Author Archives: oinsketta

States’ Rights & American racism

This is a huge topic, obviously, which becomes emotionally charged when you throw the word “racism” into the mix.    America needs to confront our long history of virulent racism, and I will dip into the subject a little here.  Leaving racism aside for the moment, there are historical scholars on both sides of this long running debate over federalism, who should have the final say in local matters, the state or the federal government.  

Our federal system gives the states the final say on making and enforcing criminal and civil law, including family law and business laws.   Only certain legal matters, essential to the nation’s functioning, are ceded by the states to the federal government.   Printing currency, for example, and a nationwide postal system, have long been federal functions.  It was simply impractical for either of these things to be left to the individual states.  Other rights, such as a woman’s right to choose to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, have been extended nationally by a Supreme Court decision recognizing a Constitutional right, even if it was creatively found in the penumbra of some other Amendment.

The absolute right of the States to decide the laws for their citizens, without federal interference, has long been an area of controversy.   Some states have outlawed the death penalty, others, like Texas, are perennially among the world leaders in death by execution.   Several states were “dry” before Prohibition became the law of the land for thirteen lucky years (for organized crime) and a few states, and many counties and towns, remained alcohol free after repeal of the 18th Amendment.   Some states allow concealed carry of handguns, others allow open carry of rifles and handguns, others restrict the right of citizens to carry guns anywhere [1].   Certain states are leaders in environmental law, for example.  California has passed strict emissions and gas mileage laws for cars sold in California and driven by its citizens.   Our new president is challenging California’s right to impose environmental standards higher than the federal mandates, put in place by his hated enemy Obama, standards which he is now lowering.   This fight over States’ rights has been going on since our nation’s earliest days.

The classic States’ rights battle was over an American’s right to own Negroes as property.  At one time chattel slavery, an ironclad right guaranteed by three of four discreet clauses in our the Constitution, was left up to the citizens of the states to vote on.   The introduction of slavery to a new territory or state was always a matter of bloody contention.   Trouble is, whatever you want to say about the “Peculiar Institution” now, slavery was lucrative as hell for the people who sold and owned the most slaves.   Certain crops, like cotton, were not nearly as profitable if you had to pay the people who did the difficult picking.    Those super-lucrative crops, planted year after year on the same fields, quickly depleted the soil, which meant that periodically moving the plantation to new fertile territory was essential for the continued profits of those who employed the vast majority of the enslaved.  It’s why the enormous Louisiana Territory, and later the annexed Republic of Texas, both came in as slave territories.

The Civil War was not waged by Lincoln to abolish slavery, as he stated succinctly to abolitionist publisher Horace Greeley and others.  Lincoln prosecuted the war against the states in rebellion in order to preserve the Union, and he would have given ground on the issue of slavery to achieve that end.   More Americans spilled their blood, and lost their lives, in that war than in any other war in U.S. history. The total dead was greater than all Americans killed in all other wars since 1776 combined, until the police action in Vietnam finally tipped the scales over a hundred years later.   You could look it up. 

I am always trying, or most often trying, to be as objective and fair as possible in analyzing things here.  We live in a nation as divided as it was in 1854, the year the Supreme Court declared that slavery was protected by the federal government everywhere in these United States, that there was no such thing as a “free state” for a slave to escape to.   A few years later we had the Civil War.   A hundred years later, to the year, the Supreme Court finally whacked another hornet’s nest– segregation.   It was held to be inherently unequal, and in the case of public schools, was ordered to be stopped “with all deliberate speed.”   People were enraged and people died after this decision too.   In every state that favored segregation, and they weren’t only in the former Confederacy, mandated desegregation was seen as federal overreach.

Where I feel I may have been unfair the other day, in bringing up this issue, was when I called today’s States’ Rights advocates racists.  That is such an emotionally charged word.  We live in a racist society, to put it plainly.   Segregation is still pretty much the rule here, although it is now de facto rather than de jure segregation.   There are no longer laws that demand continued separation of the races, it is just what’s generally done here, it’s the way most Americans act.  

It is impossible to live here without noticing the racism.  Token blacks become fabulously rich, and powerful, which gives the impression that we are “post-racial”, as racist pundits and conservative jurists like to claim.  A mulatto was even elected president a few years back, though he was subjected to ruthless personal attacks about where he was born, in an attempt to delegitimize him and defeat all of his policy initiatives.  These symbols of post-racialism aside, for the masses of blacks in America today, as for many “non-white” immigrant groups, racism is still a big, often murderous, monster.

