Monthly Archives: May 2014

She asked me why the vets who died waiting were so docile

I have a feeling these 40 dead veterans are just the tip of the iceberg.  Doesn’t seem right that they could have been so docile, my only theory is depression over their powerlessness.
 
We routinely say “thank you for your service” to people our great democracy has fucked over so many times in recent years. Redeployed over and over, deployments extended, sent into combat without combat armor against non-uniformed insurgent armies whose main weapon is the roadside bomb, criticized by the former Secretary of War (“we fight with the army we have, not necessarily the one we might like”), kept alive, due to advances in technology, with traumatic and disabling injuries that would have killed them even 15 years ago.  It’s hard to imagine who among them would NOT have PTSD, something the military resists diagnosing, since so many soldiers would rightfully use it as a reason to get sent home.   Let us not forget, hyper-masculine army culture prevents many soldiers from admitting they are depressed, anxious, in a panic whenever they hear noise.
 
Suicide has become the leading cause of death for our military lately.  I’m sure they feel hopeless, are promised over and over that they’ll get the life saving services they need and– uh, maybe next month.  Hang in there, buddy!  Have a nice day!
 
To me it’s a mindless extension of the selfish notion that everything, including schools, should be “privatized”, run with both eyes on the bottom line, with the attendant diminution of the value of human life (unless, of course, that human is wealthy).  The corporate mentality — hide inconvenient things, have robots answer phones so you don’t have to pay people to do it, screw the customer if they don’t like it, pay yourself first, maximize profits in every possible way, change the laws to keep more profit, and, above all, get your bonus.  Why the hell would you give pay incentives to VA administrators for properly running their hospitals in the first place?
 
This country may never have been the place it pretended to be, but it is worse now, in terms of the partisan hatred afoot, than at any time since the Civil War (or for the 100 years after that if you were what was nonchalantly called a ‘nigger’, especially if you didn’t know how to act).  I read about that June 21, 1964 lynching in Neshoba County, Mississippi the other day and shuddered to think I was alive and in 3rd grade when it happened, ten days after my 8th birthday.  This is not ancient history.
 
Around that time local racists sent my mother’s friend Mildred Rose an anonymous letter, on whose envelope some hate-twisted coward had scrawled COMMIE.  Mildred was a Commie (and my mother too, for that matter) because she supported busing to achieve racial integration TEN YEARS after Brown v. Bd. of Education.  Talk about incrementalism.  Schools are as segregated now, I’d wager, as they were in 1953.  All deliberate speed, yes indeed.  
 
Apparently when Senator Eastland pushed for the overtly racist William Cox (who first dismissed the indictments against most of the lynch mob who killed three young men, after burning down the black church they were using to organize a voting drive)  to be appointed to the federal bench in Mississippi he told Robert Kennedy “tell your brother to appoint him and I’ll let you have the nigger”.  The nigger was Thurgood Marshall, who got a seat on some appellate court without the dixiecrat’s opposition.
 
This country has traditionally been very bad for (apologies in advance to anyone offended)  homos, niggers, spics, Jews (I still like that we get that capital letter), Asians, Native Americans, socialists, intellectuals, a lot of other people.  I heard the other day that homosexuality was listed in the DSM until 1973, the year I graduated high school.  No wonder Ricky S____ was so coy about staying in the closet, light in the loafers and giggly though he also was (when not tearfully depressed).  Being gay was a shameful mental illness, the experts said so, don’t you know?  Many teenagers still kill themselves every day because of homophobia, in spite of a more nuanced understanding of homosexuality, and great social advances in attitudes toward it.
 
In certain ways we’re better as a nation now, in some ways much worse.  That profit drives everything and money equals speech may be the end of the game for democracy, no sense to even pretend otherwise.  I give $100 to some cause, everyone I know does the same.  Charles and David Koch kick in $1,000,000 and let’s just call that all Free Speech, how about it?  Can you say it with me, boys?  Free speech in the Free Market, Freedom on the damned march, get out of the way if you hate our freedom.
 
And the best part for those with the means to effectively exercise their free speech, you can buy your free speech anonymously, if your lawyers set up a 501(c)(4) nonprofit political action committee (PAC).  What Commies disparagingly call Dark Money is really a robust expression of freedom, in the opinion of those efficiently influencing elections and legislation.
 
On the other hand, can anyone tell me why a PAC is tax exempt, just like a charitable nonprofit prohibited by law from engaging in political action of any kind on pain of losing its tax exempt status?  Can anyone tell me why a 501(c)(4) is not required to disclose who funds it?  
 
The answer, of course, is as self-evident as the proposition that all men are created equal.   It is the same reason a dog licks its privates. Because it can.  Since money equals speech, those with the most money get to lick, or be licked, wherever they want, since it’s a parliament of pandering prostitutes.   Freedom is a beautiful thing, to those free to enjoy it.
 
