“Whatever else you may want to say about me, Elie, I want you to acknowledge that I always kept you and your sister free from want.  You never knew hunger or any other kind of physical deprivation when you were kids.  All that stuff on the physiological and safety strata of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid, I always took care of all that,” said the skeleton of my father.    

You always kept my sister and me free from want.

“I might have missed a few beats on that safety layer at the foundation of Maslow’s pyramid, since you two were never safe from my rage, but for the most part, I gave you and your sister freedom from want.  

“I realize now that when I was fuming at you two for being fucking spoiled middle class whiners, that your feeling of entitlement to decent food, and nice clothes and a warm place to sleep, was not unreasonable.  Why would you not expect those things, things that everyone you knew had?  

“On the other hand, it would probably be impossible for you to understand how crucial those things you took for granted were unless you’d experienced not having them.  How can you appreciate getting enough good food every day if you’ve never been hungry?  Clean drinking water, even, if you’ve spent years thirsty.  Or how can you not take for granted your right to select the exact clothes you want to wear if you’ve never been humiliated by the other kids making fun of the shabby clothes your parents sent you out into the world in?  Safety in your home?  You can’t appreciate the importance of that if you’ve never lived in a house that wasn’t safe, if you never had to sprint in terror in the middle of the night to wake up a tough guy cousin to come over  and strong-arm the drunks who were about to beat up your old man.  Unless you’ve suffered want, something most of the world experiences every day, you’ll have no idea how important it is to be kept free of want.”

I grant you all of that, every word of it.

“Heh, there you go again,” said the skeleton, making air quotes with bony fingers over the word “you”.  

“Good of you to grant me what you just had me say, but let’s go one step further. My brother and I were not safe in our house, not safe from our mother, not safe to eat, shit, walk down the street.  I didn’t tell you much about this when I was alive, and so necessarily you are speculating here, but my brother and I were very often hungry.  You see how skinny we were in those pictures, it’s not because we were on gluten-free diets and doing Pilates.   We were skinny because we got barely enough to eat.  

“So you and your sister always fasted on Yom Kippur, and you still do.  One day a year you get a taste of the feeling my brother and I knew on a daily basis.  Every day was Yom Kippur for us, and at the end of our normal twelve or fifteen hour fast they’d dress us in our synagogue clothes and drag us down to First Hebrew Congregation of Peekskill, that narrow white church-looking building not far from 1123 Howard Street.   We’d sit in the synagogue for three or four hours, our stomachs rumbling, enduring an endless service in a language we didn’t understand.   We were forced to praise God for his limitless kindness and mercy even as we had no breakfast or lunch.  

“I never mentioned it to you guys because it would have sounded like the typical bitter self-pitying whine of the father cursing his kids who complain about a mere a five mile walk to school, when he had walked twenty miles to school every day, barefoot in the snow and ice, after six hours of chores in the little cabin he was born in, a cabin he’d built with his own hands.  

“You know, everybody had it worse than everybody else.  I grew up in the Depression, in the deepest part of it, in a godforsaken town that was a magnet for local anti-Semites, as far as we could tell.   I was five when the stock market crashed.   My father was already out of work when the world economy went into the toilet after the World War and ten roaring years of reckless profiteering.  We were the poorest of the poor.  You cannot have a clue how much damage that simple thing, being poor, does to a child.  

“When FDR was talking about his second Bill of Rights, the right to be free of want was the biggest of them.  Essential things no American child should find herself wanting include the right to not be hungry, the right not to be afraid, the right to have a decent shelter, and clothes, and a quality public education, along with the ability to go immediately to a reasonably priced doctor if you had a health concern.   These things seem beyond dispute as minimums for all citizens in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, but we have to remember that this has always been a slave nation, too.  

“You’ll have your well-meaning post-racial racists point out the cold fact that slavery was abolished over 150 years ago.  However, the values of a nation that had no problem building its wealth based on slave labor, and mass murder of the locals, have not really changed.  45,000 unneccesary deaths in Emergency Rooms every year in America?  Part of the price of freedom, Elie.  There are people who can afford to not be treated essentially like slaves and the rest, who can afford nothing but being kicked in the nuts, powerless as slaves.  

“America has always been an experiment in democracy based on the consent of the governed subject to what was in the best interests of the the owners of massive slave work forces.  You had brief periods of social mobility, I was lucky enough to be born in one of those, as shitily unlucky as the first few decades of it were for me.  Millions of us in those years moved out of poverty into the middle class, we achieved the American Dream.  

