Kyle McKinley

Generally, when someone starts talking about secretive non-governmental organizations that supposedly control the world the content floats between amusing hyperbole and downright annoying nonsense. The free-masons, Bush and Kerry and the Skull and Bones thing are creepy and, for all I know it's all true, but it all seems so far away. I imagine some stuffy stone hall in Boston, Atlanta or London, filled with stuffy old white-guys with silly handshakes and tacky robes. And in today's 'global economy' one assumes that the real decision making happens in think tanks, in WTO conferences, at highly publicized international summits: in such an atmosphere cults and fraternities can't help but appear as a hokey pre-requisite to power or an anachronistic desire for the chrony-ism of good-old-boy networks long since buried.

And maybe that's exactly what such organizations really are all about. But, somehow, when these phantasmatic ghosts and goblins, CEOs and ex-Presidents play spooky summer-camp right in your own back yard, things seem a little more real and a lot more compelling.

That's what the progressive community of the lower Russian River valley says anyway: for the last couple of decades a network of residents from Guernville, Ca. and surrounding towns have held a yearly event to protest the beginning of the San Francisco Bohemian Club's yearly outing, a summer camp known as 'Bohemian Grove". the protest (organized by the Bohemian Grove Action Committee), a ceremony complete with giant puppets and whimsical pseudo-whitchcraft, is quite elaborate, but pales in comparison to the spectacle going on inside the Bohemian Grove grounds. There, on the second or third Saturday of each July, thousands of the world's most feared and hated men get dressed up in robes and literally burn their cares at the foot of a 40 foot tall stone owl in preparation for weeks of drunken reverie on the banks of the Russian river. Seriously, they really do this. The gathering starts with the "Cremation of Care" ritual, in which the club's mascot is burned in effigy, symbolizing a freedom from care. One hopes that even this ridiculous spectacle cannot assuge what guilt the members really ought to feel.

The Bohemian Club was founded in 1872 by a group of artistically minded San Franciscan journalists. In its early years the activities were benign enough for an elitist men's club. Membership was said to include such iconoclasts as Mark Twain and Jack London and probably consisted of Francophiles sitting around drinking gin and writing lymerics or something. In 1879 the club acquired a parcel of land outside of Monte Rio, Ca., and shortly after began building up their membership to include California elites. Bankers, politicos and academics joined and by the turn of the century the group was purported to include the likes of Teddy Roosevelt.

Since that time generations of the American elite have filed along the wooded paths of the grove. Every republican president since Eisenhower has attended, not to mention Cabinet Members, Supreme Court Justices, Senators, and of course, CEOs. Protestors claim that, contrary to the club's assertion that the event is purely 'social' and 'artistic', important national policy issues are discussed, off the record at the annual event and that many decisions have been made there. George W. Bush, for instance, publicly announced that Dick Cheney would be his 2000 running mate immediately after leaving that year's camp. Oh, yeah, Cheney is a full fledged member: supposedly he pitches camp with Stephen Bechtel, Colin Powel and George H W Bush.

For me, one of the most interesting aspects of Bohemian Grove is the emphasis on all this cooky Druid stuff. I mean, a lot of people who are critical of the Grove take this aspect of the organization's activities very seriously, claiming that hidden away in 'secret chambers' the organization has a slew of abducted child sex slaves and all sorts of creepy shit. Human sacrifice, necrophilia, the works. Certainly some of these claims are the product of internet culture and the general tendency for 'conspiracy theory' types to make sensational, hyperbolic assertions. What is genuinely strange however is how willing the Bohemian Grove people are to lend themselves to these claims. The main-stage fake druid ceremonies, complete with simulated human sacrifice, are publicly admitted to. Secretive and camera-shy as they are, there are numerous photographs of the first night's events, with the big stone owl and the fire and everyone wearing pointy red felt caps and robes.

Given this, one can either believe that the BC actually whole-heartedly go in for all of this druid, magic, stuff, OR we can assume that these guys just get off on faking all this ritual and ceremony. The relatively short history of the organization would tend to support this second conclusion, and certainly the late 19th century was a time of bizarre obsession among elite circles for this kind of mystical druid creepy stuff. But that in itself is all the more disturbing, and possibly the most fertile territory for further exploration of the BC: How is it that these apparently anachronistic secret societies have so much weight today? What is the obsession with these rituals, especially if, indeed they are known by the participants to be fabricated pagents- that is, that they lack the aura of the real? Isn't is kinda strange that republican politicos can stand in congress last week and demand an amendment on gay marriage, claiming that it is an 'aberant activity' and then whisk off in a jet to get drunk in togas and fake human sacrifice?

Even some of the more stodgy elites have got the hibbey-gibbeys from this thing: Nixon speaking privately to John D Ehrlichman in 1971 about class, gettoification and homosexuality said , "But it's not just the ratty part of town. The upper class in San Francisco is that way. The Bohemian Grove, which I attend from time to time . . . It is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine with that San Francisco crowd. I can't shake hands with anybody from San Francisco." (From a May 13, 1971, conversation among President Richard Nixon, John D. Ehrlichman, and H. R. Haldeman).

Worth-while sources for more info:
Fair.org (circa 1991)
Alex Cockburn's article (circa June, 2001).
July 17, 2004 SF Chronicle story is actually quite good and has a concise take on the Bohemian Club-though it, rather mistakenly, lumps them in with other SF elite social clubs