Season in hate: A memoir of adolescence

Season of Hate: A Memoir of Adolescence

COPYRIGHT © William Heidbreder, 2020
WORK IN PROGRESS; QUOTE WITH PERMISSION ONLY

I have written (true) stories of people and things I love or hated. But there is one story that is “essential” to me. I must commit it to paper. This may not be the most eloquent thing I have written, but it is perhaps the most fundamental and necessary, yet. I started this piece as a rant but if there’s aught that’s funny in it, there’s one less anxiety.

Was my hatred of this man murderous, or just unpleasant? You can ask yourself what an experience means when it is not happening now. Immediacy is hell, distance divine. There’s a salvation in not being where you are, and being where you are not.

In later years, having become a film buff in college, I was turned on by the films of Quentin Tarantino to think: It could actually be fun to think of the most degrading and seemingly threatening, totally outrageous, absolutely extreme, which is to say threatening in fact maybe if it were live and not imaginary, actions. One can really feel sometimes like cultivating the most extreme sentiments and their acts correspondent. An inflammatory remark, you say? Literalize that metaphor, and watch as they burn baby burn. I know that isn’t funny; we don’t tell Holocaust jokes, that would really be out of taste, especially since serious minded people are constantly telling them as sob stories so that they can collect donations from the spectators.
Inflammatory fantasies; I trust you know what I mean, or can imagine. Only readers and theater goers would survive, real people don’t stand a chance, which is part of the idea of course.

Recipe for a piece of writing about my storied traumatic past: Start with a large helping of rage. Cook it for a while, and turn it into a thought. Make it cute, make it funny, make it interesting, give it color and space. Rage must be served well-cooked. The reader will get magically transmitted what the writer can no longer bear. You’re the proxy, the sacrificial victim. Sacrifices purifies the celebrants.

People write stories of romance because they need someone to love and it keeps their heart from melting into dust, while others write stories of crime and violence, with or without the punishment that is supposed to return it to propriety, and actually the truth is that’s for English protestant Christians and other pseudo-moralists, for you don’t need that, and certainly I can do without it. So let’s just say that in a few minutes I will be sharing with you what could easily be mistaken for a desire to do something that in real life would be embarrassingly awful and, let’s admit it, painful in extremis probably in both its direct consequences and its indirect ones, because you might very well be carted off to some prison, and in an odd moment you might even be half persuaded they were right to, now that you can do nothing but bang your head against the wall and wish that would end it all. Well, on stage if you prick someone or they tear their eyes out, it stands and is tolerated because it’s only imaginary. It feels so real, but you can’t touch it, and that’s the grace that saves you. Now let’s just say for now that to prick someone is a kind of an understatement as far as the desire is concerned. Dante built a hell with nine floors. I can at least furnish one of them, and I imagine the building is pretty big and the floor extensive enough. so grab your teddy bear or whatever else you need to feel like you are in a lady therapist’s safe zone where she will cry bloody murder if someone farts or starts. You get the idea.

The world consists of two kinds of people: adults, who can stand the most untoward statements, because as papa Aristotle they want to understand things or make sense of them; and children, who only want to be comfortable and comforted, and are always going to cry out for mommy and daddy, who are policemen manqués, and will do you in for good if you upset the tray with special dishes, embarrass mom in front of whoever she needs to impress, or say S- or D- or F- or, and you get the idea. In the first group, are many people who will be destined to find something of themselves and their world in literature and art. Imagine. In the other group, lost souls who can only cling to their teddy bears while the world flushes down the toilet and they cannot even discern the stink, notwithstanding their own signal contributions thereto.

—-

I remember that I was 12 years old when this started. So it was about a year in duration, which seems poetically right.

As a child, I had few friends. School was mostly a tolerably boring ordeal. Doubtless I was more affected by what I will call “the parents” than I would have been if I had other social recourses. This was long before Facebook.

My affective recourse was music: rock and roll, played loud, from the local radio station, and my small but cherished record collection, which I earned by delivering papers in zero degree weather, one of the several signs of a personal autonomy that the man I will shortly introduce would threaten to take from me. Now he’s been dead more than 25 years and can take from me nothing but the missed chance to see him grovel in begging my forgiveness, as I wonder what a man like that would be without his language that was so well used as paper wrapping for an empty soul, in need of words to believe that he believed in. Music is the opposite of this, because the lyrics typically matter less than the sounds, which is why I don’t like rap music. With the music, I was like the five year old girl in the Velvet Underground song whose life was saved by rock and roll, because apart from that nothing that I could appreciate in any positive way was happening at all. Imagine from like four when I entered preschool, already talking too much and I think prone to fights, to 8 long years later, and nothing happened, in almost 3,000 days, there was nothing happening at all. Now the essential qualities of rock and roll are that it has a regular beat and is played loud. Add the fact that it is definitely not your parents’ Mozart, and you have an alphabet of rebellion. Give an angry brat an alphabet, and something to write with and on, and get the fuck out of his or her way, because if you learn me your language, I can use it to curse you.

I liked music that was fairly melodic, without troubling too much about the lyrics, and so sugary pop like Elton John, then, in 1973, all the rage, was nice enough (notwithstanding his satirical cynicism), and there was also Bowie and other stuff. I liked the album cover with his lower body that of a dog.

I had been given a space in the basement, in an area that shared a walk-through with my mother’s doing the laundry, which I of course resented, doubtless sharing one of her negative passions. When the baby sister was born, protected little girl number 2, I was given the basement in lieu of the baby blue painted bedroom, which was suitable enough for me, since it meant being in another part of the house. Besides the laundry room, they would come to the basement planet on certain nights to watch the TV. In those days, this was a family ritual where the box with the pictures and noise coming out of it was the campfire around which a bard might chant a poem in antique days. My stepdad bore the name of one of the more famous among those poets, though he lacked the sense and grace of one with rhyme or wit in his pedantic reason.

My mother could be nice and she could be a real nasty bitch. In the more innocent reaches of my childhood, she would sometimes speak to me of some her psychotic fantasies. They typically involved some intimate relationship that she would establish with me after extorting my consent (and of course her religion was part of this, great refuge that it is for psychotics), and some wish of hers to prove to God above that she was protecting her baby boy from harm so that she could feel useful and good and holy and happy. And then you go to heaven and basta, it’s over; fuck! If this doesn’t enchant a bored boy in fascination with his wonderful mommy, I don’t know what would. She clearly didn’t get enough of whatever kind of fucking fuckery she needed and so would this Gertrude pour distillations into my ear. A woman who never rebelled, who married a protecting table-talking daddy boss, with whom she was never in love, and found herself living no longer in the suburban Los Angeles of her youth but the squalor of Rural Route One somewhere in Michigan between the snows and mosquitos, poor soul. I didn’t have a fucking Oedipus complex about the mommy and daddy machine; rather, she and her rent-a-beau had one about me. I’m sure. The summer I turned ten I came back from spending it with my Dad, who was now getting a reputation from mom as a swinging bachelor whose friends smoked a pipe and read Playboy. So she decided to tell me there was something wrong with me; she didn’t say why. When Americans don’t like you, it’s a fair bet, if they are fuckers enough, that what they will say is that something is wrong with you. I wish; give me a style of being off and send me off; I’ll mail you a postcard from Off-land when I’m safely there.

Now she would whine and complain, take it out on me, and then shove onto me the blame. My stepdad would come home and she would immediately call out his name in her plaintive twang. He dutifully played his role, launching in for some terrifically fun verbal abuse. I later found this was like a preparation for the real treatment, but I save that for now, to tell all in due course. He was good at trying to threaten with his tongue-lashings, or humiliate with harassments. It would typically continue through the dinner hour which always included some threats, usually spoken by her, that he would do the thwack on the head that in his provincial Quebec background was called, I was duly informed, the “pije-nook.” I may be spelling it wrong; it was a thwack on the side of the head with a forefinger from a position held back like a pistol trigger with his thumb.

If she was responsible for this, and this woman, who in relation to me never took much responsibility for anything, though she could be pretty nice when she wasn’t anxious or offended, - she managed to get him to do much of her growling and snarling and barking with bared teeth for her. He for his part frequently would inform me that he was protecting his wife against me.

Though at other times she would treat me to one of her intimate talks. She liked attention, and had the gift of the gab. I had the feeling she was treating me like her therapist. All kinds of confessions that ended always by letting me know how guilty she felt about so many things that were to do with me, and how guilty she was about feeling guilty. I gathered she expected me to do something about this. Maybe to feel guilty. I learned through this experience that some people will engage in confessional discourses not to unburden themselves or you but quite the opposite. We did a lot of this the previous couple of years. Maybe she wanted my absolution.

