October 29, 2020:
Let's nail this down.
I adopted a populist anti-intellectualism indistinguishable from the MAGAverse today.
I say "indistinguishable", but that's only half true. I was anti books, pro guns, pro Vietnam war, vehemently anti-Communist. Yet at the same time I was pro drugs, pro hippies, pro dropping out, vehemently anti-authoritarian. I was not looking for a strongman daddy figure like Trump pretends to be. I was somewhere between Jeffersonianism with its faith in the wisdom of the people, and Jacksonianism with its resentment of elites. And I didn't want to hear no rationalizations about it all one way or 'nuther.
I saw the kids in the gifted program as "rich". Of course, they were not. Rich families don't send their kids to public schools. To me anyone living in a house was rich. Some of the gifted kids lived in houses with multiple stories. That was unimaginable, and I was against them for it. I was for their gardeners and cooks and nannies — the ones in La Jolla or Point Loma who had gardeners or cooks or nannies. Those are still my loyalties. Since university I've had a better understanding of who those people's friends truly are. I am though still entirely for them.
Somehow, I was going to be rich. I would not have gardeners or cooks or nannies — that's gross. But I might well have a big house, with multiple stories. Definitely with trees. Lots of trees. I wanted to own trees.
Exactly how that would happen was beyond theorizing. Not through education. School was too fucked to contemplate. Definitely not through books. Right then the point was to escape education, through truancy and drugs and alcohol. I'm eleven, the point right now is to reach eighteen. I have no goals apart from that.