I am trying to think of the States Rights argument divorced from racism.  It shouldn’t be so hard to do.   Community standards determine what is or is not pornography, for example.   There are many things that should legitimately be matters for the locality to decide.   Like if you want an oil pipeline bringing toxic tar sands sludge across your watershed.  Or if you want to ban powerful toxic chemicals used by agribusiness from your local farms.   Powerful forces have ways of defeating massive local resistance.   If there’s enough money in it, watch how quickly, whenever convenient, federal sovereignty is invoked to clobber the will of the local citizens.    Monsanto/Bayer is in the process of doing this to eliminate local opposition to their toxic agribusiness products.

One of my favorite bits of hypocrisy, from otherwise staunch States’ Rights folks, usually political conservatives who claim to favor “small government”, is ongoing federal enforcement of Nixon’s draconian Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 .  That law classifies marijuana as a dangerous, highly addictive drug with no potential medical use.  The necessity, almost 50 years of medical research later, to have a national prohibition on drugs like marijuana?   Uh… it’s the fucking law, fuck face!!!!   Only evil people smoke weed!   In the case of something like PTSD, marijuana has been shown to be as effective as, and sometimes more effective than, the cocktail of pharmaceuticals currently being served up to a population that kills themselves in large numbers every week.   140 desperate U.S. war veterans a week, according to Obama one Veteran’s Day.

Even the enforcement of Nixon’s federal drug law has a large racist element to it, which is part of its design [2].  The Controlled Substances Act has been applied to people of color way out of proportion to their numbers in society.  When Nixon passed the law it was envisioned by him as a way to keep his enemies on a short leash.   Hippies, Yippies, blacks, Mexicans, musicians, liberal intellectuals, young anti-war protesters, homosexuals, often seemed to prefer marijuana to good old American booze.    Nixon got drunk every night during the final phase of his presidency, but nobody would accuse him of being a pothead.  The numbers of people prosecuted and locked up for long prison terms under this federal law, and its many state analogues, are disproportionately “minority”. 

So I’m not just gratuitously badmouthing these racist fucks when I call them racists. We can look at the situation on the ground dispassionately and call a spade a spade, no?   The resistance to federal Civil Rights laws, including the ongoing attacks on the Voting Rights Act, like the derailing of anti-lynching legislation for a hundred years, was led by racists.   There is no way to sugar coat this.  If a state does not prevent lynching, and resists federal efforts to do so… do you have another reason, outside of good, old-fashioned American racism, handy?    The antebellum South, we were told with a straight face for decades, was a place where God set the superior white race as rulers and protectors of the inferior black race.  If you want to call that racist, go ahead.

That said, the most racist place I can recall visiting, and that includes areas between New York and Florida we drove through when I was a kid in the early 60s, where unimaginably squalid shacks could be seen by the interstate with unimaginably ragged black kids playing out front, was Boston.   We went to get ice cream at a famous Boston ice cream place, I think it was called Steve’s, and our route was blocked by a gigantic protest march.  It was 1974 or 1975.  The white parents were livid, red-faced, screaming.  Twenty years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, it was still not time to have their children taken out of the neighborhood to sit in classrooms with “niggers.”   They roared the word, it was no secret back then.

It is no secret now.  We may call it the “n-word” and agree to ostracize any non-black person in public who says the word “nigger.”  It is a hate crime for a white person to speak this word in virtually any context.   Racists have always been sly.   You never heard Obama called a nigger, not by any public official, though he was brazenly treated that way by his obstructionist Republican rivals.  He was, you know, nothing to do with his race, simply illegitimate, a liar, someone who cynically and flippantly pretended to be qualified to be president, someone who hid a telltale birth certificate that proved he was… well, you know, that’s how all those fucking people are, idn’t it?  They will lie, pretend, speak very well, make high-sounding arguments to cover their treachery.   Obama was called a secret Muslim by the same people who attacked his militant black Christian preacher.  

