Some books are phenomenons. The Hitchhiker’s Guide is a cult classic. Once in awhile, a reader might review some previous works with a new eye. For instance, the last time this reviewer read this work, Douglas Adams was alive. He now, sadly, no longer is having died in May 2001 shortly before the attacks on the World Trade Center.
Adams spanned a long career of writing about science fiction and contributed to the venerable TV series Doctor Who. The Hitchhiker’s Guide was meant to be first a radio show and so it was therefore a script. It was only a book incidentally.
A more mature reading of Adams’s work proves to have borrowed extensively from the Bible. This “Biblical Theme” is a running current throughout his work. It is not a stretch to say that everything written here is an exercise in absurdity. Adams takes more than a few pot shots at religion, although he attempts to play these shots off as being part of “how the universe works”. There is a certain “Mark Twain” type of mechanism at work here, though, because a lot of what Adams is saying as jokes are actual things that are happening. It is clear he is borrowing from the Bible, the search for the shipwreck of the Titanic, a lot of “conspiracy theories” about “lizard aliens” and a host of other bits and pieces that formed the matrix of the latter-half of the 20th century. Twain would famously travel to Israel and write about how no living person would want to live there in their right mind only to be used as a mouthpiece of prophecy since Israel would literally be a thriving country not all that long after his death. Sometimes, the joke is on ourselves even when we think the joke is on everyone else.
Interestingly Adams hated his characters from Arthur Dent to Ford Prefect to Zaphod. He became defined by the success of these characters, but he was also imprisoned by them.
As a collective work, the Hitchhiker’s Guide does not cohere together fluidly or well. There is a lot of repetition. There are large gaps that are not explained. Indeed, the book reads a little like one had a stroke, and then came back and forgot whatever was being written about before other than some broad recollections. In between times the main characters are most often drunk. This is maybe not terribly surprising, since the idea for the book came to Adams when he was laying drunk in a field starring up at the stars–or so we think. Adams establishes very early on that he is not a reliable storyteller or fact-keeper. He is aware of his contradictions in his work, and he informs the reader that this is mostly “their problem”.
Among all this insanity is some quite witty writing combined with some actually surprisingly good prose. The story that does cohere together is entertaining in about the length and duration one would want a radio show to be. It is juvenile, and it is sacrilegious, but it is also, at times, genuinely amusing. Yet, in this amusement one begins to tire of the merry-go-round whirlwind of absurdity. One starts to crave a plot that actually means something other than buffoonery. This is the nature of nonsense writing such as the Hitchhiker’s Guide. Nothing is especially enriched at a soul level for having read the work. It was entertaining.
An interesting technical point concerning Adams was that his last message in his forum read thusly:
Re: Mac OS X
I was going to wait till the summer to install it, but I succumbed and installed it last week. It takes a little getting used to, old habits are hard to reform, and it’s not quite finished (what software ever is), and much of the software that’s out to run on it is Beta.
But…
I think it’s brilliant. I’ve fallen completely in love with it. And the promise of what’s to come once people start developing in Cocoa is awesome…
Two weeks later, Adams was dead after heaping praise on the “cult of Apple”.
When asked what made him pick the number 42 as the answer to life, the universe, and everything, he said he looked out his window into his garden and simply felt like that would be the right choice. Did Adams die after eating the forbidden fruit? Even Marvin would have had to have appreciated that universal joke although Adams, at the age of 49, probably was not laughing.
Johnathan Cahn has become a controversial pastor. A cursory glance through the internet shows many differing beliefs about whether or not he is a false Prophet. Upon reading his book, The Paradigm there was nothing necessarily prophetic as such. Rather, it described a pattern nations follow when there is a prophecy that is on its way to being fulfilled.
Mr. Cahn goes to careful lengths to demonstrate that though the paradigm fits right down to years that correlate to Biblical baddies and their life decisions that affected Israel, it does not necessarily imply that the people named–usually Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton–are the embodiment necessarily of these people. Rather, they are following a pattern that is similar to what characters like Ahab and Jezebel lived. The main point is that these case studies in “what not to do” in the Bible share a lot of commonalities with the political platforms and careers of the above-named–specifically those matters which concern abortion and child sacrifice. Mr. Cahn comes very close to insisting that these overlaps are something like what Carl Jung would have termed the “expression of the collective conscious/unconscious”.
There is a tendency then, when dealing with these unconscious but familiar patterns for people to lose the division between the pattern and the person. Nowhere is Mr. Cahn suggesting that Hillary Clinton IS Jezebel–not once. Rather, what he does suggest is that there is an uncanny level of connection BETWEEN the life of Jezebel and Hillary Clinton. In a similar sense there is also an overlap between Ahab and Bill Clinton. Likewise, there is a similarity to Ahab’s son, Jehoram and a likeness to Trump and Jehu. He makes a further nuanced point that belief is not necessarily about political parties, but that if you happen to be against killing children it tends to put you into the Conservative party since the Democrats have been standing upon abortion as a key element of their political leanings. The book argues, quite simply, if you are for the pagan God Baal, you are against YHVH. Since Baal worship includes homosexual relationships and child sacrifice, then if you are against that you are for God and that is the side you should be on since otherwise you are working for evil purposes. The political party assumes a subordinate role, but the implication of which party stands on or opposes these matters cannot be avoided.
