Monthly Archives: November 2014

I Give Up Part 3

“Your messianic thoughts led you inexorably to this day,” said an articulate mercenary binding my hands with plastic cuffs, a bit tight for my taste.  

“Things will always be too tight for your taste,” he said, displaying an alarming clairvoyance.  I shook my head as it dawned on me: there was nothing supernatural involved, the chip was transmitting directly to the network and all he had to do was smile and repeat my thoughts aloud.  A parrot correctly outfitted could do it, although, in fairness to the mercenary, not develop those massive biceps.

We dream when we are young of freedom to attain the things we dream about.  There are higher impulses that it just seems right will prevail.  

“Right,” said the centurion, bored, pushing me forward now, “righty-Oh.”

I suddenly found myself thinking of terrible things few caring people care about, in a stream: the doomed children of the poor my mother correctly scolded me are an obsession of mine, unjustifiable state violence, thousands killed by secret American death squads in Viet Nam under the Phoenix Program, on suspicion of being enemies of democracy, circumvention of American law after 9/11 to blur the lines between covert and clandestine operations, eliminate the requirement to disclose covert assassinations to Congressional committees  and allow for new American death squads to operate secretly in as many countries as unaccountable persons appointed by the president deem necessary to protect our freedom here at home.  

I suddenly had the image of that young man in Ferguson, Missouri who had been shot to death back in 2014.  His large body, lying in the street for hours while they dug up evidence of why he deserved to be killed, shot so many times even though unarmed.  The National Guard was called in, anti-riot squads, tear gas, tanks, “we will control the angry crowds and protect private property by any means necessary,” vowed the governor, echoing Malcolm X grotesquely.  

“The governor didn’t say ‘by any means necessary’, jerk-off,” smirked my captor, nudging me forward.

A video of the large young man committing a misdemeanor, stealing cigars, shoving a tiny clerk, not long before the policeman confronted and killed him, was soon released and shown repeatedly on every TV station.  Perhaps, it was theorized, the unidentified cop knew he was dealing with a dangerous criminal, confirmed when the kid possibly used the f-word to the policeman, or even the explosively provocative n-word to a plainly white man.  No white man should ever be expected to abide being dismissed as a ‘nigger’, especially by a black kid.   Who could blame the large cop for his rage, for pursuing the wounded kid fifty yards, already shot, and making sure he was dead?

Why this image came into my head, I cannot say, but I saw the photos as they’d been shown on the news:  the white officer with his close cropped hair, the black teenager with a motor board on his head, a high school graduate who would never need to buy books for college.  

When a grand jury declined to prosecute the police officer, let all the facts come out in a trial, they seemed to have decided the peace officer had already suffered enough.  The riot squads were called back in, instead of 1,000 mediators, peace makers, a commitment from the government to demilitarize civil police forces, do something about the disproportionate police killing of young black men and find solutions to long-standing racial problems it pretends no longer exist.  

“Yes, I know,” said the mercenary, helping me along now with the muzzle of his gun, “we are a society that uses deadly violence to answer every question.  Given the choice between protecting human dignity and protecting private property we always choose the latter.  It’s sacred.  Do you have any more questions, sir?”  The expression on his face was so sincerely quizzical that I almost asked him about L. Paul Bremer.

“Nobody cares about L. Paul Bremer,” the soldier told me. “Yes, he fucked everything up in Iraq after the perfectly executed Shock and Awe campaign freed Iraq from a modern day Hitler.  His first idiotic error was Order 1, the de-Baathifcation.  Sure, it was stupid, in hindsight, or even with average foresight, to fire thousands of doctors, teachers, nurses, civil servants because they’d been forced, by Saddam, to be members of his political party as a condition of their employment.”  He looked at me thoughtfully, and I could see him further considering what I was thinking of asking.

“Order 2 was an even bigger disaster, I’ll grant you that.  Disband the Iraqi army making 450,000 trained soldiers suddenly unemployed and without pensions in a country where an occupying power was breaking down doors, taking people to be tortured in Saddam’s former torture prisons, where the power grid had been destroyed by American bombing, where hospitals for the masses of wounded and sick were understaffed as a result of Order 1 that fired the best doctors, nurses and administrators in Iraq?  Big fucking mistake, huge mistake, unless your aim was to create an insurgency.  I grant you all that, sir, now just keep moving.”  This time the muzzle of the gun pushed me a bit more emphatically.

“And was Bremer a complete asshole to issue this statement to the suffering people of the Iraq that he was busy anally violating in ways no less brutal than his predecessor, Saddam:  We are going to fight them and impose our will on them and we will capture, or if necessary, kill them until we have imposed law and order upon this country?  Granted, granted, granted: complete asshole.  But Bremer retired soon after to a lavish estate and hid what might have been, to a lesser man, his shameful failure at a variety of luxury properties he and his family owned.  I mean, hasn’t the man suffered enough?”

And, truly, why was I even thinking of these things as a cross was waiting for me across town?  To my left and right I could see others, already crucified, writhing as they tried to die.  Mercifully, their vocal cords had been severed to minimize their expressions of suffering.  If you lead a life that takes you, inexorably, to your execution, have the decency to at least…

The butt of a rifle, expertly deployed, made my chip fall silent.

