Monthly Archives: October 2018

A Fair Hearing — by a lynch mob

The worst part to a summary trial by a lynch mob has got to be the superior, mocking good cheer of everybody present in the moments before your inevitable death sentence, which has already been decided.   The sick feeling you have looking around at the smiles of the people about to cheer your execution must be what a tiny prey animal feels like when it’s being batted playfully between a cat’s paws.  Imagine that feeling of powerlessness seared into you by the satisfied smiles of the assembled sadists and voyeurs, before the actual sadism of the deliberately painful execution starts, as the leaders of the lynch mob make their cruel jokes at your expense.  What the fuck are they laughing about?  you must think, as they begin cutting your fingers off in preparation for the fiery grand finale of the lynching.   What indeed are they laughing about?    

I have had many opportunities to ponder this lately.  SAD!   I keep thinking of Judge Martha Kavanaugh’s now famous rule for a judge, the one she taught her choir boy son:  use your common sense, what rings true?  what rings false?  If you apply this rule, most of what passes as legitimate process in Trump’s Washington D.C. doesn’t pass the smell test.  Of course, this is a partisan statement, made by a hater, a loser, someone jealous that a young genius could be given a tiny million dollar loan from his father and parlay that into countless billions in personal wealth and then the world’s most powerful office.   OK, perhaps he exaggerated a little, maybe the small loan was more like $60,000,000 (his lawyers are poring over the scandal rag NY Times hit piece that laid out their detailed lies about their client’s mere puffery, there must be some grounds to sue those fucks…) but that’s fake news for you, folks.   The failing NY Times, am I right?  Am I right?

I have to say, applying Martha Kavanaugh’s test– a very unfair test, by the way, very unfair– the woman sent by Bill and Hillary Clinton, Oprah and George Soros to destroy a good man, a pious and even saintly man, rang a little bell of truth when she said that she clearly remembers the laughter of the two drunken older boys who had locked her in that upstairs bedroom and turned the music up when she started protesting.  That particular detail rings true (which is undoubtedly why Soros and the Clintons wrote the line for her).   Two drunken prep schools boys would laugh after one of them forced himself on to a young woman, held his hand over her mouth, to scare the crap out of her, at minimum.

When you get a trial from a lynch mob it’s got to be quick.  That’s the main feature, the extremely speedy trial.  The speed of that trial is blinding because there is no need for cross-examination, testimony, investigation, motions, objections, evidence, doubt, remarks from the judge, pointless discussions about so-called justice.  Justice is we get to kill this guilty fuck. Or, in other cases, justice is we have a 51-49 majority so we win– whatever you might think, whatever millions in the streets might think, whatever the mothers and fathers of every fifteen year-old girl in the country might think.

But here’s the funny part about all that, if we can take a brief break for a bit of levity and a raspy laugh, the mothers and fathers of at least 40% of the millions of American fifteen year-old girls believe that their daughters would never, under any circumstances, drink a beer in a house where the adults were gone, with a bunch of already drunk seventeen year-old guys and only one other girl there.   Inconceivable, you understand?  Our daughter is not a little slut!   If we ever found out she is, we’d beat the fuck out of her– with sanctions I mean, sanctions:  we’d ground her, take away her allowance, force her to come to church with us every Sunday.  If this supposed assault really happened, why didn’t the girl tell her parents and take her punishment like a man?  You see?  You see how we know she’s a fucking liar!

The beauty of a quick trial, from the point of view of a lynch mob, is that so-called good Samaritans don’t get a chance to self-righteously ride up on their white horses and call time out.  Even the people in the crowd, laughing and smirking, if their blood had a chance to cool down, and an appeal was made to their consciences, if other facts were brought out, might not be cheering when we took this sick bastard to pieces before we hung him over a fire and roasted his guilty ass.  Do you see the point of a speedy trial?  It’s in the Constitution!

I heard a discussion between investigative journalists recently, talking about their investigations.   They all agreed that the most important single element of an investigation is time.   The kiss of death, as far as truth emerging fully, is an arbitrary time limit imposed on the investigation.  It takes time to talk to enough people, to find enough corroborating evidence, to come to publishable conclusions.   If you write an investigative piece you need to have multiple sources for your reporting.   Finding and interviewing them, and carefully checking out their stories, takes time.   Before the investigative report is published it will be critically read by a team, including lawyers, who will challenge every detail, make sure the piece contains no uncorroborated speculation that could lead to a lawsuit for defamation.  All of these things, the investigation, the vetting of every source, confirming the accuracy of the report based on the sources and other evidence, take time to do properly.  

Which is exactly why a lynch mob has to act quickly, while they have the moral hot hand.   We’re going to give this fuck a fair trial and then, before any bleeding heart bullshit artist outside troublemakers can start making a stink, we’re going to lift him up by his neck and watch his feet kick, which is exactly what he deserves, good ladies and gentlemen of the jury.

As far as the president being a liar– well, everyone knew that when he was running for office.  He’s honest about the fact that he’s a liar– he makes no attempt to hide it, which makes him very truthful, in a way.   He’s lying because he’s up against liars, you understand, he’s lying for us!   His lawyers threatened to sue the NY Times for their vicious hit piece on him and they are going to sue the lying NY Times and put them out of business, watch.   Just because he’s lying doesn’t mean they are not much worse liars than him, much worse liars.  

You’re giving me a headache.  

As for me, I have just one question– where are the people who are supposed to have the president’s back about his hair?   They’re photographing him from his bald side now, those lying fucks?

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Thoughts on Common Madness

I have been writing daily now for a long time.   I look forward to it every day, taking some thought, some idea, and writing it out, refining it, making it as clear as I can, to myself and to the reader.    It feels like a valuable exercise, particularly in the perplexing world we live in.  

“All he seems to do is write, he doesn’t actually DO anything, except walk, draw and play the guitar.   It’s funny that he sometimes talks about writing for ‘the reader’, since the reader he had doesn’t even read his stuff anymore.  He had an aspiring writer friend who used to read his stuff everyday– well, the guy was actually a failed writer, he’d tried to write one ambitious great American novel decades ago and then kind of quit — but outside of that, he writes for an audience of one, himself.   It’s kind of crazy.   His stuff is sometimes pretty good.  He could make some money from it, probably, if he focused and learned a bit of marketing.”    

I surprise myself, sometimes, with the things I learn as I am mulling something over.  For example, in writing a massive first draft of a life of my father, I eventually came to see things from his point of view.  This amazed me, since the guy had always been a bitter adversary.   The process of seeing the world from his vantage point snuck up on me, but one day I suddenly had a clear view from his eyes.  It explained a lot to me about his life, about my life, my sister’s and my mother’s lives.

“He spent two years working steadily on a massive memoir of his father, it will be three years pretty soon.  He will mention the 1,200 page manuscript he has on his computer like it’s a normal thing for someone to have written.   He’s written more than a thousand pages about a complicated, difficult, unknown man nobody’s ever heard of.   Think about that.   A guy who’s published only two short pieces, ever, and suddenly he’s undertaking a massive, landmark biography of an unknown man.  

“He gets worked up about celebrity culture, the shallowness of our materialistic, advertising-driven world, the hideous spectacle of one famous idiot after another publishing and publicizing books they are well-paid for, about losing a famous trial, working for and being fired by an internationally famous bully, having a talk show where irrational hatred is preached like a religious calling.     Fame sells books, it has always been thus.  He dreams, somehow, that this massive book about his father’s life will be magically published and then he’ll get that MacCarthur Genius Grant that’s been eluding him, the one that will keep him from having to eat cat food in his dotage.”

