I Was a Teenage Existentialist #22 Slouching Through College

Trying not to be Complicit in Empire

I picked the college I went to for petty criminal reasons. St. Olaf was where my parents met, they had favored admissions for the kids of alumnae, that’s only natural, I was still 100% Norwegian. My grades were not great but my test scores were good. I was such a lazy and ignorant high school student that I thought “college” was spelled “colledge.” When I was at the admissions desk, and I asked the woman there how to spell “college” I got a very dirty look.

They had an experimental program called the Paracollege, where you could design your own major, you could have tutorials with professors instead of just classes, but most importantly you had first dibs on the oldest dorm on campus, Ytterboe, built in 1900, a Norwegian name from one of the first presidents, and that dorm was a safe place to smoke pot and not get arrested, or get hammered and not be kicked out of school. And it worked. I lived there and got away with it, after a fashion. It took five and a half years to get out of college- and I did not actually graduate for 20 years until I turned in one last religion paper. I hid from learning, and of course, marijuana prevents learning,

I had not yet bought into the idea that succeeding in this American System was a Good Thing, seeing as how we had just spent 20 years in Viet Nam killing 3 million people for no good reason at all. But I had no vision of an alternative, except to find a way to get rich. I thought I could do it through Show-Biz, a vision based on the purity of peace movement music. But I did not work at it, I thought it would just happen. I lived undercover, demotivated and lazy, getting by, coasting. “I know I’m faking it, I’m not really making it.”

Wednesday was Mandatory Drunk Night, when the Weekend started, that was our culture, Escapism, listening to records. But I was also very unaware, naive, a suburban hick. The Doors released their first album in 1967, and it was played by my older brothers who knew what it was about; but not me, I thought “Back Door Man” was about a guy who came to the back door of the house because he wasn’t allowed in the front door. My mom told me about guys with no money during the Depression, guys that they called “bums,” who came to the back door asking for food in small town Minnesota depression-time, and her mom Pearl would always fix them a plate, and they would eat it out of doors on the back step, and thank her kindly. So me? I was the man who don’t know what the little girls understand. My oldest brother told me, with barely disguised contempt what it was (“It’s ass-fucking!”), and this was such a foreign concept, I’d never heard of it before (not like now, where you hear about it all the time). I was stunned and couldn’t process it for years. I was book-smart and life-stupid.

Remember, I had no sisters.

The thing about the White suburbs is that they are about as isolating as being in a small town in the countryside. You needed a car to go anywhere. Not like New York. I remember going to downtown Minneapolis on a bus for some reason, it took 40 minutes, and there were cute White teen-age girls talking in a suave (to me) tone about ushering at Theater -in-the-Round so they could see the show for free. And I was deeply envious, with a little bit of a sense of being depraved on account of I was being deprived.This was Girl Culture, they always knew more than I did about art and culture and theater and clothes and Meaning and Life. I wanted more of that. I couldn’t go to the Theater because Dad thought theater was a waste of money. So were the movies. He grew up on a farm where cash was a precious commodity, and had to be husbanded at every opportunity, and besides, he was saving up for our college tuition for four boys. (I remember him saying wistfully once, “I remember back when I had a savings account.” Or “Pay off six loans, take out half a dozen more”) What we had was a black and white TV, and records. Dad watched the news on his TV, Mom watched PBS and Julia Child on hers, I watched cop shows like NYPD on a portable black & white in the kitchen. We did that instead of talking to each other. Dad didn’t teach me anything. And I am still in thrall to the screen, soaking up YouTube videos instead of Penguin Classics.

Black and white TV was like what Oscar Wilde said about a cigarette. “A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and yet leaves one unsatisfied.” While you were watching a show, you felt like you were in on it, it was exciting, it was a world of cowboys and Laurel and Hardy and cartoons and news, cars driving around LA or New York City, a long ways away from the Prairie. But when you were done, you felt empty. And also you felt like you were a million miles away. Another form of alienation. All the things on TV were happening in Los Angeles or New York (except Amos and Andy, which was either in Chicago or Detroit but it wasn’t from around here; I didn’t talk to a black person until I was 18 and in a college dorm, so that’s what I knew about Black people).

So TV was kind of a cool new reality, it had not been around very long. The Local channels made some homemade stuff, like “Lunch with Casey Jones” or “Axel and His Dawg.” Friends would rub it in if they had a color TV and you did not, because Dad said thatColor was a Waste of Money. Very Isolating. The Monkees were on Monday night at 6:30 p.m, and Boy Scouts started at 7:00 p.m. The Boy Scouts who lived close to church would come late because they were watching it, and I would miss it every week because it took us half an hour to get to church, so I was uncool and very self-conscious about missing The Monkees every week. The Beatles had created an enormous hunger, and they could only put out so many records, and we wanted New Stuff All The Time. So people created the Monkees, the TV Fake Beatles, because they could be on every week and the Beatles weren’t.

But reading didn’t disappear, it was real, because reading is what we did with the Paper, and Mom and Dad, having been to College, had Books around the house. They even invested in a World Book Encyclopedia. They arrived one at a time. I would read biographies in the encyclopedia, and look for what famous men like Jefferson were doing when they were 6. Didn’t find much. I found out that Thomas Jefferson was an architect and a scientist, a botanist and an inventor and an archeologist and a scholar, spoke several languages, and he played the violin and was Secretary of State. He was a 2-term President, the mark of a winner, and wrote The Declaration of Independence, and he bought the Louisiana Territory, the land I was born and raised on, and he doubled the size of the nation. Jefferson was my hero. Then I found out later that he raped an enslaved woman her whole life (Sally Hemings), who was half-sister to his first wife, and they looked alike. Jefferson loved his wife and she had died young; Jefferson and Hemings had 6 kids together, all enslaved until age 18. I learned that Jefferson undermined John Adams when Adams was President and Jefferson was his VP (which is why Adams did not get re-elected, and is remembered as a loser instead of having a memorial in DC like he should get, because Adams was the catalyst for Independence) and I found out later that when Jefferson bought Louisiana, he was not authorized to expand the territory of the nation, and Napoleon was not authorized to sell the land, because when he took it from Spain there was a stipulation that if he got rid of it, it had to be returned to Spain. But they were both Complicit Entities; they could both do something illegal of they were both doing it together. Jefferson was not authorized to buy it, Napoleon was not authorized to sell it, both of them ignored the Indians, and that’s how America became the richest, most powerful empire, disguised as a nation, in the history of the world. We followed the British Empire the way the Romans followed the Greeks. Stolen land and slave labor. Who is more American than Jefferson, The Genius Slave-Screwing President Crook?

#30#