Only in America, folks

Nov11

Fortunately for me, I write quickly. I dreaded having to write this note, but it took me only a few minutes once I sat down to do it. Nobody should have to write this kind of note to their fucking doctor.

Matt:

When I was “50 years young” (12 years ago) you introduced yourself to me as Matt and gave me a card with a number where I could text you, and you were very good about responding to the one or two I sent. Your current card has only a generic email address [1], so I am sending this there, to the attention of Glenice, who was kind enough to confirm that I should have been able to see you during my October 25th consultation with you.

On that date I saw only Nancy S______, ANP, who ordered tests, prescribed Flomax and told me I have to begin taking it immediately. She also instructed me how to stand so that she could give me a prostate exam, though I had one quite recently and we agreed not to do another at that time.

On October 5, 2018 my urine was a brownish ketchup color. On the following day I painlessly passed a blood clot, and that was the end of the blood tinged urine.

Screen shot 2018-11-11 at 3.16.20 PM.png

Nancy informed me that this is called gross hematuria, a condition the Mayo clinic states is sometimes impossible to determine the cause of. She ordered a CAT scan, which I had on October 30, and a cystoscopy. She also told me I’d retained a few ounces of urine in my bladder and had to begin taking Flomax, no matter the side effects I complained of the last time I took it, years ago. The cystoscopy was scheduled for November 8. A few hours before my appointment I had a call from your office rescheduling the exam for December 6. I called Glenice who promised me a return call from you that I have not yet had.

I understand the imperatives of corporate medicine, but I don’t think you could defend this to your urology students as good medical practice. I have no results from the CAT scan, have been given no medical opinion, have not seen the doctor I paid to see on October 25, have had no return call from him after the cystoscopy was cancelled. Might the CAT scan results eliminate the need for the cystoscopy? What, if anything, did the CT scan show? Is this isolated instance of gross hematuria something I can safely put in the rearview mirror or should I be worried about the possibility that it may be a sign of late stage prostate or bladder cancer?

I am currently being treated for idiopathic membranous nephropathy and my initial call was to my nephrologist. He told me hematuria is not a known effect of my kidney disease and said I should call my urologist. I got the earliest appointment with your office. A month later I still know exactly nothing.

You can email me, text me at ______, or call that number any time after 1 pm. I don’t think you — or anyone– would be satisfied with this kind of treatment from your doctor (leaving aside the very long waits for a blood test– which neglected to include the creatine test required for the CT scan– the appointment with your ANP, the hours waiting for the CT scan, the month long postponement of a diagnostic test). Please advise.

Eliot

(I discovered, after writing it, that there is no place to actually fucking send it… you’ve got to admire corporate medicine, baby. During regular office hours I can call and possibly even get an email address to send it to)

USA! USA!!!!

[1] Correction, one always has to read the fine print carefully when dealing with corporate vampires. There is no email contact information available for the department of urology, this is where the URL on the business card takes you, to the corporate not-actual-contact page of these Hippocratic oath taking corporate dickheads. I can’t wait to get the hospital’s next solicitation letter telling me about the wonderful, selfless work they are doing, without profit, for the community.

Thinking v. Selling

Nov10

There is a big difference between critical thinking to solve problems, a largely neglected art, and selling, the most widely practiced art in the world today. It extends far beyond politics, where the distinction could not be more clear. To think productively, to actually solve problems, we need to be able to look squarely at facts and have as many relevant pieces as possible in front of us to consider. Thinking well requires open-mindedness, intellectual honesty and a small measure of courage.

In selling, certain facts need to be deemphasized, harmful facts removed entirely from the conversation. The problem in sales is much more limited — simply to get the customer to buy — and the techniques used are infinitely more practical, with success or failure readily measurable, written in red or black. One downside for us, as a society, is that being constantly subjected to the unabashed puffery of 24/7 sales pitches makes us question almost everything we hear as possible bullshit.

The imperative to learn, the thing that makes us wonder and think in the first place, often needs to be suppressed in the service of making the sale. The art of persuasion, in the highest sense, requires laying out as much as can be known and allowing fairness to emerge organically from an open-ended dialogue. The honesty needed for growth as a human is almost the opposite of the main quality needed for clinching a sale.

I don’t want to bring in our compulsive liar-in-chief, though he is perhaps the best illustration of this distinction that comes to mind, and of course, he’s ubiquitous. Thoughtfulness, and reference to the observable world, is replaced, in every case, with the imperative to win, to clinch the sale, to “make the deal”. You give a massive tax cut to the wealthiest people and “persons” in the world, selling it as a gift to the middle class. It is clearly not, as almost all of the benefits go to the already fabulously well-off.

At election time you swear you are about to pass a real middle class tax cut, in the next few days, in fact. You swear to this even though Congress is not in session and no law can be passed when Congress is not in session. When somebody from the press raises this obvious flag that you’re not being truthful, simply call them rude, stupid, fake, working for a failing outfit, an enemy of the people, tell them brusquely to sit down, scold them with authority, like you’d talk to a disobedient dog. The angry base loves this kind of alpha dog behavior.

The invading illegal caravan of smallpox, leprosy and tuberculosis infected raping child terrorists, same deal. An immediate and terrifying existential threat to all of us, trumpeted hundreds of times in the days before the election, many millions spent to send troops to the border for a muscular photo op — nothing mentioned about this rapidly advancing murderous hoard since. The art of the deal.

Writing, it strikes me more and more, is thinking made visible. Blessedly, from time to time, we see wonderful, thought provoking (as we say) books and articles being published. The art of selling is something I know almost nothing about. Thinking as clearly as I can is something I try to practice every day as I set my thoughts down here. My hope is that sometimes these musings can help shed light on what others are also mulling over. The daily practice of writing/thinking has improved my life, I have to say. I couldn’t put a price to it, though it certainly would behoove me to.

