#2
This is not an autobiography, so I’ll skip the details about my birth and upbringing other than what is pertinent, such as the fact that I acquired a deep appreciation of forbidden words—obscenities, foul language and curses—in Bayonne, New Jersey, where I grew up. New Jersey had (has?) the reputation of being a low-class state, having an aesthetically unattractive culture, and Bayonne had the reputation of being among the lowest-class cities in the state. Apart from the oil refinery, the main industry in the city, there was a Navy base, and Broadway was often populated by sailors looking to drink more, to get laid and/or to hit someone, and they expressed these aims with craven eloquence. In the 1950s, rock-and-roll music was commonly understood by us youths to romanticize the juvenile delinquent, one defining quality of which was a working knowledge of “swear” words. My next-door neighbor, Norman, who was a renowned hoodlum, had pointed incisor teeth (a genetic condition) that gave his oral expressions a demonic quality which, like the swear words, brought my attention to the supernatural on a daily basis.
Apart from thoughts of the supernatural, I maintained an attachment to the objectionable words, due to a mix of lingering defiance and nostalgia for my youth. When I talk to family or friends or to myself, I make liberal use of foulnesses, obscenities and curse words (the three of which are commonly confused). I maintain that these are proper topics for discussion in class when the subject is contemporary culture, but that they should not actually be applied in the classroom, although I use the device of the faux mot, articulating a word that only sounds like the forbidden one but is understood to have the same meaning and therefore impact, (a technique not without controversy). I look for ways to integrate such expressions along with other coarse sensibilities into the classroom because, for better or worse, they reach people, especially adolescents, and the teacher’s responsibility is that the students learn, not that the lesson (or teacher) is necessarily “nice.”
But it was just that negative influence of Bayonne that moved my father to send me to Xavier, a Jesuit military school in New York City, one of three such schools in the world at the time, the two others being in France (of which Napoleon Bonaparte was reputedly an alumnus) and in Goa. (In hindsight, the arrangement at Xavier between the Catholic Church and the federal government might have been unconstitutional because five active-duty Army personnel—one lieutenant colonel and four senior sergeants—were assigned full-time to the teaching staff; the school has since dropped the military as mandatory.)
The Jesuits teach one to think, but they also teach obedience, so there are strict limits (to say the least) on thinking related to the supernatural. And military culture does precisely the same, but in a very this-worldly way. From these two sources, I took on the thinking and left off the limits. So, my two early influences added up to thinking freely about foulnesses, obscenities and curses as well as other topics forbidden by Church and/or State.
Also at this juncture my father made a good investment and we moved to Short Hills, one of a few suburban communities in New Jersey that managed to transcend the state’s kitschy image through a dynamic but formulaic combination of affluence and bigotry.
No Guru 