Author Archives: oinsketta

Preface fragment no. 3 or 4 or 5

Two and a half years ago I set out to write a memoir of my father’s life, a complicated life that had always been a troubling puzzle to me.   He was a man of high ideals, deeply held beliefs about justice, a great knowledge of history, sharp, funny, a lover of animals, underdogs and soul music, particularly Sam Cooke.   He was also, when the mood was upon him, a monster to his own family, conducting a relentless war over the dinner table every night.  A story that I thought might take a year or so to write has so far taken two and a half years.  The manuscript I have to wrestle with now is almost 1,200 pages, goddamn it.   I am continuing to wrestle with it, in my way.

It was tempting initially to structure the story of my father’s life with his dramatic deathbed regrets the last night of his life saved for the end, a kind of cosmic punchline at the end of a life insisting he’d had no choice but to strafe his children whenever he felt cornered.   He was literally cornered there at dinner, he sat in the worst possible seat at the kitchen table, landlocked between the wall, the counter with the toaster on it and the refrigerator, with my sister blocking his egress.  I had the best seat, right by the door, and often took advantage of it whenever I couldn’t stand the heat and had to get out of the kitchen.  

I came to realize, as I worked on the book, that setting the story up that way, with the big reveal at the end, was no favor to the reader or any kind of worthwhile dramatic revelation, really.   Not to say it wasn’t dramatic, or a revelation, but not one to save to the end of the story.  It’s not really a suspense story, or a mystery, though it’s also a suspense story and a mystery.

My father was a perplexing riddle, true, but perhaps every father’s life must be a riddle to his children.   When you think of telling the story of any life, boiling it down to a book, you are talking about a riddle.  Every human life is a riddle, human history is a riddle without an answer and much of what we experience here falls into that category.  I’ve had to keep this in mind as I work in a darkened room, trying to put together a puzzle that is missing many pieces, under the dimmest of lights.   The fragments, I think, are probably story enough.  Then again, I am not the judge of how much of a story I have managed to tell so far.

 

 

You can read all of it, in no particular order, here.

The other site I refer to at that link, while it does have some good photos and a selection of somewhat evocative early segments, hasn’t been updated for maybe a year and a half.   Feel free to check it out, but be forewarned.

Personal vs. political

I am sitting alone, having my daily silent conversation, ostensibly with a reader, (with you, dear reader!) though one can pretty easily see that I do not write for a great number of readers. [1]   It doesn’t matter if you write for one person, as in a letter, or to every sentient reader on the earth (as many of us strive to write for) the process is the same.   It is a personal process and also a political process.

No less an authority on the subject than Adolf Hitler wrote, early in his life, that art is a bridge from the artist’s heart to the heart of another.  He later applied this same principle to the art of political propaganda.   Too bad the little shit was rejected from art school, his hissy temper tantrums at art critics and gallery owners without taste would have served the world much better than the ones he threw on the world stage, but that is another matter.   No idea why I am thinking about fucking Hitler right now. [2]  

I guess, to say, the exercise is essentially that —  building a bridge from the self to others outside of the self.   Writing clearly is the goal; making it easy for the reader to follow our guided tour through our thoughts, ideas and feelings.   These are three different things, thoughts: what goes through our minds as we ponder, ideas: conclusions we come to about the things we ponder, and feelings: our emotions as this is happening.   All three of these are important, essential really.  When we write we explain what we are thinking and feeling to ourselves, in the process of setting it out clearly to the imaginary reader.  

Kurt Vonnegut always wrote imagining his sister, who was a great reader, his ideal reader, reading the page.  If the joke would make her laugh, it was worth keeping in.  If the image would make her eyes grow moist, her nostrils flare slightly, the image stayed.   If she would roll her eyes, or not buy it, or find it pretentious or ridiculous, out it went.   His writing appealed to millions, appeals to this day, but he wrote every word, to hear him tell it, imagining his sister as his only reader.  Good enough, I’d say.  We write, on one level or another, to that imagined sensibility, the sensitive reader we’d love to be reading our words.

My mother was a great reader and I can often picture her reading a sentence or paragraph I’ve just written.   She had a great grasp of language, and a love of it, and a poetic imagination.   She didn’t mind something being just a little cartoonish, if it served to make the thing more clear, the feeling and colors more vivid, the conclusion that much more emphatic.

The dialogue we have when we are alone… I don’t think I could put a price on it.  In the previous post Hannah Arendt is quoted as believing:

The passion of being was in thinking. And that comes from that two-in-one dialogue in one’s head.  And for her, that was the beginning of moral life, that dialogue.  

Can I get a “hell yeah!”?   The world is vexing, often perplexing, the only quiet we often get, and the best chance to get any real perspective (if we are persistent and lucky, and disposed toward this exercise)  is sitting by ourselves, thinking through this kind of quiet inner dialogue.   All around us busy people are complaining:   “I don’t have time to think!”  “I don’t know whether to shit or wind my watch!”   “Who has the time?!!!!”  “It’s all too much!”    “I can’t watch the news, it fills me with dread and hatred!!!”

I am a man with the luxury of time, and I spend some of it each day doing this, having a silent chat with someone I’ve never met as I run everything by myself.

How do I make the time?   Admittedly I save a lot of time every day by doing virtually no cleaning.  I clean my kitchen sink regularly, and keep all decomposable food garbage in the freezer until I take it out, I clean my bathroom occasionally.   Outside of that, and a hump to the laundromat with a heavy bag every couple of weeks, I live in a chaos that would be embarrassing if photographed.  

