Pebbles says "Gaga", Autism and Masks, M*A*S*H Finale, the CIA and Real America: gagablog 183

As the commercials between the Flinstones on Me TV played tonight I had the thought that I had never never gotten back to actually analyzing the real lyrics of Artpop - I had started my "getting it wrong" series, based on the lyrics as I heard them before looking up the actual ones - which I have been doing since the Trump Era began, getting it wrong. Then a commercial came on for the "rarely shown" final episode of M*A*S*H  - and they mentioned how many people watched it, half the country, when it first aired. This got me into an alerted state - "you know how armies are when you try to take their war away" - and I felt like the TV was giving me a message I would need to convey in gagablog format. The whole reason I was even thinking about this, and getting away from the lyrics of Artpop, was because a little monster whose profile said she was from Egypt was chatting with me yesterday on facebook and asked why I had gotten "distracted" with my gagablog - and we talked on the 6th anniversary of Artpop's release - on a day when I believe Gaga had to cancel her Las Vegas concert due to illness.

So, due to the commercial about the rare airing of the Finale of M*A*S*H in was in a heightened alertness state for messages -and they came quickly. I will get to the Flintstones and Pebble saying "Gaga", next - but now they are reminiscing about the filming of that finale - how they wanted an episode to End the War, now. "The Basic idea was the end of the war." It was a two-hour finale instead of the 30-minute form. They mention the Korean War itself was 3-4 years but the series went on for 11. Carol is remembering that she and ALan Alda go back to when he was 11 and she was 9, for example. The mentioned how the audience for the broadcast was the biggest ever -only surpassed by Superbowls since then - and that they didn't even know how many people saw it, town halls were filled with people gathered to watch it on one set, theaters closed and only take-out pizza places did any business. They said that in cities like New York the water level went down because after the show everyone flushed the toilet at the same time after holding it - these aren't the reasons why it wasn;t shown again - but this is what got my attention up: Massive, shared events are ONE kind of Magic that I have always beein interested, here, and Novelty, the Hidden, the Rare, is another kind of magic - and probably relates to kinds of censorship.

SPOLIER ALERT on the end of M*A*S*H -  as this develops it seems the plot revolves around Hawkeye being in a mental ward for "losing his mind" - and this is basically the theme of this whole edition. This MASH context  -  and I went to the store so I missed some of the episode in case there was some "objectionable" moment - but I suspect the reason it isn't shown is simply due to the length of the episode, 2 hours, but most likely the theme of mental illness - we try to avoid it. I'm only mentioning M*A*S*H for context - ALL of this is part of a spell to end war - and Hawkeye had a breakthrough remembering the trauma he was repressing, a girl killing her own baby to keep quiet - and they are now, in the restrospective, talking about how it was a real incident, to save 50 people when a troop was passing over a bridge - and how people they told had told the same story, now Alan Alda is saying he heard the same story from at least two wars and now again read it in a current war - how it happens all the time - in War. All of this is a spell to end War. Within the culture that allows War we have MANY other problems - and we need to fix these, too, all on the way to the worldwide, collective effort we need to end War and Fossil Fuels and create the new, sustainable world we all truly know we need.

But all of this about War, the Wider context - because even if we are lucky enough to live where War is not taking place we all live in the same world that still allows War - they system run by the very people who create and promote and prolong wars.

And I believe that when I write better - when I write about the world as it should be instead of the broken world as it is - it WILL get better. I've predicted that we would have to end Trump's Nazi regime and we seem to be finally making progress to that goal - but we have inner personal transformations we call all work on, in ourselves, every day - and that is what the Flintstones episode where Pebbles says "Gaga" made me think about, especially as it related to a story I heard on the radio last night about a girl's experience in the CIA.

As I'm thinking about this the commercial for MASH - "I don't need to hear a lot of Lebanese Fairy Tales!" "It's an old Bedouin trick" - Klinger just said - came on and made me think it was all part of this spell - something i would need to write about in the gagablog. Then the Flintstones episode starts and Fred is telling Pebbles the story of Snow White, with Her as Snow White and him as the Handsome King searching for her., his daughter. The 7 dwarves in this version are more like giants and they live in a house like Fred's, made of stone. Snow White has an apple from "the Evil Queen" that puts her to sleep and the Handsome King wakes her with a kiss. BJ is going home to his kid, now, and they ignored the order that his travel approval was rescinded as he flies away.

