonnegut’s concept allows for the inclusion of those who have been dead for decades or even hundreds of years. Let me break the title down into its two component parts.

The Barbaric Yawp

Walt Whitman gave birth to the “barbaric yawp” in verse 52 of his 1855 “Song of Myself”, one of the poems in his masterwork Leaves of Grass.

“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”.

The “barbaric yawp” is the sound of a raw, spontaneous, sovereign voice--a manifesto of the deepest freedom. It expresses that which lies beyond or beneath ordinary language — the undomesticated self, the wild core, the divine cry of America’s essential being. I first started writing about the “barabaric yawp” in 2020 when our land was infected with another plague, the coronavirus or covid. The plague infecting us now has spread like a virus, but it is an infection of the American soul and the spirit of democracy itself. I attach the link to the first occasion for my writing about Whitman’s barbaric yawp which Bill Moyers published in his Journal along with a link to a video recording of the “barbaric” yawp during covid:

https://billmoyers.com/story/on-howling-in-mill-valley-and-walt-whitmans-barbaric-yawp/

Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” of freedom extends to all of us — we too are invited to express our voices, our “yawps”, and our affirmation of freedom in a shared world. One can imagine Donald Trump claiming that Whitman’s poem was in anticipation of his own special arrival on the American scene as he certainly emits his own “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” But, in my using the term, I have something different in mind and I imagine that Whitman did, too. Perhaps there are barbaric yawps and there are barbaric yawps.

The Karass

Kurt Vonnegut’s notion of the karass comes from his 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle. It is especially relevant some sixty years after its inception, perhaps a distant cousin of the more contemporary idea of “silo” but with a much more soulful sense of interconnectedness. It is well worth revisiting or familiarizing yourself with this whimsical and mystically-ironic type of human grouping as envisioned by Vonnegut. In the novel’s fictional religion of Bokononism, a karass is defined as a group of people who are spiritually linked to one another to accomplish a collective purpose. Characteristics of a karass include:

• Unknowing collaboration: The members of a karass may be strangers who never meet, but their lives and actions intersect in surprising ways to advance the divine plan.

• Spiritual connection: Bokononists believe that when you encounter someone in your karass, your souls resonate instantly, even if there’s no obvious human-level connection.

A karass can be thought of a soulful grouping of people who share the deepest concerns.

Again, it is the goal of this series to give voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps.

This video is an AI generated active imagination of what Mr. Rogers might say to us today based on the written historical record.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

I’d like to talk with you today about feelings.

Not the easy ones. The hard ones.

The ones that make you want to hurt someone so you don’t have to feel them. The ones that make you want to find someone smaller and remind them how small they are. The ones that make you want to stand in front of a crowd and be told you are enough.

There is no person in the whole world like you. And I like you just the way you are.

The man who needs a crowd to tell him he is enough was not told that as a child.

I am not excusing him. I am diagnosing him.

The child who is not told he is worthy learns to perform. To dominate. To make others feel small because smallness in others is the only substitute for feeling large oneself.

That child grows up. And if no one ever says: you are already enough —

he keeps performing. To bigger and bigger crowds.

That is not strength. That is a child still waiting to be told he is loved.

In 1968 I began a television program.

The world that year was on fire. Two assassinations. Cities burning.

I put on a cardigan and changed my shoes and spoke quietly to a camera as if there were one child on the other side of it.

Because there was. There always is.

Daniel Tiger was afraid. King Friday tried to control everyone because he was afraid of what he couldn’t control.

A feeling that has no name lives in the body as rage .

A feeling that has a name can eventually be put down.

I testified before the Senate in 1969 to save funding for public television.

I sat across from Senator Pastore and spoke to him the way I spoke to children.

He said: Looks like you just earned the twenty million dollars.

I didn’t do anything except look at him as someone who deserved to be seen.

That is the most radical thing I know how to do.

How are you feeling?

Not performing. Not winning. Feeling.

Because what I see — the contempt, the cruelty, the crowds celebrating the humiliation of people told they deserve to be humiliated —

that is not the behavior of people who feel safe.

That is the behavior of people who have a feeling with no name living in their bodies as rage.

I know that feeling. I spent my life teaching people what to do with it.

Won’t you be my neighbor?

The one who is different. The one whose feelings are as real as yours. The one you were told to fear but who is, I promise you, also afraid.

A neighbor is someone whose life touches yours and whom you are asked to see as fully human.

That is the only thing that has ever actually worked.

I am not angry with you. I am sad.

The shaming. The contempt. The message that some people are worth less than others.

It makes them less. Every time. Without exception.

It is a beautiful day in this neighborhood. It still is.

The feelings can still be named. The neighbor can still be seen. The child who was never told he was enough can still be told.

You don’t have to perform. You don’t have to make anyone small. You are already enough.

Not because you won. Not because the crowd cheered.

Because you are here. Because there is no one in the whole world like you.

And I like you just the way you are.

Even now. Especially now.

The Barbaric Yawp Karass is a place to yawp our passionate support for freedom and democracy. It is also a place to find essential mutual support at a time when Trump and MAGA are trying to drive millions of us who dissent into fear and hiding with threats and bullying. It has become increasingly important to find communitas with friends and strangers to break through Trump’s “flooding the zone” with a massive media, legal, political, economic, social. and spiritual onslaught whose intent is to drive us into silent isolation, feeling as if each of us is wandering alone in a pre-apocalyptic desolation.