“That Dream is largely an opium hallucination now, a poor person in the USA is less likely to emerge from poverty than a poor person in most other wealthy nations.   Not that the poor anywhere have easy access to an escape from poverty, but part of our American Exceptionalism is that it is, in fact, exceptionally hard for an American to climb out of poverty, no matter how tightly he grasps his bootstraps.  

“Now I know what some people who are reading this ms. on-line are thinking now– Widaen is just ranting with his ventriloquist dummy, a smart, likable, sometimes cruel skeleton, using this crude literary device to vent and rant about current events.”  

Not an unfair charge, I suppose.  

“Unless, of course, you consider the deeper implications of this part of my life story.   I was hungry, raised my status enough that my children never knew hunger.  I can say that, or you can have my skeleton say that, or however you want to put it.   Few people alive and poor today can have the same expectation in America.  Do you get this?  Do you truly grasp how fucking bad and fucked up this is?   People in poverty are fucked, their children, who had no say in the matter, are almost all doomed to be fucked in perpetuity.

 “The only people who prosper at this moment in American history are the wealthy, the investor class, most of the richest of whom got the bulk, if not all of their great fortunes, the old fashioned way, by inheritance.  Talk about a right to feel superior.  Their life, in a wrongful death action, is worth thousands, or millions, of times the value of the life of a poor person who dies in identical circumstances.  You can tell them about the value of the life of that busboy who died in Windows on the World compared to the lives of the millionaire financial guys who died with him.

“And it has always been thus, it’s only that now it’s been smoothed into a so-called ideology, justified.  A rich person, no matter how shiftless and dissolute, is still respectable.  A poor person who takes any form of government assistance is a lazy parasite, an immoral taker, someone who feels ‘entitled’ to the lavish $600 monthly benefit for their ‘disability’ that the rest of us have to pay for, or the monthly $150 some of them get for food.

“You’ve always been, or often been, a hyperbolist, so let’s set out your hyperbolic formulation of this.  Leaving aside the terrible failings of Communism in practice, the mass-murder in China under Mao and the Soviet Union under Stalin, the corruption of the party aparatchiks and so on, Capitalism and Communism are always posited as two polar opposite philosophies of the world.  

“In the war between Capitalism and Communism, Capitalist ideology accepts as a cost of individual freedom that a certain number of people, a large number, maybe most, will be fucked, some a gently, others roughly, so that a few of us can own everything.  The Communist ideal is more collective, based on the right of every person to enjoyment of basic dignity and freedoms, a just society being more of a social priority than concentrating fabulous wealth in the hands of a tiny group of modern day aristocrats and the perpetuation of a huge, impoverished, permanent underclass. 

“Then you introduce fascism which, in its German form, actually brought back good old slave labor on a massive scale.  Corporations that did business with the Nazis were given access to a slave labor force, an unscrupulous Capitalist’s wet dream– no minimum wage, no health insurance, pensions, sick pay, work ’em to death, toss ’em, order replacements.  

“You go so far as to argue that the Nazis actually won the war, ideologically, in that America moved much further toward their philosophy, governing subject to the demands of a ruthless unelected clique, its methods of mass propaganda and management of public opinion, business and political supremacy over citizens rights, than it ever did toward Marxism’s meritocratic from each according to their ability to each according to their needs.  

“After the war you had Nazis like fucking General Reinhard Gehlen, and his handpicked SS and Gestapo contractors, drafted into what would become the CIA.  None of the SS or Gestapo cronies were tried at Nuremberg, they became wealthy Americans with new false identities instead, because they were rabid anti-Communists.  Gehlen and his entire team got immunity, citizenship, nice houses, got in on the ground floor of the Commie fighting CIA — it was more important to win the Cold War, even if it took actual Nazis to help us do it.

“So, I suppose I have to agree that you live in an increasingly Nazi-like country, Elie.  Suck it up and try to make the best of it.  It’s unlikely that this clown, the petulant, bullshit-spouting cancerous orange chicken come home to roost, will actually carry out his hate threats and build detention centers and torture and killing facilities.   Most likely he’ll just make it easier for his friends to enjoy endless forced sex on the rest of you powerless bastards.  Nothing to get all pissy about.  Nobody likes a whiner, Elie.”  

Then, the skeleton winked, got comfortable and went back to sleep.