Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man (tase crime alert)
John P David
Comes . . .
"Heather Henderson" <hea...@scc.net> wrote in message
news:3cb106fb...@news.scc.net...
Running in circles around in the woods with her head in a sack to say . . .
>
> You're projecting.
Yeah, well, I suppose I'm just as bourgeois as the next person, what with
only three payments left on the house, two cars, and all the usual
lobotomizing creature comforts of a totally bourgeois existence what with
the vegetable garden and enough abysmally middle class cash on hand to take
a Paris vacation if we wanted it, but . . . "projecting"? I don't think so.
As is well known, such a psycho-neurotic syndrome as that can only occur on
an unconscious basis. In other words only a bourgeois who was consciously
unaware of the shamefulness of his status as a bourgeois would manifest the
compulsive behavior of projecting the conceit of it upon another.
So, no. What we see in my rather ill-considered and humorless response to
Harter, to wit---
> >"Richard Harter" <c...@tiac.net> wrote in message
> >news:3cb08ef8...@news.SullyButtes.net...
> >
> >. . . writes a lot of cowardly, vituperative, envy-ridden, bourgeois
yuppie
> >snot.
---accurate as it may be, is anything but "projection", indeed had Accordion
Girl's response been mine, were I to have said, "You're projecting," that
indeed, in his case would have been rather more to the point--but in what
way?
Well, to charge another person with "envy" always seems an awfully low blow,
doesn't it, because it can seldom be done in a way that doesn't look
terribly self-serving since it presents the appearance in one who makes the
charge, of a person trying to think a lot of himself such that he should
suppose the hostility of another to be founded in the sort of jaded
admiration that envy amounts to.
Yet, look at the text of his story, but more than that the tone of it, as
"Jean Paul" is described: the narrator is at least grudgingly honest enough
in his bourgeois conceit to admit that the protagonist's life-style among
the working class is certainly affording a great source of grist for his
literary mill. Yet all the while that world that Jean Paul is moving in is,
in the snotty terms of the narrator referred to as a "world of grunge". How
can anything be more supercilious, bourgeois, more a direct manifestation of
class conceit, bigotry and prejudice than that? Again he grudgingly admits
that stories from that world are all the rage.
Of course they are--and why? Look at the kind of utter pabulum oozing from
the pens of bourgeois writers in this or any day. The other day I was
trying to find some interest in *The Portrait of a Lady* by Henry James
which starts out with all this so very frivolous, upper crust, effete
frippery surrounding the custom of the English Tea--and I absolutely could
not stomach it. Much as I wanted to take a crack at something by James that
I might like, by way of a style study, the further I penetrated it, the more
I became certain that my reading time was better spent in something else--so
I went back to Kierkegaard and something of Philip Roth--*Sabbath's
Theatre*.
Let us speak of Upper Crust & Bourgeois Art: Check out the video shelves.
There is nothing happening worth writing a movie about in the lives of those
snot-nose people Listen: if there is so much as the vaguest appearance on
that DVD or video case of a woman in a bridal veil with some rosy-faced,
short-haired, milk-fed, pampered looking thirty-something hick from the
suburbs pictured on that thing,--okay, I'm already starting get SICK TO MY
STOMACH just to so much as look at schlock in a box like that.
So, what indeed is Richard Harter projecting? Nothing except his bourgeois
conceit and class prejudice, so how can it be the classic case of
"projection" where his own guilt or narcissism is being projected on "Jean
Paul"? Is that in any way what we see? No, to be honest, it is no more a
manifestation of projection in his case than it can be in mine. I would
have to be feeling guilt about my bourgeois existence to project it upon
another person, and one could only feel guilt about it if one were not being
honest with himself about it. But first, one would have to be conceited in
his bourgeois status in order to feel the guilt of that conceit--for that is
the only thing which is of issue here--something unconscious which
absolutely *must* compulsively be gotten rid of by projection. This is at
the heart and soul of Freudian theory, how guilt (over anything) will drive
a person mad if he cannot in catharsis, cathect, or i.e. purge the charge
of it before it attacks the ego. Projection is just one neurotic mechanism
by which this can be done--it works by wreaking the damage on others. Its
social psychological counterpart is scapegoating behavior.
Thus now we see that the tables have turned once again, for we certainly see
the conceit in Richard Harter's characterization of Jean Paul. We see how
it is that Harter's conceit is--to evoke the Freudian term directly
describing it-- a *reaction-formation* of the guilt he harbors; his conceit
is the reactive mechanism which forms as the result of his terrible,
shameful act of selling out to the bourgeoisie--this is how he represses
that guilt and saves face in his own sight. That guilt-filled conceit is
the dirt he projects into the face and upon the figure of "Jean Paul" to
dirty him sufficiently that he should not become an existential threat, or
all the more unspeakably, an object of Richard Harter's conscious envy--but
that is rarely the character of envy that it should be *conscious*. No,
there are too many mechanisms working to repress any appearance of envy, and
it is usually the last thing, e.g. a narcissist will ever admit to himself.
No, it must be repressed and kept unconscious because it is too demeaning
to admit of it. Thus we see these imprecations about how Jean Paul's
activist consciousness has nothing whatever to do with "thought", but is
rather just a storehouse of old revolutionary rhetoric, just all vocabulary
continually being recycled for use in new causes and situations.
