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confess, uh, fusions of an ex-litmus-test
Daniel A. Foss (U17043@UICVM.BITNET)
Sun, 20 Nov 1994 08:29:20 CST
great virtue intrinsic to massive guilt is, I discovered no later than age
eight (still believing in God, how dare I not given the vast sums being expend-
ed by what had no inkling or speculativee supposition as to the ultimate rise
to power over kiddies of disengendered coparentage in quality time, a subdivi-
sion of Quality Court Motels, upon my religiomoral indoctrination), that it's
vastly more interesting, intricate, and Gordian-knotful, as described by Dr
Gordon, a famous Shrink of the period.
The foregoing sentence has been brought to you by a special grant from the
Mobil Corporation, by way of satisfaction to Sharon Reilly, in Connecticut, who
signs his name "Joe": "interesting stuff, but use shorter sentences." [Note: a
line commencing Joe's communication of Fri, 18 Nov 1994 11:25:47 -0500 (EST).
Herewith I commend to Joe my favorite sentence in C. Geertz, The Interpretation
of Cultures, 1973, sprawling as it does across two pages, implanted within it
being many sets of perfectly balanced parentheses, redolent of LISP. Do the
Jews exemplify Geertzian *primordial loyalties* - outside of Israel, which
doesn't count - or the merely tepid "imagined communities" wherein Benedict
Anderson feels more comfy? The "primordial" is not a Thingie the Old Neighbor-
hood delivered adequate preparation for. Consider Sin. Cognoscenti of the
supernatural all too easily make the serious mistake of taking Imaginary Beings
entirely too seriously, as the imaginary beings give plentiful signs and por-
tents of having fully intended such an outcome. Yet, as I have said many times
before, with greater certainty on each occasion, "Sin is what a god uses for a
crutch." Herewith, I merely indicate ("Don't point, it's impolite to point, how
may timez'Igotta tellya nottopoint?") that our full-throated-triumphant ayatol-
lahs, Protestant (Robertson) and Catholic (Buchanan) alike, have made mincemeat
of godless wibberalism with hardly any mention of imaginary beings anywhere;
"All you need is sin/All you need is sin/All you need is sin, sin/Sin is all
need." Sin is more conducive to the Primordial than are any whiteclad fluffy-
things-with-gossamer-wings. For four long years I sustained my Faith, reflect-
ive of superstitious fears of having ****wasted**** my dread of Sin for Nothing
where, in the Old Neighborhood, Waste was worst; waste not, I'm not saying want
not, but being careful helps; you never know when Wartime Rationing will break
out, it always did, always will. The perforations separating the squares are
not there for nothing.
"I gave you two rolls. What did you do with them?"
(God, such as there was of the deity, I should mention had a green eyeshade;
he, as he was most certainly a he back then, kept the books on you, and in the
End, threw the Book at you. As has always been the riddle of civilization *and*
the daily praxis of the Old Neighborhood's leading export, the Certified Public
Accountant. But who could avert the Day of Wrath? Believe ye not in the false
and lying propaganda misrepresented in the equestrian statue of Robert Moses
leading the Children of Israel across the East River. And it came to pass that
the Administration spake unto Robert Moses saying, *command the Children of
Israel that they be parted like some kinda Red Sea, that Old Neighborhood being
fulla Commies as we know it is; yea verily let them make way for the Cross
[sic] Bronx Expressway, our Chastisement for the Rosenbergs, for the unsigned
unconstitutional loyalty oaths. Let the Northern Half of the Congregation be
parted from and set against the Southern Half; let the neighborly social
networking - be it noted, not yet invented - be rent in pieces, for a stiff-
necked people ye are, taking the subway, Sinning against us full Knowingly,
for it is written, "Drive ye or be ye driven." Gone were the oral traditions
related by the Terrorist whose pew was directly in front of my father's, about
blowing up one Tsarist official after another, each one's successor interested
only in getting paid off and his just reward, the Promotion; in thus wise he'd
crossed Siberia end to end on foot three times. For another less oral adventure
story with a Jewish hero, there's Trotsky's 1905: L.D. Trotsky lived at the
other end of the Old Neighborhood, 162nd St within a brick's throw of the
Stadium; and everything he knew about the USA he read in the NY Public Library,
which was Traditional since Marx. Jane L., part Bronstein, told stories, mainly
lies, about the year 1917: "Lev, Lev, don't go back; you'll only *make
trouble*.")
