That’s not MY religion

The classes. The real ones, inherited, Aristocracies and all their dimensions, to the serfs. A belief that when I look into the eyes of another creature, I am looking at something either superior or inferior to me and  that the superior deserves more stuff. Deserves as in merits, evidence of merit? Cough. More security, health, good food and comfort in housing and transportation. Whatever our beliefs, or fantasies, this is how they manifest.

     I am not here to judge just identify. I have a judgement but it is useless. I can just go somewhere else. New York City, for instance, provides much for me that is free so I can stay away from the wealthy. The problem for the wealthy is they cannot avoid the poor. Hmmm.

     Somewhere we developed a value, I was thinking this on the lovely bus ride home yesterday, the bus ride that de stresses my journey into the city and out of, a value that has almost no value. Status, I use the term loosely because I never use it, doesn’t occur. I don’t know what it means beyond a sort of school yard sense of success. How do I seem to others.

      I have found that middle to upper class college educated persons have very little to do with, distrust of and when pushed, or slightly threatened,  marginalize working class people, other people, and seem to be preoccupied with a whole range of stuff I am not: i mean service industry, makers of things with hands type people, picking up garbage, car washing, bus boy type people. Not everyone disdains them , not outside in the streets but it is always there: non bright, like me, unfortunate or lazy. It is a predisposition. And it is natural, this disposition, is natural to our culture. We measure our sense of self, or are commanded to culturally, on where the culture and the magazines place us on the ladder.

     We, you, feel a great need to feel this way. About others. We have entire religions centered on this belief.

     Some of us are primed, when the question is asked, what do you think or how do you feel  about this or that. To answer. The crucial thing to ask is: do we really say what we think, or more usefully, feel, or do we just feel more comfortable saying something. Something we have been educated to know will be approved of.

   

    I say this because it is the bias that dare not breathe it’s name. The hatred the blue collar or church going lot may have  for the affluent if student loan burdened gets not much but solid play.

     Not much because it doesn’t happen much. I think there is a sense of otherness: Glenn Beck sees the Islamic peoples as frustrated because they don’t have what we have. Isn’t this what we do? Does the NASCAR fan allow that some people like going to the symphony? I knew a few who were opera fans. I did an adaptation of the Bacchae in a blue collar Red town in Georgia twenty years ago. My neighbors were kind but said seriously they didn’t understand it. But the Priest did. He just lit up at it. I think Beck is wrong, I think NASCAR fans are enjoying themselves so much they don’t care who frowns upon them. That some of them  also take in La Boheme sounds pretty rounded to me, but not a mark of anything. T’was in another lifetime there I learned about George Jones.

     There is a definite mistrust that builds up into hatreds around some issues. Which is a great shame and is the actual threat to Democracy we speak of so much these days.

    The Right wing bloggers and Fox lot maintain a steady snear. My experience, anecdotal, a derision only an intellectual could coin, and I have been inside the MAGA world uncompromised. Long conversations were had usually foundering on the rock that is Jesus, about whom we differed. But no-one was hated. Despite my being off the chart, unless that is the reason?

    It’s the great schism, unavoidable, I guess, the seems to exist everywhere, but that doesn’t make it good, and has led to a fascism that always waits for peoples with naturally authoritarian beliefs.   

     An educated person, it is thought,  doesn’t just rise above modest roots but rises above themselves, becomes a better person than they were. They think, they are told. I remember I was told. This is a staple belief where I live. That the uneducated person is then a child who hasn’t graduated. Who isn’t fully realized. I disagree,  it is a tenet. To improve by effort. This is what our cultures believe, there must be some truth in it, but not absolute.

    A terrific writer on Substack said this about the Iran US Israel almost war that the Western side were behaving like children, that they are children. In their highly trained, indoctrinated state they are children. And it feels that way to me. Something is missing and the conclusion I must draw from the leadership of the Western world is that they are highly educated to this immaturity.

   When I was a child being told, I had a very distinct and overwhelming response. As I remember it I had a life hallucinatory, long into adulthood. I am pretty sure this is a child reality, the world is visceral and we are brought “up” into a rational and cerebral relationship to it.

    I grasped eventually that the conventional map was possible, and there were rewards offered for the effort, but something else reassured me that the real joys of existence are not there. It feels sort of Wordsworth. Sermon on the Mounty. The Prelude, the great long orgiastic rushes about the woods and mankind. And he, and so I, would run headlong, starry eyed and laughing, into the arguments of machinery, logic, jealousy, inadequacy and war. And religion. So desperate.