It’s easy to see me as wasting my time.  Time is money, and where is the money for me?   I see the world I live in as clearly as anyone.   I understand that without success you are a failure, but it’s more complicated than that to me.  

“Look, he’s a smart guy, nobody will dispute that, but something is amiss with him.   He always admired Hillel, the Jewish sage remembered for his kindness, a man who was an illiterate shepherd until he was forty.   Like Hillel, who became a leading scholar only after learning to read late in life, he got a law degree at around the same age Hillel hit his stride.  Passed the New York and New Jersey bar exams on the first try and went on to earn a meager living as a lawyer that enabled him to just about pay his modest bills every month.  He is kind of self-righteous about his inability to make a living, really, it’s like he judges everyone around him for their success and feels morally superior, somehow.”     

Success is problematic.  

“When he has no answer, he speaks in riddles.  Zen koans.”  

I am driven to try to understand things that perplex me.   Three of my four grandparents lost everyone they ever loved back in places in Europe that had never been hospitable to their kind, places that suddenly became deadly for them.  The fourth grandparent probably lost almost everyone too, but he himself, it is said, was lost.    Fifteen lost brothers and sisters of my three grandparents that I can count, back in the Ukraine and Belarus.   No graves, no details, names for only three of them: Chaski, Volbear, Yuddle.

“He goes into these irrelevant, morbid reveries about people he never knew.  We have all lost things, some of us have experienced terrible, unbearable losses.  But we get up every day, brush our teeth, take a shower, get dressed and go out into the world.   We go to work, we socialize, we try to help others, we go to the gym, we participate in things. He thinks about things.   He does this while being very critical of successful people who think for a living.  Lately he’s on a kick about David Brooks, of all people.”

The murder of everyone on both sides of my family is no historical anomaly, really.   Millions and millions worldwide have experienced similar things in the past century, and down through history, in every epoch.   What is the larger meaning of this?   To me it is to oppose organized violence wherever you encounter it.    

“In the privacy of his rented hovel he fancies himself a kind of contemporary Gandhi.   His kick the last few years is ‘ahimsa’, the philosophy of ‘non-harm’ that Gandhi made famous in the West.  He certainly has a funny version of it, with his foul mouth, his opinionated remarks that he often delivers with no filter, no concern for how his views might chafe the person he’s talking to.   His neighbors on the air shaft are regularly treated to his alarmingly vile curses, words I will not even hint at here, grunted loudly out of nowhere, exploding violently whenever his internet service winks out for a minute, or an hour, often long after midnight.”  

There was a guy, years ago, who lived in an apartment with windows on that air shaft.   I concluded he must have had Tourette Syndrome since he would bark periodically, out of nowhere, streams of staccato curses.   I thought he must have had Tourette’s but maybe he had Spectrum internet service, I think now.   No, this was years ago, before anyone spent hours a day staring at a computer screen, clicking on links for distraction,  information and disinformation.   I remember reading in one of the local tabloids that a man had been screaming incoherently in a nearby bodega and was beaten, later dying of the beating.  I immediately thought the guy must have been him.  I never heard any screams from the air shaft after that, seemingly confirming my theory.   The only screams now come from me, I guess. 

“I don’t know if he thinks it’s funny, or clever, or what, some of the things he writes.  I mean, hours upon hours, millions of words by now.  On papers in folders and dozens of notebooks prior to the computer age, on various computer drives since then.   He even, somewhere, has the rolled up degree he got in Creative Writing.  ‘Creative Writing’– seriously, they give a masters degree for that.  He had to translate a long passage of very obscure literary French to get that degree, along with writing a ‘thesis’.   That was many years ago, before law school, before his subsistence legal career.   I mean, if you look at his life, it makes no goddamned sense.”

If you look at a human life, it rarely makes much sense.   The irrationality of so much of history is readily apparent reading it, watching it unfold.   We are not primarily rational actors here, we humans.   Powerless people are often whipped into frenzies, sold vicious ideas like racism, carry out unspeakable acts against people who, in every fundamental way but one, are exactly like them.   Powerless and supremely vulnerable.   Frustration, terror and rage are much bigger forces in history than contemplation, logic, desire for fairness.

 “Fairness.  There we go.  He likes to write as though we all have a vast array of choices, among all the daily pressures most of us face.   He feels superior to the rest of us working stiffs in a life of ‘contemplation’ only possible because he had the fantastic luck, eight years ago, to inherit enough money to live without having to work for a living, provided he lived like a monk.   The financial advisor his girlfriend took him to informed him that nobody could live more than five years on the amount his parents left him.   That was seven years ago.   He considers himself a secular monk, I suppose.  It’s clear he fancies the life he lives a life of contemplation, though what he actually contemplates is hard to imagine.   He speaks in generalities about the irrationality of human affairs, like he’s above it.   His life is arguably the most irrational of anyone he knows.”    

Any idiot can make arguments.  Some of the most argumentative people in the world are the most idiotic.   Something is wrong, they are stirred up, they react, they make arguments.   There are not two sides to every argument, sometimes there are four or five sides.   We look for logic, but most of it depends on the biases we start from.   A mentor in law school told me to read Dred Scott, the 1854 Supreme Court case that infamously, but accurately, declared “the negro has no rights a white man is bound to respect.”   Read that decision, he said, and find me one weak legal link in the argument– outside of the premise that blacks are inferior to whites.   As he said, once you get past the premise, a flawless legal argument.  I couldn’t find a single weak link of legal reasoning in that irrefutable chain of arguments and sophisticated syllogisms that led directly to the Civil War.

“He works by distraction, by the relentless, endless divergence of his written attack.  Finally he just wears you down with irrelevant bits of remembered trivia, there is nothing you can do against a scripture citing devil like that.   Nothing but turn away.”  

Nicely played, for whatever difference it might make to anyone.

 

Fighting with the Only Weapon They Have

It’s a fairly safe assumption that someone who regularly suffers from a physical condition he reasonably believes is caused by rage is frequently angry.   He may not often know exactly why he is angry, or even that he is so angry, but then a car cuts him off on the road, his skin cracks open, his spine painfully seizes up, and he literally can’t move without agony.   So angry, he can’t even scream.

There are releases from the choking grip of anger.   Vigorous physical exercise, for example, is frequently thought of as a great outlet for stress, including rage.   You work up a sweat, breathe hard, drink in oxygen for your hard-working muscles, endorphins are released,  you experience a sense of well-being.   In movies we often see a persecuted protagonist sweatily taking out her frustrations on a punching bag,    It is better to pound a heavy bag than your own head against a wall, for sure.   Probably also better than the fake catharsis we so often see in American movies, vengeful violence as the final and best answer to unbearable pain.  I’ve found that writing clearly while thinking through something thoroughly can sometimes make a difference, help me contextualize, understand  and digest my anger.

Many people don’t see anger as a chance to work through an aggravating issue that has long plagued them, but something to repress at all costs.   If a friend you admire is secretly screwing the girl you love, a young woman who then inexplicably scorns you, well… that’s something for a novel you might dream of writing some day.   Bros before hos, yo– no reason to get angry about even a double betrayal.    A person given to repressing anger, no matter how reasonable that anger might be,  will not be tolerant of someone who sees anger as part of a process to be worked through, with important insights to be gained.  

