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As a child I had nothing that was mine. Even my anal cavity was subject to my intrusive mother's power of enemant domain: she could subject my little body to enemas any time she whimmed. My given name:"Bradford" derives from "broad river ford", which is close in meaning to: doormat. Tread on me and squirt soapy water up my rectim (she outsourced that to my clueless father to do).
The teachers, after 1863 in USA: my "masters", in the so-called "prep" school they put me in showed me no respect. But there I did wrest from them one miniscule concession: The letters of the alphabet. Students were supposed to to do everything they were supposed to do and one of the things they were supposed to do was to write cursie script (perhaps so the teachers could grade them down for not crossing 't's and not dotting 'i's or maybe just because they came to work each morning and liked to feel superior to somebody).
How or why I cannot remember, but I started writing all upper case block letters instead (details here).. The teacher THREATENED me but he gave up. He had more important things to do, especially, I presume, coaching varsity lacrosse team practice. My little heresy, while theoratically potentially as dangerous to the regime as the October Revolution in Russia, in practice had no more consequence than a single faculty member fart: my parents were paying tuition and I got "A" grades.
God's Divine PlanCounterfactuals cannot be proven, but I hypothesize I would have been wiling to compromise with them. I do have an example: The doctor always wanted to look down my throat with a tongue suppressor. I gagged on it; I fought it (him). I figured out that I could strain to open my mouth so wide that he didn't need to use it. A win-win compromise: He got what he wanted AND I didn't get what I did not want.
So I speculate I would have been wiling to negotiate all the other other aspects of my childrearing. But you, my reader, may see the show stopper here: children are supposed to obey and behave as underlings, not negotiate with their parents and teachers as co-equal legislators of their form of life (or like buyers and sellers in a marketplace). Kids are supposed to do their assignments not negotiate with the teacher what they will do. It's how God created the world with archangels above angels, powers above dominions and just one step below the lowest level of the heavenly host: adults — with children directly underneath them, perhaps above plants and animals (above).
I could have offered my parents and teachers an opportunity to learn and to grow in democracy. Of course that is a joke. Ha! Ha! Just who did I think I was? I agree I didn't undersand all this at the time. I tried once and just faded away like a Nova in the sky. "It's no big deal, Brad."
There is not reason my father wasn't Hermann Broch, Edmund Husserl, Marcel Duchamp or George Steiner, or that I wasn't a garden slug or a stillbirth or unviable like the outcome of my mother's two previous pregnancies. Es gibt (things are what they ara, but is does not imply ought).
So "private property" is important to me because I neve had anything that was mine, and the people I had to put up with were incompetent to raise me but acted as if they were and thus caused me much harm perhaps with good itentions. They were as clueless as an unanswerd telephone☏: Potemkin people.
My earliest memory is sitting on my potty in the living room of the house my parents had in a section of Baltimore Maryland called "Bloomfield", which was a euphemism for a kind of undeveloped industrial area not quite as barren as where Adoff Eichmann lived in Buenos Aires Argentina (see here), but — in all seriousness — close. The house has apparently since been torn down; the still working class houses on the street now have lawns not just raw earth with occasional weeds growing on it.
I seem to recall that I had a bedroom in the attic, a room with a bright window, plastered walls and presumably a door. I seem to recall my prents slept in the unfinished resto of the attis, either n a bed or just a mattress on the floor, under the exposed roof rafters. There was a staircase to the first floor where the living room with my potty in the center of it it was. My mother had coerced me to "concentrate" (perhaps the only 3 syllable word she knew with maybe a 5.5th grade education): to stay sitting on my potty until I produced fecal matter to her specifications, and then I could get of the potty and play with my toys. To "concentrate" did not mean to think hard but to try to squeeze hard on my anal sphincter muscles. I seem to recall my mother sometimes saying: "Now let me think". Did that mean that most of the time she was, to borror Martin Heidegger's taxonomy, a world poor anmal not a world-shaping human (Dasein)? I came from nothing (I don't know what my parents living arrangeents were before "Bloomfield").
My parents did not remain in "the lower class" for long. My father worked hard, was intelligent (IQ 120?) and both my parents were like the proverbial donkey with the stick attached to his head and a carrot dangling on the far end of it so he walked forward foreever trying to catch the carrot to eat:
My parents stived for and more or less achieved "The Amerian Dream"
, of which I, all of me including my always enema enabled anus and all my other body parts, was a big part of The Plan (like the Bolssheviks had their Five Year Plans; fortunately this one ended with my mother dying just before I went to Yale — it could have ended MUCH worse, like the USSR did). OMG!
Byeyond pragmatic agenda: the reproduction of individual and species life, there is the reproduction of the "superstructure": the reproduction of social life. The propagation of the social customs and beliefs, all the shared hallucinoses, the social psychoses (ref. Wilfred Bion), which transforms mammals of species homo sapiens(?) into: people. This is done by the current people, having reproduced their species life in babies, evacuating the infants' souls and stuing the thus hollowed out space with their "way of life". The invasion of the soul snatchers.