I could see the horrified jurors:  “Look, ladies and gentlemen, if you have the stomach for it, at these photographs of the defendant’s living room…”   The prosecutor could rest his case after showing the shots of the jammed shelves, the overflowing tabletops, the collapsing piles of boxes, the carpet of papers covering everything, the tangled chaos on the floor, the cracked walls, ceilings and broken tile floors.   A jury of my actual peers would be a slovenly twelve indeed, but that is not the point.  I’m not competing for a spread in Better Homes and Gardens.

I also have the great luck not to be a covetous person, which saves time too.  A friend who plays guitar OK and has a couple of beautiful, expensive guitars– I say, God bless him!  Truly.  I’m not the envious type.  I don’t waste time or emotion measuring what I have against the acquisitions of other people.  I’m content to own what I need, to preserve the things I love– favorite pens, knives, musical instruments, to use things up, to wear the same shirt for a decade or more.   One of my favorite shirts is one my mother always liked, I wore it to visit her at the hospice the last day she had her eyes open.  It was the last shirt she saw me in, and she smiled to see it.   A colorful affair it is, purchased at Costco once upon a time.  My mother died eight years ago.  I wear the shirt now for special occasions, rarely mentioning the shirt’s connection to my mother’s death, how she smiled to see it one last time.

There is the personal, the things that matter most to us, the things we find most fascinating, compelling, irresistible.  These things vary greatly from one of us to the next.  The realm of the personal, though, is something we all share.  We all take certain things personally and we can all relate to exactly why that is.   If you can illuminate your personal passions three dimensionally enough you might draw somebody through that doorway, into a world they never appreciated before.  It’s like the old adage (and a wise one, too) that you take the professor, not the course.  You can sign up for the most interesting sounding course in the catalogue, only to find the juice and life sucked out of it by a cadaverous professor.  The flip-side is that you can take a course that appears less than marginally interesting in the course description that turns out to be fantastic, because the professor is brilliant and draws you into her love of the subject.

The personal, we are often reminded, is political, as the political is personal.  Take the average partisan voter, they take their politics very personally and their political views flow from the experiences of their personal lives.   If liberal they get exercised by the idea of racism, the state’s overbearing interference with a human right (abortion comes first to mind), the grotesquely uneven distribution of wealth and opportunity, the destruction of the natural earth by greedy corporations mining the last scraps of the world’s resources and poisoning everything.   If conservative they are pissed off at “political correctness”, the idea that every lazy poor person feels entitled to free food, free medical care, a low-cost place to stay, a cell phone, fancy sneakers, sickened at government interference with human rights– like the right not to be killed as a fetus for the convenience of an immoral pregnant woman– job killing regulations to save some endangered bird or rodent, on down the line.   These issues are litmus test left-right issues.  Abortion.   Poverty.   Catastrophic Climate Disruption.   Regulations.  Income inequality.

Also, all deeply personal issues.   This is where the rubber meets the road, as they say in that big cliche mill in the sky.   The successful politician makes a personal connection, as, say what you will about him, the current president has undoubtedly made among his supporters.   He speaks plainly to them, speaks the way they do, doesn’t worry if a bad word slips out, everyone uses a bad word sometimes.   Fuck those sons of bitches, you know what I’m saying?  Am I right?  Seriously, (a huge huzzah of approval) fuck those fucking losers.  We’re going to bomb the shit out of those motherfuckers!  You know what I’m saying?     His audience roars, they know exactly what he’s saying.  

He is a star because he speaks a language his audience takes very personally.   His opponent in the last election, whatever else we might say about her,  did not have the same gift, was not as able to make that personal connection, even as she was arguably more personable, certainly less abrasive, than our current attacker-in-chief.   Partisans will argue over which one was the bigger liar.  We must not forget, the last election was a close contest between the most hated and second most hated political personalities in America.

I have long believed, and do even now, that if people of good faith and good will sit down to solve the local version of world problems, there is much even political opposites would agree on.  The argument against this is the way “winning” politics is conducted in our intensely commercial society.   It was discovered at some point that negative campaigning wins elections, if you can get people to believe your opponent is a pedophile, for example– you have a huge advantage with the voters.  

Newt Gingrich and his friends made a science out of “wedge issues”, hammering on the emotional issues that divide us into opposing camps.   The Democratic party’s response was to try to make their tent big enough for everybody, by carefully not offending anyone.   Which in itself is kind of offensive to many, particularly if you adopt the worst ideas of your opponents in the name of “compromise” while engaging in the standard servile courtship of super-wealthy human and corporate donors.  

The Democrats’ inclusive approach was disparagingly branded “identity politics” as though the politics of the conservative is not also based on identity, and carved into the other side of the same stone.   On and on.  Blue hat, red hat.   Blue asshole, red asshole.  Brands, mere brands in a culture raised on brand loyalty, steeped in the consciousness of brands, understanding quality only through brand names.

What is my brand?   Not having a brand.   (see footnote 1)

“Not much of a goddamned brand.   Excellent brand for a loser, though, I have to give you that.”

The tone of the conversation in my head is calm, as honest as I can make it, with a bias toward trying to be fair.   If we are fair when we analyze a problem, the odds are better we’ll come to reasonable ideas about how to solve it, or at least make it better.   The alternative is an eternal contest between sullen, immovable two year-olds.

The trouble with voting for a brand, being a partisan, is that very often no thought at all goes into taking rigid positions that are always presented as either/or.   Spokesmen for our self-identified brand will tell us what side to take on any given issue, assuring us that there are only two sides to any issue, an imbecilic position few bother to question.   Good people don’t kill fetuses vs. good people don’t force fourteen year-old rape victims to carry the rapist’s baby for nine months and give birth to it.   There are arguments on both sides, I suppose, and a world of nuance between these two absolute views but the ones that begin “God said”… well, enough said, I think.  

