Author Archives: oinsketta

Worldview and World (part 2)

Yesterday was the one year anniversary of an early morning drug raid in Kentucky, using a warrant based on outdated intel, that resulted in the killing of an innocent 26 year-old EMT named Breonna Taylor in her own home. The police who broke down her door and began wildly firing into the apartment were not charged in her death, though they left her bleeding with 8 bullet wounds for twenty minutes before any medical efforts were taken to save her (depraved indifference?). As she lay dying they were busy arresting her boyfriend, who fired once at men who broke down the door — men all but one witness said never identified themselves as police. The boyfriend recently had felony charges against him dismissed, after only a year. Remember, this deadly military style assault was to enforce Prohibition, Louisville police were there to intercept illegal drugs, though none were found. Although no police were charged in Taylor’s killing, scores of protesters calling for accountability for the officers and an end to “no knock” warrants, were arrested for, essentially, felony protest. Fair is fair.

Hard as it is to believe, your worldview will determine how you see the facts of this awful case. A good percentage of the country sees this killing simply as an unavoidable tragedy, something that couldn’t have been helped. Some will argue that Taylor’s boyfriend should not have pulled out his licensed gun when he was abruptly woken by the sound of men breaking down the door. Once he fired into the leg of one of the men, whatever happened after that was coming to him. The same people will defend the Stand Your Ground laws that extend the Castle Doctrine (you may defend yourself with deadly force against a deadly threat in your home) to anywhere and anyone you fear might use deadly force against you. A black kid walking down a suburban Florida street is fair game to shoot, as we have learned, if you can prove he scared the shit out of you.

It sounds simplistic, I know, to insist on a premise like all communal hatred resulting in violence flows from the same source. Or making the obvious point about the central role early life experiences play in shaping how we see the world, for that matter. It is beyond dispute that how we see the world, our worldview, not only influences what we believe and how we act, it creates the world we live in, to a great extent. All simplistic and self-evident sounding, I know. but I hope my rambling here will shed some light for us, somehow.

Take every situation where an enraged mob goes after a certain group of people simply based on the other group’s ethnic, religious, racial or political identity and rains living hell down on them. Lately it’s angry American fools bashing elderly Asians, shoving them to the ground, slashing them with knives, because they blame all Asians for the “Wuhan Flu”, as our former president, a big fan of tough talk and violence of every kind, dubbed it. How about that Nobel Peace Prize winner, former political prisoner turned prime minister, Aung San Suu Kyi silent on the mass killings and forced evacuations of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims in her country? Two million Tutsis, slaughtered by hand, in a short, bloody span of time, by machete wielding Hutus, another tribal group. Every “ethnic” massacre is a variation on the same theme. The names change, the victims and perpetrators wear different hats, the methods of killing change, but it’s the same thing, every time. Ever hear of “necklacing?” Hell of a technique, Brownie:

Necklacing is the practice of extrajudicial summary execution and torture carried out by forcing a rubber tire filled with petrol around a victim’s chest and arms, and setting it on fire. The victim may take up to 20 minutes to die, suffering severe burns in the process.[1]

source

How can one human “necklace” another human? Easy, apparently, given the right set of circumstances. For whatever reason, the mass killing of despised “others” is a regular feature of our common history anytime masses of desperate people get really enraged, particularly when they are encouraged in this violent group mania by their leaders. It’s always a very similar horror story, a few details changed.

I don’t know why the commonality of every instance of mass violence seems so hard to grasp, or why it doesn’t act as a kind of brake on these recurring slaughters. Every time I hear the next atrocity story it reminds me of the grappling in the media with the “question” of exactly why the insane guy with the automatic weapon went nuts and killed a bunch of strangers before blowing his own head off. It’s as if, perhaps this time, the insane “gunman” who went crazy and started massacring before he “turned the gun on himself” will be the first to have a brilliant, totally valid theory for his insanely violent act.

Seeing that horrific black and white clip of the guy in the cap dumping a load of jiggly, rubber human skeletons down a chute in the early 1940s did not instantly convince me of the commonality of all such massacres, (and we’ll stipulate that the Nazi death machine was unique in its scope, size and efficiency) but it had an effect on my thinking about the subject, my view of the world.

You see something like that as a child and it stays with you, changes the way you think about “solutions” that involve the mass torture and murder of our fellow homo sapiens. I think I would have felt the same way if the clip had been of charging Turks on horseback whipping wailing Armenian women, children and old people into a raging river to drown. How are those things different? How is either fundamentally different than a man with a gun and a badge nonchalantly kneeling on another man’s neck until the pleading, handcuffed man stops moving and then keeps his knee there until the man is dead? Each of these things is characterized by what the law, in an excellent phrase, calls “depraved indifference to human life.”

On a certain fundamental level, we are all taught to accept that war, and mass killing, are simply an unfortunate, but sometimes necessary, inevitable part of politics. A particularly muscular form of diplomacy, practiced at the behest of God’s imperfect but powerful vessels. The way we have been helping the Saudi royal family starve the people of Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East, or our devastating blockade of Venezuela — a nation we are crippling economically during a deadly pandemic — just other, more coercive forms of diplomacy. Tally ho! These inferior people, given to a tyrannical form of government, or political beliefs we find repugnant, have simply got to learn to get with the program, we’ll gently starve them ’til they wise up!

Back to the personal, the place where “political” and “religious” beliefs, and “morality” are instilled. If your parent was humiliated as a child, as mine were, they will tend to see the world in a zero sum way. They can’t risk being humiliated any more, the possibility is too traumatic, and so they phrase every disagreement or conflict as a war that must be fought to the death. My father, as he was dying, said he always felt we could never have a real discussion of anything, he thought a fight was inevitable. He said that it had been his fault, because he lacked insight and saw everything in blazing black and white — a win-lose battle to the death. He felt every disagreement with his children inevitably led to a fight since he had never learned any other way, in spite of his education, sensitivity and group dynamic training, vast professional experience and highly developed mind.

In the end, as he was dying, it became important to him, as he reviewed his suddenly-ending life, to confront, out loud, for the first time, how crabbed and destructive his view of the world had been. It should have been as simple as “if you’re in pain, and come to me perplexed, let me listen patiently and try to help you instead of fighting you because I’m angry and afraid.” He realized that simple truth of being a decent human too late, as he apologized to me for the only time in his life. “I was wrong,” he said, also for the first time. Why did it take rapidly approaching death to bring these basic human realizations to him? Beats me. Tragic, truly. On the other hand, what a slippery gift he handed me right before he shuffled off and left me to close his dead eyelids with two fingers of my right hand.

There is really no risk to listening quietly to someone else’s pain, if you care about the person. It is often the only useful thing you can do for someone you care about when they are hurt, understanding how they feel. But to many people, the realm of feelings is always fraught and ready to burst into war. A war over who has the right to feel pain, how much pain is reasonable to feel, to express, how outrageous it is to pour out your troubles as though the person you are crying to doesn’t have even worse troubles! If you tell me I hurt you I am no friend if I say “that’s your problem, asshole.” There is a productive conversation, that starts with yielding to the other person’s right to be hurt, without fighting over how contemptible a worm he or she is to feel that way.

In the wake of my projectile vomiting after that searing Nazi footage from Let My People Go, my father was implacable. It was going to be a hard lesson to me. You see– you disobeyed good parental advice, your mother and I both begged you and advised you not to see what you can now never unsee, strictly for your own good, and now you want my pity because what I warned you about came sickeningly true? It’s good for you to remember next time, you contumacious little prick (yeah, look that up in that dictionary you like so much). And, by the way, seven is not too young to start acting like a man, particularly since you are so smart you don’t need anybody’s advice… (etc.)”

