Luxe, calme et volupté

We are living in disgusting times. Where persons do not have decent living conditions, it is due primarily to myopic selfishness (cupidity) and brutal thuggery of the Invisible Maw (what some call an: "Invisible hand", but it lacks fine motor coordination). Secondarily, poverty is due to Malthusian reproduction: There are already far too many concurrently metabolizing warm squirming bodies covering the face of the earth (7.94 * 10 ** 9).^[1] All those already alive deserve healthful and hopeful living conditions, but that does not give anyone the right to reproduce like proverbial rabbits and consequently make matters worse.

It should be obvious that the more children a couple on a limited income has, the less they can provide to each child and for each other. If my father had had 15 children, he could not have afforded to send me to Yale, especially without me wasting my time and feeling humiliated by being a "bursary student". In addition, if you have 15 children, no matter how much money you have, I cannot believe that losing one of them would be as painful as losing one if you had only one child. Wouldn't you take more cautious care of the one than of one in 15? How could you do otherwise without at least 15 arms and heads? Love is not a free good. If you are a woman, would you rather be an only beloved or a cipher in a big harem? If you are a man and in the military, would you rather be a sharpshooter or one of thousands clambering out of sodden trenches where you get body lice, to "go over the top"? Who gets treated better: the highly skilled sharpshooter or the unskilled labor in the trenches?

If somebody says that luxury and a childhood where one is irreplaceable is not what life should be about, I would say: "It ain't me you're talkin' to". I need graciousness in living, even if somebody else does not want any and would rather eat MRE's in a fox hole than eat classic French cuisine in a chateau. Technological progress has been going on already long enough that there need by no poor people any longer, but the more there are the more costly the task of saving all of them must surely become.

I do not like being dispensable/disposable or being soiled by dreck. I never liked it even as a child, and the more I learn, the more enraged I become. I used to be depressed by my social surround; depression is aim-inhibited ("repressed") rage. But I should not [need to] become enraged. There should be nothing enraging on earth, at least not anything man-made. God may give persons cancer but He also gave them orgasms. The mean-spirited or just unwitting hypocrites who spoil everything they get their oafish mitts on, give nothing except trouble and they take away all the good things God gave us. They are a lose-lose proposition. This is loathsome, despicable and it should be felonious.

In Sergei Eisenstein's film "The Battleship Potemkin", the Kronstadt rebellion sailors heave the physician who certified maggot ridden meat as fit for them to eat, unceremoniously, overboard. He takes a parabolic arc trajectory into the briny deep. Good riddance! Let all deregulators, prig parents, self-righteous pedagogues and everybody else who cannot be content to mind their own business, follow him.

To spare Robbie, I will not show the picture I have recently captured of the most loathsome sculpture I have ever seen. My reader, trust me that it is even more nauseating than anything any healthy mortal could possibly imagine. But some Politically Correct people ideate that it is their highest ideal of truth and beauty. It is not something that appeared in a snuff pornography magazine: It was on public display in a public park in a major American city in 2018, and people were proud of it because it replaced an equestrian statue of pro-slavery traitors Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. I think I can politely state the message of this sculpture: Leaders of minority ideological groups want to become more populous (in numbers is strength!) and one way they urge their group members implement their agenda is by female members of the group having larger litters. An antipodal opposite of gracious leisure is mass [re]production labor.

Now, let us turn to some things (and persons) who, in my personal opinion (BMcC), deserve to exist and should be taught about in schools. Lux in tenebris.

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Here we have the opera singer, Bidu Sayão, and a Japanese geisha lady. My understanding is that geishas were not prostitutes, although, naturally (Aside: Shinto saw gods in natural objects), they did appreciate good patrons. But their main function was to be cultured to entertain men in cultured ways. Men who, presumably, either are cultured or at least want to pretend to be cultured, unlike United States of America Reaganites and Donald J. Trumps, who are either genuinely boorish (stupid and ignorant) or at least try to pretend they are (stupid and ignorant). I can imagine a geisha having to pretend to be amused by (POTUS №40) Ronald Reagan explaining to her that an economist is a man with a watch chain with a Phi Beta Kappa key on one end and no watch on the other end. [Everybody please applaud now!] I think the geisha would prefer to entertain Nobel laureate economist Professor Paul Krugman.

But all is not bad in The United States of America. I know second-hand of a man whose day gig was selling pork products wholesale, but who assiduously endeavored to be cultured. He married "up", to women who disdained him. He had a Marantz stereo system in his Fifth Avenue Apartment's study. Etc. He may not have had (POTUS №40) Ronald Reagan's privileged schooling, but he was apparently no (POTUS №40) Ronald Reagan. After he died, I wore one of his lovely Italian "butter soft" leather (I recall it was not just cow hide) wallets, for years, until I totally wore it out. Some persons try to raise themselves up; some persons try to put others down. What use is schooling if it does not abet the former and arrest (shame them from doing any further damage, and help them improve their evil ways...) the latter? Look in the mirror, all (starting with myself).

