Monthly Archives: June 2016

Perhaps I was too hard on you

I thought about a question I was asked by a once close friend right after my father died.  “Did you let him have it?” he asked, “did you tell him off for good one last time?”  

The question struck me as insane.   I answered him that my father’s death had been about him, not about me.  He was the one who was dying, I said, and I’d done what I could to make his passing easier.  I cannot imagine the difficulty of leaving this fucked up world.  

“Well, you acted like a mensch,” said the skeleton of my father, “and you helped me a lot in those last hours and I am forever grateful, if such can be said by a dead man.”

I’m wondering now if I was too hard on you, judging you so harshly all those years for telling me to suck it up and be a goddamned man, when I was eight or so, and sick to heart after learning about the murder of everyone in our family left in Europe.  

“You were not too hard on me, what I did was inexcusable.  Even if you can understand it now, more than fifty years later, it does not excuse my behavior.  You were a boy, a sensitive kid, and had just learned about the most nightmarish thing any child can learn: in this world there are gangs of laughing people who will murder whole families of people and dance over their dead bodies.  Across history, and in my lifetime, many of these gangs have been delighted to kill Jews, like our family.   What kind of world is that?  

“You go on a class trip to the United Nations and get the pep talk about a new world risen from the ashes of World War Two, a world where diplomats will now work together to keep the peace.  While they’re working together to keep the peace there are gangs of laughing people murdering huddled victims all over the globe.  At the U.N. brows are furrowed, ancient enemies debate who deserves to be avenged by mobs with crude but deadly weapons, resolutions are blocked by powerful nations.  There has been more widespread war and mass murder since Hitler than ever before.  It’s just what homo sapiens does.  When in doubt, wipe ’em out.  Put your finger anywhere on a world map, chances are pretty good there are armed gangs killing another group of people.

“But, as I mentioned the other day in connection to my mother’s life, I was terrified to think about it very much.  I was afraid to think about it at all.  I was the man in the house and I was supposed to be strong, go out and hunt and bring home the food.  I was frightened that if I opened that door to the horrors of the recent past I’d never be able to close it.”

I can understand that.  I searched for hours yesterday for any clue about the doomed little hamlet your uncle and later your mother escaped from.   Not a trace of it on the internet. How is that even possible? A settlement across the river from Pinsk, seventy years after people lived there, gone without a murmur? Of the tens of thousands of Jews who lived in Pinsk we have the grim statistics, the dates on which the “aktions” took place, how many were killed, etc. We presume they marched your mother’s family off to be shot with the rest of the Jews in the area, took a giant rake and raked the muddy little hamlet into the nearby swamp.

“Well, you see, that’s what I couldn’t consider.   I never met my Uncle Yudel, Aunt Chaska, Uncle Volbear. Only Yudel ever made it to the United States. Aren sent for him at one point, then Yudel got sick. ‘America is no place for a sick man,’ Aren told him, ‘here you have to work’, and he sent him back to Truvovich where he eventually met the fate of everyone else back there. Yudel came to America and was sent back before I was born. I never even heard the story until Eli told it to you.

“I don’t know whether it’s a blessing or a curse for you, and you probably don’t either, having an endless hunger for these kinds of details. You seem to have an ability to probe into these things without screaming. That, coupled with too much time to probe…. I literally can’t imagine the torment of that. I always worked two jobs; when I wasn’t working, I was exhausted. When I had a little energy I’d read the Times cover to cover, listen to the news, read one of the many left wing publications that were published back then. Then, thank God, it was time for me to go to work.

“Whatever I may have thought of the fate of my aunt and uncles, of my grandparents (who were probably long dead before the local anti-Semites got a crack at them), of the earlier life of my mother, it was like the twitch of a horse’s ear.   I’d flick away the thought like a horse flicking away a black fly. Really, what is the point of imagining such painful things?   Better to work.”

Arbeit Macht Frei, baby. You know, I understand that this is the way of the world.

“If I may cut you off, you are working right now as you tap out these words. You have always worked, you just don’t get paid most of the time, or you’re paid pennies on the dollar. You work in silence and your work is greeted with queasy, confused silence. I don’t know how you do it. Nobody who thinks about it for a minute knows how the hell you do it, or why you do it. I’m not looking for your explanation, I’m just sayin’” said the skeleton.  

Fair enough. Not everybody has the stomach for what I do. I don’t seem to have a choice, it’s what I was designed to do.   Part of it is being kept in the dark about the most compelling parts of the story. I have to fucking know. Knowing won’t give me much, I know that too. But I have to know everything I can.

“You poor, poor bastard. And I did this to you,” said the skeleton.

Well, don’t be too hard on yourself. You couldn’t consider the things I am working with, they would have reduced you to sobbing helplessness. You leave all that to your over-sensitive little son, it’s fine.   I got it. I will always have it.

Dreadedness

My father’s most formidable armor was dreadedness.   He would get an implacable expression on his face to show he was ready for your worst.  The look was very much like Clint Eastwood’s iconic expression of hatred and superiority.  I suspect you could have shown a photograph of my father’s face at such times to a native of any culture in the world and they would have said, in their language, “dreaded aspect”.   That fearsome aspect, perversely, invited the attack he was now grimly prepared for.   Bring on your worst, lay on MacDuff, let’s see what you think you got, punk.  

My sister reported once getting a telephone message from our father and that his voice alone perfectly conveyed his dreaded aspect.  “From the first word I began to cringe and after a few seconds I wanted to rip my eardrums out just to make it stop… it was…” and as words to convey her horror failed her, she pantomimed how horrible it was, gesturing around her ears with an agonized expression on her face to show how desperately she wanted the relentless, dreaded voice to stop.  

That he was not always like this should be clear by now.  He was also funny, smart and capable of great kindness and sensitivity.  He was not only the monster that is easy to sum up as the D.U., the Dreaded Unit.  It’s just that if you see this expression on a parent’s face, and their readiness to angrily back it up, it’s impossible to forget.  You know this persona is waiting, ready to loom and do battle at any time.  

Did he show this dreadedness daily, weekly?  I really couldn’t say, more than weekly, possibly less than daily.  The fact is, he showed us this hard face often enough that we both know it very well and to this day are sensitive to the nuances of this dreaded aspect whenever we glimpse it in the world.

The thing that’s impossible to understand as a child is that this super tough pose that says “I am ready to, and capable of, smashing your face without lifting a fist” is not something a human really chooses to assume, especially with their own children.  It is a reaction related to the fight or flight reflex.  It comes about not out of toughness as much as from fear and anger.  

The anger was somewhat understandable, the fear behind it much more subtle and impossible for a child to get a glimpse of in any case.  I didn’t get any insight into the fear until I was close to forty years old.  

Eli, during one of my regular visits to his tidy one bedroom cottage in Mount Kisco, NY, revealed the main source of my father’s terror, anger and combativeness.  He revealed it reluctantly, an eye witness who had mulled over the decision to testify for decades, who stepped forward to give crucial information during the final moments of the long sentencing phase.  At this point he and I had discussed many other matters, this revelation was clearly not one he was anxious to make.

“Listen,” he had told me in his gruff voice when we began recording some of the sessions, “these things I’m telling you are for you, for whatever use you can make of them in your own life, and for your sister, nobody else.  I’m telling you these stories to help explain some difficult things that are impossible to understand, so you can start to make sense of some of these complicated, insane, twisted stories, the sometimes cock-eyed, convoluted and unexplainable behavior of certain members of our family.”  

He could see I understood this and then, because I was writing all the time, he added  “these are not stories you should write about, in any form, until everybody in them is dead.  People would be hurt by many of the things I’m telling you, even if you think you are presenting them very objectively and with perfect fairness, or even if you think you’re fictionalizing them.  The people you write about will know it’s them, and they’ll be hurt, and they won’t forgive you.  I’m telling you these personal details to explain impossible things for you.  When everybody is dead, the stories I’m telling you are your’s to do with what you like.  While we’re alive, not a word.  You understand?”

I did, even as the piece I wrote about him immediately after he died was a tissue of pure bullshit.  I was in the process of completing work for a Masters in “creative writing”, which the New York authorities had deemed functionally related to teaching third graders and which put me on a slightly higher pay level with my Common Branches teaching license.  I’d included an Eli character in my thesis, my adviser had told me the dynamic character deserved his own book and convinced me to remove the character from the narrative that became my thesis.  I wrote a fictionalized short story about him instead.

In trying to weave reality into fiction, and explain the sort of lovable rogue Eli was, I made up a completely implausible story involving Eli, his millionaire half-brother’s yacht (Dave never had a boat that I know of) and a semi-drunken sexual escapade with his half-brother’s beautiful young Brazilian wife, conducted on deck, under a tarp, while the cuckold slept in one of the cabins beneath them.  It was an absurd story in just about every way, and conveyed almost nothing of Eli, certainly nothing of his character.  There was barely a whiff of psychological truth in it.

