Thoughts Out of Season: A Journal

By Robert N. Britcher

About the Book
A single human life is impossible. The scope here, as in the internal system, is in no way limited - for example, to the real time relations with other humans. The scope is historical as well. Our genes and epigenes reverberate with the social environment we have inherited, going back to the dawn of homo sapiens, and beyond, in their forbearers; not to mention the near term experiences of the father and mother infused (literally) to the fetus. We cannot escape the inescapable, even if we were to emerge from birth and were placed immediately in isolation until death.
-- from Entry 190820

About the Author
The author lives in Gaithersburg, MD with his wife and dog.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Company
• Release date: Jul 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9798889255338

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The contents of this work, including, but not limited to, the accuracy of events, people, and places depicted; opinions expressed; permission to use previously published materials included; and any advice given or actions advocated are solely the responsibility of the author, who assumes all liability for said work and indemnifies the publisher against any claims stemming from publication of the work.

All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2023 by Robert N. Britcher

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted, downloaded, distributed, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, including photocopying and recording, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Preface

Reading and writing are essential for mental health, as are speaking and listening. It is language that has kept us sane. Without it, humans would not have survived.

This journal was inspired by Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human. Although I found his small essays disagreeable, I admired his format. His entries are grouped by subject, mine are chronological. His are world famous, mine quotidian; and my writing is a work in progress. To a lesser degree, the journal approaches the structure of Eric Hoffer’s Before the Sabbath.

The entries below are annotated by the day, following the format YYMMDD. Thus, the first entry was written November 20th, 2018.

181120 Everyone complains. Complaining is our verbal nature. Some number of readers of these thoughts will see them as observations; many as complaints. We all know complainers; I am one of them. It is only recently that I realized how much of what I say and write is a complaint. Very little of what we experience does not turn out as we expect. So we complain.

An entire book could be written on complaining. Most playwrights, novelists, even poets, complain; certainly essayists. Walking the streets and engaging one another in conversation, we inevitably complain about something; if nothing else, the weather. Now we can complain about the virus and vaccination, politics of course, parking spots. Some families complain continually. My dog complains, and it works. She gets my attention and I usually comply. Humans complain just to complain; complaining is an end in itself.

Thinking is the soul’s private conversation with itself. I put forth these thoughts in a tentative manner. At times, my brain has been disorganized and its thoughts may collide, coming from many directions. The entries below reflect this antinomy. There are always two sides to every issue. For every critique there is an element of hope. Positive change may be just around the corner.

Life is precious. The genetics of any birth, sometimes biological, sometimes electrical, sometimes simply mechanical, is a near miracle; it makes the Christian virgin birth seem ordinary. A passing thought: if one can somehow centrifuge the sediment of human buildings and reflect upon what is left, it is a poet’s world. I could have been born into the serfdom of the Middle Ages, or born in Rwanda in the 20th Century and died of cholera at 3; or, I could have never been born. Notwithstanding, a certain loyalty and guilt inhabit my mind, and they drive me to participate, in speech, to cement these conditions of which I am a part.

181127 In Europe, throughout the 18th and 19th Centuries, despite its colonialism and the wars of the 20th Century, dispossessed white men and women turned to revolt and reformation against the wealthy and powerful, seeking social justice and liberty. During that epoch in the United States, the dispossessed whites aligned themselves with the wealthy and powerful in colleague against those of color, notably native Americans, slaves, and Mexicans, hoping for more freedom, more property. As the country moved South and West, they turned to a life of pikemen, that is to say, riflemen, wanting more freedom, more privilege. Their descendants know no other way to live. Even they can change.

181130 We may be entering a new dark age. Often, I wish to forget: I wish not to dream, as dreams dredge up memories. From Hart Crane -

"Forgetfulness is like a song

That, freed from beat and measure, wanders.

Forgetfulness is like a bird whose wings are reconciled,

Outspread and motionless,—

A bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly.

Forgetfulness is rain at night,

Or an old house in a forest,—or a child.

Forgetfulness is white,—white as a blasted tree,

And it may stun the sybil into prophecy,

Or bury the Gods.

I can remember much forgetfulness."

181204 Mathematics has been our greatest discovery. (I do not mean counting, as other hominids count.) Humans have developed the habit of translating the world into numbers. We have slowly inserted ourselves into an abstract world, which is beyond our comprehension outside of numbers, as they are all we can be certain of. Thus, our love of telecomputing. Mostly we refuse to see its figurative nature.