I say believe in God as deeply as you like, and may the good, merciful things you do multiply as your faith deepens.   Personally, I have no problem with the righteous of any religion, until they come with swords, because God told them… you know.

Meantime, the conversation continues, as all good conversations should.

 

[1]  When I get a “like” I generally try to return the favor and like something on the liker’s site.  I read something I like and click like, and am often number 399 liking that post.   A big post for likes, in my case, is four or five.

I shit you not, I got a couple of likes on this very post today, went to the blahgs, read something I liked and clicked “like”.  Czech it out, eerie, crazy:

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[2] Not a day goes by… I had a great experience recently, a nervous, chatty guy I was waiting for a medical procedure with (by pure chance, never met him before), as we went up in the elevator, asking me what my ancestry was.   I assumed he was asking if I was Jewish, so I told him where my people came from.  “You’re a Jew?   Jesus Christ,” he said, which I repeated with a big smile.  I love that kind of shit.  Only tangentially related to not a day going by without some thought of Hitler, this guy certainly didn’t strike me as an anti-Semite, but… Jesus Christ!   That was great.

Hannah Arendt, towering intellectual It-Girl

I am, apparently, not the only one currently reading Hannah Arendt’s massive and fascinating The Origins of Totalitarianism (there’s a line waiting for it at the NY Public Library).  It may actually be back on the best-seller list, for reasons impossible to fathom.   One of those accidents of history, I suppose.   Sekhnet alerted me to Krista Tippett’s great interview with a British academic and author, Lyndsey Stonebridge, who recently re-read Arendt’s collected works and wrote an article on Hannah Arendt.   You can hear their conversation HERE and, bless Krista, there is also a full transcript of their edited chat.

Krista quotes Hannah Arendt:   

“What prepares men for a totalitarian domination” — and here, again, is what happens in the human heart and psyche and society that makes these things possible — “is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience, usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.”

Loneliness, which has multiplied exponentially in our cyber age.  Loneliness and the disconnection that leads some to despair, tens of thousands of Americans annually to death by drug overdose, gunshot, hanging, suicide by police, by drunk driving.   Loneliness, which makes people join mobs, if they get the chance, chanting idiotic slogans by the flickering light of Tiki torches.  

Loneliness, which has been monetized by shrewd fucks like Mark Zuckerberg (to the tune of $74,000,000,000 personal profit and counting) and organized by algorithm into potent personalized political propaganda delivery, instantly to your pocket, or bedside, with a little notification beep to remind you it’s waiting.     Loneliness is the source of much human misery, and, as so often with massive human misery, there’s gold in that misery (think of slavery, Imperialism, the coal mines, the original factory system).

Here, at the oddly placed footnote below, Krista and Lyndsey Stonebridge talk about the power of a provocative lie versus the feebleness of factual truth in politics, something that has an unaccountable relevance at the moment, though, again, hard to put my finger on why.   [1]  

I need to read more about Hannah Arendt’s life, her soul calls out to me from another world.   I feel she is a precious wise ancestor I’d be good friends with.   I recall her description of an assimilated nineteenth century Prussian Jewish woman of great wit and charm, one Rahel Varnhagen,  who held a salon where actors and other artistic and intellectual misfits gathered.    Of Rahel Varnhagen Arendt later said, (Wikipedia informs us)  that she was “my very closest woman friend, unfortunately dead a hundred years now.”[13]   I have similar feelings about Hannah Arendt, though she’s been dead far less long so far.    Here   is a nice short piece about my dear friend Hannah, with numerous linked quotes and articles.

Here is what she thought about thinking:

MS. TIPPETT:  … And honestly, Americans have a very conflicted kind of relationship, historically and philosophically, with thought and ideas. It’s a different thing than it was, for example, in the Germany that Hannah Arendt was raised in. The power of ideas. But it feels to me like there might be a receptivity now precisely because we see that it’s not getting us anywhere to be meeting my emotion with your emotion. Her — as you say, you can only have moral imagination if you also think, if you are thinking.

You talked in this podcast I heard you in that brought me to you, In Our Time, about how she always talked about the dialogue we have in our heads, that we are constantly working out what it means to be human, to be a person, whether we realize it or not.

MS. STONEBRIDGE: Yeah. She took this from Socrates and then from Heidegger, but her sense of what it meant to be a thinking person was always to be having the two-in-one dialogue in your head, that thinking wasn’t about mastery. It wasn’t about thinking about stuff in order to control it or to rationalize it. Thinking was a way of being.

The passion of being was in thinking. And that comes from that two-in-one dialogue in one’s head.  And for her, that was the beginning of moral life, that dialogue.  

There also follows — there is a notion of judgment that comes through thinking and dialogue. And the ability…

MS. TIPPETT: Discernment. Reflection.

MS. STONEBRIDGE: Well, thinking, she says, is not the same as judgment, but it creates the right conditions for judgment. But also, she says, if you can’t have that inner dialogue, then you can’t speak and act with others either because it’s part of — if you’re already divided in yourself because you’re having this conversation with yourself, and that’s the passion of your being, people who can do that can actually then move on to having conversations with other people and then judging with other people. And what she called “the banality of evil” was the inability to hear another voice, the inability to have a dialogue either with oneself or the imagination to have a dialogue with the world, the moral world.

The inability to hear an opposing view, a voice not your own, to imagine an experience you have not personally encountered.   The abiding curse of our fucking times.

