Monthly Archives: October 2015

A Way With Words

You have a way with words.  

Away with words!   Speak little, do much.  

Nicely said, Ned!  

I’ll pretend you didn’t say that, Fred.  

Now, why you want to be like that, Ed? I was trying to tender you a kind word.  

Yet you rendered me a mind turd, dittn’t you, Ted?

I just said you have your way with words.  

You sayin’ I don’t respect ’em, just have my way with ’em, is that what you’re saying, Zed?  

I’m not saying that.  I’m not saying anything.  

You sure have a funny way of not saying anything, Red.  

You said it.

Specific Excellence

There is a notion I recall from my absurd study of Philosophy at City College in the 1970s.   Most of what I read and heard as a young truth seeker in those classes has fled from memory like so much impenetrably dense, badly translated, unhelpful bullshit, fascinating though a small fraction of it was to a youth searching for meaning in a world like our’s.  But this notion stays in my head and I think of it today, many years after encountering it.  That concept is arete which I recall noting as “the specific excellence of a thing”.  I’d have to consult google to see which of the famous Greeks of antiquity it was who set forth this concept, though it was one of the Big Three.  The smart money says “Play Dough”.

Speaking of City College in the 1970s, he said, discursively, philosophy classes were held in a dark, oddly narrow, drafty hall on South Campus that would have made an excellent set for most Kafka stories.  The long ago demolished hall, an ancient, cramped, soot covered, two or three story tower-like structure, was reached by a second story passageway from another, larger, building, also very venerable and long gone.   It’s almost like trying to remember a long ago dream, piecing together these lost halls, one was called Wagner Hall, I’m pretty sure.  Was the other Mott Hall?  Shephard?  Was Wagner the philosophy tower?  There’s nobody to call to puzzle out and clarify any of it too easily.   I had no real friends at City College, I commuted there, attended classes, met with professors, interacted with classmates in class, said hi on the rare occasions I went to the cafeteria, but I recall making no friends during the years I was there, on and off, dropping in and out.   I was surprised to learn, when I returned at the end for one last nine credit semester,  that I had spent most of those semesters on the Dean’s List.

This was a different Dean’s List than the one kept in the bowels of the high school I went to.  I appeared on that list by dint of approximately two hundred days turning up late for class.   I’d found that not being in homeroom to check in first thing in the morning (I’ve always hated the early hours of the day, except for sleeping) made it much easier to slip out of classes without causing a fuss, since, technically, I was already absent, until retroactively marked present at the end of the day after I’d shown up in a few classes.  If a friend was doing something interesting, or a brilliant guitar player from, say, Evander Childs High School, was cutting school that day and had turned up at my school, I’d skip some drag of a class to take part in something more nourishing to my soul.  

Which brings us back to what google confirms is Plato’s concept of arete.   My memory of it may have changed the meaning slightly, but possibly not.  Wikipedia is impersonally coy on this matter, though the third sentence suggests an original meaning close to what I’m talking about.  Each of us is born with certain specific virtues that mark us as unique individuals.  When our “potential” is spoken of, it is the potential to do what we are born best suited to do.  Arete is manifest when we are actually doing what fulfills best our specific virtues.

A dog has a different arete than a cat– the perfect expression of one is no less perfect than the perfect expression of the other though a perfect dog is as different from a perfect cat as a perfect entrepreneur is different from a perfect painter, a perfect songwriter.  A dog and a cat can be good friends, play, sleep and eat together, but they are different animals.  A perfect painter had better also be, or know, an excellent entrepreneur, because that’s business in the arete of capitalism, if you want to paint and eat, because your specific excellence is painting (and you also need to eat) if you get the point.  Do you get the point?

I may not be making much sense with this, there is much to do today and little enough time, or will, to tackle it, but tackle it I shall.  Or think hard about tackling it anyway, there is a lot to tackle.  I am thinking, above all the other thoughts at the moment, how close I may have come to my own arete, fulfilling my own specific excellence.  It is something that has occupied my mind many times over the years, occupies it now.  Doing a thing as well as it can be done is a virtue.  