When Fred says this shortened version of the fairy tale I thought about how the Queen is the "bad guy" and the King is the "good guy" who saves her - but no suggestion of WHY the Queen is evil. Then Pebbles says "Gaga" which Fred interprets to mean "Papa" and gets very excited and tells Wilma that she said her first word. This made me think of how fairy tales and myths are older than most religions, how if you tell a kid a story and put your own spin on it it effects the way they see everything -yet babies and children and everyone have their own innate, natural knowledge of what things are.  To me, Fred was exemplifying the Patriarchy - there was a basic story and he put his spin on it, maybe the spin was already there where the Queen is the Villain and the Man is the Hero - but when Pebbles says "Gaga" I do NOT hear "Papa" - I hear "Gaga" which to me means Goddess.

So My awareness is really peaked at this point - Pebbles just said "Gaga" - its her first word (and it probably actually many babies' first word) and she keeps saying it. This is like a light version of the Simpsons predicting the future - of course there is no intentional reference to Lady Gaga in a cartoon that was made 2 decades before she was born - but for me, the Oz books prophesied her a century before, and I was therefore expecting her since the 80's, personally, before I knew who she would be.

And Fred interprets "Gaga" as "Papa" and to me this exemplifies Patriarchy - replacing the Goddess with a God, instead. This whole concept, the basic replacement of the Goddess by a "God-figure" - due to a Father twisting a story to his "benefit"  - seems to be a way it "all went wrong"  - someone taking the myths and presenting them with favorable self-interest, or demonizing an Other, in this case the Queen. Why was the Queen evil? But it trips the child's own soul-understanding of the Goddess, of Gaga. Fred is presenting himself as a "God" in contrast to the "Evil Goddess" - but at the end of the story Pebbles asks "Gaga?" - like, "but what about the Goddess?" or "How did the Queen get evil - are you sure you got that part right?"

The Flinstones were only magically predicting Gaga by having this name be Pebbles first word - but the next scene was a different "prophecy", possibly - Barney saying "Scooby Dooby Doo!" to Pebbles. This made me wonder if this was the origin of Scooby Doo - since Im pretty sure this episode was before that whole series - but I also think Scooby Doo and Scooby Dooby Doo were just popular phrase at the time, which is why when Barnie says them and Pebbles repeats them Fred freaks out - he doesn't want Pebbles to learn speech from Barney.

He decides to move and they rent their house and lease a mansion on Snob Hill. The neighbors are all freeloaders and Wilma hates it, they can't have Dino and everything is terrible. So they eventually decide to move back and get the lease broken by having Barney and Betty come over as their Hillbilly relatives who always live with them when they find them - "they don't believe in working, either!" Fred says - though it is a "different" type of not working than the rich fancy themselves doing. When discussing Fred's work they are horrified how dirty the Rock Business is and he lies and says he phones in his work and ":never goes down there."

All this fakery is bad - when Pebbles says "Gaga" to one of the kids, who is wearing a monocle, he replies "Gaga" - but in a posh, snobby tone.

Of course Fred eventually realizes he doesn't want to be like these people, doesn't want Pebbles to be like these people, wants to be with his friends and Dino, and moves back home. The whole episode was like a myth, to me, of Human Culture itself: We buy into a corrupted, Patriarchal myth to start. Based upon that we accept the idea that Some People and Ways of Living are "better" than others - and we try to work into the graces of that system. But it's actually a very bad system and when we realize this - realize it's not who we really are, not who ANYONE really is - we leave it and go Home, to be the people we REALLY are with the people who are genuine with us. As I typed that Hawkeye has come back, took the tank the enemy was targeting and drove it to the dump, and now BJ has been returned, too. Klinger is giving Sun Li a wedding dress and asking her to marry him. It will be Toledo's first marriage in English, Korean and Lebanese - but she has to find her family before she will leave Korea.