I Give Up part 2

It was a liberating moment, I recall, when I realized I could just give up.   “I Give Up!” I would call, hands up, walking step by step, slowly, toward the ruthless authorities I was surrendering to.   The sickening feeling of what I would then have to undergo was not in my mind in that moment, the forcible end of a fond dream, of a thousand sleepless nights kept awake by my dreams, the end of dreamless sleep that sucked a little life from me every night, the relief of being done with the struggle filled me with a kind of peace.  

I was chattering inwardly again, I realized, and this was a sign of the disease, I knew.  A rare condition that might someday merit inclusion in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Pharmaceutical Prescription Codes (“DSM”).  The current DSM, DSM XIII,  has over 24,000,000 discrete diagnostic and statistical prescription codes.  Modern science!  

The characteristics of this disease would not be statistically noted in a person who could say “others look at what is and say ‘why?’, I dream of things that should be and say ‘why not?'” with millions of dollars in the bank.  A person born wealthy is immune to the disease, inoculated by good fortune even before birth.  A person not born to privilege does not have the privilege of privileging this kind of thinking, in him delusional, because to objectively lack the power and proceed as though one had it is the hallmark of madness.  

Gandhi, my assistant here in the afterlife, and as pleasant a companion as one could wish for, reminds me of his great worldly success, in terms of making a living and running a business, before his great otherworldly success, leading millions, to become the living symbol of the peaceful change he wanted to see in the world. “Of course, I never said that, you know ‘be the change you want to see in the world’, ” he reminds me, “but, in essence, it is what I did.  First, though, recall that I was ambitious and hardworking and created a very successful law practice there in South Africa.  I had several people working for me, busy all the time, they made money for me while I slept.  I made a good living, had a luxurious home.  I pushed my wife around.  I was an asshole, impatient to fight the evil that was all around me but unable to see the anger in myself for what it was, what it could become.”

“But, you, my friend, are in a very different boat, although on the same perilous ocean.  Unless you had this kind of success, had the tools to market your talents, inspire others, build a business, before setting out to build a movement, why would you expect, at your rather mature age, to be able to suddenly create it out of, as the coiners of cliche would phrase it, whole cloth?”  

I knew this whole conversation was my own creation, no Gandhi, nobody waiting for my reply.  Nonetheless I felt compelled, by the disease itself, to respond, if non-responsively.  “The children of the wealthy will most often be attended to by people well paid to take their needs seriously.  At their exclusive schools they will be treated according to the most enlightened theories of education, theories that treat them as competent and unique individuals worthy of devoted attention.”

“Their opinions will be elicited, their ideas will be smiled on, their writing will be thoughtfully read and returned to them with encouraging comments in the margins.  The smiles and thoughtfulness may be slightly forced, true, since these are paid caretakers and not necessarily the ideal, loving bestowers of these things, but children are pleased by these reactions anyway, particularly in contrast to outright neglect or hostility.”  

“The children of the doomed– what is mysterious about this phrase?— they are, and I hope I am not shocking you with the bluntness of this, doomed.  Doomed in more ways than time allows me to describe, as I soon have to raise my hands and march carefully toward the mercenaries who will take me into custody.”

“There are no mercenaries there, nobody is taking you into custody, even if you give up,” Gandhi reminds me.  

There is no Gandhi there, I remind Gandhi.  

“Who, then?” he asks.

The children of the doomed.  They are born into…

“The children of the doomed, the doomed children… you’re like a broken record, the doomed children… the doomed children… what is it with you and the doomed children?  Millions of children are doomed, OK.  You didn’t make the world.  The doomed children, the doomed children…” calls the voice of my mother helpfully from the pristine white paper box where her ashes reside.  

Those authorities I mentioned, here is what they have to say, in a top secret legal opinion from the desk of current Federal Judge for life Jay Bybee, hired by powerful vice president Dick Cheney’s wartime consigliere David Addington:

For an act to constitute torture as defined [in the federal torture statute], it must inflict pain that is difficult to endure.  Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death…. For purely mental pain or suffering to amount to torture under [the federal torture statute] it must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g., months or even years.

You have had this unendurable psychological pain for months, you say?  Hard to believe, first of all, since you have been enduring it, haven’t you?  How difficult can it have been, this alleged pain– and note that harm, not pain, is the hallmark of a mental injury to rise to the level of torture– if you are able to walk in here and confront me about it, accuse me of torture, of all things?   Aren’t you being a bit subjective– I mean, how difficult to endure must it actually be, objectively?   Anyway, read my secret memo again, it says the duration must be for months, true, but it also says “or even years”.  What is unclear about this distinction, or the qualifier “or”?  Come back in five years, maybe ten.  My legal opinion is unclear, admittedly about how many years constitute significant duration.  Genius, no?  Have a nice day.

Now I am Jay Bybee.  Do you see how insidious this disease is?  My best play, it is becoming clearer and clearer to me, is to give up.  I am the author and defender of torture memos now?  

“You are the author of what you are paid to put out in the world, remember that,” says Gandhi.  “If you would have any effect in the world you must not give up, you must press on, you must have others publish your ideas, take on your fight alongside you.  You cannot do it alone, nobody in the world can.  Nor can you, if you will carefully read the description of your diagnosis in the draft of DSM XIV, give up.  You cannot give up.  You must not give up.  It may comfort you to think the discomfort will end if you do give up, but don’t worry about that, you will not give up.”  

