Thoughts from the ammo line

Nietzsche may have been on to something with THE WILL TO POWER! Thus spake Ammo Grrrll:

This may come as a shock to my faithful readers, but I am no student of Philosophy. For some survey course, I was forced to read Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. I went to the used bookstore on campus and found a copy. When I got back to the dorm, I found that the previous owner of the volume – a girl named Kathy, the flyleaf said — had used a pink marker to highlight the parts that she didn’t understand. Initially, I thought that this could come in handy for me if she had already sussed out the salient points.

Sadly, however, it soon became clear that every single page was solid pink. Not that I disagreed with Kathy. It could not have been less clear to me or any less useful had it been written in Sanskrit. I also noticed that in the final third of the book there was no more highlighter – Kathy had clearly just given up. Krikey, not a single picture or even a whimsical little joke illustrating a point, as Einstein allegedly did with his definition of “relativity.”

“When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute, you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.” Sometimes the putative quote says “pretty girl” and sometimes it’s attributed to something he said to his secretary, but in any event, it’s clear and mildly humorous, when ol’ Immanuel was neither. Being of a logical and practical bent, I questioned whether anyone could sit on a hot stove for even a SECOND, let alone a whole minute without a trip to the ER, but I took his point.

I believe I also signed up for some course that covered Friedrich Nietzsche’s “will to power” vs. Sigmund Freud’s “pleasure principle” vs. Viktor Frankl’s “will to (or search for) meaning.” But, if that was after I met my beshert – my fated lifetime love – a future novelist named Joe/Max who was not an enthusiastic or even frequent class-attender, I may not have gone to the class very often.

Joe/Max and I knew a couple of Philosophy majors in college and kidded those friends about looking in the newspaper near graduation for Help Wanted ads down at the Philosophy Factory. Well, the joke might have been on us because both Jerry Seinfeld and Steve Martin were Philosophy majors and look where it took THEM!

Anyway, though I thought a lot of Freud’s insights were poppycock, I was more attracted to his “pleasure principle” than to the “will to power” or “the search for meaning.” Almost all the men I knew growing up – hard-working farmers or small businessmen who put in 90-hour weeks lacked the luxury of free time for philosophizing.

And then there were the ladies. Heavens to Betsy, the mother of my sister’s boyfriend had EIGHT kids, all of whom were boys. Early on, the neighbors across the street in South Dakota had nine kids and both parents worked! My experience with housewives and mothers was they literally NEVER stopped working. So for both men and women, “meaning” came from doing their jobs. Almost everybody went to church, so we also learned that “meaning” came from serving God and being kind and helpful to our Fellow Man. Works for me.

Now, in my dotage, the more I observe the behavior of Leftists and bureaucrats of any stripe, the more I think that Nietzsche and his “will to power” may have been on to something. Lordy, how Leftists LOVE to control others!

I can understand how attractive “power” is when we all start out with absolutely no power at all. None. Nada. Bupkiss. In fact, so little power that two yuge giants (and any of their friends and relatives) can pick us up and just PUT us anywhere they want us to be! In a little bathtub, in a crib when we aren’t even sleepy, in an alleged “playpen” with boring toys when we would prefer to be carried around like a pasha instead.

Plus, if you had siblings – and in the ’50s almost EVERYBODY did! – you were a prisoner to some extent of the birth order. As a First-Born, I was definitely in charge. Poor Joe/Max had four older brothers and had to form shifting alliances with some to protect himself from others.

And it only gets marginally better for YEARS. Once we get to a size where the giants no longer pick us up, or the siblings no longer immiserate us, we still have no money, no jobs, no prospects, little knowledge, no transportation, and no ability to live independently. If the slightly less scary giant tells us that we are eating Liver and Lima Beans for supper, it’s not like we can just go down to the Automat and get a burger instead. Not that Alexandria, MN or any previous even smaller towns I lived in had an Automat. Heck, we didn’t even get a fast-food hamburger joint until I was in high school.

