Charades: Why I don't know what 'love' is

All "corporal punishment" does is normalize violence, brutalize children and satisfy adults' needs for compliance.

Recently, I found myself in a Facebook thread among folks bemoaning the lack of "discipline" among children and young folks, and fantasizing about the good old days when you could beat one's children howsoever one desired, extolling the virtues of corporal punishment, and bewailing the lack of more of it--you know: "Kids these days need to be beaten, but the snowflakes object"--and it awoke deep feelings in me...as it always does. I reproached them, of course, and as politely as possible.

"When did you stop beating your children," I asked.

" Beating children with switches and sticks isn't discipline, it's felony child abuse.

"People say, "well I turned out okay."

"I say, really? Then why are you beating your children into obedience, silence and submission?

"That's pretty fucked up, actually; criminal, even. "You're NOT "Okay." Get help before you hurt somebody.

But it just made me feel hollow, my gut clenched as if in anticipation of another blow.....

CONTEXT:

When I appeared right after WW II, my folks didn't have ANY IDEA about raising kids, being both privileged children of distant/detached parents themselves.  BOTH my parents were horribly ill-suited for the task of being parents, having both been the spoiled and cosseted offspring of successful Men of Business BEFORE the Depression and who survived it with their most of their wealth and possessions. They met in college in 1940, at a fencing tournament. 

My mother bore four live births, but she despised being a "mother." I truly think she considered it beneath her considerable talents, because she thought (and was often right) that she was the smartest one in the room. Like MANY women of her generation, she felt 'captured' by a role she didn't want or particularly like to play.  Eventually, captive of serious medical conditions, she took her (often prescription drug amplified) frustrations out on me. 

 She slapped me around just about every day from age 10 until I left home for the military right out of High School. She'd just stand me before her and start slapping me, and slapping me. As I got older, and became more stoic, the beating increased, too. I couldn't tell my father since I suspected he secretly approved.

As I think now, I was probably indelibly scarred by my mother's incessant violence upon me and my father's casual acceptance of it.

 I got through it, but leaving a trail strewn with broken relationships and emotional damage (three failed marriages, and countless "serious" affairs) throughout the whole of my entire 'romantic' career. I was (am) broken, inside, I now know, and didn't really notice until about 15 years ago, by which time I had pretty much permanently removed myself from the lists.

 As, now, alone with my dog--also a grizzled veteran--a grumpy, slowly shrinking "Senior" of 75, I've hope I've done all the damage I'm gonna do, either to myself or others, in one lifetime. 

I don't think about MY "future" much. But I've actually managed to learn to meet one day at a time, without desperation or enthusiasm or regret.

 

Moar Memez

 

Veterant

As a veteran, I wish people would stop glorifying the military. It's the Imperial armament. It defends the borders of OUR Empire, which may be collapsing but is still mighty and deadly, to anyone presumptuous enough to test it. 

But our oceanic moats PROTECT our borders as well as or better. Any foreseeable invasion threat would have to either cross a vast ocean or come through inhabited regions which would resist them, along with any USer response deemed appropriate.

The USofA has only, truly, ever been militarily threatened twice since 1776: 1812, and 1861-65, despite the hundreds of conflicts "we" have engaged in. Neither the Axis in WW 1, nor the fascists of WW 2 posed any actual threat to the borders or the or the political integrity of the country.

 

What ya gonna believe.....

 

 

Standing awash in the misrepresentations, prevarications, and falsehoods that flood our consciousnesses, we must acknowledge the contribution of Edward Bernays,

Freud's favorite nephew, and amanuensis when the old man was in the Colonies.

Bernays' "genius" was to recognize the inherent, social power of insights into human behavior to be gathered from Pavlov's e.g. "Behaviorialism," Taylor's Scientific Management, and Unca Sig's "Love/Death" aporia, and to operationalize/weaponize them under the rubric of "Public Relations," which is now humanity's pre-eminent epistemological resource.

Propaganda is nothing but the "other side of the coin" of PR. Indeed, ya can't spill one without the other.

I don't know whether Bernays ever contemplated the inherent totalitarianism of his system.

He worked with Raymond Loewy (who designed the pack) to sell Lucky Strikes. His book, Propaganda, was published in 1928. He taught women to smoke cigarets in the Teens. And he assisted Wilson dragging the US into WW 1.

You don't have to tell people how to think if you can tell them what they experience in words and images that, subtley or not, privilege any one viewpoint.

Ninety-nine percent of people experience the world outside their immediate local through media, and not from a "disinterested" perspective. Mediation of reality is occurring faster and more comprehensively than our Pleistocene brains can process. We are in WAAAAY over our heads.

Foamer Special:

 

An outstanding photo of Loewy's Pennsylvania Railroad S1 and one of the Dreyfuss Hudson’s. They were the epitome of railroad design at the time.

I'm informed that this 'race' HAD to have occurred on the mainline leaving Chicago, because that was the only place their tracks ran parallel long enough to really roll.
However these two appear to be at rest, from the nearly vertical plume of smoke from the S1.

 

 

Dr. Woody'z Meemz:

 Not even CLOSE.

Woke, an Haiku

Amid the tumult,

Being a conscious being
Is a needful thing.