Now my offense in general was to come home from school and often want someone to talk to. If you a lonely person and stuck living in some place with nasty people, with little opportunity to escape and be with people who like you and are nicer or somehow interesting, then what you are going to do most likely is get in nasty rows with the people you are, at least geographically in your suburban family prison house, close to, even though you don’t much like them. Around this time, my mom and I once both exchanged avowals that if the other person were to die, we would be only mildly sorry that it had to come to that. Apparently she thought I was sarcastic to her, because I had a way with her of being a bit ironical and we had been like that since I could remember, and she always resented it and would punish me. I still remember when I was four or five years old her slapping me hard and saying “Don’t you ever get angry at your mother!” She was often like this: not a person, though when she was that she could sometimes be nice, but an institution. And one defined by rules that I had better not violate since I doubtless already had and had done so the moment I made my entrance. Years later, long after I mercifully left, I learned that she had had a miscarriage a short while before she moved us with her hubby to Michigan, abandoning Lakewood, California, a suburban development near Long Beach, itself a suburban development near that suburban development that is Los Angeles, for Rural Route One, about a hundred miles from Detroit, where there were white working class kids who would beat me up on the way home from school, since I had to walk home from the bus stop. She blamed the miscarriage on her parents, in what may be a credible story in which her father said something to her that she didn’t want to hear, and she felt humiliated, because what she called “criticism” was something to her was only abuse.

She apparently did not like my wanting to talk with her when she was always, when I came home at half past three, in the kitchen, doing the wife-and-mother-household-chores thing, which I can honor her for showing her hatred for in a suitably passive-aggressive way. She did not like housework and to her credit did not think she ought to have to do it. The proto-feminism of this revolt, in a person who like my father, I recently learned, never rebelled as a young person against anything, the fact I find most damning about them, this did not restrain her from whining to hubby. He would enter the door and she would immediately tell him what I had done. I don’t think she had to do much besides give my name. My stepdad would start in with his verbal abuse, which would often continue at the dinner table. I was the obscene but not heard kind of brat. I was the kind of teenager who may someday have been destined to grow up or at least mature in some sense, but these couple of jerks would not have facilitated or gotten much credit from anyone for that.

To this day, so many years later, I feel a revulsion when I learn of people, which I think must often be true of Black kids, who have this, for me, perverse and utterly right-wing and repressive respect for authority, having learned somehow that their parents were right. You know the basic line: “This is the rule, I enforce the rules, you will obey me, or else, I will hurt you.” And all the person has to do in a university or other liberal context is make a credible claim to belong to an oppressed minority and then they are protecting their vanity understood as a respect for their persons which they are due and can enforce, and which in turn is really just respect for whatever law-and-violence scene they know they are supposed to believe in, for workers always have autonomy and liberty and respect when doing their job by bashing around people underneath them, since the bosses will tend to give them that. To be sure, they don’t need to claim that you are a sexist or racist; it would be enough to claim that you did not obey them when they gave an order. But that sounds too right-wing and universities are left-wing or liberal or progressive or something, though the reason for these claims still escapes me. I have been treated with crueler and more hate-tinged violence by American Black or Hispanic, especially Black, women or men, and always I was given to understand even by the seemingly calmest and most reasonable authorities above them working in offices proper and working off their degrees and certificates or licenses of professionalism, - always I am given to understand that if I complain about being given a beating, I'm the bad guy to begin with and now I am a sexist or racist. Though Black people only seem to get such entitlements when they are enforcers working for the Man and securing his property rights and their ideological paraphernalia. Since our society is fairly organized and bureaucratic, many things that happen depend not on persons and their wills, good or bad, but positions and what the position entails. Bosses then act like bosses and underlings who are cowardly or rebellious like what their positions makes them out to be and do. A young Black man or woman of any education in the position I was in would get, truth be told, about the same amount of punitive disdain or hatred; the difference would at most be the story that they would tell about it. A boss by any name is a boss, whatever be the color and hue, just as a worker or other powerless and exploited person is that, and is so whether or not his daddy is chairman of a big company, whether or not he is a student at an elite university, whether or not he is as white as most whites or whiter still.

My mother, stepfather, and father were right with me about almost nothing. Imagine for a moment that this is possible, and not just an obvious smear on my own possible reputation as a respectable citizen. Citizen of what? If these people were a republic, I would like to overthrow it in the most spectacularly aesthetically violent way imaginable. I don’t have any wish to harm anyone, but as I am a writer, I would like to leave no reader as innocent as those losers unscathed. I would like to burn their conscience in hot bubbling oil in a sacrificial rite imaginatively elevated to the level of either a tragedy or the happy comedy that is only such because it includes, comments on, and veritably surpasses that tragedy in a pronounced horror. I would summon in my magic incantation demons worthy of Sade himself, and more. The little Mr. Stepdad, who moonlighted as a teacher training schoolteachers who had been an ordained Baptist preacher and would preach the preach like the silliest petty hypocrite, while she would eat it up, though many years later she admitted to me that she didn’t love him. But she did want him to protect her. And it was so charming to learn that Mother superior and her little chickens that the hen when she wasn’t pecking sat upon, my two little sisters of four and two, that all of this happily little family was to be protected against the presumptive monster of demonic proportions, me.

My transgressions and acts pronounced as objects of possible punitive action were in fact everything that I might do away from them. The most comical of them only occurred when my loud basement music turned to the then popular rock opera “Jesus Christ Superstar,” which was considered by Mr. Preacher Boss Man as offensive not because its hero was Judas, presented as Christ’s conscience bearer, as he also is in a famous film made years later, but because it suggested that Mary Magdalen was Christ’s girlfriend. Christ had sex! It must have been around that time in a semi-nocturnal state I for the first time imagined myself with some nice person touching her and being touched. This can be passionate, enough for a real religion; or a politics: I would be an angry fuck you rebel in the day, and a lover at night. Maybe I’d move to Belfast and spend my days hating the Brits, whom I know about because they treat everyone including their kids like criminals, and I know what that is like at least. Hatred all day long and love under the moonlight all night long, or hate six days a week and fuck to your heart’s content like Christ and Mary on the seventh note. But alas, the policemen of all the souls also do not sleep, and speaking from his missionary position, the Man took the position that this lyrical rock opera that alluded to sex and disdained the authority of fathers speaking in the name of the father, would not be would not be allowed in his house. It would serve them right if only they were consistent to principle and didn’t reproduce.

I was given by the folks pocket change enough for the school lunch. A couple of days a week I would keep it to go out with the other kids in the evening. And here’s what it was and what we did: It was the “youth group” at their own fucking church. All these Baptists have youth groups; these are the true agents of soul murder. I would learn that later. But now I had first of all what was actually a not very mature crush on this girl Dee who was a kind of a trophy beauty. I didn’t get very stuck up too often in the presence of her and the holy soda drinks but she was cute, long blonde hair and some real tits. Swedish-American, a popular ethnicity along with the Hollanders who were mocked like Jews because it was said they would pick up pennies. She was the daughter of a bigwig in the state church, while stepdad was head of the state church’s summer Bible camp, and then there was the pastor and his two daughters, one of whom was sometimes our baby sitter, and I guess that included me; I thought her kind of cute. Dee and I never did anything except roller skate together and sip soda in cups that were mostly ice at the hamburger joint that we went to, and that was the youth group night out, two nights a week. See, the thing you do if you really want to rebel and there is a bit of the passive aggressive in you, which opens onto the beautiful possibility of just giving the people you are pissed at a real royal fuck you that goes right to their face, then if you’re the child prisoner of the church people, rebel with their fucking church! (Think “Christian rock” if you want a laugh.) I never thought that, but it occurred to me as an irony. The Folks set a rule that I could only go out two nights a week. So I did three, what did I care, and besides, I already had the sense that as soon as I came home I would be in the fuckery anyway.

The Madam of the Mother Company knew where I was, I was in the living room of some respectably church friends of theirs, and she called and the phone was for me, and she said, “Why are you doing this to me?” Later it began to dawn on me how much of my childhood and nascent blooming adolescence was really about her. I mean, for her it was about her. Some people can care so much about you when and because it’s their way of caring so much about themselves and what they need you for. Though what that was I couldn’t tell, and don’t think I much cared. She knew what I needed, too: she kept saying that she had only now discovered that when a boy gets to be around 13 that what he really needs to do is to be told, that is harassed, to take out the trash. Whose trash? It was their fucking trash, these white trash parents. What happened was that every time I came up the stairs, like for dinner and its abuse, or whatever, she would be standing there and rag on me for not having already taken out the trash before she had to tell me. This is how I learned that when someone really wants to lay into you, the best thing to do is to make it clear that you had better do what they tell you before yesterday.

Maybe because I was a boy, I didn’t need much of the comforting that my baby sisters were welcome to, but only to be told to do my job and do what I was told, and otherwise to shut up.