Arendt quote.jpg

 

[1]     MS. TIPPETT: We’re going to have to wind down here, but I’ve got so much else I want to talk about. But I want to talk briefly and this follows on that idea of lying. Which was one of those elements of totalitarianism, very much a subject alive in American politics now. But something I’m very intrigued getting a little bit deeper into this, and reading her — and I’ve thought a lot about — like a lot of things right now, it’s just out on the surface, what was already kind of fermenting. We already had a crisis of truth, or not being able to speak about truth in a complex way. And we’ve been relying on facts, and facts were never enough. And she makes these — like, here’s her essay “Lying in Politics.” She says that “factual truths,” here’s that. “Factual truths are never compellingly true. The historian knows how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life. It is always in danger of being perforated by single lies, or torn to shreds. Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy domain of human affairs. From this it follows that no factual statement can ever be beyond doubt.” Take us inside that and what that means for us now.

MS. STONEBRIDGE: For Arendt, I think why the idea of thinking and speaking as a form of action are important to her is that what she’s saying there is, you can throw enough facts, you can throw all the facts you like at people, and they will not stick. We had this, in the U.K., and I know you have, too, that it’s — “OK, against the false news we’ll have fact-finding, and we’ll tell you.

And we’ll have a team of researchers, and you just have to look on our website, and we’ll tell you which of those are lies.” And you can scream facts at people until you’re blue in the face, and a lot of colleagues and universities and journalists have been doing exactly that very hard, working tirelessly. And it’s not making any difference. And I think what she’s talking about there is the ability through thinking and communal discourse, to make truth meaningful in the world, it has to happen between people. Which is not saying we just make up our own reality. She’s not saying that. It means that this is why…

MS. TIPPETT: When she says testimony, it needs…

MS. STONEBRIDGE: Testimony.

MS. TIPPETT: It needs experience. It needs human experience around it.

MS. STONEBRIDGE: Yeah. And so I think she — that was why testimony was important to her. It’s why history and the sense of a myth were all important to her because it’s what makes truth meaningful to people together in a community. If you want a culture that’s going to take on fake news, and the political lie, I say as someone who teaches literature and history, what you need is a culture of the arts and humanity. What you need is more storytelling. What you need is more discourse. What you need is more imagination. What you need is more creation in that way, and more of a sense of what it is that ties us to those words and ties us to those stories.

MS. TIPPETT: Yeah. We need three dimensional — we need stories and facts and conversations between people and all of that working together. Right?

Feral Trio

In spite of the generally accepted idea that a feral cat, once it reaches a certain age, will not allow itself to be touched by humans, we have a feral cat, Mama Kitten, who at first would not be touched and now very much likes to be petted.   On her terms, of course, being a cat, but nonetheless, quite affectionate when the mood is on her.  She came by this gradually, sitting near us when we were outside, showing her newborn kittens to Sekhnet in the garden, coming closer, rubbing against us, eventually letting herself be touched.  We fed many of her kittens off a spoon, once she weaned them.

She is a beautiful cat, and a prodigious survivor, who, starting at six month’s old, has given birth to perhaps twenty kittens.   She is a good mother, until it is time to push the latest brood out of the nest, to attend to the next.  She can be quite savage driving off the surviving kittens when the time comes.   Sekhnet, applying human morality (oxymoron?) condemns the little survivor as a bitch when she turns savagely on her children.   In a better world we’d adopt Mama Kitten, get her spayed, make her an indoor/outdoor cat, extend her life by years, etc.   This is not, of course, a better world.

Here are three of the latest batch of four, lounging on the ramp outside the back door from which, periodically, human servants emerge, opening cans of food.  There are a few such cans on the right side of this recent photo by Sekhnet.

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We generally don’t give these beautiful little strays names because every time we get attached to a particular individual he or she disappears.  Sometimes there is a bad smell in the garden and we find a tiny corpse under a bush.  More usually the kittens are whisked off without a trace, to become meals for the local hawks.

Yesterday, strolling back from Cunningham Park just before sundown, I passed several groups of cats, a lounging mother and two or three kittens playing under a bush.  The kittens watched me as I approached, scurrying for cover as I got close.   Their mothers eyed me warily until I was a safe distance away.    Their looks said “that’s right, motherfucker, continue to carry your ass on down the street and stop looking at my children, you sick bastard.”

I recalled the debate Jonathan Franzen was involved in at one time, about wiping out the colonies of feral cats that kill, as it turns out, not thousands but billions of local birds and rodents every year.   Often for sport, it appears.   Sekhnet once saw Mama Kitten take down a finch, leaped up and tore the little yellow bird out of the air.  “I hope she’s teaching her children to hunt,” she sometimes says when she laments that we are not always around to feed them.    

It’s a brutal world out there for animals in the wild.  Even more brutal, I suppose, in areas where humans have remade the natural world, turning local species into cagey outlaws.    This brutality has been escalated (like a consumer complaint to any corporation, only for real) by the needs of the world’s top predator, homo sapiens, until not that long ago another insignificant and desperate prey animal, living by guile, as ruthless as necessary to survive.   I’d love to be able to live without making constant judgements, the way I don’t judge Mama Kitten, but, as you may have noticed, greedy, ruthless, ignorant, loud talking motherfuckers will not give it a rest.

These are three very cute kittens, though, no?

