Free Download: Henry Miller, "Tropic Of Cancer"

“The monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured – disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui – in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. And all the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach in there and shut it off.

All the while someone is eating the bread of life and drinking the wine, some dirty fat cockroach of a priest who hides away in the cellar guzzling it, while up above in the light of the street a phantom host touches the lips and the blood is pale as water. And out of the endless torment and misery no miracle comes forth, no microscopic vestige of relief. Only ideas, pale, attenuated ideas which have to be fattened by slaughter; ideas which come forth like bile, like the guts of a pig when the carcass is ripped open.

Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a salutary effect upon me. For weeks and months, for years, in fact, all my life I had been looking forward to something happening, some intrinsic event that would alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of everything, I felt relieved, felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders. At dawn I parted company with the young Hindu, after touching him for a few francs, enough for a room. Walking toward Montparnasse I decided to let myself drift with the tide, to make not the least resistance to fate, no matter in what form it presented itself. 

Nothing that had happened to me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been destroyed except my illusions. I myself was intact. The world was intact. Tomorrow there might be a revolution, a plague, an earthquake; tomorrow there might not be left a single soul to whom one could turn for sympathy, for aid, for faith. It seemed to me that the great calamity had already manifested itself, that I could be no more truly alone than at this very moment. I made up my mind that I would hold on to nothing, that I would expect nothing, that henceforth I would live as an animal, a beast of prey, a rover, a plunderer. Even if war were declared, and it were my lot to go, I would grab the bayonet and plunge it, plunge it up to the hilt. And if rape were the order of the day then rape I would, and with a vengeance.

At this very moment, in the quiet dawn of a new day, was not the earth giddy with crime and distress? Had one single element of man’s nature been altered, vitally, fundamentally altered, by the incessant march of history? By what he calls the better part of his nature, man has been betrayed, that is all. At the extreme limits of his spiritual being man finds himself again naked as a savage. When he finds God, as it were, he has been picked clean: he is a skeleton. One must burrow into life again in order to put on flesh. The word must become flesh; the soul thirsts. 

On whatever crumb my eye fastens, I will pounce and devour. If to live is the paramount thing, then I will live, even if I must become a cannibal. Heretofore I have been trying to save my precious hide, trying to preserve the few pieces of meat that hid my bones. I am done with that. I have reached the limits of endurance. My back is to the wall; I can retreat no further. As far as history goes I am dead. If there is something beyond I shall have to bounce back. I have found God, but he is insufficient. I am only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. The world which I have departed is a menagerie. The dawn is breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which the lean spirits roam with sharp claws. If I am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself.”

- Henry Miller, "Tropic of Cancer"

Freely download "Tropic of Cancer", by Henry Miller, here:

- https://gertrudesteinsite.wordpress.com/

The Daily "Near You?"

Brunswick, Georgia, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"When Idiocy Becomes Hardwired"

"When Idiocy Becomes Hardwired"

by Jeff Thomas

"At this point, virtually all of us over the age of forty have encountered enough "snowflakes" (those Millennials who have a meltdown if anything they say or believe is challenged) to understand that, increasingly, young people are being systemically coddled to the point that they cannot cope with their "reality" being questioned.

The post-war baby boomers were the first "spoiled" generation, with tens of millions of children raised under the concept that, "I don’t want my children to have to experience the hardships that I faced growing up."

Those jurisdictions that prospered most (the EU, US, Canada, etc.) were, not coincidentally, the ones where this form of childrearing became most prevalent. The net result was the ’60s generation – young adults who could be praised for their idealism in pursuing the peace movement, the civil rights movement, and equal rights for women. But those same young adults were spoiled to the degree that many felt that it made perfect sense that they should attend expensive colleges but spend much of their study time pursuing sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Flunking out or dropping out was not seen as a major issue and very few of them felt any particular guilt about having squandered their parents’ life savings in the process.

The boomer generation then became the yuppies as they hit middle age, and not surprisingly, many coddled their own children even more than they themselves had been coddled. As a result of ever-greater indulgence with each new generation of children, tens of millions of Millennials now display the result of parents doing all they can to remove every possible hardship from their children’s experience, no matter how small.