But is that true? In some cases it may very well be, but more often with
activists of the 70's than the 60's. The people that came to it in the 70's
were joiners not rebels. The "needle drugs" of which he speaks were part of
the latter day decadence of the era not of it's "Flower-Power" explosive
beginnings when there was some of that around, but just enough to be
largely, and vastly frowned upon. So, I'm afraid that Mr. Harter paints
with too broad a brush if he thinks it applies to every former so-called
"Flower Power" person of the 60's or there has never come into the world
such a thing as Apple Computer from those two acid head exceptions to 70's
decadence, Jobs and the Woz. It cannot apply to the creative flood of
material that continued to flow from the Grateful Dead all those years up to
the death of Jerry Garcia when he died not from a heroin overdose, but
because he'd been put behind lock and key into the padded cell of the
Non-Smoking section for about 12 hours longer than any hip human being can
possibly exist without dropping dead from such an insult to his personal
liberty and spiritual ambiance. Had his friends never railroaded him into
that place where he drowned in Up-Scale Yuppie Snot, he might well be yet
with us today.
You would have to deny the fabulous creative forces at work in Camille
Paglia, Hunter S. Thompson, P.J. O'Rourke, Christopher Hitchens, Norman
Mailer, Kinky Friedmann, Bob Dylan and the list just goes on too long for
anyone to finish.
So, when *projection* is seen to be coupled with the *reaction formation*
syndrome there can be no question but that a simple, curt, if not smug
response from me stated in the terms that this Lovely Little Lemon Sister
here used on me--why that would have been far more a propos.
Just no question about it.
Harter is decidedly "projecting" right along with Accordion Dreams Girl
here, who I'm sure is too busy playing the Polka to know what she is or is
not "projecting", except something along the order of musical lutefisk,
which would be just the thing at a Norwegian Wedding.
And-ah now ah-Ladies and ah-Gentlemen . . .
A little Champagne ah-Music with our favorite ah-Lovely Little Songbird to
sing that old Freudian Favorite ---
>You're Projecting
--- set to the tune of that classic all time hit, "You! You're Driving Me
Crazy, So What Did I Do To You?"
"Yes, you! You're . . .
>
> Heather
> hea...@scc.net
> http://www.scc.net/~heather
And I? I am . . .
--
JPDavid long_go...@nobodyfeelsanypain.com
John's Joint:: http://jpdavid.freewebspace.com/
On-Line Novel, *Amador Green*, MP3's and Usenet Archive
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher
esteem those who think alike than those who think differently. --Friedrich
Nietzsche
"I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of
tyranny over the mind of man." -- Thomas Jefferson
"The whole spice of life is to be judged inferior by the inferior judgment
of one's inferiors. In the end, happily, it all adds up to
truth!." --JPDavid
Snorky The Inept
to spew out a bunch of crap that could not possibly be more off-topic.
John, you're still not interesting enough to merit a life outside my
killfile.
Welcome back to rec.music.gdead, and back to the land of *PLONK*.
--
-Snorky the Inept
DEAD FREAKS UNITE
Who are you? Where are you?
How are you?
John P David
"Snorky The Inept" <hazel...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:a8roc6$nmn$1...@bob.news.rcn.net...
> "John P David" fired up the million-monkey machine just long enough for it
> to spew out a bunch of crap that could not possibly be more off-topic.
>
> John, you're still not interesting enough to merit a life outside my
> killfile.
>
> Welcome back to rec.music.gdead, and back to the land of *PLONK*.
Excellent! Glad we could get that Smorklepuss Ostrich-Beak down in the hole
right off the bat, so the quality of dialog can stay at least halfway
above-ground.
Here's the part about Jerry he didn't know was there . . .
But is that true? In some cases it may very well be, but more often with
activists of the 70's than the 60's. The people that came to it in the 70's
were joiners not rebels. The "needle drugs" of which he speaks were part of
the latter day decadence of the era not of it's "Flower-Power" explosive
beginnings when there was some of that around, but just enough to be
largely, and vastly frowned upon. So, I'm afraid that Mr. Harter paints
with too broad a brush if he thinks it applies to every former so-called
"Flower Power" person of the 60's or there has never come into the world
such a thing as Apple Computer from those two acid head exceptions to 70's
decadence, Jobs and the Woz. It cannot apply to the creative flood of
material that continued to flow from the Grateful Dead all those years up to
the death of Jerry Garcia when he died not from a heroin overdose, but
because he'd been put behind lock and key into the padded cell of the
Non-Smoking section for about 12 hours longer than any hip human being can
possibly exist without dropping dead from such an insult to his personal
liberty and spiritual ambiance. Had his friends never railroaded him into
that place where he drowned in Up-Scale Yuppie Snot, he might well be yet
with us today.
--
Who has a MP3 address where the "Crusader Rabbit Stealth Band" gig reported
in the latest Almanac can be downloaded?
jimC
> drugs" of which he speaks were part of
> the latter day decadence of the era not of it's "Flow
Just shut up. That's your cheapest way out.
--
jimC
The Official Crystal Cove Lunchtime Hikers Website
http://www.jimcolli92625.com is in abeyance with the same
old placeholder pictures.