For example,  if you feel yourself getting angry there are steps you can take to control how you express that anger.   That modicum of self-awareness and self-control is sometimes the only thing that can prevent violence.  The first essential thing is learning to recognize the initial rising of anger, that is the moment when you must become super clear in your mind and body about what you need to do differently than what the chemicals coursing through you are now urging you to do.   It is not an easy process to get better at controlling an angry reaction, but I have two friends who’ve made great progress controlling their tempers and I take courage from their examples. 

“Yeah, but he still makes that face,” a mutual friend will observe with a wry smile.   OK, but making that face is much different than following it up with a provocative insult, violently smashing things or bashing your face, isn’t it?  A much better reaction, the face, with no violence in word or deed beyond that.   I’d say that is tremendous progress, and I find it inspiring.   Plus, you can’t help the look on your face, beyond a certain point.

To someone at the mercy of  the constantly percolating violent impulses of repressed anger, there are only the tools at hand to crudely express it.   This is where the passive-aggressive playbook comes into play.   Anger is threatening and must not be expressed, but I am enraged.  I am also terrified, because if I express anger there’s no telling how cataclysmically destructive the violence will be.  The best course of action, for someone with a mortal fear of anger, is passive aggression.  In fact, it’s often the only course of action available to people afraid of conflict.

“You are a judgmental motherfucker,” the individual I have in mind here snarls, departing from his usual high civility.

We are all judges here, friend.  We judge what we can accept and what we can’t, what is proper and what is out of bounds, what is fair and what is unfair.  We judge crime and punishment.   We all do this every day, in many choices we make.   We judge this better than that, this one a friend, this one an acquaintance, this one an enemy.  

“Only vicious people like you have enemies,” says the person too angry to be angry.  

I rest my case.

“Yeah, easy for you to set up a straw man and knock it down, with nobody here to contradict your pontification,” says the nonjudgmental one.  

Nothing could be easier, buddy.  

So here’s what you do, the only power left to you.  You withhold.   I know all about the power of this, having been raised by a father with many weapons, but none more effective than this one.   You listen to the heartfelt expressions of someone close to you who is in pain, you read them laid out at length in writing, if necessary, and then reply, simply:

You’ve expressed your view of things here very clearly and I truly appreciate the mildness of your formulations.  

Period.  

Many people would find this reply to a long, thoughtful letter inadequate, annoying, perhaps even provocative, but no matter.   As all decent writers learn at some point, no iron can stab the heart like a period placed just right. [1]  

 

[1] this truth was expressed by the great Isaac Babel in his wonderful story about writing and editing “Guy De Maupassant”.

 

Working out the puzzle

An idea popped up last night as I was trying to improve my handwriting in the little drawing book I always keep in my back pocket.

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We Americans have been locked in an endless argument, as we so often are, about who is the victim and who is the perpetrator.  Cops, in cheap novels, always call the alleged perpetrator “the perp” as when they walk him, handcuffed and awkwardly trying to hide his face, past a phalanx of news photographers.   While the shame of the perp walk is deliberately inflicted, because that’s what you do to a stinkin’ skel, the identity of the victim (or “vic” in these same dime store books)  is often protected, because every protector naturally has sympathy and protectiveness for the vic.  

All the vic did was be someplace where the perp showed up.   The  vic just provided a vulnerable target for the perp, a malefactor who in most cases would have done the same to just about anyone who could serve the same need.   The vic just happened to be the one this time.   Sucks to be the vic.   Walk into the wrong room and — boom!  Traumatized for life by a scumbag.

This argument rages in public and in private.  I myself have been, it appears, recently turned from vic to perp because of my  stubborn refusal to pretend I wasn’t treated badly several times by an old friend.  The actual crime is not forgiving the old friend.    The guy said sorry, even if he did the same thing again a couple of times afterwards.  Actually, he also defended why he was right in the first place and said he had only apologized because I seemed hurt and mad.   He is currently the deeply wounded, vulnerable party and I am the arrogant, unforgiving hypocrite, so you might want to take the rest of this, as always, with a few large grains of coarse salt.

We saw this hoary debate about who is the perpetrator and who is the victim raging throughout the recent horror show of our latest Supreme Court confirmation hearings.   The only thing both sides agree about regarding the hearings is that they were a despicable circus and a national disgrace.  Men of great discernment and integrity, respected intellectuals like David Brooks and Alan Dershowitz, told us after hearing the testimony of the two alleged victims, Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh, that our opinion of who was more truthful depended entirely on which tribe we belong to.  

There was apparently nothing more at issue during the hearings as far as the judge’s qualifications for a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court aside from whether he drunkenly committed sexual assault on a girl two years younger than him while they were both in high school. An insignificant younger girl none of the other teenagers at the home where they were drinking during an impromptu gathering while the parents were away even recall, apparently.  Sometimes history narrows to a point like this one.

Let’s assume for a moment that Kavanaugh was an innocent man and the victim of a vicious coordinated political hit, as he angrily insisted he was. Some people get righteously angry when they’re accused of shameful things, we all can understand that, it proves nothing about a person’s innocence or guilt that he reacts with rage instead of humility to a terrible accusation.   If this inflammatory accusation of atrocious behavior (and a criminal act)  was concocted out of thin air by George Soros and the Clintons for nakedly political reasons, Kavanaugh had every right (if not every reason) to be outraged.   So let’s put his rage about the accusations to the side now, shall we?

Not every innocent person calls for a full investigation of the facts to prove their innocence, to clear their good name.  One reason an innocent person may not want to undergo an FBI investigation into specific allegations of something he never did is because you never know what other unfortunate facts a deep investigation into a specific, long ago time in your life might uncover.  Suppose you had been nothing more than a clandestine (to your parents and teachers)  heavy drinker back in your high school days— would you want that made public as you were about to be confirmed for a seat on the highest court in the land?  Of course not.

Accepting those two scenarios about  Kavanaugh’s righteous anger at the accusation and his, and his Party’s, resistance to a full FBI investigation to clear his name, it is possible to understand both reactions as guiltless displays of human feeling.  Construed this way they constitute no proof that he was hiding anything, or had anything to hide, or had ever hid, or continues to hide,  anything. For the sake of argument, let’s give Kavanaugh the benefit of the doubt on his demeanor under pressure, the “presumption of innocence” his defenders get so worked up about when it was rudely denied him during the rush toward a quick FBI probe.

Next we come to the substance of Mr. Kavanaugh’s actual defense, which was submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee in writing the day before Blasey Ford testified.   You can read his complete written denial here, as it was submitted to the Committee the day before both victims testified.   The most muscular and effective allegations about how he was the one being victimized were left out of the first draft of his statement.  He wisely omitted them from the written statement he gave to the Committee, why give your determined enemies a chance to organize themselves against your best attack?    He added these powerful touches to the statement he passionately delivered on national TV:

This has destroyed my family and my good name. A good name built up through decades of very hard work and public service at the highest levels of the American government.

This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election. Fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record. Revenge on behalf of the Clintons. and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.

This is a circus. The consequences will extend long past my nomination. The consequences will be with us for decades. This grotesque and coordinated character assassination will dissuade competent and good people of all political persuasions, from serving our country.

