Author Archives: oinsketta

Why so Pissed, El? (2)

We live in a culture ruled not by a desire to meet everyone’s basic human needs, or even recognize them, but by an unreasoning competitive lust to acquire more than we can possibly use.   We all need food, shelter, clothing, exercise, love, sex, companionship.   We get tasty, cheaply produced toxic foodstuffs, overpriced shelter that is a burden, (if also a major investment), for many citizens, clothing made in countries where labor is cheapest and health and safety regulations least intrusive.  Instead of walking, most of us drive everywhere in fossil-powered cars whose pollution is destroying the planet.  

There is sadly little love in our society, for most people, in part because advertising creates impossible dreams as divorce rates soar.  Sex is often a commodity in our pay to play culture, pornography is readily available to every adolescent with a phone.   Companionship, in the sense of mutually respecting friends spending time together, having a few laughs, exchanging views, is more and more rare.    Look at me right now, I’m typing these words into a void instead of chatting with a friend.   More and more of our communication, as a society, is via what is grotesquely known as Social Media.   It isn’t hard to see why people become internet trolls in this kind of inhuman environment.   Why not take out your frustrations by shitting on your countrymen when nobody can look into your pathetic eyes?

Why so mad, El?  This sick shit is the only game in town, unless you make herculean exertions to get off the grid.   If you choose not to participate in what is euphemistically called the Rat Race, the competition for wealth, you find yourself a sucker betting against the house.   When I was young banks paid a substantial interest rate to hold your money.  If you had a sum you were saving, you could put it into a long-term, federally insured, bank account that paid 10% interest.  This way you could live on a budget and keep up with inflation without putting your savings on a crooked roulette wheel.  Today banks have merged with investment houses and insurance companies, the whole game is a casino.   Rather than FDIC insurance for your life savings in the bank, you have the federal government turning a willfully blind eye to the massive Ponzi Scheme that is our financial industry-driven economy.

In fairness to the ass-dicking architects of this system [1], I have heard there is nothing like taking a dump into a $35,000 toilet bowl.   It may be nice to own as many homes as you want, I suppose, although you have to wonder about why that might be.  In order to allow these masters of the universe to live such lavish lifestyles there are certain sacrifices the rest of us must make.   Not long ago they came up with a brilliant fraud to ensure that this sacrifice by the 95% would be perpetual.   I refer you to Matt Taibbi’s The Divide, pages 38 and 39, for a clear, concise description of the details [2].

You create a system where large sums of money are continually flowing in.  This is necessary for any Ponzi Scheme.  You need a steady flow of money coming in, to pay off people, to pique their greed, to make them invest more, to keep the shell game profitable.   Some unprincipled geniuses realized there was a huge reservoir of money in the housing market and came up with a scheme to defraud unsuspecting losers of billions, perhaps trillions, of dollars.   For all of its intricateness, it is deceptively simple.  You package and sell misleadingly labeled debt.

You allow millions of people to take mortgages they can not possibly afford to keep paying.  Give them “liar’s loans”, it’s not a problem, the point is to create mountains of debt you can package and sell, the more the better.  Make the initial mortgage payments small, it doesn’t matter, you can always add a clause for balloon payments that nobody will read, or understand.   As long as housing prices are going up, these poor suckers can always sell or borrow more money against the rising price of their homes, to keep their nostrils above water.   Meantime, you package these debts into huge bundles you can sell as rock solid investments, sliced into tranches of collateralized debt obligations, or whatever you want to call them.  

To make these bad debts attractive to investors, you get the ratings agencies to assure buyers that the derivatives they are investing in are AAA-rated, nothing safer than a triple A-rated investment product.   You make the transfers and investment opportunities for these toxic assets insanely complicated for anyone outside of the financial sector to begin to understand.   It doesn’t matter as long as you keep paying high interest rates on these toxic investments in the short term.  You make this golden investment opportunities irresistible.  Then you sit back, skim off the vast profits, and wait for more foreclosures to bundle and sell.  

Since we live in a culture where winners are rewarded with obscene wealth, and losers can go fuck off and die, all this makes perfect sense.   Obama’s justice department, along with not holding John Yoo, Mitchell and Jessen, Cheney and the other creators of our torture program accountable (come on! you will say, that would have been politically impossible– and besides, Cheney would have killed everyone), prosecuted nobody for this massive systemic financial fraud against millions of Americans, a fraud that resulted in the loss of gazillions of dollars for pension funds, senior citizens’ life savings, etc.  Suckers walk, yo.

Why so fucking angry, El?  This has always been the way of the world.  You think the serfs had it any better under feudalism?   Why blame perfect presidential candidate Barack Obama for not seriously addressing the most horrific failures of the system? He was no bomb thrower, he was a pragmatist.  He joked about making some “serious Tubmans” when he was out of office.  I have confidence in his abilities, I’m certain he will be the first ex-president to monetize his talents and status to become a billionaire.  Why not dream huge in the land of the American Dream?  

