Fourold friends share a vacation house for a few days.For reasons none of themunderstand, tensions continue to escalate. Each one unwittingly plays a part in this rising stress. By the third or fourthnight, one, feeling provoked by another, reacts in fury. Later, another will lash out in anger.
People under stress get mad from time to time, especially among people they love, who, being safest, are easiest to take anger out on, which sometimes just happens. Hurt feelings heal, hopefully quickly but certainly over time, given patience, kindness and communication.
Injuries to esteem can be traumatic,especially if familiar from earlier lifeandprolonged. Their pain can threaten, even kill, old precious relationships.
Friends in the grave are no different from friends who are alive and of whom we no longerspeak, their righteous hurt become intolerable to us. Except that it’s mainly the other living ones we sometimes can’t forgive.
The lawyers Trump is still able to hire filed a unique motion in federal court the other day related to his right to retain government papers after leaving office. The judge gave them a few days to fix their filing, since shewas legitimately confused about what they are seeking and why they are seeking it in her federal courtroom.
The 27-page filing is replete with Trump’s typical political bombast, including boasts about the power of the former president’s 2022 campaign endorsements and about the Mar-a-Lago estate itself. But it also confirmed aspects of the timeline related to the Mar-a-Lago search, including the fact that the Justice Department issued two subpoenas prior to the search — one for documents on May 11 and another for security camera footage in late June. . .
. . .“We are now demanding that the Department of ‘Justice’ be instructed to immediately STOP the review of documents illegally seized from my home. ALL documents have been previously declassified,” Trump declared.
Rupert Murdoch’sNew York Post clarified that Trump didn’t have his lawyers include that strong paragraph in his motion for a special master:
“We are now demanding that the Department of ‘Justice’ be instructed to immediately STOP the review of documents illegally seized from my home. ALL documents have been previously declassified,” Trump said in a statement on his Truth Social platform soon after the motion was filed.. .
. . .Three days after the raid, on Aug. 11, the former president’s attorneys attempted to convey a message to Attorney General Merrick Garland from Trump during a conversation with Bratt. That message, according to the filing, was:
“President Trump wants the Attorney General to know that he has been hearing from people all over the country about the raid. If there was one word to describe their mood, it is ‘angry.’ The heat is building up. The pressure is building up. Whatever I can do to take the heat down, to bring the pressure down, just let us know.”
You know, as you do when you want to make sure the guy knows it’s a nice little democracy he’s got here and it would be a shame if something happened to it.
Feeling paralyzed is debilitating, which fuels the procrastination cycle. The psychological feeling of paralysismay be a bummer, but it takes pain that keeps you physically limited to really hammer it home. I used to walk for an hour or more every day, usually in the evening; always felt better after a long walk. I rode my bicycle regularly for many years, always feeling better after a good ride. Now that it’s painful to walk for more than a minute or two, as I wait to see if the arthritis treatment worked, the doctor is encouraging me to refrain from walking as much as possible (until I feel relief from the third injection of hyaluronic acid, mimicking the knee joint’s natural WD-40). “Don’t walk for exercise,” she told me two months ago. I haven’t been, and currently can’t walk much more than a block without sitting down to rest, though I’m apparently still limping two or three miles a day in the course of my daily puttering, according to my fitbit.
If you are by nature a procrastinator, cannot get yourself to make that call, or go to the website to fill out the paperwork, file your taxes, find a new doctor,make an appointment, call a company, prepared to spend an hour on hold and then negotiating, or whatever the goddamned thing is — take solace in the things you can do everyday that will make you feel better. Physical activity is very important to mental well-being, to maintaining a mild composure. Go take a walk, if you’re stuck in something you’re thinking about, go outside and walk, it will do you good. And as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. said “be kind to your knees, you’ll miss them when they’re gone.” No truer words e’er were spoken.
In 2010 the Supreme Court decided Citizens United v Federal Election Commission, ruling 5-4 that corporations have the same right to political speech as any other person and can pay for as much constitutionally protected free speech as they like. The rationale given by Anthony Kennedy was that transparency about who was donating the money would alleviate any concerns about hidden hands manipulating American politics, since Americans would know who funded various political messages.
I’ll let Heather Cox Richardson tell this grotesque story, which was reported in yesterday’s NY Times (link above, at top):
Today’s big news is an eye-popping $1.6 billion donation to a right-wing nonprofit organized in May 2020. This is the largest known single donation made to a political influence organization.