They must have thought in their narcissism that they were as interesting and more true than a book. Years later mom confessed that her no dead hubby must have read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, though all you heard him say was junk about C.S. Lewis and the fucking letters from the big dudes in the Testament. Something to do on the shitter I guess. I have a vivid memory of standing in the doorway and having a kind of panic attack. “Oh, stop it!” she said in the nastiest way I can remember. What I have always feared is finding myself vulnerable in some material way and then the Calvinist Protestants take the stage and play the chorus, and I’m now not just fucked but fucked squared. The first step is you get fucked over, and it could even be something manageably small. Then you complain, and they see you are a bit angry. And so, bingo, gotcha, you’re the bad guy now, because: Conservatives of a certain kind believe there is no injustice (it is barely possible) but only sin or crime. Individuals can do wrong, and especially if they rebel or oppose the just system, just because it comes readymade as such right out of the box. And the label says it is just. Language itself is a great weapon of social wars, because people and what they want can just be written out, so that it supposedly does not exist. Of course, the radical position that some people take, and certainly this is that of many Black people today, as their music attests, but in a somewhat different and perhaps a bit less hopeless way, in fact, it was true of punks and of a whole fucking lot of us. In the end, it will probably have to be acknowledge by anyone who is truly on the left, and I have doubts about most who say they are, including the Bernie Sanders people, that even when right-wing assholes who are loners and losers and cook up some cockamamie politics that they can spout out while they commit some horrible and stupid crime, that people like that are the ugliest tip of icebergs of discontent, and that, I am sorry to inform all the good Jews and Christians and Protestants and activists and professionals and managers and other Americans, discontent and rage, precisely because they are always political because everything is or at least can be, that these affects while they may annoy or trouble you and other good people who are boy and girl scouts and only say polite and genteel things in their churches or synagogues and offices and families and all the rest:

There is a rage, and it’s here to stay, and it’s not just “them,” it’s us. “Tip over the wall, cause governments to fall, how can you refuse it?.. No man born with a living soul can be working for the clampdown.” There was rage before. In 1774, in 1789, in 1968, in 1917 and 1989, in 1871, in 1848, …. And often the question that it all comes down to is of judging when it is only psychological and when it is also political. One must evacuate purely psychological or “spiritual” and therapeutic spaces. Psychological vs. political = management vs. politics and art = conformity and obedience vs. projects whose outcome is unpredictable because this is the nature of time, but which have the necessity that we choose, which is that of creating some different world. The only alternative to this is for a dying society to consign more and more people to treatments for failure, for breaking down like machines, or not working properly like machines.

I might as well add, since this little true story is not quite a love letter to any of its dramatis personae, that later, when I was in college, I began for the first time to learn about something I to this find painful. I don’t know if it is because they are often also evangelicals, mostly Baptists, but I found that often Black people have this kind of authoritarian personality. And pardon me, but I think this is not a joke, and it’s not something you ought to get over and reconcile yourself to, telling yourself therapeutically that your parents must have been right, which one Black roommate told me, and I thought, now I understand more about him. I don’t like people who never rebelled and don’t believe in rebellion. I do. And I don’t think it is just a stage you go through, either. Actually, I recall at the time teachers who would talk about having problems with their teenage kids. Oh yeah? We are the ones with the problems? And I’m supposed to “grow up” to be like you? I’d rather die than be like you; I would risk my life for a world absent people like you.” I don’t mean that people like this are bad people; I can’t judge ultimately on anyone’s poor innocent soul so much need of Christly grace, though of course that is not to be granted to anyone who disobeys their divine and privileged authority, unless they apologize, repent, and are sorry. I never did that and never would have. My stepfather died without apologizing to me, though the last time I saw him, six years earlier, he gave me a funny discourse about how in his religion you are not forgiven by God unless you seek and obtain the forgiveness of the person you wronged. The words are on my lips every time I remember this vivid scene, but I said nothing: Do you mean to say, Sir, that you wish to apologize to me for something? I’m listening. This is the one act of kindness I could have done for him, and it would have been good for me also, because either way, depending on what he then would say, recognizing he had wronged me or going on again about his authority and how he may have misjudged the situation, but… And that would enable me to more easily slot him in my judgement. As it is, he having died unrepentant, he will remain eternal guilty, without any exculpatory deed or explanation.

I would come home, and if I had transgressed anything, then the two of them would be sitting in the living room facing me like a little judicial council. People with the intellectual or simply pedantic pretensions of school teachers and teachers of teachers can be very artful in forms of abuse that seem like some mixture of cognitive hygiene and the perverse cruelty of those people who are so pure and holy that they can only want to batter you with a fucking discourse in which they pretend, fooling only themselves, that they are being “reasonable.” As my father was a professor, that makes a colony of infected teachers, preachers, and justly or saintly creatures. Though stepdad being still half the provincial peasant was able to get in some more manual blows as well, but I don’t get want to get ahead of the story.

I remember going to bed after the sessions and I would either be in a half-awake twilight or actually dreaming this, but each time it was like my head blowing up with hot air, literally, I had to write this to see that it is a metaphor, but that’s what brutalizing verbosity as a way of shitting on you can do to a person. This feeling was oppressive, it was not physically painful but the sensation or thought was that this is oppressive and annoying. Was this partly guilt at some unavowed desire to rebel violently, or a defense of pity against a fear that I would do him harm? It took more for me to formulate real aggressive thoughts explicitly, but then something happened.

The verbal abuse had been going on for about a year. One afternoon I was on the phone talking to someone, it was some friend, I don’t remember who. Stepdad walks in and tells me authoritatively to put the phone receiver down. Why he doesn’t say. This was a ritual and a set up to see if I would obey. And I was ready now, receiver in hand, with the answer. In fact, I don’t remember turning to him and saying no, but I must have acknowledged his presence and demand somehow, and I refused, essentially by staying on the phone. Instead of arguing combatively, I was showing that as far as I was concerned, he did not even count; I would go on as if he weren’t there. My father, who himself recently confessed while we were driving to his 90th birthday party at my cousin’s house, that he never rebelled, a fact that I think is one of the most damning things that anyone could say about themself, though it fits, because he refunctioned the right-wing anti-leftist hatred of his generation, the early 50s, into a sadistic superego-worshipping discourse of punishing every rebellious miscreant, so that I was given to know that I’m lucky we didn’t live in Argentina in the epoch of the Colonels, when radical left-wing rebellious youth who hated the military government were drugged and thrown out of airplanes. So what does the Man of God do here? He grabs the phone out of my hand and then suddenly from behind I feel a very hard thud in the back of my head. Telephones in 1974 were still these large, thick, hard plastic objects. This hurt. He replied that he had not done anything; I did it to myself. I felt an odd sense of betrayal at this lie mingled with brutality. You can lord it over a child and say that you are strict but out of love. That is not an act of love. It was my baptism of hate. This was my bar mitzvah. This was the moment in which I became the person I am today. True, it did not make me the son of a set of commandments constituting a divine law. You can well imagine why I can only think that the Moses who gave the tablets was also the young man who struck and killed the Egyptian overseer who had been beating a fellow Jew who was a worker. The overseer beat me and I reacted, and I never got over this or past it entirely. For in the subsequent many years up to now, I encountered other things that were enough like this that there was no relaxing my grip on what I hated. I have only to be reminded of it.

My sister K. and I were once close, but our friendship withered because years later I was still angry at the man who meant nothing positive to me anymore, for with that act, he and I were through, there was nothing else he could do that would move me. He had in fact also been working on a pretty regime of escalating punishments. This was also for my defiantly being away from the family home and their control of me. So he grounded me. I was not allowed to go out for a whole day. So I did, of course. Then I was grounded for a week. And then a month. And then….. .Finally I made it pretty clear I was just not even going to pay any attention to this. This man of 55 was built like Mohammed Ali and probably could have bested me in a joust, but I would have fought him for all I am worth and with everything in my power before saying uncle. Eventually, he may have had the mere decency to recognize that he had been defeated, and his “My will is your law” would not be inscribed on any tablet that I would not quickly and rightly smash.
I think the phone incident was the final element in the series of counting numbered actions for him. Then, I suddenly glimpsed K. standing in the corner. A person I did care about was trembling and shivering, with terror, which I could read on her face. Though I later had experiences like almost being gang raped when a hulking black man challenged me for sport in a jail where I was placed overnight for being homeless and unable to pay a $60 bail, and experiences like this were for me the echoes of this initiation. But I have never seen anyone else with a greater expression of being terrified. She was four. She later revealed to me that she had identified with me and feared that when she was 13 something like this would happen to her. That identification meant something to me, and I would later be so sad when I really seemed to have lost her friendship. She was a very cool young person; I admired her. My mother turned to comfort her little girl. After that she began to tell me, or was it before then?, that she was afraid that she would be embarrassed in front of her two precious little girls. I then wanted nothing more than that. In fact, I wish that both of them had been prosecuted for the crime of which they were guilty, and still are, since my unconscious does not know time in respect of traumatic experience. Maybe that is why most of us never forgive; the protestants who beg your pardon when they almost manslaughter you only mean to demand that you not resent their misdemeanor, for that would be un-Christian.

I went to my basement room and picked up the receiver of another telephone, the one I had in my sectioned off part of the basement. I called the local police, said I want to report a child beating, and in fact it is myself. They came, examined me, and according to what my mother told me later, told him to “not touch that child again.” He could at least respect me as “that child.” Later he said to his wife my mother, “send him to H——-“, mentioning the name of my father, which I thought was as if I were the child of Satan. Indeed, some time after that he said to me, “I have never heard you say you were wrong.” Well, I am not absent a conscience but what I have of one wasn’t much nourished on his watch. “Have you ever been wrong?” I asked. “I think I made a mistake,” he said, obliquely referencing me. Yes, mister, you made a mistake. And you would die 20 years later without being forgiven for it, while complaining that you did not believe you were dying, you who were so reassured that you were going to go to heaven with your sexless Jesus, you who in the end must be said to have simply believed in your own glorious domination, really exercised for its own sake and so out of pure vanity, while you believed that God and your Bible justified your buggery, you but-buggering dispenser of shit.

