I’m ashamed to say, I don’t think I ever realized the book burning of the German Nazis in the 1930s and ‘40s meant children’s books, I wasn’t thinking when I learned of it as a child, as children’s books, I was imagining adult sexual stuff, political stuff. Of course it was all of it, and it is presently in America too, all of it.

I am sorry to be a downer, but seeing it today about children, it’s . . . it’s so awful that I need pen and paper to comprehend it all at once, good Lord.

I’ve had the most miserable insight about it, which, Tweeting it isn’t clearing my buffer, I haven’t written a blog in months, I finally have a personal thing to work through this year, but I have to for this, it’s making me. The insight:

For years I’ve been making the point that spanked, abused children grow up angry, looking for a fight they’re allowed to have – psychology says this causes all sorts of personal problems, and much biology seems happy to let psychology have the point and the branch of knowledge – but Jeff’s version of biology says, from Sapolsky, that personal problems, sure – but mostly deflection. So some grow up sad, some addicted, but in the simpler world of the past there were fewer options, and still the main, evolved and socially constructed option is to grow up strong and angry, loaded, ready to be discharged when appropriate. Eighteen year old boys and young men seem to display it the most, they are perhaps allowed to the most, it is the evolved thing, as I said, so it is literally normal. It is normal, and war is normal, and apparently police states are normal.

Armchair revolutionaries like myself, we see a tedious, repetitive world of wars and young men getting into fights, this is the human condition, life is tears because of all the hate and violence that we cannot seem to solve for. An abused, angry young man, perhaps doesn’t worry so much, his overwhelming sense, his genes and his abuse are screaming at him, fight! We see a solution in a fight when that’s who we are. The world may suck, but if I fight, I can make myself some space.

But the Nazis, and the books, good Lord. I see a world of endless wars that one only leads to the next, I see war and fighting as the problem, the eternal scourge of humanity, I think this defines liberals or progressives – they see some final solution. They somehow do not see past the next fight, they somehow do not connect their desire to fight to every other warrior in our fractured histories’ identical sense of a violent “solution,” forever – “gonna be different this time,” (Talking Heads) sort of thing: always deluded, pretending they are not looking for final solution number ten thousand.

So the books.

Holocaust denial, slavery denial. CRT denial.

They are arranging to make sure their kids think a violent solution is new, that this generation is trying something never tried before. You censor historical hate, and then you say here’s the brand new solution, T just invented it! I mean, you beat them spare, then you utterly control their knowledge so that they have no idea of the real world, to make misinformed hate soldiers of your own children. How much do they hate their own children, this is impossible for me to grasp, I your mother, want you intentionally wrong and stupid and to maybe die young in a fight or a war after never being allowed a moment of freedom, OMG.

It’s like a scene in a movie, an ultimate intimidation: if I will zombify, parasitize, and weaponize my own child, imagine what I will do to you.

The more I learn about it, the more I learn that hate and war destroy everyone equally, both sides are cast into the very same Hell. What do they think they are saving the world for after they destroy their own children?

I guess that’s an ending, metaphor not intended. Damn.

Jeff

Sept. 27^th., 2022