Date: Wed, 17 Mar 93 15:45:38 -0700
Message-Id: <9303172241.AA15372@csf.Colorado.EDU>
Errors-To: roper@csf.Colorado.EDU
Reply-To: DFOSS@CCVM.sunysb.edu
Originator: wsn@csf.colorado.edu
Sender: wsn@csf.Colorado.EDU
Precedence: bulk
From: "Daniel A. Foss" <DFOSS@CCVM.sunysb.edu>
To: chriscd@jhuvm.hcf.jhu.edu
Subject:      the past that allegedly was vs any future at all
 
   Someone asked why the class is not responding to the unstimulating
confection of the periodical business press, CNN-news-analysy projections,
hardhead-ecofreakery, and other such arrantly nonsensical if inevitable (by
which I mean no way around it) ingredients of ye vraiment *Plausible Future*.
 
   That's to say, again, no matter how good you are at it, it's still going
to turn out, as the Hungarians would have said under Stalinism, "The People's
Future," that is, Lousy.
 
   Yesterday, by way of contrast, I introduced the "present" setting of the
plot, meaning as in fiction but there's plenty of the Paranoid sort too, of
my wababe space opera, A Civilization Decades In Advance Of Our Own: Contact!
By Carl Sagan Meets The Modern World System By Immanuel Wallerstein. This was
certain to have got no Afterword from the latter author. Though it kept his
faith. And the beauty part, as far as I was concerned, was that it didn't need
any future; it had the entire Past to play with.
 
   The wonderful thing about the Past is that it was and still is supposed to
have *was*, and *was* the way Them, call the local representative of Them Ms
Rosalyn Olitsky, ninth-grade teacher. This was a four year high school, so we
may call her High School Freshman Year teacher or whatever, I forget. In
History, she would Take Points Off for spelling. This was good for the
Normative Power of Facticity in terms of the noosphere going up our noses every
second; and out the same way virtually unchanged by its Processing through our
Unique Individual True Self.
   What must be correctly spelled or Teacher will Take Points Off self-
evidently more Seriously exists or existed than that the spelling whereof is
discretionary. Failure to Take Points Off for spelling is conducive to social
indiscipline, surliness, cross-class dressing by Inferiors, and, in the end,
Revolution; it all started when Jefferson, not considerate enough to think of
*other people's slaves*, changed Property to Pursuit of Happiness. From this,
kids today have not only got funny ideas about their Right To Party without
Having Money (whereby is proved one's Moral Deservingness of having a good time
which those so entitled will have no idea what that is any more than I do).
   Much worse, these kids today have got, direct from their utter licence to
spell Thingies of the Past as they please, the sense of said Past, which we
are all agreed *really was* if we were brought up Right, having been in
actuality indistinct, faked, or never-were-at-all; quickly generalized to low
and dangerous notions that School, as we call it through highschool graduation,
then the Educational Process as we tell undergratuates its name actually is in
terms of their need to know, finally Rigourous Training in Professionalism for
Meaningful Careers if they are talented *and* trustworthy, is [barnyard
epithet] and *CAPITALIST BRAINWASHING* or things worse than that which they
are going to make up Next Time, you'll see, as I am CERTAIN you are not going
to listen to me and take a FIRM HAND within an IRON GLOVE to these barbarians
you call your Children and the Future of the Nation. Mark my words.
 
   This is what the Past is for. To show what ideology does and how and why
we let it be that way, one must exaggerate and twist things a bit. After all,
THEM does it, right? *What the past is paid for is to have was*, to the extent
that time-immemoriality is what the [conventional interpretation of social]
Reality is in large measure paid for. [Note: observe how easily the usage
"paid for" gets around the sandtraps and flytraps of functionalist lingo; and
at the same time it articulates something which, by having been made
Intentionally *silly*, cibtruves withal to Get Real.]
 
   The Past, you will find, has a career of its own. It has a way of having
the sense it makes to us present-timers altered as the ideologies whereby the
present is made to make sense to us demans: What is now the nature of things,
always was the nature of things. From this and only from this do we acquire
the misplaced confidence that the future will be a mere continuation, prolong-
ation, extension of the existing tedium till we die of it. We are making no
mistake in investing Human Capital as if we will be the same living samely,
only older and better. There will always be a capitalism, always be an England,
always be an Alienation where flatworms learn and pussycats learn but you, you
unqualified scum, cannot have learned because Teacher was not around to give
you a grade. You can;t learn, Them teach. The reason I believe this is, if Them
would give the order, Go Teach, we will pay, I'd shut up. Even without the
money I'd do it for the Occupational Prestige Score alone.
 
   **** HATE THE UPPER MIDDLE CLASS BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT IN IT ****
   There's no other good reason.
 