Nazi Bastards! seriously, you can’t make this stuff up

Pardon all the Nazi stuff recently, I really couldn’t tell you why I am suddenly thinking about it so often (could be reading Hannah Arendt’s fantastic Eichmann in Jerusalem, I guess).   Here’s a nice bit for your consideration, the devil, as always, in the details:

The Gestapo had the authority to arrest citizens on the suspicion that they might commit a crime, and the definition of a crime was at their discretion. The Gestapo Law, passed in 1936, gave police the right to act extra-legally. This led to the sweeping use of Schutzhaft—”protective custody”, a  euphemism for the power to imprison people without judicial proceedings.[52]  The courts were not allowed to investigate or interfere. The Gestapo was considered to be acting legally as long as it was carrying out the leadership’s will. People were arrested arbitrarily, sent to concentration camps, or killed.[44]

source

 

A Relatively Poor Day

How we are feeling at any given moment is relative, to our own feelings at other times and to the way anyone else feels in a given moment on a given day.  I wouldn’t trade a moment of my life for even the happiest one of anybody else’s, but that’s just me.  That said, I passed a sad, low energy day today.   It was not only stumbling on the fezbook page of my old friend’s widow (she was the suggested friend of a friend I’d gone to read something by), seeing the beaming face of my dead friend in a couple of photos I’d never seen, and the one where, flanked by his daughters, his head is an alarmingly white ball with his familiar face on it.  I didn’t immediately think of the image of our old mutual friend, after a visit with him not long before the end, stopping in on neighbors who were having dinner, and bursting into uncontrollable sobs.  That image hit me just now, though it must have been lurking since I saw those happy moments in the life of my old, dead friend.  

I’d woken two hours too early again today, no idea what’s up with that shit.  This time I emerged from a dream where I was two-timing two pretty, delightful young women who were both, in the manner of such dreams, quite crazy about me.  Complicating matters was that they lived in apartments directly next door to each other, so that I locked the door of one and unlocked the door of the other after the first one went to work and the other was about to arrive home.  The obvious question of how anyone could possibly be clever enough, duplicitous enough, enough of a psychopath (not to put too fine a point on it), to carry on this deception was a considerable one.   One, the newer of the two lovers (I was leaning toward choosing this girl, if things didn’t blow up completely before I could do so), was a singer, and I had a gig at a restaurant accompanying her on guitar, for decent pay, as I recall.   The other was very cool too, and I’d known her longer, and we were very compatible and laughed a lot together.   The sex with both of them was great.  Neither had any idea of the existence of the other, as I went from one to the other over the course of an increasingly disquieting dream.  In the end, I was awake, alone, on mysteriously short sleep.

Not long afterwards I was looking at the smiling face of my dead friend who’d died of  a rare cancer, a deadly soft tissue sarcoma,   The same one that killed Hugo Chavez, he told me after Chavez died.  He told me that shortly before he himself died.   I had a call from another old friend, a prostate cancer survivor, who is seeing his oncologist Wednesday about another unrelated cancer, some kind of soft tissue sarcoma. Fucking hell.   He was calling me for advice, his sisters are closing in trying to get the rest of the money their mother left them.  I told him to just give them their shares and tell them to shut the fuck up now.   His daughter, a survivor of sexual assault at age ten from her mom’s new boyfriend (a guy my friend has somehow managed not to murder)  is having nightmares.  The latest one involves her dad dying before she gets back from sleep-away camp.  In spite of it all, we had a few laughs, he promised to keep me posted on what he learns after his visit to the oncologist.

In the background today the Yankees came from behind to tie the game in Tampa, and then, on the first pitch in the bottom of the twelfth, boom! walk-off home run.  Yankees lose.   Judge O for 5.  I’d watched the last segments of a documentary on Netflix called The Staircase, which sets out what appears to have been a grave and vicious fifteen year miscarriage of justice, in twelve parts.   Well done, but the only doctor who would have ordered it for me today would have been Dr. Mengele, the notorious Nazi fuck.   To relax I went for a long walk and listened to a bit of Hannah Arendt’s insanely detailed The Origins of Totalitarianism, which I’d recommended to a friend as being on a par with Eichmann in Jerusalem,  but which I am having second thoughts about.

Returned from the stroll on aching knees, after several days doing the exercises the distracted young woman at the PT place showed me the other day, then didn’t bother to supervise as to form.   Which would have been impossible, since she was simultaneously working with two other patients with non-knee-related troubles, each behind a curtain of their own, but very close by.   My knees are killing me, as I wait for the ibuprofen– possibly deadly for my idiopathic kidney disease — to kick in.   Well, they are not really killing me, my knees, they’re more than usually sore.  I will live. That is the thing that is so easy to forget in this exciting world we all eventually must leave forever– for the time being, we will live. 

The miracle of it, and the tragedy, really.

Totalitarian Tendencies

Of course, it’s always problematic to make comparisons between current events and infamous low points in human history, no matter how emotionally vexing those current events may be.   I call for an end (until it becomes undeniable, at which point I’ll be unable to post calls for anything) to the comparisons of brutal policymakers to Nazis or other totalitarian regimes.

Taking young children from their mothers’ arms is not the same, clearly, as wrenching a baby from the mother and smashing a rifle butt against its tiny head.   Putting a crying child in a cage for indefinite detention is not anywhere near as horrific as putting a child in a gas chamber.  You can’t even fairly compare those two things, caging and murdering.   So calling a government policy that dehumanizes certain classes of children and designates them for this kind of inhumane treatment “Nazi-like” sounds like hyperbole and is easily enough dismissed by the hard pragmatists who believe that this kind of harsh, tough, zero-tolerance policy that makes parents pay a brutally high price, their connection with their children, will deter desperate people from coming to our borders.