While we have Obama on the waterboard, I understand that the deep hatred he inspired in much of the country, merely by being “biracial”, may have led him to be more cautious than he would have been in a more just, less racist, society.   He faced a racist lynch mob every day of his presidency.  The most vocal leaders of that lynch mob are literally running the Executive branch today.  OK, leave my man out of it, then.

Why am I so fucking mad?  Because of how little choice there is in how to live by merciful human values in a corrupt, morally bankrupt, insatiably appetitive society like ours.  It is nothing to turn children into charred chopped meat somewhere thousands of miles from here, if you spin it as done in the cause of freedom and democracy.  Collateral Damage.  Sanctions against Iraq over the years cost many thousands of Iraqi children their lives, long before “Shock and Awe”, a perpetual war of aggression for no moral or legal reason.  Nothing to see here.   Drones replace “boots on the ground”, American lives are saved.  It’s all good!  We torture… some folks… call us pisher, as my grandfather used to say.   The bottom line is the economy, stupid.  The Stock Market hums along, practices largely the same as they were right before the big transfer of wealth in 2008 that was disastrous to many millions of people worldwide.  

“Nothing to fucking see here, commie bastard.  You want humble people to be left alone?   Where does that ever fucking happen?  I thought you wanted everyone’s basic so-called human needs taken care of?   How does that happen if you want to be left alone?  Asshole.  Grow some balls, go compete, monetize something, instead of whining to nobody about the infernal unfairness of life among the wise apes.  Nobody cares, do you understand me, you stupid loser fuck?  More than that, nobody is even fucking listening.”

I sit here, sucking my teeth, petulant.  I’m mad, yo.  Get me to a laughing academy, eh?  

And, smartly on cue, the spotty but expensive internet service provided by a duopoly headed by the highest paid CEO in the world, winks out.   God bless.

 

 

[1] Apologies to any loving, consensual practitioners of anal intercourse out there.  I don’t mean to disparage anyone’s sexual preference, I just get tired of using “motherfucker” to describe these ruthless motherfuckers.  “Cocksucker” is subject to the same offensive limitations as ass-dicker.  What a fucked up world… I suppose men who behave like the genteel “Planters” of old who raped their slaves for fun and profit are best described as what they are, motherfuckers.  Keep it simple.

[2] On the second of those pages, Taibbi writes:

It was a modern take on the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale.  Big banks took great masses of straw (i.e., the risky home loans of the poor, undocumented and unemployed) and spun it, factory style, into gold (i.e., AAA-rated securities).   They used a technique called securitization that allowed banks and mortgage lenders to take vast pools of home loans belonging to underemployed janitors and immigrants and magically convert them into investments that were ostensibly as safe as Microsoft corporate bonds or the sovereign debt of Luxembourg, but more lucrative than either.

Then we have this “fun fact” about the robust federal investigation into the causes of this great fraud, from page 407.  Try to read it without clenching your jaws after the punchline:

Fun fact:  When the economy crashed in 2008, the federal government formed an investigatory group to look into the causes.  The Financial Crisis Inquiry Committee was given a budget of $9.8.  Committee chairman Phil Angelides acidly noted that this was “roughly one-seventh of the budget of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.”

Meanwhile, that same year the federal drug enforcement budget leaped from $13.275 billion to $15.278 billion.  That meant that just the increase in the national drug enforcement budget for the year of the biggest financial crisis since the Depression was roughly two hundred times the size of the budget for the sole executive branch effort at formally investigating the causes of financial corruption.

One Day on Fifth Avenue

I must have been seven or eight, I think.  I recalled this the other night and wanted to write it down but forgot about it until driving down Fifth Avenue in a friend’s car a few days later.   Driving along the long stone wall along Central Park the forgotten incident flashed through my brain again.

I don’t remember much else about that day, except that, apparently, we had gone to the city by bus, from Queens.   Maybe we drove in my father’s car and the Long Island teenagers my father took to the Jewish Museum had come by bus.   I don’t recall if my sister and mother were there, but why wouldn’t they have been?   This was more than fifty years ago.  

After visiting the museum we were waiting on Fifth Avenue for the rented school bus to take us back to Long Island.  This was decades before everybody had a phone in their pocket.   My father, the director of the Nassau-Suffolk region of Young Judaea, a national Zionist youth movement (my father was fond, in those days, of imitating Arab leaders who referred to citizens of the Jewish State as “Is-rah-ale-eee Aggressors”) had a group of restless kids from the rural counties east of Queens lined up on Fifth Avenue.   At some point he sent me up Fifth Avenue to see if the bus was coming.   I walked off northwards on a mission.

