", "Bohemians come! When they got up to go to dinner, one hugged another around the middle from behind and trudged up the bank with him that way, laughing. Scenting power, press lords skip in from all over the country: Joe Albritton, former owner of The Washington Star; Charles E. Scripps and Otto Silha of Cowles Media; the McClatchys of the McClatchy chain; and David Gergen of U.S. News & World Report all obey the Bohemian command of keeping the goings-on from their readers. Participants drank 4,000 bottles of wine, carefully chosen, and almost as much liquordespite the special Bohemian Club labels, the bourbon was real ly Jim Beam and the gin really Beefeaters. The Grove was still there. Then everyone hushed as a column of hooded figures carrying torches emerged solemnly from the woods 100 yards away, bearing a corpse down to the water. "You can't," he said. "This is for the campless, not the homeless," he was saying. Music sounded softly. The Rise and Fall of Labor Unions In The U.S. Interlocking Directorates in the Corporate Community, The Power Elite's Foreign Policy in WWII & Vietnam, The Rise and Fall of Diversity at the Top, 2005-2015, Can Corporate Power Be Controlled? At the opening of each summer season proper, on July 14 this year, there is the traditional masque, representing the banish-ment of Care. It was the same bar-lodge-motel where the local police had arrested a man for pandering a few years back. Instead of Deltas and Pi Etas there are camps, some 120 in all, stretching along River Road and Morse Stephens canyon. On July 21 of this year Henry Kissinger sat at one of them, chuffing loudly to someone -- Sunshine, her called her, and Sweetie -- about the pleasant distractions of his vacation in the forest. According to the guest list, this year's attendees include George H. W. Bush, David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and several former CIA directors. "Are you going to show it?" That's right, the Bohemian Grove. 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. The getup stood out because it was so fastidious among men who had let themselves go. Lobbying is pathetically fierce. 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. And all the talk about male fellowship often sounds just like a college freshman's version of No Gurls Allowed, an institutional escape from women, from their demands, aggressions and vapors. But the club's newspapermen were also socially ambitious, aiming to chronicle California's rise in the arts and sciences. Bohemian Grove: Cremation of Care Ritual by Infinite Chariots, released 01 March 2023 1. . The poster outside Monkey Block camp advertising this year's Grove play, Pompeii, featured a gigantic erection under a toga. According to 1979 figures, the average age of Bohemians is 55. But the biggest crowd pleaser was Bubbles Boobenheim, a showgirl turned patroness who rubbed her prosthetic behind against the elevator doors at stage left. This was about the highest security I saw inside. The mood is reminiscent of high school. By the time of the first encampment, in 1878, many of the San Francisco high social class were members. No one was supposed to know he was peering up at ospreys and turkey vultures and hearing Soviet speakers along with former American secretaries of State and the present secretary of the Treasury. Henry A. Kissinger papers, part III > Series VII. Though I regularly violated Grove rule 20 ("Members and guests shall sign the register when arriving at or departing from the Grove"), I was never stopped or questioned. In June there are three long weekends of Springjinks, mostly attended by Californians. Edgar F. Kaiser), 1970s retro (Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger) and foreign bric-a-brac (Andrew Knight of The Economist). Around me the men exploded in huzzahs. No, Section 8, Article XVIII was too fine a screen for me. 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 screens get pretty fine. The Bohemian Club, founded in 1872, was originally composed of journalists and musicians ("bohemians"). It was just past noon on Sunday, the middle weekend at the encampment -- the busiest weekend, with attendance approaching 2,200 men. Fifty people were arrested. The scene was permeated by a kind of kitsch Black Forest imagery, and the setting seemed very Wagnerian -- though the music was sometimes undercut by the soft drumming of tinkling urine off the edge of the porch, where the beer drinkers went one after the other. It was born in the newsroom of the old San Francisco Examiner in 1872, when James F. Bowman, an editorial writer for the rival Chronicle, proposed