THE PROFESSIONAL PRIG

I have absolutely no sympathy for Anthony Comstock (above),  a man described by a biographer as having  “no conspicuous talents and...boundless energy”.   His brother's death from wounds suffered in the three days of slaughter at Gettysburg, compelled Anthony to join the Union Army. But the Connecticut farm boy then spent a year of isolation and boredom guarding the backwaters of St. Augustine, Florida. 

Most of his fellow soldiers considered him a bible thumping prig, who instead of simply refusing it, pompously poured his daily whiskey ration out on the ground. And the great lesson this “religio-monomaniac” took from the four blood field years  that ended slavery, was that his fellow soldiers were addicted to pornography.

By 1861 there were almost 3,000 photographers in Paris, and 200 schools teaching the skill in London. And from day one, a significant percentage of these technicians found taking “dirty pictures” very profitable.  

Shortly after Gettysburg, another smug priss, General Marsena Rudolph Patrick (above), had boasted in his diary of “burning up a large quantity of obscene books, taken from the mails.” 

And it wasn't just pocket editions of “Fanny Hill”, and the “Libertine Enchantress” that he burned. There were also the “barrack favorites”, the “carte de visite” French postcards – nude photos of women, which went for twelve cents each, and “London and Paris Volupuarties” engaged in actual sex acts, for $3 a dozen ($9 for stereoscopic views). Comstock found himself drawn to these “deadly poisons” - as he called them - “cast into the fountain of moral purity.”

By 1868 the muscular Comstock was a menial worker in New York City, making $12 a week as a porter for a dry goods store. He was a man "devoid of humor, lustful after publicity, and vastly ignorant “ who, by his own admission, spent many lonely evenings fearing “for the souls of the young men” who roomed with him. 

He joined the Young Men's Christian Association, and became convinced he faced “some of the most insidious and deadly forces of evil” in America.  A nation racked by continued violence inspired by four bloody years of war saw pornography as a low priority.  But Comstock did not share that opinion.

He quickly attracted the attention of the President of the WMCA, Morris K. Jessup (above), who had made his fortune as a banker for railroad tycoons. Jessup interviewed Comstock in his Madison Avenue mansion and liked what he saw. 

They made an unlikely pair. Jessup stood over six feet tall, and was a philanthropist to many causes. Comstock was short and brutally single minded. Despite their differences, for the next forty years Jessup supported Comstock, with money and political influence, even creating the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice for the Christian warrior, when others in the WMCA questioned his tactics. (It is interesting to note that of all the social reform movements of the late 19^th century, the Comstock's “Society” was the only one with no women in positions of authority.) Comstock would admit in his diary, “ Only one man thinks as I do and that is Mr. Jessup.”

With Jessup's support Comstock successfully lobbied congress for the Comstock Law, the last act of a lame duck congress on 3 March, 1873,  which made it illegal to send “obscene, lewd, or lascivious" material through the mail. The act also created a job of Special Postal Inspector for Comstock, allowing him define as pornographic anything mentioning birth control or preventing venereal disease. In Comstock's view, “God has set certain natural barriers. If you turn loose the passions and break down the fear (of unwanted pregnancies or disease) you bring . . . disaster.” 

His first year the new Special Inspector, always dressed in his black frock coat, traveled 23, 000 miles on a free rail pass, looking for sin in America. And luckily, since his job depended on it, he found it everywhere, and 24 states passed their own versions of "his" law, collectively called the Little Comstock Laws.

In 1872 Comstock won national attention when he went after Victoria Woodhull (above). She was no common pornographer, but a feminist who had run her own Wall Street brokerage firm and her “Weekly” newspaper -  in which Victoria argued, ”When woman rises... into the ownership and control of her sexual organs, and man is obliged to respect this freedom...then will woman be raised”  

To highlight the hypocrisy of men making decisions about birth control, the “Weekly” published details of an extramarital affair by one of her critics, popular Brooklyn minister Henry Ward Breecher.  The same day the article appeared, Victoria, her husband and her sister were all arrested. Reporting the affair, said Comstock, was spreading obscenity. Comstock's belligerent theatrics in the court room so offended some members of the jury, they hung. Still, the trial only increased the popularity of both Comstock and Breecher.

