Ell of a Ruckus...

[Ionut Dobrinescu]

Find below ALL incidences in the book of the character ELLIS:
(What ellis do you make of it?)

[...] Ellis is a Chronic came in an Acute and got fouled up bad when they overloaded him in that filthy brain-murdering room that the black boys call the “Shock Shop.” Now he's nailed against the wall in the same condition they lifted him off the table for the last time, in the same shape, arms out, palms cupped, with the same horror on his face. He's nailed like that on the wall, like a stuffed trophy. They pull the nails when it's time to eat or time to drive him in to bed when they want him to move so's I can mop the puddle where he stands. At the old place he stood so long in one spot the piss ate the floor and beams away under him and he kept falling through to the ward below, giving them all kinds of census headaches down there when roll check came around.

[...] Ellis and Ruckly are the youngest Chronics. Colonel Matterson is the oldest, an old, petrified cavalry soldier from the First War

[...] He's there pulling Ellis's hand off the wall and shaking it just like he was a politician running for something and Ellis's vote was good as anybody's. “Buddy,” he says to Ellis in a solemn voice, “my name is R. P. McMurphy and I don't like to see a full-grown man sloshin' around in his own water. Whyn't you go get dried up?” Ellis looks down at the puddle around his feet in pure surprise. “Why, I thank you,” he says and even moves off a few steps toward the latrine before the nails pull his hands back to the wall.

[...] Seven-thirty back to the day room. The Big Nurse looks out through her special glass, always polished till you can't tell it's there, and nods at what she sees, reaches up and tears a sheet off her calendar one day closer to the goal. She pushes a button for things to start. I hear the wharrup of a big sheet of tin being shook someplace. Everybody come to order. Acutes: sit on your side of the day room and wait for cards and Monopoly games to be brought out. Chronics: sit on your side and wait for puzzles from the Red Cross box. Ellis: go to your place at the wall, hands up to receive the nails and pee running down your leg. Pete: wag your head like a puppet. Scanlon: work your knobby hands on the table in front of you, constructing a make-believe bomb to blow up a make-believe world. Harding: begin talking, waving your dove hands in the air, then trap them under your armpits because grown men aren't supposed to wave their pretty hands that way. Sefelt: begin moaning about your teeth hurting and your hair falling out. Everybody: breath in… and out… in perfect order; hearts all beating at the rate the OD cards have ordered. Sound of matched cylinders. Like a cartoon world, where the figures are flat and outlined in black, jerking through some kind of goofy story that might be real funny if it weren't for the cartoon figures being real guys…

[...] The nurse looks at her watch again and pulls a slip of paper out of the folder she's holding, looks at it, and returns it to the folder. She puts the folder down and picks up the log book. Ellis coughs from his place on the wall; she waits until he stops.

[...] “You are strapped to a table, shaped, ironically, like a cross, with a crown of electric sparks in place of thorns. You are touched on each side of the head with wires. Zap! Five cents' worth of electricity through the brain and you are jointly administered therapy and a punishment for your hostile go-to-hell behavior, on top of being put out of everyone's way for six hours to three days, depending on the individual. Even when you do regain consciousness you are in a state of disorientation for days. You are unable to think coherently. You can't recall things. Enough of these treatments and a man could turn out like Mr. Ellis you see over there against the wall. A drooling, pants-wetting idiot at thirty-five. Or turn into a mindless organism that eats and eliminates and yells ‘fuck the wife,’ like Ruckly. Or look at Chief Broom clutching to his namesake there beside you.” Harding points his cigarette at me, too late for me to back off. I make like I don't notice. Go on with my sweeping. “I've heard that the Chief, years ago, received more than two hundred shock treatments when they were really the vogue. Imagine what this could do to a mind that was already slipping. Look at him: a giant janitor. There's your Vanishing American, a six-foot-eight sweeping machine, scared of its own shadow. That, my friend, is what we can be threatened with.”

[...] “All right, forget it. You, partner, how about you? What was your name—Ellis? What do you say, Ellis, to watching a ball game on TV? Just raise your hand…” Ellis's hands are nailed to the wall, can't be counted as a vote. “I said the voting is closed, Mr. McMurphy. You're just making a spectacle of yourself.”

[...] The Acutes who weren't going gathered at the day-room door, told us don't bring our catch back till it's cleaned, and Ellis pulled his hands down off the nails in the wall and squeezed Billy Bibbit's hand and told him to be a fisher of men. And Billy, watching the brass brads on that woman's Levis wink at him as she walked out of the day room, told Ellis to hell with that fisher of men business.

 

[Ionut Dobrinescu]

THE BOOK'S MOTTO LINKED TO CHAPTER 27

The book has two important mottos: one expressing gratitude for some initiation, the other obviously encyphering some important teaching which came out of this.

Most of chapter 27 is a parable.

To Vik Lovell
Who told me dragons did not exist, then led me to their lairs

… one flew east, one flew west, One flew over the cuckoo's nest.
Children's folk rhyme​

27

Up on Disturbed there's an everlasting high-pitched machine-room clatter, a prison mill stamping out license plates. And time is measured out by the di-dock, di-dock of a Ping-pong table. Men pacing their personal runways get to a wall and dip a shoulder and turn and pace back to another wall, dip a shoulder and turn and back again, fast short steps, wearing crisscrossing ruts in the tile floor, with a look of caged thirst. There's a singed smell of men scared berserk and out of control, and in the corners and under the Ping-pong table there's things crouched gnashing their teeth that the doctors and nurses can't see and the aides can't kill with disinfectant. When the ward door opened I smelled that singed smell and heard that gnash of teeth.

A tall bony old guy, dangling from a wire screwed in between his shoulder blades, met McMurphy and me at the door when the aides brought us in. He looked us over with yellow, scaled eyes and shook his head. “I wash my hands of the whole deal,” he told one of the colored aides, and the wire drug him off down the hall.

We followed him down to the day room, and McMurphy stopped at the door and spread his feet and tipped his head back to look things over: he tried to put his thumbs in his pockets, but the cuffs were too tight. “It's a scene,” he said out of the side of his mouth. I nodded my head. I'd seen it all before.

A couple of the guys pacing stopped to look at us, and the old bony man came dragging by again, washing his hands of the whole deal. Nobody paid us much mind at first...