I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) cannot speak for others, but for me, by whatever ways, I "am" two "me"s: (1) an empirical self and a [big word next: transcentental] obsever, albeit a participant observer, and I think this is very complex to understand fully but the daily life of it is not so difficult to see, and, alas for both mes all too easy to be stuck with. My parents and teaches busied themseles with working on my empirical self, likea fox frantically digging in the ground for a mole it has detected there, to eat for its dinner: "Bradford love your mother" "Bradfod obey your teachers" "Bradford write cursive scipt." Squirt! Soapy water up my rectum. Squeeze! My mother squeezing my acne pimples each evenin when I was delivered back for the mite from my day carcel (St. Paul's Illiberal Day Carcel for pubsecent male virgins except-for-omerta-sanitary-services-for-jocks). Cut the end off my penis at birth and the hair off my scalp every other Saturday.... Ever again!
They did not comletely succeed but they did much harm trying. They were like people in The West 2023 see the Russian Army in Ukraine: seizing territory and incorporting it into their expansionist imperium: trying to incorporate me into the[ir] greater body social. But the other me was beyond their reach but not their bombardment. They pounded me relenlessly. I did not like any of it. But since the empirical me was partly part of it, I didn't like "myself" either. In setting themseles up as my enemy they made me be my own enemy insoar as I as occupied territory. I am adanger to myself, becaue my self is my enemy: them. They wrecked my life like they se the Russians wrecking Ukraine. The differcenc is tha tthe Russians are truing to liberate the Uka=rainnais like an oncologist destryos a leukemia patients immune system to replace it by healthyy immune cells whereas I am like the Dombas which the Kiev regims is deltermined to ethniclly cleanse. My childrearing as my parents' and teachers' ATo (Anti Terorist Operation).
Ihey are so proud of their accomplishments but pretent how they made it happen never exissts: Fucking produces their "blessed events", and ming f*cing produces good citizns. They celebrate the latter with their mor prized rituals: Bar Mitzah, graduating from High School, Getting your college degree. They roll off the auomibileadult assemtly line. And what it he reward? to ge o do it to ht next generation in a wheel of bad karma. And if you're really good at it you even get vacations where you get to temporarily vacate it and pretend you reall are what the privilefed few who run the scam have: fun. Yes, you can ave three martini linch at Club Surf-'n-turf, until you hvae to fly back to Monday morning at the offide o i the factory again whuich is where you "normally" ar because you are normel.
The high funcioning autistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote: "Although the ether was filled with electromagnetic waves, all was dark until man opened his seeing eye and there was light." NIMBY (Not In My Back yard). But that one time where I asserted myself and carved out a small piece of private property for myself: the alphabet, although I never thought much of it until recently in my now late 70s, probably made all the difference. I always wrote a lot either coerced school often ass ignments or other. Had I continued to write cursive script (it looked like a snail's slime trail, yuk!) all of it would have been passum sub iugum (submission) to the them: what I was supposed to do because I was ssupposed to do it. I submittted docilly to the ass—ignments but the writing itself was in their face. I had not been totally regimented, aka: "socially adjusted". For "these people", "social adjustment" was a virtue, and the heavenly hierarchy of God's cosmos was immutable, with adults below the angels and children belonw them but above the primordial swamp. "Honor thy father and mother" (Matthew 15:4; you can't win 'em all).
As I was later to learn Marshall McLuhan said: The medium is the message: the message of everything I wrote was that I did not accept their regime even though I had to submit to it: Ecce verba!
So I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]), a leaking dinghy tossed upon storm swept seas rowed on, in the darkness and fog but there was always my pole star: my handwriting. All I had to do to confirm that I existed a an individual wa to write:"ABCDEFG...." which was manifestly different form what all of they wrote. Here I stand, I can do no other (ref. Martin Luther). As of +2023.12.17 I have not yet gone to the bottom. O Ile de France or Mighty Mo steaming by, can't spomebody throw me a life line? i know the fate of the crew of the USS Indianapolis.
The American dream hurt me badly and denied me the life I might other[-]wise have had. But there is a second American Dream that either few know or they censor, which I like a lot.It comes from America's second President, John Adams. (What was his and abigail's sex life like? Apple pie and Norman Rockwell Saturday evening Post covers? Or like Queen Victoria who apparently was not a "Victorian" — while she had Albert.
"I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain." (John Adams)
Let it not be said I did not try although I failed and could have done better. Who else in my social surround of origin even knew there was such a game much less tried to play? Substituet "Bizenware" for "porcelain", or at least Gerry Williams (A mid-20th century American master potter) for Wedgewood. Like America's most beloved doctoral dissertation plagerer, the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior (I did not pagiarize on mine), I have been to the mountain top but I have seen two not just one promised land: the one goes by many names such as "The Amrican Dream" or, my preference: the light at the end of the tunnel, a Vietcong with a flashlight, and the other, Rrose Selavy. I often think of the man who stands at the entrance to the Law in Franz Kafka's famous parable, or maybe thatt's not famous today when people are no longer alienated but apparently have become woke.
Who thinks of the poor fish in Franz Schubet's (a dead white male, he) lieder: "The Trout"? The trout is very smart fish. He avoids the fisherman's baited hook. So the fisherman takes a stick and muddies the water so the poor trout cannot see anything and then he [the fisherman] catches him.
 Unfortunate for themself, the person who lacks one; unfortunate for others, the person that is one. Don't be an a**hole! |
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