He smiles the famous Gandhi smile, and I feel like asking him how a mature adult man can have a ‘wet dream’ sleeping naked with his lovely, naked teenaged nieces to “test himself in the firmness of his vow of celibacy”, but, really, what is the point?  That is the question I so often ask myself, in regard to so many struggles.

 

Small Bits of Advice to Myself

Avoid sitting around in your underwear judging people who inevitably disappoint.  You can do this easily by putting on pants and a shirt when you get out of bed.

Busy people with good intentions, when confronted by a good cause they have ignored, or a friend in a pickle who asked for help and who they have not helped, react with guilt.  Guilt is the single most abundant and predictable characteristic of the well-intentioned person.  It can also be corrosive to the recipient, so beware.   Its first cousin is anger.  Guilt can become anger in a second, maybe they’re more like twins.

Look down from time to time to be sure you have pants and a shirt on.

One of the easiest ways to bludgeon someone in an intellectual joust is by reframing the issue.  Doing this can quickly paint them into a corner, force concessions over things they have not even raised, disorientingly shift the battle to a more comfortable and familiar field where your victory is assured and the point they are trying to make will never see the light of day.  

Reframing an issue to beat somebody up is an asshole move.  Try not to do it yourself.  If you are having your thoughts reframed to make you look like a fool, protesting the reframing itself will only make things worse for you and leave you further from the original discussion.  Change the frame by immediately conceding the point they are using to reframe things, even if just “for the sake of argument” (for the sake of avoiding an attempted bludgeoning, actually)  and refocus the conversation.  And check to make sure you have pants on.  

Reframing, of course, is also extremely useful to the person tormented by guilt.  By doing so the actual source of guilt, an acutely painful thing, can be avoided, while actively giving unsought advice or help in a way that can relieve the guilt.  Also an asshole move, but one is better off not judging it, since it is entirely rational behavior, if not helpful or desirable for the recipient.  Wear pants while dispassionately noticing this.  Changing the frame is rarely useful in these situations as it will often cause inflamed guilt to flare into anger.  Smile as much as possible and keep the following in mind:  remain mild and forgiving even when reason is on your side.

Lowering the expectation bar is often a good thing.  As a general principle one is well-served by being happy with less, rather than unhappy because so much more was reasonably expected.  

Feeling depressed that you seem to lack the mental energy to continue up the steep and demanding path you’ve chosen?  Be happy when you see an ad for a clinical trial on treating depression, which even includes treatment for the low-grade chronic form called dysthymia that has been used to describe your seeming psychological accommodation to a childhood spent in the company of monsters.   “Made my day!” you can chirp to yourself, jotting down the number, “help is just around the corner!”  If prone to procrastination, make sure you wait a few days to follow up by calling the information line.  Idly check pants pocket.

Take joy in small things.  Related to lowering the expectation bar, be happy when you are moving forward, even in almost imperceptible snail-like oozes.  Finally getting out of bed excited by a thought you had, even if that thought is a very small one– a small joy that must be embraced as the great motivation it is.  A small joy on a dour day is worth as much as a large joy on a happy day, maybe more.

I have more advice for myself, and anyone else who might take a useful example from any of it, but I have to change a small, but idiotic, mistake in a previous post, pointed out to me just now, if you will excuse me.  (He said, making a notably lame exit excuse.)

 

I Give Up

This may be the organizing breakthrough I’ve been waiting for, a book idea I should outline while it’s fresh.   A late Philip K. Dick type thing, since the hour’s getting late.   The main character, living in a hopeless dystopian shithole in the near future, or recent past, has finally arrived at the place where he figures he might as well just cash it in, even though his work is not done.  His gently estranged friends have no idea what he is still trying to do, if anything.  The authorities are closing in anyway, as they always are.  The powers that be, if they knew of his mission, would be certain to crucify him straight away.   Trial no longer strictly necessary, the long emergency and everything.   Death on the cross too good for him, really, considering he’s hardly performed any miracles, to speak of.  Potential to do good works, most who still know him will agree to that, but hasn’t done any really impressive miracles, in spite of a lot of talk.

Flashback to Roman times where there was a small group who worshipped a murdered rabbi they considered holy, a charismatic teacher.  They were catching hell, these early followers of Jesus.  Turning the other cheek, as they’d been taught by their other-worldly master, persecuted because they didn’t worship the gods of their worldly masters, they were fed to lions for the amusement of the idiot crowds in Rome.  

In fairness to these idiot crowds, their lives were hard and they didn’t have TV, so watching people unfathomably committed to peace even at the cost of their lives, being ripped apart by wild beasts, put to the sword in great spectacles, was the closest they had to an exciting evening out and they went in droves, according to the market research that comes to down to us.  They also were mostly poor and hungry and got free bread at these circuses, though the obscenely rich also attended.  

These spectacles, and the bread, helped keep the desperate off the streets, where they might organize and fight the people who were keeping their mercenary army’s well-sandaled feet on their necks.  Watching these Christ-loving wretches who didn’t fight back get hacked up was the best show the Roman rabble were going to get.  