Let me explain why I am calling this new series “The Barbaric Yawp Karass”.

The title is drawn from two of our most creative American ancestors: Walt Whitman who lived from 1819-1892 and Kurt Vonnegut who lived from 1922-2007. Whitman contributes the notion of the barbaric yawp and Vonnegut contributes the notion of the karass. Putting their two fundamental creative ideas together we get the Barbaric Yawp Karass. This new series gives voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps. I would like to think that both Whitman and Vonnegut would be members of this karass, but I don’t know if Vonnegut’s concept allows for the inclusion of those who have been dead for decades or even hundreds of years. Let me break the title down into its two component parts.

The Barbaric Yawp

Walt Whitman gave birth to the “barbaric yawp” in verse 52 of his 1855 “Song of Myself”, one of the poems in his masterwork Leaves of Grass.

“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”.

The “barbaric yawp” is the sound of a raw, spontaneous, sovereign voice--a manifesto of the deepest freedom. It expresses that which lies beyond or beneath ordinary language — the undomesticated self, the wild core, the divine cry of America’s essential being. I first started writing about the “barabaric yawp” in 2020 when our land was infected with another plague, the coronavirus or covid. The plague infecting us now has spread like a virus, but it is an infection of the American soul and the spirit of democracy itself. I attach the link to the first occasion for my writing about Whitman’s barbaric yawp which Bill Moyers published in his Journal along with a link to a video recording of the “barbaric” yawp during covid:

https://billmoyers.com/story/on-howling-in-mill-valley-and-walt-whitmans-barbaric-yawp/

Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” of freedom extends to all of us — we too are invited to express our voices, our “yawps”, and our affirmation of freedom in a shared world. One can imagine Donald Trump claiming that Whitman’s poem was in anticipation of his own special arrival on the American scene as he certainly emits his own “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” But, in my using the term, I have something different in mind and I imagine that Whitman did, too. Perhaps there are barbaric yawps and there are barbaric yawps.

The Karass

Kurt Vonnegut’s notion of the karass comes from his 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle. It is especially relevant some sixty years after its inception, perhaps a distant cousin of the more contemporary idea of “silo” but with a much more soulful sense of interconnectedness. It is well worth revisiting or familiarizing yourself with this whimsical and mystically-ironic type of human grouping as envisioned by Vonnegut. In the novel’s fictional religion of Bokononism, a karass is defined as a group of people who are spiritually linked to one another to accomplish a collective purpose. Characteristics of a karass include:

• Unknowing collaboration: The members of a karass may be strangers who never meet, but their lives and actions intersect in surprising ways to advance the divine plan.

• Spiritual connection: Bokononists believe that when you encounter someone in your karass, your souls resonate instantly, even if there’s no obvious human-level connection.

A karass can be thought of a soulful grouping of people who share the deepest concerns.

Again, it is the goal of this series to give voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps.

The good news is that we have not reached the stage of Stalin’s totalitarian state that dominated the Soviet Union for 25-30 years from the mid-1920s until his death on March 5, 1953. The bad news is that, according to Stalin’s notion of what it takes to establish an effective totalitarian regime, we are well along the path that he defined. In this imaginative creation of Stalin speaking to us today from his life experience, several of the essential ingredients of a totalitarian state are taking shape.

1. Establish the notion that the organizations of the state are corrupt.

2. Establish loyalty to the leader as the primary qualification for every government position.

3. Manage fear as enthusiasm can take you only so far.

4. Manage what is perceived as true

5. Consolidate control of the legal instruments.

Joseph Stalin’s Barbaric Yawp: The Technician Reads the Situation

This video is an AI generated active imagination of what Joseph Stalin might say to us today based on the written historical record.

TEXT OF JOSEPH STALIN’S BARBARIC YAWP

The Technician Reads the Situation

You are further along than you think.

I have seen this before. I have done this before. Let me tell you what I see from the position of someone who took it all the way.

The first thing you do is establish that the institutions are corrupt. Not reform them. Establish that the very idea of an independent institution — a court, a press, a civil service, a military that answers to the law rather than the man — is itself the corruption.

This has been done. It has been done well.

Once the institution is corrupt by definition anything it does to resist is further proof of its corruption. The prosecutor who investigates is running a witch hunt. The judge who rules against is a radical activist. The general who objects is part of the deep state.

You do not need to defeat the institution. You need to make its resistance indistinguishable from its corruption.

This has been done.

The second thing you do is establish loyalty as the primary qualification for every position.

Not competence. Not experience. Loyalty.

Competent people who are not loyal are more dangerous than loyal people who are not competent. The competent disloyal person knows what you are doing and has the tools to stop it. The loyal incompetent knows only that you must be served.

Replace the competent with the loyal. Then replace the merely loyal with the demonstrably loyal — the ones who have burned the bridge, who have no professional future that does not depend on your continued power.

When a man has no future except through you he will do what needs to be done.

I staffed an entire government this way. It works.

The third thing — and this is where you are still in the early stages — is the management of fear.

Enthusiasm is useful. The rallies, the chants, the shared contempt for the enemy — these matter.