Many in their generation never had to do chores, have a paper route, or get good grades in order to be given an exceptional reward, such as a cell phone. They grew to adulthood without any understanding of cause and effect, effort and reward.

Theoretically, the outcome was to be a generation that was free from troubles, free from stress, who would have only happy thoughts. The trouble with this ideal was that, by the time they reached adulthood, many of the critical life’s lessons had been missing from their upbringing. In the years during which their brains were biologically expanding and developing, they had been hardwired to expect continued indulgence throughout their lives. Any thought that they had was treated as valid, even if it was insupportable in logic.

And, today, we’re witnessing the fruits of this upbringing. Tens of millions of Millennials have never learned the concept of humility. They’re often unable to cope with their thoughts and perceptions being questioned and, in fact, often cannot think outside of themselves to understand the thoughts and perceptions of others.

They tend to be offended extremely easily and, worse, don’t know what to do when this occurs. They have such a high perception of their own self-importance that they can’t cope with being confronted, regardless of the validity of the other person’s reasoning. How they feel is far more important than logic or fact.

Hypersensitive vulnerability is a major consequence, but a greater casualty is Truth. Truth has gone from being fundamental to being something "optional" – subjective or relative and of lesser importance than someone being offended or hurt.

Of course, it would be easy to simply fob these young adults off as emotional mutants – spiteful narcissists – who cannot survive school without the school’s provision of safe spaces, cookies, puppies, and hug sessions. Previous generations of students (my own included) were often intimidated when presented with course books that had titles like Elements of Calculus and Analytic Geometry. But such books had their purpose. They were part of what had to be dealt with in order to be prepared for the adult world of ever-expanding technology.

In addition, it was expected that any student be prepared to learn (at university, if he had not already done so at home), to consider all points of view, including those less palatable. In debating classes, he’d be expected to take any side of any argument and argue it as best he could. In large measure, these requirements have disappeared from institutions of higher learning, and in their place, colleges provide coloring books, Play-Doh, and cry closets.

At the same time as a generation of "snowflakes" is being created, the same jurisdictions that are most prominently creating them (the above-mentioned EU, US, Canada, etc.) are facing, not just a generation of young adults who have a meltdown when challenged in some small way. They’re facing an international economic and political meltdown of epic proportions. Several generations of business and political leaders have created the greatest "kick the can" bubble that the world has ever witnessed.

We can’t pinpoint the day on which this bubble will pop, but it would appear that we may now be quite close, as those who have been kicking the can have been running out of the means to continue. The approach of a crisis is doubly concerning, as, historically, whenever generations of older people destroy their economy from within, it invariably falls to the younger generation to dig the country out of the resultant rubble.

Never in history has a crisis of such great proportions loomed and yet, never in history has the unfortunate generation that will inherit the damage been so unequivocally incapable of coping with that damage. As unpleasant as it may be to accept, there’s no solution for idiocy. Any society that has hardwired a generation of its children to be unable to cope will find that that generation will be a lost one. It will, in fact, be the following generation – the one that has grown up during the aftermath of the collapse – that will, of necessity, develop the skills needed to cope with an actual recovery.

So, does that mean that the world will be in chaos for more than a generation before the next batch of people can be raised to cope? Well, no. Actually, that’s already happening. In Europe, where the Millennial trend exists, western Europeans have been growing up coddled and incapable, whilst eastern Europeans, who have experienced war and hardship, are growing up to be quite capable of handling whatever hardships come their way. Likewise, in Asia, the percentage of young people who are being raised to understand that they must soon shoulder the responsibility of the future is quite high.

And elsewhere in the world – outside the sphere of the EU, US, Canada, etc. – the same is largely true. As has been forever true throughout history, civilization does not come to a halt. It’s a "movable feast" that merely changes geographic locations from one era to another. Always, as one star burns out, another takes its place. What’s of paramount importance is to read the tea leaves – to see the future coming and adjust for it."

- internationalman.com

The Poet: Theodore Roethke, "The Far Field"

"The Far Field"

I

"I dream of journeys repeatedly:

Of flying like a bat deep into a narrowing tunnel

Of driving alone, without luggage, out a long peninsula,

The road lined with snow-laden second growth,

A fine dry snow ticking the windshield,

Alternate snow and sleet, no on-coming traffic,

And no lights behind, in the blurred side-mirror,

The road changing from glazed tarface to a rubble of stone,

Ending at last in a hopeless sand-rut,

Where the car stalls,

Churning in a snowdrift

Until the headlights darken.