An understandable reaction, I understood it, even at the time. Still, not the reaction a child wants or needs. Understandable from a tit for tat perspective, but not from any other, really.

It is also tempting to repeat the treatment you experienced. This is a familiar tic of the victimized, do it to somebody else, as if abusing another victim will make you feel powerful enough to take your shame and hurt away. The way the more violent of the Ukrainians, recently starved en masse by an inhuman enemy, took it out on their own long-time, powerless, enemies when the opportunity to do so without repercussions presented itself.

I recall the vivid TED talk given by likeable neuroscientist Jim Fallon. He was a funny, mild-mannered expert in the configuration of the psychopath’s brain. He had his family tested at one point, and reviewing the brain scans, found one that was a classic psychopath’s brain. It was his own. He shrugged about it, even when his family and friends unanimously confirmed that he showed many traits of the psychopath. The fact that he didn’t flinch at the diagnosis proved that he had that moral nonchalance characteristic of the psychopath. He didn’t pretend to be upset. His point was that if someone with his brain configuration did not have their violence activated by experiencing or witnessing traumatic physical and psychological abuse during a certain early developmental window, they’d grow up to be people who lacked empathy, but who could also joke, be mild mannered, lead productive lives and never commit violence against anyone else.

Fascinating, if sometimes terribly dark, the way our views of the world are often formed by events early in life, before we know very much. I’ll hope to be on to cheerier subjects soon, boys and girls.

A Nazi’s Best Hope

A Nazi’s best hope is the same as a Ku Klux Klansman’s best hope. Finding individuals so moved by terror and rage that they will neither question nor shrink from doing whatever you convince them must be done, and rallying millions, if possible, around this righteous work. Not everyone can tie a man to a tree, bullwhip him, break his fingers and then take a blow torch to him. You have to be a certain kind of person to do that kind of work. There are many, however, who will stand by enthusiastically watching the torturer do his job, yelling encouragement, if they truly believe the person catching hell is some kind of devil. Some in the crowd might have to laugh a giddy, drunken laugh to choke down the inner revulsion it would be natural for them to feel, but they’ll be part of the mob that drags the man to the tree, they’ll talk about it with their buddies afterwards, the great thing that was done.

A Nazi’s best hope is convincing enough people, hearing about this lighting up of the night with the burnt flesh of another human, to feel the dead man “had it coming because he was evil.” That’s what propaganda is for. You need to convince enough people, usually not the best or the brightest, doesn’t matter, really, just make enough people willing to act believe, deep down, that they are the instrument of justice, the people singled out for torture deserve it. Once you have enough people on board, more respectable people will finance it, begin signing on for leadership positions, you’ll have all the funding and legitimacy you need. History proves that unscrupulous wealthy people who want unlimited power can always use a violent mob, as long as its violence can be directed toward the right enemies.

Who were the killers of my great-aunts and great-uncles, my mother’s many cousins? Neither Nazis nor klansman as such. They were a members of persecuted nationality who had the misfortune to live in the fertile breadbasket of Europe. They were fucked generation after generation, slaughtered and enslaved for hundreds of years by the Mongols, the Poles, the Russians, whoever had the more powerful military. Stalin, between 1932 and 1933, starved millions of them to death, in the Holodomor, the deadliest man-made famine in history. As many as four million Ukrainians were deliberately starved to death, by a totalitarian Communist madman, while their grain sat in huge piles, guarded by Stalin’s soldiers, waiting for Soviet authorities to take the grain back to the motherland to feed to their citizens [1]. Any hungry Ukrainian who moved toward these mountains of Ukrainian wheat was shot on the spot.

The Ukrainians who scrambled over the corpses of my people, after shooting them, had been arguably driven to their depravity by recent history (the mass starvation had been a decade earlier). The murderous Ukrainians who killed my family don’t get off the hook because so many of them had been murdered, of course (you know what they say about two wrongs…), but you can understand how the despised of the earth might feel like taking it out on a group even more despised, while getting pats on the back from those with the power to exterminate everybody in their path. Ukrainians who opposed the sort of thing that was done to my family, who took what history would regard as a more heroic stance, often found themselves hanging from trees, disemboweled, their children butchered. Makes you think.

Makes me think how often the party that is willing to employ ruthless terror, to lie, threaten, sponsor gruesome violence, often has the final word, at least for a time.

I think of this as I watch the increasingly dangerous American dance of division that has been escalating now for decades, the one funded by our most unscrupulous and well-born right-wing citizens, enlisting a vast, angry army of the easily duped. You can watch it playing out in real time, more and more insanely violent rhetoric and behavior increasingly normalized. You wonder, as a humanist, what is it with the the ubiquity of these Nazi/klan motherfuckers?

Good, constant advertising is the key. Keep the message simple, first of all. Liberty and freedom are the most important American values, everything else comes after that. Americans do not tolerate being coerced, ever, we fought a revolution and countless wars against tyranny of all forms. Tell me to do something I don’t want to, I’ll tell you about my freedom to tell you to shut the fuck up, and if you don’t shut up, I have my freedom to shoot you in your big mouth if you look like you pose any kind of threat to me, my family or my property. You see, that’s freedom and if you want to take it, come on and try. Want to try to make me wear a face mask during an infectious worldwide plague? We’ll see what the Second Amendment has to say about that!

You hear right wing blowhards echoing this very point daily, even after the violent right-wing assault on the Capitol. A defiant Madison Cawthorn stands up in Congress, after being elected in his carefully gerrymandered district, and trumpets this heroic rightwing trope, weeks after a violent, armed mob (arrested insurrectionists in the “peaceful” mob had enough ammunition to kill everyone in the Capitol several times over) took over the Capitol building disrupting the final certification of an election that wasn’t close, or, in their phrase, “stop the steal”. Bellicose, unrepentant, violent rhetoric, tough talk, is a proven winner for fundraising: Cawthorn, Taylor Greene, Hawley, Cruz, and other GOP tough guys are raking it in these days, based on their proud defense of violent extremism, even armed sedition, in defense of liberty, which is no vice, to some.

The so-called decisive victory of Joe Biden, and the narrow Senate majority by Democrats when they got that Black preacher and the Jewish journalist “elected” in the Georgia runoff? Obviously the result of stolen elections, it’s common sense. Besides, all those patriots were doing on January 6th when they overran the Capitol was spontaneously fighting this sickening injustice, in the name of freedom. They paraded through the halls of the Capitol because their freedom and liberty had been stolen from them. They didn’t do anything Jesus Christ Himself didn’t do when He finally had enough and threw the corrupt moneychangers out of the Temple.

This accursed pandemic has provided a kind of high octane fuel to this crazy upping the ante on anything that will up the stakes. We are socially disoriented, frightened, thrown out of normal social and recreational routines, our interactions limited, interpersonal skills frayed, we are all isolated and connected more and more to disembodied voices on the devices we carry with us all the time. Every few minutes we get a notification beep from some opinionated source we may have recently consulted.

Here’s a hot question for your favorite pundit: in light of increased vaccinations, is it reasonable for states to ban all scientific precautions proven to halt community spread? Well, that would depend on who y’all trust, wouldn’t it? Is it crazy or smart politics to weaponize prudent easy to follow precautions to slow the spread of a deadly disease before we actually achieve herd immunity? That would depend on who y’all trust, wouldn’t it?