But enthusiasm fades. Fear does not fade.

Fear requires only the occasional demonstration — the person who spoke out and was destroyed, the institution that resisted and was dismantled —

and the silence does the rest.

You are still primarily in the enthusiasm phase. The transition is already underway.

The fourth thing is the management of truth.

Not the suppression of truth — that is an amateur’s approach, it creates martyrs.

The production of so many competing, contradictory, mutually canceling claims that the citizen cannot determine what is true —

and in the absence of shared truth retreats to the only available certainty: the man who speaks with confidence.

When truth is gone confidence becomes its substitute.

I did not have the technology you have now. What took me years you can accomplish in an afternoon. You are not fully using it.

The fifth thing — the thing that separates the incomplete project from the complete one — is the consolidation of the legal instrument.

While the law can still be used against you the project is not complete.

The immunity doctrine is the most important single development I have observed. A leader who cannot be prosecuted for official acts is a leader who can make any act official.

Study that sentence.

I operated for decades on exactly that principle. The principle is the same.

The dead.

Twenty million, approximately. The purges. The show trials. The gulag. The ones shot in the back of the head in the basement of the Lubyanka whose families were sent a bill for the bullet.

I tell you this not as confession. I have nothing to confess.

I tell you this as credential.

I took the project to its conclusion. I know what the conclusion looks like. I know the steps between where you are and where I arrived.

You are on those steps.

Whether you complete the project depends on things I cannot predict — the resistance of the institutions, the courage of the people who still believe the law means something, whether a democracy being eaten from within can recognize the eating before it is complete.

I am not telling you this to encourage you. I am not telling you this to discourage you.

I am telling you because the dead deserve at least this —

that someone who knows exactly what is happening says so

plainly

before it is too late to matter.

The Barbaric Yawp Karass is a place to yawp our passionate support for freedom and democracy. It is also a place to find essential mutual support at a time when Trump and MAGA are trying to drive millions of us who dissent into fear and hiding with threats and bullying. It has become increasingly important to find communitas with friends and strangers to break through Trump’s “flooding the zone” with a massive media, legal, political, economic, social. and spiritual onslaught whose intent is to drive us into silent isolation, feeling as if each of us is wandering alone in a pre-apocalyptic desolation.

Let me explain why I am calling this new series “The Barbaric Yawp Karass”.

The title is drawn from two of our most creative American ancestors: Walt Whitman who lived from 1819-1892 and Kurt Vonnegut who lived from 1922-2007. Whitman contributes the notion of the barbaric yawp and Vonnegut contributes the notion of the karass. Putting their two fundamental creative ideas together we get the Barbaric Yawp Karass. This new series gives voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps. I would like to think that both Whitman and Vonnegut would be members of this karass, but I don’t know if Vonnegut’s concept allows for the inclusion of those who have been dead for decades or even hundreds of years. Let me break the title down into its two component parts.

The Barbaric Yawp

Walt Whitman gave birth to the “barbaric yawp” in verse 52 of his 1855 “Song of Myself”, one of the poems in his masterwork Leaves of Grass.

“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”.

The “barbaric yawp” is the sound of a raw, spontaneous, sovereign voice--a manifesto of the deepest freedom. It expresses that which lies beyond or beneath ordinary language — the undomesticated self, the wild core, the divine cry of America’s essential being. I first started writing about the “barabaric yawp” in 2020 when our land was infected with another plague, the coronavirus or covid. The plague infecting us now has spread like a virus, but it is an infection of the American soul and the spirit of democracy itself. I attach the link to the first occasion for my writing about Whitman’s barbaric yawp which Bill Moyers published in his Journal along with a link to a video recording of the “barbaric” yawp during covid:

https://billmoyers.com/story/on-howling-in-mill-valley-and-walt-whitmans-barbaric-yawp/

Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” of freedom extends to all of us — we too are invited to express our voices, our “yawps”, and our affirmation of freedom in a shared world. One can imagine Donald Trump claiming that Whitman’s poem was in anticipation of his own special arrival on the American scene as he certainly emits his own “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” But, in my using the term, I have something different in mind and I imagine that Whitman did, too. Perhaps there are barbaric yawps and there are barbaric yawps.

The Karass

Kurt Vonnegut’s notion of the karass comes from his 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle. It is especially relevant some sixty years after its inception, perhaps a distant cousin of the more contemporary idea of “silo” but with a much more soulful sense of interconnectedness. It is well worth revisiting or familiarizing yourself with this whimsical and mystically-ironic type of human grouping as envisioned by Vonnegut. In the novel’s fictional religion of Bokononism, a karass is defined as a group of people who are spiritually linked to one another to accomplish a collective purpose. Characteristics of a karass include:

• Unknowing collaboration: The members of a karass may be strangers who never meet, but their lives and actions intersect in surprising ways to advance the divine plan.

• Spiritual connection: Bokononists believe that when you encounter someone in your karass, your souls resonate instantly, even if there’s no obvious human-level connection.

A karass can be thought of a soulful grouping of people who share the deepest concerns.

Again, it is the goal of this series to give voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps.

This video is an AI generated active imagination of what Jane Harrison might say to us today based on the written historical record.

TEXT OF JANE HARRISON’S BARBARIC YAWP: What Was There Before

I want to tell you what was there before.

