Growing up, I came from everywhere and nowhere. With a lapsed Lutheran father and a secular Jewish mother who moved around their lives with entirely different temperaments, I saw the world with an animation and possibility like no one else. If kids define themselves as a shadow thrown in relief by a spotlight, we had so many different lights shining at us in different colors like a postmodern strobe flicker that there would never be another childhood quite like it.
Our minds were filled with essences, from Dad's framed poster of the North African Moors charging on camels to Mom's late '80s "New Age" books of post-feminist daffodil-plucking. In any case, they were both social workers who quit trying "to keep up with the culture" after 1973 and lived with a certain acquiescence to the world, which was steadily growing worse with the implications of the 1960's protest movement and the right-wing that played for keeps during and since the big McGovern "blow-out" as the media conglomerated for maximum soul-squelching profit, regardless of the gobbling turkeys below hurling shit at each other with mean-spirited invective that was ultimately meaningless upon this Paleolithic slab of a post-industrial economy.
What I instinctually figured out early was that I never particularly "fit in" anyplace when I was reaching consciousness on the tail-end of the '80s and into the '90s. I was too cynical and world-weary to be a geek, too inactive to be a jock, too romantic to be terribly attracted to math & science, and when I looked over at the sad-eyed, self-indulgent misfits who populated the liberal arts I figured
"this might have been for me, but probably not".
The
so-called "alternative kids" made me even more sick to my stomach.
They mostly looked like perverted puke with bugged fish eyes, like a gnarled, twisted tree in the
woods crowded out by the healthy ones and never got enough sunlight or proper
nutrition, perhaps coming from "bad seed" to begin with.
Or perhaps they were even like that puppy left in the basement with nothing but spiders and crickets to gnaw on, and when it came up to the yard and experienced sunlight of the God instinct it would go into epileptic fits.
I have an image of Dave Pirner of "Soul Asylum" wandering around, looking like a dopey, 4th rate minstrel out of medieval France wearing green stockings and a red, feathered hat whose lute strings keep breaking until the merry, disgusted peasants start throwing shit at him. Ah, "The Canterbury Tales" of Generation-X but I'll leave someone else to write book on that one.
But I never found "my tribe", like a man from "a country of one". You would look around the St. Louis area and bookstores of upper middle class leisure, and see what was being offered. If anything, there was "Irish pride" which to me looked like a ridiculous story of populist victimhood spoken in a great, solemn brogue at its best and at its worst descended into
"leprechauns" or "faeries" or Celtic kitsch or even groveling at the foot of the Virgin Mary with a sense of Catholic heaviness and self-flagellating guilt that was simply beyond my merry, half-Lutheran/half-Jewish comprehension.
-- "Fuck you, you're Irish!"
& F. U2!
What was even more pathetic was "German pride", but this was stripped of all Teutonic fierceness as a bunch of fat and goofy grandfathers forked bratwursts over a grill at the downtown "Oktober Fest" in lederhosen to the sound of oomp-pa-pa music. It wholly lacked that fiery, Viking fierceness that made a name for itself across the cold reaches of Northwestern Europe and had been all but castrated to avoid offending anyone with the 1930's notion of "The Master Race".
Well, you wouldn't find it down here anyway. . . . .
Nor could I readily imagine myself hanging out in the company of big, weighty, red-bearded guys in kilts participating in caber-throwing contests across the stony hills of Scotland, a cairn of stones looking more like a pile of shit from their atrocious "sheep's stomach" dishes.
There was always the Jewish community, but those people were far too urban
and liberal and neurotic. You had that archetype of "the great heaviness",
being stuck in a rut, and no redeemer ever making the ultimate appearance.
In the European tradition, "Conan the Barbarian" simply beheads the monster without much fanfare. In the Jewish tradition, the joke is that you have Woody Allen trembling outside the cave in a Viking helmet, barely able to lift the sword. If anything, he convinces the monster to go into psychoanalysis with a bit of negotiation and trickery. Maybe this way, the monster's head gets "shrunk" so he can take it off with a knife and fork like carving a Thanksgiving turkey.
When I look back on who I came to be, it made perfect sense considering my lineage. I'm half-way depressive, just like my Dad-- in fact, the spitting image of him in stately body and flesh but yet anxious and high-strung just like my mother with her inner drive to succeed, inheriting the high intelligence from both of them.
Society gladly admits as much when it comes to the cloth of parental heredity but seems to be in complete denial about the various cloths of humanity-- the different races and ethnicities. A different color, a different fabric, a different texture, a different "feel". There are breeds of men who gravitate in different directions, like invisible magnetic waves ordering iron fillings beneath a table relative to how our society is structured, which springs from the earth-- the environment from which we were minted. In an analog coin bank, there is a reason why a penny, a nickel, a dime, a quarter, and a silver dollar all go down their respective slots. If you chisel away a coin and melt it into something bigger or smaller, than perhaps it will go down another course of destiny.
But don't forget what it was in the beginning. . . . .
A bleeding-heart
social commentator like Kurt Vonnegut could never be mistaken for a corporate
CEO, normally hard, cruel, literal-minded men with little patience for flowery
sensitivity, but only "the bottom-line" of percentages. Cold,
dispassionate scientists take on a different cast in their temple of
the secular scientific method, compared to a goofy-looking hippie slob who draws
pornographic take-off's of Walt Disney comics. Some people's countenances are
open, blundering, and soft, while others are cold and angry and rigid.
If this was not so, then how can various strata of humanity be recognizably portrayed in caricature, essence paired with lifestyle with great accuracy? It was the Greeks who believed that essence came first, then matter-- and without spirit as a "blue-print" then matter has no form. Pound for pound, when one "bell-curve" is laid over another, some populations are just going to be qualitatively better at some things than others and will carry a greater tendency toward a recognizable trait, which can roughly be quantified with the right parameters of measurement if you know "what to measure". That's not to say that some individuals can break out of the mold and surprise you, but in all odds you can presume that this human being is probably going to be somewhere within "the nice, big, fat, easy center".
(If you don't believe this, then I'd sooner
see Karl
Marx slam-dunking a basketball. . . . .)
A civilization is an expression of the soul, and soul goes back into the fabric of who we are. Our rhythms, our instincts, our way of relating to the world and expressing such through culture. What comprises culture and civilization is partially an accident of exposure, of a million little contributions, but this goes back to the collective soul-- like open-source software rising up to make a whole. These traditions can be fortified and strengthened like an echo chamber when they're handed down from one generation to the next, but that does not stop the whispering of man's soul and the question--
"Why am I here?"
The West is destroying itself with a combination of personal freedom and free market economics, which is a state of permanent upheaval that doesn't particularly respect tradition. To the extent that the average man can be lulled away from his cultural heritage by a television screen is a true testament that the seeds of our decline reaching back to the very beginning. Some speak of fascism. Others speak of libertarianism. I speak of education and reaching for the higher man.
Will you join me?
*******************
"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
(Rheeee of Crickets)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
("I heard that, Missy!")
© 2009 by Insufferable Industries
Drop "The Bard" a line at