Comstock claimed he convicted 3,500 people of distribution of pornography and destroyed 15 tons of obscene books, including medical text books that displayed female anatomy charts or mentioned abortion. To Comstock, woman’s health was far less important than their moral purity. 

He also burned novels written by D.H. Lawrence and Theodore Dreiser. Comstock even tried to close down a play by George Bernard Shaw, whom he called an “Irish smut dealer”. Of the first twelve people convicted of violating the Federal Comstock law, 5 were pardoned by President Ulysses Grant, who had signed the law.  And of the 105 people arrested for violating Comstock's campaign against birth control,  all but 16 were found not guilty. In state courts Comstock fared much better.

He saw himself as “the weeder in God's garden”, but his critics saw him as “a first class Torquemada”, who had run the church's inquisition. They also saw him as chief of America's “moral eunuchs.” In 1877 Comstock went after Massachusetts social activist Ezra Heywood (above) for publishing a pamphlet about marriage called “Cupid’s Yokes”. 

The judge told the jury the pamphlet was too offensive to allow them to read it, and without reading the offensive words, they sentenced Heywood to two years at hard labor in the Dedham jail. Six months later President Rutherford B. Hayes pardoned Heywood, but Comstock saw that as a challenge. 

Comstock (above) now persecuted Heywood, having him arrested four more times, once for reprinting two poems by Walt Whitman, and again for discussing a contraceptive device called the “Comstock syringe” . By the fourth arrest the sixty year old Heywood was broke and emotionally exhausted, when in a state court he sentenced to another two years of hard labor.  This time there was no pardon. In 1892, after a year in jail, he was released, but died soon after , from tuberculosis he had contracted in jail. Comstock had won again.

Comstock boasted he had driven 15 people to suicide. His most famous victim was Ida Craddock, a free spirit and writer of fact based guides like “The Marriage Night” and “Right Marital Living”. 

After pleading guilty to violating Illinois Little Comstock law,  and receiving a suspended sentence,  Ida was immediately arrested under New York's version in 1892 and suffered three months in a workhouse. As she left that jail Comstock had her arrested again (above) on Federal charges for the same offense. This time she was sentenced to five years at hard labor. And Comstock let her know, that as soon as she served that term, he intended on arresting her again.

The night before she was to enter prison yet again, Ida Craddock put her head in an oven, turned on the gas jets, and then slit her wrists. In her public suicide note, Ida blamed her death on “This man, Anthony Comstock,...(who is) unctuous with hypocrisy..."

...."if the reading of impure books and the gazing upon impure pictures does debauch and corrupt and pervert the mind", wrote Ida,  "...(and) Anthony Comstock has himself read perhaps more obscene books, and has gazed upon perhaps more lewd pictures than has any other one man in the United States, what are we to think of the probable state of Mr. Comstock's imagination?"

Ida (above) called Comstock, "...a sex pervert;  he is what physicians term a Sadist...for nine long years I have faced social ostracism, poverty, and the dangers of persecution by Anthony Comstock.. I beg of you, for your own sakes, and for the future happiness of the young people who are dear to you, to protect my little book...” Comstock insisted that her suicide was one of his proudest achievements.

It was not only Comstock's bullying, but also his lack of self awareness that gradually weakened his grip on public morals. The final breaking point came in 1913 when Harry Reichenbach besieged Comstock with complaints about the Braun and Company gallery on west 46^th street in Manhattan. The prig-in-chief found the sidewalk in front of the art gallery crowded with young men snickering and praising the beauty of a painting of a nude woman (above) in the front window. 

Comstock stormed into the gallery and ordered the painting removed. The clerk, James Kelly, stammered, “But that is the famous “September Morn” by Paul Chabas”.  The work was indeed famous, having won a medal of honor from the French Academy of Painting just the year before. Undaunted, Comstock replied, “There is too little morning and too much maid”, and threatened to arrest the gallery owner, Philippe Ortiz,  if the painting was not removed.

Defiantly, Mr. Ortiz kept the painting in his gallery's front window for another two weeks, removing it only after the crowds jamming his studio had bought every single print of it.  Twenty years later in his memoir, “Phantom Fame”, Reichenbach admitted he had staged the entire thing, including hiring the young men to ogle the painting, as a publicity stunt for the gallery. Comstock, who was not in on the joke, had behaved as boorishly and brutally as expected.  The Gallery made a bundle.