I went to bed, and woke up in the morning, and my phone had been taken out. They meant to show me who was boss. It’s one thing to beat a child and in a cowardly way as he did. It is another for a child who doesn’t like being mistreated to complain to the authorities, thinking he could get past them and their authority. I said to myself simply, “This is a declaration of war.”

It took me a bit longer to realize that my whining wimp of a mother, wife of The Man, was as much in on this as he. Their message to me was unmistakeable: “You will obey us, or else—or else we will hurt you!” That is what the tyrant says. And no tyrant has ever been born who should not be taken down from his pedestal and given the treatment Abraham is said in a famous Midrash to have treated his father’s idols. Burn the idols, scorn the worshipful ones.

At this place, I will have a scene change. The image must somehow show a certain artificiality, for reasons that will momentarily become obvious. I come home from school the next day or one shortly thereafter, and, knowing that for a few minutes before my mother comes home to clean and whine, I will be alone in the house, I go upstairs to their bedroom and, there there is a third phone. Can you guess? I take a sharp knife and cut the cord near the wall. I take the phone and mount it on one of their pillows. With the cut cord laying upon the covers. I leave a note. “Ask not for whom the phone rings. It rings for you.”

—-

Yes, that last scene is fantasy, but I needed an ending. Maybe I still need one; that’s probably my reason for writing this. In a variant on the story, they of course, without giving any real thought to what has been going on and what I might have been trying to say, further assert their will, in the confident knowledge that nothing is more evil than disobedience in your own child, since that is part of what these protestants believe, that sin is disobedience, and no one gets any fruit of the true of life or any other kind… So they send me to some juvenile reform school or similar prison. I don’t get a trial or hearing because all they have to say is that their son and stepson was out of their control. (A couple of years later, I took a cheap plane fare from Santa Barbara to visit a friend in San Francisco, and when he wasn’t there and I wound up walking around, the police picked me up and labelled me an “out of control minor”; children are like property, to be managed or controlled.) So mom comes to visit me and gives me a crying routine that is all about her. I am ready with the response, “You will never see me again. I may change my name; I don’t need yours, anyway. I will succeed, banking partly on the rage you have sown in me. But whatever success I have, I don’t want you to hear about it, and if you do, and I hear of it, I will make sure that you are not admitted to any ceremony. You deserve and will receive no thanks. I will probably get over my hatred of your husband and his meek little wife. Give me ten, twenty years, in freedom, and I may forget about where I came from. As for you, I want you to know that the phone is ringing for you, and it will keep ringing, and if you pick it up, you may know that it was me calling you, but you will not hear my voice. This place of punishment where you have sent me, that is the kind of place you belong. You should be in prison both of you. God damn you to hell.”

Did this lead me to “a life of crime”? Not exactly, but to this day the very idea of honoring your parents just seems to me like something that requires a shift into some kind of commentary and some other practice. Something indirect. When my phone rings, it’s people I want to talk to that I want to talk to. I don’t wish you any harm, you can as far as I am concerned rot in the hell of your conscience. If you want my love, or tolerance, and in fact I think those two attitudes are rather similar and linked, maybe you should consider apologizing. It will have a price.

You could also imagine that it might have dawned on either of the teachers and preachers and knowers and showers in the larger array of family authorities that had been distributed to me, that having a smart kid as I was reputed to be, probably because I was also one for talking, call it gift of the gab or whatever you like, that they might have given me or exposed me to things or people that would have stimulated my mind, giving me some way of growing up or out or over or some else, other than just coming slowly to understand that my life is supposed to be about taking out the garbage before I am told that it is there, and then eventually moving out, getting a real world job, renting my own apartment, and all that, maybe even saving up enough money to buy me a little wife in a little house and pay for the up keeping of some more brats, going to work all day to make a pile of money to stuff in her and blow the house up with airy teacher-preacher babble like an inflatable head.

Something happened with regard to this a short while after these events. First, my stepfather backed off after this, because he saw that my anger had blossomed into something approaching hate. He ceased to exist in my thinking as a person who mattered, and of course now there was no turning back, and I would never respect his authority but also no longer had to so forcefully rebel, for some of that task had been accomplished. The fact is that he no longer had any moral authority with me at all, except maybe negatively, and since they were as Hamlet puts it of one flesh, the little lady did not have much either. But “being a good mother” was so important to her, that doing little acts of kindness and caring were of utmost importance for her to do for me or believe she might, just because that is how important I was to her. So important that once she hired a psychiatrist to talk to me, and he wanted to speak to her, and told her she was overprotective of me, so she got me in the car and said, “Dr. Fairman [that was his name] said that I am not protective enough of you.”

This Gertrude could go on to protect me in her dreams, for after I left her house for good on the eve of my 14th birthday, I returned to visit them twice, saw her a few more times at my grandparents’ house in Long Beach, and probably spoke with her on the phone 30 or 40 times, some of them pleasant, in the ensuing 45 years. A year ago she was living in an old people’s home with a dementia and some other disorder of speech and language; they called it aphasia. Maybe in a way the opposite of speaking in tongues. If I had sent her a copy of this story, which she knew enough of, she would have protested that she meant well and always loved me, and some other discourse that would just be about her. She reassured me so often that she truly loved me that I sometimes thought I should put a sign on my wall, “Remember: Your mother loves you. This must be true because she says so.” Just like her Bible told her what was true, and it was true because it said so. Most people are morally shallow.

I had one parental family left, I might as well try that option. It was happy for a summer. My Dad, having a summer vacation like all professors but lots to do still in that time, left me every morning at the local library, where I was constrained to see if I found any of the books on those shelves interesting. My interest in humanistic psychology would be burned out of me for good after I encountered yet another Baptist preacher, with her youth group, in our college town. This one was a lady. She had us kids all sing in her choir, and I remember the name of the song, “Love is surrender to his will.” She later in life got a Harvard degree in humanistic psychology, which she used to buttress her own Christ-fucking. No doubt now she is a “feminist,” which means God fucks you like a father and a mother fucker both or two in one. In fact, she believed in all kinds of love including a liberated divine body: once she took me with my father to a “therapist” man who proceeded to give me caresses on the grounds that I was an unloved child who needed love. Well, this was 1976 and in a Southern California beachfront college town where the New Age had been dawning, and the long short about all that is some people were bonkers crazy. The full story of Margaret is another story or chapter in this one, but for now I note that I had one summer of that soul or self or person that is a mind and maybe that has a larger existence in some great universal mind that would be like all of these books. Does God run a big prison-like factory where people are always been called to order to remind them of their responsibilities, or a giant library where you can get lost but not easily bored?

Pastoral fantasies of glorious bodied souls: The mind is a vegetable garden and we should follow Voltaire in cultivating ourselves there. To have a mind as like being a field where things are grown, nurture it. Through books and such like. That’s how you feed your head. Imagine. Imagine a life in which you can imagine. To have stuff to think about other than as punishment while sitting in the corner. And there’s another world in which everyone just does their job, and your job (in life) is to do your job. In other words, a world of servile servants, slaves probably to capital and its bosses or something like that, but it doesn’t matter. People know they are being fucked over when they are, and that is the important thing to grasp; theories about it are for dessert.

I surrendered to no one. Margaret later would have me hospitalized for being crazy because she didn’t like my anger. Probably thought it was partly about her. Maybe I should have been more precise on this one point. In the eight-week therapy sessions with her at the nice Mexican restaurant she would take me to, she and I could both see that that was where I was moving toward. She found me one day reading over coffee at a restaurant, something I often did. She said, “I think you don’t have any friends.” Oh my God, I am supposed to feel terrified that someone has found out this dirty secret; is that true? “I think you are holding people at arm’s length.” My arms were not long enough to metaphorically embrace this scented asshole so as to effectively tell her to get fucked. No one has any obligation to love or like anyone. If the person is your kid, you should want to, and if it’s someone in authority over you, then you just flatter them, say as little as possible, and give the Caesars what is theirs, and then clear the fuck out.

But in that summer for the first time I read books. My interest in popular humanistic psychology would later become an interest in philosophy that I still maintain. I realized that I would want to go to a college, not to get a good job and have the house trophy-wife family brats dog wall-paneling trash and luxury weekends somewhere, but to fucking cultivate my mind, and maybe contribute something to that general mind, but also to start out “authentically,” to use a word those people appreciate, since they need you to have a Right Soul on you and zipped up and shinily polished, - to start with my rage. Propositions: 1. There is at most one God or holiness or goodness, it’s one thing, but 2. Everything and everyone are part of it. 3. I am an angry young person whose participation in or doing of anything starts from the anger. 4. QED: in God’s name, be enraged and fight back.

