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June 19, 2001
Meet
the Secret Rulers of the World:
The Truth About
The Bohemian Grove
Where's the fashionable rendez-vous
for the World's Secret Government? In the good old days when
the Illuminati had a firm grip on things, it was wherever the
Bilderburgers decided to pitch their tents. Then Nelson and David
Rockefeller horned their way in, and the spotlight moved to the
Trilateral Commisssion. Was there one secret government or two?
Some said all the big decisions were taken in England, at Ditchley,
not so far from the Appeasers' former haunts at Cliveden and
only an hour by Learjet from Davos, which is where jumped up
finance ministers and self-inflating tycoons merely pretend they
rule the world.
Secret World rulers spend a
good deal of time in the air, whisking from Davos to APEC meetings
somewhere in Asia, to Ditchley, to Sun Valley, Idaho, though
mercifully no longer to the Clinton-favored Renaissance Weekend
in Hilton Head, South Carolina. But comes next July 14 and every
self-respecting member of the Secret World government will be
in a gloomy grove of redwoods alongside the Russian river in
northern California, preparing to Banish Care for the 122cnd
time, prelude to three weeks drinking gin fizzes and hashing
out the future of the world.
If the avenging posses mustered
by the Bohemian Grove Action Network manage this year to burst
through the security gates at the Bohemian Grove, they will (to
extrapolate from numerous eyewitness accounts of past sessions)
find proofs most convincing to them that here indeed is the ruling
crowd in executive session: hundreds of near-dead white men sitting
by a lake listening to Henry Kissinger, plus many other near-dead
white men in adjacent landscape in a state of intoxication so
advanced that many of them had fallen insensible among the ferns,
gin fizz glasses gripped firmly till the last.
The avenging posses may find
some puzzling elements within the Grove. Why, for example, areat
least 80 percent of the Bohemians in a state of intoxication
so advanced that many of them had fallen insensible among the
ferns, gin fizz glasses gripped firmly till the last? Why so
many games of dominoes? Why the evidence that a significant
portion of the Secret Government appear to be involved in some
theatrical production, involving the use of women's clothes
and lavish application of make-up?
Many an empire has of course
been run by drunken men wearing make-up. But a long, hard look
at the Bohemian Club, its members and appurtenances, sug-gests
that behind the pretense of Secret Government lies the reality
of a summer camp for a bunch of San Francisco businessmen, real
estate plungers and lawyers who long ago had the cunning to
recruit some outside megawattage (e.g., Herbert Hoover, a Rockefeller,
Richard Nixon) to turn their mundane frolicking into the simulacrum
of Secret Government and make the yokels gape.
The simulacrum isn't half bad.
For Republicans the club is an antechamber to the White House.
Teddy Roosevelt was a member. So, as noted, was Herbert Hoover.
In his memoirs Hoover wrote that within one hour of Calvin Coolidge's
announcement in 1927 that he would not run again, "a hundred
men-edi-tors, publishers, public officials and others from all
over the country who were at the Grove, came to my camp demanding
that I announce my candidacy." Hoover was at the Grove again
the following summer, as he had been with some considerable regularity
since 1911, when news came that Republicans had chosen him for
their candidate.
A speech to the industrial
and financial titans clus-tered for one of the Grove's famous
lake-side talks could make or break a candidacy. After a poor
reception, Nelson Rockefeller abandoned his bid for the Republican
nomination in 1964. Richard Nixon, like Hoover a mem-ber of Cave
Man's camp inside the Grove, got a raptur-ous reception in 1967
and pressed forward to the nomi-nation and the White House. It
was at the Bohemian Grove that America's nuclear weapons program
was first devised by physicists such as Ernest O. Lawrence and
Edward Teller, both members, meeting with other members who were
then in govern-ment, all confident of the security of the redwood
club-house built by Bernard Maybeck (one of our favorite American
architects) in 1904.
European leaders travel discreetly
to the Grove to ad-dress the American elite. German chancellor
Helmut Schmidt (not to be confused with Club members Chauncey
E. Schmidt or Jon Eugene Schmidt) strolled its paths with club
member Henry Kissinger, as did French socialist leader Michael
Rocard. Where else could such men hope to chat privately with
the head of IBM, a cou-ple of Rockefellers, bankers galore, a
Justice of the US Supreme Court and Charlton Heston? Even the
prickly Lee Kuan Yew hastened to visit the club, only to have
the mortification of being mistaken for a waiter.