II

At the field's end, in the corner missed by the mower,

Where the turf drops off into a grass-hidden culvert,

Haunt of the cat-bird, nesting-place of the field-mouse,

Not too far away from the ever-changing flower-dump,

Among the tin cans, tires, rusted pipes, broken machinery,-

One learned of the eternal;

And in the shrunken face of a dead rat, eaten by rain and ground-beetles

(I found it lying among the rubble of an old coal bin)

And the tom-cat, caught near the pheasant-run,

Its entrails strewn over the half-grown flowers,

Blasted to death by the night watchman.

I suffered for young birds, for young rabbits caught in the mower,

My grief was not excessive.

For to come upon warblers in early May

Was to forget time and death:

How they filled the oriole's elm, a twittering restless cloud, all one morning,

And I watched and watched till my eyes blurred from the bird shapes,-

Cape May, Blackburnian, Cerulean,-

Moving, elusive as fish, fearless,

Hanging, bunched like young fruit, bending the end branches,

Still for a moment,

Then pitching away in half-flight,

Lighter than finches,

While the wrens bickered and sang in the half-green hedgerows,

And the flicker drummed from his dead tree in the chicken-yard.

- Or to lie naked in sand,

In the silted shallows of a slow river,

Fingering a shell,

Thinking:

Once I was something like this, mindless,

Or perhaps with another mind, less peculiar;

Or to sink down to the hips in a mossy quagmire;

Or, with skinny knees, to sit astride a wet log,

Believing:

I'll return again,

As a snake or a raucous bird,

Or, with luck, as a lion.

I learned not to fear infinity,

The far field, the windy cliffs of forever,

The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow,

The wheel turning away from itself,

The sprawl of the wave,

The on-coming water.

III

The river turns on itself,

The tree retreats into its own shadow.

I feel a weightless change, a moving forward

As of water quickening before a narrowing channel

When banks converge, and the wide river whitens;

Or when two rivers combine, the blue glacial torrent

And the yellowish-green from the mountainy upland,-

At first a swift rippling between rocks,

Then a long running over flat stones

Before descending to the alluvial plane,

To the clay banks, and the wild grapes hanging from the elmtrees.

The slightly trembling water

Dropping a fine yellow silt where the sun stays;

And the crabs bask near the edge,

The weedy edge, alive with small snakes and bloodsuckers,-

I have come to a still, but not a deep center,

A point outside the glittering current;

My eyes stare at the bottom of a river,

At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains,

My mind moves in more than one place,

In a country half-land, half-water.

I am renewed by death, thought of my death,

The dry scent of a dying garden in September,

The wind fanning the ash of a low fire.

What I love is near at hand,

Always, in earth and air.

IV

The lost self changes,

Turning toward the sea,

A sea-shape turning around,-

An old man with his feet before the fire,

In robes of green, in garments of adieu.

A man faced with his own immensity

Wakes all the waves, all their loose wandering fire.

The murmur of the absolute, the why

Of being born falls on his naked ears.

His spirit moves like monumental wind

That gentles on a sunny blue plateau.

He is the end of things, the final man.

All finite things reveal infinitude:

The mountain with its singular bright shade

Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow,

The after-light upon ice-burdened pines;

Odor of basswood on a mountain-slope,

A scent beloved of bees;

Silence of water above a sunken tree:

The pure serene of memory in one man,-

A ripple widening from a single stone

Winding around the waters of the world."

- Theodore Roethke

"17 Words that Changed My Life Forever"

"17 Words that Changed My Life Forever"

by Jerry Clark

“I remember several years back I heard something that changed my life forever. Up until that point I had been struggling through life – doing everything the hard way. I couldn’t figure out why my life wasn’t going the way I felt it should be. I saw some people going through life effortlessly and seemingly with less tension and frustration while I was wondering if I could ever straighten out the mess my life had turned out to be. I was behind on my dreams, my promises, and my bills. Then one day I was listening to a tape and the lady was talking about the power of having dreams and goals and all of the other stuff that those motivational speakers talk about. By that point I had listened to hundreds of such tapes, but it seemed as if nothing worked for me.