Art needs hard work more than hard work needs art, quoth Kafka, raven-like as a besooted NYC pigeon on the windowsill of that almost forgotten philosophy hall in Harlem forty years back.  Something more to think about, if that thing was needed.

Why My Mother Loved Jon Stewart, but Hated Stephen Colbert (Draft 1)

It’s easy to understand why my mother loved Jon Stewart, what Jewish mother could not love him?   My mother was a secular Jew from the Bronx, raised to believe in equality, human rights and social justice.   I recall her telling me when I was young that she didn’t think much of Howard Fast as a writer, but that the idealistic man who’d been blacklisted as a suspected Communist had his heart in the right place.  As an old woman she was discouraged by the many signs that our country did not always have its heart in the right place.  She would clench her teeth every time President Bush came on TV.  

“How an obvious imbecile like that got to be president… every time I see him it makes me sick.”  

She regarded him as the worst American president, definitely the worst of her lifetime.  One of the last things she said to me on her deathbed at the hospice, and she said it urgently:  “please promise me Sarah Palin will never be president of the United States!”  

I promised her, thinking to myself “certainly not in your lifetime, mom.”  

She watched Jon Stewart every night.  Whenever I was in Florida with her she’d call me in to watch when his show was about to start.  She found him adorable, as, of course, he is.  He made her laugh, with his trenchant insights, facial expressions and overall comic brilliance.  He, almost alone among the media in the years of her widowhood, gave her hope that not everyone in the world was insane.  She was doubly delighted when Bill Moyers interviewed Jon Stewart and the discussion quickly became an intelligent hour long mutual admiration society between two of her favorite media personalities.  

As much as she loved Jon Stewart, she had an almost visceral dislike of his gifted protege Stephen Colbert.  As soon as Stewart’s show ended, even before Colbert’s American eagle swept beak and talons first toward the camera, she had the remote in hand and was looking for something else to watch.  I never understood this.  She couldn’t explain it, she just couldn’t stand him.  

“You realize that the overbearing right wing blowhard persona is parody, he’s playing a character.  He’s hilarious, mom.”  

She shook her head.   “I know.  I don’t know what it is, I can’t watch him.  I know it’s a parody, I just can’t stand him.”

So it wasn’t that she was like President Bush’s team who’d hired Colbert to do the Correspondents’ Club dinner, most likely in the mistaken belief that he was a fellow traveler, a very funny, popular comedian who happened to be patriotic and believe in the unquestionable greatness of America, right or wrong.  In 2006 nobody in the media was saying too much out loud about Bush and Cheney’s muscular excesses.  It was as if they were all afraid of being shot in the face with a blunderbuss full of birdshot or something.

I showed my mother the video of Colbert fearlessly skewering the president at the Correspondents’ Club.  I recall at the time feeling great admiration for him, he was about the first person to publicly suggest the Emperor and those around him were naked.   He showed impressive sang froid by doing it, literally, in the president’s face.  My mother admitted it was a great routine.  He began:

Mark Smith, ladies and gentlemen of the press corps, Madame First Lady, Mr. President, my name is Stephen Colbert and tonight it’s my privilege to celebrate this president. We’re not so different, he and I. We get it. We’re not brainiacs on the nerd patrol. We’re not members of the factinista. We go straight from the gut, right sir? That’s where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. I know some of you are going to say “I did look it up, and that’s not true.” That’s ’cause you looked it up in a book.

Next time, look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that’s how our nervous system works. Every night on my show, the Colbert Report, I speak straight from the gut, OK? I give people the truth, unfiltered by rational argument.  (the rest is here)

Bush is still smiling gamely at this point, but his smile becomes more and more brittle until it falls off his face after a few moments.  Good sport and nice guy that I’ve often heard George W. Bush is, his politics aside, I’m pretty sure he shook Colbert’s hand at the end, told him he’d done a heck of a job.   But he clearly understood in pretty short order that he was being roasted by a merciless chef with a bullet-proof persona.  You can see that watching his reactions on the video.  My mother loved it.