I was idiotic enough to mention the short story to Eli’s oldest daughter at the funeral and even stupider to mail her a copy when she told me she’d love to read it. After all, I was a cousin who had befriended her difficult father and had known him well, spoken of him with great nuance and love at the funeral.  She hoped that whatever I’d written might give her an insight or two into her own supremely problematic dad, now that he was gone.  She had no reason to suspect that in the piece I’d mentioned to her I’d been not only an unreliable narrator, but a deliberately and artlessly lying one.  

I described an invented confession of an unspeakable betrayal that had never happened.  I added, in my hubris, ‘he reported this to me with a deep regret that demonstrated, beyond any doubt, the truth of his story”.  The truth of the story I had completely invented, a story that never could have happened.  Eli was a rogue, but not that kind at all.  What an asshole move on my part it was writing the story and then sending it to Eli’s daughter.

 The deep regret with which he described this illuminating event in my father’s early childhood left me no doubt that he was revealing something painfully true that he had witnessed more than once.  

For some reason I picture the room very clearly, although it’s a room I’ve never seen, a room that was never described to me.  I see an austere room with a high ceiling and dark wood all around.   There are dust motes drifting in the slanting shaft of late summer afternoon light coming through the one narrow window.  The room is virtually airless.  It is a room from a nightmare of poverty, fear and violence.   My tiny, red-haired grandmother is seated at the head of the table, at a seat Eli described as her seat.  She always sat there, the way we always sat in the same seats around our family dinner table.  Next to her seat was a drawer.  In that drawer she kept the heavy, canvas wrapped cord for her iron.  

Eli paused to make sure I remembered what these heavy, rough cords were like.  I did, I’d seen a couple during my early childhood, from before the age of ready plastic and rubber for insulation of electrical wires.  These frayed, abrasive cords were much thicker and far less flexible than a modern day power cord.  They were round, not flat as most power cords are today.  They contained numerous heavy wires and the insulation was a series of wrappings, the outermost being a kind of rough burlap.

From the time my father could stand, any time he did anything that displeased his tiny, religious mother, a woman who as far as I can tell led an unhappy life of limitless frustration, she would yank open that drawer.  Her little hand would grab the rough, heavy cord and she’d swing it violently into the young boy’s face.

“In his face?” I asked Eli.

He nodded with infinite sorrow.  There was a pause as we looked at each other.  Then he said “after a while, all she had to do was rattle that drawer and he’d….” and the eighty-five year-old popped out of his chair and stood straight up, quivering in fear, eyes cast to the ground.

A light went on in the universe when I heard that story. Things I had no chance to understand suddenly came closer to my grasp.  I was flooded with empathy for my little father.  Imagine being a one year-old, a two year-old, and being whipped in the face by your own mother?  

“My mother, may she rest in peace,” he always began any story about her.  There were almost no stories about her.

ii

We had dinner the other night with my father’s first cousin, Azi, and his wife Sue.  It was a wonderful time.  We had a few great laughs and Azi, who greatly resembles my father, although a much more easy-going version, reminded me of him uncannily when he cracked up laughing.  My father could be reduced to helpless hysterics when he found something hilarious.  My sister and I suffer this same helplessness at times, when something is truly too funny to be able to stop laughing about.   Azi didn’t fall into this state, but we had a couple of good long laughs during our leisurely dinner.  

I mentioned the manuscript I am working on, this Book of Irv that is now about 450 pages long.  I described how, about 100 pages in, my father’s skeleton suddenly started piping up.  I told them I’d thought it was a bit of stagey device at first, these conversations with a dead man, but soon found myself looking forward to the daily talks with the skeleton, conversations that often surprised me.  Yes, these were talks I wish we’d had when he was alive, but these written ones were the next best thing.  I told Azi I woke up every day looking forward to talking with the skeleton, hearing what he had to say.  

He smiled and later asked me if I’d put any of the pages on line.  He seemed very happy that I had.   I told him I’d send him the link or he could google bookofirv, one word, and it should pop right up.  The following afternoon I sent him a link to the intro, along with a few follow-ups to our chat during dinner the night before.  I included two names of siblings of our grandparents’, Yuddle and Chashki, that I hadn’t found in his on-line family tree.  I expressed my surprise to learn, from his family tree, that my father, like him, had been named after Azriel, my father’s grandfather and Azi’s great grandfather.  I told him how much we had enjoyed the chance to have dinner with them.

What follows is likely the paranoia of a child over-sensitized to signs of dreadedness and reasons for dread.  Or, maybe not.

Late last night I googled bookofirv and, to my dismay, it popped up right above a link to gratutiousblahg with its catchy, pugnacious description:  warning: gratuitous fucking f-word and passive voice use, and another one called Fucking Moods.  I then clicked on Book of Irv and found, to my surprise, that it had been visited seven times that day, by one reader, in the United States.  This struck me because the site is generally visited by zero visitors on any given day.

The intro I’d sent him the link to had not been visited directly, which is indicated in the WordPress statistics when a link to a particular page is clicked on.  I assume it must have been Azi reading through the entries, looking at the photos, before my email reached him.  It may all be pure coincidence.  It’s possible Azi may not even have regular access to a computer during his visit to the States.

Or, it’s also possible, says the son of the Dreaded Unit, that the expression Azi had in a couple of the photos we posed for after dinner– probably a completely inadvertent micro-expression like the ones we often have in photos we are not ready for– the only glimmer I’ve ever seen on his face of my father’s dreaded aspect– and my sister was struck by this glimpse too, was a grim foreshadowing of his reaction to my emerging portrait of his beloved first cousin.  

As the last family member alive, outside of my sister and me, he may well have been offended by references to Tamarka, his grandmother, after all, a woman he undoubtedly loved, described in only the unflattering context I knew her from. Mentioning my father’s surprising lifelong bitterness toward Azi’s mother might have hurt him too. 

“What did I tell you, schmuck, about writing these things about people who are still alive?” I can hear the angry voice of Eli rasp.  “Even if everyone else is no longer alive, this guy is the son and grandson of the woman your father had little good to say about.  You both took my side against his mother?  Really?  She moved to Israel when you were a kid, how much contact did you have with her?  Asshole, do you think before you do things, even at sixty goddamned years old?”

“Eli,” called the skeleton at the top of the hill to his cousin in his grave below, “you’re a fine one to call somebody else an asshole, having been, not exactly, shall we say, a model of discretion during your long battle of a life.”

“You’re only talking that way, Bub, because you know I can’t come up that hill and kick your goddamned ass,” said the skeleton of my father’s first cousin.  “And because you know how much I love you, which would not, by the way, prevent me from knocking the shit out of you, if I could somehow get up there, which, unfortunately for me and lucky for you, I can’t.”

The Democracy Game Show

“You’ve lived long enough now to have observed a few things about democracy,” said the skeleton, squinting against the sunlight that was flooding his hilltop in Cortlandt, New York, brilliantly illuminating his tombstone.  “As Winston Churchill quipped, between stiff drinks, democracy is the worst system of government in the world, except for all the others.  Quite the wag, that Winnie.  On this sunny Sunday, why not discuss the nature of our exceptional American democracy a little?”

Sure thing.  As I learned from you, satire is often all we have.  

“Well, it’s a pretty poor substitute for power, I’ll grant you that, but I’ll take a nice pointy skewer from Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor over even the most eloquent speech by your brilliant orator friend Mr. Obama.  We’ll get back to your post-racial president later, I suspect, but first allow me a general observation about democracy.

“Your friend Thomas Jefferson, the refined renaissance man who never dignified the pernicious rumors of his thirty year miscegenation with a beautiful, light-skinned piece of his property, spoke of raking the educable few from the rubbish,” the skeleton gave a small chuckle.

“I was, it turned out, one of those educable few, so was my brother.  Look, they raked me out of the rubbish, via the GI bill, et, voila!   If I’d had more of an ability to smile as I was fed shit I might have become a college professor.  It’s the wrong way to see it, of course, smiling as I’m fed shit.  It would have been better to have just seen it as paying dues, but we only pay the dues we can afford to pay, as you yourself know very well.”  

No argument here, dad.  I’ve always lived on a very tight budget for dues paying.

“So you have an American genius like Jefferson, with his hundreds of inherited slaves and I believe thousands of acres of inherited land, surveyed by his father and his father-in-law, and later by him and registered as his property.  And you have masses of people in the colonies who don’t have jack shit, as they used to say.  There could never be enough seats in the newly created University of Virginia for all these folks, and most of them, frankly, wouldn’t know a book from a block.  Although, for the rabble they were, the masses of Americans were surprisingly literate back then.  