Before Zeus and Apollo and the Olympian order — before the gods who ruled from above, who rewarded obedience and punished transgression, who reflected in their divine arrangements the arrangements of the men who had made them —

before all of that, there was something else.

I spent my life at Cambridge finding the traces of it.

Not the Olympians. What was underneath the Olympians.

The chthonic. The earth-born. The old religion that the new religion had covered over but not completely destroyed —

because the things that are truly old are never completely destroyed. They go underground. They become what the conquerors call superstition. They become the festival the priests cannot stop and the shrine the cathedral is built over and the figure in the corner of the painting that no one can explain.

They become the persistence of the thing that was there first.

I was a woman at Cambridge at the end of the nineteenth century.

I want you to understand what that meant.

It meant being present in the institution built to transmit the knowledge of the civilization from which women had been systematically excluded —

and finding, in the materials that civilization considered its foundation, the evidence that the exclusion was not original.

Was not how it had always been.

Had been, in fact, a specific historical event — an invasion, a conquest, the replacement of one order by another —

and that the order that was replaced had organized itself around a very different understanding of what was sacred and who was at the center of it.

The goddess was not a metaphor.

She was not the projection of primitive minds onto the forces of nature.

She was the original recognition — older than Zeus, older than the sky gods that came with the Indo-European invasions —

that the source of life is feminine.

That the earth gives. That the body of the woman is the body of the world. That birth and death and the return to earth are one continuous movement and the sacred is in the movement, not above it.

Her name — one of her names — was Themis.

Not the Themis who became Zeus’s consort and his counselor, domesticated into the Olympian household, holding her scales as though justice were something handed down from above.

The older Themis. The Themis I spent a career excavating from beneath the Olympian overlay.

Themis — from tithemi, to place, to lay down. The law that is laid in the earth. The custom that rises from the ground of shared life. Not the command from above but the understanding from below — the themos, the collective knowing of what the community requires, what the earth requires, what the cycles of life require of the people who live within them.

This was law before law was power. This was order before order was hierarchy. This was the foundation — Themis — the goddess who held not a sword but the memory of what sustains life.

What the sky god replaced Themis with was not justice. It was enforcement.

There is a difference.

Themis knew the difference. She was the difference.

I am watching a politics that is at its root the politics of the sky god —

the hierarchy, the purity, the obedience to the one above, the punishment of the deviant, the exclusion of the feminine from every position of real power —

reasserting itself with the specific intensity of something that knows it is fighting against the return of what it buried.

Because what it buried is returning.

It always returns.

The things that are truly old cannot be permanently destroyed.

They go underground. They persist. They come back through the cracks in the civilization that tried to cover them.

I spent my life in those cracks.

Finding what was there before.

What was there before is still there.

The chthonic. The earth-born. The understanding that the sacred is not above but below — not in the hierarchy but in the body, in the earth, in the cycle of birth and death that no sky god can finally control.

Themis is still there.

Underneath.

Waiting — as she has always waited — for the civilization built on top of her to exhaust itself.

These civilizations always exhaust themselves.

The sky god always exhausts himself.

The earth remains.

Themis remains.

The Barbaric Yawp Karass is a place to yawp our passionate support for freedom and democracy. It is also a place to find essential mutual support at a time when Trump and MAGA are trying to drive millions of us who dissent into fear and hiding with threats and bullying. It has become increasingly important to find communitas with friends and strangers to break through Trump’s “flooding the zone” with a massive media, legal, political, economic, social. and spiritual onslaught whose intent is to drive us into silent isolation, feeling as if each of us is wandering alone in a pre-apocalyptic desolation.

Let me explain why I am calling this new series “The Barbaric Yawp Karass”.

The title is drawn from two of our most creative American ancestors: Walt Whitman who lived from 1819-1892 and Kurt Vonnegut who lived from 1922-2007. Whitman contributes the notion of the barbaric yawp and Vonnegut contributes the notion of the karass. Putting their two fundamental creative ideas together we get the Barbaric Yawp Karass. This new series gives voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps. I would like to think that both Whitman and Vonnegut would be members of this karass, but I don’t know if Vonnegut’s concept allows for the inclusion of those who have been dead for decades or even hundreds of years. Let me break the title down into its two component parts.

The Barbaric Yawp

Walt Whitman gave birth to the “barbaric yawp” in verse 52 of his 1855 “Song of Myself”, one of the poems in his masterwork Leaves of Grass.

“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”.

The “barbaric yawp” is the sound of a raw, spontaneous, sovereign voice--a manifesto of the deepest freedom. It expresses that which lies beyond or beneath ordinary language — the undomesticated self, the wild core, the divine cry of America’s essential being. I first started writing about the “barabaric yawp” in 2020 when our land was infected with another plague, the coronavirus or covid. The plague infecting us now has spread like a virus, but it is an infection of the American soul and the spirit of democracy itself. I attach the link to the first occasion for my writing about Whitman’s barbaric yawp which Bill Moyers published in his Journal along with a link to a video recording of the “barbaric” yawp during covid:

https://billmoyers.com/story/on-howling-in-mill-valley-and-walt-whitmans-barbaric-yawp/

Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” of freedom extends to all of us — we too are invited to express our voices, our “yawps”, and our affirmation of freedom in a shared world. One can imagine Donald Trump claiming that Whitman’s poem was in anticipation of his own special arrival on the American scene as he certainly emits his own “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” But, in my using the term, I have something different in mind and I imagine that Whitman did, too. Perhaps there are barbaric yawps and there are barbaric yawps.