The Bohemian Club began as
a San Francisco institu-tion in 1872, founded by journalists
and kindred lowly scriveners as an excuse for late-night boozing.
Its mem-bership was dignified by Jack London, Mark Twain, Bret
Harte and other literary roustabouts who had fetched up in the
city after the Gold Rush.
The hacks soon concluded that
Bohemianism, in the sense of real poverty, was oppressive. "It
was decided," clubman Ed Bosque wrote, "we should invite
an element to join the Club which the majority of its members
held in contempt, namely men who had money as well as brains,
but who were not, strictly speaking, Bohemians." So they
pulled in a few wealthy men of commerce to pay for the champagne
and the rot soon set in. Within a very few years the lowly scriveners
were on their way out -- except for a few of the more presentable
among them to lend a pretense of Boho-dom -- and Mammon had seized
power.
There were laments. "The
salt has been washed out of the Club by commercialism,"
one writer grumbled. On his visit to the city, Oscar Wilde gazed
around at the fleshy faces and handsomely attired members and
re-marked, "I have never seen so many well-dressed, well-fed,
business-like looking bohemians in all my life."
The final blow to the hacks
came soon thereafter. Near the end of the last century the cult
of the redwood grove as Nature's cathedral was in full swing
and the Boho-businessmen yearned to give their outings a tinc-ture
of spiritual uplift. The long-range planning commit-tee of the
club decided to buy a grove some sixty miles north of the city
near the town of Monte Rio. When the wheeling and dealing was
over, the club owned 2,700 acres of redwoods -- a grove of the
mightiest of thou-sand-year-old Sequoia sempervirens:
"We are grown men now,"
a piece of club literature announced in the early 1920s, "but
each year in the hard procession of our days there comes, thank
God, to us Bohemians, a recess time -- it is upon us. Come out,
Bohemians. Come out and play!" Soon the ancient redwoods,
hated by the Pomo Indians of the area as clammy and sepulchral,
rang to the laughter of the disporting men of commerce.
When all is said and done,
the way the beleaguered American male asserts his personhood,
defies convention, hails the American dream, is to piss against
a tree. Indeed, when confronted with a sex-discrimination suit
a few years ago, the Bohemians indignantly asserted that theirs
had to be a Men Only institution precisely because any woman
entering the club's precincts would see nothing but men occupied
in this crude pastime.
Like all such institutions
the club has its rituals, its ceremonies, its hallowed rules.
In June there are three long weekends of Springjinks, mostly
attended by Californians. At the opening of each summer season
proper, on July 14 this year, there is the traditional masque,
representing the banish-ment of Care. Amid somber music, horses
carrying caped riders gallop through the trees. Then, eerily
picked out by torchlight, robed tycoons move slowly into a clearing
with a bier supporting the effigy of Care. Amid stentori-an chants,
a blare of music and leaping flames, Care is finally cremated.
In its place the flame of eternal friend-ship is ignited and
three weeks of Boho-dom are underway.
This amalgam of pop Druidry,
Klan kitsch and Fraserian mumbo- jumbo stems from the nineteenth-cen-tury
passion for "ancient ritual." Two thousand miles away,
at the other end of the continent, the same impulse produced
Mardi Gras in New Orleans, with its Mystick Krewe, its Elves
of Oberon and the tribute paid by Rex to Comus. Many of the Boho
rituals and its first play, The Triumph of Bohemia, were worked
up by a real estate speculator called George Sterling who took
to poesy and Boho-dom late in life and banished Care permanently
in 1926 by taking strychnine in the Club's city premises.
A college kid we'll call Tom
-- the arm of the Secret Government is, after all, far-reaching
-- worked at the Bohemian Grove each summer for three years in
the middle 1990s. At that time (and we doubt things have changed)
the basic wage for the very ample force required to assist in
the banishing of Care is not handsome -- $5 to $6 an hour. But
Tom worked for an independent con-tractor supplying food and
help and got $125 a day plus tips (officially banned at the Grove)
and ended up with $3,000 for his three-week stint.
