Realist

While, as I have said, my father was no philosopher king.  He did say four things in my presence, if not directly to me, –folk or class wisdom, I guess I would call it—that stuck with me over the years and that have given me reason to ponder in an attempt to understand my father’s zietgiest as well as my own.

Once, he sang:

 Skeeter fly high, skeeter fly lowworker
If that skeeter bite my peter
That skeeter ain’t gonna fly no mo

Well, this isn’t wisdom exactly, but I pondered it wondering when a person would give a skeeter a chance like that to bite his peter.  We forget so easily! Our own Heritage.  These are the verses of a people accustomed to pissing outdoors in thick skeeter country.  Like Orlando, Florida, in 1955.  The land of a thousand lakes, or as we dubbed it on our swing through in 1955, the land of several trillion skeeters.

He also said:

 “Same shit, different bucket.”  This is a saying of rather universal dimensions, seeing that it can be applied to any two things—or pieces of shit—that are the same but have different packaging.  This might be said for example of whatever difference there is between a Big Mac (piece of shit “a”) and a Carl’s Junior burger (piece of shit “b”).  Or of most so called celebrities say, Brittany Huston (piece of shit 1) and Hilton Simpson (piece of shit 2).  But I feel it most effectively applied, as my father did at the time he spoke it, to the two political parties.  It bespeaks, when coming from the mouth of a working person, the great distance he feels between the affairs of his daily life and the mucky-mucks up there on capital hill who cannot tell shit from shinola.

Additionally:

“Shit’s like cream.  It rises to the top.”  Considered aesthetically, the co-mingling of turd-like brownness with milk like whiteness (along with the suggestion that one might accidentally drink a turd along with one’s milk), this statement is somewhat disgusting.  But it is a point well made, even more so in our present day, where well packaged shit dominates the movie industry and men of the lowest, shit-like qualities, appear to run the country and the globe.  In fact, the theory expressed in this saying seems so representative of experience as to be irrefutable.

Finally, and mostly sadly and stocially:

“Life is making the best of a bad job.” In the literature I have read, working class people are, over and over again, described as realists.  This saying would certainly take the wind out of the sails of any idealist.  And once again, the distance of the working class person from the forces that control his destiny is suggested.  He works a job he did not create.  He did not plan it, he did not finance it, he will make no money from; he knows moreover that the job is ill-designed, tossed together, constructed from inferior materials, and  probably completely unnecessary.  The one hope one has is a personal hope.  If one is not to be irrevocably stained and ruined by the bad job, if one is not to lose all dignity, one must do one’s best.  If there is any honor, that’s it.

Perhaps along with my tooth pick legs, and my great regularity, I inherited from the old man, as representative of his class and times, a dark realism that when brought into contact with my idealism produces an admixture of rank pessimism.

Who knows?

Lower Back Pain

I heard the old man’s truck pull up on the gravel out front.  It was about noon on a work day.  I had never known the old man to come home in the middle of a day unless it was raining. But it was summer and it wasn’t raining.  So thinking something might be wrong, I went to the front window as the old man tried to walk down the slope of the driveway—the house being set down below road level—bent over at 90 degrees.

lowerbackHis back had seized up he said, and he couldn’t straighten up.  Then he sat down at the kitchen table and ate his lunch from the paper bag because nothing was going to disturb his routine.  He munched in his Fritos while old lady called to make an appointment with a doctor. He came back still bent at 90 degrees.  The doctor had said that the only thing to do was to get him on his back resting in traction.  The  doctor said it might take 4 weeks, even longer for him to straighten up.

 I am not a fucking ingrate.  I might not have much positive to say about the old man as a human being; but he was a good and steady worker.  Seeing him knocked out of commission like that made me feel vulnerable and rightfully so.  He was the bread winner.  The old lady hadn’t worked since WW2 and she didn’t drive.  Also according to the old lady, we were always teetering on the brink of destitution.  She was an expert at poor mouthing, and if you asked anything about the family money, she wouldn’t tell you or she would lie.

 One hot summer afternoon the old lady told me to go into their bedroom and collect the glasses in there the old man had been using.  He loved canned lemonade.  So I went in.  The room was close and hot and stuffy, and the old man was asleep with his big belly sticking out from under his t-shirt and half of his old, pale and gnarly looking penis hanging out from under the stretched out elastic of his underpants.  He was snoring and drooling.  Flies buzzed over him because of all the sticky lemonade glasses around.

