“If you live with an animal, there is no question of whether they have a soul.  Look at a photo of any of our pets over the years, the way they look at the camera.  Can you tell me those dogs didn’t have souls?” said the skeleton of my father.  

I couldn’t, no.  But many would say, those who don’t feel any great connection to animals who walk on four legs, that we are projecting our human feelings on to creatures who don’t have deep, complex feelings of their own.   You know, it’s one of those eternal debates– are they acting out of reflex and instinct, using animal smarts learned over centuries to get what they need from humans, or are they motivated by things like love and loyalty?   

“It’s like Satchmo said when they asked him to define jazz.”  

Yeah, ‘if you gotta ask, daddy, you ain’t never gonna know’.

“Jeeves won’t find that quote for you, as you may have discovered.  It’s one of the great apocryphal quotes out there, some say it was Fats Waller who said something like that.   That’s the nature of history, though, Elie, some of the most famous things ever said were never actually said.   ‘You could look it up,’ as the Old Perfessor used to say.  Not that you’ll necessarily find it.”   The skeleton turned to watch a commotion between several birds.  

“Tell me those little bastards don’t have souls,” said the skeleton.  

Not me, I won’t tell you that.  You know, I feel bad when I kill a cockroach.  I see one running across the sink, and I rush to kill it, but I don’t want to hurt it, I want it to die instantly.   I say “nothing personal, man, it’s just that you’re a loathsome insect” or something like that.  I don’t want to see it in agony.  If he avoids the first death blow, makes a desperate three legged dash before I finish squishing him, I always apologize for the clumsy kill.   When I die, I want it to be quick, you know.  Boom!   If there’s a law of karma, I’m trying to abide by it. 

“Well, that’s very nice, Elie, but I think it’s a little crazy, too.  Anyway, just like there’s honest disagreement about whether animals have souls, and the argument can become quite heated — like in the battle between the meat and dairy industry and PETA-types — the nature of fascism, and who exactly is the fucking fascist, is now hotly in dispute.  You can look up ‘fascist’  in the dictionary, it seems like there shouldn’t be much of a dispute about it, that it’s easy enough to see, but the word itself is electrically charged and, in democracy, used primarily to enflame passions.”  

Fascism is an authoritarian system, headed by a demagogic  leader, a militarized state where citizens are unquestioningly obedient to the leader’s will and mobilized against a perceived enemy.  The fascist state relies on the use of force to ensure compliance and there are close ties between big business and the State.  Usually xenophobic and highly nationalistic, often racist as well, fascist regimes are famous for their harsh punishment of dissenters.

“Yep, that’s pretty much it.  You have a born-wealthy CEO-type used to getting his way, used to being popular, fond of military generals, his best friends the richest businessmen and celebrities in the country.   He vows to keep the nation safe, and powerful, and make it great again.   During his campaign he cheerfully tells the world that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue, and the suckers he has supporting him would literally not care, they wouldn’t even blink.  They are the best people, the best people!

“It’s fair to say that Trump’s administration leans toward the authoritarian side.  He’s not used to a group process, anyway, or politics, as such, let’s just say that.  His administration has two controversial American generals in posts not usually filled by military men, Chief of Staff and Secretary of Defense.   His Secretary of State was, until he quit to become Secretary of State, the long-time CEO of the world’s largest and most lucrative fossil fuel company.

“His leadership style is based on personal loyalty.   His billionaire cabinet, all ill-equipped for their important roles, are people long used to having their way and not being accountable to anyone below them.  Amazing as it sounds to say it, Trump makes Dubya and Cheney look like idealistic democratic leaders.   Applying the fascist label to Trump, as he continually praises authoritarians around the world, is hard to resist.   But it’s intolerable to his supporters to believe that just because he embraces racists, extreme military solutions, laws favoring the richest, seems to admire autocratic ‘strongmen’ like Erdogan and that murderous asshole in the Philippines, he is something close to a fascist.  The label has to be slapped on the faces of those who call their leader a fascist.

“Obama was a fascist, a dictator, a tyrant, do you remember that?  He was portrayed as a Nazi, a brown-skinned man with that Hitler mustache wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes in the party.  The charge that he was a Socialist was equally ridiculous.  Still, throw enough shit at the guy and things begin to stick.

“He was attacked by so-called birthers, led by the braying fellow who would succeed him, who claimed he was ineligible to be the president.  They accused him of being a secret Muslim, as if that were another shameful lie that would disqualify him from the presidency.  After repeatedly vowing to block all of his proposed legislation, and even denying him his constitutional duty to appoint a Supreme Court justice, when he began to issue executive orders, they attacked him as a totalitarian, a bully, a tyrant, Hitler in blackface.

“Hey, in Costco the other day, you saw that best-seller with the conservative Christian idiot’s argument that the Democratic party is the actual heir to the Nazi party, admired by the fascists in the thirties, to this day the most fervent proponents of fascism in government.  You can read all that on the book flap, the Big Lie is the one being spread by liberals, who treacherously oppress the democratically elected president and claim he’s a fascist.  

