half suck, half rad

Oh no, we have plenty of tall buildings and crowded streets, we want those open lonely spaces where a man can breathe free, populated by cranky but loveable old coots. Don’t you want to dominate other people by telling gays they can’t get married in your state even though it won’t change your life a bit? Well don’t I want to dominate strangers by telling them they can’t drag their cannons into Chipolte while I am eating my burrito? Well we have been here many times, let’s discuss sucks.

I’m a little struck here about how you say the company men weren’t the big sucks, because that seems to me like the very definition of company men. Well see here, I think I see a difference between the way the two of us look at things. To me the company is the people who run it. Without those people there would be no company.

But I think you see something more here, an abstract idealized company, which can stay afloat or sink, and better it stays afloat for those who get a paycheck from it, so it well behooves all of them to do what is best for the company. So that’s kind of like patriotism and I think we can agree that you are a very patriotic guy. You may think most of the people in the country are a bunch of assholes (hell everybody thinks that, especially the assholes), but the country is more than its citizens, the country is something above that.

So maybe that’s where you get the rep for being half suck, half rad. Suck because you believe in the high ideals of this abstract company (because without people it is an abstraction), but you don’t believe that the people running it have that same devotion, because they are being selfish or foolish, and therefore it is your mission, for the good of the company, to criticize them, and some of your coworkers, seeing that you were criticizing management, thought that you were a radical.

I don’t know all the much about Confucianism, and you don’t strike me as a guy who reads a lot of eastern religion, but Confucianism is more like a philosophy (there are no gods) than a religion. It’s a way to live with a heavy emphasis on respect for authority. So that’s the way I see you, although not necessarily respect for the person who outranks you, but to the abstract rules of how to live your life.

So maybe that’s why, as a Gage Park graduate in the fifties, believing in, let’s call it the wisdom of your elders, and church and state, you might be expected to go on to college and get a fancy degree and do great things, but you saw that the people weren’t worthy, that the people, though they mouthed respect for church and state, they were really just out for their own selves.

And just for balance, here’s Uncle Ken, who didn’t believe in church or state, but went to college, well I’m not sure why I did. Mostly it was to get out of my parents’ house and away from under their thumbs, I guess I had some vague notion of being a scientist, but it was awfully vague. And mostly my fellow students looked like college preps, or sucks, to me, and I felt pretty isolated, but then along came hippies, and I fell right in with them, but though straight people might see all of us as radicals, inside the hippie world I was kind of a suck. I didn’t believe in everything they believed in, I hated that new agey crap, but I went along, went along because I felt like we were a people in the minority. There were powerful forces arrayed against us, and we were better off if we all hung together and that meant that I had to put up with some things that I didn’t believe in. A thing that Beagles would never do. And in that way I am part suck and part radical.

It has a nice symmetry doesn’t it? Well it’s a bit sloppy, but I will pass it on for you to examine and give your opinion.

I kind of agree with your thing about how when you were young it was fashionable to be old, and now that you are old it is fashionable to be young. I am not so sure that that is a bad thing however, and I am out of ink this morning so I won’t get into it now.