Probably the only reason I was listening to that one was because I had developed a habit of listening to cassette tapes while driving my car. The statement the lady said was simple and I think I had even heard it somewhere before but this time a light bulb went on in my head. I remember stopping the tape and rewinding it over and over again to hear the 17 words she said. I couldn’t believe it was so basic and simple. I was looking for something sophisticated and complicated. I thought I had to attend a $10,000 seminar. I didn’t know I could find it on a $10 tape program.

I’m taking the time to tell you all of this preliminary information because when I tell you the 17 words, I really want you to get it and get it NOW! Because if you get it NOW, your life will never be the same. You will be using the same principle that all who have became wealthy before you have used. Even those who became wealthy and can’t tell you how they did use this same principle without even being aware of what they are doing. Well, are you ready for the 17 words that made a powerful and positive impact on my life and on the life of tens of thousands of individuals who have achieved unimaginable success? Of course you are… Well, here they are…

For things to change, you must get a picture

 of what you want them to change to.

Yes, it’s as simple as it sounds and as easy as it seems… Don’t try to make it any complicated than this because it will only frustrate you.

You must know exactly what you want and the more specific and clear you can get, the better. This is important because Human Beings are Teleological in nature… In other words, we move towards the pictures we constantly hold in our minds. Let me give you an example… Suppose you went to the store and bought a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle but it didn’t have a picture on the box of what the end result should look like.

Would you have a much harder time putting the picture together? Of course. You may eventually figure it out; however, the person who has a clear picture of what the end result should look like will be more than 100 times ahead of you. The question is are they 100 times ahead of you because their IQ is 100 times greater? Is it because they are 100 times better looking than you? Maybe it’s because they live 100 times closer to the person who created the puzzle? Ohh, I know – they were one of the first students to take the Evelyn Woods mind-expanding speed-reading and comprehension course right? If none of this is true then what is?

Yes, the person who had the clear and specific picture of what the outcome was supposed to be was simply operating in accordance to how our brain works. It moves towards the pictures we hold in our mind. It’s interesting because once you know exactly what it is you are moving towards, you seem to automatically know the steps to take or the necessary steps will soon become noticeable.

Your brain's subconscious mind, operating similar to a magnet, will start to attract in your direction the conditions, people, and circumstances that will help you move closer to the mental picture you maintain in your mind and it will repel all of those things that do not correlate to the picture you have in your mind. Therefore, the people who are clear and specific about what they want are using the powers of the Universe to assist them. This is, indeed, an awesome power. A person who knows how and uses this awesome power of the Universe to his or her advantage is a person who is working smart. A person who struggles every day trying to move closer to the success that they have no idea how it’s supposed to look is a person who is working hard.

Based on your observations over the years, do you think that most people are working hard or working smart? People who just work hard day in and day out without a clear picture of what they are moving towards are about as exciting as a tulip. Even though they may seem to be willing to work hard and put in the hours, they don’t seem to have much life in them. And people want to follow people who seem to have some life in them. If they want to find people who don’t seem to have much life in them, all they have to do is go to their job. People will follow people who look like they know where they are going and look like they are excited about the journey.

You must understand that your strength comes from knowing what you want. This will ignite the fire inside of you and enable you to borrow from the promise of the future so you can engage in the activities today that will move you closer and closer to what you want. It will enable you to go through the trials and tribulations that may be necessary so you can arrive at your destination. But remember the journey will be more important than the destination because in the journey you will become the person you require to become to finally arrive at your destination. So when you reach your destination, look at the person you have become and set a new destination so you can continue to grow and develop.

Whatever you do, just always remember that for things to change, you must get a picture of what you want them to change to. These are the "17 Words that Changed My Life Forever"… why not allow them to change yours too?”

- http://prorev.com

"How It Really Is"

"Back when I taught at UCLA, I was constantly amazed at how little so many students knew. Finally, I could no longer restrain myself from asking a student the question that had long puzzled me: ''What were you doing for the last 12 years before you got here?''

- Thomas Sowell

○

"The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think.

 The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling."

- Thomas Sowell

○

"The trouble with most people is that they think with 

their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds." 