I tried to get her to watch Colbert’s show a few times, but she never lasted through the opening, switching to an in progress re-run of NCIS, CSI or other murder mystery as I left, befuddled.   She loved murder mysteries, particularly NCIS.  Murder mysteries were increasingly all she read as she got older.  No less a mystery than any of these was her intense dislike of the brilliant Mr. Colbert.

One night I was going through a box of black and white family photographs.  I found a photo that made me feel like a great detective from one of her mysteries.   It was a shot of my uncle, my father’s younger brother, as a young man, dressed in a well-fitting suit.  It could have been a photograph of Stephen Colbert, in character as the rooster-like right-wing talk show host.   My mother strongly disliked my uncle.  She found him narcissistic, tyrannical, unreasonable, demanding and petty.   In  a word, Colbert’s character on the show.   She once desperately offered me a huge monetary bribe to spend a week in Florida when my uncle and aunt planned to visit her, after my father died.  She kept upping the dollar amount as I hesitated.

“Please,” she begged over the phone, “you can’t leave me alone with them!  For a week!  A week, Elie!  There will be bloodshed.”  

I rushed into her room with the photograph of my uncle.

“Is this why you hate Colbert?” I asked, handing her the photo.  

“Oh, my God,” she said, staring at the picture, “oh, my God!”  And then she began to laugh.  Another mystery satisfyingly solved.

 

Draft two is here, complete with a couple of moronic editorial improvements.

Epilogue to Childhood Memory

The ideologically driven filmmakers of “Let My People Go” (see previous post) certainly made their point to an eight year-old viewer, at least until the moment he was forced to make a dash to vomit.  In the fifty years since that visceral moment, history, like freedom, has been on the march.  

There were several wars in those years between the Jewish State and its neighbors including a decisive one, in 1967, when the virtually indefensible 1948 borders of Israel were expanded to include the buffers of the Occupied Territories of Gaza, the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Sinai.   Since that time, various Israeli governments have put permanent, strategically placed settlements in some of those territories.  There has been a shit-storm of controversy, with violent fanatics on both sides having way too much say over the outcome.  No doubt, given the choice, most people on each side would prefer peace to endless war.  The tragedy is that the voices of modest, decent people are rarely as loud and persuasive as the voices of violent haters ready to kill, everybody and anybody.  Take no chances, don’t trust their words, kill them!  Make them pay!

Intellectual understanding only goes so far.  I can understand why powerless people living in hopeless camps for generations, subjected to curfews, checkpoints, searches, rough treatment, detention, torture, would feel desperate enough to resort to and celebrate violence.  I can understand why peaceful citizens on the other side would demand curfews, checkpoints and heavy-handed tactics in order to avoid being killed by people desperate enough to blow themselves up.   Like I say, understanding with the mind only goes so far.   Certain things, in the word of one peace-loving Israeli I once knew, are un-understandable.  

In hindsight, as they say, many things snap into the old 20/20 focus.  If you think of a handful of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, determined to take some Nazis with them to hell as the Nazis were ‘liquidating’ the ghetto, you have a clue how this rear-view moral vision works.

There is no real choosing which was worse, the killing of millions during the Middle Passage over the course of three centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, or the killing of millions during a frenzied three or four year industrialized killing machine fueled by German ingenuity and efficiency.   I could not say, generations later, that either atrocity gives anyone a right to kill anyone else over it.

I’ve got no answer, propose no equivalencies, no justifications, nada.  It’s a horrible situation over there in Palestine/Israel, Israel/Palestine, as in many parts of the world, many of them in the immediate neighborhood.  Violence and brutality are always passionately justified by the practitioners.   History shows that the violent and brutal often carry the day while voices of reason usually get their brains blown out if they speak clearly enough and get enough attention.   I’d like to believe that in the long run human decency and our eternal longing for peace win out, but, looking around, I realize I may be with Anne Frank there, and Jesus, and right before he got shot, the Gandhi I was cursing just the other day.

Childhood Memory (flashback to 1963 or 1964)

My mother, seeking to protect her sensitive, fearful oldest child, urged me not to see the movie scheduled for the hotel ballroom that evening, “Let My People Go”.   I knew nothing about the film, except that all the teenagers at the convention would be seeing it.  I was seven or eight, and curious, and I wanted to see the movie, which was the only thing to do that evening anyway.