it to some friends at the Examiner, including prominent journalist Ambrose Bierce. The main priest wore a pink-and-green satin costume, while a hamadryad appeared before a redwood in a gold spangled bodysuit dripping with rhinestones. Gray, who this year had brought along Union Carbide boss Robert D. Kennedy. When one character; a PR executive, expressed a desire to make his mistress an honest woman, she objected, reminding him of an old Bohemian saying: "If it floats or flies or fools around, don't buy it, rent it." The site's annual secretive meeting takes place for two weeks in July, with Powell writing that he was present at last July's event. The most elite of the camps is Mandalay. As dinner began that night, people were already sitting down on the redwood benches at the main stage for the Grove play (despite the poster, a humorless enactment of the destruction of Pompeii). He did take a crack at toilet humor: "You know, I got to take a second to do something naughty here, since this is an all-stag arrangement. "Oh thou, great symbol of all mortal wisdom, Owl of Bohemia grant us thy counsel!". On the blackboard near the bootblack stand there were phone messages for corporate raider Henry Kravis and Bloomingdale's chairman Marvin Traub. (Then the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, who had copies of his newspaper shipped up every day.) 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? Canada. "It's already got a fur coat and the license is a lot cheaper." A waiter in a red jacket dropped an uneaten chunk of the bright red cod into a waste bin, and the Bohemians at my table talked about presidents. The mood was American and bellicose. Bohemian Grove is one of the most secretive places in the world, a Northern California campground that's a play land for the rich and powerful, with lore that claims it holds Illuminati meetings . The religion they consecrate is right-wing, laissez-faire and quintessentially western, with some Druid tree worship thrown in for fun. Sempervirens indeed. I didn't want to disagree. The size also variesonly 10 to 15 persons can be accommodated at some, while others range up to 150. Fireworks went off at the lakeside, and a brass band in peppermint-striped jackets and straw boaters came out of the woods playing "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.". All day long there is music in the Grove, and at night in some camps there are programs of entertainment: comics, singers, actors. Find home again in the Grove! Most of the visitors to this year's encampment stayed only one or two of the three weekends, although a few stayed the entire two weeks. Monte Rio is a depressed Northern California town of 900 where the forest is so thick that some streetlights stay on all day long. The long tables are lit by gas pipes that spring from the ears of wooden owl silhouettes three feet above the table, a half dozen of these per table. John McCosker of San Francisco's Steinhart Aquarium gave a popular talk about certain species of fish found off the Galapagos Islands that can change their sex in order to survive. ", Then the crypt of Care was poled slowly down the lake by a black-robed figure in a black gondola, accompanied by a great deal of special effects smoke. ", "My son was in Santiago, and David sent him letters of introduction to seven leading bankers in seven countries. ", "You know, they've got a lot of liberal faculty. In 1982 reporters followed German chancellor Helmut Schmidt co the Grove gates, and the front page of the Christian Science Monitor termed the Grove "the West's hidden summit." They talk business here all the time. Under the green parasol stood General John Chain, commander of the Strategic Air Command, who spoke of the country's desperate need for the Stealth B-2 bomber. One day in the Grove, I tipped a camp valet and he offered some unsolicited information. And they are leaders in communications, academic and art worlds. In 1984 folk singing demonstrators tried to quarantine the Bohemians inside the Grove because they were so dangerous to the outside world. 