But enough ranting, time to shave and exercise some of my other inalienable rights.  Goddamned shame about the way this country treats those brave souls we send into hell and then thank for their service, as we tell them to have a very nice day and let them wait, on secret lists, to die.  A small percentage of the corporate taxes unpaid by GE, Exxon, Apple and their ilk could fund a first rate health care system for veterans, but that would be so damned unfair to corporate CEOs!

Reminder to Be More Careful

“HEEEEEET-Lah-ree-yoos!” howled the monkey with glee, a little too enthusiastic about my minor visual joke.

I’ve got to be more careful about what I say in front of him, I thought.  I’m his fucking role model.  I haven’t really been able impress on him that ‘hitlerious’ is only appropriate and/or semi-clever in certain very specific situations.   He’d latched on to it as an all purpose howl and I was getting a little sick of it.

I’ve spoken once really well, outside of a few isolated moments of deadpan eloquence in seedy courtrooms.  I wish the monkey had been there to see me at my best.  It was at my mother’s memorial service.  I killed, as the comedians say.

“YOO keeled at your mother’s memorial!  HEEE-TLAH-ree-yoos!” yapped the monkey.

I’ve got to figure this out, how to get him off that stinking throw away.  It reminded me of when I taught a friend guitar years ago and got to hear every one of my worst musical tics played over and over and over.  At least then it forced me to learn some new musical tics, but it was painful.

“Better musical tics!  Adolflutely Hitlerious!” barked the monkey, embellishing now, I noticed– not without chagrin.

“Listen, lice picker,” I said to my pet, “if you live a good life, and are a loving person, or monkey, or whatever, then perhaps when you die someone will memorialize you the way I memorialized my mother in that nice chapel in Peekskill.  A guy in a suit will stand up there and talk from the heart, and one last time people will see you in your best light, and laugh, and be somber, and recall that you were a unique character, endearing and tough, and that you lived and left a range of colors and flavors that people can consider after you’re gone.”

“Colors and flavors!” howled my monkey, by now completely out of control, “oh, stop it, please, you’re Goering to kill me!”  Pleased with his joke, the tiny fascist scrunched up his face again and shrieked “Heeet-lah-lah-LAH-ree-yoos!”

Clearly, I will have to do something about this.

Cultivate Mindful Empathy

I urge myself today– take a calligraphy pen and write it again, as handsomely and lovingly as you can:  cultivate mindful empathy.

Though it’s difficult, particularly when feeling dispirited and abandoned by friends and family alike: remember to be aware of the troubles of others and not to minimize them.   Remember to be sensitive to what others are suffering, even when it may seem senseless to you.  Yesterday a friend, thinking of people who mistreated him decades ago, expressed understandable thoughts of revenge.   As one of the most remarkable people I’ve met, the late, great Fran MacDonald, often said, to great effect: “I understand.”  

Think about the power of that simple response:  I understand.  I hear you, I feel what you’re saying, I have digested the import to you.   On the other hand, it may have been Fran’s way of gently telling me to shut up whenever I complained, which was often.  

A talent for complaint, a genius for it, really, runs in my family.  It just comes naturally to some people.  “You’d complain if you were hung with a new rope,” my father observed to his only son more than once.

Just the other day, in the context of complaining about the many weaknesses of the so-called Affordable Care Act,  I compared our brilliant president’s many laudable speeches with his many less laudable actions, to the great annoyance of a friend who thinks Obama is a great man.  The president has spoken eloquently about the need for a transparent government while invoking the 1917 Espionage Act to intimidate leakers and maintaining an administration more opaque, less accessible to journalists and seekers of information under the Freedom of Information Act, than even the secretive Cheney’s administration was.  Net neutrality, equal access to all websites, at equal speed, is something the president has often correctly called a cornerstone of democracy.  He has pledged over and over to defend it, his ominous appointments to the board that will decide who can sell what at which internet speed and service notwithstanding.  His first official act as president was symbolically closing Guantanamo Bay prison, showing that his heart is in the right place; never mind the devilish details of the many uncharged prisoners, detained now for more than a decade, that we are force feeding there as they try to starve themselves to death.  A commitment to renewable energy, laudable, and new records for petro-fuel extraction quietly applauded by the oil companies.   Add the boom The Wall Street Journal crowed about: pumping thousands of gallons of secret, highly toxic chemical stews into the earth in order to extract trapped, and highly profitable, natural gas from deep inside the earth.  The worrisome Keystone pipeline that will transport tar sand sludge thousands of miles, from Koch Brother owned land in Canada to refineries in the American Gulf of Mexico that will extract gasoline from it, so far Obama has only approved the southern half of it for operation.    No reason, but past experience, to believe he will OK the crucial northern half of the pipeline.

By the way, I learned recently that the Koch Brothers’ father was a founding member of the John Birch Society, the outfit that contended then president Dwight D. Eisenhower was an agent of Communism.   The old reactionary is smiling in his grave at how skillfully his billionaire sons are advancing his old agenda.   Breeding will out, I suppose.

I say these critical things about our president sadly and fully realizing the virulent hatred this half-black man faces, the troubled, divided, ravished country he inherited and the additional pressure to accommodate that is placed on him, as a half-black man and our first “post-racial” president.