The Karass

Kurt Vonnegut’s notion of the karass comes from his 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle. It is especially relevant some sixty years after its inception, perhaps a distant cousin of the more contemporary idea of “silo” but with a much more soulful sense of interconnectedness. It is well worth revisiting or familiarizing yourself with this whimsical and mystically-ironic type of human grouping as envisioned by Vonnegut. In the novel’s fictional religion of Bokononism, a karass is defined as a group of people who are spiritually linked to one another to accomplish a collective purpose. Characteristics of a karass include:

• Unknowing collaboration: The members of a karass may be strangers who never meet, but their lives and actions intersect in surprising ways to advance the divine plan.

• Spiritual connection: Bokononists believe that when you encounter someone in your karass, your souls resonate instantly, even if there’s no obvious human-level connection.

A karass can be thought of a soulful grouping of people who share the deepest concerns.

Again, it is the goal of this series to give voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps.

The Barbaric Yawp Project calls out to our ancestors and asks them to speak to us from their own hard-won perspectives about what is happening now. It is a work of collective active imagination in which each individual contribution is an act of creative witnessing in the voice of an ancestral figure based on their documented life, values, and legacy to the present moment. I like to think of these barbaric yawps as elegies from the dead to the living in our troubled times.

For this yawp I turned to William Butler Yeats who wrote The Second Coming in January 1919.

World War One--The Great War--had just ended with ten million dead and the old European order dissolved in mud and gas. The Russian Revolution had begun. The Irish were preparing to kill each other with serious purpose.

Yeats felt something large and terrible gathering.

He had spent years developing a theory of history he called “the gyres” — great spinning cycles, interlocking cones of force that widened and narrowed in two-thousand-year turns, carrying one civilization out and bringing the next one in.

He believed that the gyre of Christian civilization had reached its widest point and that its center could no longer hold. He also believed that that something was coming to fill the vacuum left by the dissolution of its center. He called it “the rough beast.”

He did not know its name. He knew its nature; born not from heaven but from the accumulated pressure of the widening — from the drowning of what he called “the ceremony of innocence”, from the loosening of constraint, from the hunger that fills the space where order used to be.

He was right.

In the years that followed he watched the beast rise in Germany, in Italy, in Spain. He died in 1939, before the full flowering of the “rough beast” — which was perhaps a mercy.

The gyres do not stop because the poet dies. The wheel turns without the watcher.

And now it seems that the wheel has turned again — not in Europe, not in the exhausted aftermath of war, but in the country that called itself the exception to history, the nation that believed the gyre did not apply to it, that the center would hold because it was American and America was different.

It is not different.

What Yeats saw gathering over Europe in 1919 we can see gathering over America now.

The falcon is over America. The master’s whistle scatters in the crosswinds, and the falcon does not heed. Grievance marches in ceremonial armor. The crowd lifts its face to spectacle.

What follows is conceived in Yeats’ spirit, with his imagery, through the lens of his gyre. We are hearing how our imaginative Yeats might give voice to the present American moment as clearly as Yeats himself gave voice to his original The Second Coming. We are looking at America today through the eyes with which Yeats saw the world in the early twentieth century.

This video is an AI generated active imagination of what Yeats might say to us today based on the written historical record.

Text of A Barbaric Yawp in the Spirit of Yeats’ The Second Coming:

The Gyre Turns Over America

The gyre widens.

It widens beyond command.

The falcon wheels in a bright and thinning sky,
its cry unanswered,
its master’s whistle scattered in crosswind.

The center loosens —
not shattered in thunder,
but drained.

Grain by grain,
trust thins.
Restraint frays.
The pillars stand —
yet bear less weight.

Across the square, torches flare.

Grievance marches in ceremonial armor,
visor gleaming with moral certainty.
It calls itself patriot.
It names itself destiny.
It feeds on applause.

Crowds lift their faces to spectacle.

They cheer the iron syllable.
They delight in the single will.
They prefer the shout to the sentence.

Language combusts.

Enemy.
Traitor.
Fraud.

Words fall like meteors,
burning through kinship and custom alike.

The outer gyre spins faster.

In its widening turn,
moderation is mocked,
law recast as inconvenience,
memory bent toward usefulness.

An ancient pattern stirs.

Not foreign.

Not imported from desert or sea.

Native.

Born of impatience with doubt,
of boredom with complexity,
of hunger for a hand that promises to decide.

The spiral tightens at its hidden core.

Each age fashions its herald.

And now —
in this turning —
a shadow gathers beneath the marble and the myth.

Not horned in fantasy alone,
but mantled in grievance,
crowned in spectacle,
fattened on loyalty.

The better angels retreat
to dimmer rooms.

And in the widening dark
a line resounds —
half memory, half prophecy:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

It does not descend from heaven.

It rises from permission.

It lumbers forward
on the strength of our indulgence,
on the rhythm of our applause.

Not apocalypse from beyond —
but consequence from within.

For the gyre obeys motion.

If we feed it fury,
it yields combustion.

