Inheritance

On the right: The factory gate at Dupont Chamber Works in Deepwater, NJ, which my Dad passed through for 35 years.

 

 That Essence Rare

 

I have always bristled under the yoke of wage work. I always understood it as an imbalance of power. Someone is making money off of my labor. I don’t know if it came from seeing my Dad work, understanding that “work weren’t no joy”. I think that is from the Clash, “The Equalizer” on Sandinista!. That song kinda spelled it out. [lyrics] I learned a lot from The Clash. “The men at the factory are old and cunning/You don’t owe nothin’, so boy get running” (“Clampdown”). Maybe that’s where I first grasped the concept, but I knew my Dad hated work, too. He was a creative person who read books, liked art and music, and was often doing art, whether it was political cartoons or pen and ink drawings. But he had a family to support. Sometimes all that anger and frustration would build up. Sometimes I was on the receiving end.

I always wanted my life to have more meaning. To have some sort of significance. Even in college, perhaps to my detriment, all I thought about was learning. Becoming smarter, understanding the world and how it worked, learning about other cultures, including spending a lot of time in the AV room playing records on turntables. But I also didn’t have what it took to be successful in college. Not only did the state-run residential school not makeup for my lack of middle-class conditioning in how to make it, but my counselor pushed me to a liberal Arts education when I wanted to go to art school. I didn’t regret what I learned through a Liberal Arts education, and I learned a lot. Mostly readings outside the curriculum. Given my natural curiosity, I’d probably have pursued that path of knowledge anyway, even if I’d gone to art school.

I wanted to be an artist. I drew all the time up until high school (when things went terribly wrong). Then started back up again at Chelsea School, where I was sent by the state. I had a great art teacher. It was my favorite class. There was a stereo and we’d play music. To me, art class wasn’t long enough. I wanted to create and would lose myself in the act. And to take something from my head and put it into the real world was life affirming, an expression of myself. My Dad used to encourage my creativity, while my stepmother saw it as useless activity: if it wasn’t making money, there was no point in it. And she made us work, my sister and I. We were free labor for her, packing up trucks to go to flea markets around South Jersey. Getting up at some ridiculous hour, like 5am. Maybe earlier. Sometimes she would even take us out of school. Not to mention all the housework and projects we had to work on. And you better do it right and not mess up! Maybe that’s why I hate work so much. The most freedom I found was going on camping trips, away from doing yard work and packing trucks, and chores which I liked, like gathering firewood, setting up the tents, that sort of stuff. Outdoors and unsupervised.

I was also a sensitive kid. Not that anyone acknowledged that or was supportive. I know I cared about people. I saw the Woodstock movie, and was moved by the spirit of cooperation. I grew my hair long. Tight jeans and knee-high moccasin boots. When I got to Chelsea, my pederast counselor, led me in the direction of learning about the anti-war movement of the 1960s and the counterculture in general. Then there was The Clash, and punk in general. Especially the lyrics of The Gang of Four, which, little did I know, was leading me to critical theory, the Frankfurt school, and Herbert Marcuse and ”One Dimensional Man”. And in the library at Bard College, comparing the liberalism (not that kind) of Locke to Marx’s critique of it, my understanding grew. That was it. At that point I was fully anti-establishment and there was no going back. Once you open that can of worms, there is no putting the lid back on, short of electroshock and brainwashing. 

When I was at Chelsea, at the encouragement of “Stan, the Man”, my perv counselor, I started going to no-nuke group meetings, went to the no-nuke concert in Central Park, and even went to a War Resister’s League meeting. I refused to register for Selective Service, my first act of civil disobedience, which meant I had to lie on my financial aid application, that I had registered, which was against the law. No way was I going to give up college for my principles though. Fuck that. And I registered as a conscientious objector with the Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization. 

So, yeah, I always wanted more meaning in my life, to do something of significance, and most importantly, to start to “create the new world in the shell of the old”. I knew wage work was just exploitation that diminished the worker while enriching the employer, but more importantly, the whole Capitalist Class. My whole life, with that bitter knowledge, I butted heads with bosses, managers, supervisors, and owners. I knew if we weren’t being exploited for private gain, all that productive energy could be put toward creating a human world free of unnecessary suffering and enforced misery. And aesthetics, the artistic impulse, would be turned to that instead of the creation of cultural commodities. Without fully understanding, I knew that what I wanted was a society of free and equal producers, creating a world that embodied the human spirit and reflected our humanity in all its resplendent beauty.

To be continued…