“So, really, there was a pretty sizable pile of educable material in that heap of rubbish that could have been raked, but what are you going to do with masses of highly educated poor people anyway?   Once you’ve read all the great works of literature, philosophy and history, acquired the habits of critical thinking,  you’re not going to be content working as a brute all day and drinking grog all night.   How do we preserve life, liberty and property (forget the ‘pursuit of happiness’, you know what I’m saying?) for those who have it while making sure the brutes don’t rise up and grab any of ours for themselves?  Give them beautiful platitudes and keep them as ignorant as possible.

“We create a nation everyone can take pride in, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.   We create a government of, by and for the People.  In civics you learn that the will of the People is carried out by elected representatives on the local and federal level.  And blah, blah, blah.  But of course, you remember when I convinced you to enroll as a Democrat, because the only meaningful vote you’ll ever get is in the party primary?  Well, that was the last of my idealism talking.  How many meaningful primaries have you voted in?  You got to vote for Bernie Sanders this time.  Did it feel great?  I hope so.

“Anyway, let’s cut to the chase– what does it take to have capable elected officials working intelligently to solve difficult problems, making meaningful compromises to advance social progress, protect the environment, ensure domestic tranquility?   Educated, critical thinking voters evaluating the candidates based on what they actually believe in and what they have proven they can do. How often does that happen, Elie?   We are given the choice at election time between two shrewdly marketed brands already in debt to the people who put up billions to brand and market them, or more succinctly, as Lewis Black put it so memorably, two bowls of shit.

“Even our best presidents have been custodians of the status quo, protectors of privilege, it’s built into our two party system.  Take FDR, a class traitor and great president by almost anyone’s assessment.  His New Deal, while radical and a great improvement over what existed before in our Darwinian democracy, was largely put into place to prevent a Communist uprising here.  People were sick, tired, depressed, angry, organizing, ready to smash something.  Super-rich speculators had sucked the country dry as they have been doing from the day they arrived here in the land of opportunity. Sure, some of them had jumped from sky scrapers when they lost fortunes, but those were only the weak ones.  The stronger ones figured out how to remain rich. The rest of us?

“You read Harold Lasswell’s description of how, from the beginning, mass media has been used to sell things to the American public by manipulation.  Newspaper guys like Hearst sold war, and then when the great progressive Woodrow Wilson found it advantageous to take America into the World War he turned things over to George Creel, the advertising genius.  And Creel’s Commission tirelessly turned the tide in a very short time– an isolationist nation was lining up to fight the fucking Hun who was chopping the arms off kids in Belgium.  

“None of it ever happened, of course, the atrocities that were widely reported, but the truth cannot be allowed to stand in the way of greater truth, which in that case was to get America into that great war before it ended.  We were about to fight a war to end war, a war to make the world safe for democracy, or safe from democracy, or whatever the hell you want it to be– it will be the greatest, most glorious, most exciting war ever!  

“Until you get over there, of course, and it’s a filthy slaughterhouse worse than the battlefields of our Civil War — a war like all American wars, including the Revolutionary War, that the wealthy could literally buy their way out of serving in.  The piles of excrement next to the stinking trenches were as tall as mountains.  A hundred years later nobody has a very good explanation for why there was a world war in the first place, except that the greediest in every civilized nation were intent on exploiting the uncivilized nations without interference from every other civilized nation.  That and the billions the U.S. had loaned to Britain and France, money that would have been lost if Germany won the war. 

“Your democratic voters, if they had the true picture, would never have sent their children to be butchered in such a meaningless war.  Advertising and propaganda to the rescue.  Hitler was on the losing side in the war to end war and he was no happier about being a loser than most losers are about it.  To his accursed credit, he learned a key lesson from unscrupulous Allied propaganda in the World War, which had succeeded gloriously where more truthful, honor-bound German propaganda had not.  You read that section of Mein Kampf, where he wipes the rabies slaver off his lips and writes about how gloriously effective the lies of the Allies were.  

“Photo of a pile of dead bodies outside a Brussels hospital?  They died of disease, sadly, but why not put those corpses to good use with a nice inflammatory caption?   Slaughtered by the Hun!  Poisoned because they were witnesses to the Kaiser’s blood thirsty men’s butchery of the Belgian children.  The lies were better, the Allies found, if there was a certain internal consistency to them.  What did Lasswell say?  ‘hacking and gouging were leitmotifs in the war to the East’?   Pure bullshit calculated to enflame rage, and Hitler admired it greatly, would put the lesson to great use.  Make people hate, and fear, and they’ll do whatever you tell them needs to be done.

“That was one reason there was so much skepticism here about the rumors of the death camps once Hitler got things back up to speed in Germany.  Americans had heard the brutal lies before, the human skin lampshade story had already been used in the World War chapter one.  Fool me twice, what did Dubya say about that?”  the skeleton paused to watch a car raise a cloud of dust coming down the dirt road into the cemetery.  

“Oh, my,” said the skeleton, “we have guests!”

I don’t recall you going on this way when you were alive, to be perfectly honest about it.  

“Well, shit, I would have, Elie, but, if you recall, we were kind of lifelong adversaries.  We agreed about most things, you understand, but the one thing I could not abide was the existential threat you always posed, or that I thought you always posed.”  

You do realize how insane that sounds, don’t you?  

“Yes, of course, as I was dying it became crystal clear to me how insane that was,” said the skeleton.  

It looks like those guests are coming to visit Benny Peritsky, dad, so you can continue your remarks on American democracy.

“Well, let me sum up then.  The most essential thing for an effective representative government is an informed, intelligent, critically thinking electorate.  Free public education is supposed to educate our future voters in how to think and evaluate.  You can judge for yourself how well that’s working out for you.  Freedom of the press is supposed to ensure that the voters are well-informed.  Of course, the press, in all its modern mass media forms, is mainly interested in the bottom line, profit.  People tune in to what scares and outrages them, and to what titillates them.  That’s it, you know, if it bleeds it leads.  The details about an innovative environmental idea that can save tens of thousands, or even millions, of lives in rural areas every year?   Show us the slow-motion sequence of that maniac mowing down gay dancers in that Orlando nightclub again.  Holy shit!  Did you see that?  He took a pledge to ISIS right before he started shooting.  Holy fuck!  They’re coming to kill us!”

Indeed they are, pop.  And that’s one reason I am so grateful to have a president who runs the most transparent administration in history and works closely with the press to make sure the American public always has the truth on every vital issue.  

“Except when he’s threatening whistleblowers with the death penalty under Wilson’s 1917 Espionage Act, of course, or keeping top secret the number of children in Yemen and everywhere else his drones are killing and maiming every time he signs off on his secret kill lists,” said the skeleton.

Jesus Christ, dad, do you still hate our freedom so much?

Guns, Genetically Modified Organisms and Federalism

Should states or the federal government decide whether Americans have the right to own assault weapons and high capacity clips of ammunition?   Should the states or the feds have the final say over whether genetically engineered herbicide resistant crops may be planted anywhere, without limitation?  These are questions of federalism.

Our federal republic is an electoral democracy that balances national and local interests.   There has always been political friction over issues of federalism; does the federal or state and local government get the final say over the laws we live by? Some things are in our clear national interest, others are best decided by the local community.  Everything else we argue about.

The Civil War was fought over questions of national and regional sovereignty compelling enough to fight a war over.  States’ rights and federal government advocates clashed over every compromise in our intricately drawn U.S. Constitution.   In the end, certain fundamental issues must be resolved on a national level.

The newly granted legal rights of slaves freed after the Civil War, for example, were protected by constitutional amendments and federal laws to enforce them.   The Supreme Court soon limited the scope of these federal protections and states were allowed to pass their own laws governing the treatment of former slaves.  It was not until a hundred years later, after a lot of activism, that new federal laws against certain forms of discrimination were promulgated and protection of civil rights became a national priority.  The states are sovereign in many things, but they may not violate a federal law over that same subject matter. 

Federal preemption is the legal term for when federal law trumps state law.  The power of states and localities to act in such cases is preempted by federal law.  Our federal system is based on a case by case balancing of federal and local interests.

After a particularly horrible mass gun slaughter of kindergarten children, a large majority of Americans across the country called for federal gun restrictions. Most Americans wanted, at the very least, restoration of the ban on assault-style weapons, the guns of choice for mass shooters, a ban that was allowed to expire in 2004. This call for national action resounded again recently when a gay nightclub was strafed by a maniac wielding a legally-obtained assault rifle designed to spray dozens of bullets in seconds.

Defenders of the right to bear arms insist that gun control is a States’ Rights issue.  The NRA is a stickler on this point.  State sovereignty supporters decry federal “over-reach” every time federal gun legislation is proposed.