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. Moore's answering machine message asking friends not to call her at her vintage-clothing store in the town of Sebastopol included a denunciation of the Cremation of Care. No wonder this year's guest list included the two biggest congressional bagmen of recent years: Representative Tony Coelho, former chairman of the House Democratic Campaign Committee, and Representative Guy Vanderjagt, his counterpart on the Republican committee. Individual melted into group, but what a group: George Shultz was seated below me, and word in the camp was that a year and $75,000 or so had been spent for a production that would be seen just once, just by them. No one would be surprised. At 33, 1 was one of the youngest Bohemians, but I was welcome almost as a policy matter. [ link to imgur.com (secure)] Quoting: Ninbit. PodClips brings you the best podcast clips All clips from this episode: https://podclips.com/e/edz?ss=y___Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/podclip. This year Rocard's visit went unreported. Lowell Bergman, a producer with 60 Minutes who used to hunt rabbits in the nearby hills, remembered a fire road leading into the site near the Guerneville waste-treatment plant but said they'd spot me sneaking in. Ronald Reagan and George Bush are members. Everywhere you hear what is Bohemian and what isn't Bohemian, One night I wandered into Fore Peak camp and got a lecture from a man named Hugh about Bohemian values as they concerned Fore Peak's famous drink, a mixture of rum and hot chocolate. It's another Bohemian wee-wee word, something you haven't heard since you were 14. Then Secretary of the Interior Walter J. Hickel was negotiating reparations for the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill when he attended the 1970 encampment as the guest of Fred L. Hart preparation for the three major stage events at each Summer Encampment. "Well, I should give up putting it on my face and arms and spray it on my prick -- see if that'll do any good.". Among other things, it permits alcoholic failures to feel equal for a few days with their workaholic cousins. The avenging posses may find some puzzling elements within the Grove. The best of the traditional postprandial lakeside talks was given by former Califomia Gov. Other references aren't so subtle. Even the prickly Lee Kuan Yew hastened to visit the club, only to have the mortification of being mistaken for a waiter. "Your secretary, I got to tell you, she's 110 percent," a dark-haired man said to an older fellow. The man peeled off the mask to reveal that he really was Kissinger, and he said in his familiar gravelly accent, "I am here because I have always been convinced that the Low Jinks is the ultimate aphrodisiac." The sudden appearance of men in striped jackets shows what a bouillabaisse of traditions the Grove is. Membership in the Bohemian Club is by invitation only, and no women are allowed, either as members or guests, except for an occasional picnic for club wives. Even 100-year-old Grove annals have a homoerotic quality, with references to "slender, young Bohemians, clad in economical bathing suits." Old friends move among the tables, kissing one another, and a ruddy Bohemian gets up on a bench and, as his friends cheer him on, removes his cap and opens his mouth to sing. Then, eerily picked out by torchlight, robed tycoons move slowly into a clearing with a bier supporting the effigy of Care. The waiting lists for membership are so long it takes years for the novitiate . At dinner I sat across from a young broker who shared his wine with me and complained about his girlfriend. I repeated myself, and he said, "Yes, yes, that's true," in the famous furry voice. "No, but I've heard a lot about him and I'd like to meet him." After a poor reception, Nelson Rockefeller abandoned his bid for the Republican nomination in 1964. When a character describes modern art as "the talentless being sold by the unprincipled to the bewildered," the crowd's roar seemed to contain the grief of hundreds of businessmen who have shelled out for headquarters art they do not understand. Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Ford 2d, Robert Trent Jones, the golf course architect, and former California Lieutenant Governor Ed Reinecke have all been stage hands, and actors have included Bing Crosby, David Niven, Ray Bolger, Edgar Bergen, Phil Harris and Dan Rowan. Black jokes are out because there are a handful of black members -- though one day near the Civic Center I did hear a group of old-timers trying to imitate Jesse Jackson. The first, called Cremation of Care, is a bizarre production on the opening night of every encampment, a ritualistic ceremony involving hundreds of participants. The CIAs Changing Take on the Climate Emergency, Emancipation, Hollywoods Best Civil War Film Ever. The important men come out for the Lakeside Talks, and each speaker seems to assume that his audience can actually do something about the issues raised, which, of course, it can. The club's famed annual gathering has been held for more than 100 years at the 2,700-acre Bohemian Grove in Monte Rio, about 70 miles north of San Francisco in Sonoma County. "Honey, I lost my ring and I want to sell the house," the third one said, mocking a homecoming speech. director John McCone, and Lucius D. Clay, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Then Nelson and David Rockefeller horned their way in, and the spotlight moved to the Trilateral Commisssion. