RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,094
(this machine that rides the horse, pt. 1)
By 1976, I figure, I was so
knee-deep into information,
reading, and learning, that I
was probably an insufferable
bore. Two corners away from
mine was Elmira College,
which placement allowed
me a constant and unfettered
short-cut in. Back then it was
a road for cars too - now, no
longer. The odd Woman's Health
Clinic building, back from when
it was a girl's seminary, and, later
until 1969, a female-only,
segregated, college. Males were
allowed in then, and the health
facility had to be enlarged.
Wondering why that was, all I
could ever conclude was that
sex, birth control dispensing,
and abortions had each taken
their toll, and come calling. As
at Princeton, where the same
thing had happened, in reverse;
and where the Female Health
Clinic dispensed just about
everything needed for an orgy.
Anyway, back to Elmira - that
street has now been redesigned
closed off, and, instead, the
students mingle and a new
building or two are in place,
as well as a new lawn. There
was, back then, a rough curve in
the road right there too, one from
which my 4-year old kid went flying
out of the car when the rear door
opened as the curve was being
negotiated, by me, in my green
VW Squareback. He rolled and
tumbled, but no harm came. It
became an epic tale, later, of
speed and hi-jinks.
-
I guess that was all a roundabout
way of me getting to this: Thomas
Carlyle. You'd never think that my
interests, perhaps, or thought would
run towards a person the likes of
Carlyle. He's one of those figures of
his own time that you hear about,
dig into a bit, and back off - all those
ideas and premises of Locke, Carlyle,
and the rest, seem so onerous and
dour now; today's world being so
different that even the 'light' shed
upon such previous characters and
societal critics is a light of another
nature, no longer ours. Everything's
turned out as it's turned out, and no
thanks to, nor effectiveness of, them
has made any real difference. Profit
and politics have won out.
-
1972 brought me Thorstein Veblein;
Oswald Spengler; Henry Adams. All
of a part, which in turn brought me to
Karl Marx and the writings of Thomas
Jefferson, Tench Coxe (Alexander
Hamilton's assistant, of sorts, and a
man possessed by far more insight
and talent than the poor clod he
'assisted'), and Alexander Hamilton.
Hamilton has now been re-configured
culturally into some sort of a current,
cheaper-pabulum-baby for the lefty and
Broadway crowd of fey hipsters;
completely blinding the world to what
he was really about. More on that in a
bit....The man is a caricature of
something bad and bland.
-
You have to remember that all history
is at base a lie, a fabrication of the way
things were; written by the prevailing
culprits who won out, all it does, as read
and taught, is bolster the commanding
ethos of those rulers and their 'Society'
in place. (To my mind, there is too much
a fabric of lies everywhere, and there
are very few active 'Americans' who
would even care to refute the fabrics
of their lives' make-ups).
-
The rest of the country was going
ass-over-deep into their silly and fatuous
Bicentennial stuff, bespeaking the same
lies and distortions as always; people
mobbed every patriotic scene and/or
well-devised event, all for the further
propagation of the mythology of the
'founded America' of pastoral goodness,
individual rights and freedoms, the
yeomanry of the everyday, husbandry,
ecology, space and happiness. As if
washing machines, dead cars, destroyed
woods and forests, and the pathetic
Passaic River of shopping cars, tires,
pollution and plastic had never existed.
It was sure too much for me.
-
But it was all Alexander Hamilton would
have ever wished for. He was the original
anti-American. In fact, for all those statue
tear-downers, there's a large bust of him,
overlooking Paterson Falls, with a large
Freedom bell next to him, that ought be
torn down immediately, while you're all
in the mood for that crap. His famed 'City
of Industry,' as he'd planned and mapped
out Paterson to be, using the water works
and the falls as the means of powering and
destroying all he could for the furtherance
of Manufacture, commerce, trade and
despoliation, represented nothing so
much as the antithesis to Jefferson's,
Carlyle's, Schiller's, and others'
pastoral view of an abiding American
Eden; a pure Ruritania. Jefferson's
original stance was to let NO manufactures
take place here, to ruin what was. Instead
let Europe slave and toil in its noxious
fume and make those things needed, as
America bought and imported for them
and, in turn, supplied Europe the agri-goods
and agri-culture it lacked, amidst its teeming
filth of walled cities, cramped strictures, and
rampant poverty and distressed conditions.
-
Alas, not to be. Hamilton's opposite viewpoint,
in fact, was so disgustingly abnormal to the
American scene that he should, by then, have
been hung : He sought the labor-saving of
machinery, in place, in America's factories,
to keep 'round-the-clock shifts of child-workers
strapped to machinery. He, and Coxe, thought
nothing of it. Here are Jefferson's words in
opposition: "I have been thinking about the
workers of the great cities of the old countries,
with whom the want of food and clothing
has begotten a depravity of morals, a
dependence and a corruption." He had
no wish to see that repeated in America.
(Ralph Waldo Emerson, later on, seeing
this fruit gone sour within America's newer
soul of established drudge and machinery,
put it thusly : "Things are in the saddle,
and ride mankind. There are two laws
discrete, not reconciled; Law for man, and
law for thing. The last builds town and
fleet, but it runs wild and doth the man
unking"). Veritably, Jefferson - and our
nation - has lost its battle with profit,
goals, planning, machinery, and goods.
An overabundance of sloth and ennui
ensues. We live it.