This theme of not being who you really are reminded me of the radio program I heard last night on NPR - a girl who had left her journalism job to become a CIA agent and how she had to lie to her family and everyone she knew so they wouldn't know she had gotten a job with the CIA. Her contacts, weapons dealers to terrorists, whom she was trying to flip to work for the CIA instead, became the only people who "really knew her" because she eventually told them she was CIA to turn them.

"What better birthday present to get than your own birthday?" BJ just said about the girl the decided "shared" his daughter's birthday - since he couldn't make it home to be with her.

The CIA agent who was lying to her own friends and family, who only spent time with one person who really knew who she was, who was selling weapons - she had a baby. "I think too fast and Im scared of children, that's not terrible" Hawkeye just summed up his condition.

She said she read all the books - "What to Expect When You Are Expecting" - and they just announced the War is Over on M*A*S*H. Which I expect - one day, Soon, ALL War Will End.

But she read those books and was told she and her baby would have profound eye contact - but they didn't. When she reported this in her story I thought it would turn out that the baby had autism - because not making eye contact is the hallmark of it. But I've had my own theory about autism, not that it is caused by vaccines but that we have a social change that is making babies more autistic. I'm not blaming the parents, I'm blaming the society, but I have always suspected that, in addition to new vaccines or more likely, reporting more on vaccines and how taking them coincided with autism symptoms, I always suspected that another phenomenon that has coincided with the rise in autism is the rise in the use of cell phones to almost universal levels - in our culture. I wonder if countries that had as much vaccination, but not as much cell phone use, as we have, have the same rates of autism.

Cell phone use has reduced eye contact between EVERYONE - you can probably find out that people look at each other less than half as much as they used to - a significant change. From a magical, fairy perspective, much less eye contact is like shutting down the transportation system - the lanes are closed - at least especially for fairies that travel though people's vision and eyes, but really for all magical networking.

And if we, as a culture, are reprogrammed to spend most of the time we used to look at each other looking at an electronic device instead  - is it any wonder that "The cost of the war was $22 billion dollars...250,000 wounded, etc...400,000 Korean civilians killed - 2 million total - 1/4th of all Koreans homeless, 100,000 orphans..." BJ said "don't look at me, I only make 300 a month"  - "When you're in love you're always in trouble  - you can either stop loving them or love them a whole lot more"  - "but when you do that don't you get even more trouble?" "Yeah so love them even more."

If we, as "grown" people, have babies and keep staring at our phones when we COULD be looking into their eyes, we aren't teaching them that. Again, I am not trying to blame parents for not teaching their children eye contact, I'm blaming the culture that has been teaching everyone "not eye contact."

And the CIA agent's story fit my suspicions: She didn't say her kid had autism, this is all just a tangent. "200 million requested to reconstruct Korea - another 200 million to support Vietnam fighters..." - this is being announced on the radio "Where is Vietnam?" someone asks....

So her daughter didn't have autism, or she didn't mention it in the story. But she wouldn't look at her, wouldn't lock eyes with her.

"What good is a deaf priest? I pray to you to help me - are you deaf too?"  - now I got back and Klinger announces he is staying in Korea to be with his bride. You can be a deaf priest - it might involve opening up who you think your "flock" is to finally include deaf people - its all about getting over EVERY idea of "others" - except the Other, Evil System that is against the whole rest of the world - it IS Us, all of Us, against "Them" - but they can become us, if they want. They are talking about the chaplain character going deaf and the actor said "God threw him a curve" - and they all reminisce on their characters. Even though everyone changes the ultimate effect of changes is it does bring us closer together  - potentially - by bringing us all back to more of who we REALLY are. Because the priest IS the same person even after he goes deaf but even more of a person, a new quality that makes him relate to a whole group of people he was previously unaccustomed to.

A candidate for office on th radio was talking about how she organized some of the first Gay Pride marches and said "in areas where people had never seen a gay person" and I thought "you mean an OUT gay person - because they HAD seen gay people before even if they didn't know it." Finding out something about a person that triggers prejudice doesn't change the person but CAN change YOU - because it is the prejudice that is wrong.

But you hear about all the world news of Brexit and now Wexit, an attempt to get the Oil Country of Canada to secede - not "kkkoincidentally" led by someone with ties to White Nationalism - that is also being promoted by Putin - they idea that their "right" to drill oil trumps everyone else's right to have a an inhabitable planet to live on - it's Evil and Wrong and we need to shame and stamp it out. And we can change ourselves, our lifestyles and habits, to make changes, too - but ultimately we ALL need to overthrow an evil system that is destroying all of us.