And as we all know, in the United States political system of the early 2000s, what goes around comes around. I am an optimistic guy. I always try to be on the sunrise side of the mountain, to be optimistic about the day that is coming.

But today, I have to say that I fear for the future. Last time I was here, I told this committee that a federal judge must be independent, not swayed by public or political pressure.

I said I was such a judge, and I am. I will not be intimidated into withdrawing from this process. You’ve tried hard. You’ve given it your all. No one can question your effort, but your coordinated and well-funded effort to destroy my good name and to destroy my family will not drive me out. The vile threats of violence against my family will not drive me out.

You may defeat me in the final vote, but you’ll never get me to quit. Never.

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If you are a Republican partisan, or even a right wing radical with no allegiance to any particular political party who is simply eager to have a reliable Supreme Court vote for your views, you were roused by these words.  An innocent man, attacked by vicious, well-funded partisan enemies, forced to defend a spotlessly good name forever besmirched by a godless conspiracy of people without honor, shame or any sort of morals.   Good for him!   To someone impressed by him these lines will sound like a kind of sweet, infinitely just music:

This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election. Fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record. Revenge on behalf of the Clintons. and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.

People worried about your long record as a Republican operative, your troubling and heavily redacted partisan past, your consistent twelve year judicial record, your evasiveness and surliness during the hearings, the many misleading and false answers you gave, the haste of your controversial appointment, will not be reassured by these words, of course.  The words you spoke in portraying yourself as a saintly victim make you sound like an angry partisan and the farthest thing from the impartial, independent arbiter you claim to be, but that’s not the point.   Fuck those people!

Just one thing troubles me.   Are the American Bar Association, the dean of Yale Law School, retired Supreme Court justice and lifelong Republican John Paul Stevens, the many classmates coming forward to corroborate stories of your heavy drinking and occasional abusiveness while drunk all also part of this vast, vindictive well-funded left wing conspiracy?  

Even more ominously, what in God’s name could have possibly possessed the Jesuits, the famously fair-minded and intellectually rigorous Catholic sect that founded and run the elite prep school you attended, to take part in this calculated and orchestrated political hit by outside left-wing opposition groups?    For the love of God, Brett, how could these defenders of the faith have so treacherously, so faithlessly, abandoned you?   How did the left-wing conspirators recruit even the politically nonpartisan Jesuits?   A truly devilish bit of partisan treachery.    I read about it in this AP account:

The Jesuits took an even stronger stance. Following Thursday’s testimony by Kavanaugh and his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, the magazine of the Jesuit religious order in the United States publicly withdrew its endorsement of Kavanaugh. An editorial in America Magazine declared that “this nomination is no longer in the best interests of the country.”

Kavanaugh was a student at Georgetown Preparatory School, a Jesuit high school, when the alleged assault took place.

The editorial doesn’t attempt to parse whether Kavanaugh’s or Ford’s testimony was more credible. But it concluded that “in a world that is finally learning to take reports of harassment, assault and abuse seriously,” the nomination must be abandoned.

“If Senate Republicans proceed with his nomination, they will be prioritizing policy aims over a woman’s report of an assault,” it states. “Were he to be confirmed without this allegation being firmly disproved, it would hang over his future decisions on the Supreme Court for decades and further divide the country.”  [emphasis mine, ed.]

The magazine had previously given Kavanaugh a full-throated endorsement, stating that his addition to the Supreme Court may furnish the fifth vote needed to overrule Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion nationwide. The Catholic Church firmly opposes abortion.

That original endorsement editorial concluded that “anyone who recognizes the humanity of the unborn should support” Kavanaugh’s nomination.

The reversal is significant given that Kavanaugh has cited his Catholic faith and Jesuit education in defending himself against Ford’s accusations. In his opening statement Thursday, Kavanaugh twice referenced his years as a student at Georgetown Prep.

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The Jesuits’ editorial stated that unless Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations were firmly disproved doubts would hang over Kavanaugh’s future decisions and further divide the country.    Fortunately for Judge Kavanuagh he was nominated by a man who doesn’t know how to lose.   As far as firmly disproving all doubts, the FBI did it in less than five days.  Disproved by all nine witnesses who didn’t recall anything bad about the nominee!   Give the man his robe.  Next case!    Suck on that, Jesuits!

Jesus, it is so hard to keep your faith in a world as corrupt as this cruel place!

The battle to dominate the narrative

We can call this battle to frame the story the war for history, it is also the war for the present and future.   Those victors who get to frame the story win the most important battle in human affairs — the battle for hearts and minds — legitimacy and power.   These storytellers win the most coveted political and personal prize: convincing people to go along with what they say so that their story prevails.   The correct astutely told narrative will either completely justify or absolutely condemn a course of action.   Masses of people are whipped into action or lulled to sleep by a compelling story told just right.  

There is the undeniable reality that we are all soaking in, the facts on the ground, the war is for which story will be accepted as the credible explanation for what we can all see looking around, reading, watching, discussing.    This was driven home to me yesterday during a talk with a friend.

He has largely tuned out the political news these days.   He doesn’t follow developing stories as they are happening.   It is too aggravating, too harrowing, too depressing, too consistently unfair, too troubling.   I understand all that and I share all those feelings.   It is a reasonable response, to not focus on the predictable parade of horrors that are constantly being thrust into our faces under the seal of the President of the United States.  

I’ve taken a different approach recently, having the time and inclination, I watch certain events closely as they unfold.   The drama is endlessly gripping, if also often horrifying.

In the end, watching or not, my friend and I arrive, along with hundreds of millions of our countrymen, billions more worldwide, at the same seemingly inevitable bad place (or glorious place, if you think catastrophic climate change is fake, poor people and immigrants are criminal parasites, pre-existing medical conditions should condemn a middle class person to death, and so forth).   My friend at least spares himself the agony of constantly thwarted hope while watching the driverless car careen towards its inevitable destination.

I understood again,  watching recent events unfold in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, how history can sometimes turn on a single unexpected moment, a small detail can change an outcome — things that the best strategists seize on to turn into political narratives that change outcomes.   Here is where storytelling comes in, who is the hero, who is the victim, who is the vicious participant in a vast, well-funded conspiracy?  

The funny thing is that in each opposing story the victim is actually the persecutor and vice versa — since the only information we really have is her claim and his strenuous denial. Anybody else who was there has no memory of that inconsequential summer hang out at somebody’d house, it apparently only meant something to the younger girl who was traumatized there, if you believe her.   The truth is often not zero-sum, one side is 100% right the other side 100% wrong, but a good partisan story makes it seem so. 

If she’s lying, he’s the victim.  If he’s lying, she’s the victim.  Oh, dear, who do you believe?   Who gets the presumption of innocence?   Several others who knew the nominee well in high school and college stepped forward to give further detail about the nominee during the time he was accused by two different women of drunken sexual assault, seeming to corroborate— but, wait, corroboration is bad…. oh, dear!  A secret, limited investigation should put everything to rest.  

In our current tribal cannibal culture only one of the two gets the presumption of innocence, the other one has to disprove a presumption of guilt.  Depending on which zero-sum story you embrace, your view of the facts will be completely different.    Which story makes more sense to you?   Use Judge Martha Kavanaugh’s famous test:  use your common sense, what rings true, what rings false?