181206 Dostoevsky’s Underground Man (from Notes from the UnderGround)

The Underground Man lives his life full of shame and self-loathing, and a feeling of inadequacy. His expectations stem from the stories he has told himself. The chasm between his beliefs and the real world are abject. He is the apotheosis of human alienation. His social intercourse is steeped in hatred, revenge, and humiliation. He can never lose. Conflict with others fuels his demented spirit, resulting in more humiliation. A small price to pay for doing his will; although his perceived wins lower him farther into the awful abyss in which he lives. He would rather dive off a bridge than admit that 2+2=4. We seem to be living in such times in America. But there is hope for a better way.

One of my earliest memories is walking in squares around the living room listening to Leroy Anderson’s Blue Tango. I can still hear the music. Repeating and repeating is something I have repeated throughout my life. In retrospect, numbers played a decisive role in my life. I was 4 at the time. We shoveled coal in the morning to keep the furnace going. I would count them.

My father and my uncle, who owned a business started by my uncle’s father, had an office in Gettysburg on the square next to the Wills House where Lincoln stayed. Behind the office, which faced the square—the intersection of routes 15 and 30, the phone company operators would plug calls into the appropriate ports, the supervisor on roller skates behind them. My uncle would take me back to the phone exchange from time to time. He explained party lines to me.

My first cousin on my mother’s side, Louise, who tutored the great footballer at Penn State, Lenny Moore, matriculated at the Pennsylvania State Hospital for the first time. She was a philosopher, and liked Kant and Hannah Arendt (we live in a world of appearances). She smoked a ladies pipe and had perfect skin. On my father’s side, my cousin Robert died in that hospital when I was still in short pants.

My Uncle Carl who used spider webs to etch transits and remapped Baltimore after the disaster—as well as the Gettysburg battlefield—spent a year in Shepherd-Pratt in the forties. He lived productively until 1975. No one ever spoke of any of them: they did not exist; nothing is more embarrassing than a mental illness.

181207 American elitism: Elite college and universities, emblems of American elitism, nevertheless trumpet from their cupolas that they are champions of egalitarianism. They echo the paradox of American values. It seems that an institution needs to be elite in order to declare that it is for everyone. Four generations of my family studied at Gettysburg College.

Today, Gettysburg is a post-prep school. Rich snobs is how the current students describe themselves. The campus looks pristine. It is neatly laid out, with highly visible athletic fields and venues, some named by donors from my era. The largess extends to the old town Majestic Theater, renovated by a classmate, who gave his name to it. Even an unprejudiced eye would see that tens of millions are spent on recreation, and wonder how much is spent on education.

This attractiveness flies in the face of the data. Predictably, at and near the top, the wealthiest US college and university endowment-per-student ranges from 2 to 1 million dollars. Despite it aspirations, Gettysburg scrapes the bottom of the barrel, at a little over $100,000 per student. The school’s endowment has lost 6% in two of the last three years, mostly from investments in startups in foreign markets.

Despite glowing pronouncements from the president, grants, donated by alumni and occasionally funded from the endowment—over and above the normal 5% drawn down yearly for operations and salaries—hardly approach the rapidly ascending comprehensive fee, at $70,000 per year.

Only the wealthiest families do not need loans. The Pell Grant averages about $5700 per year; it is based on need and need not be paid back. Federal student loans run from $5,000 to $12,000; the interest rate today is 5.07 percent, also need-based and prorated. The rest of the fee is paid from family cash and private loans, the interest rate for which run from 6% to 14%.

These loans must be paid back. Private college loans cannot be forgiven, even through bankruptcy. For Gettysburg students and their families, the cumulative indebtedness is profound. The College keeps no track of these liabilities, nor do they follow up on student outcomes.

The administrators rely on what they know: marketing, fund-raising, and spending. As a regent from the University at California recently told me, in academia cost is a four-letter word. Managing to objectives within a budget surfaces behind close doors in the Business Department. Some students hear about it there. Otherwise, the students are immersed in something quite different. The core objectives: keeping up with the Jones’s, to compete with the best colleges like us.

This management philosophy and approach has prevailed for decades. Admissions selectivity and a huge budget for foreign travel amid other cultures has helped round out what is called the college educational experience. And for those who have always confused value and high price (we have all confused that at times?), the enormous price adds to the attractiveness. Gettysburg is a beautiful setting. It lies in the middle of Trump country. The signs are everywhere. The essence is exclusivity, and, indirectly, wealth. The dozens of American colleges like Gettysburg are bastions of elite capitalism. They market themselves as liberal.