But I was talking about empathy a moment ago.  I can hear the haters, and I should pause to understand:  

Whoa, nothing “half” about it, dude.  We are stricter here than the good folks who made the Nuremberg Laws.  One half black equals black.  Shoot, a damn quadroon is black!  Same for an octoroon, damn it.   We American racists are strict, son, what the hell you talkin’ about “half-black”?   Did you bother taking a look at him lately?  The only half-black thing about him is his damn policies, and his embrace of virtually every policy G.W. Bush ever enacted, and that’s the only good half.  The indisputable fact is: the man’s still black.

Which puts me in mind of my friend, the fan of Obama’s, and his measured, reasonable sounding point about incrementalism.  With all the faults of Obamacare, he said, it’s a step in the right direction that was made against unprecedented, rabid opposition and something that no previous president had the courage or political will to do.  Leaving aside that it may in many ways favor the profits of private insurance companies over the needs of American medical patients, that it leaves millions of Americans without insurance, that it makes no sense compared to a public option, it is still a step, an incremental improvement over what came before.  Of course, he works for a corporation that provides his health insurance and so is not directly effected by it, but he’s read a great deal about the details and knows many things about the law that he’s sure even those suffering under it don’t know.

I gave him an example of incrementalism from history that caused him to crease his brow and agree to disagree.  After the Civil War the 14th Amendment guaranteed the rights of citizenship to all Americans, promising due process and equal protection of the laws [1].  It also granted Congress the power to pass any laws necessary to enforce its provisions against recalcitrant states, formerly in rebellion and forced by economic necessity to ratify the amendment as a condition for federal aid, that might be intent on violating these rights.  

Within a few years of the Amendment’s ratification, in the depths of a severe economic depression caused in large part by the war to preserve or abolish slavery, the Supreme Court clarified matters.  The privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States were spelled out explicitly by the wise and unappealable jurists of the nation’s high court:  the right to migrate freely from state to state, the right to freely use navigable interstate waterways and a third, equally important right of citizenship.  

The remaining privileges and immunities of American citizenship, the Court held, were the business of the States, and if the Ku Klux Klan itself ran the damned state, well, that was not the business of the federal government, unless, of course, the State was trying to abridge any of those three enumerated rights.  Case closed.  “Call me pisher,” as my grandfather used to say.

That remained the constitutional law of the land for more than 90 years, talk about incremental.  It remained so until some clever New York radical attorneys came up with a way to invoke the long slumbering century-old enforcement statute, never repealed,  to enforce the 14th Amendment, after the murders of civil rights workers Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman in June 1964,  down in the bowels of Mississippi.  Courageous southern judges on the federal bench ruled that the old statute could be used to bring such cases into federal court.  It has been used, literally millions of times, since, after a refreshing almost hundred year nap, to enforce the original intent of the 14th amendment. 

In that Mississippi trial, by the way, seven of the nineteen accused members of the lynch mob who murdered Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman, after indictments against them were dismissed and the dismissal was overturned by the Supreme Court, eventually were convicted and sentenced to three to ten long years in prison [2].  The grinning sheriff was not convicted, though his deputy eventually served four years of his six year sentence.  Incrementalism, my man, something to be happy about — if you live to be 150 or so.

It is easy to be distracted, that’s for sure.  What is hard, and well worth doing, is cultivating mindful empathy.  It is at times very hard.  I suppose those are the times when it is most worth doing.  Today would be a good day for me to work on it.  It’s either that or jump out of my skin, leap onto my skeleton, already posed horse-like, and gallop off howling.

Come to think of it, that might be a better idea.

 

[1]  No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

[2]  On December 29 (1967), Judge Cox imposed sentences.  Roberts and Bowers got ten years, Posey and Price got six years, and the other three convicted defendants got four.  Cox said of his sentences, “They killed one nigger, one Jew, and a white man– I gave them all what I thought they deserved.”   source

 

The Arch-Enemy of Creativity

There are several forces that can choke creativity to death, but probably its most ruthless foe is a ticking clock set for a very short time frame.

“Ready, set…. create! You have twenty minutes to be creative, then we’re back on the clock: go, go, go!!!!”

In a situation like this the most musical sound you are likely to hear is the loud, rhythmic ticking of the clock counting down the minutes until creative time is over and you are back to the workaday drill. Young children can probably salvage something in this short burst of time, they are not bound by practical cultural imperatives as adults are, not yet daunted by seeming logical impossibility. A disciplined adult might write a tight paragraph or two in fifteen or twenty minutes, or play something nice on a piano or think up something new. But for most others, that tiny window to do something creative won’t be one they can leap through very productively. Just as they enter the creative zone, that free play place where most creative people report that time disappears, time will be called and it’s back to reality.

For one thing, as the clock goes from 20 to 19 to 15 minutes to 9, pressure is building. Pressure is the enemy of imagination. Time is required for the mind to unwind and the imagination to uncurl and stretch itself. Imagination takes its time, cannot be summoned instantly like a genie from a bottle. A short period of unwinding must be allowed for.

