10,615. RUDIMENTS, pt. 250

RUDIMENTS, pt. 250

Making Cars

Half of my learning life was 

spent just making things up. 

It was easy and no one even 

knew the difference  - all those 

authorities and such, in school

church and seminary and the 

rest, they were all a bunch of 

blowhards most intent on

believing their own drivel, so,

I figured why shouldn't I take

it upon myself to do it myself

just as well. I got quickly sick

and tired of hearing all their

muck. There was this one guy,

a Mr. Brown, a history teacher

in the High School  -  stern-faced,

bent headed, hunched shoulders,

like a bad cross between Richard

Nixon and Mount Rushmore, if

you had to somehow mix the two.

He lived in Staten Island, which 

back then (still is) is one of the

more dreary places around here :

just roads of ugly homes, bad 

ideas for roads and housing, 

leftover things from another

day, things no one knows what

to do with so they either plow

them over, knock them down, or

ignore them and let the rats and

the junkies figure it out. The 

people who live there aren't 

much better. If you hear, 'I live

in Staten Island,' (Shouldn't that

maybe be 'on'?), just get away

from whoever said it, quickly.

As I said, Mr. Brown lived there,

then. He could never make 

one single horse-note of sense

no matter what he said. His 

narrative of history was rank,

and riddled with offense. That

final year, the Six-Day War 

broke out, right towards the 

end of term, and he and this

Jeff Gutman scatterbrain were

running a veritable cheering

troop for Israel. Every day,

each day, right in the classroom.

Man it was annoying. Gutman

was one of those dweebs (and 

he had his little gene-pool of

followers, and others too not 

of the gene-pool), and they

allowed him to get away with

all sorts of pro-Israel shenanigans,

right there. You'd have thought

he was Abba Eban, or maybe

even Golda Meir  -  except that

was more like his mother, Lil.

My girlfriend then worked at the

town library, and Lilian Gutman

was one of the bosses, or Library 

heads or whatever. The whole

lot of them was a bunch of 

fanatics, and brooking no

opposition. Of course, he 

ended up somewhere perfect 

for him  -  Harvard or one

of those cat-catcher places,

and maybe even then the

Israeli Army, just to really

prove his case. It was bad 

enough that they'd given 

carte-blanche to a bunch 

of straight-haired and

sedentary East Euro's all 

of a sudden pretending 

they'd been kinky-haired 

Arabian-Israelite ancient 

tribal nomads just so they

could get away with stealing 

the local lands and having 

Europe allow them the 

right of erecting their own 

nation-state on someone 

else's land, under the guise, 

and tutelage, of course, of 

an acquiescing God who'd 

chosen and then allowed them 

to do all this and to kill and 

maim all the local sand-dwellers 

they could find so they then 

could move in and pretend that's 

what they'd been all along. 

(Semite, you see, means 

'sand-dweller,' so I never did

know how you could be an 

anti-Semite if you were taking 

the side of the people who lived 

there, on the sand, instead of the 

East-Euro dirt-dwellers they were
suddenly shipping in). I did tell

this to Gutman and Mr. Brown 

too one day while they were 

distributing the day's shipment 

of the daily NYTimes, which 

came into the classroom. 

Back then, you see, high 

schools allowed you to 

subscribe as a group, in 

History class to things like 

the NYTimes, and get them 

each morning and have 

something to discuss. We'd

get about 30 a day. Now . 

they just watch pre-med 

porno on phones instead.

The problem was  -  NO

discussion really was let

in. The first words I spoke on

this matter were immediately

spun around to attack me back

as being an anti-Semite. Which

case I've just explained, as I

did to them. So, the conclusion 

was I was an anti-Semite because

I wasn't rooting for the landed

East-European Kazars, and

Kiev-Rus people, actually, but was
rooting instead for the real Semites
who's always lived there. Huh? The
Kiev-Ru was/is the brand of stolen
Jewry that mostly then was importing
itself into Israel in 'Israel'. The local
Palestinians, etc., WERE the Semites.

I also said they couldn't call it 

'Isreal' because there was nothing

'real' about their cause at all.

Anyway, most people just close

their minds and stick with their 

own tribal versions of their

own family stories, I guess.

-

It was OK because I knew I was

moving on, and not to anywhere

any one of them was going. Like

salt digging into a wound, I was

really churning them up. It was

kind of funny, though, to see all

the pretention and to watch the

people prone to it fall for it doing

so big time. When you're that age,

the bigger the 'name; you can

glom onto, the 'bigger' you can

feel about your fake, big-time, 

self. There's this historian guy

named Hayden White, a historian,

who wrote, about 1966, a thing

called 'The Burden of History,'

which proposed that history was

falling behind, losing its realistic

sense. It was like that with these

two also  - and even if Mr. Brown

was a 'History' teacher, it was 

getting all twisted up. "Both 

science and art have transcended

the older, stable conceptions of

the world which required that

they render a literal copy of a

presumably static reality." White

felt that it was time History

began doing the same  -  what 

it meant was 'going outside the 

real boundaries of what occurred, 

and making things up.' Which,

of course, I'd felt Mr. Brown and 

Jeff Gutman had been doing all 

along. But this was 'high school' 

man, in a dumb-ass no-think town.

You just were not supposed think

that way, that far outside of the

box, and no one had the brains

enough there anyway to think

that anyone ever would. It was

 like being in  a preternaturally

retarded system of schooling

and learning, in which, back then,

all you really were supposed to

do was go shopping, dine, and

amass things. That was a 'citizen.'

And it was the only reason for all

that 'education' crap anyway. That,

or maybe let them ship  you off to  

Vietnam so you could come back

more with the program, or dead , 

maimed or shaking for life.

-

"The historian serves no one

well by constructing a specious

continuity between the present

world and the one which

preceded it. On the contrary,

we require a history that will

educate us to discontinuity

more than ever before; for

discontinuity, disruption, and

chance is our lot." By the later

seventies, he'd written a few

other things too, and the essential

premise I carried from it was

the idea that 'Historians' had

pretty much ended up aping

fiction writers in what they do  -  

taking the 'supposed facts' of

historical events, as victors, of 

course, and writing their own

fiction around it, their fictional,

more or less, version of how both
the what and why of things that had 

occurred. Generally phrased, All 

stories are fictions. While historical 

facts are scientifically verifiable, 

stories are not. Stories are made, not 

found, in the historical data. Meaning 

is imposed on the historical facts by 

means of the choice of plot-type,

and this is inevitably ethical and 

political  at bottom. Like Mr. Brown 

and Gutman in their sandbox. 

Written by victors; the losers

never get to write.

.