As I learned from watching my father in action for decades– it was not the thing itself that would get under his skin and send him into a long-lasting rage, it was the maddening principle of the thing being done to him.  The indignity of being held powerless, no matter the indisputable rightness of his position, the arbitrary stupidity of the other position.  

This was no doubt instilled during his powerless childhood when, between a father who could not earn a living and a mother who couldn’t control her rage, though she may have cloaked it in some religious guise, he was subjected to whatever happened to him with no regard for what was right, or just, or decent, or what his perfectly justifiable feelings about the matter might be.

It is this being made invisible that is the truest, most violent curse of poverty. You are not even a person, sir.   The tastes I’ve had of this invisibility are hideous.  I had them in court many times, while standing in the shoes of the poor and powerless threatened with eviction.  I get tastes of it to this day, trying to live on a low fixed income and forced to engage in futile arguments with under-paid idiots under no obligation to do anything but tell you they are powerless too, sir, and similarly screwed, and who, in the end, read you their masters’ regulations and tell you to have a nice day.  

This was a large part of my father’s fury to become middle class, to become wealthy enough, he thought, to become exempt from this invisibility constantly poured over the poor like tankers of cold piss.   The kind of wealth that makes one exempt from these indignities is a rare kind indeed, it takes tens of millions nowadays to even get into the room where you can be considered for a life of dignity.  Though even minimal wealth will insulate one from the worst of this galling invisibility.

Easier, by far, is to acquire the well-adjusted mindset one prays for in the Serenity Prayer, to know the difference between the things I can tackle and the things that will only drive me insane by grinding my soul into dehydrated urine.

I am reminded of this by the spiral of rage I fell into yesterday trying to verify my “priority” confirmation to have an agency’s mistake corrected so I can resume the health coverage I have paid for every month for ten years.  That I will run out of hypertension medication before coverage begins again, and have no coverage in the event of a stroke or accident, everyone agrees, is a shame, and that’s why we gave you priority in the backdating of your claim, sir.  However, you have to understand, sir, that priority means many different things.

 And we are not responsible for what the other office does, we don’t do anything in-house, and are not obligated to provide you with any information whatsoever except to verify that your claim is still labeled “priority” and still being expedited.  It took only 12 days to be electronically transmitted from this office to the one who decides, and it’s still marked priority, sir.  Can you imagine how long a non-priority case that doesn’t involve running out of hypertension medication might take?  How many people are being fucked far worse than you, sir, not eligible for any health care ever?

I get this propensity to be enraged by this kind of bland, business as usual fuck-yourself-in-the-face, sir, directly from my father.   He instilled it by doing the same to me, and to my sister.  

“He would be just as upset if he lost the 35 cents change he got when he bought the paper as he would if one of us was hit by a car.  Everything was of equal weight to him as tragedy,” my sister reminded me.  And it was true.  If you asked him, once he’d calmed down again, it wasn’t the 35 cents he’d misplaced, obviously, it was the loss of control it symbolized, the fact that his system for keeping track of things had broken down.  That he was powerless.

Which is what rage is all about.  A person who does not feel violated, and powerless, is not likely to lash out with anger.   I’d intended to go into the hideous subject here of the politically required “n-word”, a word more offensive in many ways than the hateful old word it replaces: nigger.  To say “nigger” these days is to violate a new and deeply held taboo.  To continue treating people like niggers, well, sir, you can’t use that word, no matter how descriptive, apt, perfectly fitting, the conversation is over, once you put hate speech into it, I’m going to report you for acting like a damned n-word.  

But here is the most basic thing about being treated like a nigger, you just have to take it– or, if not, don’t get all moralistic about it when we put you in a fucking choke hold. 

Substitute any other word here, if you prefer, though nigger sums it up best.  You can say kyke, spic, greaseball, habib, sand nigger, wog, chink, gook– but let’s keep it simple.  Nigger is the gold standard, the centuries-old American word of choice used to describe someone with the power to do nothing but accept the, admittedly very bad, situation.  Nigger was the word, and inferior condition, used to justify American Slavery, Jim Crow, every atrocity.  Slaughters of blacks by whites that the ruling racists re-branded as “riots” happened periodically and were quickly forgotten, the didn’t happen to people anyone had to care about, they happened to faceless niggers.

Like the massacre of defiant Blacks Easter Sunday, 1873 in Colfax, Louisiana, the one that resulted in the acquittal of all the killers involved.  Like the destruction by fire of the middle class black city of Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921, the Black Wall Street, and the detention of all black survivors in prison camps afterwards, a century of legally winked at lynching, states’ rights as code for we decide what’s best for our niggers, thank you, welfare reform to wean n-word parasites off the tax tit, defending cops who once in a while kill unarmed Blacks against the misleading and hateful accusations of fucking n-word animals.

Why did my father have such a strong identification with persecuted Blacks?  He grew up as a nigger, the poorest, dumbest, most powerless kid in a town run by Ku Klux Klan sympathizers.  He imparted the feelings of this identification with the poor and the crushing powerlessness of poverty most effectively to my sister and me.

It is the principle that is so hard to digest, maybe impossible.  Ask for the director’s name, the director of a public agency, someone who as a member of the public you should have access to, especially when there is no other meaningful avenue of appeal.  You will be told that you can hire a lawyer and subpoena that person’s name, they are under no obligation to provide the public servant’s name to you, a mere disgruntled member of the public.  

This unreasonable denial of a reasonable request will sting briefly, but the longer lasting stink is being reminded of the larger principles, like corporate laws that insulate wrong-doing corporations from liability or the lack of promised transparency by our Hope and Change “most transparent administration in history” president.  

After all, it is nobody’s business how many people are accidentally, or inadvertently, or collaterally killed in your name.  Drones are better than boots on the ground, everyone agrees, and much less expensive.  The less the public needs to know about civilian casualties the better.   Secret trade deals are better, politically, than ones that will get Americans all pissed off, like NAFTA.  That’s the principle when a public servant tells you that you have no right, as a mere member of the public, to any information you can use to try to get redress for things that, with all respect, sir, you have no way to get redressed.  Have a nice day.

“This piece is true enough, as far as it goes.  But you should go back and delete that nigger paragraph.  Too incendiary.  I was never squeamish about language, you know, but I’d urge you to be careful when using a word like nigger.  It’s just pouring gasoline on a fire to use that word, no matter how perfectly it sums up what you’re talking about,”  the skeleton of my father continues smiling, the only expression he’s got these days, taking a beat to let the point sink in.  “You know what I’m saying?  Not for nothing…”