Bob Dobbs | My Life with Lyndon LaRouche from My Diaries

Android Meme’s Xenochrony Diaries

May 22-31/66 (Rome and New York)

Not So Well-known European Businessman: We’ve got to get a hook into this student unrest that’s increasing in the United States. Since their leanings are to the left, it has to be through the socialist parties. Look for someone with a grievance in there.

Bob flew into New York and soon after perusing the radical journals for a while, he got in touch with a writer calling himself Lynn Marcus.

Dobbs: Is Lynn Marcus your real name?

Marcus: It’s Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr.

Dobbs: What’s your complaint?

LaRouche: Well, I’m a Platonist. I’ve made some discoveries that show that the real stream of Platonism is a story suppressed and untold. There is a technological basis for the conflict between Aristotelianism and the real Platonism.

Dobbs: I think it was Coleridge who said men were either Aristotelians or Platonists.

LaRouche: Yes, and the Romantics were certainly no help to my antecedents in that century–my allies being thinkers like Humboldt and Reimann.

Dobbs: So what is your strategy?

LaRouche: I’m going to offer a night class over at Columbia and create a cadre of students who can steer this revolution away from its present controllers who have a decidedly Aristotelian, Utopian bent.

Dobbs: I’m a revolutionary myself and I have funds available for you if you can show me some results and get your plans into action.

The rest of the conversation was drowned out by “Like a Rolling Stone” as Bob and LaRouche left the restaurant on West 4th Street.

Feb. 15/67 (New York)

Dobbs: I was reading an old interview with that young folk singer, Bob Dylan, the other day, trying to see why he’s so popular. He mentioned he read some Kant in college. What do you think of Kant as a philosopher?

LaRouche: Kant said there is no such thing as a cognizable creative process by which scientific discoveries are made. He also said later there is no cognizable process by which you can judge whether a form of art is good or not. It’s all arbitrary. Now I don’t agree with that at all. I operate on the exact opposite principle–that you can know the creative process. How does one come to this knowledge? By re-experiencing the act of discovery by original discoverers of principle from the past – beginning, in most cases, with the ancient Greeks. By reliving the paradox or problem, then reliving the flash of insight, and then reliving the proof of the principle, followed by the idea of applying the principle – by knowing, rather than memorizing, the most crucial experiences of scientific discovery and art in the known history of mankind, you learn nothing, but you know everything. And the tragedy is that Kant has greater influence today because he was resurrected by the likes of Norbert Wiener and his “information theory.” Bob Dylan is a product of an educational system that is organized around the principle of learning, and not knowing. He makes bad art!

Dobbs: That’s an eloquent answer, Lyn. Have you ever heard of Marshall McLuhan?

LaRouche: No.

Dobbs: Well, you will over the next few months. There is going to be a publicity blitz to raise his profile. I mention him because I know him personally and he has always stressed that he knows the identity of the processes of cognition and creation. That sounds anti-Kantian to me. I’m going to get you two together as soon as possible so you can compare notes. Meanwhile, watch for him in the media.

LaRouche: I’ll look forward to it. “Marshall McLuhan” – what a strange name!

Bob and Lyndon parted as LaRouche hopped a subway taking him up to Columbia University to teach a class, and Dobbs stopped to pick up the latest issue of the East Village Other, the Village Voice, and the New York Times.

May 1/68 (New York)

Dobbs: Lyndon, are you aware of Bucky Fuller’s architectural plans to put his domes over cities like New York?

LaRouche: Of course.

Dobbs: Would you support his ideas?

LaRouche: Not at first. I’m for building more cities. I fight for the Hamiltonian citybuilding circles and against the Jeffersonian country-bumpkin circles. The reason we don’t build more cities and are afflicted by the sprawling suburbanization in the United States is the financier-rentier circles who pretend to grow an economy through land speculation and usury. Because this fraudulent growth depends on real-estate speculation and maintaining high property values in certain parts of New York, or any American city, we can’t get investment in new cities using the latest technology because that would threaten the Wall Street financier oligarchy who reinforce this myopic tunnel vision that goes around in boom-and-bust cycles. We should design our new cities around more efficiently beautiful infrastructure systems that have high-density populations who wouldn’t lose the important role of urban classical culture that is being dissipated in the Playboy-magazine, leisure-society culture of the suburbs. Until the relevant government institutions get behind this kind of industrial policy, I wouldn’t waste my time with Bucky’s beachball antics. They’d be fine for new cities but they’d only make this concentration-camp of a city more claustrophobic and paranoid.