So how to approach graciousness, even if only in fantasy if, lamentably, not also in reality? Let me begin by stating something else not gracious, addressed especially to those persons who are not gracious and think art is fluff, which indeed, their art may be. I propose that if art cannot console person who are suffering from cancer or stuck in a fox hole or suffering from insufferable people or otherwise beset by what is less then human(e), then it probably is not worth anything. To the persons who say art is useless I respond that any art which cannot provide some comfort to persons who need help is indeed probably not worth it, so these people should get on with getting some useful art in their lives and get on with getting some appreciation of it. Where by "useful" do not not mean necessary labor or the extraction of surplus value from persons, but making metabolizing worth it (see right). As a friend of mine says: Lead, follow or get out of the way. He also said some persons are in need of retroactive birth control (which I hypothesize is why those persons may be anti-abortionists and think Griswold v. Connecticut was wrongly decided).

Art may, moreover, be useful in yet another way: If a boy becomes a concert musician, when his draft number comes up, maybe he will get a deferment or a gig in a military band instead of being brutalized and maybe crippled for life or losing his life as a soldier in the trenches. What use is an effete on the battlefield? Show the kid good wholesome war movies like Platoon and Das Boot ("The Boat"), to help him appreciate the value of fine art. Have him read Wilfred Owens's poem "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" (it's less than one page long, so it should not tax the kid's attention span, and gas masks are "cool", aren't they?). And, for paintings and sculpture, have him study George Grosz's print: "Fit for active service". "Do you still want to play video games with your friends, kid? Or would you rather learn to play Scarlatti? It's your choice. If you choose the piano, I'll even give you a nice little framed picture of ragged German soldiers retreating from Stalingrad in the Russian winter (It's cold there then, you know?), to keep on your piano to remind you of all you have given up in life to learn to play the piano."

So back to graciousness. I do not think graciousness necessarily has much to do with good manners, especially when the price of not leaving the dinner table to take a piss results in a bladder blockage before the advent of modern Western medicine (Tycho Brahe). Neither does it have anything to do with "morals", except for people not being violent, intrusive and otherwise uninvited pests. I was massively in need of: "Tea and Sympathy", as an adolescent, and my guess is that might have been illegal in Nancy Reagan's "Just say no!" moralizing police state. Donatello's David (left) does not necessarily look to be over age 18. Blessed are thay who are not noticed by History, And if conspicuous consumers get hounded to death by the Paparazzi, I think they've both earned it: (1) each Paparazzo needs to earn a living, and (2) each conspicuous consumer deserves to be consumed by his her or other's self-exposure. If you want fans to worship you, be prepared for some of them to do it in excess. I believe Jody Foster earned John Hinkley, albeit (POTUS №40) Ronald Reagan, however disgusting he was, deserved neither of them (I trust he and Nancy watched nothing more insalubrious than PG rated films in their bedroom, true? "Oh, Nancy! Somewhere over the rainbow, bluebirds fly!" "They do, Ron. We just say 'Yes!' to bluebirds...." Etc.). Whatever, Robert Bork was not confirmed to the United States Supreme Court, so Americans still have a right to privacy, pro tem.

Please, prudes, go away. Let me (and anyone else who might feel similar to myself) have some Matissian Luxe, calme et volupté – including in school while the body is still firm and healthy, but at all ages before we are dying. Give us a break! Let us breathe! If you don't want any, nobody is asking you to even watch it (ref.: Samuel Paty). Please just go away, Messrs. William Clinton Burriss Young (Harvard graduate who assigns a wood shop project to a kid who does not even have access a screw driver but otherwise gets "A" grades) and Louis Clark (Advanced Placement American History prig) and Martin Kossover, LCSW (would-be psychoanalytic supervisor), and Miss Lillian Lorenz (were you such a superannuated perma-virgin that could not cope with reading one curse word at 12 paces distance?)^[2] and all the rest of you whose names I forget or I am still afraid in 2020 to say because you may not yet be dead or for other reasons you make me remain concerned for my safety!

A mind is a terrible thing to waste. So too is a body. I have for many years wished I could write a Great American Novel. I have always known its title: "WASTE". You win your prize, mean-spiriteds: You waste my life.

See also: beautiful Réalités magazine cover, and: Naive/primitive/folk art v. fashionista art, and: Réalités, and: Atget.