At age 12 I Beheld A Blinding Flash Of Light while ascending the Up Stair-
case in Kheder. (Yeshivah, they grandiosely called it.) Today, I would tell
my young friends among the corporate cyberhippies that I'd had "a direct
Experience of the nonexistence of God." Facilitated, to be sure, by the
hassle of ascending the Up staircase. Whilst and whereas, all those organisms
who'd attained the veritable verge of adolescent hormonal Drives whereby they
were supposed, it was said in Sex Education Class, to have been Driven, they'd
have been climbing up the Down staircase if they took the stairs at all. Many
cheated the almightygod just to uphold *honour*. Jews too, in principle, could
aspire to be roughneck Warriors, like Normal people. As the Zionists were tell-
ing everybody. If you hadn't killed, you weren't real.
Two matters tempted me to Tribal Treason. One, my father was For The Yankees
which, where the Stadium was plainly visible from the living room window,
hardly seemed worth noticing, were it not for the Implications. In 1950 there
was a near riot in school. The only thing that prevented rioting and massive
destruction was that there was nobody on the other side. For once I'd kept my
mouth shut. Jews, Italians, Irish were for the Dodgers. The latter two were not
numerous in the Yeshiva. African-Americans [Negroes===>Blacks===>nomenclatural
confusion===>African-Americans; all Ethnic Groups - I've explicated how "ethnic
group" is a redundancy - possess unlimited right to rename themselves in strict
accordance with situational-contextual advantage, utility-maximization, and the
eddies of fashion excepting Crazy Eddie.] Only aliens from Westchester, anti-
semites and No Popery fanatics lurking in traning camps for Rockefeller's pri-
vate Army, which my mother told me about, would go to the Stadium as was
necessitated by paramilitary training imposed upon them for their attainment of
battle-readiness in extermination of the Jews. Look what they already did to
the Rosenbergs. Not that my mother cared at all what happened to nonespionage-
prone Jewish Communists, whereof there were 80,000, perhaps even 100,000, in
New York City alone. Some, nay, most, of my best friends were brought up in
good Communist homes - it was a Jewish denomination - but never attended Servi-
ces, or so they said later. [For all the factoids you could ask for, see Lewis
Coser and Irving Howe, A History of the Communist Party, USA: "The reason the
Party was so middle class was that it was so Jewish."] The Communist kid, in
college, stuck out from the common herd of pettybourgeois Jewish conformists.
The Communist kid burned with an inner fire showing in glowing hot-coal eyes;
this kid, especially if a woman, Knew Something Big with utter certainty, if
it was, usually, so repellent to the Party few dared defend Private Truths. The
Broad Masses, anyway, were with the Social Democrats and the Trots. Who did
nothing, but killed nobody, either. Jane, Second Wife, was a Commie. Eric, her
brother, lived upstairs, was Commie born himself. Judy, The Other Woman, was
Commie by heritage. Wife & brotherinlaw were led by iron logic to heroin, given
they were "coming from" Communism. In the Thirties, they had Parties and
Unions. (I said this in both of my books, but this didn't make commonsense
popular.) In the Sixties they had Drugs and what the charlatan Roszak, look
what I mighta been had I been so shameless, called Counterculture. To map
Drugs onto bureaucratically Red organized entities of Broadish Masses, one
came up readily with the conviction that users of grass and acid were Mere
Social Democrats; militiant-hard-core-bolshevik-vanguardism disdained petty
bourgeois respectability, descended to the lower depths of the most-exploited,
and shot up the Opiate Of The People.