 

[Ionut Dobrinescu]

ALL incidences in the book of the character RUCKLY:

Ruckly is another Chronic came in a few years back as an Acute, but him they overloaded in a different way: they made a mistake in one of their head installations. He was being a holy nuisance all over the place, kicking the black boys and biting the student nurses on the legs, so they took him away to be fixed. They strapped him to that table, and the last anybody saw of him for a while was just before they shut the door on him; he winked, just before the door closed, and told the black boys as they backed away from him, “You'll pay for this, you damn tarbabies.”
And they brought him back to the ward two weeks later, bald and the front of his face an oily purple bruise and two little button-sized plugs stitched one above each eye. You can see by his eyes how they burned him out over there; his eyes are all smoked up and gray and deserted inside like blown fuses. All day now he won't do a thing but hold an old photograph up in front of that burned-out face, turning it over and over in his cold fingers, and the picture wore gray as his eyes on both sides with all his handling till you can't tell any more what it used to be.
The staff, now, they consider Ruckly one of their failures, but I'm not sure but what he's better off than if the installation had been perfect. The installations they do nowadays are generally successful. The technicians got more skill and experience. No more of the button holes in the forehead, no cutting at all—they go in through the eye sockets (TELEVISION?). Sometimes a guy goes over for an installation, leaves the ward mean and mad and snapping at the whole world and comes back a few weeks later with black-and-blue eyes like he'd been in a fist-fight, and he's the sweetest, nicest, best-behaved thing you ever saw. He'll maybe even go home in a month or two, a hat pulled low over the face of a sleepwalker wandering round in a simple, happy dream. A success, they say, but I say he's just another robot for the Combine and might be better off as a failure, like Ruckly sitting there fumbling and drooling over his picture. He never does much else. The dwarf black boy gets a rise out of him from time to time by leaning close and asking, “Say, Ruckly, what you figure your little wife is doing in town tonight?” Ruckly's head comes up. Memory whispers someplace in that jumbled machinery. He turns red and his veins clog up at one end. This puffs him up so he can just barely make a little whistling sound in his throat. Bubbles squeeze out the corner of his mouth, he's working his jaw so hard to say something. When he finally does get to where he can say his few words it's a low, choking noise to make your skin crawl—“Fffffffuck da wife! Fffffffuck da wife!” and passes out on the spot from the effort.


“As to the theory…” The doctor takes a deep, happy breath.
“Ffffuck da wife,” Ruckly says. McMurphy hides his mouth behind the back of his hand and calls across the ward to Ruckly in a scratchy whisper, “Whose wife?” and Martini's head snaps up, eyes wide and staring. “Yeah,” he says, “whose wife? Oh. Her? Yeah, I see her. Yeah.”
“I'd give a lot to have that man's eyes,” McMurphy says of Martini and then doesn't say anything all the rest of the meeting. Just sits and watches and doesn't miss a thing that happens or a word that's said. The doctor talks about his theory until the Big Nurse finally decides he's used up time enough and asks him to hush so they can get on to Harding, and they talk the rest of the meeting about that.
McMurphy sits forward in his chair a couple of times during the meeting like he might have something to say, but he decides better and leans back. There's a puzzled expression coming over his face. Something strange is going on here, he's finding out. He can't quite put his finger on it. Like the way nobody will laugh. Now he thought sure there would be a laugh when he asked Ruckly, “Whose wife?” but there wasn't even a sign of one. The air is pressed in by the walls, too tight for laughing. There's something strange about a place where the men won't let themselves loose and laugh, something strange about the way they all knuckle under to that smiling flour-faced old mother there with the too-red lipstick and the too-big boobs. And he thinks he'll just wait a while to see what the story is in this new place before he makes any kind of play. That's a good rule for a smart gambler: look the game over awhile before you draw yourself a hand.



“You are strapped to a table, shaped, ironically, like a cross, with a crown of electric sparks in place of thorns. You are touched on each side of the head with wires. Zap! Five cents' worth of electricity through the brain and you are jointly administered therapy and a punishment for your hostile go-to-hell behavior, on top of being put out of everyone's way for six hours to three days, depending on the individual. Even when you do regain consciousness you are in a state of disorientation for days. You are unable to think coherently. You can't recall things. Enough of these treatments and a man could turn out like Mr. Ellis you see over there against the wall. A drooling, pants-wetting idiot at thirty-five. Or turn into a mindless organism that eats and eliminates and yells ‘fuck the wife,’ like Ruckly. Or look at Chief Broom clutching to his namesake there beside you.”
Harding points his cigarette at me, too late for me to back off. I make like I don't notice. Go on with my sweeping.
“I've heard that the Chief, years ago, received more than two hundred shock treatments when they were really the vogue. Imagine what this could do to a mind that was already slipping. Look at him: a giant janitor. There's your Vanishing American, a six-foot-eight sweeping machine, scared of its own shadow. That, my friend, is what we can be threatened with.”


“Wait! Wait a minute, let me talk to some of those old guys.”
“The vote is closed, Mr. McMurphy.”
“Let me talk to 'em.”
He's coming across the day room at us. He gets bigger and bigger, and he's burning red in the face. He reaches into the fog and tries to drag Ruckly to the surface because Ruckly's the youngest.
“What about you, buddy? You want to watch the World Series? Baseball? Baseball games? Just raise that hand up there—”
“Fffffffuck da wife.”
“All right, forget it. You, partner, how about you? What was your name—Ellis? What do you say, Ellis, to watching a ball game on TV? Just raise your hand…”
Ellis's hands are nailed to the wall, can't be counted as a vote.
“I said the voting is closed, Mr. McMurphy. You're just making a spectacle of yourself.”