Dobbs: Funny you mention Playboy. They just featured Bucky’s designs in the January issue of this year.

LaRouche: Case closed!

Nov. 24/69 (New York)

Dobbs: I see you managed to maintain your course through the “Days of Rage” in Chicago.

LaRouche: Yes, I think my associates now understand the irrationality that has guided the student activist movement the last few years. They are now very receptive to my program. They are ready to settle down and do some efficient conceptual work. I’m glad the catharsis of the Sixties is over.

Dobbs: You know, my parents used to spend time on the island of Capri in the early decades of this century. The stories they told me of the goings-on there, the excesses of inspiration–the Sixties as they unfolded always reminded me of those tales of Capri.

LaRouche: Really? I’d like to hear them some day, but I’ve got to get back to my typewriter now. However, I don’t think I’ll be surprised.

As Bob left LaRouche’s apartment in Greenwich Village, he noticed he almost bumped into two young men, one of whom he recognized was David Walley, the music journalist who wrote articles on Frank Zappa for the East Village Other. I must introduce myself to him someday. I wonder what he’ll think of Burnt Weenie Sandwich when it comes out.

April 27/70 (Dartmouth) {“Flaps” is a young man I first met in 1963 when he was in Junior High School in Dartmouth – Ed.}

Dobbs: Flaps! I haven’t seen you in a while.

Flaps: I’ve been in New York City. I’ve joined a workers’ movement. They came out of the SDS stuff a few years back. They call themselves the National Caucus of Labor Committees. They have some interesting ideas in their newspaper, especially this guy Lyn Marcus. He’s a Marxist, but he emphasizes technological growth and science. He’s not the “back to nature” type.

Dobbs: Sounds interesting. You don’t usually hear that kind of talk from revolutionaries these days. Can you show me their newspaper some time?

Flaps: Sure, I’ll bring some over later.

Dobbs: Have you heard about Steve? He’s gone bonkers over this McLuhan fad.

Flaps: Yeah, it’s sad. McLuhan was invited to speak at the Bilderbergers conference last May in Denmark. The NCLC has some good information on what they’re doing to screw
the working class.

July 4/71 (New York)

Flaps: Lyn, why do you think the suburbanization of the working class spells doom for us?

Marcus/LaRouche: Because real wealth comes from city-building, from the increase in relative potential population density. Suburbanization decentralizes and weakens the negentropic spiral of working-class evolution, and favors a new Dark Age dominated by the rentier-finance class.

July 17/74 (Dartmouth)

Flaps: You know, Bob, LaRouche is really emphasizing the use, by the intelligence agencies, of narco-hypnosis in political control and counter-terrorist strategies now. It’s caused a lot of factional infighting among us in New York and a lot of people are leaving.

Dobbs: The daily information-overload environment is the real terrorist action against the working class today. Not just what’s on the news any day, but the fact there is constant news twenty-four hours a day, day in, day out. Your LaRouche buddy is clueless in even how to approach this problem.

Flaps picked up his copy of Rolling Stone magazine to scan the piece by Ben Fong-Torres on Bob Dylan’s recent comeback tour. His eyes immediately fell on a section about Michael McClure introducing Marshall McLuhan to Dylan back-stage.

Nov. 3/75 (Dartmouth)

Flaps: You know, Bob, LaRouche has really begun taking on the world government. He’s moving into an international perspective and setting up an attack on a global front.

Dobbs: That would be natural now, since there’s no more satellite environment.

Flaps: No more satellite environment?

Dobbs: Yes, it’s been subsumed by the instant-replay technology.

Dec. 17/78 (New York)

Dobbs: Lyn, have you ever noticed that the central feature of all machines is rotation?

LaRouche: Now that’s a mouthful, Bob! I’ll have to think about such a sweeping generalization, but my first impression is it has the ring of fact. I’ve been so busy with our new book, Dope, Inc., I haven’t had time to think about those kinds of patterns the past year. But I think such an idea gives me a little jolt in the direction I should now go to clear my head of our drug-war work. Once again, Bob, thanks for the door to fresh air.