This went on for a long time, as the Roman Empire continued its long decline, until there arose a public relations machine that changed the script, and the long-term fate of this small sect of mostly martyrs who eventually became, at the time, the world’s most populous religion.   The story of Jesus was rebranded, brilliantly, told compellingly, the teachings most critical of the rich toned way down, blame for his murder shifted from the Roman authorities to the local Jews, and eventually sold to the highest classes of society.  The headquarters of that church today, ensconced in its own sovereign country in Rome, is a place of fabulous wealth, its art collection as impressive and valuable as any to be found in the world’s greatest museums.  

Several off-shoots of this church became very powerful and came to rule most of the European nations over time. With the divine rights of kings it was necessary to have a state that was also pretty much a church, and these churches, built on the teachings of the Son of God, a passionate devotee of peace and fairness, often went to war and put members of each other’s sects to the sword.  

The main thing, though, is the improvement of Christians’ fortunes, once they become the dominant religion through brilliant marketing, having sold the franchise to the wealthiest and most powerful of society, an inspiring story, the greatest in the history of marketing and branding.

That flashback would be only the momentary musing of the character, background that pulses through his mind as he passes the crucified, nailed up on the main streets of the once great city where he used to play stickball as a kid.   His last couple of friends would express concern over these hallucinations of crucified martyrs he kept speaking of.  There would be some debate about whether these were visions of martyrs or of criminals, or some combination of the two.  There was nothing so clear about who these ghosts on the crosses were.  

These concerned friends would also debate the kind of medication he should be on.  The author would burst through the narrative to comment, metafictively, about the events playing out in the story, bring in the real-life materials that were being metaphorically paraded before an audience of jaded literary agents, bored slush pile readers, cagey editors, ambitious book marketers, slick book packagers.

The book, of course, would bypass all these types and find its way directly into ordinary people’s lives through the internet, for a minimal cost, perhaps a donation.  This would be necessary for the author, and the character himself would also insist on it, having this successful and influential book about devoted souls slightly advancing madly impossible missions, almost enough to bring them to life, before their dejected surrender and crucifixion, bring no monetary profit to anybody.

Would kind of defeat the spirit of the book, if the author took in any real money for it.  But that is a musing for another time.

Concentrated Thinking

A writer interviewed recently by Terry Gross quoted Don DeLillo as calling writing “concentrated thinking.”  An excellent description of what a person does when focusing to write clearly, come to the point smartly, patiently untangle and remove what stands in the way of those things.  

Bad writing, like bad thinking, can be like a hungry anaconda.  Not to disparage large constrictors, we all need to eat, but a coiled monster that crushes you in its hungry embrace is not what most readers seek when they make their reading selections.  Making the reader’s task as easy as possible is one of the writer’s primary jobs, like making yourself easily understood is important in conversation. 

Which would you rather have in your lap on a Sunday afternoon, a relaxed cat or dog, or a ravenous constrictor weighing a few hundred pounds?

I’m thinking of this because, mistakenly believing I’d done some kind of good deed by answering a convoluted email from the toxic adult son of a recently deceased old friend, I had delivered to me an enormous pile of steaming shit, in a huge coil, by way of reply.  The inevitable punishment my misguided attempt at a good deed — done for the sake of others, not the vampire I was actually writing to–  deserved, no doubt.  The steaming mountain of shit, to my great alarm, uncoiled itself into a large constrictor and, as I pulled back in horror, got a firm hold on first one arm, then my torso.

I struggled against this determined monster for literally hours.  It was only through concentrated thinking, and metaphors like “coughing up a toxic hair ball”, and the fevered writing of many words, that I was able to finally loosen its terrible bonds.   The bad writing, and even worse thinking, put me back into aggravations long forgotten and filled me with a surprising amount of anger and violence.  

Bad enough writing, the product of bad enough thinking about painful emotions,  feels like it can kill you, if you let it enter your mind.   Like bad thinking, bad writing complicates things that are already difficult enough without adding complications.  

Concentrated thinking, and editing, and paring the thoughts to their most elemental form,  yielded this image, finally, which I sent as the last of too many words to the brother of this toxic person:

Your brother is a lost soul, flailing desperately.  He’s quicksand, only he talks you to death as he kills.

Like his bad writing.

 

We Can Only Do What We Can Do

I went to visit an old friend the other night, to let her off the hook.  She’d volunteered to help me as a hands-on business adviser to get my nonprofit off the ground a few years ago and found it impossible, partly because I sometimes resisted the strong opinions of this overbooked, talented, business woman and entrepreneur.  I went to release her from a promise it was impossible for her, or anyone in her position, to keep.  

I also was intent on telling her, though it’s taken me years to realize this seemingly simple thing:  people can only do what they can do and it’s ridiculous and self-defeating to be deflated or disappointed when they cannot do what they cannot do.  It’s also Einstein’s definition of insanity to continue in this loop: if someone shows repeatedly that they can’t do a particular thing, expecting them to be able to do it the next time, and getting pissed off again when they don’t, is the definition of insanity, or at least a foolproof recipe for it.

I visited to let her off the hook gently and resume our old, warm, comfortable friendship without the iceberg of my life’s biggest and best idea looming coldly in the way.  I went to tell her I recognize she had the best of intentions to help and express my appreciation for her willingness to help. Explain that I understand– seeing my plans through her framework of business success it’s hard to see my efforts to date as anything but the objective failures of someone unwilling to listen to even the best advice.  Until I can find colleagues I can inspire about my actual idea, and who become as excited as I am about the workings of the autonomous factory for creative play, I will never be able to move things forward very far or at more than a snail’s pace.