I got this horrible feeling that he was never, ever going to get.  The guy had just died and gone to pig heaven.  I don’t mean he had died really, but he had found pig heaven right here on earth.

But after about six weeks he got up and went back to work.  His back never seized up like that again.  But when ever he sat for while, the back would stiffen up.  When he got up, he would give out a groan and sort of launch himself out of the chair.  About half way across the room he would straighten up, and if he knew you were watching and he had it in him, he would let out a fart.

Farting was his highest form of humor.  He was a good farter, so why not.  I remember hearing a comedian say if something makes people laugh keep doing it till they stop.  I had stopped laughing a long time ago, but if his farts irritated the old lady, I still enjoyed it as a form of masculine bonding, I guess.  About the only thing I inherited from my old man, aside from my toothpick legs, was a vigorous and robust bowel.  I am incredibly regular.  Once when I was constipated and couldn’t shit for three days, I thought I was going to fucking die.

The Insanity of Lawns

The old man was no philosopher King.  Once they were on my ass about something I had done or hadn’t done or did and shouldn’t have.  Lord knows what.  But they could make a guy crazy, so this time, I don’t know why, I launched into my existentialism trip and started neurotically nattering on about what was the point of it all, sure you do this, so you can do that, and then you get a job and work till you die, and could they tell me what the point of all that was.  Was the point simply to do whitehouselawnwhatever came next?  Whereupon or thereabouts the old man put his hands over his ears—like the hear no evil monkey—and said, I can’t think about this shit.  If I had a shotgun right now I would shoot myself.

And let me tell you what, more than once I wished I had a shotgun to give him to see if he was as good as his word.

 When I read Waiting for Godot I decided that Beckett must have been in our house or lived in some stinking suburb in sunny SoCal.  Where nothing fucking ever happens.  Instead people plant lawns—can you believe it—and then the grass grows—well, what do you fucking expect—and when it gets TOO long—whatever the fuck that may be– and then you fucking actually CUT the lawn—in my case with a totally non-powered push lawn mower—so that it is the RIGHT LENGTH—and then the fucking shit GROWS RIGHT BACK.  And sweet god in heaven, you have to cut it again, and again, and again endlessly until you or the fucking lawn dies, whichever comes first.

Whoever thought of the so-called lawn was fucking insane or had a lot of servants to do his dirty work.  Because not only was I required to cut that little piece of fucking shit assed lawn, I had to pick up the DOG poop from it.  I hated to pick up that fucking dog poop.  Keeping a dog in a tiny little lawn area is another idea dreamed up by some fucking stupid person.  Where else then is the fucking dog going to poop but on the fucking insane lawn?  I ask.  And you have to pick it up because the DOG poop actually kills the grass.  And if you have a female dog, her piss will kill the grass.

And then in the winter, the lawn would die out, after all my work, mostly of its own accord, and I would let the poop just sit there till sometimes it became covered with green fungus.  There’s no sight quite like green fungus on dog poop on a dead lawn.  Our neighbors had a better idea.  They had a dog but they didn’t have a lawn out back—like us civilized people; they just had dirt and in the middle of that dirt they had driven a spike and attached to that spike was a chain about twenty feet long and attached to the other end of the chain was their dog.  A bull dog.

It would lie around in the dirt sleeping or licking its own ass.  And every once in a while it would walk to the end of its chain, point its asshole away from the spike and poop.  I would look over the fence and see in our neighbor’s backyard a perfect circle of dog poop.  It was quite amazing, that circle of dog poop.  That dog knew his geometry.

Casa De Ora

Our little bit of California was called Casa De Ora. That wasn’t the official postal name but that’s what we called it.  Back in the 20’s they had tried to put a tract out there.  You could still see the layout for streets, and as you drove towards where the tract was supposed to be, on both sides of the roads were brown turd like mounds of plaster of paris with the words Casa De              Ora spelled out on them in gold lettering.  I guess they were supposed to suggest a gateway into Casa De            Ora.

Just beyond the gates, stores had sprung up on both sides of the road.  The stores were set back from the road leaving a dirt area for a person to park his car in front of the store whatever it was: a couple of gas stations, a bar, a drugstore, a barber shop, another bar, an independent market, a car mechanics place, and later on the Hires root beer barrel.  The root beer barrel was made out of metal, shaped like a barrel,  painted to look like a barrel and about ten feet high.  The root beer barrel didn’t last as a root beer barrel for very long.  Next,  it was a chicken barrel, and then a fish and chips barrel, and finally, before it was torn down, it was for a long time a Mexican food barrel.

