0001 The book before me is published by Fidelity Press.  The subtitle is “The Rise, Fall and Return of American Identity”.  The author is editor of Culture Wars Magazine.  And, everyone knows what “culture wars” means.

For students who are pursuing Semiotics and History, please have a copy of this book at hand.  Look at the title and read the table of contents.  The instructions in this examination should be clear.

Dr. E. Michael Jones, the author, reads and comments on literature from a Catholic point of view.  His works are iconic, in so far as he is orthodox.  “Ortho” means “right”.  What about “dox”?  Here, I mix terminology.  Orthodox love icons.  You know, those paintings that adorn the churches with names like “Saint Basil’s”.

0002 Of course, for the semiotics of Charles S. Peirce, an icon is one of three types of natural signs.  An icon is a triadic sign-relation whose sign-object is based on the qualities of similarity, imagery, pantomime, likeness and so on.  In other words, an icon offers a sign-vehicle that allows me to visualize its sign-object.

0003 But what about the icon rendered in E. Michael Jones’s text?

What about the icon on the wall of St. Basil’s?

Razie Mah’s blog appearing in January 2025, Looking at Boris Uspenskij’s Article (2016) “Semiotics and History”, contains a hypothesis about Russian icons.

0004 Boris Uspenskij (1937-present) is a Soviet era expert on Slavic literature who, along with Juri Lotman (1922-1993), proposes that semiotic arrangements substantiate the human condition.  He does so in the 1990s, after the Soviet political system lost all credibility.  The Soviet system enshrined Marx’s slogan:  Material arrangements substantiate the human condition.  How well did that thing work?

0005 Boris Uspenskij’s journey into semiotics begins in the 1950s, when the Soviet empire is intimidating and everyone senses that Marx’s slogan applies.  After all, it sounds so scientific.

Uspenskij wants to offer a materialist explanation for the power of Russian iconography.  Russian icons are portraits and scenes painted on the foreground with a background of thinly hammered gold foil.  Uspenskij figured that icons are meant to be viewed by candlelight.  The flickering light of candles produce the aesthetic effect associated with Russian icons.

0006 Of course, this is a materialist explanation for Russian iconography, fully congruent with the central slogan of the Marxist thing: material arrangements [substantiate] human conditions.

However, from the Korean War until the fall of the Berlin Wall, Uspenskij (along with Lotman) reach the conclusion that Marxism does not have the vocabulary to explain Slavic literature.  Instead, they figure out the aesthetic effects of Slavic art by using the vocabularies of semiology and structuralism.

“Figuring out” means “bricolage”.  They practice what they figure out.  The vocabularies of semiology and structuralism hammer out a model. Then, when the form of the work of art is viewed in the flickering light of that model, an aesthetic effect is reproduced as matter.  The work of art entangles the contemporary language of the positivist mind.

0007 In the flickering illumination of a semiological and structuralist model, the work of art begins to speak to the viewer.

The Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics is discussed in Razie Mah’s blogs, spanning from December 2025 to May 2026.  These blogs initialize an online course titled “Semiotics and History”.  See Razie Mah’s blogs for October 3-6, 2025 for an introduction.

0008 This is confounding.

“Confounding” is a technical term, labeling a single form (B) that originates from one matter (A), yet entangles another matter (C)

A historical literary text (or a work of art, such as a Russian icon, A&B) becomes a form (from the perspective of a semiological and structuralist model, B alone) that entangles a voice (matter within the viewer, speaking to the viewer, in a contemporary vocabulary of meaning, presence and message, C).

0009 A as matter [substantiates] B as form.  {A[&]B} constitutes a thing.

B as form [entangles] C as matter. {A[&]B[entangles]C} is a confounding.

0010 The question that I pose is this.

Does Dr. E. Michael Jones construct a similar cognitive apparatus in the USSA, during the years preceding the collapse of its big government (il)liberal and neoconservative Marxist ideations?

0011 I know what you are thinking.

USSA?

United Sycophantic States of America?

I love acronyms.

But, what the hell is a “sycophant”?

Okay, the author has another word that begins with “S”.