Morality is a queer thing that divides into bottoms and tops. Most moralists are tops. Top morality says that there is no injustice (the way things are is necessary and just; they could not be otherwise, and so this is how they should be) but only sin or crime (and all rebellion is crime). Bottom morality is all about oppression; it knows there is sin or crime but doesn’t think or care so much about that, because the basic realities are not moral but political. Many WASPs, Jews, BASPs (Black Anglo-Saxon Protestants), women who think they are feminists and are dealing justice when they oppress the people under them, and others, have a political morality that shifts sometimes all two easily between these modes. If you are on the left as I am, you believe that there is injustice, lots of it, some of which has probably happened to you, and it is real, it matters, you care about it, hate it, want to change it, and we mean it, man.

Skipping the possibility of reading these somewhat fecal metaphors of domination as something one bastard fucker does to another, as signaling some enjoyable frivolity; for is it not obvious that all that possibility amounts to is a way of figuring aggression and violence as some kind of frivolously inconsequential ludic game, and surely one that complainants will be thought to have destined themselves—for there you have a dark side of something that emerged in the culture of the 70s, and whose real function is to depoliticize opposition through some shareable pretense that everything is sex, doubtless with the corollary that whatever it is, everybody wants it. Not. —-

The funny thing about the stepdad is that his protestant Christianity was both left-wing and authoritarian. This more than anything must have set the sour tone of some of my encounters with Black Americans. For they have a Christianity that is of course left-of-center at least on the matters that most affect them, and utterly, horribly authoritarian. The poison must be their apple of stupid knowledge. It is in fact a defining feature of both major forms of Christianity that it holds that a God who has created the world as essentially perfected demands of his human subjects essentially that they obey him; the local religion that the Christian gospels were said to amend and amorize does not have that trait in anything like that way. They even let people argue, though you can find plenty of Jewish Protestants whose reformism occludes that, something I learned the hard way. If you are even enough of a Hellene to separate power and order from justice, it becomes possible to think along other lines. Unmistakeably, and for better and worse, today’s world is a decidedly political one because everyone knows that injustice is everywhere and sin and crime are dwarfed by it. We need happier societies, not bigger prisons.

The story of my father is another chapter, but suffice it to say that he was and remains for me a smarter version of the same ideological buggery. He himself married a woman who went to her own Baptist church, and while he never hit me, he made it clear that he believes in the Man, the Bosses, in every kind of fucking authority especially if it is official or authoritatively.

He will never apologize for this, because he doesn’t know it is wrong. It is wrong. So, wronged by people whose contract was supposed to be that they help the young one learn and understand and not just as a form of obedience, which it is not, and who instead allowed themselves to be reduced to— that.

Consequently, I am what a couple of German filmmakers of my father’s generation, of it and against it (my father did not grow up under the Third Reich only because his grandparents had come here 20 years before), call “Not Reconciled”; that is the name of their film about Germany during and after the war. This is my name. I am Not Reconciled.

—-

You may suppose as most people will that that is just a truth about me. Sure, but it is more than that. If authorities wanted to stop me from writing, they would put me in a place without contacts with people who can appreciate my writing, and would prevent me from writing or having any of the materials I need to write. And they would say that everything I have to say, first, just expresses my own feeling and state of mind, which is idiotic since by definition that means that your statements have only a private meaning. And secondly, what I say may be true, but only about me, whose basic problem is an illness. But my writing is not about me, and if the call is place rightly, you may find it is about you. If your conscience is free, and not bound to the defense of some idea of social order, probably familial in some way, then this will be a salutary recognition. A hell can involve real places or poetic ones. Those few people I could momentarily want to damn for eternity may well be so that they are under the general malediction. Malediction means said to be bad or rotten.

I am not a violent man at all; when I am angry I yell at people, a habit I am not proud of. I cringe in my theater seat when a woman or man is physically assaulted or violated; it is painful because I identify; I know if a person can be subject to this, then anyone can be, and so also I. And more importantly, there is an identification in experience of this kind, above all in the art of narrative film, that is actually prior to reflection and thought: simply, he or she is pricked, and bleeds, and you immediately feel as if it is you are. Affect is here separated from sensation, but that can be evoked. There must be animals who will react similarly to a film of an animal of their species suffering; this may be a humanity that people do not so much have to learn as unlearn. I can be misjudged, and for many people, especially in America, it is enough to express strong opinions about anything to be called “violent.” In fact, I have sharp antennae for detecting both imminent violence and all kinds of injustice.

Rebellion is not a phase you get over. If you pass through it to another side, the other side is not a return to the status quo ante. If it is, you have not rebelled, and you are a failure and your life will be destined to be one; I am sorry to be the bearer of sad news in this respect, but that is how it is. In rebellion, you refuse something, and you refuse it not because you are a petulant brat who needs attention and is behaving badly and so disobediently. Rather, you refuse something that should be refused, and this is absolute, and you fucking know it, and if it is a true rebellion, you will go on and do other things, learn things, hate and love, experience, read, study, whatever, but if you learn something that’s a real truth, and especially of this kind and at this stage, it is like burned into you like a mark or branding.

It’s a cliché that some people are rebellious as youths and angry but then they grow up and mellow out and move from the anger zone to love and peace and all kinds of wonderfulness. Nonsense. There was an omnibus film in the 60s that was made by some fairly radical French and Italian directors, including Pasolini and Godard, and it is titled “Amore e rabbia,” love and anger. There is a myth in our society that justice or the divine or something is a world of order kept clean by the bosses, and those who rebel are evil. That’s a fucking lie. It’s also not true that, let’s take Biblical examples, all anger is like that of Cain. There is that of Prometheus, of Antigone, and of Christ and Moses. Now this is problematic too because people think, well, but Moses was the Boss. But he started his career striking back at an Egyptian who had struck a fellow Jew who was a worker. That’s the origin story. Cain is angry because God doesn’t honor his sacrifice to God of what is most precious to him. That’s sad and tragic, but another matter is the anger of anyone at injustice, including to themselves. You cannot have empathy or humanity for other people in their suffering if you don’t have the same anger at injustice when it is done to you. If you say you don’t, you are either some fucking man of God and probably a Tartuffe, or else you are a liar. “Christian” charity taken to all of its extremes, like those people who bump into you and say “excuse me,” and they think that is an apology but it is nothing of the kind, it is a demand. They are demanding that you not hold against them their transgressions against you; don’t make me feel guilty, they are demanding. False altruism. Amore e rabbia, love and anger, means you start with, even if this was secondary in your own history as partly in mind, your affirmation of what really counts and has value, and this would be objects of love, not obsequiousness and compromise and timidity and bullshit. And then, if you love and care about humanity and the fate of this fucking world we live in, if that doesn’t open onto some kind of rage, well then you might as well put in an early bid to join some of kind of spiritual whole and holy hospice where they care for dead souls.

Today, there are many millions of people who feel rage, because somehow, the society we live in, which seems to run largely by the pursuit of success at success and happiness through some scheme of personal gain that in the end is just survival, and in this kind of system, if you are at all sensitive you can notice that an awful lot of people will just shit on you, and if they are smart, they shit on you as a provocation, an in your face declaration of, hey, how about if I shit on you, will you like that too? Will you do anything? I have seen so many people basically do this, and then the game is that you are supposed to know how to get what you want, while they try to get what they want, in a world of total competition of everyone against everyone, and I mean, doctors and therapists do this, all kinds of stupid fuckers do this. So what this does is leaves a lot of people on the cutting room floor feeling a kind of diffuse rage. It’s rarely entirely clear what the true object of all of the rage is about or should be about, I mean, for that, it seems to me you would have to have a perfected and complete social theory, and then of course you might just say something about capitalism. Or if you are a bit more stupid as I and everyone is much of the time, you get angry not at some gigantic and occulted machinery that is visible in a theory, or some slightly paranoid notion of whoever are the evil powerful and privileged elites behind the machinery and its programs, and instead you are angry at the person immediately provoking your rage by throwing the shit in your face, and who the hell can rightly say that you shouldn’t hate then and there exactly that person, even if that won’t get very far and no revolution is made out of rage against ordinary people who are stupid assholes partly by necessity, which has some truth in it because really social injustice cannot be so simply reduced to good and evil, simply because most people, most of us, most of the time, are docile and dutiful little functionaries who are busy pulling the levers of a machine that in the end wears out and eats alive most of us. We are workers, or exploited as consumers, debtors, or talkers and writers and creators of discourses and images and meanings, none of which are exactly outside whatever we want to be against. What we can be against is immanent, not transcendent, and that means partly we are against what we are doing or what we are to some extent, which we can do by moving outside it a bit, negating it, and saying no. Even if few such acts are as perfect as we might wish, since of course it is the nature of the spatiality of the given state of affairs and the temporality of the way it works on us and we would respond to it, that we don’t know exactly how to help move the world of so much shit to some better place. But we can bet that, in fact, and all cynicism that refuses the idea itself refused, doing something is better than just going along with everything. The world we live in is not what it should be. Anger is simply the emotion that corresponds to and registers as an affect or way of being affected the fact that we recognize that we are faced with injustice. If that is true, then not just anger but rage. dangerous as it is, is justified and necessary and good. It’s a start.