The rest of the world must be allowed to recede before the mind unwinds to dream up things that don’t already exist. This takes time. It can take 20 minutes or more for the distractions to dissipate enough for the relaxation necessary for inventive play to set in, and then at least an hour is needed for that play to be of good use. Only an undistracted, relaxed person can think and act creativity. In this world of a million constant distractions, it takes time for the rippling pond of the mind to calm itself.

It’s true that many creative thoughts happen in an instant, when we are doing other things– the aha moment stepping into the shower, the missing puzzle piece appearing out of nowhere as we chop firewood. The brain is ingenious this way, because creativity and problem solving are native to us, but I am talking about setting a period to do creative work. You must not be stingy when you do this.

Thought experiment: you live a pressured life with a hundred nagging responsibilities every day. When you are not actually ticking off tasks you are worrying about tomorrow’s list, which is bad, but not as bad as the list for the following day, or next Tuesday’s. You make room on your calendar for a twenty minute session of playing your neglected musical instrument. To do this in good conscience you must first squeeze in three additional tasks, saving the remaining ten for after your little play session. Imagine the music you might improvise under those conditions.

We live in a highly pressurized, competitive society where most of us are judged on how hard we work and how much money we make. If you are born, like Thomas Jefferson, booted and spurred, etc., you can be judged on the quality of the luck you worked hard to create, but few are born having worked hard enough in the womb to emerge attended by 300 slaves. Even so, Jefferson was undeniably a prolifically creative man. If you are not born super-rich, your life is usually spent in the practical pursuit of usefulness and making money.

Creativity, unless it brings an income, is reserved for day dreamers and idlers. That I can easily be seen as both of these at the moment leaves me in a distressed state of mind sometimes. I find myself tormented by the simple fact: unless you monetize your creation very few will understand what you have been wasting your time doing. Unmonetized creativity, no matter how otherwise cool that creation may be, is– say it with me: failure and a source of shame.

I picture an immensely talented little girl who two decades ago sat at her grandmother’s upright piano and began playing two handed classical music by ear. I can see her little left hand, it was like those water bucket carrying brooms from the Sorcercer’s Apprentice scene in Fantasia. The left hand was animated, relentless, moving in perfect time, of its own accord, and continued to keep perfect time as the little girl looked at me over her shoulder and beamed. “And look, you can play this one too!” and she played another classical melody as the left hand kept playing its part perfectly. Then she played a third classical tune over the still uninterrupted bass line.

Fast forward– or better yet, don’t. Let’s keep the focus right there. The six year-old was not imagining herself on stage at Carnegie Hall, or cashing the check for playing at Carnegie Hall. She was not picturing her face on the poster, on the album cover. She was certainly not thinking of the clock, or what she might have to do next. She was in awe, splashing happily in a joyous torrent, connecting herself without any self-consciousness to a deep human longing, magically coaxing life, melody, beat and danceable music from an inanimate object.

“Yes, but the six year-old did not understand that she was not actually coaxing magical life out of that piano, she was merely discovering the musical/mathematical discoveries already made by other very talented people, Mozart, Beethoven and so forth. Remarkable, perhaps, that she could do this without knowing how to read music, OK, I’ll give you that. Good for her that her left hand could play so independently and so steadily– a real talent, OK, we’ll give you that too. But I hardly think, you know, this is just so typical of the way you try to build your ‘case’. I say, I say, blah blah blah,” says the predictable voice of the world.

There is no market for what I’m selling so far, or, more precisely, I haven’t found a way to market it yet. Our free market (as those who profit most from the system have romantically named it) is run according to the bottom line. What you can sell has value, clearly. What you dream about, unless monetized, is only a dream. We all like to dream, yes, of course, but better to dream of creating something of tangible value than of building play castles in the clouds. It may seem a shame that our culture is the way it is, to someone who likes to waste their time dreaming of things as they wish they were instead of logically fitting their creativity to what is marketable… I say, I say: blah blah blah.

Forget for a moment the arguable shame of a culture that puts a price on everything and discards whatever can’t be sold for a profit. Forget you are reading the words of a man who swims, ranting on the strenuous out breaths, against the current of the mercantile world we live in. Forget that most people simply don’t have the luxury of 20 minutes to unwind before spending an hour being creative, or any real desire to abstractly create in the first place.

Remember this — there is nothing to lament if you’re unable to think creatively if you don’t give yourself time to let life’s pressures fall away for ninety minutes or so once in a while. Creativity may be an abstraction that means little to you, it seems to mean little to most people. That’s perfectly fine. But if you mean to be creative, remember to give yourself enough time to unwind and let the world of other demands turn hazy and fade away, before you fault yourself for a lack of creativity.

employee handbook

Why they play annoying, aggressive, repetitive music while you’re on hold to talk to a human at a large corporation, ten minutes into this latest wait, finally makes sense to me.  If annoying and aggressive enough, many of the callers will give up and go to the website where a human will not have to be paid to deal with a customer.  Logical, really, and good for the bottom line, if also frustrating for the customer.