- Will Durant

○

"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance."

- Thomas Sowell

"It's Human Nature..."

“We’ve all heard the warnings and we’ve ignored them. We push our luck. We roll the dice. It’s human nature. When we’re told not to touch something we usually do even if we know better. Maybe because deep down, we’re just asking for trouble.”

- “Meredith Grey”, “Gray’s Anatomy”

If so, we're certainly getting all we want...

"The Life Of Brian"

"Yep - another true story. The Norwegian censorship authority invoked the blasphemy section of the Penal Code (section 142) to prohibit "The Life of Brian", even though this law had not been applied in decades. And yes, the Swedish film industry did run a marketing campaign on that fact. Thank goodness for our First Amendment rights!"

- Robert W. Malone

Full screen recommended.

And remember to...

Full screen recommended.

"Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life"

"Is the Middle Class Being Destroyed on Purpose?"

"Is the Middle Class Being Destroyed on Purpose?"

by Chris Martenson

"Our hardships are often reported back to us as if they were mysterious objects found at an archeological dig. But US citizens are subject to a bewildering array of perfectly understandable, and infuriating, schemes and rackets. Banking and financialization have gone too far, and are about to kill the golden goose (the middle class).

Does it seem like it’s getting harder and harder to get by and make ends meet? Not only is that actually true for the average family or person, but it’s also happening on purpose. The Middle Class is being systematically dismantled, through a combination of reckless monetary and spending policies at the macro level, but also at the micro level by predatory insurance and private equity practices.

In 1960, the average household spent 22.5% of income on housing, healthcare, and tuition; today, it’s 37%, a 68% increase in the share of income required to have a roof over one’s head, access to medical care when needed, and education. In other words, the bare minimum. The average household is now being squeezed from all sides. By rising property taxes and insurance on one side, by crushing student debts on another, and by private equity shenanigans on another.

Add it all up, and Americans are going deeper and deeper into debt as they attempt to keep their noses above the rising inflationary waters. In Q2 2025, Household debt rose by $185 billion, with mortgage debt ($131 billion) and auto loans ($13 billion) leading the increase. Credit card debt now exceeds $1 trillion, and student loans are often non-dischargeable in bankruptcy.

But the really infuriating part? So-called “private equity” has been operating as effective mini-regional monopolies in such areas as HVCA, cement, plumbing, and veterinary services. The scheme is, a given private equity firm will buy up all of the HVAC companies in a region, keeping the names to camouflage the operations as family-owned small businesses, and then hiking the fees across all of the firms at once so that you cannot escape the 300% price hikes. Don’t like the price at once firm? Call another. Oh no! They’re just as high!!

Just as mysteriously, Home insurance costs have surged of late, with the firms blaming Climate Change. The problem? None of the data supports the idea that storms are any more frequent or violent. Instead, replacement costs have gone through the roof, in part driven by private equity, which it would not surprise us to learn is owned in part by the insurance companies themselves.

Scams nested within scams wrapped within schemes, all designed to squeeze every last dollar out of helpless families. And government regulators? They are nowhere to be seen or found.

What’s the answer?

Step 1 is to be aware of the scams and schemes.

Step 2 is to realize what you can control and what you cannot.

Step 3 is to take action to build resilience and financial freedom.

To avoid becoming roadkill, this is what we each must do. So, to answer the question in the title, yes, the middle class is being intentionally destroyed."

https://peakprosperity.com/

View the video on Rumble:

- https://rumble.com/

Canadian Prepper, "Leave The City While You Still Can!"

Full screen recommended.

Canadian Prepper, 8/9/25

"Leave The City While You Still Can!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Musical Interlude: Era, “Infinity Ocean”

Full screen recommended.

Era, “Infinity Ocean”

"A Look to the Heavens"

"Have you contemplated your home galaxy lately? If your sky looked like this, perhaps you'd contemplate it more often! The featured picture is actually a composite of two images taken from the same location in south Brazil and with the same camera - but a few hours apart. The person in the image - also the astrophotographer - has much to see in the Milky Way Galaxy above.

Click image for larger size.