I offer, once again, an example from my own life of the muddle of emotions that can blot out virtually all thought and possibility for insight. By way of introduction, let us note again that emotion is almost always the deciding factor in life. The way something makes us feel determines how we react to it. The most intelligent argument is not often persuasive unless it is also engaging and emotionally satisfying. Both strands, feeling and analytical thought, must be brought into play to make a persuasive case. We humans love a sensible story that makes emotional sense to us.

So here’s a little story that may illuminate the difference between thoughtfulness and the unreasoning need to win at all costs. I had a childhood friend who went to an Ivy League college where he made a friend, Andy, a brilliant guy with a history of periodic stints in the laughing academy. Originally diagnosed as schizophrenic, Andy’s occasional spells of wild behavior were later classified as the manic end of Bipolar Disorder. Psychiatry is as much an art as a science, though some scientists make arguments to the contrary. Levels of various chemicals in the brain can be tested, neurotransmitter and other levels balanced, rebalanced, and so forth. It can make a difference, or not.

For decades they did this to the brain of this fellow, who became one of my closest friends. I was around for at least two dramatic episodes of Andy slipping over to the other side of madness, had to bring him to the mental ward myself the final time. It was scary to be close to someone in the grips of full-blown mania, full of energy and far from reason, though it never caused me to question our friendship.

When, in the end, years later, he behaved with viciousness toward me, I did not attribute it to his mental illness. I attributed it to him being an enraged asshole, pure and simple. Our mutual friend was devastated to hear that I’d finally written Andy off and did his best to convince me, during a long phone call, that I needed to forgive and forget, that we all needed to be friends.

I told him I appreciated the sentiment, and the peace-making impulse, but that I was too hurt and angry at the moment to consider any of it. I explained to him that as far as him trying to be a mediator between us, he was in the worst possible position to do it. The first requirement for a mediator is that she be disinterested in the issues and outcome, focused impartially on trying to help the parties resolve their dispute. Here, his close involvement with both of us would make that disinterest impossible. He said he understood.

Now we can fairly consider whether I was right or wrong to feel so hurt by my mad friend’s betrayal, or so angry. That is certainly a reasonable question. Put it to the side for the moment and consider, for purposes of this story, that I was deeply hurt and very angry. All you really need to know is that when Andy and I spoke to try to work things out, my old friend attempted to bully me over the phone. It was an impressive demonstration of the opposite of good will.

I have learned, over the years, that you can’t argue with someone’s feelings. Feelings are real. You must address those feelings first, if you care about having a relationship, or even a conversation. If you tell me I hurt you, and I care about you, I have to accept, first of all, that you are hurt. The impulse may be to say you’re crazy to feel that way, I never intended, I would never, blah blah blah, but that self-justifying impulse does nothing to help assuage the hurt your friend has expressed. Only acknowledgment of the feeling can be of any help when strong emotions are in play. It is a necessary first step to any real dialogue and sensitivity to a person’s emotions is a prerequisite for friendship.

I saw my old friend a few days after that phone conversation. He once again began trying to convince me that I needed to forgive my former friend Andy, who had reportedly told him “I owe him an apology, but I’m too stingy to give it”. I gave Andy’s advocate hypothetical after hypothetical to try to make him understand how hurt I was, since he could not seem to grasp it. He brushed each one aside. “That would never happen to me,” “you seem to have a fixation on that”, “well, that’s because you handled that completely wrong” “that’s your problem right there,” “I’m not prone to violent anger like you are,” “you foolishly trusted Andy” and so forth. I grew aggravated and told him so, but he would not relent. There was an important point he needed to make, a point he believed would make me see how rashly I was behaving, mitigating facts I needed to know that might make me actually forgive poor Andy.

In the end, in the face of my rising aggravation and finally real anger, he put the important facts on the table, Andy’s excuses for his final “betrayal”. Andy claimed he’d left me a missed call, apparently, that I didn’t return for days, He hadn’t slept for days before and had bronchitis on the day he promised to help me with a vexing programming problem he told me he could solve in a few minutes. He couldn’t keep his promise to do that simple thing because he had several excuses, he was very sick, sleepless, tried to call, had obligations to members of his Zen cult that came first. Why was I being so rigid, so petty, so fucking angry?

“Why didn’t you get the hell out of there?” a friend asked reasonably when I told him the story of my friend’s ruthless attempt to make me forgive. I told him he’d picked me up and driven me to his house, I had no immediate way to leave his suburban enclave.

Incidentally, all of Andy’s excuses were known to me, my friend and I had discussed them all a few days earlier.

Eventually, after a long negotiation that tested every bit of my resolve to be nonviolent, my friend apologized for his insensitivity. We remained friends, but a troubling trend soon emerged. He did not seem able to resist provoking me. In the end, when I could not get past this tic of his, he admitted that he had only apologized about the Andy business because I was so upset at the time. He had been right, he said, to insist, to try to bring facts to my attention that might help me forgive. He would do it again, he said.

In other words, no matter how aggravated you may have been, no matter how many times you urged me to stop, or reconsider, or slow down, no matter how disturbed your feelings, no matter how angry you became, what I had to say was more important than any of your so-called feelings. Your anger is your own problem, not mine.

Now at this point you may be thinking this person simply may not really know what friendship is. Maybe he needs to be left where he is, done. Goodbye friend, as little hope for you as for peace in your endlessly contentious marriage, or easily healing the many harms you’ve done to your children by your long example.

Call it a snapshot of the definition of insanity attributed to Einstein, or some kind of sentimental Anne Frank-like naivete about long-time friendship, or me just being a fool. A couple of months after our falling out I called a couple of times, left messages, and, at his texted request, sent this email:

It depresses me that people I was friendly with and had no quarrel with, your wife, your sons, R____, have all vanished from my life as a result of our falling out. Not to mention you. I understand your wife and kids have to take your side, whatever it is, but still. And you can’t even pick up the phone and return a missed call? (that was a rhetorical question)

What was my final, unforgivable act against you?