In the old days the customer was always right– nowadays we are presumed to be powerless assholes, thanked for continuing to hold and told by cheerful robots that our business is very, very important to them.

As I continue to hold I am thinking about compiling a short employee handbook, perhaps an employee e-book.  This handbook would be illustrated by children’s drawings, cut-outs and claymation– if an e-book it could be animated.  Colors, flavors and sounds of creative play could be incorporated as we describe the philosophy of the organization: a place for children to make and share discoveries, creative and technical, supported by adults who listen carefully and encouragingly to their ideas.  It would outline and explain the three rules the adult must impart:  have fun, work together, be quiet and listen when asked to listen.

“Have fun” sounds simple for kids unleashed in a room full of art supplies, but it incorporates another key aspect: you can’t have fun if people are bothering or excluding you.  Which leads to rule two: work together, and its unspoken side rule– if you don’t want to work with someone, don’t bother them.   Without rule three it all falls apart– there are times when kids get out of control and have to simply be quiet and listen for a moment.  Sometimes a particularly out of control kid needs to be made an example of, given an immediate time out until the next time.

I will be asked: what are your credentials for writing an employee handbook?  Fortunately for me, that is not a question I will have to answer.

This world is a place of zooming competition where either we leverage, revamp, brand, rebrand and strategically partner or, my friends, we disappear, unable to compete with outfits who can do all these things, who never stop doing these things.  Outfits to whom a $20,000,000 federal grant is nothing more than a good start.  I spoke to a woman from an organization that got a $20,000,000 federal grant recently, and she was not snoozing as she generously gave me more than a half hour of her busy day.  Sympathetic sounding, and making a series of helpful-sounding suggestions, as well as a small promise she hasn’t yet kept a week later, I’m sure she wondered by the end how someone as ignorant of the language of marketing and sales could think total candor and frankness might be called for in a business conversation.  She’d thought she was getting a call from a man representing an innovative organization hers could partner with.

Turns out the guy was drowning, desperate, working alone from the Book Depository window, madly thinking, out of the blue, of an illustrated employee handbook he might one day write and finally turning dispiritedly away from a menu of distasteful and so far futile tasks he’d set himself for the day.  But not before he reminded callers that their business is very, very important to him and that he appreciated their patience as they continue to hold.

 

You’ve Got the Power

We hear all the time about positive thinking, visualizing the things we want, pushing through to our goals.  These are all good ideas, even if each one is often positioned on a greased, tilted incline. 

You work for someone who doesn’t pay you.  They tap dance when confronted.   If you become angry they will never pay you.  If you remain mild, they will never pay you.  If they intend never to pay you, they will never pay you.   You can visualize the amicable resolution of this vexing situation:  a check that doesn’t bounce and a post-it note apologizing for the delay and thanking you for your patience.  Outside of visualizing that, have a nice day.

Today a Canadian, apparently, read my first post on this blahg which contained this paragraph:

I don’t mean to sound peevish, living in this moment in time when literally any idiot can wax philosophical over them internets, but I probably am peeved.   I have hard work to do, and I need a bit of luck.   Thomas Jefferson noted that his luck was multiplied many times over by his constant hard work.   I wonder, listlessly, if he really worked harder than most of his 300 slaves on the inherited plantation where the master worked so hard improving his luck, and the cause of human freedom.  It is beyond doubt that his luck was much better than their’s.

If you inherit a vast estate, and hundreds of slaves, it is much easier to become the Author of Liberty than if you are born a slave on a plantation by the Chesapeake Bay, as the brilliant and courageous Frederick Douglass was.  Though it can go either way, clearly, having no need to worry about survival, or beatings, or laws against your basic human rights, makes it easier to think positively, visualize (and buy) the things you want, push towards your goals.  Money, social prestige and power go a long way to making a lot of those hard work leads to luck type deals turn out luckier than no money, no social standing and only the power of one’s beliefs do.

That said: you’ve got the power.  It may be harder to launch a successful business with no money, no financial backers to speak of, no experience in business, but it is not impossible.  If you want it enough, believe in it enough, work hard enough, undaunted by the extreme difficulty of success, by setbacks, by the staunch disinterest of virtually everyone you know, you may succeed.  It cannot be denied that you are the only person who has the power.

We Americans learn early, and are reminded often, those of us not born booted and spurred to ride the backs of everybody else, that we are fungible drones, born to serve in fear of losing our health insurance, our pensions, our lives.  We are taught that we can only achieve the American Dream (being fantastically wealthy) by working harder, for more hours than the next fungible drone.  This next drone is not a colleague or comrade but a competitor.  There are only a few seats at the table, and most are already taken.  Ready, gladiators?  

Ah, but I am just being peevish.  I have no fear of losing my health insurance, pension or life.  I am blessed to live in comfortable circumstances.  I could have been born, like a billion or more others, without basic sanitation, without drinking water, in a toxic slum where the odds of even living to adulthood are ten million times worse than mine.  