Rebellion does not have to limit itself to refusal, but can be creative; and in fact there is no creativity without it, however “sublimated” it might be, and this is a point that even has Talmudic authority. (It says “evil inclination” is not to be suppressed by put to use creatively, and nothing worthwhile is done without it). Rebellion involves anger, rage even, but not as a passing feeling or state of mind. And it is not an illness. Foundations are laid with it, whatever may come after. Often what passes for illness, is not a malady of the self, but a general state of affairs, in the social world itself, outside you as much as inside you: it is the condition in which things are not good. That is always a worldly condition. Psychiatry now says its paradigm is ‘bio-psycho-social,” but they cannot treat, cannot cure or even manage, social conditions except as individual ones. And that is often a lie.

Rebels love and hate, or hate and love. The logical order, which places affirmation first, does not have to match the temporal order of causation. Rebels love what they care about, which is not what was given. They don’t care much for the state of things. It is material, something to change. Rebels love what they think is important to have, be, desire, affirm; and they hate the obstacles, the forces that are only against you, except of course when they can use them.

Hate seeks to destroy the Other, maybe to avoid the destruction of oneself. Anger does not seek to destroy but to change. People who merely sometimes get angry do not like acts of injustice; but people who are angry do not like the way things are. That they seek to change things and people does not mean the words must be ones of gentleness and softness. The founder of modern republican political thought, Machiavelli, gives the rule here: the proper style is the one that works. Except with people you have some relationship to that is closer than that of the mere fellow adult citizens, you should always separate private and public, self and other. As Arendt has shown, only a totalitarian society makes this unnecessary and impossible. Feel whatever you feel, think what you think, and then contemplate strategies and tactics. This is the rule in situations of actual or potential conflict.

Anger is a most democratic emotion. Anger is political. All real politics involves anger. Anger is always political because it is always about injustice. If all it means to you is that you did not get something you wanted, then at least your feeling has stayed raw and not been well-cooked; probably it’s the wrong ingredient. Anger must be cooked, and slowly, and with care, love’s care. If you are an adult or take yourself to be one, then what you are angry and stay angry about, at least until you have done something in response not just of expression of you but of re-making some corner of the world, what you are angry about is injustice, and this can be spelled out, given voice, form, content, meaning, and the completeness of a work. Emotions have about-ness: they are always about something, and anger is the emotion that accompanies and gives a tonality to the judgment that something is wrong in the situation such that it needs to be changed.

When some professional in dealing with the public at some company or agency answers the phone and you say something that is not what they expected, they typically will tell you that they understand how you are feeling, blah blah blah. Thank you ma’am or mister, but I did not call you asking for psychotherapy. In fact, what they are doing is trying to make it clear that whatever you say is not about anything; you are an idiot, meaning it is just about you. People now, all of us, are supposed to be managed psychologically. And by spiritualities and therapies of whatever kind. This is part of the form of our contemporary police state.

Societies like ours involve movements of politicizing and de- or anti-politicizing. The people in positions of managerial authority are typically anti-politicizing. After all, they want to protect their own position and the thinking that goes with it. Politicizing happens sometimes on barricades, but most often in art. At least in societies like ours. That is simply because the conditions of everyday life are anti-political. If you don’t believe this, trying telling almost anyone in a public space, whether they have authority over you given them by their institution, or not, trying telling them you disagree. See what happens. Probably they will win, you will lose, and it will not be pretty. Indeed, now you will be more angry. You are right to be.

If I am not angry enough to fight for myself, who will be?
If I were angry on my own account alone, why bother?
If not now, what use is yesterday?

Dante himself was a hater of a lover. He truly loved Beatrice, and would bring her to the poem dead or alive. He loved her as much as Abelard loved Héloise. A love among the greatest, and it didn’t stop him hating. He had enemies whose guts he hated, and they are consigned for eternity to hell. That is the way of the world. A noble soul surely will be hot for those to be loved, and cold as ice when smiling with such poise at those who God himself must share the hate for. If that is not permitted, then we don’t need a God, do we? It seems to me I write ok even without the divine messenger’s wings. Besides,

The world is not a Disney movie you watch from a seat in First Class. But of course that some people can see it as such: that is the true horror, the greatest evil of our time. Flying over it while the world implodes, sucked into its own death from the weight of its own malaises, unable to land until it is safe, maybe they will go on until the winged fuselage just runs out of steam and they are hurtled down, asleep by then of course. It would be a crime to miss tea time.

The Torah was not given to corporations and police officers of every kind, but to a bunch of filthy runaway slaves. They were led by an angry man, brought up in privilege, who hated oppression and began his career by mortally striking an oppressor, a man working for the man who was beating a worker. And if you think the law and prophets were orders to return to normalcy and do what you are told, then you’re probably reading a translation written in a police department. In that case, take it out with all the real garbage.

Injustice clings to me and I can sniff it out. I never reconciled myself to the ways of things. Nothing present is justified by knowing that worse things can happen. And so this is,

To be continued.

The truth is I may already have wanted

stepping goose like as the mission man

and based on a novel

Sade, Rimbaud, Lautréamont,

the head

My Season of Hate

—-

I remember that I was 12 years old when this started. So it was about a year in duration, which seems poetically right.

As a child, I had few friends. School was mostly a tolerably boring ordeal. Doubtless I was more affected by what I will call “the parents” than I would have been if I had other social recourses. This was long before Facebook.

My affective recourse was music: rock and roll, played loud, from the local radio station, and my small but cherished record collection, which I earned by delivering papers in zero degree weather, one of the several signs of a personal autonomy that the man I will shortly introduce would threaten to take from me. Now he’s been dead more than 25 years and can take from me nothing but the missed chance to see him grovel in begging my forgiveness, as I wonder what a man like that would be without his language that was so well used as paper wrapping for an empty soul, in need of words to believe that he believed in. Music is the opposite of this, because the lyrics typically matter less than the sounds, which is why I don’t like rap music.
With the music, I was like the five year old girl in the Velvet Underground song whose life was saved by rock and roll, because apart from that nothing that I could appreciate in any positive way was happening at all. Imagine from like four when I entered preschool, already talking too much and I think prone to fights, to 8 long years later, and nothing happened, in almost 3,000 days, there was nothing happening at all. Now the essential qualities of rock and roll are that it has a regular beat and is played loud. Add the fact that it is definitely not your parents’ Mozart, and you have an alphabet of rebellion. Give an angry brat an alphabet, and something to write with and on, and get the fuck out of his or her way, because if you learn me your language, I can use it to curse you.

I was given by the folks pocket change enough for the school lunch. A couple of days a week I would keep it to go out with the other kids in the evening. And here’s what it was and what we did: It was the “youth group” at their own fucking church. All these Baptists have youth groups; these are the true agents of soul murder. I would learn that later. But now I had first of all what was actually a not very mature crush on this girl Dee who was a kind of a trophy beauty. I didn’t get very stuck up too often in the presence of her and the holy soda drinks but she was cute, long blonde hair and some real tits. Swedish-American, a popular ethnicity along with the Hollanders who were mocked like Jews because it was said they would pick up pennies. She was the daughter of a bigwig in the state church, while stepdad was head of the state church’s summer Bible camp, and then there was the pastor and his two daughters, one of whom was sometimes our baby sitter, and I guess that included me; I thought her kind of cute. Dee and I never did anything except roller skate together and sip soda in cups that were mostly ice at the hamburger joint that we went to, and that was the youth group night out, two nights a week. See, the thing you do if you really want to rebel and there is a bit of the passive aggressive in you, which opens onto the beautiful possibility of just giving the people you are pissed at a real royal fuck you that goes right to their face, then if you’re the child prisoner of the church people, rebel with their fucking church! (Think “Christian rock” if you want a laugh.)
I never thought that, but it occurred to me as an irony. The Folks set a rule that I could only go out two nights a week. So I did three, what did I care, and besides, I already had the sense that as soon as I came home I would be in the fuckery anyway.

Maybe because I was a boy, I didn’t need much of the comforting that my baby sisters were welcome to, but only to be told to do my job and do what I was told, and otherwise to shut up.

I might as well add, since this little true story is not quite a love letter to any of its dramatis personae, that later, when I was in college, I began for the first time to learn about something I to this find painful. I don’t know if it is because they are often also evangelicals, mostly Baptists, but I found that often Black people have this kind of authoritarian personality. And pardon me, but I think this is not a joke, and it’s not something you ought to get over and reconcile yourself to, telling yourself therapeutically that your parents must have been right, which one Black roommate told me, and I thought, now I understand more about him. I don’t like people who never rebelled and don’t believe in rebellion. I do. And I don’t think it is just a stage you go through, either. Actually, I recall at the time teachers who would talk about having problems with their teenage kids. Oh yeah? We are the ones with the problems? And I’m supposed to “grow up” to be like you? I’d rather die than be like you; I would risk my life for a world absent people like you.” I don’t mean that people like this are bad people; I can’t judge ultimately on anyone’s poor innocent soul so much need of Christly grace, though of course that is not to be granted to anyone who disobeys their divine and privileged authority, unless they apologize, repent, and are sorry. I never did that and never would have. My stepfather died without apologizing to me, though the last time I saw him, six years earlier, he gave me a funny discourse about how in his religion you are not forgiven by God unless you seek and obtain the forgiveness of the person you wronged. The words are on my lips every time I remember this vivid scene, but I said nothing: Do you mean to say, Sir, that you wish to apologize to me for something? I’m listening. This is the one act of kindness I could have done for him, and it would have been good for me also, because either way, depending on what he then would say, recognizing he had wronged me or going on again about his authority and how he may have misjudged the situation, but… And that would enable me to more easily slot him in my judgement. As it is, he having denied unrepentant, he will remain eternal guilty, without any exculpatory deed or explanation.