What did you tell R_____ that made him cut off communication with me? When he left the US we were seemingly the best of friends, he was apologizing that we’d only managed to squeeze in one quick visit when he first arrived. Then, as a prelude to complete radio silence, I got a reference to “other developments over the last year or so” that presumably magnified the differences between us beyond the point of possible friendship.

Did you talk to your rabbi in the days before Yom Kippur and, if so, what did he tell you? I don’t think it’s possible that a rabbi would advise someone to make no further attempt at reconciliation with his oldest friend during the Ten Days of Repentance. I conclude you didn’t discuss it with your spiritual adviser. I think you should consider this seven minute discussion on apology, forgiveness and atonement:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/metoo-men-repent

It only took him a few days to craft this measured reply:

I do want to find a way for us to be friends again, but I suspect that responding to your questions will get us into the same back and forth mess that electronic communication had got us into earlier this year. What I suggest would be for us to cut to the chase and for you to let me know what you are looking for from me? If you are interested in exploring what Judaism would counsel us to do, I’d be open to sitting down with a Rabbi (like Rabbi P_____ from the Chabad) and put our situation before him.

Just one more test, I see, of my ability to rein in the impulse to dash an impossible person to the ground and deliver just enough kicks to let him know how I truly feel about his idiosyncratic take on love and friendship.

Democracy is for racists too

Nov8

In Florida’s gubernatorial election, the white candidate told Floridians who might be considering a vote for his rival, the black mayor of Tallahassee, “not to monkey this up.” The race was close, quite possibly would have gone the other way if the 1.4 million disenfranchised Florida voters a disproportionate number of whom are black, had the right to vote restored after serving their sentences. This lifetime ban from voting dates to an 1838 Florida constitutional provision tweaked thirty years later, after the Civil War, to comply with the letter of the amended U.S. Constitution while ensuring blacks did not take over the government. Florida is one of the few states who have this kind of lifetime disenfranchisement law, a law that affects almost a quarter of Florida’s black voters. The law was abolished by Florida voters in the election a few days ago, by a fairly robust margin. Now the next time a white candidate urges Floridians to “not monkey it up” there is a better than even chance he will have his racist ass monkeyed up at the polls.

Democracy, of course, is for racists too. The president called himself a nationalist during at least one of his many recent televised Nuremberg-style campaign rallies. At a combative press conference after his party lost the House of Representatives and there was a swing of governors that virtually evened the national map, a black female reporter asked the president if calling himself a nationalist didn’t embolden white nationalists. The president dismissed the question: “I don’t know why you’d say that. It’s such a racist question.” He repeated the phrase “racist question” in that tic-like way of his, repeating a good tasting talking point for emphasis, several times. This fellow knows something about racist questions, they were part of his father’s review process for apartment rentals until the Fair Housing Act made race-based discrimination a federal crime.

Racism is not a uniquely American problem, though our version of it has impressively exceptional roots. Not every country enshrined race-based slavery in its founding democratic constitution, protected the liberties of the owners of other people, inferior people, at law for almost a century, fought a bloody war to preserve or abolish it, instituted racist laws and had a century of terrorism against the formerly enslaved race winked at by local law enforcement. You want American Exceptionalism? Look no further than our history of racism at law and its kissing cousin, de facto racism. Let’s not talk about what Andrew Jackson’s fortune made in slavery and land speculation, the Indian Removal Act or the Chinese Exclusion Act, let’s move on.

On October 24, 2018 two African Americans, Maurice Stallard (69) grocery shopping with his grandson, and Vicki Lee Jones (67), walking to her car, were shot to death by a 51 year-old white racist named Gregory Bush. Bush had lost his right to have a gun after violence in his home, but he’d had that right restored. Easier to get your gun back than your vote, apparently. We say this man “allegedly” shot the two to death at Krogers, after trying and failing to enter a locked black church, though he was seen killing them by many witnesses. The famous presumption of innocence, you understand. He gets his right to a fair trial, no mob is going to take him out and lynch him just because he murdered a couple of people, or somebody said he did, anyway. That wouldn’t be American! They are still puzzled about why the racist fuck killed two black people, they’re investigating, you know.

Because we Americans have a five second attention span, the story of the racist murder of two random black people in Kentucky was wiped off the screen by the revelation, the very next day, that a staunch supporter of the president had sent pipe bombs to more than a dozen notable enemies continually railed against by the president. Two days later another maniac walked into a synagogue and started spraying bullets, leaving eleven dead, including a woman who was almost 100 years old. It struck me over and over that Maurice Stallard and Vicki Jones’s murders were not included in the tally of recent hate crimes. Merely being shot to death while grocery shopping with your grandson, or in the parking lot outside the Jeffersontown, Kentucky supermarket, well, bad shit happens, I guess. Hard to keep track of it all! There was a mass shooting in a club in California the other day, too bad all the people there didn’t have guns to shoot the shooter.

Now our slippery nationalist president is on the ropes as he lies about his great recent victory in the midterms, during which his party lost their majority in the House and only held on to the Senate because Republicans only had nine seats in play while the Democrats had twenty something, and several of those states had gone handily to the president in 2016. He was snarling at reporters, seemed to be feeling desperate, fired the Attorney General he’s been mocking and humiliating for the last year or two and is poised to make some daring, desperate gangster moves. He’ll be OK, we all know, because he’s pretty much a delusional psychopath who has never been accountable for a single fuck up in his life. It’s the rest of us we should be worried about.

Voting Machines vs. ATMs

Nov6

There are reports of Democratic votes being changed to Republican votes by electronic voting machines in Georgia and Texas, two closely watched races. Amid record early voting by young people and “people of color”:

… Politico is reporting glitches with voting machines in Texas and Georgia have caused some votes for Democrats to be switched for the Republican candidate or deleted. Experts have said the error is a technical malfunction. Voters and civil rights groups in Texas and Georgia have filed complaints in what are two of the most closely watched states this midterm election. source

This fucking shit again?