About a block or so into my quest I was approached by three or four black kids about my age, maybe a year or two older.   They moved in a group toward the wall and, being a suburban kid with no instincts about these kind of things, I veered in the wrong direction.  I quickly found myself trapped between the kids and the wall.  They demanded my money.  I didn’t have any money, outside of a few coins that were in my pocket, mostly pennies.  They took the change.  It was less than a quarter’s worth.  It may have been 8 or 9 cents, which, in those days, could buy you a candy bar and a few chunks of Bazooka gum.   

They demanded to look through my pockets.   I was wearing some kind of jacket and produced what was in the pockets.   Outside of some tissues, which I always carry, there’s wasn’t much.  There was some kind of small, flat box that slid open.  Inside the box was a tiny pad and the ends of a few pencils, small enough to fit into the box.  Even at that age I felt desperate if I didn’t have something to draw with on my person.   The would-be muggers examined the box in disgust, pencils stubs falling to the cobblestones by the bench along the long stone wall.  I recall one of them bent to pick up a pencil and hand it back to me.   After the robbery they headed south, toward my father and the teenagers waiting for their ride.  

From a short distance away I watched my father intercept them.   “Get up on the goddamned bench!” he commanded, and they obediently hopped up on to the bench along the park wall.   When I got closer he called out to me, as though I was a stranger, “hey, kid, did these boys take anything from you?”   I shook my head, then noted the few trifles (they’d left me my box with the drawing stuff in it).  My assailants coughed up some muddy coins, which my father handed to me when I reached him.

I remember him chuckling afterwards.  “They probably thought I was an undercover cop,” he said.   It didn’t occur to me at the time that he was an adult man, over six feet tall, and they were a small band of children, prowling the wealthy strip by the park, looking for some coins to buy candy.   I certainly don’t condone what the tiny predators were out there doing, but, I have to say, they were pretty decent about the whole thing, as far as that went.  As far as I can recall, it was the only time I saw my father act the tough guy in public.   It was more usual to see him acting this way, against the wall, back to the shelf with the toaster on it, firing live ammunition at me and my sister over the dinner table.

Why So Pissed, El?

I have a great memory, made of a moment that sucked in real time but which has become precious to me over the years.   During one of our normal family fights at the dinner table I became furious.  I must have been eight or nine, maybe younger. 

My mother, who sat next to me, responded by grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me.  She shook me like a terrier shakes a rat, or a floppy rag doll version of a rat.  In my memory I am limp, and being wagged in the rhythm of her words, almost syllable for syllable.  Picture it: “what (shake) did (shake) any (shake) body (shake) ever (shake) do (shake) to (shake) you (shake) to make you so (shake) fucking  (shake) angry?! (shake)” 

I thought of my reply many years too late.  It was one of those moments some clever grenouille dubbed l’esprit de l’escalier, the bon mot you think of after the fact, on the stairs, the perfect witty rejoinder realized moments too late to deliver.    My missed line was an obvious one: I don’t know, mom, maybe being angrily shaken when I’m clearly pissed off and asked angrily why I’m so fucking angry? 

I don’t offer this story as any kind of indictment of my mother, not at all.  She never gave me reason to doubt her love.   Those fights at the kitchen table were no holds barred, we were all in pure survival mode in the fog of war as we fired our rounds, lobbed grenades, ducked wherever we could.   She and my father were as helpless as we kids were.  I don’t hold it against either of them, at this point, it was just a tableau vivant (although not silent, but screaming) of the Human Condition.

I love the image of the mother angrily shaking her young kid and demanding to know why he’s so fucking angry.

I’m not writing this as part of my Mother’s Day or birthday card to my departed mother.   Though I’d like to note here that an orthodox Jewish friend of her’s, Benjie, hearing that she was in a coma on her 82nd birthday, told me that it is considered a sign of a righteous life to die on your birthday.   

My mother was miles away at the time, in a nice room at Hospice by the Sea, but she seemed to have heard this remark.  She’d always fought with Benjie about what she considered the idiocy of a life ruled by religious ritualism.   She hung on overnight and died a day after her birthday, that way winning one last argument with the religious friend she loved to fight  with.

Why am I angry lately?  On one level it’s the same reason my mother and father were so often angry.  An imposed sense of powerlessness, frustration they had their faces rubbed in over and over.  In reality I am no more powerless than anybody else, I just get more occasion to soak in it than most people I know, living on a small fixed income, as I do.  And, of course, I have much more time to feel my feelings daily, being self-unemployed until I can start selling little slices of myself the way professionals all do.  Few people can have any real understanding of the possible value of what you are putting together unless you sell it; once you are paid for it, all the work makes perfect sense.

We all live in the same viciously materialistic society, currently governed by a grasping, entitled madman who personifies its values to an alarming degree and is stinking up the common space with uncommon speed and effectiveness.  The poor, the weak and the marginalized are vilified in our great democracy as greedy parasites, while the truly insatiable and powerful are celebrated.  Yeah, yeah, I know, go write a letter to your Congressweasel… write an op ed, write your damned blahg, in fact, monetize it, win or go home, take a flying fuck at a rolling donut. 

