RUDIMENTS, pt. 697
(handmaidens and louses)
The first words of Richard
Nixon's autobiography are:
'I was born in a house my
father built.' There probably
aren't too many Nixon fans,
and that's understandable.
In fact though, I wonder
how many people there are
who actually even know the
name. No matter; for the lame
they make walkers. That opening
sentence always hit me good;
it has an understated, almost,
elegance of the sort little found
these days. Most people would
end up saying, if they say
anything, 'I was born in a
local hospital and taken home
to one of the development
homes all in a row and pretty
much alike alike, built by the
'Founders Acres Land Mill
Group,' an investment-builder
firm.' Something like that -
and whatever it would be would
be a far cry from the home your
father built. Everything's changed.
-
I don't even know what that would
feel like - to be able to say that
phrase and have it possess a
meaning for me, for anyone.
Any bit of that older Americana
stuff has been sent away. We've
fought wars, as a nation, with
some form of solidarity, to defend
such ideals. Intrinsic ideas, as they
are, to the dedicated premises of
the Nation's defining: work, place,
and individual responsibility, and
at the same time we've lost it all.
I said what I wanted to say about
that in the previous chapter, and
all I'll do here is add this coda:
We've diluted and given away all
of that. Because it was impossible.
Wave after wave of ethnic and
problem group has swarmed in.
If there had even been anything
solid as a basic underpinning to
the land (I guess the 'people'
would have been the original
WASP Scots/English who ended
up as the Tidewater and Tennessee
kind of mountain folk and hillbilly
sorts still in all those uplands and
out through the Ozarks and all).
That, and the Connecticut WASPY
blue-blood types, are probably
the real core of what founded
the land. Except they bring with
them now all sorts of racial problems
and attitudes of real trouble these
days. As for myself, I can't talk
because I was never any part of
that arrival crowd. Ever. I've got
no roots anywhere - being as
Unearthly as I am - and lay no
claim to any of that. With my own
'forebears' and since, I guess, what
has come into this country is wave
after wave of debris. Basic junk.
Like a virus attacking a hard-drive
brain. People give more attention
to protecting their computers from
viruses than does anyone any longer
do the same about what washes up or
creeps in to these shores and borders.
-
The world, in that sense, is pretty
much over, and all the defining
characteristics of it can now just
be called the 'bad past.' The two
largest, devious, and troublesome
things right now are China and
Russia; and no one wishes to
give them any attention, nor
counter their moves. We, on the
other hand, as a country, are
dead meat - our own horde of
whiners and complainers is
dismantling us from within.
The current swarms of energetic
refugees holding supposed claim
to all this are the worst. And they
have all the obsequious deviants
working for them, from within
here. It's over, Ken and Jane
and Bob and Ted and Alice.
Your new neighbors' names are
probably, on one side, the
Miranda-Patels, and on the
other, the Ming-Petrovs.
-
What I'm saying is that old solid
America did use to have a form,
a recognizable shape, that's been
whittled away, chipped down and
smoothed; most resembling, I'd
suppose, the United States of
Dildo, but I don't know how
good that would look on maps.
-
My own father, a rugged landslide
of not much at all, had a massive
pride in is ethnicity. A pride I
never understood. As it went, he
never even was really sure about
where he originated and with
whom. Just goes to show. My
father might have had 'some'
Italian in his blood, but I always
swore him to Albania, jut across
the water down in that bottom
section. Those blue-eyed sea bums
running back and forth between
Bari and Tirana. That's my blood.
Probably, if my father could have,
he would have loved to have built his
own house - and God the Builder,
I hope, would have extended all
the help in the world, or out of it,
because by all other design categories
my father's sense of proportion and
construction was so off-the-wall
wrong that the entire thing would
have been leaning, and monster-sized
to boot. Everything my father ever
built - probably including dreams
and aspirations - was too big for the
space it was going to. You should'a
seen - shelves, closets, brackets,
and such.
-
If the Devil ever had a handmaiden,
and I suppose the Devil did, it would
have been, here, in this country, the
haggard wife of Uncle Sam. Always
wanting more and better, pushing old
Sam along, even when Sam was nasty
and bored and tired and achy. Maybe
the word I seek is 'harradin.' I'm not
sure. But there's some essential quality
that's wrecked this place, and it's
still running hot and heavy, like a
Henry Ford Thomas Edison Alexander
Graham Bell Robert Fulton P. T.
Barnum, Bill gates, Elon Musk
Halloween critter. There's probably,
and better for my sake, thirty female
names I should put there too, but I ain't.
I was born as the louse my father built?
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