I can’t imagine being a black American today, born in a neighborhood where the infant mortality rate is higher than in some third world countries.  Life expectancy for black Americans… well, the NY Times has great news, the gap is closing, down to only about four years longer for whites.  Read all about it here.  How does a black person look around at our great and wealthy nation without fucking screaming?  I am a “white” Jew (an oxymoron, according to most non-Jewish racists) and I feel like hollering every day, though I can go anywhere I want with virtually no possibility of being stopped, frisked or shot.

Nothing to see here, folks.  We post-racial now, baby, and some of those folks marching with Nazi armbands and Confederate symbols, chanting “Jews will not replace us”– some of the finest people, the finest people, believe me, believe me.  It is on us to discuss this shameful history and continue to find ways forward, even as it is a difficult conversation to begin after centuries of ruthless silence.  The kids today are doing a much better job of ignoring racist distinctions than any other generation, by the looks of it, but we should all be talking about this, even our finest people, especially our very finest people.

 

[1]  Special shout out to major league asshole Wayne LaPierre, head of the NRA.  LaPierre advocates a federal law allowing citizens of states that allow concealed carry of firearms to bring their concealed guns into all other states.   This insane shit idea is actually being debated and has a lot of votes in the Congress.

 These highly principled gun rights advocates have banned guns from an upcoming address  by Koch puppet and Trump’s VP Mike Pence at the NRA’s annual national convention.   All those good guys with guns who can stop a bad guy with a gun will be prevented from carrying guns when they go hear Mike Pence address the upcoming pro-gun rally in Dallas.  Way to go, Wayne!

In fairness to Wayne and his murderous ilk, the Secret Service will not allow guns at the event.  The NRA is only following the law.  One still must wonder why the president’s own men have become such anti-gun freedom haters.

High school students, some of whom hate LaPierre’s freedom, pile on:

“Wait wait wait wait wait wait you’re telling me to make the VP safe there aren’t any weapons around but when it comes to children they want guns everywhere?” Matt Deitsch, a Parkland student who helped organize the March for Our Lives rally in Washington, D.C., wrote on Twitter. “Can someone explain this to me? Because it sounds like the NRA wants to protect people who help them sell guns, not kids.”

source

[2]     I quote:

In June 1971, President Nixon declared a “war on drugs.” He dramatically increased the size and presence of federal drug control agencies, and pushed through measures such as mandatory sentencing and no-knock warrants.

A top Nixon aide, John Ehrlichman, later admitted: “You want to know what this was really all about. The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”  Nixon temporarily placed marijuana in Schedule One, the most restrictive category of drugs, pending review by a commission he appointed led by Republican Pennsylvania Governor Raymond Shafer.

In 1972, the commission unanimously recommended decriminalizing the possession and distribution of marijuana for personal use. Nixon ignored the report and rejected its recommendations.        [Talk about the fucking N-word… ed.]

source

Corporate personhood

“You’ve got to stop thinking about this stuff all the time,” said Sekhnet just now with great concern.   Living on the dark side, and marinating in it this way, takes its toll.   A ticket to the madhouse.  Say you are shining a light into the darkness and a friend may from time to time cluck sympathetically about something you illuminate.  It is still a ticket to the madhouse, I realize that.

This will not be a history of corporate personhood in American law.  We can condense that history to its essence by outlining how corporations acquired more personal rights than most American citizens.   After the Civil War, which is still being waged by sometimes powerful people we benignly call racists today (though there are, of course, some very fine racists, the finest racists), Congress forced the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments down the throats of the militarily defeated Confederacy [1].  Forced to ratify these amendments in order to receive federal funds to repair their decimated infrastructures, the former slave states signed on, but bitterly, and determined not to be enslaved by these punitive laws.   

The 13th Amendment outlawed slavery, “involuntary servitude”, except, coyly and significantly, as punishment for certain crimes.  The 14th Amendment ensured that no state denied citizens the full rights of American citizenship.  The 15th extended the franchise to black men, though it would be almost a hundred years until a federal law was passed, the famous Voting Rights Act, so that black people could actually cast ballots.

The 14th Amendment was used, mostly unsuccessfully, by former slaves being fucked over by repressive state laws.  The Amendment’s scope was severely restricted by a series of Supreme Court cases in the decade immediately after its ratification.   In its intended role as a civil rights remedy, the 14th Amendment was effectively nullified for almost a century.   Unless, of course, some state interfered with your right to use a navigable interstate waterway.  I know of no case brought for that infringement.  There were few remaining causes of action for individuals under the unappealably reinterpreted 14th Amendment.  