It is easy to condemn this sort of policy as the terroristic tactic of people consumed by unreasoning hatred of the objects of their policy.   The people coming to the US southern border are portrayed by proponents of these harsh policies as criminals, rapists, terrorists, a hoard posing untold dangers to our eternally threatened nation, incredible dangers, unbelievably bad dangers, really dangerous dangers.   That many of them are running from terrors directly produced by, say, our own imbecilic ninety year selective drug prohibition regime, our eternal War on Drugs, is beside the point.  Those violent drug gangs are the problem, not the ongoing American law enforcement idiocy that has only produced a massively lucrative product for these increasingly violent foreign (and domestic) criminals to peddle.    

Fleeing gang violence, says our tiny, racist top law enforcement official, is no longer grounds for political asylum, it’s your goddamn problem, deal with it, you brown, non-English speaking losers.  Neither is fleeing a spouse who beats the living shit out of you and threatens to kill you.   Nothing to see here!  No longer America’s role, to provide a haven for women and children who will otherwise be killed in their home countries, or teenagers facing death if they refuse to join a drug cartel’s street gang.

We cannot underestimate the vital role that terrorism and the threat of violent physical force plays in human affairs.  By terrorism and violent force, I refer to the routinized violence threatened or visited on citizens by states, by nations and coalitions of nations.  This state violence causes the vast majority of deaths by terrorism (though it is rarely referred to as terrorism, for obvious reasons).  Deadly violence, and the terrifying threat of its instant deployment, and more recently fear of non-government terrorism, and the need for extreme measures to protect the populace from Terror with a capital T,  is always used by the status quo to maintain order and to influence political relations.  

The old debate over who is the terrorist is now all the rage, in our terrified of terror Post-9-11 world.  Those illegal Mexicans, Guatemalans and Hondurans are TERRORISTS, we are told by American law enforcement.   The protesters in Gaza, every one of them according to the Israeli Minister of Defense, down to the medics and members of the international press:  TERRORISTS!   When you’re fighting terror, the gloves must come off, obviously.

The I.C.E. agents who forcibly take the kids from their potential terrorist parents are only protecting law abiding citizens from criminals and terrorists, the worst of the worst, shameless terrorists using their own babies as human shields!    Those terrorists in Gaza?   We have every right to kill as many as we need to in order to make them stop hating our freedom!    Israeli leaders, particularly the extreme nationalistic right wing ones, are fond of reminding the world that Israel is the region’s only real democracy.   Therefore any means needed will be employed to defend it from haters, including opening fire on unarmed protesters, with special bullets designed to do maximum damage on impact.

The moral battle is won by the most skilled story-tellers, the people who can make us empathize the most with their point of view.  With that in mind, Israeli lawmakers are considering a law making it illegal to photograph Israeli soldiers in a way that could potentially harm Israeli military morale.  Showing a photo of an Israeli soldier cuffing a belligerent Palestinian teenager could really harm the morale of the sorely tested Israeli army.   Five years in prison for the photographer who has caused this harm to Israeli democracy, ten if the photograph, according to the law, undermines the security of the state.  They are voting on this important measure as I type these words.  Nothing to see here!  

The motto of every great democracy– Nothing to see here!   Criminalize those who take pictures of things that are nobody’s business, merely the democratic sausage we all love being made.  We are no slouches in this department, here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.  Dubya Bush’s daddy made it illegal to photograph and broadcast images of the coffins of dead American soldiers.  How bad was it for morale to see, day after day, those dead Americans coming home from war zones?!   No more of that shit, citizens of a democracy do not need that kind of incredibly depressing shit, it only creates prejudice.  It sets our people against lawful war as the solution to every business-related foreign problem our leaders seek to solve by violent means. 

Recently our perpetually petulant president withdrew the U.S. from the the Human Rights Council in the United Nations.  Who needs fake fucking Human Rights from a bunch of self-righteous loser hypocrites?  This sudden departure from the council did not come out of nowhere.  First the council unfairly condemned Israel for having snipers shoot countless protesters, killing scores, hospitalizing thousands.   Next they attacked us directly!     The UN Council on Human Rights is poised to release a report about the extent and conditions of extreme poverty in the United States.

“It’s patently ridiculous for the United Nations to examine poverty in America,” U.S. Ambassador Haley Barber said in response to the Special Rapporteur’s report.   Fair enough, Ms. Barber, if you say so.   Just because the U.S. has vast numbers of citizens,  an estimated 5.3 million (out of 40 million in poverty), living in desperate Third World type poverty is none of anyone’s damn business.  Making a big deal about falling American life expectancy, an infant mortality rate as high as in many very poor countries, America’s informed choice not to recognize the human rights of children,  outrageous meddling!   It is no business of a bunch of Socialist America haters to “impartially” investigate and write preposterous, hateful, patently ridiculous reports about us.   They’re our fucking poor people and we’ll deal with those selfish parasites, including the 13 million so-called children in poverty, as we fucking see fit, Sir.  We’ve got your Human Rights Council right here (grab crotch), bitches!

It’s not right to call them Nazis, I’ll be the first to remind you.  Assholes, yes, vicious assholes, sure, but Nazis… not quite yet.   Still, this administration is taking steady, consistent steps toward a kind of American authoritarianism.   The destruction of critical thought is the first thing that must be achieved, to allow incoherent partisan buzzwords to carry every argument.  