You will never get an extra twenty from an ATM, and you almost always will get a receipt, but the same company’s voting machines… well, it’s not so simple, you see. In 2000 a company called Diebold made many of the voting machines, they also made the ATM I used to use at my local bank. Diebold argued trade secrets and proprietary information when investigators wanted to look at the software of their suspect voting machines. The executives of Diebold were unabashed conservatives, big Republican donors, and their proprietary software occasionally displayed a glitch that counted a Democratic vote as a Republican one. Shit happens. If their banking machines had dispensed an extra twenty here and there, Diebold would have been out of business. I always thought the easy cure was paper receipts showing the actual votes, like a detailed ATM receipt, one kept in a lock box at the local voting place, the other copy taken home with the voter. Then machine counts and paper receipts could be compared to verify actual votes. Of course that ain’t going to happen.

In 2000, in south Florida, my father cast his vote for Al Gore on a computerized voting machine. The screen read “click here to confirm your vote for George W. Bush”. My father had bought a computer a few years earlier and knew to look for a “back” arrow, or “undo”. He found a way to return to the previous screen, voted for Gore again and this time it offered him the choice of finalizing his vote for Gore. “At least I had minimal computer skills,” he said afterwards, “how many 75 year-old Broward County Democrats do you suppose wound up involuntarily voting for the candidate they had gone to vote against?” A fair question we’ll never know the answer to.

In Georgia and Texas, two very keenly watched battles are unfolding on election day and there are “technical glitches” in both states coincidentally resulting in fewer Democratic votes and more Republican ones. It is 18 years on from the historically suspect 2000 election and they are still fucking around with people’s votes. I won’t go into the recent criminal (and partisan) 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court that the Voting Rights Act of 1965, made to enforce the often scoffed at Fifteenth Amendment passed almost a century earlier, no longer needs enforcement because we are now a post-racial society who had an illegitimate Muslim president whose father was an African. Racism at law is over, said the Court, and then every state with a racist, or simply Republican, legislature passed new voting restrictions that disproportionately affected minorities of every kind.

“People don’t have faith in our democracy,” cynics point out. So do clear-eyed realists. It’s hard to have faith in a pinball machine that always shows TILT. The Koch brothers, whose fifty year long game is finally paying off bigly, run ads on Yankee games that brag about Koch Industries’ commitment to a level playing field where everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed. Could be a glitch in the ad copy, they might have meant a “leveled playing field.” When you push big, unpopular ideas that sodomize all but the privileged few, born booted and spurred to ride the rest of us, it is best to make sure your people cannot be easily turned out of power when their hideous faces become too grotesque to endure.

Click here to confirm your vote for Mr. Hitler. Have a nice day, and thank you for voting, your vote is very important to us!

Veterans Day Efforts in Vain

Nov6

It was raining today in New York City, on and off, and grey and chilly all day. Since Veterans Day, November 11, falls on a Sunday in 2018, retailers begin their special Veterans Day Sales on Monday, November 5, the day the holiday is celebrated by banks and other institutions in such years. I could have that wrong, I’m now told the reason there has been no talk about Veterans Day, or the awful plight of many veterans, is that it is celebrated on November 12th this year.

Whatever, this Monday fell on the last day of all out tribal warfare before the midterm elections which will decide whether the almost 40% who love Trump will continue to control both houses of Congress as well as the Executive and Judiciary branches of our great democracy. The House of Representatives is in play, and if Democrats recapture a majority, by swinging about thirty seats, they will gain subpoena and investigatory powers. These powers will help keep the president and his people honest, restore our federal republic’s checks and balances closer to what the framers of the constitution intended.

In July 2014 a man was killed on a street corner in Staten Island. He was a big, easy-going man, well-known in the area. He put in long hours on his feet every day selling illegal cigarettes, evading the New York State taxes and effectively putting those tax dollars in his pocket by selling contraband cigarettes he had driven up from the South where the legal price of cigarettes is apparently much lower due to a much lower “sin” tax there. He did this black market business for years, at the same place, and the cops had arrested him numerous times. He served at least one hitch in prison, but he was not a hard man. He was known as a peace maker in that section of Staten Island. Sometimes he was arrested, sat in jail overnight, was issued a summons, and went home.

One particularly hot summer day he told the cops to please not fuck with him, that it was too hot to go to jail, to come back another time. The police left. A few days later, when cops came to arrest him, one got him in a chokehold and continued to choke while the man, Eric Garner, gasped “I can’t breathe” over and over until the officer choked him to death.

The Staten Island grand jury that heard the charges brought by District Attorney Dan Donovan on behalf of the family of the dead man and the community of Staten Island was unlikely to indict the cop for murder or even manslaughter. The dead man had a long criminal history, was an imposing man, with a prison record, much bigger than the officer, Officer Pantaleo, and so it was hard to argue that the case was murder or even manslaughter. No white blue collar community in America is going to indict a cop for killing a lowlife of any race, especially not a black ex-con. It doesn’t seem fair to them to try an officer for murder in a situation like that. The coroner ruled the death a homicide, but that doesn’t mean a grand jury had to indict the killer.

There was a strong case to made that Officer Pantaleo had been reckless, or careless, or negligent, in using excessive and ultimately deadly force on an unarmed man he was arresting. The DA of Staten Island never brought the criminal charge of reckless endangerment before the grand jury and so Officer Pantaleo was never indicted or prosecuted for anything in connection with Garner’s killing.

The DA was a Republican party stalwart who once ran unsuccessfully for New York State Attorney General. He was elected to Congress from New York’s Eleventh District in a special election in May 2015, after Republican congressman Michael Grimm resigned following his indictment for felony tax evasion. He got 56.8% of the vote when he was re-elected in 2016, in a district Trump won by over 20%, the only district in New York City Trump won. He is running for reelection after overcoming a challenge from Michael Grimm, now out of prison, in which he “out-Trumped” the former representative.[1] He is being opposed by a thirty-one year old Afghanistan war veteran named Max Rose. Over a million dollars has come into the Rose campaign chest from outside the district, though none of it from corporations, who are major donors to Donovan. If I was rich, I’d probably give Rose a generous donation.