The money came from Barre Seid, a 90-year-old electronics company executive, and the new organization, Marble Freedom Trust, is controlled by Leonard A. Leo, the co-chair of the Federalist Society, who has been behind the right-wing takeover of the Supreme Court. Leo has also been prominent in challenges to abortion rights, voting rights, climate change action, and so on. He announced in early 2020 that he was stepping back from the Federalist Society to remake politics at every level, but information about the massive grant and the new organization was broken today by Kenneth P. Vogel and Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times.
Marble is organized as a nonprofit, so when Seid gave it 100% of the stock in Tripp Lite, a privately held company that makes surge protectors and other electronic equipment, it could sell the stock without paying taxes. The arrangement also likely enabled Seid to avoid paying as much as $400 million in capital gains taxes on the stock. Law professor Ray Madoff of Boston College Law School, who specializes in philanthropic policy, told the New York Times: “These actions by the super wealthy are actually costing the American taxpayers to support the political spending of the wealthiest Americans.”
This massive donation is an example of so-called “dark money”: funds donated for political advocacy to nonprofits that do not have to disclose their donors. In the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC) decision, the Supreme Court said that limiting the ability of corporations and other entities to advertise their political preferences violates their First Amendment right to free speech. This was a new interpretation: until the 1970s, the Supreme Court did not agree that companies had free speech protections.
Now, nonprofit organizations can receive unlimited donations from people, corporations, or other entities for political speech. They cannot collaborate directly with candidates or campaigns, but they can promote a candidate’s policies and attack opponents, all without identifying their donors.
“I’ve never seen a group of this magnitude before,” Robert Maguire of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) told Casey Tolan, Curt Devine, and Drew Griffin of CNN. “This is the kind of money that can help these political operatives and their allies start to move the needle on issues like reshaping the federal judiciary, making it more difficult to vote, a state-by-state campaign to remake election laws and lay the groundwork for undermining future elections.” Our campaign finance system, he said, gives “wealthy donors, whether they be corporations or individuals, access and influence over the system far greater than any regular American can ever imagine.”
My post Story time was not meant to imply that all stories about the past are equally true, or that stories — narratives largely about what is true and what is not — are whatever we claim they are, only that theyfeel more or less compelling to us based on how well they satisfy what we need. Stories make us feel a certain way about ourselves, some sit comfortably, others are very hard to sit with. We prefer the ones that confirm that we are right to feel and act the way we do.
You can’t argue about what somebody deeply feels, the feelings themselves are as real as anything else in this hall of mirrors we homo sapiens live in. It may surprise you to learn that an old friend believes the story that you chose to viciously torture your closest friend and sadistically refused to let up until he cried uncle by giving you something you felt he was withholding from you. Your surprise at this unexpectedly harsh portrayal may prevent you from calmly asking a reasonable follow-up question.
Even an open-ended expression of confusion like “have you ever known me to act that way, in our long experience as friends?” may or may not give you the answer you seek, because once strong feelings are tied up in believing a story you were convinced of, by the sincere tears of someone else you love, the issues become very clear to you and such questions are seen as yet more Devil quoting scripture to evade all responsibility, all decency. The fact will remain, whether it can be shown or not, that you are the kind of person who tortures your closest friends and then fights to the point of exhaustion, like Trump, to deny every count against you, reasonable or not. If you feel your name was unfairly harmed, that’s your problem for acting so despicably and still insisting you did nothing wrong.
This is one reason a Jewish scholar called Chofetz Chayim wrote a long treatise on the importance of not harming others with malicious talk. You may be hurt, you may be angry, you may be sorely tempted to prove that you are right in your very strong feelings — but tread carefully when letting loose an arrow that can puncture somebody else’s good name. You cannot take that arrow back. You have done permanent harm to somebody by, in your hurt, expressing a one-sided view of their unworthiness to be trusted or loved. Refraining from this kind of thing can be hard to do, especially when we are under stress, hence a shelf full of volumes by this sage on the subject of holding your tongue when angry at, or hurt by, someone lest you damage their good name in thecommunity.
On the other hand, if someone has molested children, and successfully hidden this, and you are aware of it, you have a duty to warn the other parents and members of the community. The prohibition about speaking ill does not apply to people who do unprovoked, terrible harm to others. We all do harm to others, but most of it is subjective and very little of the harm we do is done deliberately. Not everything harmful is subjective or accidental, of course. Rape is not subjective, murder is not subjective, lying under oath is not subjective, these things may be disclosed to others who may be harmed. In those cases, we have a duty to warn others.
In the ordinary run of things, the stories we tell are harmless enough most of the time. We recall one detail another person has no recollection of, we talk about who has a better memory, we reminisce, we tell stories about the past that may or may not have happened exactly the way we tell them, but these shared stories bind us. They become part of us, many of these stories, the ones that make impressions on us. At the same time, we are bombarded by stories that make no sense in light of the facts, that rely on “alternative facts” and emotional buzzwords calculated to make people want to take our side against demonicenemies.
If you break a law, and law enforcement negotiates with your lawyers for a year, and then you partially comply with the law, and then a subpoena is sent for the rest of the unlawfully taken things, and you defy the subpoena, and in a quiet follow-up visit from authorities your lawyer signs a statement that everything unlawfully taken has been returned, and then a lawful search, conducted after a detailed showing that there are probably stolen items remaining with you, yields a truck full of unreturned items, proving that you have been lying all along (or, as the Grey Lady styles it “raising questions as to whether you have been fully forthcoming”), you may tell the same story this way:
Evil partisans just want my blood, they have been howling for it for a long, long time. If they can do this to me, illegally raid and ransack my home on bogus “charges”, they can do it to anybody (who accidentally “steals” sensitive government documents) and they will do it, and much worse, to you and everyone you love. This will not stand and we have to show strength, force and resolve and fight like hell, with our beautiful Second Amendment, if necessary, because if we don’t fight like hell we’re not going to have a White Christian Nation any more.
In personal life, as in politics, the stories we tell will hit the mark or miss based on how compellingly they play to our emotions. What is more compelling than adear old friend, a very tough and private person, telling you, in great pain, that her mate, a strong and well-respected man, wept every night because the torture he was forced to undergo at the hands of his merciless “best friend” was so painful, so vicious, so unfair, so inhuman? All because this “best friend” was hell-bent on being right, and getting whathe needed, no matter the cost to others, and his monstrous will was twisted to the inhuman goal of forcing the poor guy to comply withhis distorted version of the story.
Hard, very hard, to be a human living, and trying to be kind, in hard times. If you need more examples, look in any direction. Before any of us add the personal troubles we all have, the list of urgent threats we all face — ongoing, literally fascist take-over of our experiment in democracy, continued destruction of the habitat for all living things, a deadly pandemic we have “compromised” withanti-maskers and anti-vaxxers over (almost 500 Americans died of Covid-19 yesterday, c’est la vie), the normalization of lying and political violencein public life, amid systemic injustice, an epidemic of hopelessness, self-harm, murder and suicide, to name a few, are a very heavy load, before any personal worries enter the equation. The shared threats alone are quite enough to overwhelm the strongest among us. Plus, none of us, alone, are really thatstrong.Our best hope is with others.
That’s why it is so destructive to spreadapoisonousstory about a friendinthe small communityof mutual friends. Take away a person’s good name and you take away their hope for any understanding, from anybody. Not something that’s easy to defend, except, of course, with a truly compelling story.
Right-wing demagogues are making the same point that the Confederates made back when they were defending their constitutional right to hold other people as property and do with them as they pleased. It’s like the goddamn Civil War was never fought, or won by the forces of the Federal Union. Swastikas and Confederate flags, free speech protected under the First and Second Amendments, States Rights, home rule, local sovereignty! Here’s a beautiful short summary of the basic idiocy of the “States’ Rights” position.
There are many ways to describe the same situation, multiple stories are possible for every set of events. The moral of each story is wildly different as are the heroes, villains and innocent bystanders. This is common in our smash-mouthpolitics, as we see everyday.
It’s not that anything wrong was done (note the beautifully passive voice) in accidentally removing sensitive, automatically declassified national defense documents from their secure location, not by us, though those evil, partisan zealots on the other side are totally out of control, weaponizing everything, including illegally using laws and so-called legal procedures, clumsily planting fake evidence and willing to lie and do all manner of evil in an attempt to embarrass, dominate and win, because they’re sick and dangerous traitors who need to be hangingfrom lamp posts.
Clearly there are other, much different, ways to lay out the facts and details and explain the cause and effect in this story.The main thing, in our litigious culture, beyond even accuracy, is that the story is emotionally compelling.