“You’re too young to see these things,” my mother told me tensely, “when you had nightmares about Tarzan I could show you pictures of the actors, assure you it wasn’t real.”   Which was true, she’d gone to the library and found books that proved her case.  After her photographic proof that the actors who played the savage cannibals wore regular clothes, drove cars, laughed, played with their own kids, spoke English, the nightmares in which my mother, like Jane, was struck down by a cannibal’s hurled spear, stopped.  

That strategy had also worked a few years earlier when terror of another flood like in the time of Noah, vividly depicted by a children’s book illustrator with an Italian name my mother always recited in connection with this story — ah!  Tony Palazzo!– kept me awake at night.   She drove me past rows of houses on the beach and my fear succumbed to Reason.  

“But these things in the movie really happened, and not that long ago, and they were horrible, and I don’t think you’re ready to see them.”   And she was right, but having been told many times by my childish, blustering father that I was not too young to start acting like a man, goddamn it, I was determined to see the move come hell, high-water or spear throwing cannibals.

The movie started innocuously enough, woodcuts and old paintings, mosaics, pictures of ruins, a narrator detailing the ‘lachrymose history’, as I’d later come to know it, of the tireless persecution of the Jews.  There were the pyramids, built by Hebrew slaves, a familiar story to me, nothing shocking there.  The destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians, not a trauma to me, I thought smugly to myself.  The subsequent exile, I was young to grasp how traumatic this might have been.  The Romans destroyed the rebuilt temple, OK, that’s a shame, but I didn’t like going to temple anyway.  

The movie was clearly building to something, I was not too young to miss the terrible foreshadowing as the persecution and exile of ancient times became a steadily heavier drumbeat.  Now some crude depictions of Jews put to the sword during the rise of warlike Islam, pretty bad, but just drawings.  In Christian Europe, meanwhile, the Dark Ages had descended, harsh, brutal lives lived under the pall of monkish ignorance and superstition, and the Jews to blame.  By the Middle Ages the Jews were entrenched in collective Christian consciousness as the crucifiers of Jesus Christ, the son of God and the Christian Messiah.   That we were blamed for killing the Messiah came as a shock to me, I’d always thought the Messiah hadn’t come to earth yet, that once the Messiah arrived the hearts of children would be returned to their parents, forgiveness would be universal and there would be no further violence or cruelty, no death.

The torturers and hooded Klansmen of the Spanish Inquisition stood out to me, the auto de fe, trial by being burned to death, was truly horrible.  Things quickly escalated from there, pogroms, the music got more tense, and soon there were some black and white photographs.  In Russia, blood libels against Jews, claims that Jewish monsters killed Christian children to make matzoh on Passover.  This made no sense to me, even an idiot knew that matzoh was basically flour and water, where did the dead Christian child come into it?  A photograph of a grim French military man, falsely accused of treason against France and executed, though everyone in France, and everywhere else, knew he’d been set up because he was Jewish.  Theodore Herzl’s photograph, with that beard practically begging to be carved in marble, the dream of a Jewish State and now the filmmakers kicked into high gear.  This is what they’d been building up to.

Centuries of persecution of a small, decent people, driven from their homeland, vilified and hated everywhere they settled, expelled from Spain and every place else, murdered with impunity– there was only one solution: a return to our homeland.  This would not be without struggle, in part because those on the land that would be our homeland considered it their homeland, not ours.  Deals were made, land bought, proposals made, unmade, snags hit, navigated, more snags.  Nobody, it was clear by now, was in any hurry to help the Jews.  

Meanwhile, more killing of Jews in Europe, persecutions in the Arab lands.   Suddenly, oh boy, there’s a familiar Jew hater– Adolf Hitler.  I had a feeling he’d show up in this shit show.  There he is, dancing a mad jig after the fall of Poland.  Turns out this ‘jig’ was the creation of Allied propagandists using a technique I myself would use decades later, repeating a sequence of frames over and over and speeding them up to achieve a desired effect.  These propagandists took a one second sequence of Hitler laughing and stamping his jackbooted foot and repeated it enough times to create a convincingly mad, cackling dance.  I knew nothing about this trickery, an insignificant detail in context, as I watched in rising horror.  