I would come home, and if I had transgressed anything, then the two of them would be sitting in the living room facing me like a little judicial council. People with the intellectual or simply pedantic pretensions of school teachers and teachers of teachers can be very artful in forms of abuse that seem like some mixture of cognitive hygiene and the perverse cruelty of those people who are so pure and holy that they can only want to batter you with a fucking discourse in which they pretend, fooling only themselves, that they are being “reasonable.” As my father was a professor, that makes a colony of infected teachers, preachers, and justly or saintly creatures. Though stepdad being still half the provincial peasant was able to get in some more manual blows as well, but I don’t get want to get ahead of the story.

I remember going to bed after the sessions and I would either be in a half-awake twilight or actually dreaming this, but each time it was like my head blowing up with hot air, literally, I had to write this to see that it is a metaphor, but that’s what brutalizing verbosity as a way of shitting on you can do to a person. This feeling was oppressive, it was not physically painful but the sensation or thought was that this is oppressive and annoying. Was this partly guilt at some unavowed desire to rebel violently, a fear that I would do him harm? It took more for me to formulate real aggressive thoughts explicitly, but then something happened.

The verbal abuse had been going on for about a year. One afternoon I was on the phone talking to someone, it was some friend, I don’t remember who. Stepdad walks in and tells me authoritatively to put the phone receiver down. Why he doesn’t say. This was a ritual and a set up to see if I would obey. And I was ready now, receiver in hand, with the answer. In fact, I don’t remember turning to him and saying no, but I must have acknowledged his presence and demand somehow, and I refused, essentially by staying on the phone. My father, who himself recently confessed while we were driving to his 90th birthday party at my cousin’s house, that he never rebelled, a fact that I think is one of the most damning things that anyone could say about themselves, though it fits, because he refunctioned the right-wing anti-leftist hatred of his generation, the early 50s, into a sadistic superego-worshipping discourse of punishing every rebellious miscreant, so that I was given to know that I’m lucky we didn’t live in Argentina in the epoch of the Colonels, when radical left-wing rebellious youth who hated the military government were drugged and thrown out of airplanes. So what does the Man of God do here? He grabs the phone out of my hand and then suddenly from behind I feel a very hard thud in the back of my head. Telephones in 1974 were still these large hard plastic objects. This hurt. He replied that he had not done anything; I did it to myself. I felt betrayed. You can lord it over a child and say that you are strict but out of love. That is not an act of love. It was my baptism of hate. This was my bar mitzvah. This was the moment in which I became the person I am today. True, it did not make me the son of a set of commandments constituting a divine law. You can well imagine why I can only think that the Moses who gave the tablets was also the young man who struck and killed the Egyptian overseer who had been beating a fellow Jew who was a worker. The overseer beat me and I reacted, and I never got over this or past it entirely. For I encountered other things that were enough like this that there was no relaxing my grip on what I hated. I have only to be reminded of it.

My sister K. and I were once close, but our friendship withered because years later I was still angry at the man who meant nothing positive to me anymore, for with that act, he and I were through, there was nothing else he could do that would move me. He had in fact also been working on a pretty regime of escalating punishments. This was also for my defiantly being away from the family home and their control of me. So he grounded me. I was not allowed to go out for a whole day. So I did, of course. Then I was grounded for a week. And then a month. And then….. .I think the phone incident was the next element in the series of counting numbered actions for him. I suddenly glimpsed K. standing in the corner. She was trembling and shivering, with terror, which I could read on her face. I have never seen another person with a greater expression of being terrified. She was four. She later revealed to me that she had identified with me and feared that when she was 13 this would happen to her. That identification meant something to me, and I would later be so sad when I really seemed to have lost her friendship. She was a very cool young person; I admired her. My mother turned to comfort her little girl. After that she began to tell me, or was it before then?, that she was afraid that she would be embarrassed in front of her two precious little girls. I then wanted nothing more than that. In fact, I wish that both of them had been prosecuted for the crime of which they were guilty, and still are, since my unconscious does not know time in respect of traumatic experience. I went to my basement room and picked up the receiver of another telephone, the one I had in my sectioned off part of the basement. I called the local police, said I want to report a child beating, and in fact it is myself. They came, examined me, and according to what my mother told me later, told him to “not touch that child again.” He could at least respect me as “that child.” Later he said to his wife my mother, “send him to H——-“, mentioning the name of my father, which I thought was as if I were the child of Satan. Indeed, some time after that he said to me, “I have never heard you say you were wrong.” Well, I am not absent a conscience but what I have of one wasn’t much nourished on his watch. “Have you ever been wrong?” I asked. “I think I made a mistake,” he said, obliquely referencing me. Yes, mister, you made a mistake. And you would die 20 years later without being forgiven for it, while complaining that you did not believe you were dying, you who were so reassured that you were going to go to heaven with your sexless Jesus, you who in the end must be said to have simply believed in your own glorious domination, really exercised for its own sake and so out of pure vanity, while you believed that God and your Bible justified your buggery, you but-buggering dispenser of shit.

I went to bed, and woke up in the morning, and my phone had been taken out. I said to myself, “This is a declaration of war.”

It took me a bit longer to realize that my whining wimp of a mother, wife of The Man, was as much in on this as he. Their message to me was unmistakeable: “You will obey us, or else—or else we will hurt you!” That is what the tyrant says. And no tyrant has ever been born who should not be taken down from his pedestal and given the treatment Abraham is said in a famous Midrash to have treated his father’s idols. Burn the idols, scorn the worshipful ones.

At this piece, I will have a scene change. The image must somehow show a certain artificiality, for reasons that will momentarily become obvious. I come home from school the next day or one shortly thereafter, and, knowing that for a few minutes before my mother comes home to clean and whine, I will be alone in the house, I go upstairs to their bedroom and, there there is a third phone. Can you guess? I take a sharp knife and cut the cord near the wall. I take the phone and mount it on one of their pillows. With the cut cord laying upon the covers. I leave a note. “Ask not for whom the phone rings. It rings for you.”

——

You could also imagine that it might have dawned on either of the teachers and preachers and knowers and showers in the larger array of family authorities that had been distributed to me, that having a smart kid as I was reputed to be, probably because I was also one for talking, call it gift of the gab or whatever you like, that they might have given me or exposed me to things or people that would have stimulated my mind, giving me some way of growing up or out or over or some else, other than just coming slowly to understand that my life is supposed to be about taking out the garbage before I am told that it is there, eventually moving out, getting a real world job, renting my own apartment, and all that, maybe even saving up enough money to buy me a little wife in a little house and pay for the up keeping of some more brats, going to work all day to make a pile of money to stuff in her and blow the house up with airy teacher-preacher babble like an inflatable head.

Something happened with regard to this a short while after these events. First, my stepfather backed off after this, because he saw that my anger had blossomed into something approaching hate. He ceased to exist in my thinking as a person who mattered, and of course now there was turning back, and I would never respect his authority but also no longer had to rebel, for the rebellion was done. The fact is that he no longer had any moral authority with me at all, except maybe negatively, and since they were as Hamlet puts it of one flesh, the little lady did not have much either. But “being a good mother” was so important to her, that doing little acts of kindness and caring were of utmost importance for her to do for me or believe she might, just because that is how important I was to her. So important that once she hired a psychiatrist to talk to me, and he wanted to speak to her, and told her she was overprotective of me, so she got me in the car and said, “Dr. Fairman [that was his name] said that I am not protective enough of you.”

This Gertrude could go on to protect me in her dreams, for after I left her house for good on the eve of my 14th birthday, I returned to visit them twice, saw her a few more times at my grandparents’ house in Long Beach, and probably spoke with her on the phone 30 or 40 times, some of them pleasant. A year ago she was living in an old people’s home with a dementia and some other disorder of speech and language; they called it aphasia. Maybe in a way the opposite of speaking in tongues. If I had sent her a copy of this story, which she knew enough of, she would have protested that she meant well and always loved me, and some other discourse that would just be about her. She reassured me so often that she truly loved me that I sometimes thought I should put a sign on my wall, “Remember: Your mother loves you. This must be true because she says so.” Just like her Bible told her what was true, and it was true because it said so. Most people are morally shallow.

To have a mind. And, like a field where things are grown, nurture it. Through books and such like. Imagine. Imagine a life in which you can imagine. To have stuff to think about other than as punishment while sitting in the corner. And there’s another world in which everyone just does their job, and you job (in life) is to do your job. In other words, a world of slaves, probably to capital and its bosses or something like that, but it doesn’t matter. People know they are being fucked over when they are, and that is the important thing to grasp; theories about it are for dessert.