I have known many persons of the male persuasion who so deeply resented that lack of independence that they were looking for jobs (shoveling, raking, sweeping out stores, paper boy) at a very young age. They figured out that money was a kind of power and especially if you could accumulate enough to get that Grand Prize of Independence – a vehicle!! A bicycle was a welcome miracle that allowed you to get quite far, but a car was the pinnacle, not only because it could go REALLY far (especially at nineteen cents a gallon), but it allowed you to have a female passenger.

Being a girl person, I did not covet a car so much, but I did have a pretty strong “will to autonomy.” I have never wanted to boss around another human being – and resisted all managerial jobs my whole life – but I really really really didn’t want to be bossed around myself. There were times in my working life when employers made a whole separate shift just for me so I didn’t have any supervisory responsibility. That is the truth, my hand to God.

After feminism reared its ugly Betty Friedan-like head, I noticed that a great many women LOVED to boss people around. They were devoted to status and lording any small area of power over others. Any encroachment on what they perceived as their turf worked out as well as a Crip trying to take over a busy corner of a Blood’s drug trade.

As it happened, when I was an antiwar activist, the real actual Lieutenant Governor of the State of Minnesota was a very nice Democrat named Rudy Perpich (PBUH). He and I were on a radio show about the war once, we hit it off, and when we both left ‘CCO Radio Station at the same time, he gave me a card with his personal number on it and said to call him if I ever needed help with something. He even joked that his job as Lieutenant Governor wasn’t very taxing and he could stuff envelopes.

A few months later, when our group needed a permit for a (genuinely) peaceful demonstration, and also his endorsement, I sauntered on into the Lieutenant Governor’s Office where I was met by an arrogant gaggle of gatekeepers – all women – who tried to insist that I go, one by one, THROUGH them in order to gain access to Mr. Perpich. This really mattered to them, because if a nobody like me could just waltz right in, then, what was the use of THEM?

The women pointed me from one gauntlet to another that I was going to have to run. When Rudy himself came out of his office, he saw me and said, “Well, hi, Susan,” and to the chagrin of the gatekeepers he ushered me right into his office. He signed the Permit, said sure, use his name on the list of endorsers, and bid me adieu. He was like that. If looks could have killed when I came back out, it would have been another Jonestown in there.

I miss approachable leaders like that. His father was a Croatian immigrant and miner in northern Minnesota. He himself was a dentist before he got into politics. Later he served two non-consecutive terms as governor and dedicated one entire $25,000 pay raise to the promotion of – wait for it — bocce ball. You had to love a guy like that.

The women gatekeepers who were so jealously guarding their little fiefdoms seemed addicted to power. I would imagine that it is only about fifty times worse today. People prize their spot on the Organizational Chart, commensurate with money and the ability to boss underlings around. Plus, now, you have to be mindful of Diversity, Incompetence, and Entropy – or whatever those DEI letters stand for.

And so we find ourselves in an era when legions, hordes, whole divisions of Entitled Groups and a few regular old Lazy Incompetent White Male Guys simply LIVE to tell the rest of us what to eat, what to drink, what to drive, when to get inoculated, where to live and, worst of all, what to think. Soon with the brilliance of Google Gemini we will not even be able to research something to think for ourselves. We will only be spoon-fed the thin DEI gruel that Big Brother or Obese Sister want us to ingest.

I do think “The Will to Power” (“der Wille zur Macht” in German) debate is over and it has won the day. But, “as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” We will combine the other two motor forces in human behavior and find “meaning” in having “pleasure”: through love, beautiful friends, music, comedy, art, babies, obliterating the bulls-eye, a peaceful Shabbat, and a medium-rare steak.

The Coffeehouse in which Max Cossack works most days on his ninth novel has a new treat – a combination Chocolate Chip Cookie and a Brownie. A delight I call a Brookie. Always inspired by Theodor Herzl’s motto in the face of the difficulties of finding a safe Jewish homeland – “If you will it, it is no dream” — yesterday, I “willed” Max to bring a Brookie home to me. And he did.