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, who spoke on the history of the state water problems and the creation of such programs as the Central Valley Project. The Jinks jokes about women were straight out of an old joke book. They told of how a man's heart is divided between "reality" and "fantasy," how it is necessary to escape to another world of fellowship among men. It ends with the symbolic burning in effigy of a wooden skeleton in a coffin that represents the end of the cares of the world. One of the speakers this year was Defense Secretary Harold Brown. The Jinks is vigorously lowbrow. Moore agreed to help me get in, providing me with a sort of underground railroad. You know how many times we've been in someone's home, and we've wanted to go to the powder room, and we've maybe said, 'Excuse me, I've got to powder my nose.' The Club took certain measures and things are now under control. Cutting in line is distinctly un-Bohemian behavior. But in fact, class and status differences among camps are pronounced. It turned out to be only a deer lick. Another camp is aptly called Lost Angels, for it is made up of members from southern California, including Norman Chandler, publisher of The Los Angeles Times, and Andy Devine, an actor. "Oh, Rocard is having a ball." The speeches are presented as off-the-record -- one of the absurdities of Grove life, given that they are open to several thousand people. He had a dumpy body a lot like Kissinger's. There's all the redwood talk. It was at the Bohemian Grove that Americas 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. Bohemian Club In the Bohemian Club at what is known as Bohemian Grove in the redwood forest of California's Sonoma county, an event that continued into the 21st century. At Faraway camp a guy beckoned me into the camp to enjoy "a little orange juice." Some observers of the Grove had warned that security was too good; they'd sniff me out quickly. Summer after summer BGAN stoked Grove conspiracy theories by getting hold of the guest list. Everyone talks about it. One of them seemed puzzled -- the friend wasn't the sort to get going at 7:45 a.m., he noted. checks to shame. At the encampment last July, Al Haig was there, along with three other former secretaries of State: Kissinger, Shultz and William P. Rogers (Rogers as a guest of former national security adviser William P. Clark's). And this year, when president George Elliott wrote, more drably, "Around campfires large and small, warm hospitality awaits you. I love this tree as the most sound, upright and stately redwood in the grove. There's a kind of emotional experience with an election year, that between state elections, local elections, and besides, with a two year term, a congressman gets elected and the next day he starts campaigning for the next election." It's easy to imagine that many early Bohemians started out as laborers and had to remind more aristocratic visitors that social mobility was a cherished ideal. Over the years the Jinks has become the leading entertainment at the encampment, surpassing the mannered and ponderous Grove Play, which is performed the next weekend. 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. Also, it was Walter Cronkite talking. A tenet of Grove life is noncompetitive egalitarianism: all men are equal here. Th encampment has become the primary watering hole for Republican administration officials, defense contractors, press barons, old-line Hollywood figures, establishment intellectuals and a handful of German speaking men in lederhosen. But he was perfectly charming, and we talked about music and the Kennedy Center for a long time.. A screen door creaked on a little house farther up the hill, and a Bohemian named Richard poked his head out, emerging from his siesta. The rough wooden tables were piled with perfect fruit. The jokes fit right into the Grove's Ayn Rand R&R mood. (Another rule forbade cameras outside one's own camp. Bilderberg mastermind Henry Kissinger is also a reported regular at the event. 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. I used my real name. When Seymour Hersh Strained to Keep Up With CounterPunch, Nichole Stephens, Administrative Assistant. The encampment got even looser as the third and last weekend approached. 