I surrendered to no one. Margaret later would have me hospitalized for being crazy because she didn’t like my anger. Probably thought it was partly about her. Maybe I should have been more precise on this one point. In the eight-week therapy sessions with her at the nice Mexican restaurant she would take me to, she and I could both see that that was where I was moving toward. She found me one day reading over coffee at a restaurant, something I often did. She said, “I think you don’t have any friends.” Oh my God, I am supposed to feel terrified that someone has found out this dirty secret; is that true? “I think you are holding people at arm’s length.” My arms were not long enough to metaphorically embrace this asshole so as to effectively tell her to get fucked. No one has any obligation to love or like anyone. If the person is your kid, you should want to, and if it’s someone in authority over you, then you just flatter them, say as little as possible, and give the Caesars what is theirs, and then clear the fuck out.

Morality divides in bottoms and tops. Most moralists are tops. Top morality says that there is no injustice (the way things are is necessary and just; they could not be otherwise, and so this is how they should be) but only sin or crime (and all rebellion is crime). Bottom morality is all about oppression; it knows there is sin or crime but doesn’t think or care so much about that, because the basic realities are not moral but political. Many WASPs, Jews, BASPs (Black Anglo-Saxon Protestants), women who think they are feminists and are dealing justice when they oppress the people under them, and others, have a political morality that shifts sometimes all two easily between these modes. If you are on the left as I am, you believe that there is injustice, lots of it, some of which has probably happened to you, and it is real, it matters, you care about it, hate it, want to change it, and we mean it, man.

Rebellion is not a phase you get over. If you pass through it to another side, the other side is not a return to the status quo ante. If it is, you have not rebelled, and you are a failure and your life will be destined to be one; I am sorry to be the bearer of sad news in this respect, but that is how it is. In rebellion, you refuse something, and you refuse it not because you are petulant brat who needs attention and is behaving badly and so disobediently. Rather, you refuse something that should be refused, and this is absolute, and you fucking know it, and if it is a true rebellion, you will go on and do other things, learn things, hate and love, experience, read study, whatever, but if you learn something that’s a real truth, and especially of this kind and at this stage, it is like burned into you like a mark or branding.

It’s a cliché that some people are rebellious as youths and angry but then they grow up and mellow out and move from the anger zone to love and peace and all kinds of wonderfulness. Nonsense. There was an omnibus film in the 60s that was made by some fairly radical French and Italian directors, including Pasolini and Godard, and it is titled “Amore e rabbia,” love and anger. There is a myth in our society that justice or the divine or something is a world of order kept clean by the bosses, and those who rebel are evil. That’s a fucking lie. It’s also not true that, let’s take Biblical examples, that all anger is like that of Cain. There is that of Prometheus, of Antigone, and of Christ and Moses. Now this is problematic too because people think, well, but Moses was the Boss. But he started his career striking back at an Egyptian who had struck a fellow Jew who was a worker. That’s the origin story. Cain is angry because God doesn’t honor his sacrifice to God of what is most precious to him. That’s sad and tragic, but another matter is the anger of anyone at injustice, including to themselves. You cannot have empathy or humanity for other people in their suffering if you don’t have the same anger at injustice when it is done to you. If you say you don’t, you are either some fucking man of God and probably a Tartuffe, or else you are a liar. “Christian” charity taken to all of its extremes, like those people who bump into you and say “excuse me,” and they think that is an apology but it is nothing of the kind, it is a demand. They are demanding that you not hold against them their transgressions against you; don’t make me feel guilty, they are demanding. False altruism. Amore e rabbia, love and anger, means you start with, even if this was secondary in your own history as partly in mind, your affirmation of what really counts and has value, and this would be objects of love, not obsequiousness and compromise and timidity and bullshit. And then, if you love and care about humanity and the fate of this fucking world we live in, if that doesn’t open onto some kind of rage, well then you might as well put in an early bid to join some of kind of hospice even though you’re not dying or shouldn’t be.

Today, there are many millions of people who feel rage, because somehow, the society we live in, which seems to run largely by the pursuit of success at success and happiness through some scheme of personal gain that in the end is just survival, and in this kind of system, if you are at all sensitive you can notice that an awful lot of people will just shit on you, and if they are smart, they shit on you as a provocation, an in your face declaration of, hey, how about if I shit on you, will you like that too? Will you do anything? I have seen so many people basically do this, and then the game is that you are suppose to know how to get what you want, while they try to get what they want, in a world of total competition of everyone against everyone, and I mean, doctors and therapists do this, all kinds of stupid fuckers do this. So what this does is leaves a lot of people on the cutting room floor feeling a kind of diffuse rage. It’s rarely entirely clear what the true object of all of the rage is about or should be about, I mean, for that, it seems to me you would have to have a perfected and complete social theory, and then of course you would just say something about capitalism. Or if you are a bit more stupid as I and everyone is much of the time, you get angry not at some gigantic and occulted machinery that is visible in a theory, or some slightly paranoid notion of whoever are the evil powerful and privileged elites behind the machinery and its programs, and instead you are angry at the person immediately provoking your rage by throwing the shit in your face, and who the hell can rightly say that you shouldn’t hate then and there exactly that person, even if that won’t get very far and no revolution is made out of rage against ordinary people who are stupid assholes partly by necessity, which has some truth in it because really social injustice cannot be so simply reduced to good and evil, simply because most people, most of us, most of the time, are docile and dutiful little functionaries who are busy pulling the levers of a machine that in the end wears out and eats alive most of us. We are workers, or exploited as consumers, debtors, or talkers and writers and creators of discourses and images and meanings, none of which are exactly outside whatever we want to be against. What we can be against is immanent, not transcendent, and that means partly we are against what we are doing or what we are to some extent, which we can do by moving outside it a bit, negating it, and saying no. Even if few such acts are as perfect as we might wish, since of course it is the nature of the spatiality of the given state of affairs and the temporality of the way it works on us and we would respond to it, that we don’t know exactly how to help move the world of so much shit to some better place. But we can bet that, in fact, and all cynicism that refuses the idea itself refused, doing something is better than just going along with everything. The world we live in is not what it should be. Anger is simply the emotion that corresponds to and registers as an affect or way of being affected the fact that we recognize that we are faced with injustice. If that is true, then not just anger but rage. dangerous as it is, is justified and necessary and good. It’s a start.

Rebellion does not have to limit itself to refusal, but can be creative; and in fact there is no creativity without it, however “sublimated” it might be, and this is a point that even has Talmudic authority. Rebellion involves anger, rage even, but not as a passing feeling or state of mind. And it is not an illness. Often what passes for illness, is not a malady of the self, but a general state of affairs, in the social world itself, outside you as much as inside you: it is the condition in which things are not good. That is always a worldly condition. Psychiatry now says its paradigm is ‘bio-psycho-social,” but they cannot treat, cannot cure or even manage, social conditions except as individual ones. And that is often a lie.

Rebels love and hate, or hate and love. The logical order, which plays affirmation first, does not have to match the temporal order of causation. Rebels love what they care about, which is not what was given. They don’t care much for the state of things. It is material, something to change. Rebels love what they think is important to have, be, desire, affirm; and they hate the obstacles, the forces that are only against you.

Hate seeks to destroy the Other, maybe to avoid the destruction of oneself. Anger does not seek to destroy but to change. That does not mean its words must be ones of gentleness and softness. The founder of modern republican political thought, Machiavelli, gives the rule here: the proper style is the one that works. Except with people you have some relationship to that is closer than that of the mere fellow adult citizens, you should always separate private and public, self and other. As Arendt has shown, only a totalitarian society makes this unnecessary and impossible. Feel whatever you feel, think what you think, and then contemplate strategies and tactics. This is the rule in situations of actual or potential conflict.

Anger is a most democratic emotion. Anger is political. All real politics involves anger. Anger is always political because it is always about injustice. If all it means to you is that you did not get something you wanted, then your feeling has stayed raw and not been well-cooked. Anger must be cooked, and slowly, and with care, love’s care. If you are an adult or take yourself to be one, then what you are angry and stay angry about, at least until you have done something in response not just of expression of you but of re-making some corner of the world, what you are angry about is injustice, and this can be spelled out, given voice, form, content, meaning, and the completeness of a work. Emotions have about-ness: they are always about something, and anger is the emotion that accompanies and gives a tonality to the judgment that something is wrong in the situation such that it needs to be changed.

When some professional in dealing with the public at some company or agency answers the phone and you say something that is not what they expected, they typically will tell you that they understand how you are feeling, blah blah blah. Thank you ma’am or mister, but I did not call you asking for psychotherapy. In fact, what they are doing is trying to make it clear that whatever you say is not about anything; you are an idiot, and it is just about you. People now, all of us, are supposed to be managed psychologically. And by spiritualities and therapies of whatever kind. This is part of the form of our contemporary police state.

If I am not angry enough to fight for myself, who will?
If I were angry on my own account alone, why bother?
If not now, what use is yesterday?

The Torah was not given to corporations and police officers of every kind, but to a bunch of filthy runaway slaves. And if you think the law and prophets were orders to return to normalcy and do what you are told, then you’re probably reading a translation written in a police department. In that case, take it out with all the real garbage.

To be continued.

William HeidbrederJanuary 11, 2020Comment