Instead, I headed to Staten Island to canvass for him on this final day. I wanted to speak face to face with as many registered Democrats and the over 100,000 Independents on Staten Island as I could, convince as many as possible to vote for Rose the following day. The margin of victory is likely to be in the low thousands, or even closer, if the predictions of a tight race are right. It will be an uphill battle for Rose and truly every last vote counts in these district elections.

If you are dealing with brutal forces in a contest where brutality is winked at, signaled to each other, it is best to come right out and express your political views in the most direct possible way. I wanted to talk to voters face to face, let them see this old man who’d made a long trip to talk to them about why this race, the only race where a Republican and a Democrat are vying for a Congressional seat in New York City (all the rest are solidly Democratic), is so important.

Max Rose is for gun control, Dan Donovan supports the Second Amendment, though he would also support background checks. Max Rose will vote for legislation to curb climate change, Dan Donovan is not sure, since he’s not a scientist, how much human pollution really affects the escalating climate catastrophe we are all seeing. “You have to ask the scientists,” he says, in a very confident, politic way. He tends to vote with the rest of his party, and to go along with the wishes of our strongman-type president. He fended off a primary challenge from Michael Grimm by veering further toward the extreme right, swearing his allegiance to the president. He is a politician I would like to see out of office.

A friend was kind enough to give me a ride to South Ferry in his car, which saved me a lot of time and hassle getting down to the ferry. After being casually sniffed by a beautiful golden retriever, a working dog with a security handler, I waited for the next ferry to Staten Island. I was lucky enough to board one of the old ferries with the outside deck for my cruise to Staten Island. These old ferries had been taken out of service for years after a maniac hacked a bunch of people with a machete. It is much easier to safeguard a ferry where everyone is in one large compartment. This is the first ferry I’ve been on since that maniac’s attack, decades ago, that had the outdoor deck. We passed Ellis Island in the distance, the place where poor people from Europe and beyond came seeking to be admitted as immigrants or refugees.

All four of my grandparents had checked in there in the years before the immigration restrictions for poor people, strict national quotas, were put into place the year my father was born, 1924. People crowded along the railing to get photos of the Statue of Liberty. We all did. There was a group of Indians or perhaps Pakistanis (the women wore head scarves, and sandals, though it was chilly and rainy) and they were delightedly taking and posing for pictures, along with everyone else who was traveling with someone. People lined up along the railing, took turns smiling for the cellphone camera, with the dramatic statue behind them. The woman next to me on the bench and I smiled at each other as we approached the Statue of Liberty. You have a camera and you pass that beautiful statue, a symbol so full of promise for a better life to millions over the years, millions who have contributed richly to American life and history, you do this:

On ramps right outside the Saint George ferry terminal in Staten Island there are dozen of bus stops. I was informed by google maps that I could take the S-46 or the S-48 buses to Max Rose headquarters at 629 Forest Avenue. It was chilly on that bench by the water. I put on my extra layer and turned to the other old fart on the bench at the S-46 bus stop with me. He was wearing a baseball hat with a huge American flag on it. I asked him if the 46 would take me to Forest Avenue. He told me the 48 was better, because it went along Forest itself, and I could watch the numbers, it would be hard for me to get lost. The 46 went on a street parallel to Forest, but you really had to know your way around or things would get bad fast. I thanked him and went over to sit on the bench at the 48 stop.

(I witnessed, and was a second too slow to help out on, a surprising and poignant scene between high schools kids on that 48 bus– but that will have to wait for another post).

When I got to the office, about fifteen minutes before my required training for canvassing was to begin, the young woman at the door informed me that if I was here for canvassing, they were turfed out. She explained that meant that all of the names and addresses they had to canvass had been covered already by volunteers. She told me that I could join the phone bank, and motioned to a room full of young people, shoulder to shoulder, consulting lists and talking on their phones. They were reading some kind of script, I suppose, it was noisy in there. I used the bathroom and headed back to the front door.

“You want to join the phone bank?” she asked me as I approached the door. It wasn’t what I’d come for, I wanted to show some Staten Island Democrats my old face, talk to them in person for a few moments, impress on them the importance of going to vote the next day. The Democrats need to flip about 30 seats in the Congress and this race, expected to be an easy win for the Republican, appears to be running neck and neck. Making calls from the makeshift call center did not have the same appeal to me that speaking to people face to face did. I told her I was going to walk around the block and think about it.

I stepped out into pissing rain. It was raining hard enough now that ten minutes out in it were enough to soak your pants. I decided to look for something to eat, to sit inside and stay warm and dry while I decided what to do. I saw two young women with a pile of Max Rose brochures in front of them, sitting in a coffee shop. I thought about going in to speak with them, then felt self-conscious about approaching them. They would probably have been happy to talk to me about Max Rose, I’m sure, maybe even convince me how important it was for us all to be making phone calls. They never got the chance. I bought a hot pretzel a few doors away and caught the next bus back to the St. George Ferry Station.

Right before I went to sit down at the sheltered bus stop I snapped a photo of Max Rose’s Staten Island campaign office (the eleventh district extends into Brooklyn where Max Rose already has an 80 to 20 lead). It was then that I noticed that his campaign headquarters was in the same small building as Mandolin Brothers. Mandolin Brothers was a famous purveyor of excellent new and vintage stringed instruments. You could play and buy beautiful guitars, mandolins, banjos, ukuleles there. I was only there once, years ago, and pretty close to closing time, but it was a great place I always intended to return to. I smiled to think they’d loaned their space to Max Rose for his campaign. Not only great musical instruments, I thought but good political impulses. (I later learned from my smartphone that the store is long gone).

