RUDIMENTS, pt. 646
(I am loath to.....)
I always hated uplift. No, girls,
I don't mean your bras. I mean
that constant stream of goodness
and positive thrust that seemed
to have permeated everything
American, to make it valid.
It was everywhere, and it was
all crap. Elsie the Cow : Smiled.
Inanities on early TV, before
the medium was established,
they were all about smirk and
smile; getting people happy
and light, and onto the couch.
For pity's same, even the turkeys
in any schoolroom Tom Turkey
and Thanksgiving story went
down smiling and grinning right
to the end. The cleaver to the
neck. It was that stupid. All that
ever meant to me, from cereal
box to cartoon to Superman's
closing smile, was lies. Of
course, not much has changed,
except me. I hate it all now
more than I ever did, and it's
all even more prevalent. I've
always thought uplift and glee
were toxic.
-
The umbrella-toxic, actually,
that rules America, goes back a
long way, and it's also of lies and
deceit, ruling class and regulations,
in spite of the lip service paid to
everything else. I knew that as
I walked the streets of New York.
Every third building was some
form of running-down hovel; the
lower east side was a disaster
waiting to happen, and the
ownership of all this was absentee,
always off somewhere counting
the rent and subsidies monies,
and waiting for the end. The
thing about America was always
that it was at the end of the line
before it even got started. The
premise was to go through the
motions so as to convince the
rabble that that wasn't so and,
of course, that they weren't a
rabble. Support. Underpinnings.
Uplift. Myth.
-
America had always been
portrayed as a place of open
and unlimited possibilities,
and one with a frontier that
was a 'magic fountain of youth.'
One in which America continually
bathed and was rejuvenated;
where 'individualism sprouted
from the land like prairie weeds.'
Nice try Roger Rabbit, but it's
all backwards : 'the state preceded
the frontier.' Before any settlers
arrived, before the land was
swarmed, cut up and given or
sold away, the government had
bought the land and surveyed it
and built roads across it. Above
all, the United States Army
had removed Native Americans
and Mexicans from the settlers'
way, in brutal and deadly fashion.
It's that part of things that's never
mentioned - citizens are already
in subservient roles from day one.
In addition, a large portion of that
land beneath, the actual continental
USA, was sold off, back - much of it
owned (still) by the British Crown.
A complete, and perverse, reversal
of fortune. The Trojan princess,
Cassandra, it was who was
doomed by the Gods to be
always correct but be disbelieved.
In so many ways that's me.
-
If there's no real structure to hang
things on, it's all going to begin
just falling apart, things dropping
off. The Perfect conceit of the
Founding Fathers, (I figured this
all out while walking - walking
should be passed as a mandatory,
by law. Those who can't walk
will just die of from lack of
stamina physical and mental),
was in the way they built a
'structure' on which to hang
all those suppositions by which
people live, even though they're
all false. Pursuit of Happiness?
I don't think so. All men are
created equal? I don't think so.
This was a slaveholders'
convention, and a 3/5 of a
man, well designated and set,
proclamation. Liberty? Justice?
Think again, Mr. Fandango.
-
I just made mention of the good
that walking is. Look around you
sometime - when was the last
time you saw any of the little rank
bastards who rule over you walking
around? They're either in some
government vehicle or some
mini-boy's fire-breathing fire
wagon, lording it over you from
behind a window and and engine
that you've paid for and are paying
for constantly. In this dipshit town,
40 years after my active time of
enlightenment the big noise today
was that the supposed drunk who
gets called Mayor is again running
unopposed, for years 12-16. I don't
fault Mayor Elbow-Bender, I fault
the lacklusters in the town who allow
this to occur. They line up for the
freebies and the takes, but when it
comes to the gives, they've suddenly
got their panties in a bunch. I'd
love to challenge that fritzhead,
since he's got nothing to lose, to a
one-on-one debate or conversation,
or whatever it is, on his own local
TV-spew channel. I'd rip him a new
drunk asshole before he could
swallow. The trick is, I've got
nothing to lose either, and that
swank-herder needs a few good
ones to the forehead. So, Mr.
Macintosh or Blender or Heineken,
or whatever your name is, call me;
I'm free right into October, when
I have to give a reading at the local
college, address the UN, make some
TV appearances, and attend an
art reception at the Guggenheim.
But I'll fit you in : Bet you don't
have the suburban guts for that one.
TV appearances, and attend an
art reception at the Guggenheim.
But I'll fit you in : Bet you don't
have the suburban guts for that one.