Bill Barr was found by a judge to have lacked candor in his representations to the court about a DOJ memo written in response to the Mueller Report. He was found the other day, by a panel of appellate judges, to have been untruthful in asserting that the memo (on how to communicate to the public that Mueller had exonerated Trump for a crime Mueller said he could neither charge Trump with nor exonerate him for) was privileged because it discussed deliberations over whether to charge the former president with a crime or not. Mueller and Barr relied on the same OLC memo that said a sitting president may not be charged with a crime, so there was no deliberation over whether to charge him in that memo. Barr was lying, as Mueller suggested in his strongly worded letter about Barr’s misleading spin on the report, complaining that Barr had mischaracterized his findings. Barr kept Mueller’s immediately written letter to himself for months, while claiming under oath that he had no inkling of what Bob thought of his characterization of the report.
In another way of telling the story Barr was himself simply telling a story, it was puffery, a lawyer’s poetic license to spin the story to best suit his client’s needs.Those who share Barr’s worldview feel that Barr had every right, in the face of such, vicious, relentless enemies, to do everything that he did to help the leader he was rightfully protecting.
This is the society we are currently living in. We don’t need to look at politics for more examples of wildly divergent, irreconcilable accounts of an occurrence people lived through together. A blow up between old friends that nobody understood the reasons for will be described in incompatibly different stories. In one, the four all played parts in the escalating tensions, discomfort, eruptions of anger and the sickening aftermath. In another, three were pretty much the victims of one, a dangerous, sadistic and unforgiving person who nobody could even speak to without fear of being tortured. In another, the blame for the accidental horrors was fairly evenly spread between three, while the fourth was largely blameless. Another way of telling it was that once their respective traumatic childhood wounds were reopened, all bets were off, it was a zero sum war of survival, each against all. The story then became one of alliances, who believed what and, in the end, whose story would become the finalnarrative in their little social circle.
One story lets the narrator completely off the hook, in fact, makes them the sympathetic victim and defender of a fellow victim, and they themselves will tell it calmly, yet passionately, to persuade friends of the truth of it. In another story, the worst injury described will be completely absent from the first account. Things one person remembers being said, things that shocked her, are not recalled by another person, the one who allegedly said it, though a third person does recall it, although not exactly as the first one said.
In one story the only way out is through a process of reconciliation, involving a painful but necessary conversation conducted in the safety of old friendship and extending the benefit of the doubt all around. In another story the only solution, the only way to avoid reliving the devilishly painful details, is agreeing to forget the regrettable thingsever happened and carrying on as if they didn’t, even though it means, unfortunately, tacitly tolerating the intolerable sadism of thestubbornly unforgiving one who tortured everybody and demanded they comply with a twisted version of events.
And on and on. If the goal is peace, and restoration of what was lost, and that goal is shared, there seemingly should be a way out. There is not always a way out, because, while we all consistently do the best we can, sometimes the best we cando is not good enough for somebody else. If judgednot good enough someone’s best can become the seed of a new story, and that failure of character is the reason we can never fix this broken, once beautiful, rare and cherished thing.
Law in a democracy, (while tilted towards the wealthy and politically powerful, who can employ armies of lawyers to negotiate, wheedle and delay on their behalf, and also hire expert lobbyists to rewrite laws that are disadvantageous to them), is the final word on what is legal or illegal and who is accountable to the rest of us. That’s why we often hear “the rule of law” used as a synonym for democracy.
Clearly there are multiple tiers to our justice system, and the rich and powerful are not generally debased by being subjected to the strict laws that are generously applied against the lower and criminal classes. Here, we make no distinction between… you know the rest. Still, our laws, and justice system, which apply to all citizens, residents and non-diplomatic visitors, are what protect our American experiment in democracy.
In autocracy, the autocrat can change and bend the law at will. Crooks that help the autocrat are given positions of power, immunity from prosecution, sprung from jail if convicted, pardoned and restored to positions of power. Autocracy, as scholar of fascism Ruth Ben-Ghiat points out, is always enabled by a conspiracy of powerful criminals who ruthlessly serve the autocrat. Note that the rule of law applied in Nazi Germany also, though every judge, prosecutor, and defense lawyer was required to be a Nazi party member and the law was whatever the Führer said it was on any given day.
Here in the USA, even a judge vetted for loyalty to a political philosophy (membership in a legal fraternity with a strict view of how the law needs to be changed) and appointed by a president with a bent toward authoritarianism, will not be able to rule for his benefactor without evidence. The courts, (until you reach the Supreme Court, constrained by neither ethical rules nor weighing of actual evidence, and where a medieval scholar can be cited as unappealable proof that abortion is murder), are bound by the rule of law, limited in their decisions by the weight of the actual evidence presented.