Of the hundreds of cases brought under the 14th Amendment in its first fifty years, a few dozen were complaints of discrimination against black citizens.  They rarely brought any good result, because the Court had severely restricted application of the 14th Amendment almost immediately.   The bulk of the 14th Amendment cases were brought by clever lawyers for corporations, aggrieved “persons” for purposes of the 14th Amendment, deprived of the human rights of citizenship that were guaranteed to all Americans by the Amendment.   As the families of lynching victims found no relief in federal courts, corporate “persons” won a series of important cases, until we got to where we are today.

Bill Moyers said it all very succinctly a few years ago.  “I’ll believe corporations are people when the state of Texas puts one to death.”   These bulletproof legally created persons, many of them too big to regulate, jail, not bail out with taxpayer funds when they are in financial trouble, etc. do not get the kind of power they do by not being willing to break a few heads when necessary.  We know what kind of person the corporate person is: a psychopath.   Like sharks they have only one imperative: to move forward and eat.  

Actually, that is unfair to sharks.  They are only swimming in the ocean God gave them, doing what nature provides, occupying their place in the food chain, trying their best to survive. [2]   Corporations, by contrast, have created the legal ocean they swim in, made nature itself conform to their desires.   Their desire is only one two-part thing: profits and power.

Why rattle on about this, belaboring the obvious?   Corporations make our laws, laws that protect business interests, and the sacred feelings of these lawyer-made “persons”, above the interests of the ordinary human citizens.   It is not only in America, corporations are now global and have no particular allegiance to any state or nation.  Yeah, yeah, we know all that, but it’s the only game in town, why go on and on about it?  Because of how it shapes the world we live in, I suppose.

Advertising is essentially propaganda, one-sided, persuasive mass communication to advance a worldview, in the case of advertising, a product.  Advertising is commercial propaganda that shapes our values.  Living in a culture where advertising is ubiquitous and unavoidable it is easy to see this relentless influence machine as part of nature.  It is not part of human nature, any more than the occasional mass murder is just part of the human condition.   The irresistible urge to grab a pitchfork, or a torch, and head out to the lynching — just human nature, regrettable as it also is.  Corporate personhood is just some gigantic force acting on all of us that we are unable to do much about, outside of, hopefully, profiting by investments in the most successful ones, if we have the money.  Better to think of other things, if we can.

So, again, why am I kvetching about corporations today?  Because more and more interpersonal human interaction is now based on the corporate/psychopath model. Never apologize, justify, shift the conversation.  Don’t admit wrongdoing of any kind, counterattack.   It’s not truly a lie if it is effective in advancing your cause.   Bad shit happens, nobody’s fault, even if it is done in our name, with our money.   There are two sides to every story, equally valid, except that your side is irrelevant bullshit.    All men are created equal.  Free market.  They hate our freedom.  Freedom is on the march.   

Natalie Portman, a dual American-Israeli citizen, recently turned down an invitation from the state of Israel for a prestigious award with a $2,000,000 check attached.  That’s four MacArthur  genius grants, if my math is correct.   She said, through her spokesperson, that she could not accept an award from Netanyahu’s government.  That government is aggressively  conducting an endless and often brutal occupation of Palestinian territory, the brutality has escalated in recent months to the Israeli army’s ongoing shooting of unarmed civilians in Gaza.     

Portman’s principled stand has provoked outrage among the loudest official voices of American Jewry .  We jerk our knees, instead of engaging in honest discussions about complicated, and horrific, issues of human rights, decency, basic fairness.  This clamp-down on real debate is the corporate mode.  Portman, say influential American Jewish public relations firms, is an anti-Semite.  You’re with us or against us.  Black or White.  Jew or Anti-Semite.

Every psychopath in the world can relate to this formulation.   Psycopathy 101.  It’s our way or the fucking highway, asshole.   America right or wrong, kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out.  

Simple is better, we feel.  There is so much incredibly complicated injustice and horror in the world today that we simply can’t expend emotion on too much of it.  Anything that doesn’t touch us directly we are usually glad to exclude from our universe of moral worries.    That Palestinian teenager shot in the head by an Israeli sniper recently, the long shot caught on camera, along with the hooting of the sniper’s colleagues, impressed by his amazing shot?  Maybe the boy shouldn’t have been so fucking infuriated at the anti-occupation protest earlier that day.  OK?  Good enough for most of the world, sad to say.