Comstock died suddenly on the evening of 21 September, 1915. His monument was that during World War One the United States was the only nation not to supply its soldiers and sailors with prophylactics.. Instead, under Comstock's insistence, the Army and Navy merely lectured in favor of abstinence. 

As a result the Army and Navy of the United States discharged 10,000 men during a war who had become infected with sexually transmitted diseases, the largest single cause of American causalities during World War One. 

It would be another 18 years before birth control could be openly purchased in the United States. Shadows of Anthony Comstock's warped vision have distorted American education well into the 21st century, in states which refuse to offer high school students sex education, opting instead for preaching abstinence - which has proved no more effective today than it did in 1916 to 1918.  And the never ending war on "Planned Parenthood", was also begun under that prig Comstock.

It seems, like every prig, Anthony Comstock was convinced he was the savior of civilization. And yet no prig ever saves anything,  because they trade human lives for a tattered myth, a fig leaf of morality.

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BITE ME! The Truth About Vampires

 

I think, if the prince had been remembered by his real name, Vladimir Basarab Tepes,  he would have been a lot less infamous. He might still have been reviled as Vlad the Impaler, or, in the same vein, immortalized as Vlad III,  Prince of Wallachia and defender of the Christian faith.... except he was such a hellion that even the Christians refused to claim him. 

The bloody truth is that his own baptized appellation has so faded against his myth that you are far more likely to say, “Oh,  I know who that is. That is Dracula, the inappropriate Transylvanian phlebotomist.” But even then you would be dead wrong. Well, undead wrong,

Dracula is not a name. It is a title, and in Romanian means “Sons of the Dragon”. They were an order of Christian Knights, which included Vlad’s father during the mid-thirteenth century, when he was the Prince of Wallachia,  not Transylvania. He ruled a tiny slice of the southern Carpathian mountains, as a vassal to the Sultan of the Muslim Ottoman Empire.

At the tender age of five Vlad’s familiar bonds were severed when he was offered up as a hostage to the Ottoman Sultan,  Murad II (above). Vlad grew up a cruel little creature. At any moment he might be executed by Christians or Muslims because his dad was getting too close or not close enough to the Sultan.   During his six years in a Turkish prison, Vlad’s only playmates were bugs and spiders, who he tortured to his heart’s content, just as he had been tortured by being separated from his mother.

When he was eleven Vlad’s father and older brother were both murdered by Boyars, the local landlords. 

You can understand, then, that when Vlad was finally given the keys to the princedom, in 1456, he invited the Boyars to a dinner where he perforated every Boyar he could lay his bloody hands on. Unfortunately he skewered his economy as well, but you can’t have everything.

To hold onto this little kingdom Vlad (above, on the throne) had to lean first toward the Ottomans and then toward the Christians, but never to much or too long in one direction or the other.  So he laid claim to the Christian title of Dracula only at formal occasions, such as banquets and blood lettings, which were often the same events for him.  But Vlad's entrance into his victim's blood stream was about as far from the neck as you can get.

Legend has it that Vlad once sat in judgment of a wife suspected of adultery. He awarded the husband a divorce, and avoided burdening the man with child support by impaling the mother and child on the same spike. 

His social programs were saturated with the same carnassial logic. The invalids in his realm were invited to a feast, at which Vlad bolted the doors and windows and set the hall on fire. Once the flames and screaming had died down Vlad announced he had eradicated poverty in his realm, like a Republican Governor.

In 1462 the Sultan decided he had enough of Vlad’s savage vindictiveness, and the Ottomans invaded Transylvania with a 90,000 man army. Since Vlad only had about 30,000 men his cause seemed a dead letter. 

Still Vlad made it interesting by puncturing the 20,000 mostly Muslim men, women and children, living in his capital city of Targoviste, and leaving a forest of their skewered corpses behind his retreating army. 

This particular act of mass murder managed to impress the Sultan,  who was no slouch in the mass mayhem department, himself. Still the outcome was the same; Murad II  forced Vlad into exile, and  placed Vlad’s half brother on the throne.

And it turned out that Vlad’s Christian allies were no more comfortable with the intemperate Prince  than the Muslims. Vlad was locked up in the 14th century equivalent of a mental ward for 12 years, by which time the memories of his murderous malignant management style seem to have faded. 

So, in November of 1476 he had mended enough Christian fences to be re-crowned Prince, but about month later Ottoman troops ambushed Vlad and his little band of sociopaths and butchered them all. 