“Do you realize how hard you are to work with?”, she asked me with a smile, as determined to help, in spite of my attempts to reframe things, as I am to sell a philosophical system when all anyone can ever sell is a product the market will buy.  Her view is that my product cannot be so specific, it has to have the widest possible generic appeal so I can cold call hundreds of schools, marketing to them in familiar terms they are comfortable with, using professionally prepared targeted mailings and sample videos on enclosed thumb drives, and not putting them off with a radical approach, my sketchy, too candid, rambling, semi-depressing, too long sales rap and a maddeningly specific idea for exactly what I want to do and the specific places where I am willing to do it.

She had a legal pad out now, made two columns.  We were starting at the beginning, asset column, liability column.  Although I’d come to socialize, and protested that, she was determined to help, even after I told her I realize it’s absurd to rely on friends who don’t share the vision I am struggling to turn into a product for sale, a vision I am still struggling to pithily package.  I let her help me, sure, why not?  

She listed my assets: program and skills to run it, law degree, $8,000 donated dollars in the corporate war chest.  Then a light bulb went on over her head and she got excited.  My rent stabilized apartment!  I am sitting on a ‘cash cow’, if only I’d take the bold steps of violating the law and risking eviction, this was a tremendous resource as an illegal air B & B!  Hire a cleaning company, put everything in storage, have the landlord do all repairs, plaster and paint, have the floors done, buy furniture at Ikea.  I could then, from the proceeds of renting my illegal hotel suite, fund the salary for a professional partner, although, of course, I’d have to factor in bribing the superintendent of the building and use a fake name under which to solicit and accept the money, cash only, probably get a burner phone under a fake name, too.  

I expressed reservations, typical of my fearful, risk-averse nature, first of which was the constant presence of the shady superintendent who sees all comings and goings and would certainly notice people with suitcases walking up two flights, back down with suitcases, different people with new suitcases coming and going. 

“Do you do favors for the super?”  she asked.  A creative entrepreneur must be fearless and resourceful, her body language said to me.

“What, like help him take out the garbage?”  I said.

“No, I mean are you friendly to him, give him tips, take care of him, you know, do you have a good relationship with him?” 

“I guess so, we exchange wisecracks when we pass each other, I’ve made him laugh a couple of times, he’s sometimes funny,” I said, “but I don’t trust him.  Even if he was getting a cut of every guest’s cash payment, I wouldn’t trust him.  Especially then, I suppose.  Can you trust someone you have to bribe, someone who would take a bribe?”  We put the cash cow to the side, I told her I’d think about it.

Then, for purposes of marketing, she stressed the importance of camouflaging the radical nature of my student-run workshop.  “Nobody is going to send their kids to something advertised as run by kids.  I wouldn’t send my kids to anything that was ‘student run’,” she said emphatically.  “No parent wants their kids in a program the kids run.  We know our kids, especially at seven, can’t run a program, and they’re not really running your workshop, really.  You run it.  They want to know, before they hire you, before they send their kids to you, that the adult is in charge.  Run it however you want when you actually do it, if it works, which you tell me it does, fantastic, but if you think ‘student-run’ is a selling point, think again.”

This very point had been debated heatedly, and most annoyingly, at what I decided was the final board meeting with the people I had at that meeting.  Much easier to contribute criticism and strong opinion than to help imaginatively fine tune a vision you don’t share or understand, a vision, frankly, that hasn’t even been articulated professionally.  

I listened carefully to her point, trying to keep neutral body language and a receptive expression on my face.  I told her I understood she had a very strong opinion on this matter, and assured her I would give it more thought.

I felt very mature after saying this and we moved on to her next points, a few more about the cash cow I was sitting on and the nature of the marketing materials I’d have to produce, ones specifically not accenting my unique approach of putting the children’s playful motivation on the front end of the learning equation, whatever the hell that was supposed to mean.  

I’d find out the following day that there is at least one other worldwide movement dedicated to the same principles my program is, the same principles also expressed by Sugata Mitra.  It’s called the Reggio Emilia approach [1], and proceeds precisely as my workshop does.  It’s a child-centered educational movement that lets the interests and excitement of the students, carefully listened to by adult facilitators, drive the learning of that group of children.

“Yes,” I can hear my friend say, “but they are a 70 year-old movement, while you…. do you think you are easy to work with?”

As I’d shown earlier, when I’d tried to point out that, being a one person organization, much of my effectiveness depends on my ability to transcend my moods, alone, at each discouraging turn.  My idea, which has succeeded wildly in practice, is in danger of extinction unless I can recruit and retain at least one other creative person who shares my vision, I tell her.   

“We can either discuss your moods or discuss business.  If you want to discuss your moods, I’ll put this away,” she said, giving the legal pad a quick wave.  

“Business,” I said with a smile.   She smiled too.

 

[1]

At the heart of this system is the powerful image of the child. Reggio educators do not see children as empty vessels that require filling with facts. Rather they see children as full of potential, competent and capable of building their own theories.

