WelcomeSt. Göedicke of the Landwehr[1]
"We understand well. Our exclusion serves the scope to be able to give people 'a new reason'. We experienced soldiers call that 'starting seduction again and anew'. But we excluded, those off limits, tell you and your successors: You, too, will have the wrong enemy and will wage the wrong wars. Not because there are men worse than others, but because war is bad." (Hermann Friedrich Honold, ex-combattant)
"Everything we love and cherish" (Donald J. Trump, POTUS №45)
In Hermann Broch's novel "The Sleepwalkers", there is a story of a foot soldier, in World War I, who gets almost blown to bits on the battlefield. On the bet of two packs of cigarettes, two medics take him back to field hospital, and, over a period of months, piece by piece, Göedicke of the Landwehr comes back to life.
On a certain night, Göedicke, on his crutches, goes to a Christian prayer meeting. There, a civilian who has not seen military service, reads from the Bible: the story of Lazarus. Göedicke rises up on his crutches and declaims:
"Only those who have died and risen again have a right to speak."
Göedicke of the Landwehr is my patron saint (ECM [Electronics CounterMeasures] Officer: St. Bertolt of Brecht). He has been there and done that. He has walked the walk, not just talked the talk.
Pretenders to knowledge who fantasize (believe) they know it all, and con men who [Alas, in this case sometimes with good reason] imagine they can fool everybody, should shut their mouths and open their ears. They should respect what has value but which they lack and which they may even lack appreciation of the value of. As the old Packard Motor Company advertising slogan says: "Ask the man who owns one." If you are a student, would you rather learn from an owner or from somebody who has just read a sales brochure? I would expect those whose words are just scrip to feel ashamed of their nakedness and try to get some clothes on?
There are products of human undertaking that come with the instruction that if you are maintaining or repairing the thing .and you have to force a part to fit, you are doing something wrong.
I have had the misfortune in my life to encounter persons who are wrongs. One of them had an advanced academic degree and a sinecure in the business world, who thought him or her self to be the Messiah and thought themself cute to gulp 7-Eleven colas and save the downtrodden but not raise up their own employee. Also, an n for some n > 1 level manager who brazenly declaimed: "I want to see asses and elbows". And an n = 1 level manager who wore socks with little Mickey Mouse images machine stitched into them but did not want to talk about mammalian mice with me although he or she was proud to have 2 self-declaredly morbidly obese cats.
I was born a free person after 1863 and had to submit to masters in my pre-college schooling. They even subjected me to Inquisitorial Proceedings. And more.
As P.T. Barnum supposedly said in a slightly different context: There's one born every minute. They wield[ed] power over me. I have been forced to suffer fools, to earn a "living". Their (alas also "my") so-called society amply rewarded them for their valuable service of good deeds to each severally and all collectively. They got off and may to this day still get off or their legitimate hears if not themselves still get off on rubbing it in.
I have heard of fellow students getting expelled from their parents-pay-for (aka: "private") school for having oral sex in the students' toilet room when the school got off on having athletes expose their genitals to each other in a public ["locker room"] shower that to myself looked like it was out of Auschwitz (it was a Christian✟ school). I have seen whom I thought was an intelligent and ethical man be zombified into a rabid (POTUS №45) Trumpie.
I have encountered faux-radicals who live off inherited money but do not boast that this is why they are better than bourgeois hypocrites. I have seen little of the world but I have seen more than enough of it to be convinced that, as Wilfred Owen wrote, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori is a big lie. I would gladly join honest moonshiners in singing: "It ain't me you're talkin' to" – just let me know the words to sing. I abominate being stuck sitting thru mandatory voluntary narcissist managers' team selfies that the narcissist is so self-certain nobody can ever get enough of that they give everybody more of it.
Those cynical mean-spirited crypto-nihilists who are not stupid and ignorant, but who win fame and fortune from the many by preying on them in the open, by pretending they [the crypto-nihilists, not the many] are stupid and ignorant, such as (POTUS №40) Ronald Reagan, or by doing their dirty work in secret, or whatever, need to stop it and then publicly bow their heads in shame and make their confessions, to help the many become less many and more individuals. (As often, please see Adam Curtis's BBC documentaries available free on YouTube: "The Power of Nightmares" and "The Century of the Self".)