     Religion is a playing field for me because God seems like a short cut for the spiritual. After all one is easier than many. It decomplicates our understanding of the variety of self. The life of the slave is much simpler than the free. And seeing the huge energies and study that surrounds religion and its familiars like psychology, I think that all I have done is reject the one. In favor of the many, which makes maybe, belief, a lighter notion. A sensation, impulse or intuition not available in books. Or books of rules and examples. Maybe like when you read a book then see the film. I don’t think the movie is “wrong” as much as evidence that we read the books individually. I am glad that most people agree Cary Grant was a wonderful performer in movies. But I’ll not do my religion so.

    In this self improvement world the language changes. Maybe we learn to talk like the books we read.  I am over it now but for a chunk of time, if I was doing a Shakespeare play, I started to think and write the way he spoke. Now it is just a pleasure to see that influence at work and break it. Break it and let yourself free. Every time a podcaster says “you’re absolutely right” an Athlete says “each and every day” or an intellectual says “undoubtedly” I wince a wee bit. Break it.

      As a twelve year old, practicing adult talk, I waited for this new way of speaking to hit me with it’s lightning, to stun with it’s brilliance. Melville was bolder than Dickens, I love Dickens for lots of reasons in lots of ways but there is a condescension in him that isn’t in Moby Dick. And the Hitchens brothers are exceptions, not the rule. I can understand them because they want to be understood and are elegant with it. Christopher fades and gets more nasty and intolerant in his genius. Peter is Tory so has always been intolerant. But they both speak complicated language brilliantly, uncomplicatedly.

      This is not to say the people with a high school vocabulary can’t come up with a can of turds but they are no worse. Just fewer words with fewer syllables are used.

      I listened today to a wonderful academic talk about Gouverneur Morris, a forgotten Founder, who I never knew but now I do, I expect he was closest to my heart, of that turgid lot, with Tom Payne, though they hated each other. Or Morris hated him because he, Tom, was against organized religion, which Morris thought vital: faith and morality! Not seeing, as many did, especially Catholics, nothing wrong with the faith and morality of the non Christians, African or native, the new ethnic cleansing slave holders had to deal with.

    As I say, the claim that one becomes a deeper more full human being because  of an education makes so much sense if we take out the ton of characteristics humans are known for, particularly narcissism and low esteem,  and,  the evidence. That educated people are mare likely to be rich snd famous does not mean they will be deeper or more interesting. Morris was a libertine, my academic blushed, wrote a book of erotica in Paris. Which is probably why there has been no movie, and noone regards him much today. I bet this “weakness” is a conditioner of his thinking and a source of his genius.

Or even, the best of things, that the young person accepted to one of the colleges might be talented enough to do anything. Anywhere. And more useful therefore. Not wasted in “finance” or even only medicine.

    I think a person can grow during the college years, and forever, by being. It is consensus that growing up we are most curious, which makes me thing we are learners rather than taught. The cultural roots of education are that we need guiding to the right curiosities. Disciplining to the texts du jour. So the “success” of education is a thing of convention. It is anti curious, anti imaginative. And this may be necessary, I’d not say so, but of the sake of argument let’s say this disciplining and narrowing is a good thing. Then look at the cul de sac we are in now. And the impotence of trying to solve  these crises using the orthodoxies that brung us.

   There is a lot of condescension about our history to tell us the story of progress, Believing this leaves at the mercy of a mighty mess and no, we are no better than the Middle Ages, despite confidences that sell best sellers. Behold Ted Cruz. The one God is the least complicated. And he puts us all in Kindergarten ,again and again.

    Going to Kennedy and Lincoln Centers in the last decade, this tribe looks alive and smiling. Well? I cannot say given my unprofessional observations and diagnosis.  But ultimately they dont need me, and seem very, something, as things are and there is no sign they’ll be challenged within or without so Tally ho!

    But if things continue to get worse, and the causes less and less acknowledged, Hamases lurk around every corner, soon. And this schism is cause numero uno.

     My take goes like this, simply: child is born, brought up by village. Mum and Dad are not the Hollywood version, children are celebrated by whole communities, I have seen this: Islam. The child is not indoctrinated, not Islam, but are allowed to find their gods (plural) in fact it will be understood this is the singular reason for childhood. Elders who were once these same children will not be “busy” they will see the signs and intervene if the balance goes awry. Jobs will be what they have been since I was born payment based on value and not on myth or mind control, so yes, the emt will be paid the same as the shrink and the bus driver.