The houses on our street that headed up the side of the hill had all been independently built.  No tract homes, one looking like the other.  You figured that people who had come out our way to live—and we were the boonies back then—either didn’t have much money or were attempting to escape their past.  In some cases, I think both.  Half of the deep south seemed to have moved out our way, to where they could have a little “elbow room,” that being very important, and a little bit of land on which to recreate the southern lifestyle.

Peope kept big gardens, and sometimes livestock, pigs and an occasional cow.  Chickens too, but they were frowned upon because of the racket.  People stuck up “out buildings,” a tradition in the south. We had outbuildings and also collected cars down back as was also a southern tradition. At one point, we had three cars out back with anis weed growing all around them.

But one day, this man in a uniform came to our door. He said he was from health and sanitation and showed us his papers.  He said we had to get rid of the cars out back.  Something about this guy annoyed me, so I said, “Why.”  Because vermin might be growing there, he said.  Vermin? I said, are you talking about rats.  Because I have never seen a single rat down there.

The guy didn’t look at me but handed a warning citation to the old man. As the guy walked back up towards the road I said as loudly as I could without yelling, “Vermin! I haven’t seen any damn vermin down there!” But the old man and the old lady sort of slunk off; I think they were embarrassed.

I don’t know why I wasn’t.  I thought it was funny, and the guy had pissed me off by using the word vermin when he meant “rats.”  The dark shadow of civilization in the form of bureacratic double speak had just passed over the area.

Fuckers.

casa de ora

Titus Oates

Besides Miss Tuttle, the other teacher who seemed to feel I could write was Mr. Moore, my senior English teacher.  He never said he thought I could write, but he did nominate me for that national essay contest for high school seniors.   So maybe I can infer something from that.

He was a thin little man who wore sweaters and a bow tie, and like Miss Tuttle, who had gone to Columbia, Mr. Moore was east coast educated having been graduated from Princeton.  He was a titus oatesCaptain in the Army in WWII and came back changed.  This may explain his having ended up at a teacher at a nowhere high school in California.  Or it could have been his drinking problem that started after the war.

Still, he rode me about my writing and graded me harder than anyone because he knew I was going to college.  I remember getting a B+ on a long research paper.  I had worked hard on that baby.  It was supposed to be on some historical figure; so my colleagues, lacking any imagination, wrote about Washington or Florence Nightingale or Madame Curry.  I wrote about Titus Oates, 17th century perjurer and sodomite, a man who according to a poll of British Historians was the “worst Briton of the 17th century.”

Maybe Mr. Moore thought I was being a wise ass by picking Titus Oates, but the name alone was enough to fascinate me, and I had come upon my interest legitimately.  I had been perusing one of the volumes of our 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica and came across the final lines of an entry that read, something like, whereupon he lived out the rest of his years in the country where his house became known for unholy and unnatural acts.  I wanted to know more about this person and so first familiarized myself with Titus Oates and the gun power plot I believe it was called.

Titus started his career of crime by being dismissed from the Anglican clergy for blasphemous drunkenness and suspicion of sodomy. He established himself as a world class lier by concocting a whole series of lies suggesting that Catholics had intentions upon the throne and was first rewarded for his efforts with a 600 pound pension.  Later, when power shifted, he was tried, found guilty and sentenced to repeated floggings that should have killed him.  But they didn’t; whereupon part of his pension was restored, following a legal action, and he retired to the country to continue his unnatural doings.

So maybe I was being a bit of a wise ass.

Mr. Moore’s class also furnished me one of the few high school moments that I remember with any warmth.  One Monday morning he turned to us and said, “And just who the heck are these Beatles.”  This was in many ways an unprecedented moment.  I don’t recollect a teacher ever having asked his students a real question,  who asked it moreover in a spirit of curiosity and out of a desire to learn something about the lives of his students.  We sat more or less dumbfounded.  I could see he was going to let the question drop, but since it was my job in that class to answer all questions nobody else would or could, I raised my hand and said, “The best rock and roll band ever.”

