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Q: Which is a good symbol for America[1], analogous to how the Cross is a symbol for Christianity and the Star of David of David for judiasm? Pick one: (A) automobile hubcaps, or (B) fake window mullions, or (C) styrofoam coffee cups, or (D) golf balls, or (E) chemical underarm deodorants (e.g.: Ban Roll On), or (F) hair sweepings from a barber shop floor, or (G) other (please specify: bmcc.edd@gmail.com)?
Entertainment: Rich people attending a Broadway Musical performance or something. Click one of the video monitors to see middle class people watching their television.
It's not polite to say it, but the nature of politeness is to make people pretend to themselves things are not the way they are, to make them afraid of themselves and their social surround to intimidate them be what their social surround wants to deploy them as, not what otherwise they might by themselves become which might not be as useful for the agenda of that social surround and one bad apple can spoil a whole bushel and we were all born to serve the agenda of the group['s leaders], not: the group and its leaders existing for our good, but they won't acknowledge that fact because then we might not like it and consequently each say: "Hell no, I won't go!" ("What if they gave a war and nobody came?")
A child should be reared raised in an environment that can raise him (her, other) up in the vertical dimension, not in the happenstance social surround of the birth canal or C-section out of which he emerged from the uterus, and that may mean for the child to be raised by non-biologially related persons who are similar to the child, or, if not, at a bare minimum, persons who do not try to make the child be like themselves if the child is more gifted than they are.
(An adolt)
To be specific: my parents should have given me up for adoption by a highly intellectual, cultured, esthetically refined childless couple as soon as it began to become clear that I was of a more rarified species than themselves. (Love is not possessive.) And the Headmaster (left) of "prep" school they sent me to should have told them that neither he himself nor his institution was competent to educate a gifted and sensitive child.
For me (BMcC), it was split or succumb. Being schizoid beat having psychically died, 24/7/365.25, but I deserved better than that. The reason the a**holes at Westchester Institute for Training in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy shunned me is that they knew I knew what they were, and they did not like that I could maybe help other people who were not instances of their social surround to survive as themselves and not get reduced to being psychically dead like their smiling faces. I remember you, Martin Kossover, LCSW! This page will be about psychic deadness.
: normal products make a child more normal so that the child is then in greater need of normal prouducts which make the child still more normal so that the child then is in still greater need of normal products which will make the child even yet more normal which... and on and on it goes until death or dementia, whichever comes first.Who can say? Whichever way it goes, we end up with a lot of normal people and normal products which together make up normal, normalizing social surround which keeps normalizing everything and everybody more and more to keep everything perfectly normal, or, in brief: perfect. And a young lad should always remember that girls like Tootsie Rolls.
Aside: One despicable effect of normalizing childrearing and normal products follows from Arnold Hauser's observation:
"What men are willing to put up with depends on what they are able to look forward to.
Normalizing childrearing and normal products brainwash people into not having much to look forward to and consequently causing them to put up with very bad things such as, in 1964, when I turned 18 years of age, their country packaging some of us in body bags and also subjecting some others to lifelong mutilation due to their government's leaders' fantasy to kill commies in Vietnam. Are babies born lusting to be killed for their country of origin's foreign poicy, or to wear steel cages to protect their faces from being mutilated by hits from cudgels ("lacrosse sticks"), or to be wage-slaves all their lives working in meaningless jobs to serve a mindless "invisible hand"?
Q: Would people be normal even had they been given nurturing not normalizing childrearing? Would they still end up being normal had their souls not been Wonder Breaded, i.e.: had their autochthonous faculty of judgment not been destroyed and replaced by a socially conditioned faculty of pre-judgment, the purpose of which is to make the person to see things as their social surround of origin wants them to, not as they would see them for themselves if left to judge for themselves? Does normalizing childrearing for most people just populate previously uninhabited territory (a genuine "tabula rasa"), not needing to do a destruction of the child's own autochthonous spirit first, because normal children, unlike me (BMcC[18-11-46-503]), do not enter this world with any native spirit that would need to be expunged to be replaced by a social conditioned?
I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) imagine, perhaps wrongly, that had my parents not destroyed my autochthonous faculty of judgment (well, they did not completely succeed, but they did their "best" and at least crippled me...), as a child I could have perceived "the simple": that which the things in my surround had to say, and, since I did not create the world, there would be no end to what the things had to tell me of themselves, sometimes for better and also sometimes for worse, but all nonetheless coming from the things themselves, not from the masking over everything by my parents' social conditioning.
My childrearing destroyed much of what I was born with, my soul, and tried to stuff back in my childrearers' shared psychoses – the social conditioning – of the social surround I was stuck in, as deputized to my two birth parents. Instead of living among the simple, I was stuck with the familiar: The objects in social conditioning are closed predefined stand-ins for the things in the world, so that, when the socially conditioned child looks at anything, the child does not see what the thing itself has to tell him, but just sees the stand-in. The world becomes a big bore because its preprogrammed semiotic content is quickly exhausted, like a TV dinner (right), not abig table of open bowls containing various fresh foods to take or leave, or to take a second helping of, or, again, not. The child's whole lifeworld is a portion-controlled, prepackaged TV dinner. You are what you eat.
Let me try to restate this again: At least for me (BMcC[18-11-46-503]), if not for other people, what Edmund Husserl called "the natural attitude" was not natural: It was something inflicted upon me by my childrearing. Innately, I speculate I would have "bracketed" everything, i.e.: examined person, place and thing, etc. at a judgmental (not pre-judicial!) distance. But my childrearenders could not cope with being the objects of a child's judgment because that would have threatened their socially conditioned and consequently brittle self-images. The "natural attitude" was not natural for me. Item: In 7th Grade, I was neutral about school spirit; I did not care whether the gung-ho school-spirit "prep" school in which I was a student won or lost its varsity lacrosse and football games. I remember reflectively looking at the water fountain in the hall outside the classroom in which the adolt pedagogue named Mike Rentko had proven himself incompetent[2] to cope with my creativity in defining my own handwriting style. There was carpet on the floor. For me, the school was a displaced persons camp.
Your Comment on Post-Pandemic Dressing Finally Takes Shape
The New York Times
Sep 15, 2023, 2:51 PM (16 hours ago)
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Bradford McCormick | New York
It is, always impolite to report the emperor's new clothes as a freight manifest.
Shouldn't we only buy clothes we functionally need and wear them until the cost of repair exceeds the cost or replacement?
Adlof Loos's essay "Ornament and crime" (1913) is not a best-seller. He argued that since we have art we do not, like savages, need decoration, and that anybody who decorated anything in the 20th century was either a criminal or a degenerate who had not yet committed his crime.
Then along came the architect Robert Veutiri who condemned modernist architects for trying to raise the culturel level of the masses, and celebrated kitsch ("Learning from Las Vegas"). He condemned a home for the aged by Paul Rudolph because plastic flowers did not look nice in the windows, and he topped home for aged Quakers he designed (Guild House) with a gold anodized non-functioning antenna "as a symbol for the els=derly who watch so much television". IHS.
Our house is not The Bauhaus. A couple years ago AOC wore a gown to the Met gala which at least had a message, in bold red colors: "Tax the rich". And the rich apparently loved it (the gown, albeit not acting on the message).
Requiem for the USA: Mr. Venturi is still venerated by architects. The great humansit architct Louis Kahn died like a stray dog in New York's Penna train station (read his NYT obituary). Old R CRumb cartoon: Husband to wife: "See if there is anything good on tonite." Respoinse: "Why bother?"
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