Monks buried his body in the Monastery outside Comana (above), in what is today Romania. But to prove to the Sultan that Vlad was  was not merely dead, but certainly, assuredly and really most sincerely dead the soldiers  decapitated the corpse and sent his head ahead to Constantinople.

No doubt about it, Vlad Teppes  was a capricious and violent murderer, but no one thought he was coming back from the grave.  Vlad was never ever accused of being a vampire, not in his original lifetime, anyway.  He would not have even known what a “vampyre” was.  He might not even have known what a vrykolakas was. Because that was a Greek invention, a sort of Slavic vampire without dentures, one of the undead motivated by a necrotic sense of humor. 

A vrykolakas is created when a dog or a cat jumps over a fresh human grave. Should they pause to urinate on the crypt mid leap, the uric acid drives the new vrykolakas to clamber from their tomb and engage in a mortiferous game of “Knock, knock”.  In Slavic lands, a tap on the door after dark should never be answered. Not because Greeks fear Mormons will put the bite on them, but because it just encourages the vrykolakas to keep knocking. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vrykolakas)

The one thing Vlad would never have expected was to be connected with was bats. Bats eat insects, and although being warm blooded and carrying diseases which sometimes infect humans, European bats were never considered a threat. However,  in 1810, Frenchman Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire recorded the first vampire bat, captured in the New World.  By 1839 even Charles Darwin had written about the bloodthirsty little leather winged rodents.  

The closest real life version of  a human vampire are 3 species of air born rodents,  the common  Desmodus rontundus, the hairy legged Diphylla ecaudata, and the white winged Diaemus youngi. These are all the vampire bats there are.  These little south of the border blood suckers secret an anticoagulant in their saliva, called Draculin.  Very linguistically inventive, these biologists. 

Draculin keeps the victim's life's blood flowing as long as the sanguivore keeps drinking.  But vampire bats take only an ounce of blood a night, - and unlike a lawyer or an investment banker,  they often share their meals with less healthy and successful bats.  But by the end 18th century, the elements of the vampire story were on the table, waiting for someone to assemble them.  Oddly, there is little evidence Bram Stoker did that.

Irishman  Abraham "Bram: Stoker, was the business manager for  London's Lyceum Theatre, and he supplemented his income grinding out popular adventure and horror stories.  And in 1897 he conceived his most popular one,.  

"A key was turned with the loud grating noise of long disuse, and the great door swung back…Within, stood a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of color about him anywhere….The old man motioned me in with his right hand with a courtly gesture, saying in excellent English, but with a strange intonation. “Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own free will!...I am Dracula…”

But was Stoker inspired by the Romanian  Dracula? Elizabeth Miller who has made a study of the issue (“Dracula: The Shade and the Shadow” – 1998) does not think so. She wrote. “…(Stoker's) research seems to have been haphazard (though at times fortuitous) rather than scholarly. What he used, he used “as is,” errors and confusions included….After all, Stoker was writing a Gothic novel, not a historical treatise. And he was writing Dracula in his spare time, of which I doubt he had much.”

It was Stoker's (above)  business to know what the public wanted and to give it to them. Obviously the public always wants sex. But if the deeply closeted Stoker had openly supplied sex to his Victorian audiences  he would have gone directly to jail,. like his close friend, playwright Oscar Wilde.  

Had Stoker not written "Dracula" he might have been as known only as the man who married Oscar Wilde's ex-girlfriend. In fact, it was just after Wilde's conviction for "gross indecency" meaning homosexuality, that Stoker began writing Dracula,  In that story, Stoker sublimated the theme of suppressed sexuality, which has been part of every vampire tale which  followed. And none of that had anything to do with Transylvania.

It turns out the Irish had their own blood suckers, the English absentee landlords who owned most of the property in Ireland.  Between 1845  (Stoker was born in "black" 1847)  and 1852 one million Irish starved to death because the potato crops the working poor depended upon failed, and because the British government refused to let the poor eat the wheat grown on Irish land, or replace it with cheap American grown wheat. Things were so bad that many were reduced to cannibalism, and a million were forced to emigrate to find food. And although Stoker's family were middle class Irish Protestants, they could not avoid the nightmare which had been unleashed on their island.