Terror Breeds Terror

abomb

Maybe, really, it’s no big deal.  As that horrible song said, we are all just dust in the wind.  Or as that Dawkins—not Darryl, that was Chocolate Thunder—says we are just big watery bags that exist solely that genes may replicate themselves.  I don’t know, if I am gene, I would find some simpler way to recreate myself than by using great watery bags that, on top of everything else, have the curse of consciousness.  So maybe there is no purpose, or maybe there is one but we can’t see it.  I don’t know.  But some people seem a lot more purposeful than others.

 Rosco (short for a long Polish surname) was among the latter.  I don’t know how I got to know him exactly.  He was a year ahead of me in school, but he lived close by on the other side of the hill.  I guess he liked me because he would come over and just appear in our little front yard sitting on a wall right outside the front room window.  He never called ahead and when he arrived he didn’t knock either, but somebody was always passing by that window and they would see Rosco out there, and yell, Nick, Rosco is here.

 I would go out and there Rosco would be.  I didn’t know why he was there exactly and it didn’t help any that he gave the appearance of a stray balloon that had decided to settle in our front yard.  Rosco was taller than me and rounded all over.  He had a round head and a round bland face that didn’t show anything if there was anything to show beyond that bland face.  He wasn’t retarded or anything; he just gave off the impression that he didn’t know where or why he was.

I mean when he came over we never did anything.  Be damned, if I was going to ask him in the house, because then I would never get rid of him.  I would ask him how he was, and he would say he was fine or he had just eaten dinner.  And then I’d ask him what he had eaten for dinner, and it would be like, nothing special.  Trying to get him to talk was like pulling teeth, so then I would launch into talking for maybe 10 or 20 minutes straight and I would get the feeling I was going to pass out because it felt as if, talking to him, I were trying to inflate, or keep from deflating, some giant swimming pool apparatus.  After I had talked myself into torpor, I would say I had to study or something and he would go off just as he had come.

Once or twice maybe I went over to Rosco’s house.  He had a couple of younger brothers who were not rounded.  I went over only when Mr. Rosco was not there.  I got the feeling Mr. Rosco scared the Brothers Rosco shitless.  We would go down to their huge basement, and we would hear their mother playing piano music upstairs.  She was always playing the piano.

Downstairs in that basement, as Rosco said, they had everything necessary to re-create the world.  They had machines and tools of all kinds.  They had a big kiln for making pottery and expensive machine tools—I mean the kind of tools that are used to create the parts for other tools, like milling tools, I think they are called, and another machine that made screws.

And at the back of the basement was a really big door with a lock on it.  One day Rosco decided to open it for me; you could see doing that made the younger brothers nervous, like they weren’t supposed to or maybe what was inside made them nervous because, while there was space for people, it was filled with supplies, food and water and everything wrapped in a kind of paper (oil paper maybe) I had never seen, and at the very back of that a row of rifles all strung together with a chain and locked up.  We can’t touch the rifles, Rosco said, as if I were just dying to touch their rifles.

And as I was leaving they showed me around the side of the house a regular big old garbage truck that their father had bought and was remodeling and reinforcing with extra layers of metal so that after the bomb had gone off they would have something to ride around in.

I made up this little story to explain things to myself.  Mr. Rosco had been in the military in Poland and had killed people and seen people killed in World War 2 and knew how people could kill each other.  He had seen masses of bodies piled high.  Maybe he was a Nazi and he had come to America with his young bride, who bore him three sons, and then went insane and played the piano all the time.  And then he set about preparing himself and his sons for the day when everything, but them, would end.

Maybe the little story helped to explain Rosco to me or maybe what I had seen scared me and I needed a little story to explain that.  It got so I just dreaded hearing somebody yell, Nick, Rosco’s here.

Gopher!

Being that my father was a farmer, albeit a rank failure as one, maybe I inherited some man of the soil genes because starting in junior high and through high school and later when I was living in the green room, I was appointed keeper of the family garden.  We had a whole .5 acre down back, so the garden wasn’t exactly a modest affair.

gopher trapI would start preparing the soil in March when it would be all clumped and hard to work from the rains.  That dirt had a lot of clay in it, but I would turn it over and then make a trip to the chicken shit place and dump the chicken shit all over what I had turned.  In early April the soil dried and became workable.

I planted zucchini and corn seeds, and being a worried wart, I was all the time coming to see if they were coming up or not.  Cause if they didn’t come up when they were supposed to the timing might be off for the summer heat.  So one evening I am sitting there admiring my handy work, and  right before my eyes the finely worked earth around a young and healthy look zucchini bud starts to move and then the whole zucchini disappeared right before my eyes.