And the message I got from the CIA girl and her daughter and the koi fish, and from Pebbles saying Gaga, the message I want to convey here, is the key to it all. Vaccines are the scapegoat of Autism - one they have used politically to drive wedges in communities, to call everyone, like Marianne, who rightfully criticizes the pharmaceutical industry, "anti-vaccers" to demonize them. But what if cell phones, which we have been using more and more in the same time period autism rates have risen, what if they are the real culprit? You can see how the companies would not want that information to spread, for example. But just think about it - eye contact between everyone has been reduced. Maybe it's not by half - but maybe it is even more. People will sit together but talk to each other through their phones. Aphex Twin's "Orange TV commercial..." EP had an inlay card that said "In the Future People will think it strange that we only ever used our phones to talk with one another? - it was cryptic at the time, it did not even make sense, but now it makes double sense: we not only use phones for more than talking to each other, not "only to talk" but we also ONLY use our phones to talk, far too often.

If eye contact has been reduced this much, any substantial amount, then we ALL suffer from it whether we realize it or not - because we don't understand how important eye contact - all types of contact - really is. But to Babies it is even MORE important - it's like how we form the core of our existence in spiritual dimensions we don't even know about. So our babies aren't getting nearly as much of this as they need and suffer from it. Why are boys rates of autism so much higher than girls? Maybe, culturally, the idea that we don't really have to look at or pay attention to our babies - isn't there an app for that? - could be applied more often to male children, or girls could more frequently, naturally, trigger that bond with their parents - or girls would be more likely to be held, for longer, etc - all sorts of gendering but a general tendency away from eye contact could be seen as being applied more to boys than girls, thus increasing their rates of autism.

I know that autism is more than just "lack of eye contact" and while that is one symptom and something everyone in the modern culture might have more of, my speculation is that it "does" more than science realizes and the babies are lacking more of that development by missing it.

The very fact that the CIA agent had "read in a book" to expect deep eye contact - not that it happened naturally - shows how far away all of us, as a society, have strayed from this basic appreciation. I mentioned this to my wife and she just said "isn't it just Natural to stare into your babies eyes?" and I replied "yes, of course-  but that is the whole problem, we appreciate nature, as witches, and want to be part of it - but as a society we have been duped into artificiality and too many people aren't responding to that nature."

She never said the kid HAD autism - this is a tangent to make a point, a few points, about how they use lies and disinformation to protect some industries and create divisions between groups of people. But she DID say her daughter wouldn't look at her. And she said she was expecting it, she was trying to get her to - she knew she was SUPPOSED to - but she knew it from a book, not from her own nature. She knew it was something she HAD to do, not felt it as her own compelling nature. And the daughter wasn't responding to her - until she realized what was going on.

She said she walked to the park even though they lived in Shanghai and the pollution was bad - and her daughter loved the koi pond there, watching the fish. One fish came to the surface and was looking at them and the CIA agent said "I bet we look funny to them" and her daughter laughed and looked at her.

"I came to Hollywood to be a prostitute, to prostitute my talent, and that show reminded me I could do it for Love" one of them said - Hot Lips said she still couldn't say her goodbye line without choking up, because she still couldn't say it because she wouldn't ever forget him. And the Goodbye in rocks was to Hawkeye, when BJ refused to say it aloud, but also to America, the World, from the show.  I'm glad I'm writing this at the end of this show - because of the Unity of all the people who co-watched it, when it aired, because of that moment of collective consciousness, like Yippies levitating the pentagon - but also for ALL these other kinds of Unity, between the actors and their Futures, audience, passions - between Story and Telling, tales within tales, etc. Alan Alda is saying he never expected it in Mass media, he expected it in a small theater - but it happened in front of 105 million people. And they are saying they don't know if it made them a better actor, it made them a better person - but it certainly did help bring out the greatness of all the actors, and other who were inspired by it. And that's how art works, how art saves the world.