“Boys, I've given a great deal of thought to what I am about to say. I've talked it over with the doctor and with the rest of the staff, and, as much as we regretted it, we all came to the same conclusion—that there should be some manner of punishment meted out for the unspeakable behavior concerning the house duties three weeks ago.” She raised her hand and looked around. “We waited this long to say anything, hoping that you men would take it upon yourselves to apologize for the rebellious way you acted. But not a one of you has shown the slightest sign of remorse.”
Her hand went up again to stop any interruptions that might come—the movement of a tarot-card reader in a glass arcade case.
“Please understand: We do not impose certain rules and restrictions on you without a great deal of thought about their therapeutic value. A good many of you are in here because you could not adjust to the rules of society in the Outside World, because you refused to face up to them, because you tried to circumvent them and avoid them. At some time—perhaps in your childhood—you may have been allowed to get away with flouting the rules of society. When you broke a rule you knew it. You wanted to be dealt with, needed it, but the punishment did not come. That foolish lenience on the part of your parents may have been the germ that grew into your present illness. I tell you this hoping you will understand that it is entirely for your own good that we enforce discipline and order.”
She let her head twist around the room. Regret for the job she has to do was worked into her face. It was quiet except for that high fevered, delirious ringing in my head.
“It's difficult to enforce discipline in these surroundings. You must be able to see that. What can we do to you? You can't be arrested. You can't be put on bread and water. You must see that the staff has a problem; what can we do?”
Ruckly had an idea what they could do, but she didn't pay any attention to it. The face moved with a ticking noise till the features achieved a different look. She finally answered her own question.
“We must take away a privilege. And after careful consideration of the circumstances of this rebellion, we've decided that there would be a certain justice in taking away the privilege of the tub room that you men have been using for your card games during the day. Does this seem unfair?”
Her head didn't move. She didn't look. But one by one everybody else looked at him sitting there in his corner. Even the old Chronics, wondering why everybody had turned to look in one direction, stretched out their scrawny necks like birds and turned to look at McMurphy—faces turned to him, full of a naked, scared hope.
That single thin note in my head was like tires speeding down a pavement.

 

[Richard Stanley]

(What ellis do you make of it?)

What the ell-is going on? They're making an ell of a ruckus?

And Billy, watching the brass brads on that woman's Levis wink at him as she walked out of the day room, told Ellis to hell with that fisher of men business.

In regards to the NT allusions that Joe discussed, I find this passage intriguing. The brassy Levis wink at him.

The surface reading renders that the brads on the denim pants are twinkling light reflections back to him, but it is well known in psychology that the inclusion of key words, in most any order and even out of context, can have an immediate effect upon the otherwise unaware audience.

That said, it would be better if these posts of yours were moved to a separate thread as they aren't in the topic of the parallels between Kesy and Cosby. Perhaps 'Ell of a Ruckus' would be a good Topic title name?

In case you aren't familiar with doing so: Just click on the appropriate category and one can then view all the threads in the category. At the top right you will see a "Post New Thread" button. If it is a problem then perhaps we can get Jerry to move them to a new thread. Members now have 12 hours to make edits, BTW.

 

[Ionut Dobrinescu]

I got it.
But since I can't delete or edit anymore my posts, I won't bother to move (or rather duplicate) them under another topic.
More corroboration of Kesey with the NT allusions would be welcome.

 

[Jerry Russell]

Moved!

 

[Ionut Dobrinescu]

This is Ken Kesey Live at University of Virginia - YouTube
Right at the end (jump to minute 52:46) 0f the conference he recites his favorite mantra.

Wil-li-am wil-li-am
tremble toes,
he's a good fisherman,
catches hens,
puts 'em inna pens…
wire blier,
a limber lock,
three geese
inna flock…
one flew east,
one flew west,
one flew over
the cuckoo's nest…
O-U-T spells out…
you dirty dish
rag you
go out

 

[Ionut Dobrinescu]

The FOG MACHINE is a recurrent theme in the novel, and chapter 15 is a parable entirely dedicated to it. The fog machine (a 'simple rig') to which some simply adhere and some are downright committed stands for the establishment matrix, a prison for our minds. It comes as a confortable deception for all those who wouldn't dare or wouldn't prefer to take the red pill (Excerpts below)


The least black boy and one of the bigger ones catch me before I get ten steps out of the mop closet, and drag me back to the shaving room. I don't fight or make any noise. If you yell it's just tougher on you. I hold back the yelling. I hold back till they get to my temples. I'm not sure it's one of those substitute machines and not a shaver till it gets to my temples; then I can't hold back. It's not a will-power thing any more when they get to my temples. It's a… button, pushed, says Air Raid Air Raid, turns me on so loud it's like no sound, everybody yelling at me, hands over their ears from behind a glass wall, faces working around in talk circles but no sound from the mouths. My sound soaks up all other sound. They start the fog machine again and it's snowing down cold and white all over me like skim milk, so thick I might even be able to hide in it if they didn't have a hold on me. I can't see six inches in front of me through the fog and the only thing I can hear over the wail I'm making is the Big Nurse whoop and charge up the hall while she crashes patients outta her way with that wicker bag. I hear her coming but I still can't hush my hollering. I holler till she gets there. They hold me down while she jams wicker bag and all into my mouth and shoves it down with a mop handle.

Before noontime they're at the fog machine again but they haven't got it turned up full; it's not so thick but what I can see if I strain real hard. One of these days I'll quit straining and let myself go completely, lose myself in the fog the way some of the other Chronics have, but for the time being I'm interested in this new man—I want to see how he takes to the Group Meeting coming up. Ten minutes to one the fog dissolves completely and the black boys are telling Acutes to clear the floor for the meeting. All the tables are carried out of the day room to the tub room across the hall—leaves the floor, McMurphy says, like we was aiming to have us a little dance.

I hear the high, cold, whistling wet breath of the fog machine, see the first wisps of it come seeping out from under McMurphy's bed. I hope he knows enough to hide in the fog. Right now, she's got the fog machine switched on, and it's rolling in so fast I can't see a thing but her face, rolling in thicker and thicker, and I feel as hopeless and dead as I felt happy a minute ago, when she gave that little jerk—even more hopeless than ever before, on account of I know now there is no real help against her or her Combine. McMurphy can't help any more than I could. Nobody can help. And the more I think about how nothing can be helped, the faster the fog rolls in. And I'm glad when it gets thick enough you're lost in it and can let go, and be safe again.


I was seeing him different than when he first came in; I was seeing more to him than just big hands and red sideburns and a broken-nosed grin. I'd see him do things that didn't fit with his face or hands, things like painting a picture at OT with real paints on a blank paper with no lines or numbers anywhere on it to tell him where to paint, or like writing letters to somebody in a beautiful flowing hand. How could a man who looked like him paint pictures or write letters to people, or be upset and worried like I saw him once when he got a letter back? These were the kind of things you expected from Billy Bibbit or Harding. Harding had hands that looked like they should have done paintings, though they never did; Harding trapped his hands and forced them to work sawing planks for doghouses. McMurphy wasn't like that. He hadn't let what he looked like run his life one way or the other, any more than he'd let the Combine mill him into fitting where they wanted him to fit. I was seeing lots of things different. I figured the fog machine had broke down in the walls when they turned it up too high for that meeting on Friday, so now they weren't able to circulate fog and gas and foul up the way things looked. For the first time in years I was seeing people with none of that black outline they used to have, and one night I was even able to see out the windows.

