Existence Precedes Essence

I've been at the blogging game for over 20 years so often when things come up now, I'll think to myself, "I know I blogged about that before."  The trick these days is to actually find the stuff I wrote, requiring that I dig into the Internet Archive with so much of my musings deleted and defunct.  Such spelunking also brings me a bit of mirth as I rediscover things that I had forgotten about.

While I was looking for that picture of our shenanigans in DC with the Bush and Cheney, I stumbled across this vignette:

Battle of Algiers:

5TH JOURNALIST: Sartre has written another article ...

MATHIEU: Will you kindly explain to me why all the Sartres are always born on the other side?

5TH JOURNALIST: Then you like Sartre, colonel ...

MATHIEU: Not really, but he's even less appealing as an enemy. 

Okay, so whiskeyina gave me a copy of the May 1965 Playboy featuring an interview with Jean-Paul Sartre: 

Other people are hell insofar as you are plunged from birth into a situation to which you are obliged to submit. You are born the son of a rich man, or an Algerian, or a doctor, or an American. Then you have a cut-and-dried future mapped out, a future made for you by others. They haven't created it directly, but they are part of a social order that makes you what you are. If you're a peasant's son, the social order obliges you to move to the city where the machines await you, machines that need fellows like you to keep them going.

So it's your fate to be a certain type of worker, a country kid who has been driven away from the country by a certain type of capitalist pressure. Now the factory is a function of your being.

What exactly is your "being"? It is the job you're doing, a job that masters you completely because it wears you down--along with your pay, which classifies you exactly by your standard of living.

All this has been thrust upon you by other people...Or take a child who was born in Algeria in 1930 or 1935. He was doomed to an explosion into death and the tortures that were his destiny...[but] you can take action against what people have made of you and transform yourself...It takes a lot to change destiny. That destiny has got to be intolerable...

In our social order a man is always dominated by material things, and these things are themselves produced and exploited by others.  These others do not confront him face to face.  No.  They impinge of him through the agency of objects.

You, for example, have separated yourself from me...with this tape recorder.  We put all of modern civilization between  us.  Thus we ourselves become things.  A crowd of other things intervene, from the maker of this gadget of yours to the magazine that you represent.

I'm sure JPS would've loved being interviewed for a Paxcast, and I totally affirm that I didn't look at the centerfold at all.

Since I'd just blogged about Sartre, including that very scene from The Battle of Algiers, I could not let this go unremarked.

And what a time capsule!  I'd stopped by my friend Ina's house on the way back from a War Tax Resistance conference at the Woolman Hill Quaker Retreat Center in Deerfield, MA, and enjoyed cookies and other refreshments, along with receiving the gift of new reading material, before continuing on my way.

That was an interesting and fortifying weekend, hanging out with so many Quakers and other fellow travelers.  Attended my first Meeting since my mother's death in '06, which was a surprisingly emotional experience.  Met some folks who knew the old bookseller in Madison, ME, whom I visited every year when I was at Colby (his name, oddly enough, was Colby).  Also met Juanita Nelson, organizer for CORE and the Freedom Rides, amongst other things.

Alas, Paxcast (one of my several podcasts, along with its live stream version, Paxlive) is one of the many things now memory holed.  But that's okay, since the whole world is on fire and all will be forgotten soon enough.  Fat lot of good my efforts did.

Selah.