   Recall from yesterday that Earth is within the National Space of a
semiperipheral country anyone can tell is Mexico. "There were two things
about this country that were truly astronomical: the rate of inflation and
the magnitude of the external debt." The ruling PRI's Party organ, the
Division of Applied Anthropology, is sharged with mucking about in Earth's
Past to ensure that Earth History turns out in accordance with the Party
Doctrine, which not even the Retarded take seriously what with the country
abutting the Superpower of the Spiral Arm called the Collossus, regarding
"the tending of all life toward socialism." The rightwing PAN, operating
through its lucrative front, the Indo-European Corporation, which owns the
rights to the English Language and many many others (and collects royalties
on every word over the phone, data-entered in the ocmputer, said in the
movies and TV, printed, faxed, whatnot; since, *if this is capitalism, somebody
or something has by definition got to own the rights to each and every thing*.
(Like the old, "Nulle terre sans seigneur.") And wants to resume Collection
parts of Europe which have for decades been plain *deadbeats*.
 
   What ensues is supposed to be a farce of spy vs spy, with nobody changing
much of Earth's history much. This is where I can use racism. You'll never
believe someone of my race would be allowed to teach Race and Intergroup, but
odd looks were all tne more an inducement to get me Early Retired by the
students and get someone not only Normal-looking but Competent, too, instead.
What I loved was Stereotypes, and would "teach" - laughably speakding - people
how to make Stereotypes for Peoples who did not exist, or did not exist as we
know them, or, like the Sub-Carpatho-Ruthenians, existed only for tax purposes.
 
   So both sides, lazy and slovenly as Stereotype demanded, cancelled each
other our. Occasionally, I'd tell my e-mail correspondents that Port Jefferson
was gone and there was a place called Port Leisler not in quite the same place.
You all know, I'm sure, that Jacob Leisler headed the first last and only
regime to take state power in Anglo North America as a result of proletarian
insurrection; this was in 1690. Leisler's Fatal Mistake, the Left always makes
Fatal Mistakes unless you kill many more people than necessary to evade killing
to few; "pitiless and relentless terror" and all that which in the end comes
out when it hurts you most, "We're trying to *be good* now, honest!"
   Leisler's mistake was, I was saying, failure Decisively and Resulutely to
Crush, due to Right-Opportunist errors, the refugee bourgeois-Moderate
government of the Province of New York, then hiding out in Albany. In 1691
the British reinstalled the Albany regime and hung Leisler for Treason. That
is the way it goes, but suspend awareness of that occasionally.
 
   Through all of history and long before the sturggle continued, with the
Myth-Implanter from the Division of Applied Antropology, name of Yahweh and
a fallguy for the higherups, introduced explaining Dietary Laws to hominids
in Olduvai Gorge. "As for Australopithecus thou shalt not eat, for
Austoalopithecus is thy brother." Which means there is no food supply.
   "Go outside. You have a world to win."
   "Suppose we get lost."
 
   Can't go into how my fictionalized persona became the slave, officially
Research Assistant, of Procopius of Caesarea, court historian of the Sacred
Palace of Justinian The Great, psychotic but on a supreme autocrat grandiosity
delusions like Vicegerent of Christ on Earth can look pretty good. Procopius,
you know, was a snoop and a gossip who hid behind pillars and wrote a Secret
History which is mostly lies which represent the real unofficial version as
officially approved.
 
   The whole novel came to utter ruin when I was required by common sense to
write a sex scene between the Emperor Justinian, who was Orthodox Catholic,
and Empress Theodora, who was Monophysite. I told you about my difficulty with
dirty parts. It is also incontestable that sex across theological lines
regarding the Nature(s) of Christ presented especially great problems, both
at the time and to the novelist. But how can you cop out when you have for a
fictitious character the second most beautiful woman (Helen of Troy had the
brains of Patty Hearst) of all history and the smartest, smarter even than
Cleopatra (who looked like a graduate student with hair in bun and spoke seven
languages).
   What was I doing in 532? I'd been locked up in the I-E Corp's Time Prison
in that time zone; the guerrillas made a getaway in a yellow schoolbus; and I
got bumped when one of the guerrillas insisting his pet sheep, Agnes Dei, later
sacrificed in contemporary Mexico by hungry Maya, along with him. this was a
touch of autobiographical realism.
 
   What good did it do? Thanks to this silliness, I learned a helluvalot about
the Sixth Century Bubonic Plague (a.k.a., The Plague of Justinian; "demographic
sinks" inclusive of the chain of causation leading to the rise of Islam; and
the doings and reactions of ruling classes confronted by sudden and unimagined
Labor Shortage. And such.
 
   Live in the Past like me; it's not any more Real than the Future, but the
way it got faked can get understood lots easier.
 
Daniel A. Foss