Experts Who Don’t Know Jack

How strange that the expert on child ‘sexuality’ is a man who never changed a diaper. Freud didn’t take care of his babies, it just wasn’t done back then. He didn’t get barfed on or peed on and he never sat up all night rocking a feverish infant. But he’s the expert.

And I love when Victorian men write authoritatively on the nature of women. Women couldn’t write about themselves; Victorian men wouldn’t let them. Anyway, who would want to hear from that half of humankind who were mentally deficient, if not downright silly?

Oh, and communist intellectuals back in the day writing about Workers. Communist intellectuals carried nary a callous on their soft hands, but they were the experts. Why didn’t the peasants revolt? We told them about their exploitation, we told them about dialectical materialism-what’s wrong with those peasants?

There are probably a thousand other examples, but as a peasant, a woman, a mother, and a person with a strange ability to remember how I thought as a child-these are the ones that catch my eye.

Psychoanalysis, Marxism, and Victorian paternalism have come to be seen as flawed, but they had a big impact on the world at one time. Once again, the elite issue decrees from on high and the public sucks it up because, you know-experts!

I was once scheduled to speak at a conference on community organizing. My friend, who was an official at the Housing Authority asked, “Are you taking a briefcase?” Well, sure,” I answered.

“Is it over 500 miles away?”

“As a matter of fact it is, yes. Why do you ask?”

“Congratulations:  the definition of an expert is someone from over 500 miles away who carries a briefcase.”

“Billy Wolf” is from the Magic Barn, (growing up wild on a New England farm) available here.