The movie had a scene, at the beginning, in which a conservative banker said bluntly that "Kane" (Hearst) was a Communist. It went on to make a big mystery about the word "Rosebud," which referred to General Crowley's system of "Rosy Cross" Cabalistic magick which the Communists were using to make money out of nothing. It exposed, almost blatantly, how Unistat was actually governed.
Welles was blacklisted, and spent the rest of his life wandering around the world playing bit parts in films by other directors.
The W. F. Bach Society financed Welles in the making of his second film, Art Is What You Can Get Away With, which was a bold glorification of El Mir.
Next, the W. F. Bach cabal financed a new literary journal, Passaic Review, which they advertised so widely that everybody with any pretense to being an intellectual had to read it.
The Passaic Review heaped scorn and invective on the established literary idols of the time-Simon Moon, the neo-surrealist novelist; Gerald Ford, the "country-and-western" poet; Norman Mailer; Robert Heinlein; Tim Hildebrand; and so on. They also denounced all the alleged "greats" of the first part of the century, like H. P. Lovecraft, Henry James, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Putney Drake.
They established their own pantheon of "great" writers, which included William Butler Yeats (an obscure Irish schoolteacher nobody had ever heard of), Olaf Stapledon, Arthur Flegenheimer, and Jonathan Latimer.
After only two years of bombardment by the erudite and authoritative-sounding articles in Passaic Review, most self-declared intellectuals were seriously comparing Yeats with Eliot and granting that some of Stapledon's novels were as good as anything by James or Drake.
All of this was an experiment, actually. Blake Williams had not believed everything he told the founders of the W. F. Bach Society. He was convinced that a great deal of what passes for Value was created, not by labor as the Marxists thought, nor by supply-and-demand as the Free Market economists claimed, but by what he as an anthropologist recognized as shamanism.
He was trying to find out how much Value, and hence how much Reality, was so created.
He believed that large hunks of experience could be altered by people who regarded themselves as shamans and considered anyone who opposed them to be rival shamans trying to sell an alternative Reality.
It was his plan to move the Bach group, slowly, from experimenting upon the economics of art to experimenting upon the art of economics.
He knew that Value was the Schrodinger's Cat in every equation.
THE MAD FISHMONGER AGAIN
"Gentlemen," Clem Cotex said smugly, "I believe I have identified the Mad Fishmonger."
The entire membership of the Warren Belch Society- all eight of them-were assembled in the tiny office and a gasp of astonishment went up.
"Yes," Clem said emphatically, standing at the head of the table, under the portrait of Wigner's Friend, "I believe I have a positive 'make' on the 'suspect,' as Jack Webb would say."
Anthropologist Blake Williams, he of the monumental obsession upon Schrodinger's occasionally dead cat, spoke first. "Who?" he cried, almost in the tone of one who hears that the circle has, at last, been squared.
"Let me present the evidence," Cotex said with a solemnity that fit the occasion. He doused the lights and stepped to his slide-projector machine.
On the screen at the other end of the office appeared a well-known face.
"That's General Crowley, the discoverer of the North Pole!" exclaimed Professor Percy "Prime" Time.
"Yes," said Clem Cotex with deliberation. "General Edward A. Crowley, the best-known explorer and adventurer of the early decades of our century. The model of the English nobleman. The idol of young boys everywhere. General Crowley, indeed." He paused dramatically.
"Look at those eyes." Clem's voice suddenly had the tone of Perry Mason addressing the court. "How would you describe those dark and brooding orbs, my friends?"
"Well," Dr. Williams said, "he has what I believe is called urn a piercing gaze."
"Exactly," Cotex said. "A piercing gaze."
Another picture of General Crowley came on the screen. And another. And another.
"The same piercing gaze," Clem said pointedly, "year after year. No matter where he is when a photographer pops up-Africa, Mexico, the North Pole; it doesn't matter-always the same piercing gaze."
"Well ah aren't heroes supposed to have a piercing gaze?" Old Prime Time protested, wondering if this was just another of Clem's wild-goose chases.
"In a certain class of sensational fiction," Clem said tightly, "heroes have a piercing gaze. Sometimes the villains do too-Fu Manchu for instance. But we are not living in that kind of novel," he went on, not bothering to tell them his opinion of what kind of novel they were living in. "In our reality, a piercing gaze means only one thing, and you all know what it is, gentlemen."
Another picture of General Crowley came on the screen, one in which he was much older than in the previous four photos; but he still had the same dark and deep-yes, piercing-gaze.
"These are the eyes," Clem said, "of a hopeless slave of the hashish habit. Now, as you all know, many English military men acquired a taste for the resin of the Cannabis Indica plant while in India, and were none the worse for it. Certainly, an occasional smoke of the hash is an enjoyable, even a mind-expanding, experience. I daresay most of you here have tried it, and I gladly admit that I have. But a sensible man keeps such diversions within certain bounds. Such a sane, sound man does not 'do a number' (as our younger people call it) until evening, or at least until twilight. Well, maybe late afternoon, occasionally. Perhaps in the morning once in a while. But not one stick of hash after another, day after day, year after year, for twenty, thirty, forty years! No: one who fits that description is a slave of the habit, a hashish robot, a man whose mind has lost contact with Reality (whatever that is) and wanders amid the phantasms of his own poisoned brain. A man, as the Irish say, whose mind had been taken away by the Wee People."
All gazed up at the photo of General Crowley, "the last of the Kipling heroes," as a journalist had called him, and Crowley gazed back at them, stony-eyed, impassive, enigmatic.
"Now, I have been studying all of General Crowley's wanderings," Clem went on. "He was, in fact, back in England during November of 1881. The crab and periwinkle prank would have been easy for a man of his wealth, if his mind had already acquired that strange quirk, that twist in the sensibility, which cannabis abusers refer to in their own argot as 'a spaced-out sense of humor.'
"In 1893, what do we find?" Clem continued. "General Crowley was visiting the Jersey shore, right here in Unistat, 'fishing and relaxing,' he says in his autobiography. And that very summer we see the first record of 'the Jersey Devil,' that fabulous monster that looked like a gorilla, jumped like a kangaroo, and glowed in the dark.
"I think we can discount later appearances of the Jersey Devil," Clem said argumentatively, "as the work of lesser pranksters, inspired by General Crowley's initial success. "In 1904," Clem went on, "there was the famous werewolf scare in Northumberland. General Crowley was back in England that year. In 1905 we have the first major UFO flap in Spain. General Crowley was vacationing there. In 1908 gnomes and other Little Green Men were reported in Switzerland. General Crowley was there, allegedly only to climb mountains.