The fact remains, difficult and problematic though it may also be, you’ve got the power.   The trick is figuring out how to harness that power and use it consistently and positively.  A tricky trick, no doubt, but we are ingenious bastards, those of us who would be the Authors of Liberty but are not born as Philosopher Princes.

A few patriotic thoughts on Memorial Day

What we are to remember on Memorial Day is sometimes hard to recall.  If I’m not mistaken, this holiday used to be called Decoration Day, a day when Sunnyland Slim tickled the black notes and sang the blues for his dear, departed Freddie Lee every year.  “I never will forget about my Freddie Lee, I sing the blues for her on Eh-eh-EV-ry Deh-CO-ray-ZHJUN Day” he sang off the DJ copy of the LP my father had in his collection.  You can hear a few bars of it, with great sax by King Curtis, here   (track 6).  Somebody my father knew in college, probably one of the college station’s DJs, laid it on young Irv, knowing he was passionate about the Human Rights of the Negro and other underdogs and a lover of race music.

My father attended college after World War II on the GI bill and for the first time in his life, I think, was widely recognized for his intelligence. He did well at Syracuse and enrolled in a doctoral program in history at Columbia University.  Somewhere along the way he picked up the Sunnyland Slim album and a couple of early King Curtis records, as well as some by John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy.  I never heard him listen to anything but Sam Cooke and cantorial music on the stereo at home, but these were definitely his records I listened to in the basement of that long-ago sold house in Queens.

Slim’s Shout, the album was called, probably the only LP recorded by the piano player.  (The internet shoots this theory to hell, the album was released in 1960– years after my father’s college days ended.  It is also one of several LPs Sunnyland Slim recorded during his long life.  The instant genius memory of the internet also informs us that the tune Slim sings with such conviction about his Freddie Lee was written by Sonny Boy Williamson II.   Presumably Freddie Lee was the other bluesman’s lost woman.)

What we remember on Memorial Day– the lives men and women in uniform gave up fighting in wars.  We remember their sacrifice, the ‘ultimate sacrifice’, as it is usually styled.  Some of these soldiers, sailors, fliers, fought to keep our nation safe and secure.   Many were heroes.   Many were not, nor did they die fighting to keep The Home of the Brave free to those able to fully enjoy the pursuit of happiness; they fought in human terror, trying to stay alive and not managing it.

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What we do not remember on Memorial Day– the hellish hideousness of war.   That few wars make any sense, except in the cruel calculus of those intent on remaining in power.  That most of the men and women who die in wars do not go into harm’s way voluntarily.  Many over the centuries were conscripted, others, for lack of a better choice, join an army they could be shot for deserting.  Heroism and cowardice, and patriotism, and keeping the world safe for democracy, or opposing a series of modern day Hitlers large and small, have very little to do with most war or most of the people killed in war.  

Decoration Day, Wikipedia informs us, began after the Civil War when families would go to cemeteries all over the country to decorate the graves of the fallen.   The Civil War, our simplified history teaches us, was fought to keep this great nation whole and to free the slaves.   It is only in an advanced placement high school course that students may learn about the Draft Riots in New York City, a pogrom during which blacks were hung from lamp posts and the national guard fought the enraged white citizens driven mad by the fact that the rich could buy their way out of this bloodbath while the poor were conscripted to fight for the rights of southern blacks held as property, who, once freed, would be competitors for the scarce work these poor whites were looking for.

Memorial Day is also not the day to remember that the wealthy men who began the Civil War, those aristocrats romanticized history sometimes calls “The Planters”, who painted the destroyed landscape of the American south with the blood of Americans, were deemed to have suffered enough by the loss of their slaves.  The forty acres and a mule that idealistic Americans thought were the least the freed slaves should be given, well, would you settle for Black Codes, you special favorites of the law?

I recently found a paper which had somehow worked its way to the top of a table, a page I photocopied more than a decade and a half ago, when I was a law student trying to make sense of the history of American racism at law.  The unknown author wrote of the debate in Congress after the Civil War, men like Thaddeus Stevens advocated seizing the millions of acres owned by the Planters, a few hundred people, and distributing it to the millions of freed slaves and poor whites, to make them self-sufficient and to ensure that the sacrifices of the war would not have been made in vain.

The wealthiest hundred families in the former Confederacy moved swiftly to make sure only their wartime sacrifices would not be in vain.  A few decades later history would be written to show that the South had been betrayed by vicious Northerners, a partial excuse for the many blacks burnt and/or hanging from trees in those years.  One of the things those vicious Northerners did not manage to do was to give the freed slaves a fighting chance in the former confederacy, or at law, the laudable intentions of the Thirteenth (ended slavery), Fourteenth (US Citizens have guaranteed civil rights) and Fifteenth (Black men may vote– unless not allowed to) Amendments notwithstanding.   A series of infuriating and irrefutable Supreme Court decisions ensured that a century of Black Codes, racism at law and lynching would not be hampered by Constitutional Amendments ratified by the former Confederacy (in exchange for federal aid to rebuild their infrastructure) virtually at gun point.

It is a shameful history, and in one important sense not very different from the history we are living today, when the richest few families in the country own more than the vast majority of the rest of the citizens combined, where they purchase the legislation necessary to keep their privileges and advantages in place, thank you.  Where wars are fought by the poor for the benefit of those who used to be called War Profiteers.

Let us not forget: you can get a good deal on a mattress on Memorial Day.  The malls are packed.  Beaches open for business tomorrow.  The summer begins.  Take a moment, as you are enjoying your freedom, to remember the men and women who gave their lives so that you could barbecue, watch TV, pursue happiness, go to the beach, and live proudly in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

And remember, while thanking the war dead, to thank those wise politicians who abolished conscription and moved this nation to an all-volunteer army. That went a long way toward our nation being able to whole-heartedly support our troops by cheering any war these brave, hapless soldiers are sent to fight and die in.  

Next year we will remember those additional brave men and women who fall at the hands of those pretending to be our allies, the many soldiers who fall by their own hands, as well as those killed in unwinnable combat with a hazy and implacable enemy who hates our freedom.

 

Be Of Good Cheer

Coming up with the odd one liner is no substitute for being of good cheer.   The odd one-liner may cause a good guffaw, but that laugh passes quickly and, in the larger scheme of things, does not make up for an abiding lack of cheerfulness.

Remarking that someone’s redeeming qualities are becoming more and more elusive may be a clever way of understating the obvious, but it’s no substitute for a day’s work.

That’s why they call it work.  

Be of good cheer.

Letting Go of the Dying

Four years ago today my mother died.   She had been in a deep sleep at the Hospice by the Sea (miles from the sea, but a nice place nonetheless) for almost 24 hours, sleeping through her 82nd birthday.  She eventually breathed her last and was gone.

Last night I spoke to an old friend whose mother, at 90, has been suffering from Parkinson’s Disease for many years.  She long ago lost the ability to move without pain and has been bed-ridden for the last few years.  In recent months she has virtually lost the ability to speak.  When she could still speak she would frequently tell her daughter that she wanted to die.   Of course, dying is not as easy as merely wanting to die.

“She makes her wishes pretty clear though,” my friend complained, after confirming that her mother is silent most of the time, except when crying out in pain.  It bothers her, the way her mother clenches her teeth against food and water, for example.

My friend’s sister is a doctor, she arranged for intravenous hydration and nutrition for the dying woman, as well as blood thinners and other medications to prolong the dying woman’s life.   The bags of nutrition cost $100 a day.   There has been trouble getting people to keep the port clean, very hard to find skilled nursing people who will also stay for a 12 hour shift, and overnight.  Unless one has unlimited funds, of course, which my friend and her family don’t.  So the two sisters perform most of the medical procedures.

I spent some time listening to my friend’s intense frustration with Hospice, which was reluctantly invited into the picture last week.   The social worker and nurses, as described, sound like a bunch of insensitive bureaucrat assholes.  On the other hand, they are dealing with two adults who will not honor their mother’s expressed wishes and are doing everything possible to keep her alive as long as possible.

“My nephew’s graduation is June 4,” my friend tells me wearily, and that’s one reason they want their mother to live a few weeks longer.  Not that she will be at the graduation, but it would be very inconvenient for everybody to have a funeral in the short time between now and the graduation.

On the other hand, two weeks is a lifetime of misery for a woman in chronic pain whose daughters are spending thousands of dollars to make sure she lives until at least June 5th.

“She’s so angry,” observed my friend.

I told her the story Mickey Rourke told to James Lipton.  He’d been very protective of his little brother for the kids’ entire life.  The younger brother had some deadly disease and clung to life for a long time after he should have been dead.   Rourke sat by his bed every day.  The hospice nurse called him into the kitchen.

“And I knew what she was gonna say.  She told me my brother had lived months longer than anyone she’d ever cared for with his disease and told me he was clinging to life because I wouldn’t let him go.  She said I had to tell him it was OK to go.”

“Jesus,” said Lipton, “she said that to you?”

“Yeah, so I went in and said ‘it’s OK, I love you and you can go.’”

“How long did it take him to die after that?” Lipton asked.

“About 20 seconds,” said Rourke.

She was impressed by this story.  It is an impressive story.   But she is not ready to let her mother go.

I told her the story from the beginning of Sherwin Nuland’s excellent How We Die.  I admitted to her that I’d never read much of the highly lauded book, but told her about the unforgettable opening chapter.   

Nuland, a resident, emerges from a hospital room drenched in sweat and close to hyperventilating.   An older doctor calms him and asks what happened.  Nuland described a terminally ill patient, in his nineties, who went into cardiac arrest while Nuland was making his rounds.  He’d spent twenty minutes frantically performing every heroic measure possible to bring the man back from death, but had been unsuccessful.

The older doctor reminded him that the patient was in his nineties, waiting to die from a wasting disease.   He asked Nuland what kind of favor he would have done the old man by reviving him to live a few more hours or days when his wait to die was now over.