Depending on what we prefer to hear, we may eagerly learn about more evidence that the former president and an organized group planned, funded, advertised for and incited the January 6th riot, while ordering federal troops to stand down for 3 hours and 19 minutes during the riot, imagining a kind of Alamo (nothing glorious about the original one staged by a bunch of violent American slavery advocates, go google that shit show…) that would galvanize their faithful to obey a higher law, perhaps creating a glorious pantheon of martyrs to rally around. Or, in the alternative, that the patriots who took the corrupt bull by the horns on January 6 were merely spontaneous heroes, acting courageously to prevent the fraud of millions of irrationally angry N-words.

Is there middle ground here? Not really. It was either a riot, an insurrection desperately launched by a powerful madman and his associates to retain power after losing an election by an indisputable margin or an outpouring of spontaneous American devotion to liberty proving that Jesus Christ and the White Race really are the masters of the greatest country in history and cucks who don’t believe that can just suck it.

A study came out Tuesday that concludes that while early in the pandemic the infection and death rates were much higher in Democratically run states (being on the coasts, more densely populated, more tourism, larger airports, more international travelers, etc.) than in less populous Republican ones, by July 4 (neat irony) Blue states had started to control the spread of the disease, while Red states took the lead in infections and death and have surpassed those infection and death rates since [2].

Or, depending on your source of trusted news, the “study” was fake and partisan, paid for by wealthy pedophile blood drinkers like Michael Bloomberg (it was by the “Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Medical University of South Carolina” — duh!) intent on destroying our freedom by convincing us to keep our distance from others, wash our hands and wear masks, depriving us of our God-given freedom to spread whatever invisible so-called disease we want to whoever we want. Who are goddamned child-raping, blood-swilling pedophiles to tell us what to do?

Or, as the governor of Texas might say: y’all hate our freedom. After he reopened the state for business, parties and everything else, no strings attached, his attorney general (the one who brought the Supreme Court lawsuit attempting to throw out millions of votes in states Trump “lost”– the deranged suit signed on to by other Republican attorneys general and members of Congress) is now threatening to sue the city of Austin for trying to mandate reasonable COVID safety precautions like mask wearing and social distancing.

A Nazi’s best bet? That a lie will prove more powerful than any fact anybody can prove with other facts. Once you’ve got that, the sky’s the limit, dream big, any horrible problem in the world, real or simply perceived, will suddenly have a final solution, inspired by the intoxicating liberty of absolute power.

Our best bet? Working together, paying close attention, using the tools we have to organize, make our voices heard, to make sure these autocratic anti-science, alternative reality trumpeting minoritarian motherfucker’s stay in their holes.

At the very least by putting the burden back on the 40 minority party members trying to block debate by making them actively hold the floor continuously in a traditional filibuster rather than forcing the majority to get to 60 by finding 10 votes among a solid block of craven conformists who will not even vote to condemn a president for organizing, funding and inciting a violent riot in their own house — a riot that saw chants to hang their Vice President, suddenly an enemy of their party leader.

That is, you return to the old filibuster rules if you can’t finally get two conservative “moderate” “centrists” in your own party to go along with killing that relic of slavery and white supremacy in the Senate. The filibuster was created by Senators and put into the Senate rules. It takes a 1 vote majority to change the prime tool of obstruction into something that allows legislative debate to take place and laws to be passed and sent to the president for his or her signature.

The anti-fascist party is likely to have only one shot at this preservation of democracy business. It’s going to be a short window. Then we get massive voter suppression in a majority of states, gerrymandered voting for state court judges, to guarantee party loyalists get elected in state as well as federal courts, and, The Thousand Year Reich.

[1]

The Ukrainian famine—known as the Holodomor, a combination of the Ukrainian words for “starvation” and “to inflict death”—by one estimate claimed the lives of 3.9 million people, about 13 percent of the population. And, unlike other famines in history caused by blight or drought, this was caused when a dictator wanted both to replace Ukraine’s small farms with state-run collectives and punish independence-minded Ukrainians who posed a threat to his totalitarian authority.

source

[2]

States with Democratic governors had the highest incidence and death rates from Covid-19 in the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, but states with Republican governors surpassed those rates as the crisis dragged on, a study released Tuesday found.

“From March to early June, Republican-led states had lower Covid-19 incidence rates compared with Democratic-led states. On June 3, the association reversed, and Republican-led states had higher incidence,” the study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Medical University of South Carolina showed.

“For death rates, Republican-led states had lower rates early in the pandemic, but higher rates from July 4 through mid-December,” the study found.

source

Worldview and the world (part 1)

When I was quite young, early in elementary school, I ignored my parents strong warning and sat in a hotel auditorium full of chain smoking teenagers (this was probably 1963) watching a movie about Jewish history. The movie was called Let My People Go, it was an argument for a Jewish state being the only solution in a world that was constantly trying to kill the eternally homeless Jews. The idea was that if the Jews had a state like every other nation, it would be a refuge that could be defended against all enemies. Without a state, it was always a matter of time until mobs could be loosed on the Jews — as they had been to murderous effect against most of my own family, just thirteen years before I was born, as I’d later learn.

My parents urged me not to see the movie partly because I was subject to terrible dreams as a boy. Looking back now, I see these dreams as an expression of my fear at being constantly attacked by a prosecutorial father and an emotional mother who generally followed the old man’s lead. Something about the hot seat I often sat in didn’t sit right with me, if I may put it that way. I was left to work out what was wrong with this picture in my fertile imagination, which expressed itself in nightmares back then.

My mother read me a book about Noah’s Ark, and turned the pages of the large picture book where I saw thousands drowning in the swirling flood waters, because they were wicked. I wasn’t consoled by the fact that God found all these millions of creatures wicked, I was upset about all the animals that drowned, every lamb, calf, koala bear, puppy, kitten, along with every child on the earth at that time. I was too young to think “what the fuck kind of insanely vengeful God is this who takes this kind of psycho revenge on evil humans by wiping out virtually all life on the planet?” I didn’t think “how come he spared all the aquatic creatures?”. I had a recurrent nightmare of drowning, especially during thunder storms. Eventually, one rainy day, my mother took me to Far Rockaway where we drove past homes built right on the ocean front. That probably helped.

I lost my fear of dying in another one of God’s angry floods, but then it was a scene from a Tarzan movie I saw one day on the little black and white portable TV with the rabbit ears. Jane and some other white folks were escaping from a tribe of cannibals who had tied them up. I don’t know how this could be true, but I recall vividly the moment when a hurled spear felled Jane from behind as she fled. Must have grazed her, I don’t know how else to explain it. Tarzan eventually saved the day but the image of that cannibal brute hurling that spear into Jane’s back as she ran for her life chilled me to the bone. It wasn’t Jane in my nightmares, who was getting the point of a spear between her shoulder blades, it was my mother. Who was throwing the spear? No idea, but who would do such a thing? Who ate people?

My mother took me to the library where she found a book about Hollywood movie making that had plenty of photos of actors, almost all of them white, being painted black and turned into cannibals for Tarzan movies. In one, a half-black painted cannibal is wearing glasses, reading the paper while a make up artist works on him. He’s smoking a cigarette. “You see?” my mother said, “it’s all fake. These people all go home to their own kids, it’s movie making, it’s fantasy, made up, not real”. I did see. I think it had an effect on my cannibal nightmares. The racist underpinnings of the Tarzan franchise, the nonchalant endorsement of colonialism and the scarcity of actual cannibalism among Africans, were not important to me at that time. I had a way to understand that I’d been sold a tissue of bullshit by a Hollywood movie and the dreams stopped.

