Author Archives: oinsketta

How to Deal with Unintentional Tasering

This tricky subject is definitely a work in progress, though I have a few strong theories I’ve been testing.  I am referring to the best way to react after someone close to you, with the very best of intentions and full of love, accidentally tasers you in the genitals.  Intentional tasering is another subject for another day.

Undeniably, this unintended injury hurts like Evangelical hell, but what is the best thing to do when you have recovered the ability to speak, and breathe, and refrain from writhing on the floor in agony?

I’ve had the opportunity to ponder this from time to time during my more than six decades of the occasional tasering virtually all of us experience once in a while.   I am trying to hold myself to a difficult standard of peacefulness in my personal life, a standard I wish was more universal.   I try to live a life of non-harm, what Winston Churchill’s little brown man in the diaper taught the world is called Ahimsa.  

Ahimsa is a strong, principled stance against violence that resists violence without inflicting it.    It has its limits, as far as I can see, I certainly would drop it like a bad habit if somebody was coming to kill me or do me or a loved one bodily harm, but as a general principle of behavior that would vastly improve all life in this world, I can find no fault in it.

Violence comes in many forms, some of them devilishly sneaky.   Being acutely conscious of exactly what hurts me, in its many shades and nuances, I try my best not to do it to people I care about.  In the abstract, I care about all people.  So, since I try not to react truculently to things like an accidental application of electric current to my testicles — if I know the shock was delivered unwittingly — I should also be working on not lashing out angrily at misguided Nazi-admirers, though that will have to be a project for another decade, I think.  Certainly the subject for another essay.

Hard enough in my personal life, not to get up from a tasering and smack somebody hard across the nose, before remembering that the taser was not applied with any ill-will.   The person may not even have realized they were holding a taser.  The first things to do when you are angry, I’ve learned, at a high personal cost, are breathe, wait, and think.  Your head will clear and after some time passes you will have a better idea than your first angry response.   Hard to do, friends, but very important, if you don’t want to live in a shrinking world of constant, eternally justifiable conflict.

I’ll give you an example, if I can, of a subtle form of tasering that may be delivered inadvertently.   Each of us has been sensitized to certain mistreatment by our upbringing.  To some people, silence is a perfectly valid response to a question.   “Hmmmm… you have very much provoked my thoughts, excellent inquiry… wow… let me work this one between my silent lips for a while as I meditate on your provocative line of self-reflection.”   I can picture Shakers, or Quakers, or some silently praying sect, nodding sagely, exchanging small smiles, while they ponder something deep one of them has offered.   On the other hand, there are people, and I am one of them, who have had strategic silence deployed against them, sometimes in a cruel manner, from their earliest memory.   When I ask a friend “what do you think?” and I hear no reply, it has the effect of a hard, accidental knee to the groin.  

This is because my father, a deeply troubled man, lived his personal life with a helmet and flak jacket on, probing with his bayonet whenever he felt cornered, which was often, since he lived in a trench with an opening on only one side.  If I’d ask him for something that was impossible for him to give — like non-judgmental emotional support in a moment of fear, for example — if he couldn’t deflect my question by framing it as another instance of my sniveling emotional neediness (sadly, I began displaying this lifelong trait at a very precocious age) — he would set his jaw and say nothing.   “Dad,” I would ask, at five, or six, before I learned better, “you are seriously not going to say anything?”   Silence and a short thrust of his bayonet would be his only reply.  As a result, I became very sensitive to this kind of silent reply when I ask things of people.  

My father, a highly intelligent man who was able to present his point of view adroitly, always argued that people cannot change on a fundamental level.  I can grant him part of that point — our fundamental natures, our original impulses, are very hard to change.   We are born with certain traits, we emerge from our mother’s womb more or less emotional than others, more or less prone to fear, anger, violence, calmness, happiness, whatever.  Then, of course, how we are nurtured plays a large role in how powerful these impulses remain in us.  Then, ideally, if childhood works out, we become adults with choices, people free to learn crucial skills we realize we lack, work on improving the limitations that increase our suffering and the suffering of those we care about.  