The violins on the soundtrack began weeping more emphatically.  Then, as I looked around me at crying teen-aged faces in heavy cigarette smoke, there was the footage, shot by the Nazis themselves, of exactly what my mother had cried to try to stop me from seeing.  A terrified boy my age with his hands up, savage beatings, Jewish corpses lying on the sidewalk.  This was terrifying imagery.  Then there was the guy with the wheelbarrow, on grainy black and white film, moving resolutely forward.  The giant wheelbarrow was filled with jiggly, rubber looking skeletons.  He was wearing a cap and smoking a cigarette.  He came to the edge of a huge pit, upended the wheel barrow and dropped the corpses down a chute.  They wriggled down the ramp, landed on top of hundreds more naked dead skeletons.  

I ran up the aisle through the crying audience, got to the elevator, to the room, saw my little sister’s shocked face as I burst into the room and, a second later, projectile vomited.  My mother hugged me, crying, and said “I told you….”

One from the shut the fuck up department

Felt good to solve a vexing problem in short order.   Got two numbers for actual dermatologists from the bright, efficient receptionist at my primary care doctor’s office, both in my plan.  Within minutes I was making an appointment with one for next Thursday.  The very reasonable, thorough, old-school receptionist told me I’d pay $150 by check for the visit, will be reimbursed if insured rate is lower.  She told me exactly what referral form she needs faxed to her office.  Got directions to the office, done.  

Too easy, I realized.  Obamacare is famous for not allowing things to happen this easily.  After only ten or fifteen more minutes on hold with Empire Blue Cross, after paying my premium, I was speaking with an agent to verify that this doctor is in network.   She only handles California and Nevada, it turns out, had no idea why my call was routed to her, since I live in NY and called the proper number on the back of my card.  

She was good enough to go on-line, and after only a brief hold, inform me that this old school doctor is out of network.  I will therefore be responsible for paying all undiscounted fees including any possible lab fees with no intervention from the private insurance company I pay my monthly premium to.  

I run the other doctor’s name by her.  Also, unfortunately, out of network.  She directs me to the on-line list for dermatologists in my network.  There are over a hundred other dermatologists I’ve never heard of, within five miles of me.

If you can, please, direct me to the shut the fuck up department, I was told it was on this floor.

Feeling Powerless?

Don’t worry, there are hard-working, brilliant idealists at work standing up for you.

A few years ago the commonly cited number was 45,000 Americans a year dying deaths that could have been prevented had their illnesses been detected before the fatal stage that brought them to an Emergency Room.   My father, though he retired with excellent medical insurance and was on Medicare, though he saw an endocrinologist, hematologist and cardiologist regularly the last two years of his life, as his energy and life force deteriorated, was first diagnosed with liver cancer by an ER doctor, six days before he died.  

My father’s case was, hopefully, unusual in a nation with the most advanced medical technology in the world.  Most of the 45,000 annual American deaths that could have been prevented by earlier intervention (a few seconds of diligent google research shows this recalled number is a fraction of annual preventable American deaths) were died by poor people, people without health insurance, people too frightened, by disease and the specters of unaffordable expense, bankruptcy and pre-existing conditions, to see doctors.  Many who died needlessly probably had serious warning signs they should have heeded.    

In part to address this intolerable death toll in our extremely wealthy nation, in part to rein in the runaway cost increases of the most expensive medical care in the world, President Obama passed the landmark compromise medical insurance bill that bears his name.   I haven’t seen the statistics since Obamacare went into effect, but I’ll guess that the number of annual preventable American deaths has come way down, maybe by as much as a third.  

Progress on an institutional level is at best incremental and the perfect must not become the enemy of the good the president, a man with millions of determined enemies, reminds us.   Malcolm X, in his posthumous autobiography, remarked that sticking a knife ten inches into someone and pulling it out six inches is also considered progress.  But tell that to the guy with the knife stuck into his body.    