“With Tarzan I could show you it was all make believe. This movie will show you things that are worse than any bad dream you ever had, and I can’t show you anything to make them go away because these things actually happened,” my mother told me with tears in her eyes. She cried as she begged me not to see the movie. But I was a tough guy and I insisted. She sobbed, my father attempted to bully me, but I wouldn’t back down so they let me have my way.

I remember a smug feeling as I watched the early scenes, stone carvings, etchings, crude drawings of brutality, somber narration. “This is nothing…” I remember thinking, once again my parents just being jerks, treating me like a baby. As the movie traveled from antiquity to the present day the images got more and more realistic, until there were photographs. That got my attention. “Are those people dead?” I remember thinking as they flashed a photo from the Age of Pogroms in Russia in the early twentieth century, The thought may have occurred to me, “Jesus, my grandparents came from Russia and they must have been alive by then…”

Then there were movies, which really got my attention. I’d heard of Hitler and there he was, dancing that insane fake jig I learned years later had been a neat bit of editing by an American or British propagandist who took a clip of a triumphant Hitler stamping his foot and repeated it several times to make it appear he was doing a mad victory jig. Hitler himself, as he wrote in Mein Kampf, had nothing but admiration for such hate and fear-inspiring propaganda tricks and, as he was sitting on top of the world after the fall of Paris, or maybe it was Poland, I’m sure he wasn’t much bothered by his weak enemies trying to make him look crazy.

I seem to remember my little sister there with me at first, but she was gone by then. All around me the smoking teenagers were crying. I wasn’t prepared for what I saw next. The perhaps ten second black and white film clip is seared in my memory as if it was put there by a branding iron. A short stocky man in a cap, with a cigar or cigarette in his mouth, is wheeling a gigantic wheelbarrow. The wheelbarrow is full of naked, jiggling, rubbery looking skeletons covered with skin. He comes to the edge of a gigantic pit, with a chute. He upends the wheelbarrow and the emaciated corpses wriggle down the chute. There was a cherry on top. The guy with the cap throws his cigar in after them and heads back for another load of skeletons.

On the soundtrack violins are weeping and wailing as this hideous action takes place. The teenagers around me are all sobbing. I make a run for it, through the cigarette smoke illuminated by the light of the projector. Make it up to our room in the hotel above, get through the door, see my mother’s crying face and immediately vomit my guts out.

In those moments the beginning of my worldview was sealed. Governments, like people, are capable of good or great evil. When a violent madman is in charge, millions of people will do whatever he tells them to do, no matter how insane. You can disobey the authorities, of course, but they will just torture or kill you, it’s nothing to them. None of us are safe, especially if you belong to a traditionally despised minority group.

As I grew older I was mystified and disgusted by the arguments victim groups seem to constantly have about who suffered the worst. Instead of all victims working together, somehow we became divided into interest groups, suffering lobbies. Blacks and Jews, once allies in the Civil Rights struggle here, wound up turned against each other. The argument over who suffered more is often bitter.

The atrocity of the slave trade lasted for centuries, it was an unspeakably dehumanizing horror involving widespread rape and murder and millions died after being kidnapped from their homes in Africa. In the US, after the official end of slavery, there was a century of white supremacist terrorism the US government did nothing about. There were frequent pogroms in which many blacks, including old people and children, were massacred in what were always misleadingly called “race riots”. There is still widespread racism against the descendants of slaves that half of the country is in violent denial about.

The Jews caught organized hell in Europe where, during a two year-period 1942-1943 virtually my entire family was massacred. It was history’s most prodigious act of mechanized genocide, millions killed on an industrial scale in a few short years. Jews have been hated for two thousand years or more, stubborn, proud, too smart, often defamed as deicides. killers of Jesus.

How are these things — the Holocaust and the Slave Trade — different in their essence? And there have been others, everywhere, just as horrific. What use is the infernal debate about whose suffering is worse? We all need to work together or Hitler and the Klan win, no? This has been in my mind since I disobeyed my parents and saw that awful movie as kid.

(end of part one)

Little Girl Wants to Live

Sekhnet and I have been very sad to see Little Girl, one of the feral cats we care for, seemingly following the progression of her mother’s quick, sudden death a few months back. Little Girl, a skilled hunter, who with her great paw-eye coordination, loves to catch thrown cat treats midair, with both paws and, often pop the treat directly into her mouth, is closely bonded to Sekhet and has lately been much more interactive with me. Now, no longer hunting or seeking to have treats thrown to her, she seems to be dying. The other day Sekhnet put out a box with a rug in it, in the sun, and Little Girl emerged to sun herself there each of the last few days.

A few nights ago, I went out to check on her. I sat next to her insulated sleeping box and saw she was in there and breathing, I didn’t want to bother her. She generally doesn’t like to be petted in there and lets you know with a quick yowl and a flash of her long, sharp claws.

While I sat by her box, her sister Whiteback hopped the fence and wanted to be petted and get a few treats. I obliged and as Whiteback began crunching the treats I saw Little Girl’s paw emerge from the box, reaching toward me as if to tap me on the arm. Her mighty claws were, for once, not extended (see photo below of her mighty claws, when she was a kitten). I put some treats in the palm of my hand and reached inside. Little Girl ate them all, licking my palm when the treats were done. She ate a few more batches. I was glad to see her appetite seemed better. When she was done eating I petted her a few times, until, eventually, she gave me a brief taste of the claw, indicating she’d had enough affection.

Her mother was about six when she died, Little Girl is not yet three. She’s been hanging in there so far, sat on Sekhnet’s lap for a long time yesterday, eating delicacies that Sekhnet brought her. We’re hoping for the best, her recovery, thinking perhaps a younger, healthier cat might be able to fight off whatever killed her mother, unlikely though it seems. We’re encouraged that she’s still eating a bit.

Here are two photos of her with brothers Turtleback and Whitefoot, from June, 2018 (Little Girl center in each). Those two wonderful little souls were gone within a few months of their birth. Little Girl, though she has been folding up her tents for the last week or two, does not seem ready to call it a day yet. It is a hard struggle for survival out there for feral cats, the ones who survive are tough, tough, tough– and lucky.

As I type I got this update on my phone from Sekhnet in the garden, under the caption “cozy dog…”, informing me that she ate a tiny bit more:

Your Mother’s Anger

My mother, who as a girl, and even as an adult, had been brutalized by her domineering mother, was prone to flashes of anger. I learned to avoid provoking my mother’s outrage toward the end of her life. I was generally quite successful, but there were a few slip ups.

One happened not long before she died, in the narrow hallway outside the bathroom of her apartment in Florida, where the short hallway from her bedroom met the rest of the place. She had mentioned her anger at her daughter, and said she felt guilty about it, since her daughter had been taking such excellent care of her in recent years. She loved her, and depended on her, but there were certain issues that just made her furious.

I knew these issues well, from her point of view and from her daughter’s, both sometimes called me to vent. The stories were remarkably consistent, the major issue that drove each other crazy was constant. A good mediator could have helped a lot, their most common area of conflict was straightforward and seemingly easy to fix, but each was absolutely convinced the other would never go for mediation.

In an effort to reassure my mother about the anger she felt guilty about, I said that many mothers and daughters have such issues. It was fairly classic, it seemed to me, and I rattled off a number of these troubled mother-daughter relationships among people we knew. Believing that personal insight is the only key to interpersonal problem-solving, as I do, I misguidedly I pointed out that she had had ongoing conflicts with her own mother, in childhood and throughout the years I saw them together. My mother instantly flew into a rage.

“I had a wonderful relationship with my mother!” she snarled. We were standing very close to each other in that narrow space, her face turned red, her teeth were bared, she could have reached out and started choking me, if she’d been the violent type. I turned on a fucking dime.