Monsanto corporation, makers of powerful herbicides (they were the makers of Agent Orange) herbicide-resistant genetically modified organisms, and other powerful environmental agents, is currently in federal court arguing that federal preemption should allow Monsanto’s customers to disseminate GMOs without limitation, everywhere in the United States.  

Giant international corporations like Monsanto increasingly argue that their U.S. business interests should be protected by federal immunity from state regulation and are deserving of a federal shield against liability for injuries resulting from use of their products.   Regarding their desire to be shielded from liability, they are like the gun makers, except that where the gun lobby wants states to decide, these chemical makers argue for federal preemption of all other laws.

In most things taking place within their borders, states have broad decision-making powers.   States make their own criminal, business and family laws, levy taxes, regulate most health, safety and environmental matters.  The right of the states to retain all powers not reserved to the federal government is a well-established principle in our Bill of Rights.  The Ninth Amendment reads:  The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.  

Last week three judges for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals heard a case involving federal statutes Monsanto argues preempt the laws and wishes of every local community in every one of the fifty states. Monsanto argues that state and local government is powerless to protect small farmers and delicate and unique ecosystems from the harms that  genetically engineered crops can cause.

The facts of this case are pretty stark.  Farmers and environmentalists in Hawaii argue that GMO cultivation contaminates their environment.  Many GMOs are engineered to be immune to herbicides, they are cultivated in conjunction with powerful herbicides and pesticides.   Chemicals used with these GMOs contaminate the habitat, soil and water of Hawaii and threaten neighboring farmers’ livelihoods.  The cultivation of these genetically engineered plants introduces toxic chemicals into schools, homes and gardens that, in Hawaii, are often close to farm land.  

 The crops the counties in Hawaii attempted to regulate, with laws Monsanto sued for relief from, are created to be herbicide-resistant, designed to allow growers to spray (Monsanto’s) Roundup and other weed killers (like 2,4-D, a component of Monsanto’s Agent Orange) on the whole field without killing the crop.  Other Monsanto crops are engineered to exude their own pesticides.  The Hawaii laws were also intended to limit transgenic contamination, the spread of the DNA of the genetically engineered plants themselves.

Under traditional American federalism the local community would, barring some overriding national interest, usually have the final say on local health, safety, and environmental matters.  The flora and fauna of the Hawaiian islands are part of a unique and delicate ecosystem and the state of Hawaii is thousands of miles from the shores of the mainland United States. It is hard to think of a better case for States’ Rights than Hawaii seeking autonomy over matters directly affecting its own ecology.

Monsanto argues that the federal Plant Protection Act and other federal statutes prevent the State of Hawaii, or any county or local government, from restricting the use of Monsanto’s genetically modified organisms anywhere in the Hawaiian islands, or anywhere else in the country.

The Ninth Circuit has previously ruled that once USDA allows a GMO plant to be sold commercially, the federal government has no authority to restrict it in any manner, so if the court accepts Monsanto’s latest argument, this would put those crops beyond the reach of any government regulation.

How do we reconcile the case of using federal law to force herbicide-resistant plants and toxic chemicals into every American community, on the one hand, and using a states’ rights argument to block federal action to control America’s unique plague of frequent mass murders by gun, on the other?  A moment then, for the compelling arguments for federal preemption of state and local law in each case.

In the case of guns, the factual argument is immediately easy to grasp.  Guns easily travel from states with permissive laws into states with restrictive ones, and regularly kill people in states with the most stringent controls.  Without federal laws, the regular mass shootings that are a unique and gruesome feature of present-day America will never stop, no matter what heroic steps individual states may try to take to prevent them. 

There is a strong case for why federal regulations are needed to stop these massacres. Only a nationwide law can have any effect on controlling access to highly portable weapons like “America’s gun”, the AR-15, the mass killers’ gun of choice.  These semi-automatic weapons shoot dozens of rounds in seconds, they were designed to allow special forces to shoot their way out of military confrontations with multiple deadly enemies.

What is the compelling national interest that justifies Monsanto seeking federal preemption of the reasonable wishes of citizens of every state, even of an island state with a unique and delicate ecosystem over 2,000 miles from the mainland U.S.?  That is now up to three federal judges, appointed for life, to decide.

Religion, the opiate, meant little to Irv at the end

Irv was raised by a very religious mother.  I have no idea if his father was religious, his father’s wishes never seemed to come into play.  The home my father and his little brother grew up in was ruled by the strict orthodox laws of Judaism, in their most brutal and austere form.  The family was kosher, and regulars at the little synagogue at the narrow, church-like, white painted First Hebrew Congregation of Peekskill where the father swept the floors for a few copeks a week.   The poor mother, who could often not feed her family, insisted on giving charity every week, which she paid out from the coins in her little Tzedakah (“justice” “mercy” “good deed” “fairness” “piety” “alms” or “charity”) box.  

The synagogue sent Jewish transients to their house to board there overnight, as a way of generating a little income for the poor family.  These were Jewish hobos who traveled looking for work during the Depression.  Apparently many were drunks and they’d piss out the windows or literally throw their shit around like drunken chimpanzees.  When they caused too much of a ruckus Irv’s mother would scream for him to run and get Eli, who lived nearby.  Eli would come over and bodily throw these bums out in the street, administer an enraged warning or a thrashing, depending on the needs of the situation.  

In the army corporal Israel (his name was actually Azrael, but the army didn’t make such distinctions) remained as kosher as it was possible to be as a grunt.  He lived on side dishes during meals when they served pork.  As an adult he kept more or less kosher, although not strictly so, by any means.  He ate Chinese food, for example, but always beef or chicken.   He didn’t stop his wife from frying up some bacon for the kids whenever she liked, though he was never tempted to taste it.  “I’m so hungry, I could eat pork!” was one of his stock phrases.  He never did, until, one night, and to my great disappointment, somehow, he tasted a little Szechuan pork and found it delicious (which it was).  He never tasted it again, to my knowledge.

He explained the laws of Kashrut (“kosherness”) to my sister and me in a memorable way.  He summed them up as laws of mercifulness.  It was exceedingly cruel to boil an animal in its mother’s milk; this was the reason Jews didn’t eat diary and meat together.  Kashrut insisted that animals must be slaughtered as painlessly as possible, he explained.  Though years later I’d see a chicken slaughtered in this manner by a farmer in Israel  and the way it ran, without its head, plowing the dirt with its neck, did not make it look like a very painless way for a living bird to become a delicious chicken dinner.

As a boy Irv was taken to the small shul regularly and no doubt endured the endless services there, rising, being seated, rising, being seated, rising.  I can picture his mother looking on from the women’s section of that sexually segregated congregation, boring a hole in the side of her son’s neck with her stern gaze.  I imagine the services in that tiny synagogue must have been as dry and stultifying as some of the worst services I’ve endured over the years.  My father’s religious upbringing was devoid of joy, as mine would be, to the extent I endured my Hebrew School days.  

He never tried to impose his religious views on his wife.  She was a proudly secular Jew and had no use for the superstitious rituals of the orthodox.  It went beyond that, really, she couldn’t refrain from colorfully expressing her complete disdain for their ignorant ideas, rigid ritualism, small-minded prejudice, and mostly, to her, their mind-numbing, self-righteous stupidity.    

My mother came by these views honestly.  She got the beginnings of them from her mother, who had fallen under the spell of the Marxists who came to the Ukraine right after the revolution and established a Jewish Youth Group for the Jews of the Vishnivetz area, spreading the message of cooperation, universal brotherhood with fellow workers and hope for a much better future in a world justly ruled by workers.  Of course, this movement lasted only a short time.  Within a few years all of the Jewish fellow workers in Vishnevitz would be slaughtered by their Ukrainian fellow workers, at the urging of their fellow workers from Germany.

My father, to his credit, never challenged my mother on any of this.  Partly, I suppose, because he agreed with most of it.  For her part, my mother never gave him any grief for going to synagogue on the High Holidays, though it was understood that she wouldn’t be caught dead rising and being seated hypocritically during the endless proceedings.  My mother also participated robustly in the Passover seders every year, usually as the host and chef for two large gatherings.  The story of the exodus from slavery to freedom was meaningful to her, even if all the rituals and prayers were a little tiring.  

The moral and ethical essence of every religion is how mercifully its adherents apply the mostly merciful teachings of their holy books.  The good of all faiths share a similar worldview, it has often been noted.  Their god teaches them to love justice and mercy and to help others as much as they can.  Their teachings command them to overcome their worst impulses, exercise restraint and strive to be better people.  There are many religious people who are wonderfully compassionate examples of a higher spiritual awareness.  