 

[Ionut Dobrinescu]

Chapter 15 - the parable of 'the fog machine' (complete in 4 succesive posts).

I know how they work it, the fog machine. We had a whole platoon used to operate fog machines around airfields overseas. Whenever intelligence figured there might be a bombing attack, or if the generals had something secret they wanted to pull-out of sight, hid so good that even the spies on the base couldn't see what went on—they fogged the field.
It's a simple rig: you got an ordinary compressor sucks water out of one tank and a special oil out of another tank, and compresses them together, and from the black stem at the end of the machine blooms a white cloud of fog that can cover a whole airfield in ninety seconds. The first thing I saw when I landed in Europe was the fog those machines make. There were some interceptors close after our transport, and soon as it hit ground the fog crew started up the machines. We could look out the transport's round, scratched windows and watch the jeeps draw the machines up close to the plane and watch the fog boil out till it rolled across the field and stuck against the windows like wet cotton.
You found your way off the plane by following a little referees' horn the lieutenant kept blowing, sounded like a goose honking. Soon as you were out of the hatch you couldn't see no more than maybe three feet in any direction. You felt like you were out on that airfield all by yourself. You were safe from the enemy, but you were awfully alone. Sounds died and dissolved after a few yards, and you couldn't hear any of the rest of your crew, nothing but that little horn squeaking and honking out of a soft furry whiteness so thick that your body just faded into white below the belt; other than that brown shirt and brass buckle, you couldn't see nothing but white, like from the waist down you were being dissolved by the fog too.
And then some guy wandering as lost as you would all of a sudden be right before your eyes, his face bigger and clearer than you ever saw a man's face before in your life. Your eyes were working so hard to see in that fog that when something did come in sight every detail was ten times as clear as usual, so clear both of you had to look away. When a man showed up you didn't want to look at his face and he didn't want to look at yours, because it's painful to see somebody so clear that it's like looking inside him, but then neither did you want to look away and lose him completely. You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it might be, or you could relax and lose yourself.
When they first used that fog machine on the ward, one they bought from Army Surplus and hid in the vents in the new place before we moved in, I kept looking at anything that appeared out of the fog as long and hard as I could, to keep track of it, just like I used to do when they fogged the airfields in Europe. Nobody'd be blowing a horn to show the way, there was no rope to hold to, so fixing my eyes on something was the only way I kept from getting lost. Sometimes I got lost in it anyway, got in too deep, trying to hide, and every time I did, it seemed like I always turned up at that same place, at that same metal door with the row of rivets like eyes and no number, just like the room behind that door drew me to it, no matter how hard I tried to stay away, just like the current generated by the fiends in that room was conducted in a beam along the fog and pulled me back along it like a robot. I'd wander for days in the fog, scared I'd never see another thing, then there'd be that door, opening to show me the mattress padding on the other side to stop out the sounds, the men standing in a line like zombies among shiny copper wires and tubes pulsing light, and the bright scrape of arcing electricity. I'd take my place in the line and wait my turn at the table. The table shaped like a cross, with shadows of a thousand murdered men printed on it, silhouette wrists and ankles running under leather straps sweated green with use, a silhouette neck and head running up to a silver band goes across the forehead. And a technician at the controls beside the table looking up from his dials and down the line and pointing at me with a rubber glove. “Wait, I know that big bastard there—better rabbit-punch him or call for some more help or something. He's an awful case for thrashing around.”
So I used to try not to get in too deep, for fear I'd get lost and turn up at the Shock Shop door. I looked hard at anything that came into sight and hung on like a man in a blizzard hangs on a fence rail. But they kept making the fog thicker and thicker, and it seemed to me that, no matter how hard I tried, two or three times a month I found myself with that door opening in front of me to the acid smell of sparks and ozone. In spite of all I could do, it was getting tough to keep from getting lost.
Then I discovered something: I don't have to end up at that door if I stay still when the fog comes over me and just keep quiet. The trouble was I'd been finding that door my own self because I got scared of being lost so long and went to hollering so they could track me. In a way, I was hollering for them to track me; I had figured that anything was better'n being lost for good, even the Shock Shop. Now, I don't know. Being lost isn't so bad.
All this morning I been waiting for them to fog us in again. The last few days they been doing it more and more. It's my idea they're doing it on account of McMurphy. They haven't got him fixed with controls yet, and they're trying to catch him off guard. They can see he's due to be a problem; a half a dozen times already he's roused Cheswick and Harding and some of the others to where it looked like they might actually stand up to one of the black boys—but always, just the time it looked like the patient might be helped, the fog would start, like it's starting now.
I heard the compressor start pumping in the grill a few minutes back, just as the guys went to moving tables out of the day room for the therapeutic meeting, and already the mist is oozing across the floor so thick my pants legs are wet. I'm cleaning the windows in the door of the glass station, and I hear the Big Nurse pick up the phone and call the doctor to tell him we're just about ready for the meeting, and tell him perhaps he'd best keep an hour free this afternoon for a staff meeting. “The reason being,” she tells him, “I think it is past time to have a discussion of the subject of Patient Randle McMurphy and whether he should be on this ward or not.” She listens a minute, then tells him, “I don't think it's wise to let him go on upsetting the patients the way he has the last few days.”
That's why she's fogging the ward for the meeting. She don't usually do that. But now she's going to do something with McMurphy today, probably ship him to Disturbed. I put down my window rag and go to my chair at the end of the line of Chronics, barely able to see the guys getting into their chairs and the doctor coming through the door wiping his glasses like he thinks the blurred look comes from his steamed lenses instead of the fog.
It's rolling in thicker than I ever seen it before.
I can hear them out there, trying to go on with the meeting, talking some nonsense about Billy Bibbit's stutter and how it came about. The words come to me like through water, it's so thick. In fact it's so much like water it floats me right up out of my chair and I don't know which end is up for a while. Floating makes me a little sick to the stomach at first. I can't see a thing. I never had it so thick it floated me like this.
The words get dim and loud, off and on, as I float around, but as loud as they get, loud enough sometimes I know I'm right next to the guy that's talking, I still can't see a thing.
I recognize Billy's voice, stuttering worse than ever because he's nervous. “…fuh-fuh-flunked out of college be-be-cause I quit ROTC. I c-c-couldn't take it. Wh-wh-wh-whenever the officer in charge of class would call roll, call ‘Bibbit,’ I couldn't answer. You were s-s-supposed to say heh—heh—heh…” He's choking on the word, like it's a bone in his throat. I hear him swallow and start again. “You were supposed to say, ‘Here sir,’ and I never c-c-could get it out.”
His voice gets dim; then the Big Nurse's voice comes cutting from the left. “Can you recall, Billy, when you first had speech trouble? When did you first stutter, do you remember?”
I can't tell is he laughing or what. “Fir-first stutter? First stutter? The first word I said I st-stut-tered: m-m-m-m-mamma.”
Then the talking fades out altogether: I never knew that to happen before. Maybe Billy's hid himself in the fog too. Maybe all the guys finally and forever crowded back into the fog.
A chair and me float past each other. It's the first thing I've seen. It comes sifting out of the fog off to my right, and for a few seconds it's right beside my face, just out of my reach. I been accustomed of late to just let things alone when they appear in the fog, sit still and not try to hang on. But this time I'm scared, the way I used to be scared. I try with all I got to pull myself over to the chair and get hold of it, but there's nothing to brace against and all I can do is thrash the air, all I can do is watch the chair come clear, clearer than ever before to where I can even make out the fingerprint where a worker touched the varnish before it was dry, looming out for a few seconds, then fading on off again. I never seen it where things floated around this way. I never seen it this thick before, thick to where I can't get down to the floor and get on my feet if I wanted to and walk around. That's why I'm so scared; I feel I'm going to float off someplace for good this time.