On a fundamental DNA level, sure, one person will still feel a reflex to be angry while another, given the same stimulus, will be reflexively optimistic, or whatever. My father’s argument, if taken to the logical extreme, is ultimately a defense of the wisdom of hopelessness, a proof against our ability to learn and improve ourselves, no matter how miserable we may be in our current stinking foxhole.  We should note that my father changed his view on this, and sincerely regretted he had not examined the view more carefully, hours before he died.

So the question, after being accidentally tasered by someone close to you, comes down to this, as far as I can see: a short series of direct questions to be put simply to ensure against future accidental genital tasering, each hopefully to be answered with a clear “yes.”  [1]

Do you understand why that thing you pressed the trigger of sent an electrical current to some very sensitive nerve endings in my privates?  

Can you relate to a sensitivity in yourself that would react the same way, if I accidentally sent a small charge of electricity there?    

Do you see my “please do not taser” area clearly now?  

Will you kindly promise to refrain from sending another jolt there?  

Outside of that, I see only the potential for more shocks to what my eight year-olds in Harlem sometimes referred to as my privacy.   If what constitutes a taser to the good friend’s privacy is not made clearly understood between both friends, feel free to live your life flinching, ducking, ready to writhe.   It doesn’t seem a viable life strategy to me, though we all have our own opinions on such things, one supposes.  

If somebody cares about you, they should be able to understand your non-angry explanation of why their sincere attempt to help you hurt you so much.  They should then make an effort not to taser you in the same place, ever again.  Kind of a bottom line, I think, in what we should expect from our loved ones in this best of all possible worlds.

 

 

[1]  Practice tip:  if these questions are not asked carefully, with supreme humility, they will result in the opposite of the intended effect, if the person you are seeking peace with is prone to flying off the handle when angered.    Live and learn…

Broken Record, Hitler’s Birthday edition

I’m aware that all I can seem to do is viciously criticize Nazi-admirers, instead of sometimes acknowledging any of the great things they also do.   I’m a broken record with a suspiciously Yiddish accent, what can I say?   This today:

In environmental news, the Trump administration has rolled back regulations on emissions of toxic mercury and other pollutants from coal- and oil-fired power plants. The new rule changes how the Environmental Protection Agency will run cost-benefit analyses for power plants: The perceived health benefits of cutting pollution will be reduced, while the economic costs of curbing pollution will be increased. Mercury is a highly toxic metal that causes brain damage and birth defects.

source

I know, I know.  There’s nothing any of us can do about it, mercury has probably not damaged any of our brains, why can’t I just shut the fuck up and take my increased air-borne mercury like a man?   The $64,000,000,000 question, I suppose.

We must often make do with the best we can do

Dr. Pangloss, an absurdly optimistic character created by Voltaire, famously lived in the “best of all possible worlds” where everything happened for a preordained purpose, even the most senseless and horrific things.  As I recall he kept this belief even after half of his ass was removed by cannibals for use as a ham (and many other equally atrocious things befell him and his student).  Easy to laugh at a panglossian chap like that as we look around at a world that could certainly be better in many obvious ways, but I mention him to remind myself that sometimes doing very little is actually the best we can do in this world, and doing that little takes us, in a real sense, to the “best of all possible worlds.”   Under less than ideal circumstances, of course, but still, by far the best alternative available to us, the little we can do.

Being able to transmit complicated thoughts and difficult emotions in words is a gift of being human.    It is among the miracles of being a “wise ape.”  True, it exists along side our susceptibility to mass terror, mass murder and so forth, but our ability to speak, to read and write, is, in itself, a great blessing.   Words that literally change the world can sometimes be conceived and written.   Words can save a person from despair when she reads them, actually save a life.   Save a single human life, say the sages, and you have saved all of mankind.

Many of us write here on the internet [1].  We write for many reasons — to entertain, inform, make our opinions known, for attention, the illusion of writing for a readership, to brag, to show off our skills and our humility, to pretend to wisdom or expertise, to sing, to play, to force ourselves to write as well as we can, to drum up business, to gather an army of followers to invade and conquer other websites, to pass the time, etc.   But every one of us knows, I think, that, confronted by a sudden vexation, it is a great advantage to be able to write it out clearly.  

The ability to write clearly allows us to set things out for others to share and also, to see things more clearly ourselves.  Often this thinking-writing process is the best we can do and the time we spend here becoming better at writing with clarity is time well-spent when the last seconds are ticking away on the clock and the game is on the line.