The ferry back was one of the now typical ferries that have no external decks along the sides for good, open air views. The ferry was entirely closed, which was fine with me, it was shitty out, and cold, I was disappointed, and tired, and I sat on a bench hardly noticing that we were traveling over a vast stretch of ocean water. In a little over twenty minutes we were docking at the foot of Manhattan Island. I passed a black lab with a working dog collar on and also the golden lab, who was now barking continuously. It must have been close to quitting time for the golden lab, and her patience was just about done.

A short walk north and west from the ferry station in lower Manhattan, you come to this museum:

On the front door is this sign:

We are stronger than hate, until hate actually murders us. It happens. It has not stopped happening for many years now, though the names of those being murdered by hate keep changing. Genocide continues with horrific consistency, on massive scales and on more limited scales. Four years ago, for example, a few thousand Yazidi men were slaughtered in the Sinjar Massacre, too few for a proper genocide, perhaps, but still very, very horrible. The Rohingya were recently the subjects of persecution and genocide in Myanmar, the nation formerly known as Burma. Everyone in Yemen is catching hell, children are being killed every day, casualties of the brutal Saudi war there, which rages with American support. Protesters and rock throwers are being shot to death in more than one country, threatened with being shot to death here, by the American president. So-called strongmen appear here and there to enforce their will by organized mob violence and with their armies. They use the military to intimidate citizens and perceived enemies, as our president is doing now, having soldiers install concertina wire along the border fence at a cost CBS news reported tonight is perhaps $200,000,000.

Many people feel the world is overdue for its next, and final, world war. Look at the world, it’s in chaos, violent storms and other natural disasters are regularly destroying homes and killing people all over the planet, species are disappearing, violent ideologies are waging ruthless wars against unarmed civilians in many places. Some historians claim that we are living in the most peaceful moment of human history. I think that’s a wonderful thought, probably backed by some kind of very convincing statistical evidence. I also don’t think it’s true. The world is waiting to explode into the next mass murder, many people everywhere are desperate, snarling angrily, we are one big bomb away, and violence is in the air.

So I say, to myself and to people of all faiths and original nationalities who vote in American elections: vote today for the party that is less racist, less xenophobic, less nationalist, less extreme in its divisive rhetoric. Changing one-party control of our democracy is not the answer to all of America’s problems, but it is the start. The other way lies madness.

[1] Wikipedia:

In 2018, Donovan faced a primary challenge from former Rep. Michael Grimm.^[27] During the primary campaign, Grimm accused Donovan of having tried to entice Grimm to drop out of the race by offering to lobby Trump to pardon Grimm.^[27] Grimm pleaded guilty to federal tax evasion charges in 2014 and spent several months in prison.^[27] During the primary, both candidates emphasized their loyalty to Trump, seeking to “out-Trump each other,” according to the Washington Post.^[28] In the 2018 general election Donovan is facing Max Rose.^[29]

I’ve Waited Long

Nov4

I am typing in the room where my mother’s ashes sit in a box in a beautiful paper bag. The elegant bag is in the corner, out of my view, and I haven’t looked at it in a long time, but it is a distinctive bag. The bag is brown paper on the outside, a pure slate gray on the inside. My mother would like the bag. She has no worries now, nor any wishes, either. I decided years ago that I’d scatter her ashes in the Long Island Sound at the public beach at Wading River, but we haven’t done it so far, in eight and a half years. I haven’t been to that beach in more than fifty years, who knows if you can even get on the beach now without a resident pass? When I was there last there were swings, seesaws and a sliding pond on the sand, and a small parking lot with maybe eight spots painted on the once black shore road.

The idea of scattering my mother’s ashes in the water at Wading River was a sentimental one. I think of those months in that rented green and white bungalow a hundred yards from the lapping water as the happiest summers of her life, but who knows? She always said she wanted to live near the water, and for a couple of summers we did. I don’t know if she was happy there or not, hearing the waves breaking at night. What I do know is that at the moment she truly doesn’t care. Her concern at the end was about not being eaten by worms and bugs, the thought terrified her. I assured her it would never happen and it will never happen.

The scattering of her ashes is more a poetic matter, really. Every so often it gives me a pang, that I haven’t managed to scatter her ashes into the gently lapping Long Island Sound, that her ashes are sitting there in that elegant paper bag. On the other hand, I am positive she doesn’t mind, even if she would chide me about my long failure to do it, if she were somehow able to.

That I can sit here, a few feet from her ashes, writing thoughtfully about it in words almost nobody will ever see, is a blessing and my form of daily meditation. Thinking these thoughts, molding them into sections that I then comb carefully for readability, focuses my spirit, clarifies my beliefs, sharpens my sense of purpose. That I have little clue about the only thing the world understands — attaining financial success — does not distract me while I work. The hard work of vainly striving is not a remote consideration while I concentrate on making my words express my thoughts, my heart, as clearly as I can.

I had a call just now from a one-time good friend of my mother’s, a woman a year older than my mother. My mother would have been ninety last May, this woman was ninety-one last month, and still going strong. God bless her, as we say. Her mind is sharp, her language is crisp, she is upright and walking and driving great distances– still a force at ninety-one. In the course of narrating a lot of horrors she asked me to keep to myself, while assuring me that she is up to the challenges, taking them one day at a time, she mentioned something that gave her a glimmer of hope in these dark times.

She attended an interfaith vigil the other day, the great throng of several faiths who had gathered was inspiring to her. The hall was very crowded, with a big crowd outside also. Somebody came through the mass of people outside and ushered her inside to a seat she didn’t want. “I can stand, I’m perfectly fine,” she insisted, “give the seat to someone who needs it.” In the end, she took the seat, though she felt bad about it. Her ninety-two year-old friend, who had declined the seat in another part of the crowded hall, regretted it afterwards as her lower back tightened up painfully after standing on the concrete floor for a couple of hours. Better to be seated than aching, I say more and more often now.