Other deeply religious individuals take time out from other good works to put non-believers to the sword, excommunicate them, burn them as heretics, torture them, disembowel pregnant heretics and send their unborn children to hell with them.  These murderers always believe they are doing God’s will, as insane as it indisputably is, for example, for followers of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, to kill each other over the language the other Christian sect chooses to pray to their mutual Messiah in.  

Jesus, I always imagine, is weeping in heaven over the behavior of the more insane of his followers and the trillion dollar church industries claiming to carry out his merciful teachings while endorsing many forms of human cruelty.   It’s unfair to judge all religious people on their sometimes rabid leaders or on the acts of a few million of them over the centuries, perhaps, but– hell, life’s unfair.

“Well, as President Kennedy said, ‘life’s unfair,'” my father used to say.

Dig it.  Whatever else you can say about the incomparable adventure that is life, it is unfair.  The most important ingredient of a religious life, or any life, for that matter, it seems to me,  is love.  Without love you get the Crusades, violent Jihad, the Hundred Years War, the Thirty Years war, etc.   I can hear my mother snarling about the murderously self-righteous of all religions, ignorant fuckers happy to kill to prove how all-merciful their imaginary  God is.

My father shed most of the trappings of his religious upbringing over the years.  By the time he was in the hospital, waiting to die, he expressed no religious feeling at all.  I asked him, that last night of his life, if he wanted me to say kaddish for him after he died.  He shrugged, told me it meant nothing to him one way or another if I chanted the mourners’ prayer of praise to God (in Aramaic, a language nobody alive understands) for thirty days after his death, or for a year, as the orthodox do.  He assured me he really didn’t give a shit about kaddish, or any other religious matters.  I believed him.  

The following story illustrates the depth of my father’s final belief about religion as well as any story I can think of.

While he was becoming increasingly bitter and pessimistic during the last years of his life, he came to more and more regret the lack of intimacy with those he loved, as he sadly reported from his death bed.  He explained that he had never seen affection shared in the home he grew up in. “I had no idea how it was even done,” he croaked.   He was always affectionate to animals, playful with young children he encountered.

 “He always loved small kids and little dogs, probably because they posed no threat to him,” my sister once observed, astutely.

As often happens in life, my parents found an inventive way to find the love and intimacy that was so hard for them to achieve with their own loved ones.   Interacting with strangers, being loved unconditionally and showing the children of these strangers unconditional love, was a blessing they shared with a young couple who had repudiated their own parents when they were born again into fellowship with Jesus.

My parents had been volunteering to help teach reading for the first grade class of the teacher who had taught both of their grandchildren.   They had both been impressed by this dedicated teacher’s kindness, and the way she instilled care and cooperation in her young students.  They went to read books to the children in the years after their grandchildren attended her class. They also helped the children crack the code of reading, working with them one on one or in small groups.

“She’s a lovely woman,” my mother told me once, “and she has created a very kind atmosphere in the classroom.  The kids really treat each other remarkably well and I have to credit that to her.”  I could tell there was a punchline to this compliment on the way.

“But I have to say, in terms of teaching the children math, and reading, or anything, really, besides how to treat each other– which I’ll grant you is also very important– she seems to be a moron.”  And she described with illustrations the parochial stupidity of this very kind woman.  

“Plus,” said my mother, laying down the trump card, “she’s a born again Christian.”

My father was uncharacteristically subdued in the face of this opinion.  He basically agreed, but to him, it seemed, the social development piece was more important than the lack of skills this experienced teacher imparted.  

In any case, at some point they met the parents of one of the more learning challenged kids.  My mother had told me about this kid she was working with, beautiful, and very sweet, but seemingly incapable of grasping anything when it came to reading.  The letters of the alphabet seemed to mystify this little sweetie completely.  To my surprise, my parents soon became close friends with the parents of this young born again Christian girl, often visiting them at their home. 

They were very loving to the young girl from school and her younger siblings, bringing them presents, spending a lot of time with them.  My sister contrasted this to their less effusive relationship with her children, their only grandkids.  Another of those surrogate situations, clearly, trying to get right with strangers what was difficult or impossible to accomplish with actual loved ones.  I heard some stories about this young born-again couple over the last few years of my father’s life.  

For one thing, the couple did not talk to their own parents.  Their parents and they had disowned each other, they were no longer in contact.  Their parents, clearly, were determined to go to hell, and there was nothing the young couple could do about that.  The time they spent with my parents was clearly cherished by them, they always made my parents feel at home, and treasured.  My mother chuckled over what a good-natured imbecile the husband was.

“They were arguing with us once about evolution.  You know, born-agains believe that humans and dinosaurs lived together 6,000 years ago, when God created the Garden of Eden.  I was laying out the theory of evolution, and the time frame, the millions of years over which all these changes took place, all the scientific evidence and Lisa kept shrugging it off as secular humanist propaganda.  When God is on your side, you know, the sky’s the limit in what you can believe and God will provide the facts, if facts are even needed in a life of blind faith.  So Lisa is making these ridiculous arguments and she calls on Hector, who was in the kitchen, for some support.”

“And Hector sticks his head out from behind the kitchen wall, with a banana in his hand and half of it in his mouth and says ‘you’re not going to convince me that I came from a monkey.’  And he looked exactly like a monkey.  Even Lisa cracked up, it was too perfect.”

“He did.  He looked like Curious George,” said my father “except without the curiosity.  He’s a delightful guy, but as closed minded as they make them.” 

This closed-mindedness, the ultimate fatal flaw in anyone who’d cross my father’s path, it was the one thing impossible for him to tolerate, seemed no obstacle to a loving relationship with this young couple.  It was kind of mind blowing, but at the same time, having no dog in the fight, I felt glad they at least were sharing this love with people.  A net gain for all involved, I figured.  

My parents never reported any overt attempts to convert them.  They spent many a pleasant time with them.  I never met them, or was particularly interested in meeting them, but I regret that now.  They would play a disturbing role in my father’s final hours and I’m sorry I wasn’t on hand to do as Eli would have done with guests in his aunt’s home who insisted on their God-given right to fling dung.

When my father was suddenly hospitalized, six days before his death, they came to visit him at the hospital– on the last, or possibly second to last, day of his life.  I wasn’t there when they arrived, sleeping late the day after our long conversation on the last night of my father’s life, as far as I can recall.  My sister was there, unfortunately I was not.  My father was very weak, hardly able to speak.  They arrived with a group of people from their church, including the kind but stupid first grade teacher my parents had volunteered to teach reading for.

According to my sister, who cannot be doubted in this account, they formed a circle around my father’s bed.  They prayed to Jesus to accept his soul and they had my father, a lifelong Jew, secular humanist and lifelong scoffer at the doggedly defended superstitions of other religions, agree that he would allow Jesus to be his personal savior.  

“They made him accept Jesus Christ,” my sister told me in horror, “and he did.”  

I tried to reassure her that he’d been too weak to put up a fight, that he was trying to be kind to them, but the image disquieted me greatly too.  I told her I wished I’d been there, to kick them out of his hospital room.  The nerve of those fucking fanatics!  

“He accepted Christ as his personal savior,” my sister told me, aghast.

I suspect the old man was philosophical about this acceptance of an imaginary savior.  Maybe he was hedging his bets.  I’m sure when he looked into those expectant, loving faces he thought, “yeah, what the fuck, sure, Jesus, yeah, OK.”  He probably nodded, which caused a ripple of horror to go through my sister.  She was in too much grief at the moment to do more than cringe in horror.

The proof of the depth of their dedicated, if superficial, Christian charity would be seen soon enough. Not once did they visit or contact my mother, the grieving widow.  Not in the days immediately after my father’s death or at any other time during the last five years of her lonely life as a widow.  They did not seem to give a shit about saving my mother’s soul, now that my father was tucked safely by the bosom of his personal savior.

My father, with his large, funny persona, had apparently been the drawing card to this loving relationship.  It would not be the only time my mother would be abandoned by those dear friends who had been so close with the couple.  My father, for his part, would not be in the least bit surprised by this betrayal by avowedly religious people.

The Hardest Trick of All

On Thu, Jun 16, 2016 at 1:00 AM, bitemyass@gmail.com wrote:

The Hardest Trick of All

“You’ve been giving serious thought to the best way to live this third chapter of your life since mom died,” said the skeleton.  “I know one large feature is that you’ve turned aside from fighting, to a surprising extent, I have to say, even though your mate, a natural born wrangler, can’t seem to resist testing your resolve regularly. 
 

“Of course, since you’re going to read this to Sekhnet, let me define ‘wrangler’ precisely, so you can possibly avoid an ass-whipping.  A wrangler wrestles unruly steers and horses into the corral.  Sure they can be quarrelsome, but the main qualities a wrangler needs are strength, fearlessness, toughness and a stubbornness equal to a bull’s.  Heh, maybe you get your ass whupped anyway,” said the skeleton with a grunted laugh.