“The book jacket implies that this popular right-wing Indian-American author will convincingly demonstrate that the left are actually the violent fascists, while the  Republican party, in contrast, has always been the party of ‘small government, political liberty, and economic freedom.’   Plus, not only did Hitler and Mussolini love and admire the Democratic Party, but Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, inspired Nazi racial theory.   So there!  In other words, eat shit, fuckface– I know you are, but what am I? ”  

,

You’ll have to excuse me today dad, my attention span is really shattered by this anniversary of September 11, 2001.   

“Your’s and everybody’s,” said the skeleton.  “Living in a post-9/11 world, in a state of endless, infinitely lucrative war.  Since this posing gasbag was inaugurated, less than nine months ago, the U.S. has killed about as many brown civilians as Al-Qu’aeda killed Americans on September 11th.  The notorious Communist organ Newsweek– note the red banner– gave the number, as of July, at over 2,200 or an average of twelve civilian deaths a day. 2,996 is the number given for Americans killed on 9/11. Reminds me of that great, probably apocryphal quote of Stalin’s: the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic.”  

Like I told the paternalistic nephrologist– if you get bad side effects from the chemotherapy she proposed you personally scored 100%, no matter that the odds were 40 to 1 against you getting the side effects.  

“That’s correct.  If you’re the last man to die for a mistake… there you go.  If you’re the sole survivor of a Yemeni family wiped out by a hellish man-made catastrophe brought against you by American munitions delivered by the Saudi air-force with strategic support from the American military: medieval disease, bad water, bombed home, shrapnel, white phosphorous, septic wounds … could I blame you for devoting yourself to violent revenge against America?”  

I don’t think so.   It’s all, as always, a question of whose ox is gored.  

“Mel Brooks had that profound image of the difference between tragedy and comedy.  ‘Tragedy is when I break a fingernail.  Comedy is when you fall down a manhole and die.’  It’s whose ox is gored, and if you believe your ox has a soul.  Or if it has no soul, I suppose, how much of a monetary loss you suffered when your ox was gored.   That second formulation is more how it usually works.   You can’t put a price on a soul, unless you’re a poet or a mystic, but the body itself is worth its weight in organs and elements, and the labor it can perform.”  

You know, I get very few comments by anybody who may be reading these pages where I’m struggling to put together your portrait.  The most consistent, of those few, is a concern that I am ruining things by injecting ‘current events’ with their short shelf-life.   As a student of history…

“Yeah, you can call it current events, or you can call the various spins partisans put on events the first draft of history.”  

Sekhnet will see something Aaron Sorkin wrote a decade ago and find it prescient, it seems to describe exactly what this asshole-in-chief and his destructive appointees are doing right now.  Even though, in terms of history, the things he wrote about were well under way, had been going inexorably in that direction for some time.

“Well, it doesn’t take Nostradamus to predict the direction things are going, particularly when you have a deliberately dumbed down, distracted consumer culture, a commercial culture based on misdirection, with a political ‘dialogue’ framed by ads from ‘think tanks’ and highly paid ‘pundits’ who talk shit.  Especially when you factor in the deep history of racial hatred, denial, calculated distortion and division that has always been close to the heart of our great American experiment in democracy.  

“Like my boy Rush Limbaugh taking a handful of pills and spouting on about how liberal Nazis are exploiting natural disasters like these recent devastating hurricanes to advance their anti-freedom myths about human-caused climate disruption,” said the skeleton.

Add in the marketing funnels and targeted content sent directly to the phone of every American, according to their data-mined preferences, via ‘social media’, and you have the perfect storm.  

“You could argue that it would be irresponsible for you to ignore these things when we check in,” said the skeleton.

I don’t want to argue anything anymore.  

“Too late for that, Elie.  It’s in your nature.   Weren’t you the guy who started the day searching for the margin of Trump’s electoral college victory?  Impressive numbers, too, very efficiently done, a true surgical strike.  That fucking Robert Mercer really is a genius of data crunching.   Four swing states that netted him a decisive 75 electors in a democratic election he lost by almost three million votes.   He won three of the four states by a fraction of a percentage point.  He had margins of victory of 0.23% (Michigan), 0.72% (Pennsylvania), 0.76% (Wisconsin) and a whopping 1.2% in Florida.  According to Wikipedia, he won by 78,000 votes in three counties in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, a margin that gave him the 46 electoral votes of those states, with elegant economy — less than two thousand votes per elector.”

Do animals have souls?  

“Yes, absolutely.  You know they do.”   

Do Yemeni children have souls?  

“Please, Elie.  I mean, I feel your pain about all this, as the great neoliberal William Jefferson Clinton famously used to say, on his way to amassing a fabulous personal fortune, but… I mean… really.  Yeah, Yemeni children have souls.  Of course.   But you may as well apologize to the cockroaches in your kitchen sink as worry about those poor kids.  

“There was probably someone just like you in 1943, a person of tortured conscience, with too much time on his hands, agonizing into his notebook about the souls of little Jews who were being stomped into the dirt without a trace.  Unless that person conveyed his moral torment in a stirring and memorable phrase, had it published by a large media outlet, quoted by some famous opinion-maker, that little bit of civic minded anguish would meet the same fate as the Jewish kid caught with a smuggled loaf of bread under his coat, in some muddy shithole in Poland.”

Ain’t dat some shit?   

“Yop.   Happy marketing to you, Elie, and have a blessed September 11th.”

With that, the skeleton of my father fell back into the soft dirt of his grave, a big smile on his face, or whatever that expression was.