 

[Ionut Dobrinescu]

I see a Chronic float into sight a little below me. It's old Colonel Matterson, reading from the wrinkled scripture of that long yellow hand. I look close at him because I figure it's the last time I'll ever see him. His face is enormous, almost more than I can bear. Every hair and wrinkle of him is big, as though I was looking at him with one of those microscopes. I see him so clear I see his whole life. The face is sixty years of southwest Army camps, rutted by iron-rimmed caisson wheels, worn to the bone by thousands of feet on two-day marches.
He holds out that long hand and brings it up in front of his eyes and squints into it, brings up his other hand and underlines the words with a finger wooden and varnished the color of a gunstock by nicotine. His voice as deep and slow and patient, and I see the words come out dark and heavy over his brittle lips when he reads.
“No… The flag is… Ah-mer-ica. America is… the plum. The peach. The wah-ter-mel-on. America is… the gumdrop. The pump-kin seed. America is… tell-ah-vision.”
It's true. It's all wrote down on that yellow hand. I can read it along with him myself.
“Now… The cross is… Mex-i-co.” He looks up to see if I'm paying attention, and when he sees I am he smiles at me and goes on. “Mexico is… the wal-nut. The hazelnut. The ay-corn. Mexico is… the rain-bow. The rain-bow is… wooden. Mexico is… woo-den.”
I can see what he's driving at. He's been saying this sort of thing for the whole six years he's been here, but I never paid him any mind, figured he was no more than a talking statue, a thing made out of bone and arthritis, rambling on and on with these goofy definitions of his that didn't make a lick of sense. Now, at last, I see what he's saying. I'm trying to hold him for one last look to remember him, and that's what makes me look hard enough to understand. He pauses and peers up at me again to make sure I'm getting it, and I want to yell out to him Yes, I see: Mexico is like the walnut; it's brown and hard and you feel it with your eye and it feels like the walnut! You're making sense, old man, a sense of your own. You're not crazy the way they think. Yes… I see…
But the fog's clogged my throat to where I can't make a sound. As he sifts away I see him bend back over that hand.
“Now… The green sheep is… Can-a-da. Canada is… the fir tree. The wheat field. The cal-en-dar…”
I strain to see him drifting away. I strain so hard my eyes ache and I have to close them, and when I open them again the colonel is gone. I'm floating by myself again, more lost than ever.
This is the time, I tell myself. I'm going for good.
There's old Pete, face like a searchlight. He's fifty yards off to my left, but I can see him plain as though there wasn't any fog at all. Or maybe he's up right close and real small, I can't be sure. He tells me once about how tired he is, and just his saying it makes me see his whole life on the railroad, see him working to figure out how to read a watch, breaking a sweat while he tries to get the right button in the right hole of his railroad overalls, doing his absolute damnedest to keep up with a job that comes so easy to the others they can sit back in a chair padded with cardboard and read mystery stories and girlie books. Not that he ever really figured to keep up—he knew from the start he couldn't do that—but he had to try to keep up, just to keep them in sight. So for forty years he was able to live, if not right in the world of men, at least on the edge of it.
I can see all that, and be hurt by it, the way I was hurt by seeing things in the Army, in the war. The way I was hurt by seeing what happened to Papa and the tribe. I thought I'd got over seeing those things and fretting over them. There's no sense in it. There's nothing to be done.
“I'm tired,” is what he says.
“I know you're tired, Pete, but I can't do you no good fretting about it. You know I can't.”
Pete floats on the way of the old colonel.
Here comes Billy Bibbit, the way Pete come by. They're all filing by for a last look. I know Billy can't be more'n a few feet away, but he's so tiny he looks like he's a mile off. His face is out to me like the face of a beggar, needing so much more'n anybody can give. His mouth works like a little doll's mouth.
“And even when I pr-proposed, I flubbed it. I said ‘Huh-honey, will you muh-muh-muh-muh-muh…’ till the girl broke out l-laughing.”
Nurse's voice, I can't see where it comes from: “Your mother has spoken to me about this girl, Billy. Apparently she was quite a bit beneath you. What would you speculate it was about her that frightened you so, Billy?”
“I was in luh-love with her.”
I can't do nothing for you either, Billy. You know that. None of us can. You got to understand that as soon as a man goes to help somebody, he leaves himself wide open. He has to be cagey, Billy, you should know that as well as anyone. What could I do? I can't fix your stuttering. I can't wipe the razorblade scars off your wrists or the cigarette burns off the back of your hands. I can't give you a new mother. And as far as the nurse riding you like this, rubbing your nose in your weakness till what little dignity you got left is gone and you shrink up to nothing from humiliation, I can't do anything about that, either. At Anzio, I saw a buddy of mine tied to a tree fifty yards from me, screaming for water, his face blistered in the sun. They wanted me to try to go out and help him. They'd of cut me in half from that farmhouse over there.
Put your face away, Billy.
They keep filing past.
It's like each face was a sign like one of those “I'm Blind” signs the dago accordion players in Portland hung around their necks, only these signs say “I'm tired” or “I'm scared” or “I'm dying of a bum liver” or “I'm all bound up with machinery and people pushing me alla time.” I can read all the signs, it don't make any difference how little the print gets. Some of the faces are looking around at one another and could read the other fellow's if they would, but what's the sense? The faces blow past in the fog like confetti.
I'm further off than I've ever been. This is what it's like to be dead. I guess this is what it's like to be a Vegetable; you lose yourself in the fog. You don't move. They feed your body till it finally stops eating; then they burn it. It's not so bad. There's no pain. I don't feel much of anything other than a touch of chill I figure will pass in time.
I see my commanding officer pinning notices on the bulletin board, what we're to wear today. I see the US Department of Interior bearing down on our little tribe with a gravel-crushing machine.
I see Papa come loping out of a draw and slow up to try and take aim at a big six-point buck springing off through the cedars. Shot after shot puffs out of the barrel, knocking dust all around the buck. I come out of the draw behind Papa and bring the buck down with my second shot just as it starts climbing the rimrock. I grin at Papa.
I never knew you to miss a shot like that before, Papa. Eye's gone, boy. Can't hold a bead. Sights on my gun just now was shakin' like a dog shittin' peach pits.
Papa, I'm telling you: that cactus moon of Sid's is gonna make you old before your time.
A man drinks that cactus moon of Sid's boy, he's already old before his time. Let's go gut that animal out before the flies blow him.
That's not even happening now. You see? There's nothing you can do about a happening out of the past like that.
Look there, my man…
I hear whispers, black boys.
Look there, that old fool Broom, slipped off to sleep.
Tha's right, Chief Broom, tha's right. You sleep an' keep outta trouble. Yasss.
I'm not cold any more. I think I've about made it. I'm off to where the cold can't reach me. I can stay off here for good. I'm not scared any more. They can't reach me. Just the words reach me, and those're fading.
Well… in as much as Billy has decided to walk out on the discussion, does anyone else have a problem to bring before the group?
As a matter of fact, ma'am, there does happen to be something…