 “I get that you’re taking to heart Erik Erikson’s insight about this third chapter in life being about regrets or some kind of fulfillment, I believe he calls it Generativity vs. Bitterness.  You wrote about it, you could throw a footnote in here for the reader,” he said.  

(He didn’t know about hyperlinks, though he may have clicked a few toward the end of his days)

 

“Look, you’re trying to do the hardest thing in the world, the hardest trick of all.  I salute you in this noble quest, even as I recognize the idiotic hubris of the attempt.  You want to critically examine our lives and come away with some kind of insight to move you toward a productive last chapter of your life.  I applaud it, dead man though I also am.  

“Here’s the trap, as I see it, you’re trying to view life through the lens of critical history, a lens that, certainly when used to look at, say, the descendants of African hostages long experience here,  gives ample reason for pessimism.  Your challenge is maintaining some vital force that will allow for action.  At your age, at 60 now, it’s harder to have the energy, of course, but it’s psychic energy I’m talking about, which you need to see as a renewable resource.  

 “And that, my boy, is the trickiest trick of all, continually renewing your faith in a world that has become more and more about a system of domination that does not want the wrong kind of faith.  You had a good idea, working creatively with doomed kids.  Didn’t work out too well for you, you are up against billionaires with megaphones, after all and those hard-charging opinionated winners always dominate any discussion they get into.  No matter.  You have to keep moving forward.  I see what you’re hoping to do with this book, and I hope you succeed, for both of our sakes, but here’s the trap I hope you don’t fall into.  The rabbit hole that turns out to be a worm hole, or black hole.

“Don’t let your ambition blind you.  Your plan for this book is super ambitious, you want it to be a game changer, for you, for your program, for anyone who reads it. You want to tell the story of my life, set in historical and political context brought forward into today, told by a narrator I influenced greatly, if often perniciously, even as my once illuminating idealism turned to darkness and bile.  The narrator is determined to not suffer the same fate as the abusive father was doomed to by the father’s abusive mother.  

 

“It’s possible that for all the narrator’s seeming insight, the tragic missing insight is that the narrator has already been, and remains, long fucked.  By not competing against his peers all along he is a no-name flash in the pan who writes a fine book too late, published by an obscure outfit with no money to publicize it, it sinks like a stone a week after publication, and the writer is worse off for having written, discounting the princely $7,000 he was paid for the work.  

 

“Until, of course, five years after your death, when the book is exhumed by an influential person, reissued, suddenly celebrated as the important work it was all along,” the skeleton paused, seemingly to take a whiff of the stink of a decomposing animal dead somewhere nearby.

 

Being Right vs. Being Lucky

“You know, Elie, I’ve been thinking about this the last couple of days,” said the skeleton.  

What’s that, dad?  

“You’re spending too much time talking to a dead man recently.  Look, not that I don’t enjoy our conversations, but, I mean, do you think it’s healthy for this chat to be the highlight of your day?” the skeleton turned his head, as though looking around.

You mean as opposed to my mediocre diet, my relative lack of exercise, the less than ideal amount of sleep I get, my solitary life, the lack of a new network of needed doctors thanks to the vagaries of Obamacare, things like that?  

“Yeah, you’re right.  Listen, what I was really thinking about was the need to be right, where it comes from, how it does its idiot work.  My mother, who you learned from Eli whipped me in the face and sealed my fate before I was two, was a powerless, angry woman.  All she had was being obeyed, by anyone she could bend to her will.   I cannot imagine the terrifying shithole she was born into.   Talk about born under a bad sign, the filthy little hamlet off a river outside Pinsk was literally stomped out, rubbed right off the map of the world.  Never existed.

“The Jews who eked out an existence there?  Fuck ’em, who gives a shit?  Poor people, Jews, grind ’em up, pfooo! good riddance, rabbi.  I cannot begin to imagine all the nightmare elements that went into making my mother a little tyrant.  I never thought much about these things when I was alive, for fear of what thinking about them might do to me.   People who claim to love you can use you as a slave?  Your family can just be stomped into the mud without a trace?   What kind of arbitrary, brutal life are we born into?

“That was one reason I loved animals so much, as your mother also did.  I think we transmitted that to you and your sister.  A dog will return whatever treatment he gets, will always give you the benefit of the doubt.   It’s like animals cut to the chase, to the essential thing we all need in life: caring for each other.   It was my pleasure, although I didn’t enjoy it, of course, giving those insulin shots to Sassy every evening.  The dog was a complete sad sack, you remember.  Nobody particularly liked her, she’d hide under the bed, cower from people for no reason.  We knew she had no reason to cringe because we’d raised her from a newborn pup, she never had anyone do anything mean to her.  Still, she was an odd dog, very paranoid.  Your mother said she was mentally ill, maybe she was, I guess it’s possible a dog can be mentally ill.  

“The thing was, Sassy trusted me and I took care never to hurt her.  You know, I’d pinch the skin on her back, make a little fold, and the needle was very thin, I don’t even know how much she felt it.  But she seemed to know I was doing this for her benefit and was always very calm and trusting when I’d give her the shot.  I think now how natural it felt to take such tender care of her and could kick myself again for being so unnatural so much of the time, like in those battles you describe around the dinner table.”

Well, there’s nothing natural about being natural a lot of the time, I suppose.  Our society is based on being unnatural, of course, on a false and desperate notion of winning and losing that makes us the best possible, most driven, consumers.  We’re in the hands of cannibals, no different in their essential natures than they’ve ever been, like true believing functionaries of the Nazi or any other ruthless single-minded party.  You mention the need to be right– that’s the only game in town, a town that can, as far as we can tell, be rubbed out under a jackboot with or without notice.

“The white indentured servants made common cause with the black slaves and Indians during the early days of our great experiment in democracy,” said the skeleton.  “It seemed obvious enough to poor whites that they were in the same boat as the other servants and slaves, as well as with the Indians whose land was being stolen by the wealthy whites.   Black and white servants became romantically involved, escaped slavery together, often found sanctuary with the Indians, with whom they made common cause.  

“This caused a major concern for the wealthy new land barons, you understand.   The idea of poor people of all races united and looking for some measure of justice gave the status quo the heebie jeebies.   ‘How to keep everything for ourselves?’ wondered the wealthiest and the greediest.

“You read about it in Zinn’s Peoples’ History, Virginia, in the 17th century, actually put it into law– the white man’s superiority over the Negro.  A white indentured servant got much better treatment than the average African slave.  You couldn’t strip him naked when you whipped him, for example.  When you freed the white man after his indenture you had to give him 100 acres to farm, and a mule, and ten barrels of corn meal, a musket, some money.   Every white servant knew this was coming to him at the end of his years as a common nigger, and he got it under Virginia law even before the year 1700.   The wealthy ‘planters’ created a culture down there that enlisted poor whites to oversee their fellow slaves, where the white man could look down on his inferiors, no matter how low the white man’s station in life.

 “That’s what segregation was all about.  Even the poorest white trash could walk into a bathroom with plumbing, tile on the walls and floor, doors on the toilet stalls.  The Colored bathroom?  Hah, sometimes those creatures would just have to do their business behind a bush.  You know, not every place had a bathroom where a Negro could sit on a regular toilet, wash their hands in a regular sink.   So ‘separate but equal’ was like a hilarious joke told over and over again by winking whites, it was a way of saying everyone got what they deserved.

“The examples are countless.  How does the great democracy, who welcomes the poor and starving of all nations to participate in this experiment in human equality, justify forcing the natives off their land, sometimes in death marches, destroying the buffalo herds that are their sustenance, making treaties they will violate over and over, eventually just killing the fuckers en masse?   Manifest Destiny.  Ask any junior high school student what gave the descendants of white Europeans the right to march over Mexicans, Indians and anyone else in their way and they’ll tell you:  manifest destiny.  

“The phrase was invented by a newspaper man, caught on quickly.  Our destiny is manifest, look, it’s right here, plain as the nose on your face, see?  Destiny is in our hands.  Like a team one game behind with four games to play, just keep winning, that’s all we can do by way of controlling our destiny.

“Being right, it’s all most powerless people get, Elie,” said the skeleton, slowly shaking his head. “The people you talk to, they are all smiling at you as they think ‘he’s a smart guy, he can seem to justify his beliefs, articulate his values… but he’s a loser.'”  

I’ve always been that way, dad, clever with words, able to articulate my values and beliefs.   With those things, and a paid Metrocard, I can get on any subway I like.   We are judged on one scale here, as you know, what we are worth.  And that is measured the only way it can be, in the honest coin of dollars and cents.  