Fucking gophers!

I had tried about everything to tame them except poison, not because I was ecologically conscious but because I didn’t want to take the risk of poisoning my self some how.  I had tried the various folk methods.  I stuck hoses in their holes and ran water for hours but to no avail.  Once the area behind the garden sank down and once the water went into a neighbor’s yard.  Then I did the thing with car flares, and went around sticking them in the holes till it looked like the backyard was about to become a volcano.

 The only thing that really “worked” or seemed to produce concrete results was a gopher trap.  So seeing my zucchini disappear I went out and bought a new one.  It looked like a rat trap, though much bigger, and had teeth designed to clamp down and break the gopher’s neck.  I was careful with those damn things.   You’d put some cheese or something on it as bait and then jam the trap as far as you could in a hole, and then come out the next morning, pull the thing out by its chain and see if you’d had any luck.

I swear that particular summer I was like the Great White Hunter of Gophers.  Every morning I hooked something.  I would pry open the jaws and throw the corpse over into our neighbor’s back yard which was all covered with weeds.  I mean they wouldn’t notice it.  Then one day I pulled out the Moby Dick of gophers. This sucker was huge and it had reddish head hair and a reddish tuff beard just like me and the fucker wasn’t dead.

So I went and got a two pound hammer out of the back of the truck, and there I am about to perform the coup de grace when my little brother comes up and goes on, Is it still alive?  Are you going to kill it with that hammer?  Are you going to hit on the head? You know it looks like you? And I just sort of blew and said, would you get the fuck out of here, goddamn it to hell.  And—wham–as he walked off, looking hurt, I splattered the things head.

I apologized to my brother and said I don’t know why but I just got angry for some reason maybe because I felt hoisted on my own petard.

The New Math

  • I liked the sciences pretty much.  I liked biology quite a bit.  I saw a TV show about a guy who traveled all over checking out the health of the world’s bat population.  I thought that was a pretty sputnickgood job.  But my career in the sciences was screwed up by the Sputnik.  The Reds sent this up in 1957, an unmanned satellite that in pictures looked out as big as a basketball.  The Reds had got a jump on us.  We were behind in the technoscience race. And you’d have thought the sky was falling.

MSomebody got the bright idea that the reason the Reds had got the jump lay with the backwardness of America’s school children.  So the experts got together and decided to cook up a whole new science curriculum based, no doubt, on the most advanced principles.  This new curriculum arrived at my school, not in the form of books, but copied manuscripts tacked together with humongous staples.

The first time I got one of these books was in geometry.  We had a pretty good math teacher, but that whole year of geometry I never knew what was going on because the teacher didn’t know how to teach that stuff.  To scare us into trying, he told us our final grade for the course would be based on an exam the government was going to give us.  I got 28 right out of a 100 and was sure I had failed my first class.  But it turned out 28 right was pretty high and I got an A- for not understanding a damn thing the whole year.

Next year in chemistry was even worse.  We had another of those Xeroxed books and the teacher couldn’t make heads or tails of it.  All I remember about that class was staring at the periodic table above the teacher’s head.  At least in geometry I had learned about triangles and obtuse and acute angles and such, but chemistry I got nothing out of.  That’s too bad because now I understand, at least remotely, that the bridge between the animate and the inanimate, the living and deadness, consists of blind biochemical reactions and reductions.  I mean it could have been interesting.

 And my senior year trigonometry class—well, it didn’t have one of those new updated books.  We just had an idiot as a teacher.  We had maybe 15 people in that class; and again I struggled along trying my best to understand, but the teacher only seemed interested in telling us about what he had done the last weekend.

I guess even back then the world was getting smaller because something the Reds did fucked up my possible career in the sciences.  So when it came to college, I went with my strengths, with what I thought I could do well at, and became an English major, not having the slightest idea what that was, and did not become, like a number of people at my high school, an engineer, a sensible thing for a working class student to do.

12 Caesars

The old lady said that in polite company three things were never discussed: religion, politics, and sex.  I guess we had an extremely polite family because none of these things were ever discussed; sex especially was not discussed.  I assume the old lady knew her four sons came equipped with penises.  But I don’t remember the word penis ever used.

12 caesarsBack in SC lacking bathroom facilities, we had a bath once a week whether we needed it or not.  In the summers, I remember we were lined up and one after another would step naked into a big wash tub and the old lady would more or less hose us down.  I can’t remember if she washed our male members; I am sort of glad I can’t.