 

[Ionut Dobrinescu]

That's that McMurphy. He's far away. He's still trying to pull people out of the fog. Why don't he leave me be?
“…remember that vote we had a day or so back-about the TV time? Well, today's Friday and I thought I might just bring it up again, just to see if anybody else has picked up a little guts.”
“Mr. McMurphy, the purpose of this meeting is therapy, group therapy, and I'm not certain these petty grievances—”
“Yeah, yeah, the hell with that, we've heard it before. Me and some of the rest of the guys decided—”
“One moment, Mr. McMurphy, let me pose a question to the group: do any of you feel that Mr. McMurphy is perhaps imposing his personal desires on some of you too much? I've been thinking you might be happier if he were moved to a different ward.”
Nobody says anything for a minute. Then someone says, “Let him vote, why dontcha? Why ya want to ship him to Disturbed just for bringing up a vote? What's so wrong with changing time?”
“Why, Mr. Scanlon, as I recall, you refused to eat for three days until we allowed you to turn the set on at six instead of six-thirty.”
“A man needs to see the world news, don't he? God, they coulda bombed Washington and it'd been a week before we'd of heard.”
“Yes? And how do you feel about relinquishing your world news to watch a bunch of men play baseball?”
“We can't have both, huh? No, I suppose not. Well, what the dickens—I don't guess they'll bomb us this week.” “Let's let him have the vote, Miss Ratched.”
“Very well. But I think this is ample evidence of how much he is upsetting some of you patients. What is it you are proposing, Mr. McMurphy?”
“I'm proposing a revote on watching the TV in the afternoon.”
“You're certain one more vote will satisfy you? We have more important things—”
“It'll satisfy me. I just'd kind of like to see which of these birds has any guts and which doesn't.”
“It's that kind of talk, Doctor Spivey, that makes me wonder if the patients wouldn't be more content if Mr. McMurphy were moved.”
“Let him call the vote, why dontcha?”
“Certainly, Mr. Cheswick. A vote is now before the group. Will a show of hands be adequate, Mr. McMurphy, or are you going to insist on a secret ballot?”
“I want to see the hands. I want to see the hands that don't go up, too.”
“Everyone in favor of changing the television time to the afternoon, raise his hand.”
The first hand that comes up, I can tell, is McMurphy's, because of the bandage where that control panel cut into him when he tried to lift it. And then off down the slope I see them, other hands coming up out of the fog. It's like… that big red hand of McMurphy's is reaching into the fog and dropping down and dragging the men up by their hands, dragging them blinking into the open. First one, then another, then the next. Right on down the line of Acutes, dragging them out of the fog till there they stand, all twenty of them, raising not just for watching TV, but against the Big Nurse, against her trying to send McMurphy to Disturbed, against the way she's talked and acted and beat them down for years.
Nobody says anything. I can feel how stunned everybody is, the patients as well as the staff. The nurse can't figure what happened; yesterday, before he tried lifting that panel, there wasn't but four or five men might of voted. But when she talks she don't let it show in her voice how surprised she is.
“I count only twenty, Mr. McMurphy.”
“Twenty? Well, why not? Twenty is all of us there—” His voice hangs as he realizes what she means. “Now hold on just a goddamned minute, lady—”
“I'm afraid the vote is defeated.”
“Hold on just one goddamned minute!”
“There are forty patients on the ward, Mr. McMurphy. Forty patients, and only twenty voted. You must have a majority to change the ward policy. I'm afraid the vote is closed.”
The hands are coming down across the room. The guys know they're whipped, are trying to slip back into the safety of the fog. McMurphy is on his feet.
“Well, I'll be a sonofabitch. You mean to tell me that's how you're gonna pull it? Count the votes of those old birds over there too?”
“Didn't you explain the voting procedure to him, Doctor?”
“I'm afraid—a majority is called for, McMurphy. She's right, she's right.”
“A majority, Mr. McMurphy; it's in the ward constitution.” “And I suppose the way to change the damned constitution is with a majority vote. Sure. Of all the chicken-shit things I've ever seen, this by God takes the cake!”
“I'm sorry, Mr. McMurphy, but you'll find it written in the policy if you'd care for me to—”
“So this's how you work this democratic bullshit—hell's bells!”
“You seem upset, Mr. McMurphy. Doesn't he seem upset, Doctor? I want you to note this.”
“Don't give me that noise, lady. When a guy's getting screwed he's got a right to holler. And we've been damn well screwed.”
“Perhaps, Doctor, in view of the patient's condition, we should bring this meeting to a close early today—”
“Wait! Wait a minute, let me talk to some of those old guys.”
“The vote is closed, Mr. McMurphy.”
“Let me talk to 'em.”
He's coming across the day room at us. He gets bigger and bigger, and he's burning red in the face. He reaches into the fog and tries to drag Ruckly to the surface because Ruckly's the youngest.
“What about you, buddy? You want to watch the World Series? Baseball? Baseball games? Just raise that hand up there—”
“Fffffffuck da wife.”
“All right, forget it. You, partner, how about you? What was your name—Ellis? What do you say, Ellis, to watching a ball game on TV? Just raise your hand…”
Ellis's hands are nailed to the wall, can't be counted as a vote.
“I said the voting is closed, Mr. McMurphy. You're just making a spectacle of yourself.”
He don't pay any attention to her. He comes on down the line of Chronics. “C'mon, c'mon, just one vote from you birds, just raise a hand. Show her you can still do it.”
“I'm tired,” says Pete and wags his head.
“The night is… the Pacific Ocean.” The Colonel is reading off his hand, can't be bothered with voting.
“One of you guys, for cryin' out loud! This is where you get the edge, don't you see that? We have to do this—or we're whipped! Don't a one of you clucks know what I'm talking about enough to give us a hand? You, Gabriel? George? No? You, Chief, what about you?”
He's standing over me in the mist. Why won't he leave me be?
“Chief, you're our last bet.”
The Big Nurse is folding her papers; the other nurses are standing up around her. She finally gets to her feet.
“The meeting is adjourned, then”, I hear her say. “And I'd like to see the staff down in the staff room in about an hour. So, if there is nothing el—”
It's too late to stop it now. McMurphy did something to it that first day, put some kind of hex on it with his hand so it won't act like I order it. There's no sense in it, any fool can see; I wouldn't do it on my own. Just by the way the nurse is staring at me with her mouth empty of words I can see I'm in for trouble, but I can't stop it. McMurphy's got hidden wires hooked to it, lifting it slow just to get me out of the fog and into the open where I'm fair game. He's doing it, wires…