But I have also seen that there are some good folks out [t]here. On YouTube you can listen to Admiral William McRaven advising persons to make their bed in the morning to be able to hold their head up even if life pushes them down for the rest of their day. You can read Elsa Morante's paean to all History's roadkill ("History: A novel"). Walter J. Ong, S.J. can tell you that evolutionarily, males are expendable (1 male can inseminate 20 or more females for massive parallel processing, but if only 1 female, the recruiting pipeline is constricted to single-threading no matter how many males clot up behind the single point of failure). Stanley Kubrick produced the film "Paths of glory" (which lead but to the grave). Henri Matisse painted "Luxe, calme et volupté". And Marcel Duchamp famously signed a standard issue male urinal: "R. Mutt" (Cool!).
As United states President Richard Nixon might have said: I am not a downer. I once had a teacher (Teachers College Columbia University, not Yale College 1964-68), who, when I said to him or her: I want to write a paper on [X] instead of doing the course assignments, replied: Go do it and I got an A+ for what I did (grading is bad, but good persons sometimes can finesse bad things a bit). At Yale I did learn about Wassily Kandinsky's and Marcel Duchamp's art (I now, over 50 years too late, think I even had 2 Professors there who would have let me RYO had I not been denied knowledge of the possibility of that by my social surround of origin – it is hard for me to keep from going off in a negative direction, thanks to "the them of my social surround of origin" ... including having observed one massively hypocritical Full Professor of Art History "star", at Yale, who told his students not to take notes on his lectures but to enjoy the art works because they would not be tested on his lectures, but only on [not his words but mine (BMcC):] regurgitative memorization of pictures of some 300 art works on display in another building). My highly cultured freshman roommate's little Kandinsky-esque drawings [he took that narcissist's class instead of the narcissist learning from him!] were where I first learned of Kandinsky ("Go figure!"). Ars gratia GPA.
I have 2 sweet and precious Maine Coon cats at this time. I have Robbie's A place to study, here, for now, too. I drink my morning coffee from a hand made high-fire ceramic coffee cup that probably is as the Revox tape recorder ad went: "Built like a brick shipyard" although I consider myself a conservator of it and try to be gentle with it because to feel it with my fingers feels good and I need refined sensory gratification. Not everything in America 2020 is dreck + sometimes even graduate degreed neo-ethno-bigot pots calling the kettle black. Edmund Husserl's lecture "Philosophy and the crisis of European Humanity" (1935) may or may not still be available free on the Internet after my ISP will soon (autumn 2020) destroy my personal website because website hosting is no longer profitable for them.
Cats like leisure. Wassily Kandinsky had a pet cat, Vas'ka in Sévres, and neither pet house cats when no mice to be caught nor WK's paintings are cost effective or offshorable. Neither, if one thinks about it, are zillionaire leveraged buyouters' minds cost effective or offshorable. Zillionaires do not, please correct me if I am wrong here, procure their minds by lowest bid RFP, or do they? If they get cancer, do they select their cancer treatment by lowest bid RFP? Do they drink lowest bid RFP water and chauffeur themselves around in lowest bid RFP clunker automobiles (used Yugos, maybe?)?
St. Göedicke of the Landwehr speaks. Listen! He's my Pussy Riot: Holy Virgin Mother of God, please put Putin (and all his fellow travellers and wannabees) away! What do you think here, my reader? bmcc.edd@gmail.com
Footnotes
- ↑ Of course Göedicke is a mis-spelling of: Gödicke. But was man made for language or was language made for man? If you have understood I made a mis-spelling, then I have communicated successfully. Is the goal to communicate or to spell words according to somebody's or some institution's dictates? Maybe they should stop dictating except where there is exignet rationale, like on fire escape signs the word should not be spelled: "EGGZ-IT" because that would not communicate?