The unregulated inflation of the world’s most lucrative medical insurance and pharmaceutical industries, and obscene loopholes like ineligibility for insurance coverage at any price for people with “pre-existing” medical conditions, screamed for regulation.  Obama’s team, headed by medical industry insider Liz Fowler, working for industry financed former Senator Max Baucus (now Ambassador to China), struck a compromise — price increases for medical insurance would be regulated, American health care would become more outcome and prevention-based, there would be no more exclusions for ‘pre-existing conditions’, industry-wide cost saving measures would be introduced over time.  

The private insurance industry got something in return for giving up all this power and potentially some of its profit.  Americans of sufficient means would be mandated to buy private insurance or pay penalties for not buying it.  

Medicaid eligibility would be extended under Obamacare.  Although millions of Americans would remain uninsured, millions who’d been previously unable to afford health insurance could now purchase and even, in most cases, afford it, under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  

Somehow, along with the industry consenting to be regulated, forced to justify regular, generous increases in insurance premiums, paying out for sick people whose conditions pre-existed their purchase of medical insurance, the law provides that patients have no right to be informed of actual costs prior to any medical visits or treatments.  I kid you not.  

You make an appointment to see a physician’s assistant about a stomach ailment.  Nobody anywhere, not at the company you pay your premium to, not at the doctor’s office, can tell you in advance what that twenty minute visit will cost.  

“We have to wait until the doctor’s office bills us, there’s no way to tell you in advance,” the insurance company will say.  

“We have to be told by the insurance company what the price will be,” the doctor’s office will tell you, “the insurance company sets the price, then we are allowed to bill you.”  

Then, since all plans in your income range might be high deductible plans, you will have to pay the entire cost, whatever it might be, “out of pocket”.   That’s the law.  There is what’s fair and there is law, and the two are, regrettably, not always the same.  

If you went to a store where there were no prices on the items, where no sales person could tell you a price until after you signed a blank credit card statement to buy something, with no chance for return or refund, you would not shop in that store.   Picture a restaurant with no prices on the menu, smiling waiters assuring you that everything was delicious and not to worry, the prices were as low as possible for such amazing food.  

Assume the dinner was fine, or even if it wasn’t, here comes the friendly waiter with your check.  Dinner for two without wine: $507, coincidentally the same as my bill for seeing that physician’s assistant who was so clueless and unhelpful.  The manager is not able to hear an appeal or make any changes to the price.  The owner will not speak to customers under any circumstances, and he’s not in, anyway.  If you try not to pay there is a policeman at the door to inform you lawyers will be called to garnish your wages, and make the collection.   Don’t believe it?  Wait a few weeks, the lawyer’s letter will be in your mailbox informing you of your obligation to pay a legal debt.  

In fairness, and it’s always important to be fair, the $507 total for my visit with the physician’s assistant turned out to have been billed in error.  My next set of bills, which I confirmed the accuracy of with my insurance company, informed me I should have only been charged $457.   And much of that was my own fault.  I’d agreed with the nurse that it was reasonable to do a blood test, to rule out something serious our internet research hadn’t suggested.   The price of the blood test I had to pay was $327, discounted by my insurance company from the sticker price of $642.  Instead of being grateful for the almost 50% discount, here I am bitching and moaning.   Just goes to show, some people are never fucking happy. 

But, if you will excuse me, I have to figure out who else to call to find out how to avoid a similar expense to have a dermatological body scan done by a physician’s assistant I was misinformed yesterday is a doctor.  My concern is not only the cost of the visit and exam, but if anything has to be sent to the lab, that can add from $179 ( to sky’s the limit)  to my out-of-pocket expense, in a addition to $131 for the required pre-procedure office visit, as in the case of my 100% covered preventive care colonoscopy a year back.

Deleted insight

this had to wind up on the cutting room floor:

We learn as adults that even people who love us can do us great harm. It’s not strictly their fault. Humans are the product of their genes and how they were handled when they were young. The research is in about the harm of adverse childhood experiences, even the DNA and immune systems are changed by abuse and neglect. Certain things are impossible to truly recover from, though the human capacity for healing is also remarkable.