 

[Ionut Dobrinescu]

No. That's not the truth. I lifted it myself.
McMurphy whoops and drags me standing, pounding my back.
“Twenty-one! The Chief's vote makes it twenty-one! And by God if that ain't a majority I'll eat my hat!”
“Yippee,” Cheswick yells. The other Acutes are coming across toward me.
“The meeting was closed,” she says. Her smile is still there, but the back of her neck as she walks out of the day room and into the Nurses' Station, is red and swelling like she'll blow apart any second.
But she don't blow up, not right off, not until about an hour later. Behind the glass her smile is twisted and queer, like we've never seen before. She just sits. I can see her shoulders rise and fall as she breathes.
McMurphy looks up at the clock and he says it's time for the game. He's over by the drinking fountain with some of the other Acutes, down on his knees scouring off the baseboard. I'm sweeping out the broom closet for the tenth time that day. Scanlon and Harding, they got the buffer going up and down the hall, polishing the new wax into shining figure eights. McMurphy says again that he guesses it must be game time and he stands up, leaves the scouring rag where it lies. Nobody else stops work. McMurphy walks past the window where she's glaring out at him and grins at her like he knows he's got her whipped now. When he tips his head back and winks at her she gives that little sideways jerk of her head.
Everybody keeps on at what he's doing, but they all watch out of the corners of their eyes while he drags his armchair out to in front of the TV set, then switches on the set and sits down. A picture swirls onto the screen of a parrot out on the baseball field singing razor-blade songs. McMurphy gets up and turns up the sound to drown out the music coming down from the speaker in the ceiling, and he drags another chair in front of him and sits down and crosses his feet on the chair and leans back and lights a cigarette. He scratches his belly and yawns.
“Hoo-weee! Man, all I need me now is a can of beer and a red-hot.”
We can see the nurse's face get red and her mouth work as she stares at him. She looks around for a second and sees everybody's watching what she's going to do—even the black boys and the little nurses sneaking looks at her, and the residents beginning to drift in for the staff meeting, they're watching. Her mouth clamps shut. She looks back at McMurphy and waits till the razor-blade song is finished; then she gets up and goes to the steel door where the controls are, and she flips a switch and the TV picture swirls back into the gray. Nothing is left on the screen but a little eye of light beading right down on McMurphy sitting there.
That eye don't faze him a bit. To tell the truth, he don't even let on he knows the picture is turned off; he puts his cigarette between his teeth and pushes his cap forward in his red hair till he has to lean back to see out from under the brim.
And sits that way, with his hands crossed behind his head and his feet stuck out in a chair, a smoking cigarette sticking out from under his hatbrim—watching the TV screen.
The nurse stands this as long as she can; then she comes to the door of the Nurses' Station and calls across to him he'd better help the men with the housework. He ignores her.
“I said, Mr. McMurphy, that you are supposed to be working during these hours.” Her voice has a tight whine like an electric saw ripping through pine. “Mr. McMurphy, I'm warning you!”
Everybody's stopped what he was doing. She looks around her, then takes a step out of the Nurses' Station toward McMurphy.
“You're committed, you realize. You are… under the jurisdiction of me… the staff.” She's holding up a fist, all those red-orange fingernails burning into her palm. “Under jurisdiction and control—”
Harding shuts off the buffer, and leaves it in the hall, and goes pulls him a chair up alongside McMurphy and sits down and lights him a cigarette too.
“Mr. Harding! You return to your scheduled duties!”
I think how her voice sounds like it hit a nail, and this strikes me so funny I almost laugh.
“Mr. Har-ding!”
Then Cheswick goes and gets him a chair, and then Billy Bibbit goes, and then Scanlon and then Fredrickson and Sefelt, and then we all put down our mops and brooms and scouring rags and we all go pull us chairs up.
“You men—Stop this. Stop!”
And we're all sitting there lined up in front of that blanked-out TV set, watching the gray screen just like we could see the baseball game clear as day, and she's ranting and screaming behind us.
If somebody'd of come in and took a look, men watching a blank TV, a fifty-year-old woman hollering and squealing at the back of their heads about discipline and order and recriminations, they'd of thought the whole bunch was crazy as loons.

 

[Ionut Dobrinescu]

MORPHEUS to NEO:
Do you want to know what it is? The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us, even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out to your window, or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth that you are a slave. Like everyone else you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind. Unfortunately no one can be told what the matrix is. You have to see it for yourself. This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. Remember: all I'm offering is THE TRUTH. Follow me.

