Customer Reviews

TSOG: The Thing That Ate The Constitution

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

TSOG is political satire at its most entertaining high - something far beyond your wildest dreams. Capable of evoking hysterical laughter and revelation all in the same quip, Wilson delivers punch after punch of thoughtful thrills. TSOG is rapturous, raucously humorous, and pleasurably mind-boggling. What other book takes you from the exciting works of luminaries such as Ezra Pound and Alfred Korzybski to side splitting sections on unidentified flying virgins and why Hannibal Lecter would be suitable as President!

Wilson's mind is razor sharp but as thrillingly imaginative as ever with delightful intellectual surprises around every corner. The reader marvels at Wilson's uncanny ability to interconnect the Church with the U.S. government with the Mafia and sundry other human folly.

The author openly bashes the hypocrisies of "faith-based organizations" and the many dangers of orthodoxy.

A lively account of a trip to Cannabis Cup leads to various wonderful uses of the "f" word.

Bungling idiots in office are skewered like never before in parodies that challenge the best of Hollywood's comedy writers to hyperkinetic runs for the money.

Mainly the thrill of reading Wilson is the uniquely acerbic but always light-hearted and comedic tone which reminds you what is so important about freedom. In the end you may not have created a rupture in the power structures but your mind has roamed through dimensions that are constantly considered off-limits.

Wilson shows all of us that thought processes are not heretical -that we are free to use our minds as we see fit. In this spirit exists the only real hope that while living in an increasingly more restrictive society we, the people - and not our Tsarist government - will ultimately be victorious.

I hate to pan a R.A.W. book, but this is, by far, his weakest effort. Some of it reprints material from 'Trajectories', even more of it is material from his website . The original material has been bulked up by silly full-page illustrations that add very little to the book, and even more pages are spent on quotes, many of them from Ezra Pound, so that the book should almost be credited as "Edited by" R.A.W. instead of authored. Wilson doesn't put a lot of effort into maintaining his "Tsarist-Occupied Government" argument beyond the short introductory essay (which, itself, is Wilson at his conspiracy-theory best), so the title of the book is a little misleading; this is more like a sequel to _Coincidence: A Head Trip_, filled with much shorter writings on Wilson's familiar themes; Satanic Panics, religion, uncertainty, drugs, UFOs and archetypes.

The last ten pages are a preview of his next book to be published, _Tale of the Tribe_, advertised as being about the Internet (by which I assume New Falcon means the World Wide Web). Given that so much of _TSOG_ looks like an amateur website captured on paper, one can hope that a book on contributions to cyberspace models by Rennaisance thinkers will work out better.

It seems to me that the state of the U.S. gov't needs to be critiqued in the way that Robert Anton Wilson does. It's unfortunate that, as the need grows, his power to voice that critique seems to be failing.

TSOG, which stands for Tsarist Occupational Government, is Wilson's term for the take-over Bush Co. has assumed over the United States of America with a Tsarist-style dictatorship, however he does note the basically interchangeable nature of `Bore and Gush'.

Wilson opens with a touching and maddening description of the state of his body thanks to post-polio syndrome and the current TSOG in America, though his mind remains as sharp as ever. He comments on the inhumane intervention of the federal government regarding the only thing that relives his otherwise constant pain: marijuana; the state of California having already declared it legal for medicinal use, and the direct effects on the condition of his health as a result of their illegal ruling.

Wilson covers his usual range of fascinating, slightly off-beat topics, ranging from conspiracy theories, the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, religion, marijuana and the war on some drugs, and furthers his philosophy of `Maybe Logic' (a brilliant DVD of the same name was [finally] released in the summer of 2003).

Interspersed are also clever line drawings by the author, poignant, satirical, and yet another reminder that Wilson is talented in so many respects. The bits of visual art that pepper his work are rarely mentioned, but in my opinion they should to be: he's pretty damn good.

However, TSOG doesn't seem to contain the usual amount of personal stories and accounts usually found in many of the previous RAW books that made them so cleverly inspiring and entertaining. Or perhaps it is that TSOG is mostly comprised of quotations, news articles, statistics and other bits gathered from websites and outside sources rather than purely written (or typed as the case may be) in his own hand.

Yet, as always, Wilson continues to provide the reader with intelligent thought and inspire delineations off toward the beaten path. Though TSOG doesn't compare as favourably with his previous works, his fans will likely enjoy it anyway.

While there is no overall theme to this work, unlike others of RAW's works, it still is great. Mostly put together from the "Thoughts of the Month" from Wilson's web site and expansions on those, it strikes home at the problems of the government intruding in our lives.

I'm a huge RA. Wilson fan and recommend all of his books. This is a hard book to read however for anybody who believes they "are" free in the modern United States. RAW seriously asks the questions any intelligent individual should be concerned with about matters of civil liberties, the nature of government, and with his usual wit and compassionate humour. A must for anybody interested in freedom, liberty, and increasing their intelligence. Nobody can accuse RAW of being naive, uninformed, or blindly optimistic.

Bob keeps getting better and better. Loosely following the pattern of Dante's Commedia, Bob travels from Amsterdam to the hellish inner workings of our government, with some wonderful tidbits about Faulkner and Ezra and bears, oh my!

Robert Anton Wilson is sort of like the Howard Stern of the New Age movement. I'll give him this, he's entertaining. This book however, gets a resounding 'piece of crap' rating. It's a great book of fun little facts, but completely lacks any unifying theme (despite what you'd think), and Wilson degenerates all too often into one of his pat rants. This guy's getting old, and he apparently needs money, because he's cranking out high-volume and low quality lately, and re-issuing danged near everything. It's incredibly interesting (as a synthesis of facts already known to me and avid RAW Readers) in the first few chapters, but then meanders like the mind of a septagenarian, life-long potsmoker (oh wait, that's what Wilson *is*!!), on his deathbed. It gets into 15 year old news (the Manhattan Beach Satanic child abuse case(s)....ummmm...Why!?), 'Seeing-is-not-knowing' General Semantics that Wilson is wellknown for and 'map is not the territory' etc...all of which have *what* to do with a neo/quasi-fascist conspiracy financed by Dutch-English-American banker/extant blueblood families that have subverted the American Constitution? Well, I don't friggin' know either, but my guess is that the answer is 'nothing' and Wilson needed to put out a book. There's this whole reciprocally fellative network that I've noticed with these 'new agers' cross-endorsing their latest project and the New Falcon Press is a particularly egregious case of this phenomenon (in fact, in some occult bookstores, the genre, yes the *genre* is listed as Wilson-Hyatt- hahahahahahahaha).