Where the Anvils Fall From the Sky: Behold a Pale Horse pp. 341-352

 If you get that reference, you’re as old as me.

Jonathan May has now decided that England isn’t for him and moved, as all international businessmen do—to Oklahoma. I’m not knocking the state of Oklahoma, but this is an odd move for someone like May. The entire section so far is a humble brag and his move to Oklahoma seems like a letdown for what he’s claimed so far.

He’s trying to claim that, well I’m not sure what he’s trying to claim. What we know from him is that he inherited some money from Charles I, then made thousands of tiny businesses, was a successful middleman, and then earned the ire of some local police. All of this prompts the move to the United States to get away from the harassment in the UK. Why doesn’t he move to New York, or, since the story is taking place in the early 80s, San Francisco? Or try Chicago…of course, I’m missing that he’s not providing a detail—where in Oklahoma did he move? It’s a big state, it’s not Alaska but Oklahoma is huge. We can assume he moved to Tulsa, but he never says, this is odd.

May diverges into this strange analysis of the land near the Rocky Mountains that has a motherlode of silver and gold in it. It’s odd because the implication is that his company owns the deposits, but it’s never said that he purchased the land.

The core of the argument he’s going to make, I think, is going to be some sovereign citizen business techno-legal argument about how he owns 517,000 acres of land that is just bursting with gold, silver, and other mineral deposits. I make this prediction because the next few pages are full of technical sounding but ultimately meaningless statements that could only come from someone unfamiliar with the legal aspects of a business but familiar enough with the vocabulary of it. He starts using terms like “Prime Capital Notes” and “Bill of exchange” in order to sound legitimate. However, we must understand that this thing we are reading is an appeal he’s writing to US Congressmen, they’d be familiar with these terms, and it would be unnecessary to define them.

You can have the rating he provides on page 344 of AAA, but he neither mentions the rating agency, only that it is private, not does he provide the name of the company that is getting the rating. By his own admission he has thousands of charters set up by his bequeathment from King Charles I.

All these terminologies seek to conceal the real problem with his business venture in metals—where are they? May says the land that he owns is full of gold and silver. Fine, produce it. Show me the ore, show me the vein, anything. He can’t though, because none of this is real. I know this because the worth of his find, he says is 180,077,900,000 dollars. This is the total assets that his trust controls, but he can’t find someone to back his Trust? Why does he need backing, he’s sitting on 180B dollars in 1986. This would make his business the wealthiest on the planet and only exceeded by the GDPs of nations. He doesn’t need a bank, he is the bank. With 180B in 1986 he could underwrite the England itself.

Instead, we get arguments over small banks in Minnesota and pages of legalese that, again, sounds like it means something but it doesn’t. I hate teaching the subject of business ethics, but it does prepare me to read things like this.

Finally, we get something, on page 349, that has some content, “…it is generally agreed within informed circles that the presidency of James Earl Carter was orchestrated and primarily paid-for in campaign funds by various ‘inner circle’ members of the Trilateral Commission.”

We get something good, I mean, it’s still bad but it’s what we’re here for. I have never, in my long life, heard anyone refer to President Carter as anything other than “Jimmy Carter.” No one as ever called him James Earl Carter outside of his presidential oath of office.

A running theme in conspiracy literature is how ultra-competent and completely incompetent the conspirators are. May wants to tell me that Carter’s presidency was bought by “them,” which in this case is the Trilateral Commission. Carter is not president when May’s business is with the Minnesota bank or whoever it is that won’t fund his enterprise (one clue that people like him are full of shit is when they want to sue because no one will do business with them), so bringing up Carter is a very odd thing to do. Secondly, Carter loses to Reagan by a margin so wide it’s utterly absurd to think about now. Why didn’t the Trilaterals bail him out then? None of this part of the conspiracy makes any sense.

Which is fortunate because this completely dropped. May then moves on to chide the close relationship between the Arabic Oil producing world, US banks, and the US government. Which, ok, broken clock; but what is it doing here?

My earlier prediction was wrong. He’s completely abandoned the notion of his land ownership. He’s completely abandoned the charters and everything left to him by Charles I. In short, May (and by extension Cooper) has wasted our time.

I know what is happening here. May has spent the last 19 pages making an attempt to establish his credentials. He’s failed at it, but that doesn’t matter because no one is actually reading this but us. The point is to pretend that he’s got all of this money somewhere, that he fled the UK because of the constrictive laws that prevent business, and all of that is going to lend to his actual accusations. This is proof by the illusion of complexity; it’s so boring, it looks so technical, that we must assume that there is something which we do not understand therefore the person must be smart.

This is how post-modernism works and why people think Derrida is some kind of genius. It’s an illusion and when you drill down on the words—you find out that there is no content there. People who are actually good with words—writers like Bill Shakespeare and Terry Pratchett, directors like Scorsese and Tarantino, lyricists like Swift and Chuck D—these people convey meaning so that anyone can understand it. Shakespeare reads difficult at first, but once you get used to the style even an eight-year-old can understand what is happening. People like May, don’t get this because they are profoundly incurious about the world and only see appearances without reflection on it.