Small mercies take on a bigger and bigger significance as life goes on. We see few enough of them in the world now, as so many nations stand on the brink of merciless horrors many of us believed were a barbaric relic of a bygone, insane age. I’m talking about a small mercy like finding a vacant bench at the point of a walk when your arthritic knees are barking. The relief you feel, taking the weight off your troubled bones, a gift you give yourself, provided by a merciful side of the universe and gratefully accepted.

There was a lot on this woman’s mind, and much of it I agreed not to share with anyone, so there’s that. At one point, God bless her, she couldn’t resist giving me just a little shit about not calling her lately, after I’d spent hours on the phone last month advising her about some very vexing things– and sent her several more pages about my father’s life that she was too vexed to really take in.

iii

After the Saudis murdered a journalist in their consulate in Turkey last month there was a period of several weeks during which the vicious, smiling thirty-four year-old Crown Prince had his advisors and marketing folks make up and spin multiple lies about what happened to the disappeared critic of the regime. Our president, also born to great wealth that made him feel truly exceptional since childhood, stalled along with the Crown fucking Prince of Saudi Arabia, a fundamentalist Islamic monarchy. “We have to wait until the Saudis finish investigating whether they murdered this vicious, lying journalist, which they strongly deny, look, they strongly deny it, like Justice Kavanaugh denied all those lies against him — whatever happened to the presumption of innocence that liberals used to talk about? Here they go, rushing to call MBS a murderer, which we don’t know, we may never know, certainly not until he’s done investigating whether he is or not, look, this kid is a gem, a great, great future king– no presumption of innocence for him? Typical of the lying haters and hypocrites, funders and defenders of the raping, leprosy and smallpox infected terrorist hoards advancing on us …”

All we have, any of us, is the impression we leave behind on those who knew us. We are whispers, after our death, not even ghosts. The example of how we lived is the only thing we leave to the world of people who knew us. The power we may have wielded over others is nothing, it is how we used that power that is remembered, that lessons for the living can be drawn from.

I had an old friend who lives the frenetic, embattled life of a successful suburban citizen. His many stresses and frustrations have few, if any, safe outlets. It appears that I became his best option for relief. More and more, particularly since I’ve devoted myself, from before my mother’s death, to restraining my angry reactions as much as I can, he took to provoking me. I pointed this out to him each time he did it, but he always argued that he was not provoking me, that I just get mad unfairly, that maybe I was the one with the provocation problem, not him. I had more than one opportunity to throw him on the ground and kick him, but I breathed and fought my way to remaining as peaceful as I could. This restraint apparently goaded him to ever greater provocations.

In the end, he provoked me into detailing the many things I don’t respect about him. I don’t know if I mentioned his lack of basic courage, which I think is probably encompassed in the unfortunate phrase I do recall using “moral retard”. In the wake of this his wife called me, basically offering me an ultimatum. You have to forgive him, she told me, because he loves you, we all love you.

I explained why it’s impossible to forgive someone who takes no responsibility for hurtful things they repeatedly do. Futile, really, since those hurtful things continue on and on into the future if they are not acknowledged and corrected. The only option, to pretend everything is fine because people tell you that they love you, is not one I’m willing to take, even for the high moral cause of professed love.

Besides, I told her, love is the way you treat people, what you reflexively do when you see a loved one in pain. Love is action, not a word. I told her to let her husband know that I’ll be happy to hear from him once he gets some insight in the therapy he assures me he is working hard at. “That’s not going to happen,” his wife told me, and it had the ring of truth. He would rather lose his oldest friend than admit that the annoyingly superior fuck might have been even partially right. Zero sum, baby, he can’t help himself. If you don’t win, you lose. What could be worse than that? Ask the president.

It began to bug me more and more that because I’d taken a principled stance in regard to an old friendship I’d lost the longtime friendship of his wife and his two sons, as well as the friendship of a close mutual friend, apparently enraged at how badly I’ve hurt his troubled old friend. I called the guy on Halloween (spooky, I know), to ask him three questions that had formed in my head. I left a voicemail. I heard nothing back from him, though I’d spontaneously left him the option of doing nothing, saying I’d email him the questions if I didn’t hear back.

A few hours later I rethought my offer. What was the point of sending questions to someone who could not even reply to a voicemail? It would only increase my aggravation if I never heard back, give him an easy, an effortless, final provocation. I called again, left a second message, asking him to text, email or call me if he was willing to help me by answering three questions.

Two days later, having heard nothing, I texted him, asking if he was out of town or too weak and unJewish to respond. “Weak and unJewish”, an admittedly provocative formulation (especially to a Jew who fervently prays every morning), but, in context, restrained, I thought, particularly after two days of silence by way of reply.

I soon got the texts one would expect, explaining how he’d heard the first message and thought he’d be getting an email, and then no email came, and then, belatedly, he saw the other voicemail from me but didn’t actually hear it until after my recent text a few hours earlier and so on and so forth and so, you see, there was a rationale to all the delay, a hazard of digital communication (which is what I’d called to avoid in the first place) and, yes, please send him the three questions.

I sent this:

It depresses me that people I was friendly with and had no quarrel with, your wife, your sons, R___, have all vanished from my life as a result of our falling out. Not to mention you. I understand your wife and kids have to take your side, whatever it is, but still. And you can’t even pick up the phone and return a missed call? (rhetorical question)

What was my final, unforgivable act against you?

What did you tell R____ that made him cut off communication with me? When he left the US we were seemingly the best of friends, he was apologizing that we’d only managed to squeeze in one quick visit when he first arrived. Then, as a prelude to complete radio silence, I got a reference to “other developments over the last year or so” that presumably magnified the differences between us beyond the point of possible friendship.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/metoo-men-repent

I heard back quickly by email. He’d received my questions, but I’d have to give him a few days to answer them.

I took a breath and typed back: OK.