Children have the right to be … active participants in the organization of their identities, abilities, and autonomy.. .  “better citizens of the world”… (this system) also credits children, and each individual child, with an extraordinary wealth of inborn abilities and potential, strength and creativity.  Irreversible suffering and impoverishment of the child is caused when this fact is not acknowledged [my emphasis– ed].

Each day and every moment, we, the teachers, follow the directions of the children and adapt ourselves, always observing, documenting, listening and interpreting their goals, theories and strategies so we can gain insight into their thinking, always ready to make changes and support the children in their discoveries.

“Tell me and I’ll forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I’ll understand.” Chinese Proverb

source

 

The Madness of Being Mad

First, let me just say, I have never felt more mentally alert, focused, articulate, in the moment, centered.  Second, let me just add, I have never more frequently done things like locking my keys inside the locked house, making foolish mistakes on simple, routine strategic matters, being unable — some might foolishly say ‘unwilling’–  to move a foot in any direction, alienating more people or doing so more pleasantly, listing more commonplace small forgettings as ruthlessly or judging over and underwhelmed people, including myself, more harshly, if never in a calmer, more measured way.    

The phone?  It weighs a hundred and fifty pounds.  Why are you bothering me about picking up the phone?  I will send out a mass email, surely somebody I know, or used to know, will come by to help me lift the goddamn thing to my head so I can make those thank you calls.  “Thank you, thank you!” I will say cheerfully to people confused into silence by my sudden gratitude.  Suspicious, they’ll wonder if I’m mocking them.  They will be right to wonder.  That’s why I don’t pick up the phone, a small piece of metal that ridiculously weighs as much as many full grown human beings.   A once state-of-the-art cell phone that belonged to my now dead mother, she used it every day when she was alive, how the hell did she lift it to her ear?   

“You use the phone that your mother, dead more than four years, used to use?” asks a friend, already knowing the answer, but somehow having to ask anyway.  You are not the only one who is insane, I tell myself to console myself, wondering who is the one who is saying this reassuring thing to me.

Such is the madness of the mildly mad, or maybe not.

The Fairness Doctrine

There used to be a rule for broadcasters, all of whom use public airways built and maintained by the government, We The People, that required them to present a certain amount of controversial public interest content and give both sides equal opportunity to influence public opinion in any debate involving that public interest.  If you gave ten minutes to the spokesman for everyone having as many guns as they want and being free to take them everywhere they go and use them freely if they feel threatened, or even just a bit paranoid, well, a spokesman for people who are not insane had to be given a chance to rebut that opinion.  It was called The Fairness Doctrine, a quaint idea today.  The FCC apparently abandoned the doctrine during the Reagan Administration.

I suspect the Fairness Doctrine was devoured by ravenous Big Media when they got consolidated enough to openly advocate for the forcible drowning of the government in a bathtub and the government decided maybe it wasn’t wise to piss off the three or so major corporations who now control all of the broadcast news.  However it vanished, it simply is not the rule any more, except, seemingly, after presidential performances.  After the State of the Union the opposition gets a few moments to convince their base that the president has just unloaded a dump truck full of shit onto their kitchen tables.  

Of course, we isolated cranks who tap our thoughts onto the internet have never been bound by any kind of fairness doctrine.  Protected by the First Amendment, we rule our micro-kingdoms with absolute authority and a divine right to be as unreasonable and unfair as we like.   Still, many people have a tic that acts up when unfairness rears up on its hind legs and sprays urine in all directions while braying like a donkey.

A reader pointed out, quite fairly, that I’d been unfair recently, to myself.  He pointed out that I presented my old friends’ lack of care for me and her unkept promises to me much more gently (in the post I removed, hypothetically to protect her feelings, though there was virtually no chance she’d ever read the post) than I presented the counter position in yesterday’s post, the “compelling” reasons why she probably felt justified to act like a self-righteous, selfish, demanding, angry, materialistic jerk.  

Her theoretically compelling reasons, painted bravura style in the merciless strokes of the internal victimizer, an artist who can harshly improvise like nobody’s business, presented an unquestionably idealistic man (me) in the most damning possible light.  “He sleeps late!  He gets depressed!  He doesn’t make that fifth and sixth phone call when he gets no answer the first few times.  He’s not an undaunted salesman nor a master of marketing, graphic design OR branding!  He doesn’t burn to sell his great ideas, the loser!  He’s not out healing the lame and kissing lepers, though he claims he’d love nothing better.”  

I should go back and add a line about the stinking lack of fairness of that unfair characterization.  After all, I don’t want to give the impression that I learned nothing from battles with my unhappy, ruthless father, a man filled with terrible regrets in the last few nights of his life.  Here is what I learned:  it is easy to see imperfection, be put off by it and reduce the imperfect thing to the sum of its imperfections.  It is easy to be disappointed and hurt, life can be a parade of reasons for discouragement and anger.  

In your unhappiness it is very easy to give way to a kind of righteous disappointment, reduce the complex, multidimensional thing that all creatures are to one flat surface.  That flat surface will be covered with the disgusting stuff of disappointment.  Studying the aggravating flattened details will take away your appetite, make you angry, make you want to tick that person off the list of people in your life.  

“That fucking fuck,” you will think to yourself, possibly say out loud.  Possibly even say it out loud to the actual fucking fuck while slapping its face back and forth a few times, getting in a kick too, metaphorically if not here in the physical world.

