Monthly Archives: March 2023

Image for a dead friendship

In hindsight, it’s often easy to see the moment when a friendship ends. The time of death can be placed pretty precisely in retrospect.

The image I had for the year I was hoping a cherished friendship was not dead was me carrying the corpse of a relationship I was desperately believing was not actually dead.

I realized just the other day that a more accurate image, in light of how relentlessly this heavy cadaver fought me to the death every time I tried to make peace, is that I was carrying a zombie who kept trying to bite me. Lovingly toting around a biting zombie. Try getting your brain around that.

Bad enough to be naive enough to carry the dead body of a beloved in hopes that maybe they’re not dead. But how much worse to carry a zombie that is actively trying to bite you the entire time?

The timely hush money payment that allowed Trump to win the Electoral College

Using the timeline of actual events (so unfair!) right before the 2016 election, Lawrence O’Donnell shows how crucial suppressing the story of the porn star who had a brief sexual encounter with the entitled pussy grabber-in- chief candidate was to Trumpie’s brilliantly engineered electoral college victory a few weeks later.

O’Donnell makes a good case that without this well- timed hush money payment, there never would have been a president pussy grabber. So rather than a minor infraction that should not be the first prosecution against the totally innocent and persecuted self-proclaimed billionaire, it is fitting and proper. The illegal and fraudulently concealed campaign contribution of suppressing this damaging story is foundational to the entire 45th president’s story.

If it wasn’t for all the so-called facts, Trumpie would have excellent defenses to all of these baseless partisan witch hunts!

Low tactic

When you find yourself without a good argument, getting frustrated with the person you can’t convince without him bringing in disputed facts, don’t lower yourself to the ad hominem attack “you’re being a lawyer, this isn’t a trial, or a prosecution and don’t try to turn this into an inquisition, I won’t let you put me on trial, I’m not the one on trial here.”  Understandable though it may be to react this way when you feel cornered, it doesn’t help your case and it makes you look bad.

Especially when you deploy it against a reluctant and underpaid former lawyer who hated the idiotic adversarial system and was drawn to problem-solving and compromise every time over zero-sum trial by adversarial combat. 

Look at the parade of ever more marginal lying scumbags who continue to bring a flotilla of frivolous, legally incoherent, evidence-free claims on behalf of a vindictive, lying sociopath and his pernicious disinformation machine.  Those lawyers are behaving as we expect the accursed stereotype of the “anything for a dollar,” or an intoxicating whiff of power, lawyers to act. 

That the licenses of these lying mercenary dicks were not immediately yanked by the legal profession is another proof of the moral idiocy of an adversarial system in which a lawyer/client can use the courts strictly for delay, expense and vexation, with no consequence to themselves. They can justify anything he or his client can imagine might, in some world, not be, technically, an outright transactional lie fraudulently presented to the court in a way that would risk their law license. Satan is often depicted as a lawyer in a very expensive suit.

So when you are about to complain, when your side of argument loses sight of the agreed facts, take a breath instead of playing the lawyer card a lawyer to assert it’s unfair, and frustrating to argue with someone trained in the martial art of law. Stop and consider: isn’t this really a good time to take a breath and pause, let the hot emotion cool a bit? Isn’t that deep breath a much better alternative to possibly insulting a friend and making them antagonistic in return?  

Short answer:  yes.

Conflict, to many hurt people, is a war to be won not a problem to be resolved

Some people are so hurt that, when it comes to inevitable conflict, they see it as hurt others or be hurt yourself, and take no chances — they attack. They commonly deploy a technique known as DARVO, (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) a reflexive strategy whenever there is conflict — make it the complete fault of the other person.   

Conflict, to this personality, is not something to be resolved, it is a war for existence itself that must be won by any means necessary.  The first rule of conflict, for those who see it as total war, is:  deny any role in the conflict and blame the merciless party you disagree with. Like so:

This conflict is entirely your creation and not my fault in any way, so you are the cause of the entire conflict and the only one who can fix it, obviously!  I need to defend myself against your unfair, sick, dangerous attacks.  I’ve never had conflict in my life, your life is one long conflict, so the entire problem must be you, though, of course, you can’t admit that, because that would make you wrong, which you can never be.  You keep insisting I hurt you but you hurt me continually,  brutally, unfairly and without the slightest mercy or hesitation, etc.

If you think about it for a moment, the only hope of resolving a conflict is through an honest back and forth, everyone gaining a better understanding of the cause of the problem, everyone willing to compromise to make the mutual pain stop.  This takes a certain maturity and faith in the problem solving abilities of the other person in the conflict. 