You get screwed by a bureaucracy, say you lose your health coverage, without warning, during a deadly pandemic (to take a random example).   Frightening, disorienting, unfair, possibly illegal — just writing these words provides the beginning of relief.  Putting a scary or aggravating scenario into clear language does something to neutralize panic.  The practice of writing an aggravation down, tweaking the lines for clarity and brevity, adding helpful details, deleting distracting ones… an excellent discipline for taming thoughts and feelings that might otherwise run amok and rob you of rest in your slumbers. 

We’re living in a fucking worldwide plague, literally, with cynical, calculating, clueless cretins in charge of Federal Emergency Management and many other areas of public health, safety and liberty.   The thought that the forces of greed and death are exploiting this tragedy to gain even greater advantage over the masses of us worldwide is objectively horrifying.  There are many reasons to be concerned, afraid, magnified by disorienting loneliness during this time of “social distancing” when the closest to socializing many of us can get is the telephone or “social media” which is a shorthand for how to be in touch without actually venturing anything personal that you wouldn’t want the entire world to know about.  

Social media fosters the actual opposite of intimacy, it creates the superficial illusion of connection.  Intimacy is a rare and life-sustaining form of friendship that can only be achieved one on one, over time, with the ongoing sharing of vulnerabilities, values and trust.  You cannot, strictly (or even permissively) speaking, share real trust via social media, trust me on this.

Being old school, you reach out in your isolation to write a personal letter to an actual flesh and blood friend, knowing that she has a tendency to freak out sometimes and suffer in silence, to make sure she’s okay, extend a hand for mutual support.   “This plague is a disorienting ordeal, n’est-ce pas?  I hope you and your pup are OK” you write in a hand-written letter that sets out some of your own worries.

The answer comes directly a few days later, typed and delivered on your phone’s beautiful, glowing screen.

“Me and Bonesy are fine, old friend, thank you for asking, and, as you know, even if I was struggling and terrified, which I am not, thankfully, I wouldn’t be a whining, self-pitying wuss like you and make a squealing incoherent federal case out of bad luck that is entirely of your own making, pal.  Thanks for reaching out! Always great to hear from you.  Please keep in touch.”  

You might think, poised over the tiny keys of your phone: it appears my old friend might be in  trouble, I wonder — is there anything helpful I can do from here in my own quarantine?   Well might you wonder.   You might want to write a few hundred words, to make the wonder something you can set out in front of you, organize, study, explain a bit to yourself, mull over.   Edit, clarify and repeat.   Word to the wise.

 

 

[1] It occurs to me from time to time that I need to figure out how to collect the probably millions of words I’ve composed and posted here on this website the last few years and save them in a format I can store on various hard-drives.   If I had a mass of readers I’d ask for any ideas about how to do this, but since few stop by, I’ll keep the question to myself.  On second thought, anyone have any ideas?  Does WordPress still have something like that old RSS feed that can be copied and pasted easily?

This Plague Too Shall Pass

In the end, at the end of our widespread terror and disorientation, the vast majority of us —  at least if we are not homeless, destitute, imprisoned, illegally detained, already ill with something else, housed in nursing homes, forced to work without personal protective equipment, or foolishly expose ourselves to known risk —  will survive this deadly pandemic.  It is terrifying, it is hard to adjust to living in a plague.  Some days will be better, some days will be worse.  

It is good to remember this:  in the end, this too shall pass, as all things, and even all of us, inevitably do.

When the deadly threat has passed we may find ourselves living in a society that has made significant institutional changes for the better.  Perhaps this horror will cause Americans to finally force lawmakers to recognize everyone’s human right to have health care in this country, and an affordable home, and access to a good, healthy diet.  

Chances are equally good, of course, given the energetic organizing on, and far above, the ground to keep things as they are, we could find ourselves in the Fourth Reich, since Nazi-types are much better at mobilizing their true-believers who know exactly who they hate and blame, than are ordinary people just trying to live decent lives.   We need to stay vigilant, and organize to fight for what we must — for example, the right not to live in a failed state ruled by remorseless kleptocrats where millions starve and tens of thousands die in the name of maintaining a brutally unjust “status quo”.