“What do you feel like tonight, Lester’s or the Thai place?” I asked, pivoting as nonchalantly as Fred Astaire.

“Ooh, let’s have Thai,” she said, smiling in anticipation, and in great relief that I was immediately shutting the hell up about her difficult childhood.

That was the graceful end of my last attempt to shine any kind of light anywhere my mother didn’t want light shined.

It makes a cute anecdote, like a fortune cookie. Adroit son distracts angry mom with delicious bauble. It’s a little funny. On the other hand, it’s serious as the cancer that was eating at my mother in those final days.

Your mother’s anger?

She may never tell you the reasons for it, even those she knows well, preferring the painful, unpredictably rippling repercussions of repressing painful feelings, especially shameful, humiliating ones (who wants to feel that shit?) to laying out the many reasons she has to feel rightfully angry, especially laying this out to her children. It is the mother’s prerogative whether or not to give any insight into why she is sometimes short-tempered, or flies into a rage. She may know something about it, she may not.

I keep thinking of two of the luckiest breaks I’ve had in my life, both involving gifts of difficult honesty from people who loved my parents and cared deeply for me. The first one came from my parents’ best friend Arlene, when I was in my twenties. There was no doubt of their love for each other, there was never more spirited conversation, laughter and fun than when Arlene and her husband Russ were in the house. She took the trouble, during a long sunset walk across a beautiful hill, when I visited her after Russ died, to make me understand that my parents’ were basically unhappy people and that their unhappiness had nothing to do with me, though I undoubtedly, and understandably, blamed myself, since my parents always did. It was like Arlene had reached up and pulled a string to turn on a light in the darkness. It was the first inkling I had of a mature and beneficial understanding of my life up to that point.

The second lucky break, which I have written about many times, was my father’s first cousin Eli, who, toward the end of his long life, after many, many visits and long discussions deep into the night, finally revealing something that explained a deeply buried mystery about my father’s implacability. Eli and my parents loved each other as much as Arlene and my parents did. There was no motive on Eli’s part, as there had been none on Arlene’s, to in any way hurt or disparage my parents. These things were told to me strictly to help me understand a perplexing mystery they saw me wrestling with.

Eli told me, with limitless sorrow, that Chava, my father’s mother and Eli’s favorite aunt, a woman who loved Eli to death and who had always pampered him, had whipped my infant father in the face from the time he could stand. He’d witnessed it many times.

“How old was he when she started?” I asked Eli.

“However old you are when you can first stand on your two legs, I don’t know, one and a half, two?” he said with infinite sadness.

If those two revelations had never come to me, I have no idea how my life would be today, after the rocky start I had. Arlene’s insight made me begin to realize that trying to please people who could never be pleased, who would always blame me for their frustrations no matter what, was a fool’s errand. Eli’s flooded me with sudden sympathy for my poor bastard of a father. It made me understand how hard he must have struggled not to do the same to my little sister and me, even as he used other means to senselessly punish us. I had to give the man a certain amount of credit, after learning about his own senselessly destructive whippings, for limiting his destructiveness to words and rage. He could have easily started beating the hell out of me when I defied him as an adversarial, highly skilled baby.

Eli’s terrible revelation let directly to me, a few years later, being able to fully understand that my father, a victim of unthinkable abuse, had done his best with the very fucked up hand he’d been dealt. He had to fight to the death, it was that or face the horror of his own mother shamelessly humiliating him from the time he could stand, simply for the crime of being alive. That was how he saw the world, anyway, a bleak place of constant war and unreliable alliances. Fuck. Think about how that kind of treatment from your mother would warp your sense of yourself, your place in the world, your role as a parent. Knowing about my father’s traumatic childhood was essential, it allowed me to finally let go of a lot of anger I’d been carrying around.

I know there are many people, though I’ve met relatively few, who had a wonderful relationship with both parents. To you I say– you are truly blessed, and surely grateful, as you would have learned to be from people who were also grateful for the blessings in their lives, including their children.

For virtually everybody I’ve met, usually one or the other parent was better, sometimes just by virtue of being less monstrous than the other. We are lucky to get love and admiration from one parent, or if not a parent, another adult we meet early on. Even in the worst of situations, we humans always look to rationalize a bad situation, especially when we are young, inexperienced, and at the mercy of things and people we have little hope of understanding. We need to develop this ability to rationalize pain or be destroyed. If it was your father who was more openly at war with you, welcome to the club, there’s half a world full of members. To those whose mother was the more ruthless caregiver, and there are many millions there with you, you have my sympathy.

My point here, as I struggle to clarify and fully understand the quicksand I am gently splashing in, is that, if my troubled life is any indication of what’s good or bad for anyone else’s, the more we understand, the more insight we have into troubling things that happened to our parents, the better our chances of resolving conflicts within ourselves that are utterly hopeless when everything remains resolutely hidden and all personal life is a matter of pretending that the shame behind anger and self-loathing is nothing. The formulation of those who hide this way is intolerable, but I will reduce it to a footnote, so as not to ruin an otherwise reasonable piece with a tell-tale snarl of my own at the end [1].

[1] The formulation of the abusive insister on secrecy, the provider and hider of shame, goes something like this:

“Nothing at all to see here, history is overrated. Shit happens, life looks forward, not backwards. The past is prologue to nothing. Trust me, just be happy, don’t be a judgmental, angry, vindictive person like your insane uncle. Don’t worry about your mother’s pain, your father’s. It helps nobody. I already told you, for the thousandth time, the check’s in the mail and I won’t come in your mouth, so stop struggling so much, would you?”

American Healthcare under the unamended, serially challenged ACA

I got a notice on Sunday from the New York State of Health, the state entity that administers the Affordable Care Act Marketplace in NYS, selling various plans and being the final arbiter of all things health insurance for millions of otherwise uninsured New Yorkers. It has been run, since its inception, by a marginally competent and apparently energetic Cuomo appointee named Donna Frescatore. Under her stewardship, you can get the New York State of Health to fix their own errors (if they result in denial of coverage or denial of the subsidy the law says your income provides for) only after arbitration, a process that takes just three months or so. I’ve had to do this twice over the years (while having no health insurance the second time). Fair is fair. Frescatore has been promoted for her excellent work at the NYS of Health and now also runs New York State Medicaid, because, why not? Albany is known as a corrupt town and Cuomo is suddenly looking every bit as obnoxious and autocratic as many of us long felt he is.

Anyway, because the New York State of Health gave me no notice last March that I needed to upload a document I’d forgotten to maintain my insurance coverage (though they sent a timely notice to my insurance company, informing them to cancel my insurance effective April 1) I found myself without affordable health care during the first full month of the pandemic’s initial surge in New York City, where I live.

I found out when a doctor’s office called me to tell me there was a problem with my upcoming visit, my insurance had been rejected. In disbelief, since I’d paid premiums for the entire year, I contacted my insurance company and learned it was true. This time, they informed me with regret, NYS had cancelled it. The insurance company apparently has no legal obligation to pass on such notice to the consumer under the PPACA. So sorry!

Infuriating, yes, scary too, particularly during a massive public health emergency that has now killed about 525, 000 Americans. Fortunately for me, I didn’t need to seek arbitration last April, and since I learned my insurance had been cancelled a few days before the deadline for getting it back in May, I was able to complete the ten minute on-line fix before the April 15 deadline for coverage in May. A friend advised me to go the the NY State of Health website and see why I’d be terminated. I uploaded the document they’d requested, the whole thing took a few minutes. If I’d had notice (NYS of Health claimed, falsely, that I had) I would have done this the day my insurance company was ordered by NYS of Health to cancel my insurance in 20 days. Last year my insurance was restored effective May 1. Slight harm, slight foul. I was glad to have health insurance again during lockdown.