My friend was impressed by this story too.   But she is still not ready to let her mother go.

I told her other stories, about my father’s death, and my mother’s.  About how hard it is to let someone you love go.   I told her that as they approach their deaths their final autonomy is all they have left, that it must be about their wishes, and not our wishes for them.  And how approaching death from a terminal disease often follows a pattern.  The person begins withdrawing from the world and eventually loses the desire to eat or drink and just wants to be done.

“If you expressed a wish not to eat and drink, which is one of the final signs that a person is ready to die, and you were hydrated and given nutrition against you will, you wouldn’t like it,” I pointed out.

“No,” my friend said, “I wouldn’t.”

We spoke a little longer and in the end, before wishing her strength and urging her again to get rid of the Hospice if they didn’t quickly shape up, I stated the obvious.  “You and your sister are not ready to let your mother go.”  She agreed.  I wished her a good night’s sleep and told her we’d talk soon.   She sounded grateful for the conversation in an otherwise terrifying void.

But I’m sure another box of nutrition and hydration supplies is being ordered today, as I reflect on the relentless sorrows of this world.

What You Will Be Asked to Do 

If you are patient, they will ask you to be even more patient.  Generous?  They will always demand more generosity, they can never have enough of that in this greedy world.  If you have a sense of humor, make us laugh.  You’re a clever guy, why won’t you make us laugh?  

Nine year-old today came into the last animation workshop toward the end, crying.  I asked her what was wrong, she couldn’t say.  I gave her a sheet of photos of herself, face exploding into mischievousness.  “This will cheer you up,” I told her, going through the box of supplies I was trying to divide between two heavy duffel bags to take out of the classroom and carry back to my crowded apartment.

“I know what I want to say,” she said a moment later.   She meant she wanted me to shoot a little video of her.  I was happy to oblige.

“What I like best about….” she said, then searched for the word, flustered.

“Take two,” I said, and she tried it again.  Same thing.

“Take three,” I said and she said “what I like best about…” there was another long pause then she said “stop motion” and I nodded and said “animation.”  

“Animation,” she said.

“Take four,” I said.  And she recorded her bit.  I shook her hand and thanked her, told her it was a pleasure working with her.

And it was, even under the worst circumstances so far for the endangered animation workshop.  A good group of kids, a poorly run after-school program.   The kids are given the choice of doing their homework, or animation.  Right after animation they can go outside into the springtime to run around, if they are done with their homework.  Today three kids animated while the other seven did their homework.

I’ve been paying an assistant to run the workshop.  I pay him the full fee I was paid at the last place.  He is a nice guy who has little experience teaching.  He runs a watered down version of the workshop, he edits fairly good versions of the kids’ animations, though he doesn’t take the time I often did to massage a few frames into an interesting animation nobody watches.  I realize now that there is a training component needed, and trainee rates while candidates get up to speed, but a deal’s a deal, and so I grossly overpaid this guy while I attended every session and actually ran the workshop, for no pay.

My invoice for the ten sessions was never paid.  I got a kind of apology when I first raised this with the controller back in March.  He told me the invoice had never been forwarded to him.  He asked me to send him the invoice and assured me he’d pay it by the end of the month.  He did not.  On my follow up call in April he apologized, described a hectic move to a new office and asked me to re-send the invoice and said he’d pay it on receipt.  Again, no check.  On my third follow up, after he didn’t return my call, he took out the cane and the hat and did the old soft shoe.

“You know how it is, Eliot,” he told me, beginning to dance like a young Buddy Ebsen. 

“Niggers get paid last, sir, if at all,” was one thing I might have said to him, though we don’t use that kind of language anymore.  My point would have been, if you are meek and lack the power to make anyone listen to you, shut the fuck up and take what you get, if anything.

There is every indication that this small after-school program that hired us for the ten sessions is going out of business after the death, at 34, of the woman who created and ran it.  When this happens my program will be stiffed for the fee for services we provided under the worst of circumstances so far.

Today I get back on the horse and pretend the program is flourishing, though the taste in my mouth is not of something delicious.  I will try to persuade myself and a woman at a large after-school nonprofit, recipient of a $20,000,000 federal grant (if and when she returns my call), that wehearyou.net is a vibrant and innovative program her outfit would do well to partner with.  She would be able to put the program in a dozen public schools in very short order, if we come to terms.  

I’ve got to hope the almost eight hours of sleep I got last night will be the tonic I need.  Maybe there is no tonic powerful enough to pull of the confident sales job I will need to do, feeling as deflated as I do at the moment.

Be of good cheer, though.  However hard you may think you have it, literally everybody else has it harder.  Be assured, whenever your leg gets cut off, the paper cuts of those around you will be held up as reminders that your crying is of no use.

Crying is of no use.  Think of Mel Brooks’ definition of tragedy and comedy.  Tragedy is when I cut my finger.  Comedy is when you fall into a manhole and die.  Funny, isn’t it?