And there is a Gallic term, deach-fhoula - pronounced drac-ula - which means tainted or bad blood. There is even an Irish castle called Dun Drac-ula (above), or the castle of the tainted blood, which sits on property once controlled by a legendary 5th century Irish landlord and or warlord  named Abhartach (pronounced avertack) who was either a dwarf or a giant. Among his other crimes, and there were many, Abhartach required the village of Garvagh to yearly produce a bowl of human blood, which he then drank in their presence. A pretty nasty form of intimidation. He claimed it gave him supernatural powers.

Legend says that eventually the villagers killed Abhartach. But once he was dead and buried - vertically as was the tradition - he came back, and they had to kill him all over again. After a second second coming of Abhartach, the villagers buried him upside down, and they erected a stone Dolman atop his gave, to keep him there. Locals still refer to it as as the Slaghtaverty Dolman (above), or "The Giant's Grave".  

So maybe his mother's bedtime stories were Stoker's  inspiration for the bloodsucker supreme, in which case it was a political allegory instead of a sexual allusion,  The truth is, it could have been both. Stoker's name was on the title page, but there is evidence that his London editor cut the first one hundred pages off the book before publishing it, along with lots of other market driven changes..   

But Vampires on the page proved so bloodless they produced few progeny. And it was not until 1922 that the Prince of Darkness hit the silver screen. Suddenly sucking blood became a business model, able to even survive the misdirected anger of Stokers' widow,  the lovely Florence Ann Lemon Balcombe Stoker. 

After "Bram" died from tertiary syphilis in 1912, Florence (above) became the executor of his estate, such as it was. She managed to publish a collection of his short stories in 1914, but the sales were anemic.  Then, in 1922 she learned of a film claiming it was "loosely based" on her late husband's book, which had been released by a German organization called Parna films.  

Now Parna is a Sanskrit word meaning life force, as in "may the force be with you". Founded by a small group of occult affectionados in 1920, they intended getting rich by making films about the supernatural.  They hired writer Henrik Galeen, based on his script "The Golem: How He Came Into The World' (above). But a single minded Jewish mud monster failed to resonate with German audiences at least in 1914. However the occultists were certain a film version of Dracula would be hit, but to avoid sharing royalties, Galeen changed the name of his undead vampire to Count Orlok, and named the entire effort "Nosferatu".

 In the spring of 1921 they hired Friedrich Murnau (above) to direct, and after rewriting the ending, he started shooting in July.  

And on 4 March, 1922, "Nosferatu" opened to rave reviews from everybody except Florence Stoker. With the backing of the British Society of Authors, Florence  demanded the producers pay her royalties, and that they turn over to her the negative of the film, as well as every copy made so far. In a ploy as old as business, Parna declared bankruptcy under the legal theory "you can't sue me because I no longer exist".  The film about the undead had become a zombie movie.

It didn't work. In 1925 the German courts ruled in Florence's favor. The single negative of Nosferatu, and all distribution prints were handed over to her lawyers. Whereupon, Florence burned the lot. Maybe she should have seen the film before she burned it.   Some partial prints were discovered later, and slowly over the last century, film lovers have cobbled much of the film back together.  Their success with the reborn "Nosferatu" helped sell a lot of copies of the book "Dracula".

Still since then Dracula has been to Hollywood and Berlin and Moscow and back, in almost 200 retellings of the myth of Dracula and his pups. We all know how to annoy a vampire - garlic or a cat - how to kill a vampire - sunlight or a stake through the heart. and a Cross seems to cause them great pain, even of its two candle sticks held at right angles.  And it never seems to bother fans of the bite movies that we allot brain space to all of this vital information about a mythical creature we are never going to meet.

The disconnect in these  ensanguine exhibiionists is that central issue of sex, which makes no sex, er sense.  To the  un-dead, any exchange of bodily fluids is what you call counter productive. For a vampire, it can only be a one way street. Believe me, there are no vampires out there watching porn on the Internet.

An actual human vampire would require a similar anticoagulant in their saliva to Draculin, else their nightly siphoning would form a huge clot of hemoglobin in their tummies, which they would vomit up periodically like a big stinky full ball. And a few of those around the property should make Vampires stand out like a sick cat. Has anybody given this any thought?  Obviously, I have.

But the human fascination with fangs seems to have always been all about the sublimation of sex, sort of like slipping on a Fruedian slip.  Who would have thunk that? 

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