Let my try my style by finishing this story about the koi. After the fish looked at them and they both laughed at what Mom said and they actually LOOKED at each other, the girl realized what was going on. She was so hidden, so masked, by all of her concerns in the CIA that the baby was never looking at HER - because she wasn't there. She was somewhere else in her mind, worried about Al Qeada or other terrorists - she ended up leaving the girl to negotiate a deal because if they couldn't stop an attack someone else's daughter would suffer - the pressures of the job. I didn't hear the end of her story, how her relationship with her daughter was after that trip - but I heard the part that stood out to me.

She said that after she realized her daughter was not seeing her because she was not being "present" -she was preoccupied with work - she said she started paying attention to that, tried to be her genuine self and be present, to notice things, in her time with her daughter and at those moments she connected. Basically she was trying to "do the eye contact" as an exercise and the baby wasn't having it - but when she got over her worries and was truly paying attention she could connect with her.

So I'm sure cell phones and screens in general have been effecting us, reducing our eye contact and storytelling, personal sharing, for DECADES. but even if you HAVE or are trying to have eye contact, if it is no that Natural Gazing Trancelike state of Love that is NATURE then it isn't having the full benefit - if you are looking into your babies eyes and worrying about a terrorist attack no wonder she wouldn't want to look at you, wouldn't want to absorb those energies, those ideas.

because science doesn't know this but it isn't just "time" or "angle" of eye contact - its the thoughts behind it. It's looking on a baby with Love, and sadly we have all been trained AWAY from that Natural desire and state.

The CIA agent, the mom, said that when she walked around with her daughter strapped on her belly she became "her Yoda" - because she KNEW the baby needed her to relax and be present, to be her true, natural self, in order to connect with her. She is in a somewhat more extreme case because of what her job IS, being a Spy - but all of us wear masks and have filters built between us and other based upon our concerns of work or whatever goes on in our lives.

And she at least knew that she SHOULD want to look into her baby's eyes - a lot of parents don't even get that information and too many babies don't even have parents - and far too many people just don't care about people as much as they need to, they can't due to their own trauma - or not being looked at enough as babies themselves, before the whole society got to such a point that the conditions that arise from this are even more severe after the cumulative effect over generations.

But we can ALL do things to make up for this - we can look at each other and connect. We can connect through art, through experiencing it together in an audience or as artists creating new worlds for others to explore.  Those experiences encourage us to share them and to create more to share with others - and this is also why I am glad to "finish" writing about War at the showing of the M*A*S*H finally and say "Good Bye" to the world, the Past, in which War could exist.

We can start a New World in which War does not exist - in which this crippling separation we ALL suffer from - does not exist. We can make that world looking into our babies eyes with Love  - and we can LEARN that look from babies and learn to look on each other, at all ages, with Love, too.

This is actually some of the deepest magic there is - while I have to go to work, now, and wish I could say more, i also feel I've said too much, too roundabout - I want to be more direct, I want to be able to tell you and look in your eyes - but the truth is the REAL message, who we REALLY are when we shed our masks and Spy-work, is there in ANY eyes you look into.

"Look into any eyes, you'll find value you can see clear through another day" - from the Grateful Dead song "Box Of Rain" - this stuff is always said best through Art, well best through Eyes themselves, but the best reminders to do it are Art. Art brings us together, new people to meet and see each other, and the art itself becomes an Eye to look into and to see us, too. We just have to do it, put aside the obstructions and BE with each other, and we WILL save the world, together.

This is all just returning to our true nature, the natural feelings of Love that make us look at each other. We just have to get rid of the shame and fear that makes us look away. When we do that in ourselves, between us, and come together, activate that magic and more magic, the art we make and respond to along this path, the magic we create WILL overthrow the evil system. As I type this final line Dawson on Hogan's Heroes just said "next time we do business with the enemy we better make sure he's on our side>"

this is the simple plan - only do business with the GOOD people, boycott the Bad - until it turns them good or puts them out of business. And we can make that happen with words, art, inspirations - and loving looks, sharing glances, time, thoughts and experience. We save the world by coming together, by seeing each other, by being present and remembering that everyone is potentially or own personal Yoda at that moment.

Thanks for reading and thanks for saying "Gaga" and reminding me to write this, Pebbles and All babies!