Honest conversation and understanding are the last things a person who needs to “win” every conflict can tolerate.  So-called honesty is perceived as a vicious attack on vital organs!  So you use all of your powers to transform the other party into the unreasonable aggressor and recruit loyal allies in the brutal war to defend your good name against the slander that you are hell-bent on winning at any price.

Talk about your basic mindfuck.   The cherry on top is that people you have known for years, and considered close friends, could believe this simplistic and ridiculous version of events rather than the much more plausible story of what actually took place… perfectly mindfucking…

Remember the acronym DARVO — deny, attack, reverse victim and offender.  How did I go all these years with no shorthand for the consistent way every angry person who cannot be wrong that I’ve ever had a conflict with has reacted?   What is the word for the flying monkeys who believe the weaponized DARVO version of reality?   Oh, yeah, flying monkeys.   Oh wee yo…  

I understand, but sorry

It’s sad, but also freeing, to understand that while somebody you care about can’t help their anger, feels they must behave as they do, their misery is also no excuse for things they do that become intolerable to you. What you can’t tolerate, you can’t tolerate.

“But if I can’t help it, it can’t be my fault!” the person might cry.

OK, but if you can’t help doing it over and over, and won’t talk about it, and I can’t stand it, I can’t help you either.

It’s as tragic as untimely death itself, but the math of it is pretty straightforward.

Trumpie totally refutes judge’s finding

Judge Beryl Howell granted the DOJ’s motion to compel Trumpie’s attorney Evan Corcoran to answer questions, under the penalties of perjury, about the many classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago after he certified, falsely, that after a diligent search all documents had been returned. She ruled that attorney/client privilege does not apply to many of the questions because of the crime/fraud exception.

Because Trumpie and his attorney appear to have jointly participated in crimes, obstruction of justice, for example (the order is under seal) attorney/client privilege does not apply to conversations and actions related to those crimes. Corcoran has to answer the DOJ’s questions about these alleged crimes, or plead the Fifth.

In response Trumpie’s “office” issued this stinging smackdown of the weak, woke DOJ and pathetic, abusive American justice system, as reported in The New York Times:

source

Hell, of course you will!

Isolation is bad for the health

Isolation, particularly if it also involves an inability to move around freely, is a form of torture.  Solitary confinement has finally been identified by the UN and various human rights organizations as torture.  Take away a person’s freedom, their ability to interact with other humans, and the outlet of vigorous exercise, and you’ve got yourself a nice, self-sustaining torture room.  Economical, too.

Humans, like many animals, are highly social creatures who take comfort in being together.   Being isolated with only your own thoughts, fears and moods as company will eventually drive a person mad.  The beauty of isolation as torture, from the sadist’s point of view, is that, as long as you are also immobilized, you cannot make it stop.  All isolation requires is silence from everybody else, which is easy enough to accomplish in our competitive, hectically busy world.  You just have to whisper a few specific, ugly things about the person you’ve isolated to anyone who might have been sympathetic, sit back, and watch your handiwork.   

People undergoing torture will do anything to make it stop.   To picture how destructive long term isolation is, think of its chilling political implications.  Here in the Home of the Brave (TM) we have tens of millions of isolated, grumpy old Americans riveted to on-line “communities” where their millions of new virtual friends all believe that adrenochrome, the mythical element in a terrified child’s blood that fuels the lust of “woke” cannibal pedophiles while infusing them with ungodly strength, is the demonic currency of the global plan, by you know who, to enslave all white nonpedophiles.   If they are that powerful, and capable of that kind of satanic atrocity against innocent children, what do they have in store for the rest of us?

On a personal level, I woke up with a slightly larger sense of isolation today.  The scared feral cat I had patiently gained the trust of, and who I fed every day as he rubbed his head against me to be petted, is lying dead outside the window, apparently clipped by a speeding car the other night as he waited to cross the street he’d crossed countless times.  

I had been giving two more old friends of fifty plus years the benefit of the doubt for the last few months.  Even as I suspected, during their long silence, that a good outcome from this benefit of the doubt was doubtful.   Today I woke up to more silence, a goodbye kiss from Sekhnet (off to the city for a couple of days) and then, ruminations.  I thought of another unanswered WhatsApp I finally sent out yesterday, after no comment on my upcoming knee replacement surgery text,  “understood, you believe I am unforgiving and dishonest” sent to a close friend I’ve known since we were fourteen.

Do the math, a fifty year friendship with friends since we were teenagers, and you will see another example of the obvious:  childishness is not limited to young kids.  We are sociable, we are also clannish and our choices are subject to whim, peer pressure and narrow self-interest.  Some are immature from cradle to grave.

