Putting Yourself in a Trap for Fun and Diversion (Hello to the Son of the Widow’s Son, Wherever You Are)

We worked together for one year in Japan at the same school. He lived in Hiyoshi, same as the tiny groupuscule from the Fellowship of Friends that I ran into during that year. He taught English, went to Temple University, and lived with a Japanese wife with whom he seemed to have a pretty happy, still-fresh marriage. I also thought he fit the bill as the doppelganger to a college friend I’d called The Captain. Difference was, The Captain was the son of a minister. The Son was the progeny of a Southern police chief and Freemason.

The Son of the Widow’s Son read tons of Graham Hancock, smoked cigarettes like he needed to personally deplete the world’s supply, enjoyed Kirin beer, and scoured the internet for all sorts of alternative news, which he’d dutifully print out and share with his Japanese students when he saw an opportunity. He also refused to use e-mail.

“It’s not secure. All of it is monitored,” he said.

At that point, I already had been introduced to the early Disinfo.com (helmed by Richard Metzger) and knew about Project Echelon, Carnivore and the like. Yet, I felt that somehow, if you weren’t writing certain key words in your e-mails, you had nothing to worry about. Of course, now that it’s obvious that things have advanced far beyond Carnivore, what with several recent publications letting Main Core, out of the bag, there’s still nothing to worry about. If they know about you, they know about you. It’s a waste of energy to worry or get paranoid about; that way leads to inaction and a crack-up that only the most skillful and the most lucky come out of for the better.

Still, I lost track of The Son of the Widow’s Son precisely because he did not use e-mail. At some point, after I left Japan, I either lost his number or it changed, I forget which. A letter I sent apparently was not addressed right and so, The Son of the Widow’s Son ceased to be anything more than a memory to me.

There are several things worth remembering about him, which informed quite a bit of what I got up to after I left that Japan year, filled with so many synchronicities, so many RAW’ish 23s, so many changes.

See, it was The Son of the Widow’s Son who told me about putting the salts in all the corners of my room when those ghosts were terrifying me something fierce in my room in rural Japan, a room that had been unoccupied since the death of my friend-landlord’s very beloved grandmother. For that I thank him greatly.

The Son of the Widow’s Son was also there, smoking and smiling fiercely, on my first journey through the reality of Terrence McKenna’s fungal friends, as we both were guided through thick woods, run-down walkways, past hidden kami shrines, and finally to the ocean on one foggy night seven years ago.

And The Son of the Widow’s Son is who told me about Lyndon LaRouche, that ol’ dark intelligence trickster and dictator of his own insular kingdom, what he’d been saying on the radio while the 9-11 went down. I’d just sat down in the sauna room of a remote onsen, flanked by two wrinkly Japanese men in towels. This is the moment when the surreality of the attacks appeared through the hot fog of the room on the Japanese TV, Japanese reporter screaming and running, never once letting go of her microphone as she barrelled down a lower Manhattan street with swarm of gaijin, attempting to escape from the gray clouds of Christine Todd-Whitman approved, non-toxic smoke, dust, gas and debris.

“This guy was saying it had to be an inside job, an element of the government involved because the military jets were not scrambled, they were told to stand down. He said it was an attempted coup.”

It’s interesting how that suspicion was first sowed by such a suspicious person as LaRouche so quickly. But a man no less suspicious, though considerably less powerful (thankfully) than the folks he has wished to be for the past forty plus years–the presidents, the presidential advisors, the movers and shakers of Washington. But being a spook, a shadow has its perks, too, I suppose.

I knew LaRouche as the crazy old codger who ran for president from prison one year, the guy whose followers plastered telephone polls with run-on-sentence-heavy leaflets praising and pleading for the ear of President Bill Clinton while decrying the evil villainy of…Al Gore. I knew him as the guy whose local representative, out of misplaced curiousity, I had called back in college, only to be talked at for the next two hours before the compulsion to take a nap got me off the phone. I also knew LaRouche as a former Trotskyist who’d done a Mussolini turn, moving from the extreme margins of the Left in the 60’s to the extreme margins of the Right by the 1970’s. And I had read that he had a private intelligence organization.

Hmmm…what does it mean when a sketchy guy with a private intelligence organization says that a nationally traumatic event is “an inside job” and a “coup” while its still happening? What might a guy like that know and what might he just be pretending to know? And how different is the stuff he really knows from what he’s saying?

Curiousity killed the cat and all that. Hearing The Son of the Widow’s Son tell me about this LaRouche guy’s proclamation about 9/11, most certainly affected my reaction upon seeing a bunch of LaRouchers with a table out in my New York neighborhood a month later when I returned to the States. I handed them a dollar, wrote down my number and name and waited to get invited to a meeting.

I wanted to know if I could separate the wheat from the chaff. If I could figure out what the LaRouche people were really up to; but if that was the only reason I dove into the world of the LaRouchers, I could have simply cut to the chase and read a few books. The other truth (and I’m sure it’s not the only one), though, is that more than anything, I wanted to see if I could put myself in a trap and then get out of it.

I learned quite a bit, I think, in the bargain, but I’m just as certain that I wasted a good many months distracted from more worthwhile pursuits, attracting crazy energies to me. I could have been Jeremy Duggan.

I hope one day to meet The Son of the Widow’s Son again. I’ve got so much to tell him. Just in case that never happens, maybe he’ll stumble across Waking the Midnight Sun and read this.