March 30/79 (New York)

Flaps: Why are you emphasizing the historical role of Venice more and more?

LaRouche: Because we are in the middle of a replay of the Fourteenth Century when the Bardi and Peruzzi banking families failed to encourage city-building and technological growth, thanks to their entropic, usurious financial policies, and subsequently fostered the stressful conditions that led to the Black Plague in the middle of that century. This plague wiped out not only millions of people’s lives but also the renaissance fostered by the policies of Frederick the Second and geniuses like Dante in the previous hundred years. Today, we are witnessing the destruction of the American infrastructure that was initiated by Abraham Lincoln’s and Henry Carey’s industrial policies between 1861 and 1876, continued by FDR after earlier setbacks, and accelerated in the early Sixties by JFK and the Apollo space program. This progress was halted by the widescale implementation of a paradigm shift called the “post-industrial society” beginning in 1966. One of the institutions that initiated this new policy model was the Cini Foundation in Italy in 1963, the year President Kennedy was assassinated.

Flaps: What you’re telling me is information that we haven’t published in our newspaper or the Campaigner.

LaRouche: No, but what I just outlined for you is the framework for what we will be researching, supplementing, and publishing in the Eighties. It’s going to be exciting material. It will certainly help mobilize our political constituency.

Flaps: I hope so because I’ve been a little disappointed with our organization’s progress so far.

LaRouche: You’re going to have to be a lot more patient than that. I envision our movement taking at least a hundred years before we see some real results.

June 30/80 (New York)

LaRouche: Steinberg tells me you’ve got some interesting new information.

Flaps: My sources tell me to watch for the growing influence of the Orthodox Church in Moscow. So I’ve begun researching the old “Third Rome” plan, and I’d like your help.

LaRouche: Tell me what you’ve got.

Nov. 9/85 (Seattle) {“Ian” is a young man I first met in 1984 when he was living in Toronto – Ed.}

Ian: Flaps, you’ve wanted me to feature LaRouche as a columnist in our newspaper ever since we met.

Flaps: Yeah. Why, have you decided to do it?

Ian: Not really. But I’ve been scooped. There’s a journalist in Toronto who has a radio show and he regularly interviews LaRouche’s associates from the Executive Intelligence Review.

Flaps: You’re kidding. How could that be allowed in one of the Queen’s cities? LaRouche would be assassinated if he ever went to Toronto.

Ian: I don’t know about that, but this guy–Bob Marshall’s his name–he’s getting away with it.

Flaps: We don’t even have a distributor in Toronto. I’ve gotta look into this. Do you remember any names of the people he interviewed?

Ian: Richard Freeman. He has Freeman on more than anybody else. Marshall even had LaRouche on once.

Flaps: Wow! We’re on a lot of radio stations here in the States now, but getting into Canada is not what I expected. I’ve got old friends in Toronto. I’m going to call them and get ’em to listen to this guy!

Ian ordered another coffee from the waitress and proceeded to study the packaging of the news in various American dailies he had spread out on the table. Flaps returned to reading an essay in an old Campaigner on why the British hate Shakespeare.

Nov. 2/93 (New York)

William Irwin Thompson: Many people in the seminar are puzzled because you keep mentioning McLuhan’s tetrad. They don’t see how it relates to the evolution of consciousness.

Dobbs: Wait until I bring up Lyndon LaRouche. They’ll be even more puzzled.

Thompson: Seriously, Americans have completely forgotten about McLuhan.

Dobbs: Your students don’t seem to be aware of Wired magazine.

Thompson: What’s that?

Dobbs: A new popular magazine that touts McLuhan as its “patron saint.” It’s having an impact as the “Rolling Stone” of the Nineties while using McLuhan as a mnemonic.

Thompson: I’ll have to check it out.

Dobbs: And then, when your lectures start again next spring, I won’t have to mention McLuhan because perhaps you’ll carry the ball.

Thompson smiled, and quickly asked Bob to keep his voice down as it was attracting the attention of the other diners in the Upper West Side restaurant. Later that night Rudy Giuliani was elected Mayor of New York City.