“That’s not life, Elie,” my father, so well-practiced in that procedure, would say now, as he wheezed on the last night of his life.  We are not the sum of our failings, we are complex, iridescent beings, sometimes luminous, sometimes murky, like our motives.   Humans and animals are the best games in town, nothing against plants, soil, the sky, all the rest of God’s green earth.  

Of course, we humans are, at the same time, also the worst game in town.  The best villains in drama have good reasons for why they act so badly, compelling ones the audience can relate to.  Same for the heroes, not all good, my friends.  Same for all of us, born good and bad, like a phrase under Isaac Babel’s pen, ready to be turned brilliantly toward the light or cast confusedly into unreadable gloom.  

So my apologies to myself for being so harsh on myself yesterday, and I will add a line to the post and forgive myself for yesterday’s treachery, for being kinder to a sometimes jerk I love than to myself, another occasional jerk, who I also love.

Public vs. Private — a consideration about not being an asshole

The public-private line has blurred with an explosion in technology that allows everyone so inclined to be the protagonist or antihero of their own self-created  drama.   It is wonderful and horrible, our new ability to make an electronic version of ourselves available worldwide at any time.   Science fiction.  

And like the best science fiction, it raises moral and ethical questions.   Like exploring the decent boundaries of on-line candor and respect for the privacy of others.

Many of these billions of daily posts are ethically neutral, avatars showing photographs of their lunch, or today’s design in their latte, or pictures taken from the end of their own arms, lips pursed, eyebrow raised, shirt undone.   Timeless rules still apply, provocative photos of beautiful people will always be viewed many more times than the same photos of ordinary looking people.  Things become more complicated with the on-line writings of strangers and people that we know.

From time to time you come across something that really moves or entertains you and think “fuck, this person ought to…”.   What ought this person do?   Have 100,000 followers giving a penny for the blogger’s thoughts every day?  More acclaim from fellow bloggers?  There was not even a word the equivalent of “blogger” until very recently, but like all ubiquitous things, it’s hard to imagine a time without what exists now.  It’s not even an exercise worth much effort.

The unmediated creation of public utterances can lead to hurt feelings.  A celebrity tweets an honest reaction their publicists will earn their money walking back.  A joke comes off as hate speech.  I didn’t mean… I’m sorry if… I try to be a role model… I…  The essence of wit is quickness, a blessing or curse when such things can be sent around the world with a click, without the timing or the wink to insure its proper effect.  

A writer putting out a book, or pounding out a column, would have an editor or publisher who might say “uh, Dave, are you sure you really want to say that about angry people on hair triggers who love guns?”  On-line, on his own weblog, amused at how well he’s made his point, Dave just hits “publish” while still chuckling.  The angry gun lover on a hair-trigger might turn out to be the neighbor in the next apartment who hates the sound of Dave laughing loudly to himself early every morning while writing the posts Dave himself finds so hilarious.  Googling his annoying neighbor he finds Dave’s blog and hurries over, not to congratulate him.  Not so funny, Dave, is it, coming loudly through the bedroom wall when I’m trying to sleep, grinding my teeth with this glock under my pillow, asshole… not quite so adorably witty now, are we?

I am thinking about this privacy business (having refrained from using the word “I” for as long as he could) in connection with something I posted here the other day that is easily seen as an extended self-righteous exercise in publicly airing very soiled laundry.  I thought of it at the time (and much of it still is) as an exercise in laying out several complicated and important lessons I’ve learned recently (and I will pluck those out and distill them for a future post).  Using a hypothetical example from my life, clearly identifiable as a real person, and close friend, however, has the potential to cause hurt and trouble.  Why would anyone but a person not clearly thinking things through risk causing such harm?   A hasty word, like an arrow let loose from the bow, can never be taken back.

“What are you, a fucking detached philosopher living in an extended thought experiment in your own universe of perfect forms?” a friend might ask, “how did you expect her to react, you pathetic, self-absorbed, fucking wannabe wise man?   How wise is someone who embarrasses someone like that in a public forum, even if that public is only a handful of people?  Anyone in the world can read that shit, forward it to anyone else.  I could send her the link while we’re talking right now, from my phone.  And how, reading it, could she not be mortified?  Don’t you think she’s already feeling a little guilty about having promised and failed to help several times running?  You alluded to her pang yourself. You may be irrefutably right in every particular, and wording everything very gently, but you’re wrong to post it publicly.”  

“She has her own compelling version of this story too, don’t forget, and she can justify everything  — you don’t sleep normal hours, don’t knock on doors every day, do nothing to help yourself, don’t follow through on anything, live mainly in your own head, expect others to do heroic work in service of your saintly mission when you yourself mostly dream of the blessed work you’d be honored to do someday when the time is right.  Do you think someone like you is easy to work with?”  

“Yes, you see yourself as a selfless servant with a noble vision, but what do you actually do in the world, besides sit in judgment of people busy accomplishing things?  Sit in judgment in your underwear, mind you, in the middle of the afternoon or the godforsaken hours of the early morning, when it’s dark outside.  At least put on a pair of goddamn pants when you sit in judgment of us, man.” 

