Bohos are Patriots
San Francisco’s Bohemian Club was founded by a rude gaggle of newsmen, artists, musicians and dramatists back in 1872. How this cutting-edge arts & intelligentsia drinking fraternity morphed into today’s rich, powerful and ultra-conservative version of Animal House in the Sonoma County redwoods is a slight puzzler.
Every Republican president since Calvin Coolidge has partied down at the Bohemian Grove.
“Weaving Spiders Come Not Here” is the Bohemian Club motto, meant to suggest that no deals are to be cut at their two week long Bohemian Grove summer bacchanalia. And if you believe that, why I’m selling some sunny oceanfront property in North Dakota…
William Shakespeare spun “Weaving Spiders” into his A Midsummer Night’s Dream four centuries ago. Methinks ol’ Will would be dumbstruck at the absurdity of two thousand filthy-rich plunderers calling themselves, of all things, bohemians, invading Sonoma County from all corners of the Republican corporate universe, hell-bent on perpetual inebriation, stumbling about looking for ancient redwoods to whiz on. The notion that these guys (no gals allowed) spend their time singing Kumbaya while uttering nary a business &/or political-dealing syllable, as their motto demands, transcends satire.
“The faggiest goddamn thing I've ever seen.” —Richard Nixon
In other words—this ain’t Camp Avant-Garde. But what accounts for the Bohemian Club turning a complete 180?
Perhaps it changed because broken down newsmen and artist-types are perpetually more bombastic and consumption-adept than they are fiscally solvent. Could be the deadbeat proto-Bohos simply needed someone to foot their outrageous bar tab.
Businessmen Bohos soon cloned themselves into the majority clubbers. Career-active newsmen were actually banned. Instead, Big Business invited Old Money, bankers, Joint Chiefs, right wing think tankers and high ranking conservative politicos to their blowout on western Sonoma County’s Russian River.
However, artists were still needed to concoct, produce and perform the many year-round club offerings. Some artists couldn’t afford the dues, and businessmen tend to exhibit numerically cumulative rather then participatory art talents, so the club created “associate memberships.” These lesser millionaire artistes work the Boho performance plantation. Rock stars like Steve Miller and Grateful Deaders Bob Weir and Mickey Hart are members. So is the former Ronald McDonald.
Herbert Hoover called the Bohemian Grove’s summer encampment “The Greatest Men’s Party on Earth.” There are over a hundred permanent Bohemian Grove camps. They sport names like Cave Man, Silverado Squatters and Hill Billies. One camp is famous for it’s perpetual daiquiri machine. Another for its pre-dawn gin fizzes.
While it’s known that Dick Cheney gave a run-up to Iraq-1 lecture on “War in the 21st Century”, the mammoth statue of the clubs’ patron saint, John of Nepomuk, stands finger-to-lips, cautioning Bohos to keep everything they hear and see while staying in the guarded encampment hidden from the unwashed masses (some protesting) outside the Grove gates.
Early Bohos included Mark Twain and the artist Virgil Williams. Today it’s the Bechtels, the Bush boys, two Rockefellers, a du Pont, Rummy and Henry K. In the early years, when the summer encampment was held in Muir Woods, a towering pacifistic Buddha oversaw the proceedings. The all-seeing Owl has long since become the club’s mascot, and the place is absolutely filthy with warmongers and defense contractors.
Each year club members gather together before scores of hooded performers holding fiery torches in a grand ceremony up on the stage across their small man-made lake. This spectacle, the “Cremation of Care,” has mock-mythic underpinnings. Texas-based conspiracy journalist Alex Jones sneaked into the Grove to bear witness to the proceedings in 2000. He claims the Cremation of Care ceremony is an “ancient Canaanite occult ritual…carried out by world leaders.” I can’t personally confirm that, but photos of the event do qualify as the essence of weird.
The heady combination of wealth, power and secrecy tethered to scandal-rumoring and innuendo has produced a sub-industry of Bohemian Club conspiracy theories. Perhaps the most provocative assertion is by former journalist David Icke. He claims that the Bohos are all reptilian shape-changers who invaded Earth millions of years ago. Other conspiracy theorists swear humans are sacrificed at the Grove, and that a secret underground dungeon is used to enact unspeakable atrocities.
But tin-hat fantasies aside, many of the world’s most powerful men will gather here again next summer, sworn to absolute secrecy. Perhaps they just dress up in drag, drink themselves silly and blow off a little steam; or run through the redwoods au naturel, relieving the incomprehensible stress of running and ruining our world. Maybe they just sit around playing rummy, scarfing scotch and howling at the moon. But then again, they’re not telling, so how are we to say?
Famed playwright Oscar Wilde cut through the Bohemian Club mythos just 10 years after its founding. Wilde visited San Francisco a celebrated and scandalized writer. His Boho hosts conspired to get him drunk and make a fool of him. But after successfully drinking his antagonists under the table, the still razor-witted Wilde proclaimed “I never saw so many well-dressed, well-fed business-looking Bohemians in my life.”
Wilde’s epitaph would read true on the tombstone of our republic.