I had the same chance for a comfortable, successful middle class life as any of my hardworking friends, I know.  It is unseemly of me to complain, really, having so flagrantly failed to cash in my winning ticket years ago.  I could be running on a very fancy treadmill in really, really expensive running shoes.  Instead of moralistically daydreaming about making any difference about anything, or even having a  voice in the conversation.

So what is it specifically that is so maddening?  We accommodate ourselves to the world we must live in.  It is a place where only a microscopic fraction of humans have any say about what is done in our names.  We learn as much as we can about the proper way to act and try to take as much solace as possible from doing what we believe is the right thing, from our sense of integrity.  Having integrity of any kind is just one challenge of being a member of a dodgy species like our earth ruling, hubris-filled, existentially terrified homo sapiens.   Homo sapiens, the self-named “wise man”, has figured it all out, everything except how to behave decently toward his fellow primate.  Oh, and how not to destroy life on the planet while exploiting its bounty and striving to own and control everything.

Money, motherfucker, the only thing you lack, to give substance and reality to your fleeting, meaningless life, is a dump truck full of filthy lucre.  Until you get paid, you ain’t shit.  If you forget that for a minute, how about a long wait for a subway at night, a tight squeeze into the train with a thousand other powerless chumps too stupid to take a $45 cab ride home, remember now what you are?   Next go visit a doctor here, wait a few hours for surly service, try to see a specialist — here, let us remind you again, bitch — you want to feel like you have integrity of some kind, with that laughably shit insurance?   Hah! Yaw hilarious!  Unless and until you get paid for what you can do better than someone else, friend, you ain’t a fart in the wind, let alone shit.  Let that be a fucking lesson to you, ass-bite.  Have a wonderful day!

(to be continued)

Happy Birthday, Mom

Yesterday I was at a party, a memorial and celebration of the life of the mother of an old friend who died recently at 95. [1]  My friend’s mother was, in fact, almost 96 when she died.  In a glamorously lit photo from more than 70 years ago, she appears as a dreamy beauty from the silver screen.   Her smooth face is illuminated as Rita Hayworth’s was in those gorgeous black and whites taken during the war with Hitler and Tojo.  [2]   When I met his mother, my friend and I figured out, she was 47.   Seems like the blink of an eye.

My own mother, who died in 2010, would be ninety today.  Happy birthday, mom.   There is a book to write about you, someday, if the God it’s hard not to curse just a little allows me the time and focus to write it.   Not that you had much use for that particular fable, the whole God thing, the all-wise, always merciful creator who lets the creatures He made in His image take the fall for every evil thing that is constantly happening in His miraculous world of Free Will. 

There was a blue, leather bound notebook I remember seeing as a kid.  Your poems were in it.  Your gravestone, don’t forget, is inscribed, in Hebrew, “heart of a poet”.   You had such a heart, a heart that would not allow a simple story to be told without a couple of embellishments that would make the story shine a bit more.   I came not here to quibble about truthfulness, not on your birthday.  Not to say you weren’t also essentially a candid and truthful person.   You just always had that artist’s desire to make the thing a little more perfect, in this crooked, cockeyed world.

Funny though, as funny as this conceit of talking to someone dead for eight years tomorrow, I was sitting at your kitchen table in Florida, close to the end of your long battle with cancer.   That twenty-three year ordeal that knocked the shit out of you, and eventually took your last breath.   You were on the phone, talking to your buddy Sophie, also my friend, and she asked you if I had arrived in Florida, as planned.

“No,” you said emphatically, as I watched in amazement, “he got stuck at the airport, in that terrible blizzard they had in New York last night.  He was there for hours, before they finally cancelled his flight.  I don’t know when he’ll get here…”   I said nothing, of course, but as soon as you hung up the phone I asked you what the fuck?! 

“I love to lie!” you said happily.  “I don’t know what it is, but I love to lie.”

A few days later, when we were visiting Sophie, the subject of my being stranded at LaGuardia never came up.  Why would it?   Sophie lived to be 98 by living in the present.  She was happy we were there, happy we were going to your favorite restaurant for lunch, eager to hear all the latest news.

I know, I know, of all the stories, that’s the one I tell on your birthday.  Some fucking son!   Hey, what can I tell you, mom, that’s the way God made me.

Kurt Vonnegut replaced Isaac Asimov as the president of some organization of free-thinking atheists.  In his first address to the group he told them Asimov was looking down from heaven, smiling on them all.   This caused the assembled intellectuals to roar in mirth.  If it had been now, one might have texted ROTFLMAO!    Funny line, Kurt.     

What has that to do with you, mom?   You know very well.  You always loved a good story, especially one with a punchline.   I don’t really have one for this birthday card, as I am feeling almost constantly angry these days, but I’m, you dig, trying to keep it light here for you.   For YOU, mom.  That’s kind of funny right there.   Even as we both know you’re smiling down from heaven right now, thinking of the perfect rejoinder.