When I arrived at the age of growing sexual interest, I knew I believe accurately how babies were made but that was about it.  And at that time, magazines and books on sexual subjects were remarkably absent.  “Playboy” magazine started coming out in the 50s, but it was kept in a special place in the drugstore and was covered with a plain brown paper wrapping.  Additionally, practicing safe sex could be awkward for a shy boy since condoms were not displayed out in the open but were locked up somewhere in the back and one had to ask the druggist for them explicitly and openly.

Being literarily inclined, I did more or less by accident lay my hands on Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, even though both were banned at the time for obsenity.  The latter was hard going, sort of murky, and hard to find the good parts.  Also there was stuff about sticking flowers in pubic hairs and the male figure had a number of names for this penis.  The book seemed a bit artsy-fartsy.  Personally, I have never named my penis.  Cancer was considerably better, clearer, more vivid and direct and I even liked reading some of the parts around the good parts.

But mostly I got my sex Ed. I think from taking Roman.  I mean Latin, but I like to call it Roman because learning Latin led me to learning about Rome.  You can learn a lot by learning Roman.  I came across Grave’s I, Cladius in the high school library; I read that and found it remotely titillating.  Unfortunately, the old lady who refused to recognize we had any right to privacy happened to pick up the book, read a bit of it, and got it banned from the school library because largely of its mention of Spanish Fly.

 This pissed me off.  In my edition of Claudius, Graves mentioned some of the sources for his book, so I went down to the public library and checked out a copy of Suetonius’ “Lives of the 12 Caesars.”  It had Latin on one page and English on the other, so my mother thought I was studying Roman.  Extra credit, I said.

I get the feeling Suetonius’ was sort of an early gossip columnist and spared no smut or filthy details in his biographical treatments.  Nero, for example, was a pig of the first water.  He killed his mother I think.  He raped women regularly and married boys.  He liked to dress up at night in the skin of a bear, prowl alleys, and commit sadistic acts of sexual violence upon both sexes.  This might not seem very arousing, but then lines like “he fondled and kissed her breasts” could send me to fantasy land.  And I learned a hell of a lot about other stuff from Suetonius about politics, and just plain murder.

I think in the Bible somebody says nothing is new under the sun.  The Romans ruled by panem et circenses.   The same as today, I think.  We’ve got so much bread people are getting bloated, and as for circuses there’s no end of them.

Miss Tuttle and FDR

If a person thinks he can write that’s probably because somebody in the family does or somebody tells him he can.  In my case, it was the latter and the culprit was my 8th grade English teacher, Miss Tuttle.  She was young, dark haired, skinny and energetic, and she wore makeup in a way that you noticed  Also, I remember the girl’s giggling at how she dressed; that was because they said she went to France every year and bought stuff over there.

sentencediagramShe read something that I wrote and told me I had talent as a writer and that I wrote like Winston Churchill.  Given my mother’s England background, I knew who he was, though I didn’t know he had written any books.  Miss Tuttle’s way of encouraging my talent was to make me come in at lunch and diagram sentences on the blackboard to get my grammar down.  It did help, I guess, though I really learned grammar by taking Roman.  Years later I learned that Miss Tuttle was a graduate of Columbia Teacher’s College and had for much of her adult life an ongoing correspondence with Bertrand Russell.

 Who knows? Maybe Miss Tuttle was a “leftist” because she was the only teacher I ever had—aside from a couple of lectures as an undergraduate—who lectured to us and had us read stuff about the labor movement.  She told us about the Haymarket Massacre and how our government had held a show trial and put to death perfectly innocent anarchists.  Really pretty heady stuff for me; maybe brick layers had a sort of history too and perfectly appropriate stuff too to teach the kids of working class people, which we were really.

But I think we all thought we were middle class, or middle class in the making, like those people on TV.  So issues of class that have become more important to me as I have aged were pretty much written out of existence, just like Orwell says in 1984.  The people in charge write the histories and the histories that suit the middle class and their employers, the elite capitalist class, are middle class histories, human interest histories, when most of human history has been of inhuman interest only, about goddamn forces that squash people like bugs.

I was reading a labor history and I find it amazing that as recently as 60 years ago or so an actual president could run for office and say stuff like:

For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor-other people’s lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.

That was FDR talking in the 1930’s; and in light of today’s politics of delusion and denial, you have to wonder how anybody running for President today could fucking talk like that and still win.