And in one respect Miss Deane has scored more heavily than she could
well have realized. Her warning that I should protect H. 3rd from
radical literature touches an impending tragedy in my life. Almost by
intuition Miss Deane seems to realize that the child and I are not in
agreement in our political opinions. Of the fifteen or twenty words in
which H. 3rd is proficient one is "mine" and another is "gimme." When he
goes to the park he wears a naval uniform with the insignia of an ensign
on his left arm. There is gold braid on his cap. Moreover, H. 3rd has in
his own right two Liberty bonds, a card of thrift stamps, a
rocking-horse, a railroad, a submarine, three picture books, an
automobile and a Noah's ark. Any effort to socialize a single one of
these holdings is met by a protest so violent that I cannot help but
realize that the child's sense of property rights is strongly developed.
That is, his own property rights, for he is often inclined to dispute my
title to cigarette stumps, safety razor blades and carving knives.
Moreover, H. 3rd is unblushingly parasitic. We fail to remember that he
has ever offered to make any return for the regular income of milk and
oatmeal, and sometimes carrots, which is issued to him regularly by his
parents. To be sure, he once gave me a chicken bone and on another
occasion a spool of cotton, but both times he promptly took them away
again. I am even inclined to question whether, in any strictly legal
sense, the chicken bone or the spool were his. Granting that they had
been carelessly discarded by other members of his family, and that, by
his own efforts, H. 3rd rescued the spool from the scrapbasket and the
chicken bone from behind the trash box, the fact remains that it was I
who bought the chicken and Miss X who purchased the spool. We were
entitled at least to a royalty during the life of the two utilities, but
H. 3rd merely absorbed them without explanation or promise.
I doubt whether Dell or Eastman or even Karl Marx himself could avail to
check the rampant individualism of the child. He has always displayed an
impatience and an irritation at abstract arguments. The best that can be
done is to avoid introducing contentious subjects. For the present Miss
X and I are able to carry on destructive and seditious conversations
even in his presence by spelling out "p-r-o-l-e-t-a-r-i-a-t" and
"b-o-u-r-g-e-o-i-s-i-e" and other words which might make him mad. We
have even been able to keep Trotzky's picture above the mantelpiece in
the red room, but in this case Miss X adopted a subterfuge which seems
to me rather questionable. She told H. 3rd that it was a portrait of
Nicholas Murray Butler.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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