The Sins of the Fathers

Nov2

The Holy One, Blessed Be He, in Leviticus 26, makes it clear that He will punish the children, grandchildren, yea, the great-grandchildren of sinners seven times over. OK, actually, I’m lying, He only implies it, merely hints at it in his final threat. There will be no children or grandchildren left alive when the All Merciful is done with you, disobedient sinners. As it is written:

27 “‘If in spite of this you still do not listen to me but continue to be hostile toward me, 28 then in my anger I will be hostile toward you, and I myself will punish you for your sins seven times over. 29 You will eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters.'” [1]

As it is written (by me):

The father’s weakness
anger, vanity
visited as a curse
on the lives
of his children

It does not, of course, need to be written this way, though frequently it is. Your parents are your first role models for how to act. Sometimes they are the worst possible role models, in which case, you will have to take your lumps for having originally learned how to treat others from teachers who had a poor idea of how to do it.

It makes me very sad, because, though you can learn these things over the course of many years, given the time and inclination and the luck of finding people to support you in this difficult endeavor, the odds of ever doing so are greatly stacked against you if you’re raised by senselessly enraged parents, or terrified ones. They can’t be expected to offer meaningful support because they don’t even understand what you’re trying to do. Your parents’ poor teaching will, as Ha Shem threatens the willfully disobedient, eat your flesh.

[1] The Lord’s truly divine punchline (you really should read the entire five or six paragraphs of unimaginable horror the Holy One threatens will befall the disobedient, if you want the full effect of the punchline):

36 “‘As for those of you who are left, I will make their hearts so fearful in the lands of their enemies that the sound of a windblown leaf will put them to flight. They will run as though fleeing from the sword, and they will fall, even though no one is pursuing them. 37 They will stumble over one another as though fleeing from the sword, even though no one is pursuing them. So you will not be able to stand before your enemies. 38 You will perish among the nations; the land of your enemies will devour you. 39 Those of you who are left will waste away in the lands of their enemies because of their sins; also because of their ancestors’ sins they will waste away.'”

A Fall Evening Falls in Inwood

Nov2

From a spot on a nice wooden bench, looking west, toward the Hudson River and the rest of America:

I returned to this lovely spot the next evening, about an hour later, during what photographers call magic hour:

Happy Halloween!

Oct31

In honor of this great pagan holiday, a few snippets from the life of our grotesque pumpkin-colored leader, a man who is always dressed, and coiffed, for Halloween.

The president is always poised to counterpunch, as he was taught to do by belatedly disgraced, too-late disbarred gay homophobe Roy Cohn [1]. Cohn impressed on the young Trump that the best thing to do when accused or attacked is to hit back much, much harder. The Department of Justice accuses you of violating the Fair Housing Act by not renting government subsidized apartments to blacks, hispanics and other lowlifes? You countersue the DOJ for defamation: $100,000,000, fuckers! Now watch those sweaty weasels at the DOJ start backpedaling.

Here is the president’s reaction to the pipe bomb sent to CNN:

Screen shot 2018-10-31 at 1.04.47 PM.png

Who is really to blame for this bomb? The fucks at lying fake news deserved it, earned it, and if they don’t stop reporting my lies, FAST! they’re going to get more of what they deserve.

In the blitzkrieg of bullshit that marks the insane Trump/Cohn counterattack strategy, it is quickly on to the next controversy to erase the previous ones — poor families fleeing poverty and death in Honduras constitute a deadly invasion force that must be repelled by the U.S. military!!! His son-in-law is a Jew, his daughter converted, his most loyal and rabid anti-immigration assistant Stephen Miller is a Jew, so how can anyone hold him, an unabashed nationalist, responsible for the murder of Jewish globalists in that synagogue where they didn’t have the good sense to post armed guards as the Second Amendment clearly allows?

The shit bombs fall so prolifically from the president’s mouth that much of it goes unremarked on. His assessment of the brutal Saudi torture and execution of a journalist in their consulate: bad concept, bad execution, terrible cover-up, should have earned him at least a bloody nose. Nothing, as always for this supremely untruthful entitled man made a multi-millionaire as a child by his foolish-risk enabling dad.

I didn’t get a chance to comment on this wonderful bit of drollery from the normally reserved New York Times. The Times exploded Trump’s self-made billionaire lie by showing, in excruciating detail, the long pattern of his father Fred’s lawless manipulations to avoid tax laws and the lifetime gifts totaling about $400,000,000 to his idiotic, preening, serially failing son.

Nobody cares, those who dislike him already now have the facts about his perhaps most massive lie and his base knows he lies, but so does the NY TIMES! The failing, lying New York Times!!! The Times report is the result of massive research, based on 100,000 documents, every detail examined, vetted and every claim, no doubt, combed through by a careful legal team.

The Times describes a company the Trumps set up, one of many, to pass Fred’s fortune on to his children tax free. This particular company was created to grossly inflate Fred Trump’s expenses for building supplies and pass the “profits” on to his children. It was a relatively simple scam, if a boiler cost Fred Trump $5,000, this company would charge Fred’s company twice that and his kids would keep the difference. In the middle of the section describing this fraudulent business, the Grey Lady drops this:

Then the article simply continues describing the fraudulent company, without any comment on this bullshit threat by one of the president’s army of aggressive lawyers. To those who love the president this threat vindicates them, like the strong denials by Saudi murderers or the president’s problematic extremist Supreme Court nominee. See — the lying NY Times is lying!!! To those with even the slightest critical ability, the failure of the president to sue the Lying New York Times (also known by many of his staunchest supporters as the Jew York Times) means the lawyer’s threat was as empty as many of the threats and promises the lawyer’s supremely litigious client has made over the years.

Happy Halloween, y’all!

[1] Because when I have any doubt about a factual assertion I make here I do a quick and easy fact check, I asked google “was Roy Cohn a homophobe?” He was, many sources agree. Here is one of the results that came up in about one second, a marvelous little summary of the career of this malevolent creature, a career I highlighted in a footnote scroll to the bottom of this one for two excellent treatments of this evil fuck: