At the Lost and Found
The following is the Introduction to my new book, At the Lost and Found (Clarity Press).
My dear mother, who had an artistic temperament that tended at times toward the sentimental, liked to call me a contrarian. She was right. I think she liked but feared this inclination of mine that started in childhood. It no doubt has many roots, some of which an artful reader may sense in the essays in this book, for while I have written about the lies and coverups of the ruling elites, I have tried to do so in a self-revelatory way, even in the writing where it is couched in pure artifice.
I have always felt that conventional life was a provocation because it hid more than it revealed; that it harbored secrets that could not be exposed or else the make-believe nature of normal life would collapse like a cardboard set. That people were performing for some invisible director that they couldn’t or wouldn’t recognize. I always wondered why.
There is nothing profound in this tendency of mine, except the powerful force of it throughout my life. Like everyone, I was ushered onto this Shakespearean stage and have acted out many roles assigned to me but always with the inner consciousness that something was amiss. Everyone seemed to be playing someone, but who was the player? Who was I?
Because I grew up in a large literate family where our sizable bookcase was filled with great literary classics, I have always loved to read. I noticed early on that the great writers focused on this performative nature of social life, and this strengthened my burgeoning artist’s eye. I particularly remember the family set of Mark Twain’s books that drew me in this direction, his humorous ways of puncturing social hypocrisy.
My writing was born within all my reading, including my grandparents’ large and colorfully illustrated volume of Arabian Nights that I would sneak a peek at from time to time. Then there was my father’s witt
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