When you take stock of the major stresses that we are actually up against at the moment, this may be the most stressful non-holocaust moment in recorded human history, for the most people, all at the same time.   I took a few of the top reasons for our reasonable terror and despair and put them in a paragraph.   It might help you keep some perspective — or it might just add to your nightmares.   I hope it helps you feel better, to see how much we are up against right now and how gigantic your right to feel upset really is.

Random footnote from a deleted email response whining about something or other [1].

[1] short evocation of selected horrors from previous, rejected draft:
 
We’re living in an extraordinarily fucked up moment in human history: foreseeable end of the habitable planet, fascist-type strongmen in charge of most countries, totalitarian types who rule by dividing populations along ethnic and racial fault lines, a ruthless and unrestrained global economy now in free-fall, doomsday clock set to mere seconds to midnight due to unprecedented nuclear threat, this wicked plague where asymptomatic people are infectious and immunity may or may not occur after recovery from the disease, instant mass unemployment, the potential for sudden mass starvation (even for average Americans in a nation that produces vast amounts of often uneaten food) — the weird, sudden attenuation of all social ties, nobody making eye contact in the public space, even from 20 feet, the world’s most powerful maniac lying openly and dementedly on State TV every evening to keep his zombie base jacked up to the max, a gaffe-prone, sometimes lying (though genial and nicely toothed) husk of a compromiser being proffered as the opposition’s best hope ghost candidate — this list can literally go on for another twenty lines.   The stress is palpable, unbearable some days, and people are not holding up well under it.   It certainly doesn’t always bring out the best in most of us.
 

Now Good Americans are actually happy about the deaths of Bad Americans during a plague

I don’t consider myself a particularly evil person.  I get angry, for example when I’m overpowered by somebody who grabs my arm and keeps slapping me hard in the face with my own hand, asking solicitously why I keep hitting myself.   I may have a lower threshold for being bullied than a more highly evolved earthling, but I do my best to remain as mild as I can, under circumstances that sometimes make mildness seem a very unappealing option.    Anger is a good warning system, it seems to me, not to give in the urging of righteous, enflamed feelings and do something outright evil.  And yet…

The other day I saw a piece quoting the evangelical minister of a mega-church, telling his flock, in a packed church, at a time when more reasonable people were “social distancing” all over the world, that faith protected him from COVID-19, that the Lord would protect all the faithful.  He added a nice underscore to the effect that AND YOU CAN TAKE THAT TO THE BANK, PRAISE GOD!   A couple of weeks later this man of God was dead of COVID-19.   It immediately struck me as a rare instance of justice, a wonderful “good for you” joke on a pompous, influential, ignorant jackass.   I posted the short news item here.  

So a fellow citizen, as opinionated as any of us have an absolute right to be, died a horrible death in ironic circumstances and I took in his death only as a great punchline.   Never thought about it any other way.

Served the ignorant snake-oil selling motherfucker right, was my only thought as I posted it here, thinking myself wry, for the few and the misguided to read.   Good joke, no?   “God loves and protects righteous people like me, this so-called virus is God’s message to the accursed non-believers, ignore what these people of no faith are telling you… oh, shit, I … I … can’t breathe…. what in Lord’s name?   Ahhh, get me… to … the h-h-hospital…” 

Is it really funny?  Yes, and definitely also not funny at all.  Is it funny to laugh about a death sentence someone got just for being a fool or a blowhard?   Laughing about it reminded me of what I read years ago about the officially approved humor of the Third Reich, at a time when other humor was increasingly punishable by death [1].   Nazis were not without humor, many of them loved to laugh.  What made them laugh?   A good, spicy Jew joke was surely a winner at the old brauhaus. A joke about Hitler being a little nuts?  The weakest penalty for that was referred to as the “Hitler Cut”– castration.

Hoo, boy, right away, a bee line to that dark place with the Nazis…

Am I saying it’s wrong to laugh when a bully of some kind, while berating you and brandishing a club to beat you with, slips on a banana peel and lands wrong, cracking his skull and spilling his brains out on the sidewalk?   Of course not.  I’m just saying… what have we come to as a species when we “wise apes” celebrate the actual deaths of people who espouse views repugnant to our own?     Put the shoe on the other foot, picture a death sentence for someone you agree with for expressing what you both believe, it’s easy to see the sickness of it.    