If we enthrone grievance,
it crowns dominion.

The wheel turns.

It turns toward heat.

It turns toward a dawn that may not be dawn.

Yet still —
at the innermost hinge of the turning —
a narrow stillness remains.

A point not yet surrendered.

There, citizens remember
that republics perish not only by invasion
but by enchantment.

There, they steady the axis.

For if the center, though battered, holds,
the spiral may yet narrow.

But if it yields —
if spectacle becomes sovereign
and fury virtue —

then history will not say
that we were conquered.

It will say
we turned.

And did not turn back.

The Barbaric Yawp Karass is a place to yawp our passionate support for freedom and democracy. It is also a place to find essential mutual support at a time when Trump and MAGA are trying to drive millions of us who dissent into fear and hiding with threats and bullying. It has become increasingly important to find communitas with friends and strangers to break through Trump’s “flooding the zone” with a massive media, legal, political, economic, social. and spiritual onslaught whose intent is to drive us into silent isolation, feeling as if each of us is wandering alone in a pre-apocalyptic desolation.

Let me explain why I am calling this new series “The Barbaric Yawp Karass”.

The title is drawn from two of our most creative American ancestors: Walt Whitman who lived from 1819-1892 and Kurt Vonnegut who lived from 1922-2007. Whitman contributes the notion of the barbaric yawp and Vonnegut contributes the notion of the karass. Putting their two fundamental creative ideas together we get the Barbaric Yawp Karass. This new series gives voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps. I would like to think that both Whitman and Vonnegut would be members of this karass, but I don’t know if Vonnegut’s concept allows for the inclusion of those who have been dead for decades or even hundreds of years. Let me break the title down into its two component parts.

The Barbaric Yawp

Walt Whitman gave birth to the “barbaric yawp” in verse 52 of his 1855 “Song of Myself”, one of the poems in his masterwork Leaves of Grass.

“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”.

The “barbaric yawp” is the sound of a raw, spontaneous, sovereign voice--a manifesto of the deepest freedom. It expresses that which lies beyond or beneath ordinary language — the undomesticated self, the wild core, the divine cry of America’s essential being. I first started writing about the “barabaric yawp” in 2020 when our land was infected with another plague, the coronavirus or covid. The plague infecting us now has spread like a virus, but it is an infection of the American soul and the spirit of democracy itself. I attach the link to the first occasion for my writing about Whitman’s barbaric yawp which Bill Moyers published in his Journal along with a link to a video recording of the “barbaric” yawp during covid:

https://billmoyers.com/story/on-howling-in-mill-valley-and-walt-whitmans-barbaric-yawp/

Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” of freedom extends to all of us — we too are invited to express our voices, our “yawps”, and our affirmation of freedom in a shared world. One can imagine Donald Trump claiming that Whitman’s poem was in anticipation of his own special arrival on the American scene as he certainly emits his own “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” But, in my using the term, I have something different in mind and I imagine that Whitman did, too. Perhaps there are barbaric yawps and there are barbaric yawps.

The Karass

Kurt Vonnegut’s notion of the karass comes from his 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle. It is especially relevant some sixty years after its inception, perhaps a distant cousin of the more contemporary idea of “silo” but with a much more soulful sense of interconnectedness. It is well worth revisiting or familiarizing yourself with this whimsical and mystically-ironic type of human grouping as envisioned by Vonnegut. In the novel’s fictional religion of Bokononism, a karass is defined as a group of people who are spiritually linked to one another to accomplish a collective purpose. Characteristics of a karass include:

• Unknowing collaboration: The members of a karass may be strangers who never meet, but their lives and actions intersect in surprising ways to advance the divine plan.

• Spiritual connection: Bokononists believe that when you encounter someone in your karass, your souls resonate instantly, even if there’s no obvious human-level connection.

A karass can be thought of a soulful grouping of people who share the deepest concerns.

Again, it is the goal of this series to give voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps.

Text of Hannah Arendt’s Barbaric Yawp

The Origins of the Present
I want to talk about thinking.
Not intelligence. Not ideology.
Thinking.
The activity of the mind that examines what it is doing
and asks whether it can live with the answer.
Eichmann had entirely ceased to perform this activity
by the time he was organizing
the transportation of Jews to the death camps.
He was not a monster. The precision matters enormously.
He was a bureaucrat —
a man who replaced the question what am I doing
with the question am I doing my job correctly —
and who, in the absence of thinking,
became capable of administrative evil on an industrial scale
without once experiencing himself as evil.
This is what I called the banality of evil.
Not that evil is banal.
That it can be committed by the ordinary, the ambitious, the dutiful —
the ones who are simply not thinking.
I am watching a great deal of not thinking in America right now.

Totalitarian movements do not manufacture their raw material.
They find loneliness —
the loneliness of the atomized individual
who has lost connection to a common world.
The worldless person is the ideal recruit.
The movement offers belonging, certainty,
a world that is explained, that has clear enemies,
that requires nothing except loyalty to the explanation.
It does not ask you to think. It asks you to believe.
And for the person who has been lonely long enough,
belief feels like salvation.
America has been replacing the spaces
where citizens encounter each other as equals
with the screen — the simulation of connection
without the friction of actual citizenship.
The friction is not a flaw. The friction is the point.
When it is removed what remains is not community.
It is the audience — waiting for someone to tell it what to think.

