Mantra Thinking means taking a fresh look at what we take for granted. I can’t push the Mantra itself all the time, but sometimes I can get the conversation around to what, for the average person, is the mindlessness Mommy Professor never prepared him for.
In one episode of Seinfeld, the last scene had them going to the emergency room from a circumcision. Due to Costanza’s bungling, both he and the bis had been cut and needed to go to the hospital. The joke was NOT that somebody had been sliced and was bleeding, but that two ADULTS had been sliced. There was no question in anybody’s mind that adults who get cut must go to the emergency room.
The fun idea was that only the INFANT should have been sliced. It occurs to no one that the tiny baby needs any attention, though for him the cut is a lot more serious than it would be to an adult. Gentile babies born in a hospital have been sliced like this for over seventy years, routinely.
After the year 2000 a couple of doctors did experiments with modern electronic stuff and published their discovery: Circumcision is PAINFUL for the infant. In fact, with the machine they have been using since the 1930s, it is TRAUMATICALLY painful. It is so bad that some doctors have been giving kids some anesthetics in the last few years. Nobody considered it before.
I have also seen many, many hilarious scenes on TV of children getting their baby teeth pulled. It’s a real yuck! Their mouth is bleeding and some of the most sensitive nerves in the body are exposed. So they show fear. That means they are just little sissies, of course.
Now make that person into an adult who has a tooth coming out. Suddenly we need a trip to the dentist’s office, we need Novocain, we are dealing with court suits if it is done cruelly.
An adult who converts to Judaism is not ABOUT to have some dirty, uneducated old bis slice at him. They only take one drop of blood from an ADULT, and they are damned careful about THAT. But it’s always open season on infants, both Christian and Jewish.
It is not that everybody doesn’t KNOW about the cruelty of circumcision and tooth-pulling. It is just that no one THINKS about it. THINKING about what you know is Mantra Thinking.
#1 by BGLass on 03/10/2010 - 8:59 am
A related interesting reality is some kids soothe themselves by telling themselves THEY will grow up someday, then THEY can be cruel. This is all growing up is to them. Others experiencing the exact same cruelty, say they won’t be like that, and when they grow up, they will be super nice, instead. A few —not many– try to remember, so they can TELL grownups– since the problem must be they didn’t SAY IT right, b/c screaming in pain, and saying “that hurts,” and so on never worked, and b/c they can’t imagine the grownups know FULL WELL they are cruel, and were hurting on purpose. And even when adults KNOW, there’s a simultaneous “not knowing,” where they lie to themselves and others about it and really think they’re nice. The rememberers believed people were good and must have not understood. They go from explaining pain so clearly no one could not hear, to analyzing why adults refuse to hear, to trying to process why they, themselves, are different, to trying to save ‘the one.’ It’s a whole life very few even know about. When cruel adults apprehend glimmers of rememberers, they feel jealousy and hate, resenting being in the presence of someone not perverted like them. A Jew yes, but Wilhelm Reich (despite his weird vegetative machines, lol), tried hard in The Murder of Christ to talk about it, from what I recall. The whole problem gets SAID, from time to time, and any such statement is golden to the few who remember. The Seinfeld joke acknowledges adults know-but-won’t know at the same time. And the funniest thing about Jewish comedy is that the players NEVER think it is about THEM. One day, someone watching Sacha Cohen put crap on ladies’ dining tables, or Sandra Bernhardt discussing having her ‘black brothers rape’ DECIDES to move into another perspective, another point of view, and say, ‘that says far more about you than it will ever say about me.” When these comedians get glimmers of that —apprehension of someone existing outside their joke— they can turn paranoid and vicious. Remembering is a sign of high class sometimes, or age, or poverty, sometimes sainthood; the whole idea being that the person who remembers CAN AFFORD IT, by virtue of bank balance, being put to pasture, or having forsaken the world, otherwise. Sorry to go on, but I love thinking about this.
#2 by BGLass on 03/10/2010 - 9:16 am
And P.s.: Reich died in jail, grossly discredited, after a life of trying to tell adults that children feel pain. Unacknowledged and displaced childhood pain is the deepest tool of the state, the cruelty that must be kept alive, in order to channel it at will, he had argued. The penalty for memory can be death.