Tom's day began at 5:30 a.m.,
preparing for break-fast. The Bohemian Club is set up along frat
house lines. Instead of Deltas and Pi Etas there are camps, some
120 in all, stretching along River Road and Morse Stephens canyon.
Their names follow the imaginative arc of American industrialists
and financiers over the past hun-dred years, from Druids to Hillbillies
(George Bush, Walter Cronkite, William F. Buckley), Isle of
Aves (John E. Du Pont), Meyerling, Owl's Nest (Eddie Albert,
Ronald Reagan), Silverado Squatters, Totem Inn (which has actually
boasted a writer, Allen Drury), Woof (former Secretary of State
James A. Baker III), Wayside Log (which has boasted another writer,
Herman Wouk), Ye Merrie Yowls, Zaca.
The camp Tom lived and worked
at was thick with real estate tycoons and had a reputation for
good food and comfortable appointments. Tom fixed the early morning
gin fizzes and kindred cobweb banishers. He got the pa-pers
-- San Francisco Chronicle, Wall Street Journal, New York Times.
He cleaned up the mess left by the Bohos' nocturnal revels. He
served up the fruits, juices, eggs and bacon and listened to
captains of commerce start their day's chat about business affairs.
The club has a fa-mous motto, "weaving spiders not come
here," meaning No shop talk, but Tom laughs. "They
talk business here all the time. The younger members brown-nose
shame-lessly, making contacts." By midmorning it's another
day in Bohemia, with Tom's hands never idle as he runs up Old
Fashioneds and Manhattans. The members prefer to mix their own
martinis.
Though he was no career man
at the Grove Tom had al-ready taken on a caustic loyalty to his
camp. He sneered at nearby Abbey, a lowly place equipped merely
with tents and believed to have a tradition of unmentionable
prac-tices. He sneered too, though more deferentially, at lordly
Mandalay camp, inaccessible save by written invitation by a member,
luxuriously appointed and stocked with the Membership Committee's
most determined stab at the pretense of Secret Government. Here
are to be found members of the Bechtel clan owners of the largest
engineering contractorship in the world, veterans of Republican
Washington of the era of Gerorge Bush Sr (former Treasury Secretary
Nick Brady, former Secretary of State George Shultz), souven-irs
of industrial might (Leonard K. Firestone. Edgar F. Kaiser),
1970s retro (Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger) and foreign bric-a-brac
(Andrew Knight of The Economist).
The waiting lists for membership
are so long it takes years for the novitiate to be admitted.
Lobbying is pathetically fierce. Tom Watson, the builder of IBM,
once took a long weekend off from his retirement job as US ambassador
to Moscow to fly to San Francisco to dine with a Bohemian Grove
board member and discreetly lobby for membership. A friend of
mine, big in Reagan time, has been on the doorstep for 15 years.
He says he likes it that way. He's spared the heftysign-up fee
of around $10,000 and annual membership duesm and only has to
pony up when he's invited, which is every two or three years.
Particularly in the more sumptuous camps even this takes plenty
of money, sharing bills for retinues of uniformed servants,
vintage cellars, master chefs and kindred accouterments of spiritual
refreshment. But what, in the end, does the member get for his
pains?
There are lakeside talks. Here,
of an evening, Grovers can hear a banker or a Treasury official
wend his way through the intricacies of Third World debt rescheduling,
or listen to a European leader who will offer himself up for
inspection. There are increasingtly popular science talks at
the Bohemian Grove's museum. During the day there are enviro-strolls
with some biologist from Stanford or Berkeley lecturing his retinue
on successional stages in redwood regenera-tion. There's skeet-shooting
on the private range. There's endless dominoes -- the Grove's
board-game par excel-lence. There's Not Being At Home with the
wife. But best of all, there are the talent revue and the play.
Visit some corporate suite
in San Francisco in June or early July and if you see the CEO
brooding thoughtfully before his plate-glass window overlooking
the Bay Bridge, the chances are he is not thinking about some
impending take-over or merciless down-sizing. He is probably
worrying about the cut of his tutu for the drag act for which
he has been rehearsing keenly for many months.
These plays are planned five
years in advance, with no expense spared. Tycoons vie eagerly
for the privilege of shifting a stage prop or securing the bestcomputerized
lighting system that money can provide. Although the talent shows
put on by Merv Griffin and Art Linkletter were reckoned at least
in past years to be good, the plays are pretty awful, heavily
freighted with double-entendres about swollen members and the
like. A poster for one Grove play, Pompeii, featured a mighty
erection under a toga, modelled no doubt on the redoubtable organ
in the Pompeiian fresco photographed by many a touring tycoon.