What one wishes Mr. Cahn would do is attempt to explain where these patterns stop matching. For instance, Ahab died. Bill Clinton remained alive. Hillary Clinton was defeated, but so far she has not been eaten by dogs. Why are these patterns so tight in certain respects, and glaringly divergent in other ways? Is it simply the case that people who appear to be enemies of YHVH follow these patterns, butnot precisely? Can they pick up some other pattern later and what is the purpose of assuming such “paradigms?” These are questions that Mr. Cahn does not appear to offer any speculation concerning. Likely, this is because he is attempting to stay away from anything that might cast him in the role of having made a prophecy. On the other hand, everything about the pattern he indicates concerns prophecy directly. Indeed, the story of Ahab and Jezebel concerns a prophecy uttered due to murder perpetrated to take possession of a vineyard. If all these overlaps are present, then is it much of a jump to say that should Bill and Hillary Clinton be guilty of murder that they have covered up in some fashion that they should face a similar end? Indeed, Cahn points out Whitewater which was a shady land deal in the Ozarks and the mysterious death of Vince Foster. Should we then not expect that for the pattern to complete that Fort Marcy, named after Randolph B Marcy, who was a father-in-law to George B. McClellan who was the General for the Union under Lincoln during the Civil War to re-emerge since it was the place of Mr. Foster’s death? Did not Lincoln also die under dubious circumstances? Maybe there isa massive pattern that Mr. Cahn has identified as a smaller series or sub-pattern or type. This level of revelation would indeed, if found to be a pattern, be tantamount to the “clearing of blood from the land.”
Of course, the reader is left not knowing whether Mr. Cahn supposes something like this. He does an excellent job pointing out the pattern, and for most people, that’s probably plenty with which to contend. While it is a good appetite whetter, it leaves one craving a more substantial meal in terms of context. Sure, there are many commonalities, but why where they lack a good fit are they not fitting? Coincidence? The reader hardly thinks so after this read. There has GOT to be a reason, and maybe Mr. Cahn knows but is reserving it for a future book. If so, expect an update here.
Back in 2007, John Perkins was busy writing about some deep, dark conspiracies that grace the pages of his book The Secret History of an American Empire. Much of what he had to say concerned the NSA, hitmen and regime changes, and a quite unflattering picture of American policy working in tandem with things like the IMF and the World Bank. Before even this book came out shortly after 9-11, Mr. Perkins wrote another book that might have been a kind of confessional to unburden himself for having taken part in the apparatus which he now writes concerning.
Mr. Perkins story begins with his joining the Peace Corps so that he could sidestep the issue of being drafted into Vietnam. This Peace Corps experience puts him in touch with some Shamans who live in the rainforests and it is there that he begins to learn the nature of the journey he is undertaking although he certainly falls into the staunchly materialistic paradigm of the world for an extended time. This puts him into contact with both powerful military industrial corporations and indigenous peoples who are being exploited by them. It is evident that the tension between these positions is something that has caused Mr. Perkins high levels of discomfort and indeed, likely embodies the “wounded healer” aspect of any Shamanic Journey.
Mr. Perkins learns from the Shamans that the world is “dreamed into being” but it appears the American Dream has become an industrial nightmare. After many harrowing interactions with dangerous people in foreign places such as in Brazil, Sudan, or Indonesia, he eventually decides the Shamans are right and that the children of the world need a new dream if they are to have a future.
Reading the many reviews of this book is interesting for the simple reason that many dismiss it as conspiracy theory, and yet, the facts were researched by the New York Times and found to be consistent. Mr. Perkins says that during the writing of his books he was threatened for having spoken about these issues and it does make one wonder how on earth a book such as this was published in the pre-Trump political landscape of the twilight of George Bush Jr’s presidency.
Still, Mr. Perkins has managed to carve out a decent living as a writer and a speaker concerning these issues. It will require more than a confessional with extensive writing contracts to “make up” for the damaging systems he participated in earlier on. Troublingly, Mr. Perkins seems to believe it is possible to have World Peace without something rather drastic happening to allow this to be so. (Think Biblical-level world events?) While the world is partly a dream, it is not entirely a dream. If it were so, one would never need to “wake-up”. People do not, for instance, simply enact nightmares by nature at the scale Mr. Perkins is seeing without there being something fundamentally wrong with the people involved. While it is laudable to make a check list of proactive actions to try to “wake people up”–a lot of Mr. Perkins’s book feels like one is a priest inside a Catholic Church listening to someone unburden their soul. Is he looking for the reader to absolve him? Is his courage in speaking and focus on a future for his children enough to make him like the Shamans that taught him? Or, is it the case that Mr. Perkins has found yet another way to rob indigenous people of more resources–in this case their spirituality–to create a brand and a niche writing market for himself? It proves hard to trust those who have been entangled deeply in the tendrils of the NSA.
Still, blowing the whistle does require courage and a willingness to go against the system. The above questions are really only answerable by God and Mr. Perkins. Perhaps one should apply the principle and dictate that if Mr. Perkins is not “for” this industrial military melange, then perhaps enemy of the enemy of the people is the people’s friend after all.
Regardless, the book makes for an interesting read that fills in some gaps in American history from a unique perspective. There is a Third Edition of this book now available, which may also makesome needed amendments to the work given the changing times. That edition was not available for review at this time, however, if it becomes so in the future expect a follow-up.