“Well, it’s all most people can understand.  It’s as manifest as Manifest Destiny.  Is it better to be rich or poor?  Ask anyone and you will get the same clear, entirely reasonable answer.  If your goal is something you can show clearly to the world, how much easier is your life than struggling to advance abstractions?  Just say ‘Manifest Destiny’ shoot the savage in the face, force the women and children into an icy river to drown and build your railroad.   People who hesitate, who think too much, people like you… well, what is the point?”  

Ah, you pose a question I cannot answer today, father.  I think I will lie down with that familiar black dog and rest my eyes for a while, as I ponder my manifest destiny.

 

The Sometime Impossibility of Restraint

“Look, I realize I’m dead and it’s only through you that I have any voice at the moment, and it’s really not my place, or even plausible, for me to get worked up about things that happen more than a decade after my death, but goddamn it,” said the skeleton, as worked up as I’d seen him in a while.  

Far be it from me, dad, to deprive you of your posthumous right to speak.

“All right, then, put the words in my mouth,” said the skeleton grimly.  

“Another maniac legally buys a powerful assault weapon and enough bullets to kill hundreds of people, if all goes well for the sick fuck.  American exceptionalism, it’s every fucking enraged, murderous, suicidal American coward’s right, unless he has a felony conviction or a clear and convincing history of mental health issues that will allow a given state to make it hard for him to get an assault rifle, to have as many assault weapons and clips of deadly ammo as he can afford.

“You know the Second Amendment, that speaks of the federal government not infringing on the right of the States to have well-regulated militias, has been interpreted by unappealable right-wing geniuses to mean every individual American can have any weaponry their sick little hearts desire, with no regulation by the government that gives them that right.

“Let’s go to the text, you play the right wing Supreme Court justice and interpret the plain language of the Second Amendment:  A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed. [1]

“I had to laugh, but it was not a pleasant laugh, when I heard the FBI director talk about the need for a deep, transparent inquiry into the motivations of this sick piece of shit– I’m sure it will be as transparent as it will be deep.  No investigation is necessary, and it burns me in my grave to listen to the same dumb show, the same mindless theatrics, the same mind rotting falsely complicated bullshit, dancing around the only point worth making, the one that’s shooting American people directly in the face every day, literally.  

“Why did this maniac go into a gay club and kill as many people as he could before his suicide by police?  What possible motive could a man who insists he is not a homosexual have for going into a place where homosexuals gather and murdering as many as he can?  It is certainly a perplexing question, eh, mass media?  Eh, pundits and politicians?   Why, oh why, would an, admittedly, angry but otherwise perfectly normal American guy with no criminal record or history of mental illness go into a gay club and start spraying death in every direction?  A real head scratcher.

“Let’s look at his ideology for clues to his possible motivation and what the larger meaning of this could be for all of us, shall we? It’s imponderably mysterious, after all.  Hmmmm, Muslim name, could be a terrorist, we are at war with Terror, after all.  Look, right before he left home to kill he signed up to friend ISIS on facebook.  Aha!!!!  

“No.  You don’t need any investigation whatsoever.  What you need to do is what Australia did after a particular gun massacre that was the last straw.  What we should have done immediately after that sick fuck in Connecticut shot his mother in the face, ‘thanks for the gun, mom, love you!‘ and trotted off dressed like Sylvester Stallone as Rambo to murder as many five year-olds as he could with his new toy.  That mass shooting was probably five or six hundred mass shootings ago.   When is it enough carnage?  Do what any country that is not homicidally insane does:  take away the fucking guns, make it hard for the average terrified law-abiding moron to buy all the murder weapons he feels he needs.  You want to hunt deer, go right ahead, buy any hunting rifle you want, you get a few shots, one at a time, and kill all the deer you want, if that’s your sick pleasure.  

“‘Guns don’t kill people,’ the NRA keeps insisting, ‘the wrong people with guns kill people.  It’s not the guns themselves.  The guns are fine, the guns are moral, peaceful, wonderful.  It’s bad people with guns, you see, which is why we need every good person to purchase and strap on as much weaponry as their cowardly little bodies can carry, and bandoliers of ammo, to make sure heroic good people are armed to the teeth to kill the bad people before they can misuse their wonderful new morally neutral guns.  If every kindergarten teacher in the country had top notch guns, and wore them fully loaded at all times, far fewer of their infinitely precious little charges would be slaughtered by bad people misusing their guns every year,’

 “No, Elie, what we need to do is line up the CEOs of the NRA and their entire army of well-paid lobbyists, put them in front of a high wall, with a firing squad of freedom loving gun nuts armed to the teeth with assault rifles, full clips of hollow point cop killer bullets, with guns to their heads to force them to shoot, and make a red and black Jackson Pollock on the wall behind those fucking death-profiteering monsters, paint Guernica in their inhuman fucking blood…”

 Look, dad, obviously I share your horror, your outrage, but don’t get worked up like that.

 “Or what? I’m going to bust a blood vessel? You may have noticed, I’m a fucking skeleton. What’s going to happen to me beyond this?   I can finally speak my mind, thanks to that ingenious apology to my son as I was dying. Heh, I knew I’d get some long-lasting benefit from that apology,”   the skeleton laughed, coughed once, and then went into a coughing fit.

 Look, obviously, I agree.   We need to literally kill those who insist they’ll shoot you in the fucking face if you try to take the billions upon billions of dollars they make every year from selling fear and death.  Being shot in the face with a gun is the only language they understand.

 “No, truly, literally. I know we employ a certain amount of hyperbole in our family, but what you are saying is literally true. What did that rabid, smirking Charlton Heston say about his right to his guns?   ‘You’ll pry this gun out of my cold dead hand’.   Fine, fair enough, let’s do it.  Done, that was easy.   Next!

 “I used to love that intro to Gunsmoke, Pop’s favorite show. ‘There is just one way to handle the killers and spoilers, and that’s with the U.S. Marshal… and Gunsmoke!’

“Your fierce Sekhnet is not against torture as long as it’s used only on deserving torturees.  Our list would have guys like Dick Cheney, that chuckling, criminally insane Rumsfeld, John Yoo.  I’m not against a good massacre either, as long as you’re killing the killers and the spoilers,” said the skeleton.

Got that out of your system, dad?  

“No,” said the skeleton, “but it helped a tiny bit.  Jesus, I wish I had a fucking gun right now, I’m telling you….”

 

[1] In Caetano v. Massachusetts (2016), the Supreme Court reiterated its earlier rulings that “the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding” and that its protection is not limited to “only those weapons useful in warfare”.[15]

Child Labor and Anti-lynching Laws

“What do your croaking, amphibious friends say ‘plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’?  New day, same shit.  I know you were startled the other day to learn there was no federal law banning child labor until I was fourteen,” said the skeleton, sitting up on a remarkably cool, fresh mid-June morning in the First Hebrew Congregation of Peekskill boneyard.

“Speaking of boneyards, don’t forget your mother’s yahrzeit tonight,” he said, “it should have really been last night, but since God is a mean drunk at a party, you’re the only one trying to keep score.”  

I’ll light one for you too, if I manage to remember when I get home.

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” said the skeleton philosophically.  “but, yeah, I saw you literally stop in your tracks and make a note of that law, passed in 1938, under FDR’s New Deal, that established a federal minimum wage (a pathetic near-starvation pittance then, as now) forbade an employer from requiring more than 40 hours of work a week and banned child labor.  A bill banning child labor had been sitting around since 1924, the year I was born.   I was fourteen years old when FDR signed that bill into law, could have already spent my whole life at a full-time, sixty, seventy hour a week job.  

“The only childhood job I ever mentioned to you was the indenture at Tamarka’s every weekend when my brother and I, as part of our mother’s lifelong debt for her passage in rat-infested steerage, would dig our fingernails into her fucking rubber tree as we dusted the enormous leaves.  Tormenting that plant was our only outlet, our powerless, silent slave-like way of venting.  The plant, for its part, truly did not seem to give a crap about our sadistic treatment.  You know how stoic plants are.  Tamarka’s rubber tree was stubborn, too.  The more we tortured it the heartier it seemed to become.

“But, yeah, 1938 it finally became illegal, nationwide, to lock children in a sweatshop or send them down into a mine.  At the same time there was a federal anti-lynching law the blacks and people like Eleanor Roosevelt were trying to get passed.  FDR, always the pragmatic visionary, realized he’d lose the support of the Dixiecrats, those racist, Ku Klux Klan loving Southern Democrats– the same ilk that all turned staunchly Republican overnight after LBJ betrayed his race and the South– and when have those reactionary “rebel” pricks ever not been betrayed?–  anyway, FDR quietly pretended he didn’t know about any anti-lynching law.  

“You can’t sign a federal law against lynching and expect the votes of the lynch mobs.  And there are a lot of voters in those lynch mobs and they tend to think in rather black and white terms, if “think” is even a word you can use in connection with a lynch mob.”