Along with the big play there
is the comedy revue -- Low Jinks -- for which members again rehearse
with passionate anticipation. World affairs stood still a few
seasons ago as Henry Kissinger prepared for his big moment, which
was to enter, dressed as a dumpy man wearing a Kissinger mask
which he duly pulled off, to reveal the ever-familiar features,
while announcing in his glottal accent, "I am here because
I have always been convinced that The Low Jinks is the ultimate
aphrodisi-ac." Puissance -- this is after all a mature crowd
scam-pering about amid the Sequoia sempervirens -- is a big theme,
and the drag acts are heavily overstated.
Boho-member Wouk once got off
a sententious paragraph about the Grove being the site of that
purest of loves, the friendship that men can nourish between
each other in noble surroundings. Some years ago a gay writer
called Ron Bluestein described his stint waitering at the Grove
in a very funny pamphlet, "A Waitress in Bohemia,"
in which he evoked the below-the-stairs homosexual culture fostered
by a workforce mostly recruited from San Francisco. Some anthropologists
of Boho culture even believe that the Grove is now encircled
with gay resi-dential suburbs that have inevitably sprung up
to ac-commodate these migrants.
Informed sources discount these
stories somewhat. Of course there are gay waiters and gay bohemians
too, discreetly cruising River Road, but it seems that it was
back in the 1970s things got somewhat out of hand. The Club took
certain measures and things are now under control.
Along with its most definitely
closet contingent, the club also has about 2,000 heterosexuals
cooped up for the summer retreat, with no women officially on
the premises except for a daily minibus of female cleaners --
the consequence of a lawsuit brought by feminists a few years
ago -- which can go no farther into the Grove than the Camp Fire
circle, 400 yards from the Main Gate. Randy members break bounds
and head for such straight cruising spots as the Northwood Lodge
and Country Club where vigorously bejeweled women in their thirties
are to be found
A few years ago KGO radio,
out of San Francisco, had an interesting talk show in which callers
with first-hand Grove experience told their tales. A man from
Monte Rio said he was only one of several towns-people renting
cabins every year to prostitutes traveling from as far as Las
Vegas to renew the Bohos' spiritual fibers. He said it was a
big shot in the arm for Monte Rio's ailing economy. This same
caller moved from shots in the arm to shots in another location.
He said he stocked his cabins with plenty of booze as well as
syringes of a potency drug re-cently approved by the Food and
Drug Administration which furnishes four to six-hour erections.
Sempervirens indeed. The Monte Rio caller added that at least
this quotient of Secret Government included good tippers, doling
out splendid gratuities to their companions.
In the 1990s the Grove's reputation
as the site of Secret Government was in eclipse. The Mandalay
camp roster told the story, with its grizzled veterans of the
Reagan-Bush years. The contours of the Republican Party had changed,
in a manner not entirely suited to the Club. The young Christian
zealots of the Newt revolution were scarcely Low Jinksters, and
Newt -- he did give a lake-side talk in 1995 -- was a little
too tacky in style for the gin fizz set. Dole wasn't even a member
and with Bill and Hillary in office, journalists dashed off each
year to the Carolina coast to write about the Renaissance Weekend
at Hilton Head where the idiom was of the 1990s -- self-awareness,
being in touch with your inner self, networking -- rather than
the 1890s -- making merrie, getting drunk and us-ing the Old
Boy Net.
But here we are in the Bush
II era, and the Bush Clan is pure Secret Government, all the
way from the old Rockefeller connection, to Skull and Bones and
the Knights of Malta. Dick Cheney's a Grover.
So spare yourself the expense
of travelling from Quebec to the next session of the WTO. Voyage
to Sonoma County and muster against Secret World Government which,
let's face it, isn't exactly secret. For the Rally and Line of
Shame, be at the Monte Rio parking lot across from the Rio theater
at 2pm, July 14
For further details, call the
Bohemian Grove Action Network, whose Mary Moore has been chivvying
the Grovers for twenty years, at 707-874-2248 or check out http://www.sonomacountyfreepress.org
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