 

[1] I am well-aware, Sekhnet (and mom), that the structure of this sentence is as ridiculous as the one I love from the old Mad Magazine “I was the prisoner of a sadistic hunchback with bad breath named Harold.”   I point out that the ambiguity about who died in that first, dick-fingered sentence, my friend or his mother, was resolved a nano-second later in the sentence that follows.   For what it’s worth, to a caviler with bad breath named Sekhnet…

OK, as I suggested above, I’m too pissed off and impatient at the moment to fix it.  (No, you don’t have bad breath, Sekh, and I’m pretty sure if you did it wouldn’t have the same name that you do).  Peace!

[2] see note above.  Rita never posed with Hitler and Tojo.  No way.

The Seven Deadly Sins

Last night I was making a bookmark for a friend I promised months ago I’d send some bookmarks to.  I’d made them months back.  A few were nice, but I’ve mislaid them here in the quivering paper quicksand in this house of constantly shifting stacks of paper.   Most had gibberish writing on them, among the colors and drawings.  I decided to use my fancy Namiki Falcon to inscribe more meaningful words on the new bookmarks.  I made one with the Seven Deadly Sins on it, for handy reference. [1]    

Pride
Greed (avarice)
Lust
Envy (jealousy, covetousness)
Gluttony
Wrath (anger)
Sloth (laziness)

Reading the list I had a minor revelation.  Below the sins I wrote “7 for 7, impressive!”

I don’t have to say any more than that, I think.  Except perhaps to state the obvious, what is lacking in someone who exhibits all seven of these bad traits.

Pride keeps a person thinking they are more important than everybody else, removes empathy.

Lust turns other people into mere vessels for gratification, removes mutuality, makes the objects of lust disposable.

Greed speaks for itself, it places the desires of the self about all else.

Envy, as corrosive an emotion as there is, is an enemy of peace and driver of malice, it keeps bitterness and ill-will simmering.

Gluttony means you will covet and steal someone else’s portion to overfeed yourself.

Wrath is the same as just being mad, fucking nuts — it is the opposite of prudence, if you think about it, since an angry person literally cannot think straight.

Sloth may be the slipperiest sin.   It means you are perpetually too lazy to do the hard work that needs to be done.

Seven for seven! You’ve got to hand it to the motherfucker.   Every cardinal sin on the list and the pious Christian right loves him.  Now that is a unique species of fucking genius!

20180518_005809 (1).jpg

 

 

[1]   The seven deadly sins, also known as the capital vices or cardinal sins, is a grouping and classification of vices within Christian teachings. … These sins are often thought to be abuses or excessive versions of one’s natural faculties or passions (for example, gluttony abuses one’s desire to eat).   source

A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Medicine Go Down

As we walk through this world of darkness certain things become clear if we live long enough.  It is better to be mild with upset people whenever possible.   Particularly when confronted by someone who is angry, it is best to remain calm, keep your eye on defusing rather than escalating anger.   It’s not easy, and not always possible, but is generally a better way to walk through a violent place than flipping the bird at every one of the many angry, deserving jerks you will encounter here.

Then there is the calculated use of strategically applied reasonableness to attain a desired goal.  Not exactly the same thing as described above, but it’s a smart play. Interim CIA director Gina Haspel, who repeatedly denied the incendiary charge that stripping prisoners naked, freezing or overheating their cages, slamming them against walls, depriving them of sleep for days on end, blasting deafening music, making them engage in forced mock sex (for the cameras), using electrodes, stress positions, hanging with feet barely touching the ground, other fear and terror inducing techniques, amount to torture, backed off ever so slightly in her denials of government wrongdoing.  

These things were all perfectly legal when the CIA did them, Gina Haspel insisted repeatedly, if not 100% uncontroversially, during her confirmation hearing.  “Bloody Gina,” by all reports, was pretty gung-ho about the new freedom to roughly interrogate granted by the top secret Torture Memo[1]  and the $80,000,000 manual of best arguably non-torture practices painstakingly laid out by two patriotic American psychologist/torture tutors, Jessen and Mitchell.  To my knowledge she did not deny that she destroyed evidence of torture conducted under her watch at a “black site” in Thailand.

It was going to be a tight vote for the president’s nominee for CIA director, Ms. Haspel and her allies realized.  So she wrote a heartfelt letter to the top ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner.  The magic words:

While I won’t condemn those that made these hard calls, and I have noted the valuable intelligence collected, the program ultimately did damage to our officers and our standing in the world. With the benefit of hindsight and my experience as a senior agency leader, the enhanced interrogation program is not one the C.I.A. should have undertaken.

source

It seems to have done the trick, precatory (non-legally binding — she promises nothing, , admits nada) language and all.   She should now, with Mark Warner’s vote and a couple of others, have enough votes today to become America’s Next Top Spook.   It is petty, I know, to parse such sincere words as though they were crafted with the help of a lawyer and other partisan hacks, but I can’t help but note just a couple of things.   After-the-fact snideness is about all we get to exercise, much of the time, here in our great, participatory democracy.