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 Committees most determined stab at the pretense of Secret Government. The contours of the Republican Party had changed, in a manner not entirely suited to the Club. 09/16/2019 04:05 PM. "My friends don't understand this," a pudgy 35-year-old in front of me confided to his companion. At the Bohemian Grove, he joined the Piedmont Camp to be with his close personal friends from Piedmontthe Witters, Dollars, etc.instead of joining a business camp. One camp, called Aviary, is composed entirely of members who were, or are, singers. Activists from truthaction.org have obtained the official guest list for Bohemian Grove's 2008 midsummer encampment along with a map of the Grove's facilities. The camp Tom lived and worked at was thick with real estate tycoons and had a reputation for good food and comfortable appointments. Reagan said that it was good to be back. Bohemian Grove is a campground owned by the Bohemian Club. "One of the contemporary myths about the Bohemian Club is that it is a gathering and decision-making place for national and international 'power brokers,"' the club's then-president said in 1980. When will ye learn that me ye cannot slay? Had a red fist painted on the back of her gown. It urged its followers to form "Boho Clubs" to study members so they could be "held accountable by the American People" for participating "in the maintenance of the process of plutocratic patriarchy which threatens the planet Earth with omnicide from the nuclear menace." Two of the buses bore vanity license plates commemorating the 1989 presidential inauguration -- they had the words Kinder and Gentler stamped on them. Just the same, a man on his own often gets invited back to camps by gay Bohemians. By such standards, San Francisco businessmen surely looked crude. Owl's Nest is sort of an old Hollywood-corporatist camp. (Brady was the U.S. Treasury Secretary at the time.) ), Zweigenhaft on Teaching about Class & Social Change, Interlocks and Interactions Among the Power Elite, http://whorulesamerica.net/power/bohemian_grove_spy.html. Degrowth or Debunk: Do Degrowth proponents have a strategy? 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. Today they were offering Alaskan cod, sauted lamb kidneys, eggs, French toast, bacon, sausages. One Bohemian, a patrician fellow with silver hair, wheeled in rage, saying, "I'll be goddamned." Informed sources discount these stories somewhat. Title. Mr. Ford and Mr. Kissinger this year were .guests of Mandalay, whose members include Stephen Bechtel Sr., Stephen Bechtel Jr., Leonard Case Firestone and Edgar F. Kaiser, among the industrialists; former C.I.A. European leaders travel discreetly to the Grove to ad-dress the American elite. You can't describe it," he explained. The Monte Rio caller added that at least this quotient of Secret Government included good tippers, doling out splendid gratuities to their companions. ", It was in the phone circle that Henry Kissinger alienated some brother Bohemians on the middle weekend. Meanwhile, the racked-up Owl Hoots drawings dubbed the sculpture the "statue of Piece" and pictured a Bohemian commenting that she would be "fun to dance with." Bohemian GroveWhere Big Shots Go to Camp, https://www.nytimes.com/1977/08/14/archives/bohemian-grove-where-big-shots-go-to-camp.html. The sense that you are inside an actual club is heightened by all the furnishings that could not survive a wet season outdoors: the stuffed lion on top of Jungle camp; the red lanterns in the trees behind Dragons camp at night, which add to the haunting atmosphere; the paintings of camels, pelicans and naked women that are hung outside; the soft couch in the doorway of Woof camp, and everywhere pianos that, when the encampment is over, go back to the piano warehouse near the front gate. This button displays the currently selected search type. The productions, involving hundreds altogether, are estimated to cost upwards of $30,000 each. On July 21 of this year Henry Kissinger sat at one of them, chuffing loudly to someone -- Sunshine, her called her, and Sweetie -- about the pleasant distractions of his vacation in the forest. The talent section is no doubt in acted in and staged each year by club members. "What do you call this?" Many an empire has of course been run by drunken men wearing make-up. But by then I'd made my connection, My driver was Mary Moore, an Earth Mother type with long silvery-blond hair who is the most active member of a distinctly Californian left-wing group called the Bohemian Grove Action Network. (Cronkite camps in Hill Billies along with George H.W.