 

[Richard Stanley]

I get your association between The Matrix and the ..Cuckoo's Nest. Especially given that explicit Matrix excerpt, I wonder what your opinion is of the notion that the Wachowski siblings are really not our friends just because they had Morpheus point this out. Jerry and I briefly touched on this in our review of the recent Wachowski movie Jupiter Ascending, which is really trying to tell us generally the same thing about who runs the show behind the scenes.

The Wizard of Oz did similarly using the old man behind the veil, but in that case he was just a meek old man, or at least once unveiled he portrayed himself as meek and of otherwise good nature, seeming not understanding the gravity of what he was doing to us. But before the veil was pulled back, it was still him with the demanding voice. But what was the effect of this message?

Are these messages to those alert enough to take positive action, or rather warning them who is really running the Matrix and therefore upset the apple cart at your own risk?

 

[Ionut Dobrinescu]

I know that the Wachowski brothers have been discussed here, and I could only pay attention to their latest Jupiter Ascending because of your excellent review here. But I must admit that I don't have as yet an opinion on them, friend or foe.

Nevertherless, I think that whoever does not openly state the truth is not necessarily an enemy of the truth, and may have his reasons to act ambiguously as part of the FOG MACHINE.

In retrospect, how would you call, friend or foe, now historical characters in literature such as: Josephus Flavius (and his Flavian Signature), Christopher Marlowe, Emilia Bassano aka Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, George Orwell, Frank Baum, J.D. Salinger, Ken Kesey, Stanley Kubrick, Umberto Eco...? Would their work qualify as warning (at least) or as positive action (at most)?

As far as positive action is concerned, I already came to the personal conclusion that a global awakening from the Matrix is neither feasible, nor desirable. Much to our regret, a world of completely free-thinking people would not be governable, for lack of consensus and social conformity. I fear that the true exploit in the evolution of human society was to figure out and set up the Matrix for the masterminding of most, and not to dismantle it for the intellectual gratification of the few (those actually NOT in charge with ruling and managing the society).

Because the ultimate question is this: when the Postflaviana mindset comes of age, based on the revelations of a few, what kind of a world will that be for the people at large?

 

[Richard Stanley]

Those are are all excellent points, and questions. I have pondered on this generally myself.

I fear that the true exploit in the evolution of human society was to figure out and set up the Matrix for the masterminding of most, and not to dismantle it for the intellectual gratification of the few (those actually NOT in charge with ruling and managing the society).

Saussey's Ruler's of Evil (the download link is somewhere on this site) has this as an underlying premise in his revelation of Jesuit, Masonic, and American history, but I'm not sure if he wasn't really being tongue-in-cheek in his framing of this.

Ironically some 'freethinking' people have felt more comfortable in secret associations, attempting to hide from the Matrix du jour, and perhaps the Matrix has allowed for such playpens, frequently knowing they can always covertly tap those resources when they have need.

That humans can become like herdless cats when breaking free from the sheep paradigm certainly presents a problem, but perhaps it is more an issue of finding the proper balance? After all the Matrix's organs over time are all ripe for abuse, besides managing their sheep and the cats' foibles, even if your premise is true.

 

[Jerry Russell]

Ionut,

Thanks very much for your comments, and also for your support for Joe's work at Wikipedia.

I am curious where this fear comes from, that people who are not deceived by religious and cultural lies will become ungovernable. Aside from the tiny percentage of the population who are genetically psychopathic, I believe that most people have an instinctive level of altruism and a strong desire to live together peacefully with their neighbors. You might take a look at my article "Paleolithic hunter-gatherer egalitarianism" (on this site) to get an idea of our view of the nature of social life before the rise of psychopathic ruling systems.

 

[Ionut Dobrinescu]

It is not as much nominal „fear” as probabilistic concern that, for lack of ideological mantras, much of the society as we've been knowing it for some time would most likely disintegrate -- unless consensus is renewed under a new paradigm, accesible at various levels to both idiots and geniuses, but to the same effect.

Because RELIGION and EMPIRE are not the only social processes in need of ideological support from the Matrix system: MONEY for instance is a social convention (another cultural lie, if you prefer) built on some universal trust between strangers, which is no longer invested in humans, communities or sacred values, but in the impersonal systems that back it, the Matrix core at its best!

Although EDUCATION can be a mass-process, CULTURE is always a selective one. And I think I can prove it in no time:

Would you care to free yourself from the Matrix money-system by learning everything on your own about Bitcoin like... right away? As far as I know, Bitcoin, just as CM, is not being taught in any schools and universities, although plenty of information is widely available: The Book Of Satoshi, Mastering Bitcoin, Bitcoin: And the Future of Money, The Age of Cryptocurrency.

The point is this: if your answer is NO, or MAYBE, or LATER, am I entitled to suspect that you are unwilling to take the red pill, or too dumb, or too much of a victim and willing accomplice of the psychopathic ruling system, or too confortable to leave the safety of the fog machine which controls the issue of credit? Is learning about Caesar's Messiah any different?

PS: For some serious anthropological considerations on the global vision paradigm, I would recommend Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

 

[Wolfsire]

I know that the Wachowski brothers have been discussed here, and I could only pay attention to their latest Jupiter Ascending because of your excellent review here. But I must admit that I don't have as yet an opinion on them, friend or foe?

Foe, and the Matrix is more fog. The truth is that the red pill is offered to provide more deception to those that know the blue is false.

http://mileswmathis.com/matrix2.pdf

After reading this, I spend a fair amount of time looking at photos and doing comparisons. Larry did not have a sex change to become Lana. They are different people, and Lana is most likely an actual female.

 

[Richard Stanley]

The point is this: if your answer is NO, or MAYBE, or LATER, am I entitled to suspect that you are unwilling to take the red pill, or too dumb, or too much of a victim and willing accomplice of the psychopathic ruling system, or too confortable to leave the safety of the fog machine which controls the issue of credit? Is learning about Caesar's Messiah any different?

My excuse is that I'm spending too much epic time and effort trying to avoid becoming a god, so to speak. Which in a less dramatic sense is, of course, a major concern generally for a lot of people - besides all the other bread and circus distractions the Matrix offers them.

I'm a little bit puzzled as to where you are going with your argument though. Are you saying that a replacement paradigm is needed for the components of the present Matrix, as you seem to be endorsing for its MONEY aspect? If so, I would agree, but don't ask me how to accomplish it all. I'm just trying to get out of Plato's Cave before my metaphorical toilet finishes flushing.