-
What America needs back is some
moxie; a punch-back, a shove,
with sarcasm. Any of those older
street guys I used to know, they'd
not hold anything back, and it was
just New York, like that. One time,
a small group of us were standing
at the sidewalk on Eighth Street,
near Broadway, and there was a lot
of noisy traffic; horns blaring, trucks
groaning, plumes of dark truck
smoke floating up, and no real
movement at all. One of the girls
there remarked on it, and Steve
Sloman, a Studio School veteran,
remarks : 'Look at 'em. It's Weds.,
only half into the week, they've got
to get home yet, worked all day,
hate themselves probably, and have
to do it all again tomorrow! No
wonder they're angry. I'd be angry
too if I was one of them.' It was
real obvious, and pretty basic,
but to hear it blurted out by one
of 'us,' (art-world slummers, not
at work in that real world at all),
startled me. 'Yeah!' I thought.
'There really must be another
world out there!' He's right.'
The way I always saw it is that
you've got to grasp the real;
grab at it, very hard, and hang
on. That's how you make a life -
not by adherence to illusions
and fakery and sleight of hand
and quick feints. Forget the hat
and rabbit and the napkin and
all that chimerical, magic-show
crap. That's for the nitwits in their
little show-cars. You can work your
butt off all your days in some
miserable cement-mill, and all
you're going to get at the end of
your time is a lead-basket of the
same lies and illusions they'd
feed to a dog. Sit. Be still.
Follow the pull of my leash.
-
Did I mention umbrella-toxic? yeah,
What America needs back is some
moxie; a punch-back, a shove,
with sarcasm. Any of those older
street guys I used to know, they'd
not hold anything back, and it was
just New York, like that. One time,
a small group of us were standing
at the sidewalk on Eighth Street,
near Broadway, and there was a lot
of noisy traffic; horns blaring, trucks
groaning, plumes of dark truck
smoke floating up, and no real
movement at all. One of the girls
there remarked on it, and Steve
Sloman, a Studio School veteran,
remarks : 'Look at 'em. It's Weds.,
only half into the week, they've got
to get home yet, worked all day,
hate themselves probably, and have
to do it all again tomorrow! No
wonder they're angry. I'd be angry
too if I was one of them.' It was
real obvious, and pretty basic,
but to hear it blurted out by one
of 'us,' (art-world slummers, not
at work in that real world at all),
startled me. 'Yeah!' I thought.
'There really must be another
world out there!' He's right.'
The way I always saw it is that
you've got to grasp the real;
grab at it, very hard, and hang
on. That's how you make a life -
not by adherence to illusions
and fakery and sleight of hand
and quick feints. Forget the hat
and rabbit and the napkin and
all that chimerical, magic-show
crap. That's for the nitwits in their
little show-cars. You can work your
butt off all your days in some
miserable cement-mill, and all
you're going to get at the end of
your time is a lead-basket of the
same lies and illusions they'd
feed to a dog. Sit. Be still.
Follow the pull of my leash.
-
Did I mention umbrella-toxic? yeah,
I did - that's the rubric by which
lies and misrepresentations are
promulgated. In New York City's
darker circles, as I said yesterday,
you couldn't get away with that.
Those Irish boys, for instance,
over at Johnathon Swift's Hibernian
Lounge - probably on of the nicer
grog holes ever - they sit around
reading the Irish papers there, stuff
piled up everywhere, drink after
drink, beer after beer, yet they
watch and listen to every word
that's said - a word out of order or
a professed untruth at the expense
of the common man and the order
of rank and file people, and whoever
it was who just said that is going
down. Here, in Avenel, some sort
of masturbation, by contrast, is
the order of the day. No challenge,
no takers. I'm never seen a more
motley bunch : passivity, people
sitting at traffic light long after
they've gone green. No objections;
the teen-queen guy in the first
car in the row, just sitting there
tapping on his phone, never
even knowing that the light
had changed. No one does a
darn about anything. It's just
like the local politics. Letting
girls act as men.
---
"In the fall of 1986, just out of college,
I set out to hitchhike across the
northwestern part of the United States.
I'd hardly ever been west of the Hudson
River, and in my mind what waited for
me out in Dakota and Wyoming and
Montana was not only the real America
but the real me as well. I'd grown up in a
Boston suburb where people's homes
were set behind deep hedges or protected
by huge yards and neighbors hardly knew
each other. And they didn't need to:
nothing ever happened in my town
that required anything close to a
collective effort. Anything bad that
happened was taken care of by the
police or fire department, or at the
very least the town maintenance crews.