There are facts, things that actually happened.  Without witnesses, of course, it’s a matter of faith that people who vow to tell the truth under the penalties of perjury are in fact telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth.   A liar will always try to take advantage of this presumption that people do not lie under oath.   They always do if they know there is no definitive proof that they are lying.

Our current president galvanized a lot of rage and discontent during a carnival-like campaign, spinning a shifting narrative that was dismissed by his many detractors as the inane blathering of an idiot con-man.  His crowds, fond of raising their arms in unison and lustily chanting things like “Lock Her Up! Lock her Up!” are easy to make fun of (from afar, anyway).    In the end this shameless huckster became president by less than 100,000 votes nationwide.  Broken into the individual precincts necessary for his Electoral College margin, his national victory came down to deciding handfuls of votes in a few hundred, or maybe even only a few dozen, shrewdly targeted polling places.  

That fact, that his victory depended on genius analytics, skillful marketing and aggressive voter mobilization in selected counties of selected ‘battleground’ states, contrasts with the wider narrative that he was swept into power by a populist movement, millions and millions of average Americans sick of corrupt American politics, tired of America no longer being great.  The candidate himself frankly described how at first he had dismissed “Drain the Swamp,” considering it a fairly lackluster slogan.   He only changed his mind when he saw how quickly crowds seemed to take to it, how they loved chanting it.   He made it a central part of every rally after that.  What good showman refuses to play one of his greatest hits when the crowd screams for an encore?   

It is sickening to repeat, particularly in a political environment that makes an excellent case against the proposition (and repeatedly, about the existence of truth itself), but facts really do matter.  The largest lesson of his victory in 2016 is not that a plain-spoken outsider with a long history of using the media to promote himself and get massive amounts of free publicity can reach millions of disaffected people, with the help of a few supportive billionaires, and get enough votes to win.  

The more important story is how the powerful people who wanted to consolidate their power in perpetuity, willing to ride even this particular crude, cruel, unsportsmanlike donkey to their larger, long-term goals, got that crucial margin of a few thousand votes exactly where they needed them to put an unqualified fake into the White House and a long-term majority of justices they trained and selected on to the Supreme Court.

Whether Russian hackers hired by Vladimir Putin helped the effort or it was a 100% American initiative, or some combination of both, the outcome is not in question: Mr. Trump got the tiny slice of votes required, exactly where he needed them, for a majority in the Electoral College.  He is legally the president, end of story.

I was thinking of this to watch/not to watch decision in the context of the recent Kavanaugh nomination hearings.   The conclusion was foregone, as my friend wearily pointed out, as we all knew going in.   A partisan Senate with a 51-49 majority, there was no way the majority party’s partisan nominee was not getting confirmed.   Which, of course, is exactly what happened, so all that anxiety about the outcome while the depressing circus ground on was a waste of energy.   But as always, the real drama, and any possible lessons, of the story live in the devilish details that can only be seen by watching closely.

Everyone who saw Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony found it to some degree credible.   She came forward reluctantly, with nothing to gain, in well-founded fear, facing death threats.   She spoke meekly but also with certainty about the details she remembered, including the identity of the drunk teenager who for a few unforgettably scarring moments (for her) made an involuntary sex toy of her.   She even explained how trauma is indelibly stamped on the hippocampus, making a victim’s visual recall of certain specific details highly accurate.   She did not make an irrefutable criminal case against the man who had sexually assaulted her decades earlier, nor was she required to, but she made a very credible case about the events of that day and the identity of the boy who held his hand over her mouth after locking her in a bedroom.  Another woman came forward seeking to testify about another drunken assault at Yale.   A third woman came forward.   The desperate liberal conspiracy in full bloom!

In light of the nominee’s confirmation a few days later, my friend considered Blasey Ford and her compelling testimony ‘collateral damage’, the whole kangaroo hearing so much dirty water down the drain.   Accurate description, of course, in terms of how little effect her testimony wound up having, how her life was destroyed in passing by forces who 100% didn’t give a rat’s cuisse about the truth or falseness of what she said.  

The issue had been reframed: she had not made a credible criminal case that would have stood up to get a conviction in court– plus he denied it 100%, the exact degree of certainty she had about him being the attacker.  A nothingburger!   No need to even look for corroboration, let’s vote!

The issue as she testified was not about making a criminal case, of course, but about shining a light on the nominee’s character, including his willingness to make many misleading and untruthful statements, and the long-time Republican operative’s possibly unjudicial temperament.   Once the nominee denied it all, and the issue was reframed that her testimony didn’t rise to the level needed for a criminal conviction, all that was left to the nominee was to demonstrate his innocence and his judicial temperament.   That he did neither, outside of indignant conspiracy-bashing 100% denials, did nothing to contradict even the reframed story. And, of course, because it was 51-49, no story was actually even required.   Yet we are left with a potent right wing talking point now, good enough for their base, about the Democrats’ self-serving “abandonment of the presumption of innocence.” Their guy was, as always, the only victim here.

Christine Blasey Ford is, absolutely, in the minds of millions, ‘collateral damage’.   You can see right wing women on youTube picking apart her facial expressions as she awaited her public ordeal, about to relive the trauma on live TV– “she involuntarily opened and shut her mouth twice, clear indication that she’s preparing to lie”.   Right wing women jumped on this with both feet, apparently.

My thought was that we should make her name part of a rallying cry to mobilize voters in the upcoming elections.   Make her sacrifice mean something politically, was my thought.   It was this absurd idea I was toying with, in trying to think up ways to support the opposition in the crucial upcoming elections, that caused my friend to try to straighten me out.

I’d described to him how, immediately after she testified, Republicans, including the crew at Fox, were worriedly questioning whether Kavanaugh could survive this totally believable and very damaging testimony.   There was a short period when it appeared that a brave citizen might have been able to stop a political gang bang in progress.  In spite of everything, in spite of 51-49, when they broke for lunch, it appeared the nominee was in big trouble.   Fox was worried and so, reportedly, was the president.

After a long lunch break and presumably a hurried war council, the nomination was saved by angry counter-accusations during which Blasey Ford’s credible allegations, although barely even referred to, were strongly shouted down by one Republican man after another, denounced as part of an orchestrated political hit funded, according to these angry partisans, by millions of dollars from rich liberals. A series of loudly sounding charred pots and kettles, talking about how black the motives of their unprincipled opponents were.  A draw, decided 51-49 (50-48 in the end).

My friend, by not watching the drama as it unfolded and before it came to its preordained conclusion, had no trouble dismissing Blasey Ford as anything but the latest example of another innocent, decent person burned up by the ruthless application of opportunistic partisan politics.    Having seen the proceedings, I believe her name, properly invoked, could be a powerful political rallying cry, get many otherwise apathetic, resigned people to the polls for midterm elections that are typically voted in by only the tiniest slice of our electorate, decided by handfuls of votes. 

I don’t have the phrase yet, and even if I did, I have no way to reach anyone with my ideas.  A few friends might think it a good phrase, if could I coin it pithily, present it winningly, and that would be that. On the other hand, we need to use every persuasive technique at our disposal to change the outcome of enough state elections to return subpoena power to the opposition party.   A 51-49 Senate majority is hardly the expression of democracy that full investigations into widespread government wrong-doing is.   