The central band of our home Galaxy stretches diagonally up from the lower left. This band is dotted with spectacular sights including dark nebular filaments, bright blue stars, and red nebulas. Millions of fainter and redder stars fill in the deep Galactic background. To the lower right of the Milky Way are the colorful gas and dust clouds of Rho Ophiuchi, featuring the bright orange star Antares. On this night, just above and to the right of Antares was the bright planet Jupiter. The sky is so old and so familiar that humanity has formulated many stories about it, some of which inspired this very picture."

- https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap191015.html

Chet Raymo, “The Seeds of Contemplation”

“The Seeds of Contemplation”

by Chet Raymo

“Do a Google search for “Cuthbert” and you’ll get two main hits: a stunning blonde Canadian actress who I never heard of, and the 7th-century Anglo-Saxon monk I was looking for. Make that an image search and poor Saint Cuthbert gets washed away in a sea of unclad sexiness that would probably have rattled the poor abbot/bishop to his core.

Well, we don’t really know, do we? We don’t really know what was on Saint Cuthbert’s mind. Certainly he had an impressive career as a Church administrator, but be seems to have been irresistibly drawn to the life of an anchorite. For a while he was prior at the famous abbey of Lindisfarne on the coast of Northumbria, then bishop of the same place, but he gave all that up for a solitary cell on the nearby island of Farne. According to tradition, his severe abode had no windows or doors, and no views of scenery or humans. It was circular and open only to the sky. There Cuthbert lived, like a mouse at the bottom of a coffee can.

Was his mouse-eye view of the sky enough to feed his soul? Presumably he didn’t see rainbows, since rainbows don’t appear near the zenith. He was far enough north (56° 37′) not to see the sun at all, even in summer, depending on how wide was the angle of his view of the sky. Only a few bright stars illuminated his night: Capella, Vega, and Deneb (taking into account the 18 degrees of precession since his time). In late summer the Milky Way would have been draped overhead, although- alas- the least bright part of the galaxy. The aurora would have entertained him on occasion, and “shooting stars.”

How much is enough? Thoreau had his pond, and dinner at the Emersons whenever he wanted. Henry Beston had the whole wide sea crashing outside his “outermost” house on Cape Cod. Annie Dillard’s Tinker Creek was in a valley, but her patch of sky was supplemented by woods and fields and the always changing theater of the creek itself. Many of us have longed at one time or another for greater simplicity, for a life lived deliberately, for the intensely-experienced few rather than the trivialized many. It’s all a matter of finding the balance, between the harsh parsimony of the anchorite’s cell and the rush and clutter of 21st-century, media-saturated overload.”

- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/

"Market Overheating, Economy Plunging; It's Much Worse Than You Think"

Full screen recommended.

Jeremiah Babe, 8/9/25

"Market Overheating, Economy Plunging; 

It's Much Worse Than You Think"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"The Land Of Dreams...

“Father, O father! what do we here
In this land of unbelief and fear?
The Land of Dreams is better far,
Above the light of the morning star.”
- William Blake, “The Land of Dreams”

The Daily "Near You?"

Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada. Thanks for stopping by!

"Why?"

"Is there an answer to the question of why bad things happen to good people? The response would be… to forgive the world for not being perfect, to forgive God for not making a better world, to reach out to the people around us, and to go on living despite it all, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it has happened."

- Harold S. Kushner

"Reflections on School and Prison"

"Reflections on School and Prison"

By John Taylor Gatto

"My wife doesn't allow a television in our home, so when I'm traveling alone, as I often must, temptation sometimes overwhelms me and I find myself indiscriminately channel-surfing for hours, searching for what - I don't know, perhaps a football game even in March or April, May, June, July, August.

It was on such a fruitless mission that I paused on the A&E channel long enough to hear that a documentary about cults was in the offing. If I watched the thing, I was promised I would learn the six secret principles of cults, how to enslave the human mind beyond its power to escape, how to imprison the spirit, bending it to the discipline of the cult. Hey, my wife wasn't around, sounded "educational" to me.

In a dreamlike state in the Howard Johnson's motel in Norwich, New York I heard that the first way to recognize a cult was that it "keeps its victims unaware." 'Why, that's just what institutional schools do,' I said to myself; I've spent the last 10 years of my life traveling a million and a half miles to bear witness to that universal crime of forced schooling I had been a party to over a 30-year public school teaching career.

