WelcomeThere are two American dreams. the first deprived me of the life the second would have given me. Bu tther is a connection: The first did at lest send me to the college where I would begin to learn a few thing sthat enables me to build on them to eventually discover the second one.
I here place a cdrtain object as the duck-rabbit between the two. From the side of the bad merian dream it's where "straight" males get to expose their genitals to each other in a "manly" way. From the other side it was a revoutionary work of art. and it's relevant in a second way: It's from 1917. Some of the people who denied me the life I could have had were born after that, including my 2 biological progenitora. I am not talking about thingsthat were in the future but jstu in a different "place". Like dogs and cats can live at the same time as garden slugs but are different from them.
| Mike Rentko (1932-2022) |
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Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) |
| << What was bad | (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) | What could have been good >> |
Everybody knows what Amerian Dream #1 is. It's what Donald Trump called: "our beautiful and successful suburbs" (here).
It's a lawn to mow and a mortgage to pay and a job doing something otr other that daddy commutes to in an automobile and mommy get's pregnant and has 3 children and the ids go to scholol and play on the varsity team and what's the point of it? To have backyard barbecues on Sunday afternoons in the summer.
Htow did I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) feel about it all? Nobody ever asked ans I was too ignoranced to have had an answer. Do you want to grow up and be like your daddy? No. Are you bored? Yes. Do you like it here? [silence] Would you like something else? [silence] Poor kid.
Somewere in my adult years of less-than-living, I came across American Dream #2. Instantly I recognized it as something I would like:
"I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain." (John Adams)
Mr. Adams died in 1826. It does n't take a mathematical prodigy to figure out his grandchildren had probably all died before I was born so I should have been from a generation which had inherited "a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain". Duh.
I have been able over a long life to learn about and study some of thosee what I call "higher"things: higher than the pathetic, superficial and often phony banality of The American Dream #l that, for me, was a downer thatd dragged me down. But not fully:
Like Moses, I have been alowed to see the Promised Land but not go there. I was childreared in the Dark Age of "in locl parentis" (translate: parents are insane) by anti-sexual parents and jock off school teaches. In 1967 The Rolling Stones had a song that seems innocuous to me: "Let's spend the night together". NIMBY.
I was able to aqwuire culture but not a life. A beautiful building without a foundation (or on a mound of detritus). And there was more uniquely for me that I did not ask for but I got (see here). Beyond respiration and alimentation, my species needs which should have been a give on which to build a life, were so well met that if these other two were equally well satisfied I would have died from asphyxiation in a few minutes and stavation in a few days. I'm still dying, Rrose Selavy.
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