Free Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed Page A

with Him. The flesh is next. Plastic will soon prevail over flesh and bones. Death will have taken over. Why is it Death you like? Because then no 1 will keep you up all night with that racket dancing and singing. The next morning you can get up and build, drill, progress putting up skyscrapers and…and…and…working and stuff. You know? Keeping busy.
    Now some problems. Jes Grew. Mu’tafikah, Teutonic Knights who’ve done it again making such a mess of things that Carl Jung wrote:
The catastrophe of the first World War and the extraordinary spiritual malaise that came afterwards were needed to arouse a doubt as to whether all was well with the white man’s mind.
    * Joost A. M. Meerloo, The Dance: from Ritual to Rock and Roll, Ballet to Ballroom (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1960), p. 39.

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    T HE HEADQUARTERS OF THE Wallflower Order, backbone of the Atonists is, due to the Jes Grew contagion, bustling with activity. Aides run about like ants scurrying across a white telephone. They use a new invention Television to scan the U.S. for Jes Grew activity at this moment stirring Chicago.
    Wearing sandals and dressed like a Cecil B. De Mille extra, Hierophant 1 paces the floor, his long, grey beard touching his waist. His yellow eyes dart from screen to video screen as he watches the progress of the epidemic. Watching it Fade Out of Kansas City only to Fade In in St. Louis. Various wooden, metallic and plastic figures shaped like human beings, pet zombies and creatures whose mothers were scared by computers speak to 1 another in code. Gibberish. Sounds of tape recorders of its human voice at high speed. Jes Grew is compounded by the Mu’tafikah who are responsible for art thefts now ravishing the private collections of Europe and America. 1 of their number, an international Mu’tafikah, has lifted the sacred Papyri of Ani stored in the British Museum and returned it to “Brothers in Cairo,” so read the “illiterate” “contradictory” “scrawls,” product of “a tormented mind,” which was left behind at the scene of the theft.
    The Far Eastern Museum of Cologne has discovered several items from its Chinese collection missing. To add to this, the war launched by the Order against the Haitian nation has been exposed by a well-planted headline in the New York Sun. More books concerning Haiti have been checked out of American libraries in a week than in the previous history of the library system. To add to that, people walk all over New York speaking Creole and wearing tropical clothes; the women long white dresses, the men linen suits. As the war drags on it arrives upon American shores. The Wallflower Order launched the war against Haiti in hopes of allaying Jes Grew symptoms by attacking their miasmatic source. But little Haiti resists. It becomes a world-wide symbol for religious and aesthetic freedom. When an artist happens upon a new form he shouts “I Have Reached My Haiti!”
    Dance manias inundate the land. J. A. Rogers writes, “It is just the epidemic contagiousness of jazz that makes it, like measles, sweep the block.” * People do the Charleston the Texas Tommy and other anonymously created symptoms of Jes Grew. The Wallflower Order remembers the 10th-Century tarantism which nearly threatened the survival of the Church. Even Paracelsus, a “radical” who startled the academicians by lecturing in the vernacular, termed these manias “a disease.”
    The Wallflower Order is well aware of what Jes Grew wants and what Jes Grew needs. In case they’re wrong they have other techniques. Their diagnosis is the same as PaPa LaBas’, a “so-called” astrodetective they have under surveillance.
    You must capture its Celebration and then it will dissolve. It’s a new age. 1920. Sword fighting only interests the kids who attend the matinees. Douglas Fairbanks can sell Liberty Bonds and act but he is of no aid to you. The Teutonic Order is of no use. You must use something up-to-date to curb Jes Grew. To knock