Robert Burns, the ‘father’ of romantic sex, had his birthday celebration yesterday.
Erection Reflections
Desire’s Remains
Romantic Leftovers
Sexual Sentiment
Romance – Sexual Lipstick
Snot Paper
Booger Sheets
I wanted to bring up the character of the 17-18th centuries when it was a time of great economic and social stress in the task of feeding growing populations, its attendant pollution, limitations of trees, their growth of literacy and awareness, famine and the tyranny of rulership of monarch governments. All this didn’t make for a very pleasant circumstance for most humans in the daily grind of living.
Robert Burns grew up as a tenant farmer. This meant two things…first, he knew how to grow crops, food, to farm. Such a skill brings to the soul a kind of confidence in the ability to survive.
The second thing was that he lived under the domination of the “owners” ethic of his time. The land, a territorial imperative, was owned by European monarchy all across Europe, Scotland was owned by British Royalty. (I don’t know if an individual outside nobility was even entitled to own land?). This reached back to earlier times of tribes, families and castles, continually at war, where ordinary people ‘belonged” to the castle family, the Lords, i.e. the “Land Lord”.
Land control and ownership was, and still is, the foundation of power and wealth. Nobles provided life support for everyone including housing, dwelling, food and employment. In Robert’s case as a tenant farmer, which meant he had the skills needed, but had to submit to the conditions of the landlord’s agent, which represented essentially British nobility located hundreds of miles away in England or such. The production of food was essential to everyone’s existence, standard of living, and to the income of its owners. You did what the landlord’s agent told you to do.
The Nobles ownership-rights-ethic came out of the past, controlled and protected with armies, they alone decided who and where people lived, and their conditions.
They rented out farmland to people who could and would produce food. This was the systemic foundation of wealth throughout Europe at the time. Probably 70-80 percent of ordinary people depended on this system.
When a crop failed, so did the flow of wealth to the Nobility, whatever the cause. Nobility were usually not concerned about the people or their life conditions. They were essentially oblivious to the needs of those they used to create their wealth. They were far away and essentially out of range of having any living contact or feelings of concern.
When something epic like environmental extremes fell upon the land forcing hardship, starvation and life on the edge, ownership didn’t consider the other people, only their loss of wealth.
One of the actions of the time was to evict the people who couldn’t pay the rent, tenant farmers, their workers and their families, from dwellings that were already contaminated with disease in abominable hovels of cold, sewer-less places to live, eat, sleep and raise children, circumstances that would be unimaginable for us today. Many ordered their agents to carry out evictions at gunpoint.
Where could they go? What could they do to survive?
Some were offered passage to America (indentured) like North and South Carolina, to ‘grow’ “plant-nation” crops, driving slaves in their labor. This land was previously confiscated and occupied Indian land that the British Nobility “owned”.
Potato famine, social oblivion. A Pathetic effect of a ”me first” ownership system. The problem of rational distribution and a means of creating wealth continue to plague humanity. It seems that we are unable to reason with gold in our pockets. Gorilla grunts, please.