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.