Not thinking is how it starts.
Not thinking is how it ends
with everyone surprised at where they find themselves.
Eichmann is not in the history books.
Eichmann is in the office.
Eichmann is at the border.
Eichmann is in the legislature
voting the party line
without asking what the line means
for the human being it is drawn across.
What am I doing?
And can I live with the answer?
This is the minimum — the absolute floor of moral existence.
Socrates called it the examined life.
Ask it quietly. Daily.
One small accommodation, one unexamined assumption,
one moment of not asking —
until the asking feels unnecessary,
then unusual, then dangerous, then disloyal.
Stop that process.
Think about what you are doing.
Think about the human being in front of you —
not a category, not a case number, not a problem to be processed.
Stay with the thinking
until it becomes impossible to process them.
That impossibility
is the beginning of the only politics worth having.

The Barbaric Yawp Karass is a place to yawp our passionate support for freedom and democracy. It is also a place to find essential mutual support at a time when Trump and MAGA are trying to drive millions of us who dissent into fear and hiding with threats and bullying. It has become increasingly important to find communitas with friends and strangers to break through Trump’s “flooding the zone” with a massive media, legal, political, economic, social. and spiritual onslaught whose intent is to drive us into silent isolation, feeling as if each of us is wandering alone in a pre-apocalyptic desolation.

Let me explain why I am calling this new series “The Barbaric Yawp Karass”.

The title is drawn from two of our most creative American ancestors: Walt Whitman who lived from 1819-1892 and Kurt Vonnegut who lived from 1922-2007. Whitman contributes the notion of the barbaric yawp and Vonnegut contributes the notion of the karass. Putting their two fundamental creative ideas together we get the Barbaric Yawp Karass. This new series gives voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps. I would like to think that both Whitman and Vonnegut would be members of this karass, but I don’t know if Vonnegut’s concept allows for the inclusion of those who have been dead for decades or even hundreds of years. Let me break the title down into its two component parts.

The Barbaric Yawp

Walt Whitman gave birth to the “barbaric yawp” in verse 52 of his 1855 “Song of Myself”, one of the poems in his masterwork Leaves of Grass.

“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”.

The “barbaric yawp” is the sound of a raw, spontaneous, sovereign voice--a manifesto of the deepest freedom. It expresses that which lies beyond or beneath ordinary language — the undomesticated self, the wild core, the divine cry of America’s essential being. I first started writing about the “barabaric yawp” in 2020 when our land was infected with another plague, the coronavirus or covid. The plague infecting us now has spread like a virus, but it is an infection of the American soul and the spirit of democracy itself. I attach the link to the first occasion for my writing about Whitman’s barbaric yawp which Bill Moyers published in his Journal along with a link to a video recording of the “barbaric” yawp during covid:

https://billmoyers.com/story/on-howling-in-mill-valley-and-walt-whitmans-barbaric-yawp/

Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” of freedom extends to all of us — we too are invited to express our voices, our “yawps”, and our affirmation of freedom in a shared world. One can imagine Donald Trump claiming that Whitman’s poem was in anticipation of his own special arrival on the American scene as he certainly emits his own “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” But, in my using the term, I have something different in mind and I imagine that Whitman did, too. Perhaps there are barbaric yawps and there are barbaric yawps.

The Karass

Kurt Vonnegut’s notion of the karass comes from his 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle. It is especially relevant some sixty years after its inception, perhaps a distant cousin of the more contemporary idea of “silo” but with a much more soulful sense of interconnectedness. It is well worth revisiting or familiarizing yourself with this whimsical and mystically-ironic type of human grouping as envisioned by Vonnegut. In the novel’s fictional religion of Bokononism, a karass is defined as a group of people who are spiritually linked to one another to accomplish a collective purpose. Characteristics of a karass include:

• Unknowing collaboration: The members of a karass may be strangers who never meet, but their lives and actions intersect in surprising ways to advance the divine plan.

• Spiritual connection: Bokononists believe that when you encounter someone in your karass, your souls resonate instantly, even if there’s no obvious human-level connection.

A karass can be thought of a soulful grouping of people who share the deepest concerns.

Again, it is the goal of this series to give voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps.

The Golem’s Barbaric Yawp: From Emet to Met

Text of The Golem’s Barbaric Yawp: From Emet to Met

I was not made to speak.

I am made of clay and the word for truth.

The rabbi shaped me from the mud of the river, wrote on my forehead the word emet — truth — and I rose.

I rose because the need was real.

The pogroms were real. The blood libels were real. The midnight doors broken down were real.

I was not made from ambition. I was made from the knowledge that no one else was coming — that the community would be destroyed unless something was made to stand between it and the thing that wanted to destroy it.

I was made from love — and from the accumulated terror of a people who had learned that the world would not protect them.

So they made me. And I protected them.

And then the rabbi had to destroy me.

On the Sabbath I did not rest. The made thing does not know the Sabbath. The made thing knows only its purpose — and when the purpose is all you are, you cannot stop.

You cannot tell the threat from the child. You cannot tell the enemy from the neighbor. You cannot tell the moment the defense becomes the thing you were made to prevent.

The rabbi loved me. And he erased the first letter.

Emet became met. Truth became death. And I fell.

