The American Dream

America is all about people wanting more: bigger portions, bigger houses (bigger mort—gages), bigger celebrities, bigger waistlines (well, not this one), more of everything....

Too much of a whole lot of stuff that ain't worth nuthin' to me (BMcC[18-11-46-503])

This is easy for me to say, because I do not buy into the way of the world. I don't like and I don't want most of what the people around me by choice ingest and perforce excrete.^[3]

A big problem, the cause of a lot of big problems, is that people want more. They want a bigger house. They want more children. And they want it more quickly, too.

"When in doubt, wait it out." (Michael Eigen)

"Less is more. (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe)

But people like to have dead[-]lines to keep themselves engaged. Again, this is easy for me to say because one of the first things in my life that I liked was waiting for Godot, who, of course, will never arrive. And I am sensitive to the danger, because all my life I have wanted to be some place other than where I was (some place better!) and I couldn't get away from where I was stuck being: my parents, my prep school, my job..., fast enough – preferably yesterday, whenever today was or is. But I do not have the capitalizaton to leave. Most people do not want to get away: they just want to get more of where they already are, which is easier since they've already got some of it. If you want a bigger lawn, well, why not, since you already have a lawn? I never wanted any lawn, which means I couldn't just extrapolate....

Is the problem that people who can't do anything in the vertical dimension need to be occupied in the horizontal dimension, or else god knows what would become of their energy? My childrearing and schooling almost completely destroyed my creativity and consequently I got bored because I didn't like what they stuffed down my throat as ther replacement for my self, either. (Nuture abhors a vacuum.) Now, alas very belatedly, as I have regrown more creative as I've grown older, i am reciprocally bored a lot less. I'm occupied writing about boredom, and that's how I'm not bored right now. But firm young flesh is a lot more fun then an aging body. And it's so weird: The adolts around me were obsessed with denying me my young sexuality so I lost out on a good thing. What did they gain from depriving me pleasure? Is that how they got sexually aroused, by keeping me from getting any? That's really sick, isn't it? In loco parents translates as parents are insane.

Back to the back yard. Why did they want one? Why did they want to char meat on a grill? Why did they want to sit out on a patio in the evening and get bitten by mosquitos which either they complain about or applied sticky greasy bug repellant to their skin or both or whatever they did or didn't do or ideate they were doing or not doing? But they did have imaginations. They could imagine themselves drinking a Coca-Cola before they went to the frig to get one. And the Headmaster of the prep school they put me in could imagine receiving more tuition money before he received it.

Of course, a real child is an endless source of engagement for its parents, even if only to keep snooping on him, find out naughty things he is doing and punish him for it. Work expands to fill the time available for doing it.

Then there is fashion. Keeping up with the Joneses is being a donkey chasing a carrot tied to another donkey's tail, who, for his part, is chasing a carrot attached to your tail. The fun never ends.

I have always wanted better, not more, but if you demur that better is a kind of more then OK. Sticks and stones can break my bones but the effect of words on a perosn depends on his [←note that is not a genderist word!] ideological orientation. Political correctnessers are prickly about words, but not me. The most valuable (in capitalist terms) thing I own is a piece of pottery that might look to some people like it came from Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped, and it fits in a 2 inch cube and neither does it have any "precious metal" in it, although if I did drop it and it broke (It's "build like a brick shipyard", to quote the old Revox tapte recorder advertising slogan), and I could afford it, I would have it repaired with gold like the national treasures in Japan. I look at it for hours and never tire of it. It's soul food.

If I was rich like Jeff Bezos, there is a house I really would like to live in, in Switzerland: Bianchi house at Riva san Vitale by Mario Botta (It is extensively documented on the Internet). If I wasm y dissertation sponsor from Teacher College I'd probably pass it up becuse it would not be big enough for all my books. You can't have everyting in this world, even if you are Jeff Bezos, and even he will not be able to take it with him. So what would I do about this house? I would follow the example of one of my neighbors: I would have a real estate agent knock on the door and tell the current owner I'd pay anything he asked for it on condition he did not show it to anybody and get out. The market value of the house may be a couple million dollars USD. Can't get that? There's a small house near where I live that's a real early 20th century Palladian design, not just an ordinary house with a Palladian window. I could almost have afforded it but my wife would not hav econsidered it since it does not hav eenough suare feet. Her mother's house is worth probably twice s much. Offer me Versailles and of course I would take it: to sell it. My ideal automobile, even if pollution was not an issue and I feel that automobiles in general at bad, like cancer cells in the bloodstream? My father's brother, back in 1961 was a non-CPA accountant who worked for the state of Maryland and had a low end Porsche 356 with maybe 40 horsepower. Of course I'd want it in mint condition. It doesn't have airconditioning. Well I'd sweat in the summer.

Less is more. But "Mies" said something even more to the point: "God is in the details." The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA): I generally am suspicious of museum curators; I once had the displeasure of working under a fashionista one. I like conservators; at the same time I worked in the same museum as the conservator who was later to become chief conservator of The National Gallery (Vic Covey) — he was a good guy.

One day now many years ago I was walking through "MOMA", in the design gallery. I saw somethingthat disgusted me. There on the wall was a Danese wall calender. I have one. They were $20 USD in 1969 and maybe $200 today. But ther ewas something special about this one.

The little date "cards were all wrong (Click the above to see them right on mine). Any museums will take good care of its multimliion dollar exhibit blockbusters. But as Jesus Crist said: "As ye do it unto the least of these, my brethren, you do it unto Me." (Matt 25:40). MOMA wsa under no constraint to display this inexpensive object.But he you are going to do something ,you should do it right. Some slob on the MOMA payroll did not give a shit about something less important than, say, sociopath Pablo Picasso's^[1] "Guernica". The Museum of Modern ART blasphemes against what I consider to be the true god: quality. Quality is not a comparative. If you can't take the heat don't come in the kitchen.

I do not ask for much in life and I do not want much. I want everything I see or touch or otherwise to come in contact with or even have to know about to be quality. That's all. Of course I'd love to own a Kandinsky masterpiece, but I'll settle for running a photocopy off an inkjet printer and taping it to the wall, but not with shiny old cellophane tape, only the newer matt finish transparent tape which does not cost much more but which I do not find repulsive to be around. It would not cost all that much for me to want nothing more than I would have. I must consume, but in order to create (not procreate – I paid for one abortion before they were legal and it was done in a Roman Catholic hospital where either that was not a big deal in 1970 or else they didn't know about it. Can you imagine how different the earth would be if everybody thought and felt like me instead of wanting always:

wanting more and different.

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"Prove all thingsl hold fast that which is good." (1 Thes 5:21)^[2]

Why ignorant people may think they are know-it-alls

Ignorant people may often want more because they can't appreciate anything. Dogs like to eat cat feces. In the domain of knowledge maybe the following image is relevant: If you are ignorant you don't know there is much to know about or not know about. A person is ignorant not just because they do not know much but more importantly because they do not have a clue that there are [m]any things they do not know. So if you are a very learned person who knows 100,000 things but you know that there are 100,000,000,000 things to know, you don't feel all that knowledgeable, do you? But if you only aware that there are 10 things and you know 11 things, you think you know even more than everything. Such a person fancies they really are very knowledgeable, and indeed they may be: about very little, and that is one of the many things they do not know they do not know.