I won’t condemn those that made these hard calls

It’s a nitpick, but I love use use of the word “that” to refer to those who insisted torture was legal.  “That,” while acceptable as a reference to a person, is also exclusively used to refer to animals and inanimate objects; “who” is exclusively used for people.   A telltale slip.  Nothing to see here.  Yes, OK, Dick Cheney was a bit of an inanimate object, as were the steely men who made “these hard calls”.   Kind of like a corporate “person”, not something you’d want watching your back in a fox hole, or babysitting for your kids, or meeting in a dark alley.

I also love the principled refusal to condemn the architects of the recent American torture program.  You go!

and I have noted the valuable intelligence collected

So Gina Haspel is sticking to her guns, a woman of principle!  In contrast to the reasoned opinion of every intelligence expert I’ve ever heard on the subject, she is suggesting that torture works.   She will not say it’s not a damned good way to get evil fucks to give up valuable intelligence.   Nope.  The regrettable part, to Haspel and her higher morality, is that it makes us look bad to be secretly doing things that, when leaked, make us look like monsters no better than the people we are torturing, er, interrogating in an enhanced, perfectly legal, or at the very least arguably legal, manner.

Since we are good, and evil people, or people we suspect may be evil, are evil, or quite possibly evil in the case of mere suspects, well, our American secret agents hold themselves to a much higher moral standard than standard morality requires. You see, we only secretly torture us some folks to preserve our higher moral values.  

It is important to grasp this distinction.  Only then can you understand why our highly principled UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, walks out when the Palestinian delegation complains about the fog of tear gas rained from Israeli drones and the dozens of demonstrators killed and many hundreds wounded on the Gaza border with Israel. The NY Times headline today refers to “scores” of Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers in the last two days.  Typical liberal crap– “scores,” while technically accurate, suggests way more than a mere sixty or so, eh, Nikki?

US ambassador Haley defended Israel’s amazing “restraint” in killing and maiming so few of the people who publicly massed to openly hate their freedom.  No other country, she insisted, could have behaved with more restraint.  Then she got up and left as the Palestinian representative began to speak.   The perfect way to show the world how much America cares, how willing we always are to listen.  How much more moral we are than those who self-righteously, hypocritically, attack our higher morality.

“Just a spoon full of sugar
makes the medicine go down,
the medicine go dow-own,
the medicine go down,
just a spoon full of sugar
makes the medicine go down
in the most delightful way!”

 

[1]    Torture, according to that memo, “must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” Yoo also advised that for mental pain or suffering to amount to torture, “it must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years.”     source

U.S.A.!! U.S.A.!!!!

I wish I could remember my father’s exact arch remark every time something shameful was revealed about our country and its people.  He said it the same way each time.   “Doesn’t it make you proud to be an American?” may have been it, though it could also have been “Makes you glad to be an American….”    Words to that effect.   I heard him say it many times, but, sadly, I can’t be sure which words composed the exact phrase.

I’m thinking of this because my sister alerted me to an imagination beggaring “informercial” she’d seen on TV.   While I was talking to her I found the two minute video ad, which I pass on to you without further comment.  Except to say, order your’s today, supplies are limited — and satire is now officially dead in America.

 

 

Thank You, Amy

Democracy Now! opens today’s headlines with the 25 [1] Palestinians killed, and over a thousand wounded, by Israeli bullets yesterday.  The Palestinians are protesting the U.S. Embassy being moved to Jerusalem, on the day Ivanka and Jared land in Israel for a ceremony opening the new embassy.   Jared will get right back to work on Middle East peace, one of several important tasks he’s been given by President America’s Got A Complete  Asshole.  The protesters are massing by the highly fortified border between Gaza and Israel, where they are also contending with tear gas, dropped from Israeli drones over Gaza.   Meanwhile, right wing fanatics applaud the Israeli violence as moral and just, or at the very least, necessary.

We are used to this America RIGHT OR WRONG stance from years of black-and-white thinkers defending atrocities.  “If we committed atrocities– and I say IF, because we are basically good and our enemies are evil— they WERE FOR A VERY GOOD FUCKING REASON!   Look how evil those fucks we ‘tortured’, threw out of helicopters, burned, slammed against walls, deprived of sleep, shoved feeding tubes up their assholes— only evil can fight evil.   Like you never had a fucking evil thought, you self-righteous piece of shit!  Go live in Roosha, boy, if you hate our freedom so much”

As I walked into a concert for peace the other night, Arab and Jewish Israelis, Arab and Jewish Palestinians, showing how to make beautiful music across bitter and deadly historic disagreements, there was a small knot of protesters outside the venue.    They were chanting that the synagogue where the concert was being held was anti-Semitic.  They chanted some catchy little rhyme about hate.  