(I worked for them one summer. I
remember shoveling a little too hard
one day and the foreman telling me to
'slow down' because, as he said, 'Some of
us have to get through a lifetime of this.')
The sheer predictability of of life in an
American suburb left me hoping -
somewhat irresponsibly - for a
hurricane or a tornado or something
that would require us all to band together
to survive. Something that would
make us feel like a tribe. What I wanted
wasn't destruction and mayhem but the
opposite: solidarity. I wanted the chance
to prove my worth to the community
and my peers, but I lived in a time and
a place where nothing dangerous ever
really happened. Surely this was new
in the human experience, I thought. How
do you become an adult in a society that
doesn't ask for sacrifice? How do you
become a man in a world that doesn't
require courage?
---
"In the fall of 1986, just out of college,
I set out to hitchhike across the
northwestern part of the United States.
I'd hardly ever been west of the Hudson
River, and in my mind what waited for
me out in Dakota and Wyoming and
Montana was not only the real America
but the real me as well. I'd grown up in a
Boston suburb where people's homes
were set behind deep hedges or protected
by huge yards and neighbors hardly knew
each other. And they didn't need to:
nothing ever happened in my town
that required anything close to a
collective effort. Anything bad that
happened was taken care of by the
police or fire department, or at the
very least the town maintenance crews.
(I worked for them one summer. I
remember shoveling a little too hard
one day and the foreman telling me to
'slow down' because, as he said, 'Some of
us have to get through a lifetime of this.')
The sheer predictability of of life in an
American suburb left me hoping -
somewhat irresponsibly - for a
hurricane or a tornado or something
that would require us all to band together
to survive. Something that would
make us feel like a tribe. What I wanted
wasn't destruction and mayhem but the
opposite: solidarity. I wanted the chance
to prove my worth to the community
and my peers, but I lived in a time and
a place where nothing dangerous ever
really happened. Surely this was new
in the human experience, I thought. How
do you become an adult in a society that
doesn't ask for sacrifice? How do you
become a man in a world that doesn't
require courage?
-
'These things ween't going to happen
in my hometown, but putting myself
in a situation where I had very little
control - like hitchhiking across the
country - seemed like a decent
substitute. That's how I wound up
outside Gillette, Wyoming, one
morning in late October, 1986, with
my pack leaned against the guardrail
and an interstate map in my back
pocket. Semis rattled over the bridge
spacers and hurtled on towards the
Rockies a hundred miles away. Pickup
trucks passed with men in them who
turned to stare as they went by. A few
unrolled their window and threw beer
bottles at me that exploded harmlessly
against the asphalt. In my pack I had a
tent and a sleeping bag, a set of aluminum
cookpots, and a Swedish-made camping
stove that ran on gasoline and had
to be pressurized with a thumb-pump.
That and a week's worth of food was
all I had with me outside Gillette, WY
that morning, when I saw a man
walking toward me up the on-ramp
from town. From a distance I could see
the he wore a quilted, old, canvas union
suit and carried a black lunch-box. I
took my hands out of my pocket and
turned to face him.He walked up and
stood there studying me. His hair was
wild and matted and his union suit
was shiny with filth and grease at
the thighs. He didn't look unkindly but
I was young and alone and I watched
him like a hawk. He asked me where
I was headed. 'California,' I said. He
nodded. 'How much food you got?' he
asked. I thought about this. I had
plenty of food - along with all the rest
of my gear - and he obviously didn't
have much. I'd give food to anyone who
said he was hungry, but I didn't want
to get robbed, and that's what seemed
was about to happen. 'Oh, I just got a
little cheese,' I lied. I stood there ready,
but he just shook his head. 'You can't
get to California on just a little cheese,'
he said. 'You need more than that.' The
man said that he lived in a broken-down
car and that every morning he walked
three miles to a coal mine outside of
town to see if they needed fill-in work.
Some days they did; some days they
didn't, and this was one of the days
they didn't. 'So, I won't be needing
this,' he said, opening his black
lunch box. 'I saw you from town and
just wanted to be sure you were OK.'
The lunch box contained a bologna
sandwich, an apple, and a bag of
potato chips. The food had probably
come from a local church. I had no
choice but to take it. I thanked him
and put the food in my pack for later
and wished him luck. Then he turned
and made his way back down the
on-ramp toward Gillette. I thought
about that man for the rest of my trip.