Think of the incoherent messages about this policy of taking children from their parents, the citing of biblical scripture to justify it, the denials about the policy, the indignant objection to cages being referred to as cages, the blaming of Democrats for the policy, the sudden reversal of the policy by executive order.  None of that really matters, if we are really ready for the end of our democracy.   The silencing of all thoughtful criticism leads to the acceptance of incoherent narratives.  This process is crucial for anyone seeking absolute control over a population.  Silence the critics and you’re most of the way home.  The lying media, enemy of the people, knows this too.  Those bastards need to be made to fall into line, by hook or by crook.

Once the possibility of  coherent public discussion is eliminated, the rest is pretty much downhill for any motherfucker, already in the highest position in our government, who would become Supreme Leader.   The test of American democracy is upon us all.  The good news is that’s its a pass/fail exam, which is also, sadly, the bad news.

 

I’ll leave this one to Diane Ravitch

As I am currently delving deeply into Hannah Arendt’s deep Eichmann in Jerusalem, it is hard for me to see any government policy that dehumanizes selected humans as unrelated to the larger Nazi worldview and purpose.   You dehumanize unworthy humans who you can then treat viciously, blame whoever you like for your own deliberate brutality, heck, blame the dehumanized themselves, wait for any outcry to die down, then do whatever the hell you want to the sons and daughters of bitches.   Hitler 101, straight up.

So it won’t do for me to get emotionally involved here, any more than I already am.  I offer this one bit, from Diane’s piece, two immoral administration spokespeople indecently citing the words of Jesus in a bland attempt to justify their boss’s inhumane, unChristlike purposes:

Sessions, who continues to vigorously defend the policy he pushed for internally, freely acknowledges that Bush and Obama did not interpret the law the same way that Trump is doing now. “The previous administration wouldn’t prosecute illegal aliens who entered the country with children,” he said last Thursday in Fort Wayne, Ind. “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for his purposes.” (Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended using religion to justify the policy. “I can say that it is very biblical to enforce the law,” the White House press secretary told reporters that afternoon.)

I can say, without hesitation or need to qualify it in any way, that Adolf Eichmann and his ilk would have been equally comfortable with the quoted scripture about obedience to authority.  A moral duty to accept the dictates of a human governor as expressions of God’s law … Jesus Christ.   It may be many things, but it sure as hell ain’t democracy.    

I now refer you to Diane Ravitch’s well-done post, which is here.

And, after reading the piece, I salute Laura Bush [1] and Melania.  You go!  Expressions of the best American impulses, rather than the most petulant, vicious, extortionate and politically cynical.

 

[1] From Laura Bush’s editorial:

Recently, Colleen Kraft, who heads the American Academy of Pediatrics, visited a shelter run by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement. She reported that while there were beds, toys, crayons, a playground and diaper changes, the people working at the shelter had been instructed not to pick up or touch the children to comfort them. Imagine not being able to pick up a child who is not yet out of diapers.

 

Internet Service Provider Duopoly Millionaire Strikebreaker

I’ve got to write and post this quickly, my internet has been out all day so far, as it was most of yesterday, only winking back on a few minutes ago during a long call with Spectrum tech support. While on hold I learned, and passed on to Ron, the good-natured Spectrum rep, that Tom Rutledge, the great and important CEO of Spectrum’s parent company, a guy who made $98.5 million in 2016 when his outfit bought Time Warner Cable, is still refusing to negotiate with the technicians union, IBEW local No. 3, an outfit whose strike is in its second year.

Rutledge, in fairness to him and his principled refusal to negotiate with the lawfully constituted technicians’ union, is probably bitter at the vast drop in his income.  He made a mere $7,800,000 last year and his ungrateful technicians are bitching about giving up certain features of their health plan, retirement benefits and things like that.   It’s hard to blame Rutledge for being so intractable, unless you are the kind of person who is harsh to complete assholes.

Ron had no idea Spectrum technicians in New York were on strike, though he’d heard of vandalism in NYC.  I explained the difference between vandalism and acts of skilled sabotage by workers whose rights under the National Labor Relations Act seemed to be being violated.   I explained to him that in the old days workers who accepted bad pay to cross a picket line and break a strike were called bad names, including scabs, and that I was reluctant to let a strike breaking technician into my apartment to check a modem that doesn’t seem to be faulty, as it is currently working.  

Ron agreed the problem was not the modem, since it is getting a fine signal at the moment.   The problem could be in the “drop”, the box that splits off from the “node” for delivery into individual buildings.  The node serves 248 modems in my area, the drop might serve a dozen in my building.   There was no way for him to monitor activity on my “drop”, though only 10 of 248 modems on my node are currently offline.  If you are wondering why I don’t just switch to an ISP that is not so fucked up, I will tell you.

We have two ISPs in most of New York City, Spectrum (a branch of Charter, who bought the franchise from Time Warner Cable a few years back) and Verizon.  Both ISP giants provide substandard internet service, intermittent service, and, because the free competition we hear so much about only involves two giants in our free market, they are free to set whatever prices it pleases them to set for whatever service they see fit to provide.  I currently pay $50 a month for intermittent internet service from Spectrum, having grown tired of no service and repeated lies from Verizon.  Ron was somehow able to give me a double credit today for the hours last night into today that I had no service: a generous $3.33.

I have to contact the technicians’ union, IBEW local # 3 and get the latest on their strike against Spectrum, the internet provider with the handsomely compensated CEO, a chap who made over $100 million the last two years.  This wealthy titan will not negotiate with the union.  He does not believe in unions.  If he had his way, workers would not be paid at all. Think of how much more money he could make if all those wasted technician salaries, vacation days, health benefits, pension contributions were saved, clawed back, put into his tax-free investment portfolio!

