I Could Be Wrong, But...
Was $14,345.95— |
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Owning Up
©2009 David Boyne
—Maya Angelou
Recently, I bought a house. Or, more accurately, I bought a mortgage. It came with a nice little house.
The nice little house has a well-fenced, dog-ready backyard. Which is why I wanted this house, as the politically incorrect owner of the apartment I was happily renting would not allow me to have a canine domestic partner. Now, as owner of a house, Society recognizes my right to have a domestic partner of the golden retriever orientation, should I desire to. I do.
But here’s the thing: I have never owned a house before.
And here’s the other thing: I’m not convinced that I own one now.
In fact, I am much more inclined to believe that I don’t own this house. I just pretend to. Fortunately, Society pretends along with me.
When Society pretends something, it constructs an elaborate infrastructure, designed to keep anyone from disproving what it pretends. Curiously, that is also what a person suffering from delusional paranoia does. Be that as it may, the infrastructure of collective pretending which Society constructs to allow people to believe they “own’ things, creates employment, something our country needs more of. People who own things create work for lawyers, who are experts in society's pretentions. And also for insurance companies, who are experts at gambling on most folks being, more often than not, competent, and wanting first, to do no harm. Our societal delusion of owning things creates many other jobs, too. For realtors named Kent Johnson, electricians named Zach Cornelius, drain uncloggers named Chris Kilkenny, and handymen named Smokin' Joe Osborn.
But, I wander.
When I promised to take on the mortgage that comes bundled with the nice little house and well-fenced yard, Society promised to reward me with tax breaks. People who do not join in Society’s game of pretending to own houses, or businesses, or planes, trains, ships and baseball franchises, are not given tax breaks. In fact, Society is so entranced with its delusion of being an Ownership Society, that it actually paid me to play! Once I opted-in to the collective delusion of owning a house, and the earth it rests upon, the no-break taxes I had paid for decades when a renter in places from Maine to Florida, and Manhattan to San Francisco, came back to me in the form of a government-financed mortgage.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m quite happy with the social contract I’ve entered into. I shall hold up my end of this shared delusion that I “own” the nice little house that came with my big fat mortgage.
But.
I must ask, How can anyone ever really “own” anything?
Isn’t all we ever really own whatever we brought with us into this world, added to whatever we take with us when we leave this world? And, if you stop to do the math, doesn’t that add up to nothing? No thing?
I could be wrong, but I’ve sometimes wondered if all we ever really own is our DNA. Maybe we own it, because we can choose to pass it on. Or not. The gift of Life, and the genes that come with it, are the only real inheritance. For millennia, our DNA could only be remodeled by the designs or accidents of Nature. This is called, “evolution.” But now we are on the verge of Society remodeling our DNA by design or accident. This is called, “evolution.”
Keeping in mind that I don’t know what I’m talking about, I shall employ bolding, italics, underlining, and exclamation marks! This will make my statement emphatic, and it will sound like I know what I’m talking about. Here goes:
We never own anything! We just get to use it while we’re here!
Despite the brilliant clarity of my emphatic assertion, very few people see ownership the way I see it. That’s because I’m retarded. And because everyone has done growed up in a Society that, if enough other people agree to conspire with you to pretend you “own” what you say you own, you are allowed to state, emphatically, “Yo! I own this!”
We can then put sensor-tripped recordings of stern voices on the vehicles we own, to tell anyone who approaches, “Back away from my car!” And we can create piles of notarized paperwork filed with title companies to say, “Back away from my house!” And we can put gold rings on another person’s finger to say, “Back away from my spouse!”
Our Society, like any person in the throes of a delusion, can be terribly cruel to those who will not share in and support their delusion. Look at what our Society did to Native Americans. Indians just could not get into their heads, our fundamental belief that we own the earth. Just as we could not get into our heads, their fundamental belief that we belong to the earth. Lord knows, we tried to get them to play nice. We invited them, at the point of repeating rifles and Gatling guns, to join in our game of owning. We gave them deeds and treaties, bills of sale, even big mortgages that came with little houses on hardscrabble land. But the unenlightened savages thought the inky scratch marks on parchment and paper we gave them were…inky scratch marks on parchment and paper. They could not grasp that those inky scratch marks were the very code of our collective delusion of owning things. Frustrated by the Indians declining to join in our Society’s reindeer games, we were left with no choice but to deconstruct their societies. This is called, “evolution.” Now that enough time has passed since the deconstruction, we can afford to feel a bit guilty, without having to surrender our ownership of anything. Magnanimously, we salve our guilt by giving the post-deconstruction Indians a reward. You guessed it; tax breaks.
But, I wander.
There is one assertion of ownership I think may be legitimate. I call it the Ratso Rizzo Manifesto of Ownership.
In the movie Midnight Cowboy, there is a scene in which the character Ratso Rizzo, played by Dustin Hoffman, is crossing a street in Manhattan. A taxi driver competes with Rizzo for ownership of the same few feet of pavement, and attempts to intimidate Rizzo into relinquishing the bit of contested pavement by aiming the two tons of his moving vehicle at him. Outraged, Rizzo pounds his hands on the filthy hot hood of the taxi and yells at the driver “Hey! I’m walkin’ here! I’m walkin’ here!”
And that, grasshopper, is The Ratso Rizzo Manifesto of Ownership: We are all just passing through, and all we ever really own is the space we take up at any given moment.