I thought about him for the rest of my
life. He'd been generous, yes, but lots
of people are generous; what made him
different was the fat that he'd taken
'responsibility' for me. He'd spotted
me from town and walked half a mile
out a highway to make sure I was OK.
Robert frost famously wrote that home
is the place where, when you have to
go there, they have to take you in. The
word 'tribe' is far harder to define, but a
start might be the people you feel
compelled to share the last of your food
with. For reasons I'll never know, the
man in Gillette decided to treat me
like a member of his tribe.
-
This book is about why that sentiment
is such a rare and precious thing in
modern society, and how the lack of it
has affected us all. It's about what we
can learn from tribal societies about
loyalty and belonging and the eternal
quest for meaning. It's about why -
for many people - war feels better than
peace and hardship can turn out to be
a great blessing and disasters are
sometimes remembered more fondly
than weddings or tropical vacations.
Humans don't mind hardship, in fact
they thrive on it; what they mind is
not feeling necessary. Modern society
has perfected the art of making people
not feel necessary. It is time for
that to end. - 'Tribe' by Sebastian
Junger, ----....Introduction.'
'These things ween't going to happen
in my hometown, but putting myself
in a situation where I had very little
control - like hitchhiking across the
country - seemed like a decent
substitute. That's how I wound up
outside Gillette, Wyoming, one
morning in late October, 1986, with
my pack leaned against the guardrail
and an interstate map in my back
pocket. Semis rattled over the bridge
spacers and hurtled on towards the
Rockies a hundred miles away. Pickup
trucks passed with men in them who
turned to stare as they went by. A few
unrolled their window and threw beer
bottles at me that exploded harmlessly
against the asphalt. In my pack I had a
tent and a sleeping bag, a set of aluminum
cookpots, and a Swedish-made camping
stove that ran on gasoline and had
to be pressurized with a thumb-pump.
That and a week's worth of food was
all I had with me outside Gillette, WY
that morning, when I saw a man
walking toward me up the on-ramp
from town. From a distance I could see
the he wore a quilted, old, canvas union
suit and carried a black lunch-box. I
took my hands out of my pocket and
turned to face him.He walked up and
stood there studying me. His hair was
wild and matted and his union suit
was shiny with filth and grease at
the thighs. He didn't look unkindly but
I was young and alone and I watched
him like a hawk. He asked me where
I was headed. 'California,' I said. He
nodded. 'How much food you got?' he
asked. I thought about this. I had
plenty of food - along with all the rest
of my gear - and he obviously didn't
have much. I'd give food to anyone who
said he was hungry, but I didn't want
to get robbed, and that's what seemed
was about to happen. 'Oh, I just got a
little cheese,' I lied. I stood there ready,
but he just shook his head. 'You can't
get to California on just a little cheese,'
he said. 'You need more than that.' The
man said that he lived in a broken-down
car and that every morning he walked
three miles to a coal mine outside of
town to see if they needed fill-in work.
Some days they did; some days they
didn't, and this was one of the days
they didn't. 'So, I won't be needing
this,' he said, opening his black
lunch box. 'I saw you from town and
just wanted to be sure you were OK.'
The lunch box contained a bologna
sandwich, an apple, and a bag of
potato chips. The food had probably
come from a local church. I had no
choice but to take it. I thanked him
and put the food in my pack for later
and wished him luck. Then he turned
and made his way back down the
on-ramp toward Gillette. I thought
about that man for the rest of my trip.
I thought about him for the rest of my
life. He'd been generous, yes, but lots
of people are generous; what made him
different was the fat that he'd taken
'responsibility' for me. He'd spotted
me from town and walked half a mile
out a highway to make sure I was OK.
Robert frost famously wrote that home
is the place where, when you have to
go there, they have to take you in. The
word 'tribe' is far harder to define, but a
start might be the people you feel
compelled to share the last of your food
with. For reasons I'll never know, the
man in Gillette decided to treat me
like a member of his tribe.
-
This book is about why that sentiment
is such a rare and precious thing in
modern society, and how the lack of it
has affected us all. It's about what we
can learn from tribal societies about
loyalty and belonging and the eternal
quest for meaning. It's about why -
for many people - war feels better than
peace and hardship can turn out to be
a great blessing and disasters are
sometimes remembered more fondly
than weddings or tropical vacations.
Humans don't mind hardship, in fact
they thrive on it; what they mind is
not feeling necessary. Modern society
has perfected the art of making people
not feel necessary. It is time for
that to end. - 'Tribe' by Sebastian
Junger, ----....Introduction.'
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