Blessed art thou o lord our god who in thy supernal nonexistence made me
phobic of needles.
Mixed marriages never work; the unmixed kind never work either; and for all
practical purposes I'm too stupid to work, excepting only for the maniacal urge
to prove the vast horde of conspiratorial Them that Them was, is, and always
will be, wrong wrong wrong. Especially about me. Howbeit there is so little
about me that is, uh, True, and that part is tedious.
Back in hippie times, my apartment-sharer, The Grim Reaper, who was Jewish,
looked far more Jewish than I, pronounced my obsession with Truth, excused as
forced upon me by dint of lacking social skills to get away with lies,
*STUPID*, inexcusable: "The truth...is true. That's about all you can say about
it." He had lots of fun; I never got caught in a lie.
The second bit of Tribal Treason I committed, about teenagish, but not the
kinda teenagish you're familiar with todayish; this was hanging out at the
Republican campaign headquarters. Nobody had ever seen a Republican; they were
Known, however, to Own Things, which made them Powerful such as to bely their
numbers. Politics was explicated to me at age 12 by my father: "The repoobli-
cans is f'r da rich; the democrats iz f'r da woikingman." My mother was more
succinct: "*JEWS* are *DEMOCRATS*." With all that unanimity, who needed me. All
my life I wanted to annoy somebody, get away with it, let somebody annoy me. So
aplogies to the noble zimmerman:
But I went starkraving stircrazed lonely,
I needed somewhere to go,
Cause I'd never consider escaping to,
Desolation row.
There was this *lumpen*, name of Sid, the I Like Ikeries had open up an I
Like Iking office on Jerome Ave, a brokenglass throw from High School. I hung
out and annoyed the Republicans, just onnacounta they didn't throw me out as
fast as Normal people. Finally, they too threw me out. A sleazy den of scummy
degenerates, even, can put up with so much, only.
Who knew?
Who coulda thought, there would come a day, Tuesday Nov 8, 1994, when the
first shoulda been made last; and the low in spirit be exalted. The simple
explanation, "the *goyim*," won't wash, The People were in there Gingriching
with the worst of them. Irving Kristol's even-worse-than-his-father son, Bill
Kristol, was playing Spokesman all over the place, especially the Times. (You
recall the difference between a Spokesman and a Spokesperson? Nah, you're fool-
ing, I gotcher number. In seven years of teaching at Rutgers, two-thirds of my
time hadda be spent on catching cheaters, I made such a vivid impression of
Mental Retardation upon the undergraduate community.
Before that, there were the Neocons. Invented by Norman Podhoretz. Who today
remembers Norman Podhoretz. Certainly not me. Along with his path-losing
article in the pages of Commentary, a fascist pornographic comic book without
pictures, where is expounded the difference between Authoritarian governments,
who are for us, hence we must pay for them which ensures that one day over the
rainbow they will become Good, and Totalitarian governments, which are irrati-
onally not so, such that they will never change should they last longer than
Stonehenge (all gone now, the lady, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, was WRongeR than crime)
and they will grip the minds of their enslaved-minded subject masses for all
eternity plus a few weeks' grace period thereafter.
The country ran out of Jews; the perspicatious Kissinger, at Nixon's behest,
else the visionary Nixon, at Kissinger's urging, Got China Back, and the rest
of the demographic Thingie is history. Which for me is fun, History, I mean.
Daniel A. Foss
<This was the tormented result of thinking all night about Mike Lieber. Why I
shoulda done that, who knows. Not a thing above addresses, let alone zipcodes,
what was said in the post wherewith he responded to my post. Parts, at least
one word, are still under deconstruction by an expert select crew of members
of the Deconstruction Union, where it is simply not true that Sicilian nativity
helps you get in. In the following part, we examine what might have been meant
by the usage "*smart*" employed by Lieber; and there will be full discussion of
the controversy between Arians and Catholics, from the fourth century onwards,
and which revolved, spinning out of control, that is, around the difference, so
all-important, between "same" and "similar." But the present controversy has
nothing in common with that.>
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