And, the television intoned in order, a cult controls its victims' time and environment (by this time I was sitting up with pen and pad taking notes), creates fear and dependency, suppresses old customs, instills new beliefs, and allows no criticism. "But, but," I heard my conscience sputtering, "that's the perfect formula for a government school." School was structured to be an expression of cult discipline! School was a cult, not unlike the murder cult Princess Grace ended her days on earth a member of, or the legendary Thuggee in British India which worshipped Kali, the Destroyer!

Prison, as we have evolved it following British and Hindu models, seeks to impose the same discipline on its serious recruits, breaking them to an understanding of their own profound worthlessness. It should be no secret to anyone reading this that in America, the land of the free, more people are imprisoned, by far, than in any nation past or present, including Communist China or Stalin's Soviet Union. Prison in America is a booming business, incarcerating about five times the percentage of our population who were jailed in the middle of the Great Depression. Some fiendish spirit is loose in our land whose bleak heart can only be plumbed by seeing the correspondences among cults, prisons, and schools.

The most obvious relationship between government schooling and our penal system is that they both involve prisons of measured time: Movements, thoughts, associations in both are controlled by total strangers whose biographies remain a sealed book to inmates and their families. Any attempt to uncover those biographies in order to consider the fitness of employees would be met by howls of outrage and refusal, or punished severely if the research were pressed.

The structures in which students are confined along with their certified handlers long ago exceeded any human scale, they are megalithic constructions designed to emphasize the insignificance of the indwelling population, and the stark power of their invisible masters. Yet both the anonymity of the operatives and the inhumanity of the architecture have a subtler side, too, a side which can only be appreciated when you realize that its purpose is to make us childish.

Almost all Americans have had an intense school experience which occupied their entire youth, an experience during which they were drilled thoroughly in the culture and economy of the well-schooled greater society, in which individuals have been rendered helpless to do much of anything except watch television or punch buttons on a keypad.

Before you begin to blame the childish for being that way and join the chorus of those defending the general imprisonment of adults and the schooling by force of children because there isn't any other way to handle the mob, you want to at least consider the possibility that we've been trained in childishness and helplessness for a reason. And that reason is that helpless people are easy to manage. Helpless people can be counted upon to act as their own jailers because they are so inadequate to complex reality they are afraid of new experience. They're like animals whose spirits have been broken. Helpless people take orders well, they don't have minds of their own, they are predictable, they won't surprise corporations or governments with resistance to the newest product craze, the newest genetic patent - or by armed revolution. Helpless people can be counted on to despise independent citizens and hence they act as a fifth column in opposition to social change in the direction of personal sovereignty.

From a managerial standpoint, people addicted to defining their lives by the stuff they buy, or by pats on the head, comprise a managerial utopia. In prison, or school, the way to this condition, this safe condition, is prepared by a drill in the extension of small privileges and honors, or the withholding of same, by punishments and rewards externally imposed until the inner ability of the human spirit to punish or reward itself - and hence by free of tutelage - is destroyed or suppressed. The animal trainers in service to the rich and powerful through history- not B.F. Skinner or the behaviorists- created this form of training.

Some kids become too wordlessly angry at this deal to conform to the patterns laid down in 12 years of forced training; for these a graduate school or schools are created; for most it is the school of poverty and marginalization; for some, the school called jail. Jail is a place where the bare bones of forced schooling become exposed and highlighted:

•In prison you stay in your classroom 24 hours a day.

•In prison the teachers wear guns and carry clubs.

•In prison all associations are strictly controlled.

Both school and prison are high security institutions, cut off from the general society. The possibilities of learning in either place are so strictly limited that only a few survive this training intact. Both make us helpless to direct our own lives. Prison is only a more stringent refresher course for angry and confused souls who retain some notion of personal independence, however warped or grotesque the natural impulse has become.

About 6.3 million Americans have the experience of prison added to the experience of forced schooling, but such a number is only the tip of an iceberg. Thanks to lurid newspaper stories, endless television, movies, books, songs, and other public utterances under the control of corporate managers, all of us are steeped in a vision where prison seems the only protection of physical safety in a dangerous world. We are taught our fellow beings are violently untrustworthy; that only through the protection of authorities can we be safe. Both school and prison destroy trust, the glue of real community. It's a divide-and-conquer strategy, and it works.