In a case I followed, Trump, et al v. Boockvar [1], one of hundreds of lawsuits brought by Trump for President, Inc. and the RNC prior to the 2020 election, in a concerted attempt to suppress Democratic mail-in and drop box votes, a young Federalist Society judge, J. Nicholas Ranjan, appointed for life by the plaintiff himself, ruled that evidence of massive potential voter fraud and “vote dilution” and all the rest of the claims Trump made against Pennsylvania Secretary of State Boockvar must be presented. He then ruled that the evidence presented, hundreds of pages of printouts of opinion pieces by Breitbart, FOX and the like, did not satisfy the legal definition of evidence of concrete harm. In dismissing the case, he wrote more than a hundred additional pages explaining the legal rationale for every one of his decisions and detailing the authorities he relied on, for the benefit of the federal appeals court he wrote was likely to get the case. He made his decision appeal-proof, basically.
A great day for the rule of law and the burden of proof. Here’s a link to the case https://casetext.com/case/donald-j-trump-for-president-inc-v-boockvar-3 and I suspect you’ll be as shocked as I was to scan, at the top of the judge’s long decision, the list of hundreds of people involved in litigating a case that went on for months before being dismissed for lack of evidence. There is also, naturally, a scary wink at the Federalist Society’s best hope for changing the nature of our multi-racial democracy, another seed of the Independent State Legislature “Doctrine” [2]. This “doctrine” is teed up for a 6-3 decision next term on whether state legislatures have the ultimate authority to decide who won federal elections in their state, no matter what “majoritarian tyranny” might have to say at the so-called voting booth.
In a court of law (outside of the current Supreme Court), you need proof of yourlegal injury or your case gets dismissed. In the court of public opinion, proof is not necessary for angry partisans who believe the worst of their enemies automatically. You need to keep righteous outrage boiling and have people willing to physically threaten those who insist on the, like totally unfair, “rule of law.” What to make of an outrageously unfair law like the one below? Makes you want to holler, if you support the man millions are vindictively hoping will be finally prosecuted for it, and many other crimes he appears to have serially committed:
18 U.S. Code § 793 – Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information
(f) Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer—
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.
(g) If two or more persons conspire to violate any of the foregoing provisions of this section, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each of the parties to such conspiracy shall be subject to the punishment provided for the offense which is the object of such conspiracy.
and, most unfair of all, if you make money by legitimately selling so-called national security documents, that you honestly believed you owned and had every right to sell, or do whatever else you wanted with, they try to “legally” confiscate the money you made! On top of fines and prison time!
(h) (1) Any person convicted of a violation of this section shall forfeit to the United States, irrespective of any provision of State law, any property constituting, or derived from, any proceeds the person obtained, directly or indirectly, from any foreign government, or any faction or party or military or naval force within a foreign country, whether recognized or unrecognized by the United States, as the result of such violation.
Take names (agents who conducted the partisan search and illegal seizure, the judge who allowed it, and their families!) and… let’s just say “kick ass”. Shame if anything happened to this nice little democracy of yours. If you’re thinking of weaponizing the Secret Service (SS) innocently not informing members of Congress of on-line chatter calling for their murder, by name (hi, Nancy), on January 6, until hours into the riot — think again!
[1]
In Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. v. Boockvar, No. 2:20-cv-966, 2020 WL 5997680 (W.D. Pa. Oct. 10, 2020), the Western District of Pennsylvania dismissed a legal challenge to election guidance given by the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania regarding manned security near absentee drop boxes, performing of signature comparisons for mail-in ballots, and a county-residency requirement for poll watchers.
[2] from Ranjan’s decision:
But the job of an unelected federal judge isn’t to suggest election improvements, especially when those improvements contradict the reasoned judgment of democratically elected officials. See Andino v. Middleton , ––– U.S. ––––, 141 S.Ct. 9, 9–10, 208 L.Ed.2d 7, (Oct. 5, 2020) (Kavanaugh, J. concurring) (state legislatures should not be subject to “second-guessing by an unelected federal judiciary,” which is “not accountable to the people”) (cleaned up).
Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. v. Boockvar, 493 F. Supp. 3d 331, 343 (W.D. Pa. 2020)
gratuitousblahg 