How is it that a woman can face death threats (ongoing we hear) to testify credibly about a traumatic attack that has tortured her anew since her long ago prep school sexual assaulter was put on the short list to be one of the nine most powerful people in the country, and be effectively shouted down by enraged partisan men ignoring the allegations entirely, and that is the end of it?   I know, I know, 51-49.

But does that inevitable ‘collateral damage’ apply to any woman who comes forward and testifies against a powerful man as credibly as Blasey Ford did?   Collateral damage, sister, if the guy is as connected and powerful as this good, God-fearing Jesuit prep school graduate.    The Jesuits disowned him in their national weekly, but who the hell are they, anyway?  A bunch of self-righteous partisan traitors, if the prevailing story, in all of its many contradictory wrinkles, is to be believed.

We tell the stories we need to tell, privately and publicly.  It is up to fair-minded people of good will to decide which stories are more believable than others.  My own story, for example, is a long tale of seemingly willful refusal to succeed.   I tell it differently, of course, bringing integrity and other fantastic notions into it, but there is a powerful case to be made that I am a deluded, judgmental, viciously opinionated loser who can’t even write half as well as I believe I can.   Luckily for me, it’s not up to me to convince anyone about anything.  

 

The value of good feedback

Every book you have ever read was written by an author and then edited, and improved,  by a professional editor.   It is this team that produces a book worth reading, writing combed thoroughly to make it as readable and coherent as possible.  No writer can anticipate every problem a reader might encounter with her work.   Tics the writer can’t see may make an otherwise excellent piece impossible for many people to read.    I understand now how important good editorial input is for good writing.   For the best results, writer and editor must have similar sensibilities and goals.   In the scantest of published careers, I’ve experienced the horror of having whole paragraphs rendered barely coherent by an overzealous and untalented editor who swapped specific. carefully worded opening sentences for generic ones that meant something completely different.  The wrong opening sentence curses the rest of the paragraph.

We try to impose editorial oversight on ourselves as we write by imagining our reader’s reactions, with mixed results.  It is easy enough to learn to distrust and murder the overly cute darlings we may come up with from time to time.   Writing under strong emotion we might write, in an otherwise persuasive analysis of a vexing subject, that the man we are describing is the closest any of us will ever encounter to a talking piece of shit.   This is not an observation that will clinch the moral correctness of an argument.  Many readers will be repelled by a writer who stoops to scatology to portray an arguably despicable zealot; turn away and never turn back.  

An editor will immediately flag the line, something the writer may have a harder time even noticing.   The editor will demand more of the writer than a summary dismissal of a man who is, arguably, the very thing the writer has described.  Good writing requires more and a good editor asks the writer for it.

I offer this example of a paragraph I rewrote after considering my sister’s comments on the original paragraph.    After hearing her concerns, I was unable to defend the specificity of the original paragraph and I understood more clearly what I needed to write in its place, in terms of advancing the story.   Here is the rewritten paragraph about my thankless career as a lawyer:

The fees I should have earned on those two cases would have allowed me to pay off my student loans and choose a life more suitable to my personality.  I didn’t have the stomach to persevere on either case, finding both clients despicable.  I persisted unhappily in a distasteful career I’d undertaken mostly to try to please a father who nothing could have pleased.

The original paragraph, which my sister told me had an off-putting whiff of anger notably absent from the rest of the piece, read:

In one case the attorney who took over the case after I’d spent months securing a rare win at the EEOC got one-third of the half-million or more we won for the discriminated against asshole client; for reasons too sad to detail, I got $6,000.   In the other case, a frivolous but not illegal attempt at a lucrative eviction, I took in about a quarter of what I should have, put off by the client’s offhand anti-Semitic slurs. The opposing counsel was, indeed, a vile piece of shit, though “dirty Eastern European kike” proved impossible for me to swallow.  

I had already rewritten the paragraph above in response to another reader’s discomfort with the original, even more detailed paragraph.   The rewritten (now discarded) paragraph above was about half as detailed as the one before it, and, as it turns out, still many times more detailed than it needed to be.    What point was the paragraph trying to make? That I’d been unable to hold my nose as a lawyer, even on the rare occasions when there was a strong monetary incentive to do so.   No details really needed to make that point except that I turned away from a bad smell, and two excellent paydays.

You can read the original piece and see the rewritten paragraph in context.   If you are fortunate enough to get thoughtful feedback from someone whose intelligence as a reader you respect, consider it carefully.   The value of good editorial input is nothing to sneeze at.  Comments by perceptive readers help us write better.   Dismiss the considered opinions of others you respect at peril to your writing. 

Weaponizing civility

I had a falling out with a friend from my childhood over his tendency to ignore my feelings, something that seemingly got harder and harder for him to control as time went on.   It was irrelevant to him that he was making me angry about his insistence on one thing or another, my anger was my own problem, the painful truth he was driving at was too important to turn into a referendum on the propriety of putting an old friend in an aggravating position, attacking him or ignoring his clear discomfort.

My childhood friend has a troubled relation with anger, something he was taught to swallow by parents who were also taught to swallow anger, whether they had a right to feel angry or not.   His mother recently described to me how she was taught by her mother, who I knew and could believe it of, to concoct a story rather than ever confront anybody in a way that might result in anger.   Following this practice, she learned late in life, did not always have the intended result.

Every one of us has to deal with anger, a difficult, sometimes scary emotion that is often quite appropriate in an unjust world.   Most things that provoke people  are things most people would be angry about if subjected to.   The key to how you view these provocations is often whether you personally are provoked or not– it is a matter of whether or not you identify with the anger personally.  

Not everyone is taught that swallowing anger, and coming up with an anodyne story to bring a close to the underlying conflict, is the best way to deal with that harsh emotion.  It may be a widely practiced method, but that just puts it in the same category as racism, misogyny, advocating mass killing for a patriotic reason or for no reason and a lot of other widely practiced human emotional excesses.  Compared to raging outright whenever one feels aggrieved, swallowing anger is probably a better alternative, though neither approach leads to a good outcome.

Swallowing anger is a demonstrably bad long term strategy.   Anger is corrosive, comes out one way or the other and it leads to many terrible things including a tendency to irrationally fly off the handle, to lash out at people it’s safe to attack who may have nothing to do with the source of one’s anger, to be stricken by bodily pains so severe that the sufferer cannot even move.  

Maybe the worst thing about swallowing anger is that it makes any anger shown by anyone else, no matter how reasonable it might be, infuriating.  Denying another person’s right to their feelings is a common cause of anger, which must then be swallowed.   It also, sadly, makes friendship ultimately impossible with anyone not committed to pretending about fundamental things that might be absent:  like the right not to have their feelings repeatedly hurt by their closest friends, the right to swallow or not swallow anger, the right to try to make things right when a relationship is about to be lost.

The reasons this old friend was so angry at me are hard to know exactly.   I don’t seem as jittery in my own skin as he is, I’m a little more affable, more comfortable in social settings.   I play guitar better than him, I seem to stand up for myself and my beliefs in a way he can’t and I can express anger when I need to.  

I don’t know what exactly it was that made him provoke me so frequently, beyond the fact that he knew he could lash out at me without much consequence for him.   As mad as he sometimes made me, as furious as some of his attacks were, I never hit him back very hard.   There was probably nobody else in his lifetime of swallowing rage that he felt safe enough to do this with.  