Leap Into Action — as though you mean it!

Said a small voice, easily ignored.  I should get the timer, set it for ten minutes, since I can’t let myself slip into this tap tap tap right now, must somehow, you know, leap into action, as though I mean it.    I enter a kind of focused hypnotic state here, outside of time, not thinking of what needs to be done, thinking of other things.

I’m thinking about an art exhibit I saw the other day, beautifully mounted in a nice space on the fifth floor of an inconspicuous office building on West 21st Street.   The artwork was created by men and women of all ages locked on an overpopulated prison island, the stuff of nightmares.  10,000 people waiting, sometimes for more than a year, for their speedy trial, or to accept a plea deal that will spring them, with “time served”, from what can only be described as hell.   A tiny proportion, perhaps a few hundred, participate in art therapy sessions, sessions most of them love.   A much smaller group wind up dead, like the teenager from one of the art therapy groups, not long ago found hanging by some kind of noose.

Overcrowded with people arrested in NYC who can’t afford bail, this island is a fortress with a long history of brutality toward the possibly guilty.   Anyone who has the money to post bail is spared the purgatory these poor souls are jammed into.  I recall from law school that a person able to post bail is something like 95% more likely than one who stays locked up to avoid prison time in the end. There is institutional injustice in our broken Criminal Justice System, we all know that, and cities like NYC have long, sorry histories, we finally have a mayor who seems intent on addressing this injustice and blah blah blah.

In the meantime, people like this good woman struggle to bring a bit of light into that dark world in ‘the belly of the beast’, as one man with a talent for words, many years in that darkness and an unquenchable need to be violent once styled it.

The woman who arranged the exhibit, spent hours meticulously typing out the professional descriptions of each work, spray-mounting paper works onto mats so they could be hung for viewing, taking care of all the publicity and other details, is someone I’ve known since we were young teenagers.   I walk in and join three others viewing the art on the walls of the large, airy gallery.  I give her a tired smile and she returns this smile with one so exhausted-looking it is almost heartbreaking.  We hug and she offers me a tour, once I’ve had a chance to look at the work.

The theme of the show is Hope.  Hope is written on many of the collages, the elements of which must either be torn out and glued or given to an art therapist, who, at some other time, will neatly cut out the indicated elements for later collaging.  The prisoners are not allowed to have even the scissors kindergarten kids use.  Too dangerous.  While a marker can be jammed into a fellow inmate’s eye socket, they seem to be allowed to use markers, these mostly non-violent prisoners assumed innocent until their speedy, if long-delayed, trials.

I point out one drawing I love, among many that reflect only the game attempt to cling to hope in a hopeless place.  There was something about the drawing that drew me to it, the lightness of touch, the colors, the joy in the childishly rendered woman who stands with her arms open at the center of the frame, the lovingly rendered foliage and prayer beads forming a frame.  My friend briefly lights up, this was done by a sixty year-old woman in one of her art therapy groups.  She’d be thrilled for a note from me.  

I write to her, tell her the drawing was beautiful, gave me great joy to see, as it must have given her joy to create.  I tell her I hope she will continue to draw.  I felt good expressing this appreciation.  

I forget to tell her something very obvious to me now.  “I hope you get out of prison soon.”   I don’t realize that omission until just now.  I nod to think I’d done something nice in writing the note, can’t really get too worked up that I missed a chance to write the thing that would have meant the most:  I hope the tumor is benign and they get it out with no pain and that you have a fast recovery and are reunited with the children whose names you lovingly inscribed inside the heart-shaped frame of the prayer beads.

After a beautiful memorial service for a cousin of mine who died at 40, after apparently sucking every moment of joy and meaning out of her short life, I shook her father’s hand.  “It was a beautiful memorial,” I told him.  

“Yes, if only we didn’t have to have it.”

The art therapist cannot bring anything that can be used as a weapon into the prison.  This means no umbrella when it’s raining.  She drives over the guarded bridge to the island, parks her car and walks to a checkpoint and if it’s raining, so be it.  A small price to pay to do blessed work.