When I went to renew my plan for 2021, in the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, when all New Yorkers are required to re-enroll, I was surprised to learn that my renewal was not due until May 1, 2021 (or April 15th, I guess). I verified this, paid my first six months’ premiums and have had no problem with services under my insurance since.

I’ve often questioned why the overwhelmed NYS of Health makes everyone re-certify in these hectic weeks at the end of the year, when phone lines are jammed, mistakes are routinely made, the website crashes, instead of on a rolling basis, say, by birthdate which would allow everyone to be better served. One characteristic of a great, unaccountable bureaucrat is inviolable rigidity.

I had a notice from NY State of Health on Sunday night, in their typical opaque bureaurcratese it notified me:

I suspected it had to do with my obligation to re-certify before the fifteenth of the month prior to the first month of coverage, on pain of losing health insurance with likely arbitration looming if I wanted help paying for ongoing health care. The arbitration is great, by the way, after only a month or two wait, you get a formal hearing over the phone, where a lawyer/arbitrator grills you and you present your side of the story complete with all evidence you may want to submit. A few weeks later you receive an arbitrator’s decision in the mail. I’m two for two in these, although, in fairness to everyone, I practiced law for fifteen years or so.

I keep thinking of the tens of thousands of poor bastards who lose insurance or premium subsidies every year who may not be up to putting on a legal showing of NYS of Health’s errors resulted in their loss of affordable health care. An experienced lawyer who doggedly searched the law for months, calling every state and federal (and NYC) office I could fine, spending hours on-line, I never found the law my insurance company had violated when they’d illegally terminated my insurance the previous (and instantly restored it when I filed an on-line complaint at the NYS Department of Finance– of course it was DOF!). I think, what chance does the average low-income New Yorker stand against the opaque Patient Protection Act?

Typical of all fucking notices from the NY State of Health, they bury the lede, (after informing the reader in the annual notice of notice email that the customer may have received the message in error). The notice is usually many pages long, and what you need to do is often set out on page eight or ten, like they want to make sure to fuck your brain good and proper before coming to the point, informing you of your inviolable obligation. Of course, this could be succinctly stated at the top of the notice, but… what the hey? I assume Donna Frescatore (who does not allow her subordinates at NYS of Health to give out her name) has something to do with this oppressive approach to informing low-income citizens of their rights and obligations. What you need to do to keep your health insurance could be up top, on page one of the important notice, but, you know, fuck it.

Much as I despise her type, Donna probably had nothing to do with this next bit, which is surely part of the Patient Protection Act itself (the communist inspired one passed on a party-line vote by the last illegitimate president before the present illegitimate one, inserted after massive, obvious but unprovable fraud — the very worst, most insidious kind of fraud!!):

IMPORTANT: When you end coverage with one plan and start a new one in the same year, all
of your cost-sharing responsibilities start over. For example, any payments that went toward the
annual deductible for your old plan will not apply to the new plan. This is true even if the new
plan is with the same company.

Which only stands to reason, you know, because, why not? Corporations are people too.

I remind all Americans that this shit is an exclusively American sickness– advertising medications — “ask your doetor!”, excluding eyes and teeth from the definition of “health care”, buying health insurance rather than health care itself, a trillion dollar industry with a million wealthy middle men demanding Americans pay way more for health care than citizens of any other civilized, wealthy nation in the world. Every “moderate” Democrat in Congress will defend each of these self-evident things as right, just as ordained by Jesus Christ Himself.

Medicare, the popular health insurance program for Americans over 65, had many problems when it was first passed under LBJ. Those problems were addressed and many were fixed over the next few years. In contrast, the ACA, a highly conservative plan (brainchild of the Heritage Foundation — deniers of climate science, promoters of the myth of voter fraud and so forth) that left the profits of large health corporations intact, has been attacked by angry Republicans since its passage, many attempts to repeal it launched (recall, it was only the dying John McCain’s dramatic thumbs down that saved it under Trumpie) and so all of its original warts and infirmities remain. When it works, it’s fine. When you hit any kind of snag, you’re pretty much fucked, patient protections or no.

Now I’m going to go back to read the rest of the fucking thing, the informative and entirely reasonable gem above was on page three or four.

Whew, further down the notice we learn:

Please Note: Changing your coverage is different than ending your coverage. If you want to switch
plans and do not want to make any other changes to your account, call NY State of Health to find out if
you are eligible to switch plans and to pick a different plan. Enrollment in Child Health Plus and the
Essential Plan can be changed at any time during the year.

I just read all seven pages of this important notice (that may have been sent to me in error), doesn’t seem to be any action I need to take at this time. Here are just some of the other languages one can request this important document in:

Getting Help in a Language Other than English

This is an important document. If you need help to understand it, please call 1-855-355-5777. We can
give you an interpreter for free in the language you speak.

Español (Spanish)
Este es un documento importante. Si necesita ayuda para entenderlo, llame al 1-855-355-5777. Podemos proporcionarle gratuitamente un intérprete en el idioma que habla.

繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
這是一份重要文件。如果您在理解這份文件上需要幫助，請撥打電話：1-855-355-5777。 我們可為您免費
提供一名會講您的語言的口譯人員。


简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
这是一份重要文件。如果您在理解这份文件上需要帮助，请拨打电话：1-855-355-5777。 我们可为您免费
提供一名会讲您的语言的口译人员。


Русский (Russian)
Это важный документ. Если вам нужна помощь, чтобы понять его, позвоните по телефону
1-855-355-5777. Мы можем бесплатно предоставить вам переводчика на ваш родной язык.

Kreyòl Ayisyen (Haitian Creole)
Sa a se yon dokiman enpòtan. Si ou bezwen èd pou w konprann li, tanpri rele 1-855-355-5777. Nou ka
ba ou yon entèprèt gratis nan lang ou pale a.

বাংলা (Bengali)
এ􀎜ট এক􀎜ট গুরুত্বপূণ ন􀎺িথ। যিদ এ􀎜ট বুঝেত আপনার সাহােয􀒝র প্রেয়াজন হয় তেব অনুগ্রহ কের 1-855-355-5777
এ কল করুন। আপিন􀎭য ভাষায় কথা বেলন আমরা আপনােক িবনামূেল􀒝􀎭স ভাষায়􀎭দাভাষী প্রদান করেত পাির।

اللغة العربية (Arabic(
هذه الوثيقة مهمة. وإذا كنت بحاجة إلى مساعدة لفهم الوثيقة، يُرجى الاتصال على الرقم 5777-355-855-1 .ويمكننا أن
نوفر لك مترجمًا فوريًا باللغة التي تتحدثها مجانًا.

한국어 (Korean)
중요 문서입니다. 이해하는 데 도움이 필요하시면, 1-855-355-5777번으로 전화하십시오. 귀하가 사용하는
언어의 무료 통역사를 제공해드릴 수 있습니다.

Français (French)
Ceci est un document important. Si vous avez besoin d’aide pour le comprendre, appelez le
1-855-355-5777. Nous pouvons vous offrir gratuitement les services d’un interprète qui parle votre
langue.


Polski (Polish)
Ten dokument jest ważny. Jeśli potrzebuje Pan(i) pomocy w jego zrozumieniu, proszę zadzwonić pod
numer 1-855-355-5777. Możemy zapewnić bezpłatne usługi tłumacza w Pana(i) języku.

􁤖हन्दी (Hindi)
यह एक महत्वपूण􁭅दस्तावेज ह।ै य􁳰द आपको इसेसमझनेकेिलए सहायता क􁳱आवश्यकता हो, तो कृपया 1-855-355-5777 पर
कॉल कर􁱶। हम आपको आप जो भाषा (􁳲हदी) बोलतेह􁱹उसम􁱶िनःशुल्क दभु ािषया सेवा प्रदान कर सकतेह।􁱹

اردو (Urdu(
یہ اہم دستاویز ہے۔ اگر آپ کو اسے سمجھنے میں مدد درکار ہے، تو براہِ کرم 5777-355-855-1پر کال کریں۔ ہم آپ کو
آپ کی زبان میں مُفت ترجمان فراہم کر سکتے ہیں

And I think to myself, what a wonderful world! It really is amazing how varied and adaptable we brilliant (and sometimes irrational and brutal) wise apes are. Can you say that in Urdu?

Irv’s deathbed dilemma

This is becoming a terrible irony I can’t seem to overcome. I didn’t agree with my father about certain things, but this indigestible thing that he found so maddening I can’t seem to get past either. On his deathbed, when the subject of a family member came up, my father, Irv Widaen, was fixated on an insoluble vexation.

I tried, unsuccessfully, to lead him past it. This single issue seemed to blot out everything else about that family member. My father simply could not get over this one thing, he returned to it over and over. After a more than twenty year wrestling match with the issue, I find myself stopped by the same thing that confounded Irv.

It’s unfair, perhaps, to write anything about this here, but it is burning me daily so I’ll do a delicate dance to set out the dilemma in the abstract. I must describe it without revealing any of the many details that would cause shame. Try that one on sometime, it is a good workout.

This is the larger problem– when you are forbidden to speak of a dark thing there is no way toward the light. You might be totally reasonable seeking to put a troubling issue on the table, but those who feel their very souls will be jeopardized by disclosure will fight you, literally, to the death. Many find it infinitely better to pretend than to face a painful thing, especially if they believe people can’t change anyway.

My father was pessimistic in this regard, always arguing that while people might make superficial changes to their behavior, their innate, fundamental natures could never be changed. If you make strides in controlling a temper that has gotten you in trouble many times, you are only pretending you are not angry, each time you restrain yourself, but you are still prone to it in a way that others, born less angry, are not.

To me that position made little sense, since learning to control your temper is a great stride forward in life. Either you can work to improve something important or not. But many are as pessimistic as my father was about our emotional elasticity, our ability to learn from our painful mistakes and do better. That pessimism itself prevents growth, since the pessimist feels that growth is an illusion.

So, I cannot mention the thing that is eating at me, not here, certainly not with the people involved, not anywhere really. It’s like the “disappearance” of the bulk of my family, on my mother’s side, in August, 1943, all led to a ravine on the northwestern edge of town for a bullet in the back of the head in that sloping mass grave. On my father’s side, there is no clue how they were all murdered or what happened to their corpses, all we know is that every one of them was killed. It was always a subject too terrible to discuss. What would have been the point?

My grandfather, the sole survivor of his large family (recently I discovered a younger brother or a nephew who had an amazing, harrowing adventure escaping death over and over as a draftee in the Soviet Army– the reason he was not in town when its Jewish population was liquidated) liked violent movies, “shooting pictures” he called them, and lived a quiet life of fear and prejudice. My grandmother swung between great cheerfulness and despair, drinking sizable quantities of vodka along the way. She lost all six of her siblings, her parents, all but one aunt and uncle, everybody she’d ever loved back home, but never said a word about it.

Again, thinking about it now, what can anyone really have said about such an atrocity, the hideous details of which I only confirmed recently? Maybe they should have been in therapy or something, but I can understand how they never discussed this indigestible horror with their grandson. I get why my parents kept their silence.

The thing that tormented my father as he was dying, the thing that torments me now, is an ongoing situation that nobody is allowed to talk about. Since nobody is allowed to talk about this individual’s long pattern of shameful deception and abuse, done and hidden year after year after year, unrepentantly, the only alternative is to pretend none of it ever happened. We do this for the sake of a loved one, I suppose, not that this pretend really helps anyone.

The price we pay for doing this is participating in a lie — pretending these awful things, real betrayals that have changed lives, never actually happened. The price we pay for continuing to be perplexed by this is that we make ourselves dangerous enemies of those who want to leave others in the dark, out of shame.

I remember sighing when my father kept bringing this situation up as he was dying. I was hoping he had another message I could play back to our family member, who’d had a troubling relationship with Irv — as we all did. I hoped in vain, I could never play the little digital recording to the family member — it would not have helped anyone. Now, almost sixteen years later, I find myself behind the same immovable rock my father was pinned by as he lay dying.

I can say only a few more things about it. My father, by his harmful behavior and his outright emotional abuse, kind of made this outcome inevitable. There’s a fucking irony for you, one I couldn’t go into when I was trying to comfort the complicated man as he was dying. I could have made an irrefutable case of direct cause and effect, but what would have been the point when the guy was trying so hard to make amends, to go in peace, when that was truly all I wanted for him?

We have all met people so damaged that they insist on things that make absolutely no sense. We see national figures making such ridiculous, lying pronouncements in the media every day. Someone I knew told me a few years back that she loved me, and her family loved me, that they considered me part of the family, but that if I didn’t immediately forgive someone who would not yield in his insistence that his many provocations were figments of my easily angered imagination, that there would not be a second chance. Love us now or you’re dead to us all, she told me. And so I was dead, because people who loved me now saw that I was a totally unforgiving fucking asshole, no matter about any actual apology or show of contrition that would have allowed me to do the thing I wanted to do, forgive a childhood friend.

This is a very important piece, often overlooked in the widespread belief that all forgiveness is good and any failure to forgive is a fault– true forgiveness can only happen when the person who has done the damage is contrite, expresses an understanding of the hurtfulness of their acts, promises to try to do better. Without contrition and seeking forgiveness reconciliation is a brittle sham, waiting for the next offense to shatter it. Some are able to empathize and make amends, others reflexively vilify the unforgiving person they were unable to apologize to. I don’t understand this, but it always strikes me as an indication of severe damage when someone tells me they love me, but that they’ll kill me if I don’t let go of all hurt instantly.

These things go back to our upbringing. Some people are raised by emotionally mature parents and they get the benefit of a parent who is able to keep the child’s best interest front and center and not confuse their own needs with the need to show their child the right way to deal with life’s challenges. In my case, sadly, both of my parents, although very intelligent, decent, with good senses of humor, had survived brutal childhoods that left them emotionally unable to not react with frustration and rage at times when a much better reaction would have been silence, more thought, and a reasonable response that actually dealt with the issue in a way that taught the right lesson. It did not help me greatly when I first realized this about my parents, but it helps me now.

Again, pain and fear will stop us in our tracks. “Why didn’t my mother love me?” is a painful question. The answer is bad too: she did, as best she could, in her fucked up, damaged, damaging way. This is hard to understand, hard to make any good use of. The only thing that can lead to any kind of useful insight is understanding how they became this way, what happened to make them monsters. In the case of this family member, that kind of inquiry is strictly forbidden. To even pose the question makes you an enemy, since it presupposes that this person should change, should be able to make amends to the people he hurts. The false image of this person as emotionally whole, and good, and always loving, needs to be fostered at all costs. And maintaining that false image requires lying.

As I was writing the draft of my intended book about my father, I was careful to make no mention of this person, or the dramatic dynamic that illustrated a side of my father so clearly. I did not want to lose any members of my small family by divulging what I knew they kept secret (those who even knew of it) at all costs. We agree to disagree (an odious concept), simply don’t talk about it, everybody knows where everybody stands, it’s fucked up, possibly emotionally indefensible, intellectually dishonest, but it is what it is and no philosophical wiseass fuck insisting on the abstraction of “truth” and its great value in understanding our place in the world is going to make any difference. Forgive and love or, at least pretend to do those things, simply play along with the long con, or else you are the fucking problem, Jack.

I am the fucking problem, no doubt about it. Which leaves me in the same untenable position I often found myself in as a boy– you may be absolutely correct, you may be righteous, your position might even be mature and the most helpful one around– but you are the fucking problem, you sick bastard. In the case of my troubled, damaged parents, I was able to finally come to a helpful understanding. This one, man, it’s just sodomizing me around the clock and trying to make me swear it’s doing nothing of the fucking kind, a demand such things typically make of us.

A Thousand Cuts

The dermatologist does a volume business, so the surgeon cuts deep, to cut only once and be done — he can see many more patients this way. Mohs surgery is designed to leave a minimal scar, particularly when removing a cancer on the face invisible to the naked eye, as this latest one (unseen by the dermatologist, diagnosed by me) was. But it takes time to remove the cells a few layers at a time, examine the cutting under a microscope, scrape a little more if needed. In a volume practice you simply cut down to the cartilage of the nose, examine the cutting under a microscope to verify you got the whole thing and you’re done.

As the patient, if you don’t want a deep scar, you can pay out of pocket to have your nose cut again, differently, stitches put in, etc. Or you can stop being a crybaby, this is the fourth or fifth scar on your nose anyway. Every other Mohs surgery you’ve had took hours, with this one you were in and out, after having the wound cauterized, in about thirty minutes.

You learn new words as you get older. Nocturia, waking at night to urinate. You hope to wake, anyway (so far, so good). Crepitate, the cracking sound your arthritic knee makes when you get up from a chair or the bed, the snap and pop accompanying the pain. Venous ablation — the process of inserting a wire into the veins of your leg to cauterize them from the inside to allow normal blood flow to return and reduce the odds of a stroke from pooled blood in the lower legs. Hematuria, blood in the urine, sometimes dribbling out in a dark brown stream, before the clot can finally be pushed through and get spit out.

Sometimes this shit just seems to come in a flood. You get up for nocturia, crepitate with a wince of sharp pain, feel a throb from where the next vein needs to be ablated, et voila, gross hematuria, a thin stream of prune juice and an impressive clot in the toilet bowl. Then you break a tooth.

These things can have an effect on your mood, like angry people claiming that because they love you they can do whatever they want to you and you just have to accept it — Ahimsa Boy. Especially hard to take as you watch the suffering of tens of millions, the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands and the embrace by tens of millions of a brazen, partisan denial of this suffering. Things being done to solve massive, societal problems, things supported by 3/4 of our citizens, are countered by lies and irrelevant talking points told to undermine every effort to ameliorate mass suffering. The proposed budget for pediatric psychiatric services in the American Rescue Plan, for aid to suffering children during an unprecedented (in a hundred years) pandemic is countered by a snarl of “cancel culture” when a private publisher decides to stop printing books with a few hilariously racist characters in them [1].

Then we throw this deep, cunning cut into the mix, just to complete the picture mood-wise:

This feral cat’s affectionate, fierce mother, Mama Kitten, died in October of an undiagnosed disease. It took a few months after her mother’s death for Little Girl, her mother’s shadow, a good hunter who had always been second in command to her dominant mother, to get comfortable in her new role as the alpha cat. In time she became almost as trusting and affectionate as her mother had been. Her coat is silky and she loves to be scratched and petted (when she feels like it, being a cat). She and her sister Whiteback are the only survivors of the litter with their brothers Whitefoot and Turtleback.

Lately she has shown the same signs of approaching death that her mother displayed before she died. A curious asymmetrical thickening of her abdomen (similar to her mother and older sibling Grey Guy right before they died) and a loss of energy, appetite and status. Her dopey little sister Whiteback recently stepped up to take her food the way Little Girl had done to her mother right before the end. Little Girl took to the same warm, insulated box her mother stayed in before she died and she didn’t come out for meals yesterday.

I offered her a treat, which she declined. I reached in to pet her and she reminded me she is a feral cat, giving me a nice long slash on the thumb with her sharp claws. Sekhnet was more persistent, and more persuasive, and she spent a long time petting and comforting the doomed cat, virtually immobile in her warm box. As fate would have it, it was frigid last night. We both expected to find a beautiful little corpse this morning.

Sekhnet sent me the picture above, from earlier today, reported that the cat who hadn’t eaten yesterday was very happy to eat a new kind of fish shaped cat cookie, as well as some sardines. “Her last supper,” Sekhnet said fighting back tears.

Later I went out to the garden and saw Sekhnet, comically bent in half, Little Girl lounging on Sekhnet’s back, one of her favorite places. Little Girl was massaging Sekhnet’s back.

As a kitten she’d often perched like a parrot on Sekhnet’s shoulder as the human went about her work in the garden. As Sekhnet maintained her bent pose and tried to resist crying I petted and scratched Little Girl for a long time. She inclined her head to indicate the angle she wanted her face massaged from.

She seemed happy for the attention and showed no inclination to leave her comfortable spot on Sekhnet’s back. After a time I lifted her to a nearby perch where, after revealing how wobbly she was on her legs, she had a few more fish-shaped treats and drank some water.

It appears there will be another feral cat funeral very soon. I hope I’m able to carry her to her final resting place after my fourth goddamned venous ablation tomorrow.

[1] fucking politics:

What does one thing (helping people in deep jeopardy) have to do with the other (“cancel culture”)? FUCK YOU! The so-called facts of an organized, well-funded months’ long campaign to convince Americans of a lie, that Joe Biden was elected by massive fraud, with the collusion of countless Republican traitors in several states, are met by a cry that Biden is the fucking liar and a tool of vicious radical N-word terrorists! Irrationality is just as valid as so-called rational analysis! In other words: FUCK YOU!!

You have a brazen zealot like Ron Johnson from Wisconsin, who insists it wasn’t Trump’s people who ran amok in the Capitol after months of Trump fomenting a lie, after the “Stop the Steal” rally was shown an incendiary propaganda video blaming thieving, violent libtard cucks, inflammatory speeches delivered right before the riled up mob headed to the Capitol to “stop the steal”– the angry mob had every right to be angry, first of all, because they truly believed a fucking infuriating alternative fact– and second of all, it was leftists, posing as Trump supporters, who smeared feces and attacked cops on January 6th.

Prior to party-line passage of the American Rescue Act Johnson somehow was able to force hapless clerks to read the 628 page Democrat [sic] aloud to an empty chamber, until the wee hours of the night. A clever leftie (Sarah Lazarus at Crooked Media) will observe of this kind of stunt:

Senators finally began debating the coronavirus-relief bill on Friday, after Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) forced a handful of innocent clerks to read the full text out loud to him all night as a stalling tactic. Democrats immediately made up for the lost time by shortening the debate from 20 hours to three hours when no Republicans were there to object, but hopefully Ron had a nice time at his tyrannical, coronavirus-themed slumber party!

source

And then we learn that the GOP managed to extend the “debate” to 24 hours of bipartisanship anyway. To demonstrate that you can win an election, by a signifiant margin, and still be regularly pantsed by the minority party, a unified, lockstep party with no compunction about justifying anything their mad leader says or does, no matter how wild, insane or demonstrably false. Many people I know tune out politics because, it only aggravates us and there’s nothing anyone in a democracy can actually do to hold anyone else accountable for anything.