Just because a person can take punches and kicks without responding in kind doesn’t mean he likes being punched and kicked.  There comes a time when even the fondest sentimental attachment frays and finally tears apart under this kind of regime.   My competitive friend’s anger, in the end, was as much about this as anything:  even though my life is manifestly a failure in every way our society uses to measure a life (beautiful home, nice car, good income, social status, quantifiable financial success), he somehow felt I have the upper hand, have the more enviable life.  My squalid rented apartment in a marginal neighborhood somehow provides me the same sense of security as his beautiful home in a wealthy suburb, which is objectively unfair.

His anger at the unfairness of this, it appears, became like a snowball rolling down an immense hill in heavy snow.  As his troubled  marriage reached a new crisis, I became the go-to guy to lash out at.   Finally, when he petulantly told me his extracted apology was apparently not good enough for a prig like me, that my stubborn demand that he actually change the way he behaved toward me was very unfair, especially considering that he was actually the victim, now and forever, we were finally done. 54 years and … poof!

Now we come to the killing power of civility.   You can rage in a polite way, as our newest Junior Associate Supreme Court justice did at his recent hearings.   Nothing he said while raging is unprintable, he never lost control to the point that he uttered a line that could cost him his position on the nation’s highest court (like when I recently referred to him as a “piece of shit” and a “motherfucker” — the end of my Supreme Court dream).   He never cursed, never even came close to using an off-color term.   He never crossed the line into easily dismissible rage, everything he said while raging, however childish and regrettable it may also have been — every word was printable, “good enough”, anyway.  

Reading a transcript of his remarks you may not feel he acquitted himself as the brilliant, impartial jurist he presented himself as, his responses make him look like an hysterical zealot to some, and less than 100% candid and truthful, beyond question, but he clearly adhered to the rule of civility, firmly, if crudely.   It is that angrily clenched sphincter of a mouth, whenever confronted with a question he was in any way threatened by, that speaks louder than anything he actually said.

So it is with civility, being civil means never really having to say you’re sorry.

I recently saw the end of a long email correspondence with a friend who is a master of civility.    He was a mutual friend of the old friend mentioned above, the guy with the unexpressible, irrepressible anger problems.   He suffers periodically from disabling physical conditions he sees as directly related to the ongoing, inchoate rage he has to swallow daily.   He subscribes to Dr. John Sarno’s theory of Tension Myoneural Syndrome (TMS), the mind/body’s creation of crippling physical pain to mask even more terrifying psychic pain.   We’ve had many discussions over the years about this, and I’ve learned things from the exchange.  He is an excellent writer, a smart man and over the years we’ve regularly exchanged countless facts, observations and opinions that have enriched both of us.    

Recently he informed me that he’s unwilling to hear any story even tangentially related to our once mutual friend, or to be part of any conversation in any way related to any of the issues raised by that long friendship, the impasse we came to and our current estrangement.  I made a last attempt to get back on the same page with him.  

I laid out the harm of preemptively forbidding whole areas of conversation,  This ban, I pointed out, ruled out some of the most fundamental things friends should do for each other, starting with hearing what’s on your friend’s mind.   To him, his stance was simple loyalty to an old friend and a refusal to take sides.   Reasonable enough, on one level, and one might ask why I could not abide by his request to talk about anything else.   I couldn’t help but think of Switzerland during the Second World War, neutral, not taking sides, right and wrong — not our business… and my correspondent’s longtime aversion to difficult topics of conversation.  

I imagined the conversations available after the ban on any talk related in any arguable way to my falling out with my childhood friend.   Out of bounds: the corrosive nature of unacknowledged rage, the sharp brutality of denial and the nimble, desperate inventions of shameful secrecy.  The blackout would render our once frank correspondence untenable from my end since it closes the door to the things I am wrestling with daily.   I wasn’t looking for a taking of sides, though my correspondent felt that taking sides was inevitable, once the door opened, and that he would not allow himself to be placed in that position.  I took considerable pains not to offend my sometimes fussy correspondent, rewriting my email a number of times before sending it to make sure not to bruise his feelings.  I raised a handful of separate points, as tactfully as I was able.   Perhaps the most important section was:

We’re touching on a core belief about life: you explore freely and openly with those closest to you to try to get to larger truths, learn something from our own experiences and the lives and choices of those we know, trusting a good friend, in the course of a larger conversation, not to deliberately fuck you or thoughtlessly put you in an untenable position — or, out of deep loyalty or some other principle, you put up a wall, set parameters on what can be discussed against the possibility that such fucking and untenable torment is as inevitable as the next attack of TMS whenever anger is some part of the equation.

It points to the very different expectations we have of our closest friends, of our inner lives.  Also to our different relationships with anger.   I’m drawn to this kind of troubling but sometimes illuminating inquiry and the related stories, the more insight I can get the better; you appear to be drawn away from it.  Conflict, like pain, instructs us about which way to go sometimes.   Conflict is supremely uncomfortable, I know, but it’s also occasionally unavoidable if people are to grow, change, become wiser.   

It’s possible to work through conflicts if you can clearly see the part you’re playing, and there is openness to honest discussion on both sides.  There is a way of viewing conflict that is not starkly black and white, right or wrong, zero sum, winner/loser.  It is rare, and hard, but conflicts can be resolved without war (and can never be with war).  You can look squarely at what needs to be changed to resolve a conflict and, for the sake of a valued relationship, change it, sometimes.  There are general principles and a lifetime of beliefs involved in every choice a person makes, things that should be fair game for discussion, or… apparently not.

I didn’t have to wait long for his short, quick reply.  I read it to my sister.  She chuckled and said he was really smart, and agreed that he had channeled the DU (our relentless father) beautifully, it was the model wonderfully civil fuck you.   It reads, in its entirety (outside of a closing sentence wishing me luck, good health and good times in the coming weeks):

You’ve expressed your view of things here very clearly, and I truly appreciate both the re-send (with a more navigable font) and the mildness of your formulations.

We’ve had a great run with this correspondence for ten years now.  But in light of what you’ve written, and other developments over the past year or so, I think we may well have reached the point where our differences outweigh our many affinities, and that it is indeed time for a break.

Heh, can’t argue with that.   I particularly loved the lawyerly genius of  “and other developments over the past year or so”.  The DU himself could not have topped that one.   Reminiscent of the immortal line, uttered by my defeated father at the end of a desperate fight not to have an honest discussion with his adult son:  “if I ever honestly told you what I really think of you it would do such irreparable damage we’d never have any chance of ever having any kind of relationship between us.”  

Set and match.  

Nicely done, dad, we’ll revisit this on your death bed a few years from now, when I’ll have one last chance to be mild about how wrong you were, you poor bastard.  

Have a blessed day.

Psoriasis

My father was tortured by severe psoriasis that required at least one extended hospitalization during my sister’s and my childhood.  It was an unusually severe case.   Many people with psoriasis have scaly patches on their elbows, forearms, their scalp.   My father’s lifelong friend Benjie had psoriasis on his arms, and sometimes his hands, for much of the time I knew him.   My father’s psoriasis covered virtually his whole body, which was red, with white scales on it.  The itchiness of the scales caused him to scratch, and when he scratched, flakes would fall off.   It was like a biblical plague, really, and judging by the ads for psoriasis treatments I get on my phone lately (since visiting a doctor about my newly diagnosed arthritis), many Americans still suffer from it.  

