Cheekless Kafirs

Brother Theodore
Ernest Samuel Llime - March 2009, Woodhaven

Sometime in the second half of the 70's, I got to sit in on one of Brother Theodore's rants. It left me feeling a lot like I felt lying in a dark field just before dawn on October 24, 1973 while my tank was burning.

I came to New York on December 15, 1975 after living for 14 years in the land of Israel which took place 14 years after I was born in a country named Romania. I have always been a dreamer, a stargazer, a somewhat displaced human and I am still not sure that I truly belong HERE (doesn't matter how you define that.) Looking at myself in my mind's eye I see a Candide, a Billy Pilgrim, a Michael Valentine (before he fully grokk-ed humans.)

I don't think anyone can imagine the impact that day to day life in America had on me (even I cannot and I've lived through it.) My English was improving day by day and the time came when I could finally understand what Dylan was singing about. It got so good that I could even understand every one of Zappa's words (with or without the Mothers) even though I had no idea what he was saying. Saturday Night Live - which I watched religiously looking for clues - was in its most potent incarnation. There was a guy on 5th avenue protesting his status as a battered husband and another guy who dyed his head with shoe polish to simulate hair, and played a drum kit on the sidewalk. Every day in front of 550 5th avenue (that belonged to the Shah) there was a crowd of Iranian protestors who tortured and hung themselves in order to point out the injustices in their country. I was catching up on music by listening to The Fugs and Captain Beefheart.

In the present, I feel that I have made great progress understanding American humor. I read most - maybe all - of Robert Anton Wilson's writings, I saw "Abel Raises Cain" and I met Alan Abel (he claims he didn't do the "battered husband" gig.)

Lots of other funny things happened in the meantime.
Imelda's shoes - seemed more important than the fall of her U.S. supported husband.
The Ayatollahs - replacing another U.S. supported tyrant with an extreme regime so tyrannical it is even starting to worry the rest of the Arab world.
The raid on Waco - no one knows for sure what happened (besides lots of deaths;) some of the evidence, including a bullet ridden church door disappeared the next day.
The children of the YFZ Ranch - removed by the authorities for all kinds of bogus reasons - but happily returned later on.

As for Brother Theodore, I wasn't sure at the time that I didn't end up in some kind of strange cult. I thought it might be something like the Church of Scientology where I had watched a very twisted "History of the World" movie. His name did come up in conversation once in a while, but somehow, I never caught any of his appearances on the Letterman show and it is only now that the mystery is resolved. Many thanks to UncleBob Martin who has posted a link to the Brother Theodore Collection - Torrent Reactor NET . I am still digesting the stuff but I believe I am starting to see the light.

Will the above serve as an intro to Brother Theodore? I say it will serve as well as any. I have a few points of similarity with the good old Brother; I was not myself in a concentration camp but I had lost a lot of my family in one of them and though I do not usually advertise this, I believe that a lot of my thinking processes were influenced by this fact. Just like Brother Theodore, I cannot get rid of my heavy accent (it's not as strong as his.) I believe I have finally come to terms with the absurd and its various incarnations from Kurt Schwitters, through Dali, Zappa and on to The Plasmatics and G.G. Allin. In an event that seems in retrospect imitative and pretentious, I once read John Lennon's "A Spaniard in the Works" and "In His Own Write" out loud to a circle of friends on a beach in Israel, none of whom understood the English language (the puns do not work in translation.)

But, unlike Brother Theodore I have always been an immortalist. Where he says : "As long as there is death, there is hope" I say "Fight Death - LIVE!"