I walked over to them, and learned that they feel that since one of the groups sponsoring the concert, New Israel Fund, is apparently against the proposed U.S. law that would make it a felony to support BDS, Boycott, Divest, Sanction and that, therefore, the concert was propaganda for haters of Israel, self-hating Jews, etc..   There was really no talking to them about the issues involved.   Arab lives simply don’t matter to these zealots, anyone questioning Israel’s right to enact any policies whatsoever are the moral equivalent of Nazis.

Those who hate Israel are able to make certain apt comparisons between Israel’s state policies under Netanyahu and those of the NSDAP in Germany, the group history remembers as the Nazis.  There is collective punishment.  One member of your village takes a shot at one of us and we raze all the houses on the block.   There is a casualness about deadly violence directed at the people being occupied.   Settlers and occupying soldiers have a right to shoot Arabs who hate them in a provocative way.  It’s like here, the way racists think of angry blacks.  They’re scary and who can blame you if you flinch sometimes and shoot one?   They want to kill you, so go ahead and shoot them before they do. 

I don’t hate Israel, not at all.  As an idea, as an ideal, as a reality, Israel is very important to me as a Jew, particularly in a world where anti-Semitism is on the rise, along with all kinds of racism.  That said, the current governing coalition in Israel, with its long tactic of the Iron Fist, the abandonment of Jewish morality about helping the weak, feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, etc. (notably not about protecting Jews at the expense of everyone else) is the Israeli equivalent of Trump’s America.  There is the same level of nuance, of empathy, of vision of the future.

Israel, right or wrong.  USA!   USA!!!!   It cannot be, though it very often is, that creatures with such simplistic views carry the day.  These things are complicated, you will say, there are millions of Palestinians, in camps, generation on generation of hopeless rage.   You solve the problem by being strong, making sure your iron fist can crush whatever comes, at whatever cost is necessary.   This is a recipe for a self-perpetuating eternal war.  It’s like The War On Terror or the War on Drugs.  These zero-sum policies are moronic non-solutions to real, pressing human problems.

“Duh, if we, uh, kill all the terrorists, and all the drug dealers, and all the people who think the terrorists might have legitimate grievances, and all the people who buy the drugs from the drug dealers, well— eventually these evil fucks will get the point.  We will kill all of them, and done.  Is that simple enough for you?”    Very much simple enough, yes.  The only problem is that imbecilic, violent “solutions” only create more despair, violence, motive for retaliation, hopelessness, rage, killing. 

Aside from that, it’s the best possible way to deal with a complicated problem– kill all the fuckers who complain too loudly.  You’d want that done to you, if you had legitimate grievances, despair, rage, hopelessness.  Isn’t that true?

 

[1] by the following day the numbers were 61 Palestinians dead and 2,700 wounded, as reported by Democracy Now!    Reports vary widely:  

Gaza protests – as it happened: Two Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in second day of deadly violence      The Independent · 20 mins ago       source
Gaza braces for protests and funerals a day after at least 58 Palestinians killed by Israeli troops      Telegraph.co.uk · 14 hours ago    source
Israel Kills Dozens at Gaza Border as U.S. Embassy Opens in Jerusalem
New York Times · 18 hours ago
Dozens of Palestinians killed in Gaza clashes as US Embassy opens
CNN · 1 day ago
 

Lynching in America

Terry Gross recently did a show on the new National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, a museum that honors the “victims of lynching and racial terrorism in the U.S.”    The hideous subject of gruesome, racially motivated murders, usually involving prolonged torture,  is little discussed and even less often analyzed here in the land where it was long practiced.   The highly uncomfortable subject of lynching is usually treated, by those whose family members were never lynched, with the famous Obama formula of “looking forward, not back” on horrific American practices, though, of course, that is unfair to the first African-American (literally) president.  

Stalin, a man not known for his wit, is credited with the witty formulation:  the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million men, a statistic.  Thousands were lynched during a long reign of terror against the previously enslaved citizens of these great United States, but a look at just one lynching should suffice to drive the nature of this vicious tragedy home.  

Then consider the pompous blowhard fuckheads (racist fuckheads, by the way) who decade after decade thwarted any and all attempts to make lynching a federal crime.  The strutting, braying racists of today, men like America’s former Sheriff Joe “I Know the Law Better Than You, Fuckface, er, your Honor” Arpaio, are just an echo of those walking turds who considered themselves good men, American patriots.

I don’t mean to get all emotional about this subject, a subject which I have thought about many times over the last few years.  My feelings on the subject have been stirred in recent days by America’s collective nonchalance about our extensive, secret torture program directed against suspected Islamic terrorists, with the confirmation of a zealous, stonewalling torture advocate hanging by the votes of a few spineless politicians.    (See this one for more on Gina Haspel, the reality TV president’s pick for America’s Top Spook).

I recall my father telling me that not all lynchings were secret backwoods murders.  Some of them happened in broad daylight, before a cheering crowd of average Americans who brought a picnic lunch, and the kids, and afterwards bought souvenirs of the event, photos, dismembered body parts taken from the screaming victim.  Imagine that, if you can.