I had two unsettling conversations with my lifelong friend, months back.  In the first, she lambasted me for being unforgiving, unloving, and torturing two dear old mutual friends who loved me dearly.  When I protested that she’d been told an unfair, untrue story, gave my account of the senseless conflict that was being pinned entirely on me, my “defensiveness” proved my guilt to my old friend.   I had the creepy feeling I was the defendant in a witch trial.

“You’ve worn me out,” she said as she got off the phone to have dinner.  

A few weeks later the theme was my dishonesty.  She told me that if I really can’t forgive these cherished lifelong friends, who clearly love me, I have to be honest enough to tell them.  Neatly, the entire mountain of bat shit had been piled on me.  Not only an unforgiving, loveless, torturing prick, but a lying one too.    My character had been assassinated, this old friend was talking to a despised, stinking corpse.  I seemed to be the only one who didn’t realize I was already dead.

I understand now that what sent the old friend who set this all afoot into a rage was that I was probably the only person in her life who, in fifty years, had never contradicted her about anything.  I was always easy to get along with, even when she was being mercurial, controlling, judgmental, I always understood and never took anybody’s side against her.  Suddenly, during a tense “vacation” with her and her husband, worn out by days of mounting stress, I seemed to be defying her — for the first time ever!  This “et tu, Brute” moment made her fly into a rage and have a full blown shit fit.  And thinking about it, what safer target for her rage, that had been building for a long time, amid the endless Covid crisis at work and awful, mounting tension with her husband, than the one person in her life who had never made her feel bad about herself?

From her point of view, as she angrily explained whenever I brutally tried to resolve the conflict, she never got angry, never did anything wrong, she only apologized to me the morning after I claimed she was mad because I was clearly so weak that I’d been hurt by nothing after I’d been so threatening and aggressive and completely to blame for any “tension” I perceived.  I was also stubbornly unwilling to take responsibility for causing all the bad feelings between everyone there.  From her husband’s point of view, whatever she said, that was his position.  If she said something different, that was his new position.  

While I spent a year of torment trying to fix a broken friendship, and preserving their privacy (since I truly didn’t understand how things had come to this ugly pass), these determined winners were working overtime to control the news cycle and destroy my good name among everyone we knew in common.  Of the two stories about our falling out, their ever-evolving one and the one we’d all lived, one makes much more sense than the other.  This could be a big problem to these two respectable, sociable people, make them look shamefully imperfect and less than 100% admirable.  Intolerable!  They went to work, passionately confiding in everyone we knew in common the story that left them the complete victims of me, an unaccountably vicious asshole. 

From their friends’ point of view, if they were both that hurt, and told the identical story, and Eliot wasn’t talking about it, then Eliot must be a sadistic, diabolical, lying, unloving fuck, no matter how he might use his silver plated lawyer’s logic to try to twist the facts, and love itself, to obscure that ugly truth.  No matter how well he’d hid this from us during those decades of carefree, seemingly loving friendship.

Most people, you may have noticed, prefer simplicity to complication.  It is a worldwide disease at the moment — there are only two choices in any situation.  It is either Red or Blue, Unregulated Capitalism or Totalitarian Communism, Systemic Racism or Senseless Rage, absolute forgiveness no matter what or an inability to love.  This is by design.  It is much easier for tyrants to rule unopposed if everything is phrased as a war — black vs. white, good vs. evil, God vs. Satan, love vs. hate and everyone is constantly provoked to fight to prove they are on the right side of these ephemeral absolutes.  The irresistible power of this divisive strategy is that a statement like “good people on both sides” when one side are Nazis and Klansmen and the other side is their intended victims, cannot be seen as a statement of moral neutrality.   Claiming there are good violent racists means that you agree with their plan.

Political tyranny is a vast human nightmare, and a necessary part of its hellscape is the terrifying personal isolation of all citizens, particularly if they don’t take part in the lynchings and pogroms.  Everyone is vulnerable, at any time, to being denounced to the authorities and subjected to the harshest punishment.  The same goes for the reign of personal tyranny, maintained by what is often called Narcissistic Abuse.  The person who can never be wrong has the same bag of tricks as any despot and the same reflex to deploy them to deadly effect if unquestioning loyalty to them is ever violated.  If you live within the social circle of someone who can never be wrong, who must always be seen as perfect, and obeyed, know that they have always practiced bringing others to their side against all enemies and get used to the taste of being vilified and cast out if you ever make them feel bad about anything.

Doesn’t make the bitterness of it that much easier to get used to, mind you, but it’s a good reminder that the world is simply the world, homo sapiens are not necessarily “wise apes” and that the only things we can really influence, on a good day, are our reactions to the ongoing shit show.  Cold comfort on a cold day, I know, but better than resorting to desperate acts, no?

Then, silence.