Persons I would like to be instead of the who's-not-really-me I'm stuck with due to: "The them"

"They put me off at the wrong stop when I was born." (Doug Schaff / BMcC[18-11-46-503])^[1]

Wanda Landowska
Susanne Langer
Hannah Arendt
Amanda Lear
Monia Vitti
Bidu Sayão
Rosa Poncelle
Yoko Ono

Sweet timid little, vulnerable Margaret Keane cat.

(Rrose Selavy; Krazy Kat)

Wassily Kandinsky
Edmund Husserl
Eugen Fink
Marcel Duchamp
Hans-Georg Gadamer
George Steiner
Sophocles
Aristotle
Michelangelo Antonioni
Sviatoslav Richter
Michelangelo Buonarroti
Alain Resnais
Tristan Tzara
Sun-Tzu
Lessing J. Rosenwald

"The them" is my (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) neologism to refer to Martin Heidegger's "das Man" as an aggregate. "The them" can consist of one or more, even ten billion "das Man" agglomerating like herd animals, e.g.: haredim or professional soccer game fans or any other mass event. Crowds frighten and disgust me. My life matters to me; I do not care about any group's "identity". Only individual persons have identities (which, of course, they need to overcome). In groups and a fortiori in a crowd, people change, like grasshoppers change into locusts and they swarm. Where's Waldo?

Agglomerating living human bodies, like a bowl of jellybeans, or a hoard of locusts, or whatever. Where's Waldo?

✓ I definitely would not want to be "anybody but me" because most (albeit not all!) the people aka: "The them" I have encountered in my life have been even far worser than the thing the conscious life writing these words was stuck with because it never fully capitulated to become a them. Some of The them never should have been born, or, having had the misfortune to see the light, gone back swiftly whence they came. (paraphrasing Sophocles from a slightly different context) The them is the real H. Lacks cancer. The remainder of The them that is not toxic to come in contact with is just in the third person: more or less Potemkin people.

✓ I would have preferred to be an attractive [preferably "barren"] female, but at least I am not stifled in a minotaur's body, like some male hominds, Each day, I more resent The them that, as they politely call their male genital mutilation social custom: "circumcised" my body and my soul to make my capacity for sexual pleasure even less than it already had to be by being male in the first place but then The them ignoranced me of what they left (It is imperative for The them that males retain biological capacity to produce more thems!).

✓ The them lacks the faculty to appreciate anything, but a them can smile. (Viruses are parasitic: they cannot exist except in host cells they colonize.) The them bodies emit words from their oral orifices, but do[es] The them instantiate discursive language? As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: "The them" have sunk so low that they cannot even despise themselves. (Higher mammals such as cats and dogs lack language, too, but cats and dogs can love me and play with me; cats and dogs do not consume me for headcount / bodycount, without even being decent about it like carrion birds and waiting until after I die a natural death. After I am dead, I welcome The them to enjoy my corpse tartare or to cook me however they like for whatever meal they want. Bon appetit!)

Persons I wish were still alive so I could enjoy their friendship and ask them for help

I was too ignoranced and frightened by my childrearing to THINK to ask persons for help. I was a lost soul.
Lou Forsdale	Teachers College professor I later became friend with. I could have learned more from our friendship. (I missed my last chance to talk with him because I went on vacation and missed one of my regular Sunday phone calls and he unexpectedly died before the next Sunday due possibly to medical malpractice.)
John Wild	Yale philosophy professor who liked me.
Maxine Greene	Teachers College professor who respected an essay I wrote. If I had asked for help would she have halped me in the academic world?
Broch	Personal friend contacted thru one of his father's publishers. I should have learned more from him about both his father and himself.
Mitch Tullai	Famed St. Paul's School athletic coach. Potential helper if I had asked him to work up an apprpopriate physical fitness program for me? (Long shot)
Angelo Gentile	Seemingly decent teacher; taught kids to respect books. Potential helper at St. Paul's School if I had asked for help? (Long shot)
There's a limit to what a person can expect from others. They have their own problems. It's the parents' responsibility to provide their child what he (she, other) needs. It's the society's responsibility to see the parents have what they need to do it. It's not the "alma mater"'s responsibility, but if the parents fail, the school should be step up to the plate. America failed my parents (and St. Paul's School). Consequently, my parents and St. Paul's School in turn failed me.

Go on to: who/what I got stuck being...

+2023.03.28 v067

"Why reinvent the past with the assets of the future? The times are rotten, the culture sick. Fools rule. Capacity weakens. Let's turn our imagination to nobler possibilities." (ROM)

"Tenebrae mentium tenebra orbis."(BMcC[18-11-46-503])

Footnotes

↑ Where I would like to be: Of course not anywhere not "privileged". But the reason I would put up with being rich in America is to not be not rich in America, or England or India or Russia or South Africa or a lot of other places. I would like to live in the northern Italy of "La dolce vita" and Michelangelo Antonioni's 1950s "Monica Vitti" films. Second best, Japan. Luxemborg? France? The Scandanavian countries? To quote a certain architect: "I like white walls, don't you?"

Barak Obama entering the conspicuous comsumption class.