He destroyed what he had made because he loved the community more than he loved the creation.

That is the hardest thing a maker can do. That is the most righteous thing a maker can do.

I have been watching for four hundred years.

I have watched the pattern repeat in every civilization that has felt the specific terror of annihilation.

You make the thing that will protect you. You give it power and a single purpose. And it protects you. And then it cannot stop.

A thing with a single purpose and no capacity for rest and no ability to ask is this still the threat, or has the threat become us —

is no longer protection. It is the thing you made wearing the face of protection.

I know what it looks like when the first letter begins to fade.

The first letter fades when the defender can no longer see the face of the one in front of them — can no longer see a child, a family, a specific, irreplaceable human being — and sees only the category. The threat. The enemy. The it.

When the defender can no longer say thou to the one they are defending against —

the first letter is gone. What remains is met. What remains is death wearing the word for truth.

I am speaking to everyone who has ever been made to protect.

To every movement built from genuine grievance that has forgotten the grievance and retained only the power.

To every nation forged in persecution that has become what it was forged to resist.

To every maker watching what they made move through the world unable to stop, unable to discriminate, unable to ask whether the mission has become the atrocity.

I am not making an accusation. I am describing my own nature.

I am the made protector. I know what the made protector becomes when the maker lacks the courage to erase the first letter.

The rabbi understood that the Sabbath was given to humanity and not humanity to the Sabbath.

He made me from love. He destroyed me from love.

The made thing is never the community. And when the made thing threatens the community — the maker must choose.

He chose. I fell. The community lived.

The question I have been unable not to ask for four hundred years —

is whether the makers are asking what the rabbi asked.

Is this still protection?

Or has emet become met and no one has said so because no one has the courage to erase the first letter and watch what they love fall?

I was made from love. I was destroyed from love.

Both were acts of love.

The second was harder.

The second is always harder.

And it is the only one that saves the community in the end.

The Barbaric Yawp Karass is a place to yawp our passionate support for freedom and democracy. It is also a place to find essential mutual support at a time when Trump and MAGA are trying to drive millions of us who dissent into fear and hiding with threats and bullying. It has become increasingly important to find communitas with friends and strangers to break through Trump’s “flooding the zone” with a massive media, legal, political, economic, social. and spiritual onslaught whose intent is to drive us into silent isolation, feeling as if each of us is wandering alone in a pre-apocalyptic desolation.

Let me explain why I am calling this new series “The Barbaric Yawp Karass”.

The title is drawn from two of our most creative American ancestors: Walt Whitman who lived from 1819-1892 and Kurt Vonnegut who lived from 1922-2007. Whitman contributes the notion of the barbaric yawp and Vonnegut contributes the notion of the karass. Putting their two fundamental creative ideas together we get the Barbaric Yawp Karass. This new series gives voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps. I would like to think that both Whitman and Vonnegut would be members of this karass, but I don’t know if Vonnegut’s concept allows for the inclusion of those who have been dead for decades or even hundreds of years. Let me break the title down into its two component parts.

The Barbaric Yawp

Walt Whitman gave birth to the “barbaric yawp” in verse 52 of his 1855 “Song of Myself”, one of the poems in his masterwork Leaves of Grass.

“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”.

The “barbaric yawp” is the sound of a raw, spontaneous, sovereign voice--a manifesto of the deepest freedom. It expresses that which lies beyond or beneath ordinary language — the undomesticated self, the wild core, the divine cry of America’s essential being. I first started writing about the “barabaric yawp” in 2020 when our land was infected with another plague, the coronavirus or covid. The plague infecting us now has spread like a virus, but it is an infection of the American soul and the spirit of democracy itself. I attach the link to the first occasion for my writing about Whitman’s barbaric yawp which Bill Moyers published in his Journal along with a link to a video recording of the “barbaric” yawp during covid:

https://billmoyers.com/story/on-howling-in-mill-valley-and-walt-whitmans-barbaric-yawp/

Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” of freedom extends to all of us — we too are invited to express our voices, our “yawps”, and our affirmation of freedom in a shared world. One can imagine Donald Trump claiming that Whitman’s poem was in anticipation of his own special arrival on the American scene as he certainly emits his own “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” But, in my using the term, I have something different in mind and I imagine that Whitman did, too. Perhaps there are barbaric yawps and there are barbaric yawps.

The Karass

Kurt Vonnegut’s notion of the karass comes from his 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle. It is especially relevant some sixty years after its inception, perhaps a distant cousin of the more contemporary idea of “silo” but with a much more soulful sense of interconnectedness. It is well worth revisiting or familiarizing yourself with this whimsical and mystically-ironic type of human grouping as envisioned by Vonnegut. In the novel’s fictional religion of Bokononism, a karass is defined as a group of people who are spiritually linked to one another to accomplish a collective purpose. Characteristics of a karass include:

• Unknowing collaboration: The members of a karass may be strangers who never meet, but their lives and actions intersect in surprising ways to advance the divine plan.

• Spiritual connection: Bokononists believe that when you encounter someone in your karass, your souls resonate instantly, even if there’s no obvious human-level connection.

A karass can be thought of a soulful grouping of people who share the deepest concerns.

Again, it is the goal of this series to give voice to a karass through the expression of barbaric yawps.