I need to contact the IBEW and offer to help them publicize their strike.  They ran a great online ad a few months back, very compelling, but not a public word since.   Almost nobody knows about the status of the strike that strikebreaker CEO Tom Rutledge is doing his best to make go away.   I wonder how many are still on strike after more than a year, like Jewish children making a strong moral case to a Nazi. I want to support the union and I need the striking workers, if possible, to exempt my home from their sabotage of Spectrum’s never perfect, now never worse, service.

Spectrum told me yesterday that my modem is defective, that, for once, there is no outage in my area, on my node.   They will need to send scab technicians over to inspect it all, the modem, the interior connection, outside connectivity at the “drop”, issues relating to the entire node, etc. They gave me a generous $1.67 credit yesterday for a day without internet service (this outage must last, according to corporate policy, at least four consecutive hours to qualify for the refund). The modem I was assured yesterday must be broken, after hours of no service with no outages reported, is delivering a signal again now.   Ron assured me today it is very unlikely to be the modem.

Shades of the old runaround from Spectrum’s fellow duopolist ISP Verizon, who told me for months that there was a technical problem with my line and that they were working on it, that a technical team would contact me the following day. I was never contacted. The problem was not with my line, it was with the entire Verizon network, which was off-line for many months as they switched their network from copper wire to fiber. This required digging up streets, getting permits, burying fiberoptic cable, it took many months. A call to Verizon was the same bullshit, month after month. A complete lie.  The technical team will call you tomorrow, we have no idea why you have no service, now about that huge bill you keep refusing to pay…

If your only business is making profit, it would behoove you to lie if you might lose the bulk of your customers during the months they will have no service.  What self-respecting American business would admit something that would undoubtedly cause an exodus of customers?  Verizon billed me, month after month, for service I had not been receiving.  According to them, no refund was due until I paid in full.  They were demanding hundreds of dollars by the end.  Would it seem petty of me to call them Nazi motherfuckers?  Sure it would, they are just an American business trying to keep the lights on so that all Americans can enjoy a brighter day!

 

post-script:

The modern world, my friends, where every war must be fought by propagandists who specialize in branding, messaging and targeted marketing, sometimes brings us, just fucking bullshit.

Pull up the IBEW information on their long-running strike against Charter/Spectrum, and here you go:

check us out, brothers and sisters

You can read about the neo-liberal asshole NYS Governor’s battle with the mega-corporation, complete with mealy mouthed almost-threats and a hint at support for a striking union that is a key political support group.  We have to go to Crain’s, in May 2018, for any kind of update on this shit?

Crain’s article

Nice bit of Irony re: Israel’s kidnapping of Eichmann

This tasty irony was discussed in Hannah Arendt’s epilogue to Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Israel apparently caught a lot of flack from many quarters, including distinguished jurists and legal theorists, for kidnapping Adolf Eichmann from Argentina to stand trial in Jerusalem.   Some expressed the view that Israel had more right to kill him in Buenos Aires  than to kidnap him for purposes of a trial. [1]  

Argentina became a haven for top Nazis on the lam in part because of its tolerance for Nazi types living under false names, in part due to a network of SS men in South America and also because of their strict statute of limitation for war crimes.  If a Nazi could avoid capture for that long, he was legally home free in Argentina, Argentina would not extradite him.  

The Israelis caught Eichmann (who was living as Ricardo Klement) just after the fifteen years was up.  The statute of limitations had run, no more prosecution for that crime, those crimes, any crimes, sorry.   The Israeli’s couldn’t legally get jurisdiction over him as long to try him under their own laws as long as Eichmann had his feet on Argentine soil.   The Nazi Hunters and Ben Gurion seemed to have found themselves SOL, both in the law school sense of the acronym for statute of limitations, and in the Louis Armstrong sense referred to in the title of his “SOL Blues”, meaning “shit out of luck”.  

So they kidnapped the piece of garbage.  Rendered him back to Israel, if you will.

“… only Eichmann’s de facto statelessness enabled Israel to get away with kidnapping him [2], and it is understandable that despite the innumerable precedents cited in Jerusalem to justify the act of kidnapping, the one relevant one, the capture of Berthold Jakob, a Leftist German Jewish journalist, in Switzerland by Gestapo agents in 1935, was never mentioned.”

Nor did Hannah Arendt bother to point out the rather tasty irony of the one on-point legal precedent being the what’s good for goose is good for the gander of a Nazi protesting treatment that only the fucking Nazis, in their infinite legalistic slickness, had ever done before.  Berthold Jakob, at the time of his kidnapping, was not a fugitive from the law, as were all the others cited as precedent by Israeli prosecutors.

Nazis, man, some very fine people, very fine people, the finest people.

 

[1]  This is, in fact, the way most state killings are normally done these days, by the U.S.A. anyway: extrajudicially, no need for judge, jury, trial.   President declares you an enemy combatant, puts you on the secret kill list, they kill you.  No muss, no fuss.  But 1960, the time of Eichmann’s capture, was, in some ways, a quainter time in matters like fully-legal state execution without a judicial process of any kind.

[2] Eichmann had entered Argentina and was living there under a fake name, Ricardo Klement (Ricardo presumably for the priest that helped him get out of Europe) and so was not legally Adolf Eichmann in Argentina.   Also, in another neat bit of irony, recall that the Nazis were legally able to do much of what they did to Jews, Gypsies, other enemies of the states (transporting them East, among other things) under international law because they had declared them “stateless”.   Now Rickey Ricardo Eichmann himself was not protected by Argentine authorities because he was … legally stateless.   Germany wanted nothing to do with the Nazi bastard, his lawyer made the request, so the Jews just grabbed him.