Hypocrisy is not a crime, though, in the absence of all other sports and most entertainments during this plague,  it’s become something of our national pastime here in our gruesomely divided states of America.

 

[1] Richard Grunberger had a chapter on Nazi humor, if I recall correctly, in his The Twelve Year Reich, A Social History of Nazi Germany 1933-45.  

About the tome, from Jeff Bezos’s ad:

“In chilling detail, this social history brilliantly demonstrates the awesome power of a brutal government to corrode the human spirit.”–Wall Street Journal
 
“Invaluable for every student of the Nazi era.”–New York Times Book Review
The 12-Year Reich, the first comprehensive social study of the Third Reich, shows what the Nazi regime proffered as the “ideal” society and how the German people responded. Along with the violence, corruption, persecution, public extravaganzas, the ever-present Party, and the cult of the Fuhrer, a ghastly imitation of ordinary life went on.
How did people talk during the Third Reich? What films could they see? What political jokes did they tell? Did Nazi ranting about the role of women (no make-up, smoking, or dieting) correspond with reality? What was the effect of the regime on family life (where fathers were encouraged to inform on sons, and children on parents)? When the country embraced National Socialism in 1933, how did that acceptance impact the churches, the civil service, farmers, housewives, businessmen, health care, sports, education, “justice,” the army, the arts, and the Jews? Using examples that range from the horrifying to the absurd, Grunberger captures vividly the nightmarish texture of the times and reveals how Nazis effectively permeated the everyday lives of German citizens. The result is a brilliant, terrifying glimpse of the people who dwelt along the edges of an abyss-often disappearing into it.

A Vision of Heaven

As a child I had a picture of heaven as a place of eternal peace.   I’m sure this came from my father, who, though angry and embattled while he was on this earth with the rest of us,  is living in such a place now.   My child’s image of heaven was of old enemies meeting on a cloud, embracing and laughing off their old, earthbound enmity.  Their old reasons for hating each other now delicious jokes to be shared and laughed about together in the ever-after.

I was reminded of this today, when I had a wake up call from Elaine at Healthfirst, the health insurance company that has done so much to impersonally fuck me over lately.  Apparently my DFS complaint, which I had attempted to revoke by email on Tuesday, had been quickly assigned to an investigator who contacted Healthfirst.  Good to know that process still works so quickly, anyway.

The last time Elaine and I spoke, things had not gone well.  I had asked her pointedly several times if she was drunk.  I eventually hung up on her after one too many incoherent, drunk-sounding answers from the Resolution Specialist.  That was back on March 7, I think, the last, and ugliest, of several long conversations we had.

She began our conversation cautiously, as you might imagine.   I immediately informed her that I’d contacted DFS to retract the complaint (I believed I had finally successfully done that last night on their website).   I told her that this time Healthfirst was not to blame for the termination of my health insurance.   I told her I wished Healthfirst had contacted me on March 11, when they were informed that they needed to terminate my insurance effective March 31. I could have prevented the cancellation of my health insurance if I’d had a heads up from them in time to stay insured.

She explained that the March 11 notice Healthfirst got contained the same claim my on-line, inbox-posted version had — that I’d received two notices to remedy my easily fixable error, one the day after I re-enrolled and the March 11 notice I was never notified of.   Healthfirst was in the same boat as I was, it seemed.   No other notice had been sent to anyone, I never got the March 11 notice in any form, until after my insurance was terminated and it was too late to do anything about it.  Unlike Healthfirst, only I had had my health insurance interrupted for a month during a plague, but that wasn’t Healthfirst’s fault.  

The odd thing is how gentle our conversation was.  I had no animus toward poor Elaine, a native Russian speaker doing her best in a difficult language.   Her promised written summaries had been the best she could do, subject to redactions from “regulatory”, I grasped that now.   It was not her fault that NYS does not provide consumers with the laws that protect them from, for example, termination of health insurance without notice.  

“Did you call the New York State of Health?” Elaine asked sympathetically.  I explained to her that on a good day one cannot easily get through on the phone, during the pandemic wait times are much longer.  The reps one eventually speaks to there are as limited in their knowledge and their power to help as the ones at Healthfirst, they cannot see the entire picture or explain difficult things that are difficult, or even impossible, to explain.  She seemed to understand this.   I told her I’d found and fixed the mistake easily on-line.  If only I’d had notice to do it sooner!

Thinking about the surprisingly pleasant call afterwards (she’d been palpably relived to get no fight from me), and how we wished each other well, and spoke for the first time without defensiveness or anger on either side, two humans in very similar little boats, I was reminded of my childish view of heaven.   From the minds of children…

 

Inner Dialogue, Pandemic installment #1

I used to have frequent conversations with the skeleton of my long-dead father.  I did this for about two years, almost every day, sitting at the computer, taking dictation to the steady beat of my tapping fingers, thumb adding off-beats on the space bar.  Once in a while I read one of these chats, often out of curiosity after I see someone has clicked on one (as somebody did yesterday) and realize I miss talking to my witty lifelong enemy, now that he is dead and full of self-knowledge and empathy.

“Who are you talking to, motherfucker?”  

You’re a droll one, doll-face.  You know goddamned well who I’m talking to.  I’m having what you might call an inner dialogue, something that becomes necessary from time to time to straighten out my unruly thoughts, if you know what I’m saying.  

“Talking to yourself…”    

I’m going to ignore these interruptions.   The nagging, niggling voice of the reflexive interrupter is not something to be interrupted by, if you seek clarity of any kind.  

“If you say so, Chief.”  

You can be 100% correct in your analysis, based on specific past experience and outside knowledge, your overall analysis can be dead on, and you can still, in an individual case, be wrong.  For example, you can be dealing with an inhuman bureaucracy, bent on saving money by cutting the eligibility of anyone it can, in a system brutally skewed toward protecting the privileges of the privileged; that bureaucracy can have twice or more arbitrarily fucked you, in excruciating detail, for reasons they later reverse — and in “the instant case”, as we are taught to say by law professors,  you may have simply been fucked by your own inaction or error, the inhuman bureaucracy in that particular case virtually, or at least legally, blameless.

“Seriously, man, who are you talking to?”

That is a disgusting and fake question.  You have a sickening smell.   You’re a disgraceful excuse for an interrupter!  

“Apologies, SIR!”  

As you were.  Now men, it is very important, and I say this to you as a role model and the steward of your morality, that you not be confused by these competing truths.   Both things can be true at the same time, even if one is more true at the moment than the other.  Do not doubt your essential analytical skills because you find yourself mistaken in one instance.   Yes, the enemy is brutal and sneaky.   Yes, sometimes you fall asleep at your post with your hand on your dick, mouth open, vulnerable to even the kindest, most considerate attack.  

“Sir, yes Sir!”

The exploitation of your vulnerability, even if done by the enemy in the most considerate possible way AT THAT TIME, does not mean that at any other time your ruthless enemy will not revert to character, not revert to the supremely inconsiderate beast it also is.  

Your faith in your fact-based analysis, men, should be as clear to you as a glass of pure water.  Be the water, not the glass.

“Bruce Lee, Jeet Kun Do, the Way of the Intercepting Fist.”  

Just so.

You can live on a low income, by choice, and not really be entitled to call yourself low-income, though why you would want to do that  is another question entirely.  You can be protected by someone who loves you, who has the means to protect you financially from the worst, and still be vulnerable to the same institutional cruelties that routinely kill many other people in your situation.   

Be self-effacing at your own risk, men.  Remember, the boy who cries “poison gas!” in a coal mine filled with odorless gas will still be killed by the poison gas he can’t smell.

It’s may be easy to view someone you feel has not worked as hard as you, at least not for pay, as a whiner complaining about the brand new rope being used to hang him.  

To consider me a pampered stuck pig screaming in pain from a self-inflicted wound I imagine is another of the thousand cuts freely given to anybody who speaks up, or stays silent, howling at unbearable, over-amped length, tediously advertising myself as the most learned and righteous of victims, giving pompous, imagined voice to the other, voiceless, real victims, is to paint only a corner of the larger picture.  I am also, potentially, with the right marinade and glaze, and slow-cooked to a turn, a very tasty rack of ribs.

“Sir, yes SIR!  Oh, yum! SIR!”

 

 

 

Seth nails the description

Marvelously descriptive opening:

“… threatening to make the same mistakes he made at the start of this crisis… when Donald Trump was elected in 2016 this was exactly the kind of nightmare scenario everyone was afraid of, what would happen in a global crisis if the most powerful man in the world was a racist game show host who’s failed at virtually everything in his life except for pretending to be a successful businessman on TV.   And he’s not even good at pretending, look at him pretending to be president — he just stares directly into the camera and can’t even be bothered to put some fake documents on his desk…”

 

 This British wit does  the full Monty Python job on America’s Greatest Winner, holy cow.  Bear in mind, though, only about 60% of Americans would agree with either of these “funny” guys.

The Boy Who Cried “Poison Gas in the Coal Mine!”

Things are bad right now, we all know it.  If it was only this relentless pathogen we were up against, we’d be up against it.   Of course, it’s much worse than that.  The inhabitable earth, our natural world, is also in immediate and irreparable jeopardy, as demagogic strong men around the world ignore the approaching catastrophe, appealing to unifying ethnic and racial hatreds instead.

My mother, when I was a hyperbolic young boy (I got that poetic trait from her) used to warn me about being The Boy Who Cried Wolf.  She told me the story of the scaredy-cat shepherd boy who would yell “WOLF!” whenever he was scared.  The men from the village would come running with axes.  After a while the village just started ignoring his cries and, of course, one night, real wolves came and ate him and all of the sheep.

Then there is Kurt Vonnegut’s “canary in the coal mine,” a bird that (in human form) can also cry wolf, I suppose.    Vonnegut said that artistic types, being more attuned to and easily distracted by odd smells than most people, were society’s canaries in the coal mine. Miners used to carry these small birds into the mine shafts in cages.   The birds have tiny lungs, which would quickly fill with any odorless poisonous gas the miners might have accidentally tapped into.   When the canary fell off its perch, dead, it was time for the miners to quickly get out of the mine.   Writers and sensitive types, according to Vonnegut, serve this same warning purpose for society at large.

I felt like one of these tiny-lunged bastards the last few days, not that I am a writer or a sensitive type, officially.   If I hadn’t had the call from the doctor, I’d have never learned my health insurance had been cancelled weeks earlier.   Apparently no law requires more than… nothing.   Once my immediate problem (no health insurance during a pandemic) was solved, I found I could breathe again.  I now only need to hold my breath until May 1, assuming no other hidden hassle lies in wait for me.

AND I AM ONE OF THE VERY LUCKY ONES.  I know this very well.   My feet never touch the ground, I am carried gently from place to place and set down carefully on soft, clean pillows.   I am loved and cared for, like a beloved pet.   I realize this and am very thankful for it.   I don’t know why I keep thinking about the millions and millions who are perpetually doomed to unthinkably grim fates.  

What about those millions of Americans who lost jobs recently — along with employer-based health insurance —  with no chance for affordable health insurance during a public health emergency?   Some, with savings,  can rely on the expensive, aptly named COBRA, but, seriously, your best hope for comfort, while unemployed in America during a world-wide plague, is COBRA?

The chaotic federal administration’s bungled response to this massive public health crisis illustrates the need for strong laws to protect programs that protect lives.   The human right to health care, for example, because it’s a human right, should be guaranteed by the government of the richest nation in human history to all of its citizens, so that none need fear death due to insufficient income.   And so forth.  

Instead, taking this crisis in the sense of the Chinese ideogram that also, famously (and probably falsely) means “opportunity,” long-sought radical right-wing programs that benefit the very wealthiest and most unprincipled are jammed through the moment the time is right — while we are all in terror for our lives.  No need for the EPA regulations, fuck Nixon and the Commie horse he rode in on! Protecting the “environment” like a bunch of tree hugging pansies!  Drop dead, job killers!   And so on, and so on, and scooby-dooby-doo-yeah.

Being summarily thrown off health insurance, particularly during a plague, is objectively terrifying and infuriating.  It should not happen to anyone.   Odd to say, my overheated, anguished screams of the last few days, before I heeded sensible advice and checked the website of the public agency that provides my health insurance, are as alien to me now as the last chirp of countless dead canaries who, having served, are forgotten, as all flesh must eventually be.   I feel a bit abashed to have been the canary boy who cried “DEATH!!!” during the plague when it was his own easily fixable error (even if he got no reminder to fix it) that tried to come back and kill him.  What a cry baby!