Google Jesse Washington (or simply click here), if you want to feel sick to your stomach about Making America Great Again.  A glance at the photo of his charred, mutilated corpse, toward the top of the linked entry, should suffice.  A glimpse of the photo of the vast crowd, pressing in from every direction to get a close look at the torture, will make your skin crawl.  

Jesse Washington was an illiterate teenaged farm hand, a black kid, accused of… whatever… probably making advances toward a white woman, nay, raping her, with his eyes if not his body– yeah, that’s it– he raped her — and then he murdered her!  Justice followed swiftly.  Within a week, after full due process as guaranteed by our Constitution, Jesse Washington was a burnt, mutilated husk of a corpse, on display for the roaring crowd. 

The record shows he was convicted of the rape and murder of the white woman he worked for, seven days after the white woman’s bludgeoned body was found.  He was convicted after a no doubt scrupulously fair hour long trial, found guilty of both crimes by a jury of his peers in Waco, Texas, 1916.  The jury deliberated for four minutes.  Washington apparently had confessed to the crimes and his inexperienced court-appointed lawyers attempted no defense.  In any event, there clearly would not be time for an appeal.

I note here that just as in the cases when police shoot unarmed blacks who later turn out to have criminal records of some kind, the fact of their record does not begin to justify the extrajudicial death sentence. You will hear gas bags argue that point, but… you know.   Even if Jesse Washington was guilty of the crimes he was convicted for, the punishment should never be left up to a lynch mob.  Although in Waco that day it was, with the law and order mayor, up for re-election, and police chief, standing aside.

An example was made of him as he was immediately dragged from the courthouse and thousands of righteous white people, up to half the population of the Texas town,  pressed forward in front of Waco City Hall, good Christians, their children on their shoulders, to watch him be publicly tortured to death over the course of two hours.  His death by torture lasted twice as long as the trial, imagine that.  

Jesse Washington’s fingers and genitals were chopped off.  The lack of fingers thwarted his attempts to climb the chains to get out of the bonfire he was lowered into.  He was burned a bit, raised back over the bonfire by the chains, lowered, burned slowly, piece by piece,  dismembered, burned some more, hung like a large strip of beef jerky, eventually dead.  His charred, armless body was chained to a wagon and dragged a few miles, to be hung up on display in the small town where the murder had taken place, as a lesson to everybody.

What is hard to understand about this terrorist act we blandly refer to as “lynching”?   It is unthinkable social barbarity of an unspeakably medieval variety.  The larger horror is that lynching is performed to keep the status quo humming along, to strengthen desired social norms.   It is a public demonstration, or equally effective as a private one people can wink about, of the prerogative of a group with the power to torture and kill anyone they target in a group without the power to do anything about it.  

How much real power did the white barber from Waco, Texas, his wife and three kids have as they stood in the sun among the 10,000 to 15,000 good citizens watching men roast, cut and hang Jesse Washington to death, children pry his teeth out to keep as souvenirs?   Not much.   But, goddamn, they sure had more power than that boy they were taking to pieces up front.   The satisfied face on one of the spectators, looking at the charred remains of Jesse Washington, says it all.   You can see the picture on the linked Wikipedia page. 

Here in America when we talk about terrorism it’s always the same one note samba: Al Queda, ISIS, fanatical militant Islamists who hate our freedom.  It is not a brave stand for me to point out that those motherfuckers have nothing on our home grown haters.  We just don’t talk about our history of violent racism and the legally winked at terrorism that long supported it.  We don’t talk about the many harms that flow from institutionally protected violence, like the epigenetic changes passed on among the descendants  of the victims. 

I am glad that museum is open in Alabama, I’d like to visit it some day, unlikely as that may be.   It is past time for Americans to begin confronting, understanding and addressing America’s shameful, ongoing, long-repressed history of racialized fear, rage, hatred and deadly violence.  

Since I always try to end even the most depressing of these posts on an uplifting note, here you go:

On the centenary of the lynching, May 15, 2016, the mayor of Waco apologized in a ceremony to some of Washington’s descendants. A historical marker is being erected.[114]

Fuck Eric Schneiderman

I’ve admired Schneiderman’s principled political stands throughout his career, which I followed since he was a political tadpole.  Now he is permanently done in government, because, apparently, he can’t control his violent anger around certain women.

A sponsor of bills to protect women from being battered or choked, he stepped down immediately after reports of these allegations against him were published in The New Yorker the other day.   So goodbye to the activist Attorney General of New York State, one of the few who seemed to relish going toe to toe with corrupt billionaires and their shady enterprises.  A sad day all around for anyone but the president and his circle.

I will leave it to the great Samantha Bee, who puts institutionally protected anger against women into much sharper, and funnier, perspective than I can.  Click here to watch Sam tear Eric a new asshole,