RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,058
(ideal time)
Did you know that Humankind
now takes having a roof over one's
head as a human right? Having
evolved from 'an outdoor species
into an indoor one, we've gone
from the African savannah's wide
open expanses, intimate with
Nature and seeking protection
under tree canopies, so that our
genetic hardwiring, built over
millennia, still craves that older
connection to nature.' Hmmm.
No wonder I scan skies and look
to the heavens to forestall a certain
sort of K-Mart innate boredom.
Even the confines of an expensive
car can't solve this new dilemma.
I go, though the way be wild?
-
That's not mine, that 'way be wild'
thing. In fact, as I recall, it's from
Linus, in an old Peanuts cartoon.
None of that sounds vital now, but
in the very late 1960's this Charles
Schulz guy had the world wrapped
with his 'Peanuts' cartoon. I was
never a fan at all, not even a follower
or a reader of the daily strip. Couldn't
have cared less. I hated the roundness
of the character's, and the even lines
and marks of the drawings, and I
always deemed the emotions and
exclamations to be childish. BUT,
I had a friend, here, in Avenel
(dead now, both the friend, and
the place), who thought Peanuts
was high social-science and that it
perfectly captured a form of the
zeitgeist. He was enrapt by the
cartoon strip. I was not, and used
to tell him 'When I see Charlie
Brown in a Vietnam setting, in
jungle fatigues and a helmet,
cradling an automatic weapon,
perhaps then I believe this shit.'
I couldn't stand that Lucy and
Linus and Pig Pen and Charlie
crap, no way. I thought it was
oblivious to society-at-large
and not representative of it at
all; and that its supposed nuggets
of cute wisdom were drivel. As
for the Schultz guy himself, he
and his whole story seemed bogus
to me; but at least he laid low and
unseen enough not to be a social
pain. He was to flip-side equivalent,
in a way, to Walt Disney, the person.
Disney for a while (I think he died
maybe about 1966 or '67?), was like
the John Wayne of America's social
and pleasure fabric, a complete jerk
making fantasy parks for morons and
arrested development types. He too
was one of those representative
American characters who, in those
days, was mucking it up for everyone.
Theme parks and pleasure castles,
all chaste and fake. I used to wish to
tie his Snow White to a bedpost and
have a rip at her just to shut her face
up. Little was lost when we lost
those two.
-
My same friend who liked Peanuts
and Charles Schulz, as it turned out,
was a closeted gay fellow, a serial
romancer of either sex, a jumbled
moire-pattern of twisted ideals and
fractured fairy tales, who did later
take his own life. Oh well. Lucy never
pulled that football away at the last
moment, I guess. He used to walk
the streets with a small, hand-held,
transistor radio tuned to the daily
Dr. Joyce Brothers show. Yep,
another very strange 1960's radio
broadcast wrangler. Like the Jean
Shepherd of self-help talk and social
commentary. She was a weak-voice,
wan and willowy lady who purported
at social science, radio interviews
and the dispensing of advice to others.
Sort of like the Self-Help section of
any Barnes & Noble, or Borders,
bookstore, some years later when
enlightenment and self-improvement
became a working tenet of probably
those same people who used their
yoga mats and Lulemon tights for
self-mastery. I used to think it was
awkward, or perverse, to see a guy
walking the streets with a transistor
radio held to his ear. Very bizarre,
and to listening to Joyce Brothers?
The Bess Meyerson of camp? It
certainly just set me more adrift.
I'd walk through the Broadway/w80's
area, and all the Spanish guys would
be out there, vending and hopping
around, and they too had transistor
radio blaring - even sometimes
'boom boxes' - but at least they were
usually tuned to Yankee games, or
playoff games, or the world series.
This was all different.
-
Distinctions I could never get over:
Peanuts, Charles Schulz, Walt Disney,
Joyce Brothers, Vietnam, napalm,
burning flesh, torched hamlets and
villages, B-52's flaring high in the
sky, remaining death and destruction
to thatched huts, blinded and maimed
prisoners with hands tied behind their
backs, the machine gunning of villages
and their inhabitants, suspected rice
field guerrilla-fighters, political types
on the USA radio and TV proclaiming
their right-causes and excuses for war,
fomenting ire and confusion by twisting
stories and images, conjuring facts up
out of thin air so as to justify the death,
maiming and murder of - besides the
58,000 American soldiers churned
through - countless cadavers of the
Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian
dead souls that Peanuts and Lucy and
Charles Schulz or Joyce Brothers, or
Jean Shepherd, for that matter. had
ever reached for. It seemed as if
'American' social science only saw
things one way, and demanded that
one way alone : a pleasure principle,
a self-esteemed and sacrosanct sense
of superiority, and a righteousness about
national entitlement and statist-self
that saw a jungle and a people and
any indigenous trifle as something
in the way, to be bombed, torched,
or murdered at will. Time? For
America, 1960's time was an ideal,
opaque, but gossamer, whose luck
and timing just, eventually,ran out
and died. This was the start of it all.
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