The golden hoe

 

OKLAHOMA CITY – I am only vaguely familiar with the video game Minecraft. I know it is popular with kids and I recall seeing a Minecraft T-shirt a few weeks ago and wondering about it.

After a little research, I learned that Minecraft was launched in November 2011 (11/11) and would go on to become the best-selling video game of all time. Essentially, players

So, it was interesting that I had a dream involving a tool that Minecraft players can put together, called a “golden hoe.”

Now, I am not sure if the “golden hoe” in Minecraft – which is created by using two sticks and two gold ingots – is the “golden hoe” in my dream, but it is interesting to learn more about it, as it is created to help survive in that blocky, online world. Although some players consider the golden hoe to be largely useless.

Anyway, in my “golden hoe” dream, I am in a Los Angeles-esque residential neighborhood. It reminds me of the neighborhoods that Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) visits over the course of the 1974 film Chinatown, a film set in the 1930’s.

I am in a house, having come out of the bathroom wearing only a towel around my waist. I am suddenly aware that next door, a large group of well-dressed gangsters have gathered and are loudly discussing their plans for an upcoming heist or crime of some sort.

Worried that I might be noticed by these swarthy mobsters, I duck down below the level of the bedroom window, so as not to be seen.

As I do this, I can hear a song – a chain-gang-like work song that goes like this: “Who hoed the muzzline? / Who hoed the muzzline? Who hoed the muzzline with the golden hoe?”

Muzzline? Golden hoe? What is this all about? I really have no idea. Is there a call-and-response chain gang working out on the street? My dream ends and I never get an answer.

When I awake, I immediately send myself a message, with the lyrics of this mysterious song, that I could imagine the Coen Brothers using in O Brother, Where Art Thou? Or Pete Seeger singing and playing along to on his banjo. I got the impression that it was connected with communist radicals, as noted in a book I reviewed at Red Dirt Report in 2016 titled Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression by Robin D.G. Kelley, and published in 1990.

In my March 26, 2016 review of Kelley’s book, I wrote:

“Kelley's thoroughly-researched book explains how poor and working-class black Alabamians (sharecroppers, miners, and others in rural areas and in the urban Birmingham region) were attracted to the Communist Party's message of inclusion, their focus on the internationally-recognized Scottsboro Boys case, of black men being falsely accused of rape, and also condemning and fighting Jim Crow, which was the standard of segregation, and not allowing black citizens to vote and so forth.

This, of course, resulted in a lot of anger and consternation in the dominant white community. Whites formed lynching parties to rid the countryside of "Reds," terrorizing African-Americans anywhere they went. The examples Kelley offers are hair-raising and shocking in their violence and cruelty.”

As for “muzzline,” my research on this strange word only led me to Muslim dating sites and to a similar-sounding word: “muslin.” This is a sturdy, woven cotton fabric used in making garments and has its roots in South Asia, but was first manufactured in Mosul, Iraq, which is where the word “muslin” comes from.

Interestingly, an online July 2020 story on the Trump White House “muzzling” Dr. Anthony Fauci, is printed as “muzzline” instead of “muzzling.”

There has been a lot of “muzzling” of speech of late, particularly on the part of the fascistic leftists who are outraged at every turn. If they don’t like your speech, they silence you. Perhaps a “golden hoe” to the skull might wake up some of these tyrants-in-training that we do things differently in America.

So, what of this golden hoe? Well, I was reminded of scenes early in the reboot of Twin Peaks in 2017 where Dr. Lawrence Jacoby – working under his podcasting/broadcasting name of “Dr. Amp,” is selling “golden shovels” for $29.99 to his listeners, so they can “shovel themselves out of the shit and into the truth. Dig yourself out of the shit. $29.99. That’s right.”

Perhaps because I have been thinking about the metaphor of America as Chinatown in Chinatown or Twin Peaks in Twin Peaks: The Return. Regarding the latter, creators David Lynch and Mark Frost seem to be quite prescient about how America would be some five-or-more years after Twin Peaks: The Return aired on Showtime. The violence and confusion and dark sorcery we witness in Twin Peaks: The Return shocks the conscience.

As for the gangster angle in my dream, well you have the gangster Mitchum Brothers in Las Vegas played by Robert Knepper and Jim Belushi. At one point, they come upon a shoot-out in a Vegas cul-de-sac. Knepper’s character tells his brother, “People are under a lot of stress, Bradley.” Truer words. And Vegas embodies that stress and insanity.

The Mitchum Brothers come upon Kyle MacLachlan’s Agent Cooper, who is, at this point, child-like Dougie Jones. Dougie befriends the Mitchum brothers, telling them they have “hearts of gold,” even though he knows they are criminals.

The color gold and physical gold seems to play a role in the series.

There it is … gold. In fact, the name Twin Peaks is no longer presented in the neon green of the 1990’s original series, but in gold letters on the deluxe boxed edition.

BOTTOM LINE

Does my dream point to grim future that will start as a 1930’s-esque Great Depression, where gangsters really run things and the rest of us are metaphorical slaves on a plantation? It is becoming ever clearer that the Great Reset crowd is quite comfortable with making sure the economy crashes and we're all just miserable, while they prepare their Alternative 3 future. This may be a good time to learn how to use a hoe for that backyard garden many of us will likely be planting in the near-future.