Corporate culture has become a resonator of low-level fearfulness to such an extent that we gladly throw huge numbers of our fellow human beings in jail, just as we abandon our children to penal institutionalization in schools; the constant presentation of prison as our salvation, or school as the essential trainer of children, makes us all prisoners. It corrupts our inner life, it divides us from one another so that relationships lifelong are thin and shallow. School teaches us to divorce one another, to put aside loyalty for advantage, to quell our inner voices, subordinating them to management.

School and prison do the work that Rome's first emperor, Julius Cesear, said was necessary to manage a conquered population. In order to keep the conquered conquered, you have to keep them divided. School classrooms do that job more gently than prison cells, but they do it more effectively.

The people who inflict these things on the rest of us are insane, however normal their words and countenances appear. Hard as that is to believe, you must remember that this nation became rich, powerful, and the free-est place in civilized human history without any forced schooling-or prisons-to speak of. In spite of their neat suits, white shirts, and calm ways of speaking, the folks who build and maintain forced institutional schooling-as well as professionalized institutional mass incorporation-are insane, sick people cut off from human understanding, cut off from the hopes and dreams of ordinary humanity.

You may prefer, however, to see them as crazy as foxes. Both school and prison - by cutting us off from raw experience with people, projects, and ideas - have trained us to stay in harmony with a mass-production economy whose principle product is junk which must be consumed if it is to survive. The survival of this economy depends upon people becoming addicted to consumption, addicted to owning (and discarding) stuff. As my own addiction to mindlessness re-emerges when I travel alone, and is testified to by aimless channel-surfing on television, hour upon hour, so too, for almost all, in one fashion or another; what begins as a nearly universal human weakness - but only a minor part of healthy life, well within control - becomes, through forced training from birth in our culture, mightily enhanced by schooling and television, the common destiny of the commons.

School also trains us to accept a gigantic government with multiple police forces whose need is to control all significant decisions, even in private lives. The monstrous government with its comprehensive surveillance, its theft of your money, its ability to confine those who resist indoctrination, is the perfect mirror imitation of a command economy where "work" is mostly defined in corporate boardrooms, where the wishes and plans of a few CEOs and their families are imposed on the lives of all. These are the new nobility, bidding fair over the past several decades to extend their rule over the entire planet. Welcome to the American empire which has replaced both Republican and Democratic forbears.

School is the processing center for its mercenaries, who, of necessity must needs be made incomplete. This could not have happened without first rendering our people frightened of personal sovereignty, by making them childish and dependent. But is it now too strong to be overthrown?

I don't think so, but the road away from it will be long and difficult. There is no mechanism in existence through which its antithesis can be mobilized except the individual family, the particular family, the unique family. Associations of families which waste their time in wholesale opposition to the thing are doomed, I believe, to disappointment. We will not see this power rolled back in our lifetimes.

Yet saying this is a far cry from throwing up one's hands in despair. Rust doesn't organize to bring down a powerful building nor do termites organize to collapse a house. Each set of molecules, less of any contradiction to the integrity of the larger structure. The miracle we're after at large is available to each on of us in small right now. First you have to break the invisible chains that schooling has laid on your own mind; you need to stop defining yourself by what you buy or who approves of you. Stop being fearful of new experiences or at least press on regardless of your fear.

By all means homeschool your kids for a while and if you can't do that, teach them to be quiet little saboteurs of the school order. Teach them that very little of value will happen to them as a gift inside school walls, but that if they "want" an education they will have to take it, nobody is ever given an education. Teach them that. Teach them to challenge the world around them, to take risks. Teach them the junk they put in their minds through television, indeed through all forms of commercial entertainment, is propaganda of one sort of another.

You might even unplug your television today. Or go to see an old friend you haven't seen in a while. In the next election, vote for a third-party candidate; whatever he or she stands for is irrelevant. Once you begin breaking out of the jail your schooling built around you you'll think of many things to do for yourself and your kids. You don't need any gurus, not even me. And when you finally break out of your private jail you'll discover how wonderful and necessary a gift of God that liberty really is. Hey, get started!”

- http://www.homeschoolnewslink.com/