A surprisingly cool breeze toyed with the trees and shrubs, playfully touseling their leaves.   A car purred by on the country road just outside the cemetery gates, crunching the gravel at the top of the road down to the graves as it passed.  The skeleton paused as the birds came in like a tiny chorus to make music of the silence.  

“Nice,” said the skeleton, “more prose for the cutting room floor, but it’s good to set the scene a little now and then.  And to let the reader breathe a couple of beats. To let the whine breathe a little before you decant it.  You know I was always a lightning fast reader, but even I always appreciated breaks on a page.  Books where the author simply forges ahead in endless paragraphs and each page is like a heavy black slab– a grim prospect compared to Elmore Leonard’s pages, or Vonnegut’s.”

I was wondering just now if putting my words in your mouth is such a good idea.

 “Well, you know, I really wouldn’t have an opinion on that, Elie,” said the skeleton with a wry, skeletal grin.

“Personally, I think you’re conveying me fairly.  Sure, some days, like today for example, you might be putting a little too much of your own thoughts into my quotation marks, but, at the same time, I think it’s fair.  These are all the kinds of things I would say.  

“Look, in 1938, almost a decade into the Depression– and don’t forget, we’d already had a bunch of very severe economic depressions in this great experiment in democracy, there was a calamitous one, for example, right after the Civil War, as you might expect, this one lasted much longer and happened at the dawn of mass media, when the radio came into play, and so news of how badly everyone was suffering was nationwide, plus the newsreels we all saw every week told the same story — the heroic FDR is quietly downplaying the importance of allowing federal enforcement of the Constitution, the right not to be hanged by the neck for the amusement of a crowd snarling ‘nigger’ as your feet kick in the air, for fuck’s sake.   This is the way it’s always been, Elie. 

“We had a photo of FDR on the wall, he was a hero to all poor people.  Blacks loved him, like they would later love JFK and that brilliant, charming fraud Bill Clinton, the great centrist Democrat who made it safe for easy-going Republicans to vote for the cool guy, our first black president.  Blacks loved Clinton, for some reason.  One of those abusive relationships, I suppose, where true, the guy beats me, and arguably sometimes makes me have sex against my will, let’s not call it rape exactly, because I know he loves me, and he’s always very contrite afterwards….”

Pull yourself together, dad.  Such lamentations are for the living, not for skeletons. We all know Mr. Clinton was the best Republican president since Ike.  

“I saw a sign, during the 1956 election, carried by some pugnacious cretin, I don’t remember where, that said ‘Vote for Ike, not the kyke.’   Shades of ‘Vote for Cuomo, not the homo’ when Ed Koch ran against Mario Cuomo.  Do you know who the kyke was in the 1956 election?”  

I guess it had to be Adlai Stevenson.  

“Your mother and I, of course, voted for that brilliant kyke-like fellow, though, of course, he was only Jewish to an anti-Semite.  The thing was, he thought like the best of the Jews, which is to say, like the best of any people, and there are billions of them alive on the planet today, who believe in fairness, justice, equality, decency, intelligent debate and problem-solving based on the facts, all those quaint things that the people most greedily intent on appropriating everything in the world, wealth, power, unfair advantage, immunity, the right to do what is hateful to them to anybody, at any time, with no consequence to them or their vast wealth…

“Wow, Elie, I have to take a breath.  I never spoke in sentences that had no ending, that’s one of your tics.  Phew.   Yeah, plus ça change and shit.  Ike was really not all that bad, in retrospect, compared to the blandly evil crew that followed, even as it took him a while to finally put his foot up Joseph McCarthy’s hideous ass, which the ranting alcoholic senator used for shitting from, likely at long intervals that left him cranky,  as well as for roaring out his accusations from about people who hated our freedom.  He used the same crusty orifice, is what I’m saying.  

“Plus ça change, Elie, now we have dozens of his kind, bloviating on the radio and TV and becoming millionaires, their hateful views resonating with millions who have been screwed by the same conscience-repressed fucks who have never hesitated to kill, impoverish or do whatever else had to be done to preserve their privileges.”  

Their privileges and immunities, dad.  Well, as always, it has been a privilege, father, to spend this time with you, and my fortunate immunity, as well, to say sayonara, even in the middle of a chat.  

“Aw, you’re going already?  You just got here…” said the skeleton, as he fell back into his nap with that inscrutable expression the dead so often have on their faces.

 

Feed Me After Them!

I made the mistake, recently, while talking with my sister and recalling the terrible skirmishes over our family dinner table, of making a grotesque comparison.  This proneness to hyperbole, something my sister and I both have to be on guard against, we got from our mother, a poet and exaggerator of bunyanesque proportions. 

“No,” my sister said firmly, and I realized at once she was right, “you can’t say Auschwitz.”  I know it was a disgusting metaphor, and also inapt and she was quite responsibly drawing a line and not letting our conversation get completely out of hand.

“That’s true, sorry.  That was bad,” I said, and we paused for a moment.

“OK,” I said “it was like the no-man’s land between the trenches in World War One. A muddy expanse between barbed wire, with random machine gun fire, the groans of dying horses, biplanes swooping in to strafe us, chlorine gas rolling in over the hill, and we had no gas masks.”

“That’s fair,” she said.

This poison gas reference didn’t offend her, chlorine, although nasty business, was not always deadly, like Zyklon B.  The reference to rolling chlorine gas was proportional, and just part of warfare in those years, and helped to convey the scene of horror we faced every night over our flank steak, tossed salad and Rice-a-Roni.  

Onto this hopeless, senseless battlefield stepped our tired father every evening, still rumpled from his desperate late afternoon nap and mentally preparing, right after dinner, to drive out to his second job, as a kind of community organizer among Jewish teenagers in the Nassau-Suffolk region of Young Judaea.  

It would often start right away, as my mother was serving dinner.  There would be a grumble, a snarled response, voices would rise quickly, escalate, then the flash point and it would be open warfare.  I would yell something intolerably mean back at my sister and she would slash, with her lightning quick reflex for the jugular, and our mother would leap in and we’d both jump on her and pummel her into submission.  My father usually exhibited a certain reluctance to enter the fray, odd, in hindsight, because he was the main architect of the larger war and its most vocal supporter.  He’d often begin with a heartfelt appeal to our mother.  

“Feed me after them!” he would  plead, lowing like a wounded bull.  “Jesus Christ, I’ve asked you a thousand times, Evvy” he had a bit of the hyperbolist too, “feed me after them.  I’m begging you.”    

This rare show of vulnerability in our father, he only made this plea when he was beside himself with despair over the whole situation, would act like a tonic on my sister and me, and we’d turn our full attention to him.  It would take literally no time, then he was in the middle, swinging away with every verbal bludgeon that came to hand.  While pausing for a breath he would sometimes moan again “Evvy, for the love of God, feed me after them…”

Our mother, to her credit, would never consider splitting up the family at dinner that way.  After all, it was the one time of day we were all together.  For another thing, it would be twice as much work for her, after a day slugging it out with her two difficult kids.  The daughter had been such a placid, easy baby.  The boy was always trouble, it’s true, but these days it was hard for my mother to decide which poison was worse.  

I guess her dilemma was the same as the one my sister and I sometimes wrestle with.  Although she had dubbed our father the D.U., The Dreaded Unit, an uncannily fitting name our father seemed to take as an honorific, she always argues that our mother was by far the more dangerous of the two.  I grant her the points, but I always find the D.U. was capable of more damage when he was swinging two two-handed swords and bellowing his war cry.  

“It’s a matter of taste, really,” I will sometimes say.  

“Look, there’s no debate that the D.U. was very, very bad,” my sister will allow, “but she was much worse.”  And she will draw out the “much” like Rosie Perez, to emphasize by how large a margin she feels our mother was worse than the Dreaded Unit.  

“On a colorful side note,” said the skeleton, “you remember the Waner brothers, both Hall of Famers, who were nicknamed Big Poison and Little Poison?  Pitchers and opposing managers started calling these two hitting machines Poison and the names became part of baseball folklore.  Big Poison was a star when his brother came up to play beside him in the outfield, and they named his kid brother Little Poison, of course.  But Little Poison was actually bigger than Big Poison.  Ain’t dat some shit?”  

Sho nuff is, dad.

 

historical footnote from Wikipedia, which backs my father’s story, in the end:

Paul was known as “Big Poison” and Lloyd was known as “Little Poison.” One story claims that their nicknames reflect a Brooklyn Dodgers fan’s pronunciation of “Big Person” and “Little Person.” In 1927, the season the brothers accumulated 460 hits, the fan is said to have remarked, “Them Waners! It’s always the little poison on thoid (third) and the big poison on foist (first)!” But given that Lloyd was actually taller, this story would seem somewhat incongruous.