The scales itched and my father scratched.   He would frequently use a stand-up vacuum cleaner to suck the scales off the floor of the living room, dining room and kitchen.   I realize now that was one reason we generally didn’t have carpeting on the first floor.   The electric broom would get hot with use and the scales, exposed to this heat, would give off a mildly sickening smell of burning flesh.   It was a particular sweet smell I can still remember very clearly decades later.

This is one terrible feature of my father’s life, a poorly understood torment of a disease he suffered from.   There was apparently a strong correlation between the severity of the disease and the stress my father was under.   After he retired and moved to warm, humid Florida the scales disappeared completely.  But from the age of thirty-two (the year I was born) on, when things got too stressful, and the weather was particularly cold in New York City, my father’s skin would crack and bleed.  When this happened he checked himself into New York Hospital where they treated him with steroids, special baths and rest.   I recall visiting him there, I was maybe 14.   The view over the East River from his hospital room, which was on a very high floor, was amazing.  

The visit to his hospital room was not without drama.   My mother, for reasons she took to her grave, insisted I wear a certain pair of blue pants to visit the hospital.  These were the kind of pants they used to call slacks, as opposed to the jeans I always wore.  I tried on the blue pants and they ballooned grotesquely in several places.   I did a turn in the living room to show this and my mother was unimpressed.   I changed out of the pants, back into jeans, and my mother had a shit fit.   My refusal to wear the hideous pants was the proof, apparently, that I did not love my father enough to wear a pair of nice slacks to visit him.   As often happened, the fight became ugly.   I don’t recall which pants I eventually wore for that visit, but I do remember my father lying in the hospital bed and the magnificent view, the nearby UN and Long Island, stretching to the horizon across the shimmering East River. 

Ironically, the hideous blue pants were later tapered by my sister, who nobody knew was a naturally gifted seamstress.   One day, without any training, she was suddenly able to do precise alterations of clothing.  In their altered form I liked them as much as any other pants I had at the time and wore them frequently.   If only the alteration had taken place before the visit to my poor father at NYU hospital!

Silence!

I learned young, in my cells, the truth that the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.   Whenever something scary or painful happened to me or my sister, something that cried out for discussion in the home I grew up in, silence was imposed.   “You have to respect my right to ignore your pain,” was my father’s position.   He actually said as much to me explicitly, when we were both adults.    He had his own terrible pain, clearly, which made him very uncomfortable in these situations.    Why did I have to respect his silence?   I lived in his house, he bought me my clothes, my food and everything else.   I suppose that was how his logic worked, though it applied long after the childhood rationale was gone and he’d regret it all bitterly as he was dying.    

Silence is a prerogative of power.   If you have the power, you simply sit, lips pressed together, a silent “fuck you” the most irrefutable response to anything you don’t feel  like talking about, for any reason or no real reason.   That’s power.  Ask the powerful nominee a question he doesn’t want to answer.  He has already spent hours strategizing with the lawyers of the man who nominated him, has vast experience in this process himself as legal advisor on such nominations to a past president.   He is asked a question he doesn’t want to answer.  Clamps his lips together, stares at the questioner with undisguised hostility, knowing he can eventually run out the game clock.  “My answer, sir, is a loud, silent FUCK YOU!” he glares, mouth constricted to the size of a tightly clenched sphincter.

If a powerless person is sexually assaulted in the woods, a hand clamped over her mouth, and there is nobody there to hear her muffled protests– was there a sexual assault?   Come on.   Is this even a question?  

The Constitution was largely silent on the question of slavery.  To many of those who did not immensely profit from the “Peculiar Institution”, chattel slavery was an abomination.  For the rest a virulent racism was encouraged, so they didn’t care about the slaves.  It would not do to enshrine slavery too explicitly in the liberty-granting blueprint for republican democracy written by men who believed that all men were created equal, endowed by their creator with certain unalienable human rights and so forth.  Lawyers are geniuses of this kind of thing, inserting the devilish, controlling details between two commas, bland as all get out.   “… such persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit…” [1]  yeah, there we go– the constitutional basis for the Fugitive Slave Act is authorized by an equally innocuous-sounding clause.  Read the Constitution, it’s not long.  See if you can find the three discrete, discreet phrases making slavery as lawful as anything else a landed white man had a right to.  As a law student it took me a long time to find all three.

Silence!  Those who would be tyrants must become masters of this.   Speaking with a definitive, uncontradictable voice is only possible when no contradiction is allowed.   First thing you do, silence all the investigative journalists.  Then the lawyers of the opposition.   Once these troublesome elements are dealt with, the sailing is much smoother for a tyrant.  Of course, “tyrant” is such a judgmental word.   Can’t we just say Leader?   Or Winner?  

Silence!  Your right to be heard is limited by my right not to hear you, fucker.  If you can make yourself heard, go right ahead.   Let me just put on my state-of-the-art noise canceling headphones and my sleep blinders, ah, that’s much better.  Alone with my own thoughts.   Among them, no thought of taking off my blinders and deafeners.   Scream away in your victimhood, assholes, it’s so much faint white noise to me.

Silence, while sometimes the best response when tempers are hot, more often than not benefits the powerful and the guilty.   The most important single thing required for an unjust scheme to  succeed, without adverse consequences for the hatchers, for any crime to be committed with impunity, is silence.   Silence is golden, literally.

Irrelevant Logic

Advocates for Brett Kavanaugh felt great urgency to get him on the Supreme Court as quickly as possible, for many reasons.    Delay would only allow for more and more basic and uncomfortable questions to be asked, more people willing to testify against him to come forward.   Our brazen president decided to double down [1], have the nominee brazen it out, short delay for very limited, top secret investigation — for the optics of transparency and fairness — then immediate vote and we win.

An exercise in logic for all you non-partisans out there:

Democrats and Republicans alike found Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony credible, and nobody who spoke publicly on either side said they didn’t believe her story, though Republicans were reticent about one particular detail, which was neither corroborated nor disproved by the limited FBI probe.   To a man, the men on the Senate Judiciary Committee who spoke publicly said they believed Blasey Ford’s testimony.   They would have sounded like liars, and insensitive, morally tone-deaf  cads, if they had claimed not to believe her, since she did come across as truthful.  

Keep that thought in mind — credible testimony.  

Now keep this thought in mind:  Blasey Ford’s testimony was, at the same time, part of an orchestrated political hit, a calculated partisan smear against this fine, highly qualified nominee, as the impeccable nominee himself and the indignant Republican men of the Committee all claimed .

Logic?   Truthful, yes, but a smear.  In the end: a wash.  Although, logically, she could not have been testifying truthfully and, at the same time,  been part of a vicious partisan smear against an innocent man.

Basic logic is often collateral damage in our zero-sum post-fact media spin world.  In any case, logic is irrelevant in modern political interpretive dance.

That said, it is important, as a democratic corrective, that Democrats and Independents take the House in the upcoming midterms.   Progressives on the House Judiciary Committee have already informed the president that, once they have subpoena power back, they intend to examine what appears to be Kavanaugh’s untruthfulness under oath during his recent confirmation hearings and his testimony before being confirmed for the federal bench more than a decade ago.    That is the only picture that gives me any solace in this dark moment for the silenced majority, a real investigation into the truthfulness of this smug, petulant, entitled zealot fuck.

 

 

[1] One commentator noted that he was “tripling down” in this case.   This is a characteristic move of our zero-sum winner-in-chief.