The new model of higher education is already a matter of practice in virtually all states: two years at a local community college. Then, if it fits the student’s objectives, transfer the credits to an in-state publicly-funded, or private university. This will make college affordable, and it will lower the current student loan debt of over one trillion dollars. The accoutrements of the total college experience, fraternal organizations, bands, Saturday afternoon football games, choirs, parties, and the glow of identification and loyalty can be sought elsewhere. The ultimate objective is, after all, education: learning, and how to learn, especially mathematics, languages, science, economics, history, and the classical arts, including especially poetry.

Do not mistake the elitism of American colleges and universities with the socialistic concept of public education from First through Twelfth grades! To claim that every citizen does not have an equal educational opportunity is a slur to Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Horace Mann, Thaddeus Stevens—a benefactor of Gettysburg College, and John Dewey. The US did not always have free public education, available to every child, throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But we do today, and it is an opportunity for all.

181207 We believe in opportunity in America; but one must follow this advice: climb every mountain, and every wall, to get in. Awaiting you is another ladder. Now climb some more. The American founders, who risked their lives for religious freedom in the name of colonialism, suffered endlessly in England and Scotland under the heavy stick of the sect imposed by the current monarchy. Once here, the women found the winters too cold. (Their letters, and the sermons of Jonathan Edwards, make no mention of the slaves impressed from Africa drowning in the holds of ships.) It was hard in some places, harder in others. People immigrated to the colonies, later the states, out of greed and fear. The slaves were brought here; given no choice, and that has made all the difference, in our understanding of deprivation.

When Jefferson changed Locke’s and Blackstone’s wording from life, liberty, and property to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, he recognized how thrilling the road to Wall Street and political power could be. The journey is all, as the Hindi say. America became the land, not of opportunity, but of opportunists. America encouraged the Carnegies and the Vanderbilts, and left everyone else behind. You too can get rich, or, at least, live a more favorable financial life.

181210 The American media is both complicit and adversarial in the Trump fandango. When the president needs attention, he knows where to get it. The media, formally the press, should tell us the news, not tell us how to think. When, exactly, did this begin? It is not the blight of the Internet and computing. Some of the most egregious purveyors of truth operate, and operated on the radio, introduced on a wide scale in the 1930s. Journalists are examples of powerful mentors.

181212 One of the few things I noticed in elementary school was the similarity of the marks strung across the top of the board: the letters and numbers of the English language. Each written mark, like a c, has no intrinsic meaning. Its meaning derives from its difference in relation to the other marks. As such, I thought then, but did not understand, there were many likenesses, and this could lead to problems.

Over the years, I contributed to many communications errors as a result of a 1 looking like an l, a 0 looking like an o; a v looking like a u, and so on. But then we are near the end of discursive writing. Keystrokes have eliminated most of these problems. But the keyboard has introduced its own issues: for me, the nearness of the d to the s, and the proximity of the m and the n have encouraged errors, albeit correctable.

181222 African Americans have gradually assimilated into professions, such as law, government, and medicine. Our laws now support their advancement, culminating in the election of the decent and extraordinarily competent Barack Obama.

Race is a contrived concept. Genetics plays no role in a cultural group’s behavior. The role of environment is enormous. This includes the early development of children, the ongoing impact of culture and religion. As in any endeavor, some succeed and many do not. African Americans did not immigrate here, they were shanghaied. They are the only group who, wholesale, did not come to America willingly. Some were kings in their villages. That is a decisive difference, separating them from other groups. Easily identified and misidentified by skin color, many have continued to be treated as slaves would be.

The nation’s culture militates against opportunity for many people—and peoples. Prejudice seems as high today as ever. Congressional and state laws have improved matters; they at least set a standard. But the laws of laissez-faire economics favor those who have already succeeded.

Virtually all of my school friends whose parents were attorneys, physicians, academics, athletes, or business people, became attorneys, physicians, academics, athletes, and business people. That they lived sound economic lives did not hurt. Those who did not succeed in school, regardless of cultural background, generally were raised by parents who also had not succeeded in school.

The overwhelming majority of us are placed in small boats, built and set in motion by our immediate forbears; we row when absolutely necessary, but in the direction already vectored.

181222 Could there be a connection between the Puritans, the Reformed, Baptists, and dozens of other judgmental sects and the fervor for weaponry and war in the United States?

The Trump affair is a circus event nonpareil, complete with elephants and sexy women riding them, high-wire dare-devils, Vasserot, the armless ambidextrian, lighting a match between his great and second toe, the Indian rubber-man, and the minstrel players. Much of the sinuous fabric of the America is the blending of strident righteousness with Disneyland and the Hollywood entertainment culture.

181224 It is Christmas Eve and I just learned that my tickets to the