Fair points all, if a tad brutal in their one-sidedness.  If you would live by “first, do no harm”, the next thing would be to delete that post.  Outside of the unintended irony of making a long and detailed case against someone who loves you in order to demonstrate that it is better to be soft-spoken and forgiving, even to an asshole, what good purpose could it possibly serve?  You may whisper your irrefutable indictment of an old friend softly, but it’s no less damning for the gentle delivery, and perhaps much more damning.  

 

I Mash Yer Fez– rewrite

There is irony that flies and irony too heavy to leave the ground.  Sometimes you can tweak the flightless variety a bit, sometimes not.  I tried and failed in my first attempt at this one a couple of days back, to the horror of more than one reader.  I will give it a more straightforward shake, lose some of the italics, try to say directly what I meant to say the first time.

I endorse gentleness and mildness, and strive to maintain these qualities above all, although it is not easy work.   Our society is violent, competitive and challenging, for one thing.   Most humans are prone to anger when mistreated or frustrated.   It is an almost irresistibly good feeling to be right, to feel justified, to prevail.  This reflex to prevail is a common cause of friction and leads to righteous anger when we feel wronged or victimized in our zero sum society.   Wars are fought, faces punched, prisons filled, lives destroyed, out of righteous anger.    

Our society’s laws, not always designed to ensure fairness, can be seen as the organized expression of this rage to be right.   Follow me here: laws are made by those with the power to institutionalize their unfair advantage, no matter how grotesque, and to enforce it by deadly state action, if necessary.  The penalty for looting after a natural disaster and making off with a bag of groceries — prison, if you’re not shot first.  The penalty for participating in, and profiting handsomely from, billion dollar financial fraud — it’s complicated.

Our land of the free and the home of the brave, the worlds’ first modern republican democracy, was for a century a land of slavery.  This history is considered ancient and is rarely discussed at any depth.   The arguments against slavery are many, well-known, have in recent times won the day. It seems beyond dispute now that slavery is evil, morally repugnant and illegal.  The single compelling argument for a century of American slavery was this:  we need them to make ourselves wealthier by having a slave economy, fuck you, stay out of our way of life.  

The bitter, bloody struggle that resulted in the abolition of American slavery was over for less than a decade before a legally sanctioned new version of The Peculiar Institution was set in place for a century by Supreme Court skullduggery and racist codes of strict segregation violently maintained by terrorism winked at under the laws of the former slave states.   The struggle for freedom for the descendants of slaves during that century cost many brave lives.  

Today many Americans feel satisfied that slavery is deep in our past, some consider us a “post racial society”, since we now have a half-black man in the White House.  Can anyone really say with a straight face that our ongoing history of racism at law and in practice has ever been seriously addressed in this country?

Slavery and racism are considered by many as elements of ancient history, and they are hot subjects that raise hackles on both sides.  Fine, then, let’s grant that American racism is all in the past, for the sake of moving on and take a look at more recent outrages at law.  

We have been, since the devastating, coordinated terrorist attacks of 9/11/01, engaged in a permanent war against terrorism, The War on Terror, a war that is used to justify many excesses including the murder of many blameless civilians in a number of countries, right now.  

Soon after the 9/11 attacks Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld  fired chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Hugh Shelton, a commander reluctant to abandon legal safeguards designed to minimize the deaths of innocent people and ensure a solid intelligence foundation before employing elite, secret black ops squads to kill suspected terrorists.   Rumsfeld replaced him with a new general who agreed with the sleek, muscular, infinitely flexible new black ops policy the Bush administration had in mind to go after al Qaeda and similar groups.

They sincerely believed that preventing the killing of innocent civilians was a meaningless consideration in an all out existential world-wide War On Terror.  Collateral damage, Rumsfeld and the Bush administration believed, is inevitable and, if kept secret, not something many Americans would get excited about.  They were correct in that calculation.  What you don’t know, you don’t want to know, even if you thought you might have needed to know it, if you know what I’m saying.

Before circumventing the letter, spirit and intent of national security and anti-torture laws and treaties, the administration hired a team of lawyers to write preemptive justifications detailing why they are legally allowed, even obliged, to not follow the laws they were willfully violating.

What makes all this intolerable for an idealist who believes, Anne Frank-like, in spite of it all, in democracy, is that these legal justifications are classified, state secrets kept from the citizens of the world’s greatest democracy.   And once these secret policies are given a fig leaf of legality and put into motion, it is almost impossible to stop them.  Our current president has stepped up the secret killings and prosecuted journalists under a 1917 anti-espionage statute carrying the death penalty to prevent the release of truths about our policies that might embolden our many enemies.

Righteous rage can be intoxicating to a maniac.  While intoxicated with what feels to him like righteous rage, spraying machine gun fire at inhuman enemies seems like a reasonable thing to do.  After that, though, the let down often comes quickly.  After a moment’s reflection the maniac is as likely to turn the gun on himself as to do anything else.  

Personally, no matter how provoked or worked up, I would err on the side of pausing to take a few breaths before capitulating to rage and smashing someone’s fez.  

Unless under direct physical threat, being gentle, calm and soft-spoken is usually much more productive than being righteously enraged, agitated, loud, and ready for justifiable violence.  

Of course, I know where I live and I fully realize how idiotic what I’m saying sounds.  Even if I’m totally right.