While I was writing this I had a call from a 212 area code.  The woman identified herself as working for the corporation that provides my health insurance.  For security purposes, she said, she needed my phone number.  I told her it was the same number she had just dialed.  She called me Eeloit instead of Eliot, suggesting that she was calling from a country where nobody is named Eliot.   She informed me that she could not continue the conversation unless I gave her my number.  She acknowledged that I had every right not to give the number and told me I could call back to find out why they were calling.

A great weariness falls over me as I try to tell this little anecdote as quickly as possible.   To save myself the hassle of being on hold while they valued me as a customer,  I gave her the number she already had, barked out my date of birth.

 “Thank you for that, Eeloit.  The reason we are calling, Eeloit, is to confirm the address we have for you.  Your last invoice was returned to us by the Post Office as undeliverable.”

Umar, you fucking piece of shit, was my first thought.  Umar is the gratingly polite supervisor of my local post office, a man offended that a customer would complain about a properly stamped business mailer being returned to him.  It could have been Umar, on his way to an early shift, leaning on my buzzer at 5:30 a.m. the other day.  Or, like the insurance invoice sent to me and returned to sender, it could have simply been random stupid stuff that happens in our random world.  

Whatever the case, the nice woman who called me from Hyderabad said she’d be unable to send me the returned invoice, in it’s marked envelope, so that I could make a formal complaint to the federal postal inspector about the interference with my mail delivery.  She understood why I’d want it investigated, but, unfortunately, Eeloit, we cannot contact the mail department, they are the ones who would have received the returned bill and there is no way to contact them.  I am only calling to inform you that your invoice was returned to us.

Even if you live a comfortable middle class life in America, there are many frustrations, of course.  These frustrations increase the lower you are on the income scale.  If you are well-to-do you will still sit in brutal traffic, even if you are in a comfortable car with a great sound system.  Frustrating as hell, but somehow, it is different from being on public transportation that simply stops dead while you wait in darkness in a tunnel.   After five minutes an announcement comes on. “Thank you for your patience, customers, and suck a big one while we wait for this unexpected train traffic ahead to clear up.  We should be moving shortly.”   It’s hard not to recall, at such regularly occurring moments,  how much money the CEO of this poorly functioning public corporation makes.

 The CEO will talk about all the great improvements they are making to the infrastructure of the greatest mass transit system in the nation.  I guarantee that cocksucker has never spent an endless twenty-five minutes creeping between two local stations because “we are working harder to serve you better.”  His chauffeur uses an app that routes his limo around traffic, I’m quite certain.  If you never need to ride the subway, or do it once in a blue moon, these things will not bother you nearly as much as someone subjected to this daily.  

The same goes for anyone never kicked off a government program by mistake, say health insurance, which can take months to have reinstated.   Hard as hell  to fix those kind of mistakes, though people with insurance through work will never have to deal with them.  Poor people’s lives are famously more stressful, and shorter, than middle class lives, deal with it if you want to live like a fucking monk.  Otherwise, get the job your education and skills qualify you for, make some money, buy a house, and a car, and gold-plated health insurance and shut the fuck up.

“Are you done torturing yourself yet?” Sekhnet calls from the garden [3].  The garden is really coming along out there as Spring seems to finally be springing.   There are buds on the trees, the farm is beginning to come alive again.   She is right, of course, but also– fuck, this is not rocket science I’m doing here.  It seems entirely possible that people can begin to….  

Ah, what the fuck am I talking about?  Along with millions of others I read Jane Mayer’s powerful best seller The Dark Side, which gave excruciating detail about the well-justified, still defended, secret American torture program.  The last word on that was our president saying ” with the best of intentions, we tortured some folks, best to move on”.   Jeremy Scahill’s brilliant best seller Dirty Wars clearly sets out the hellish new paradigm of American power– secretly killing those who might hate our freedom wherever they may be.  The response to Scahill’s expose was a new president universally applauded by the mass media for dropping tons of explosives in some part of the world every time he feels really cornered.

I’m going to change any hearts and minds with these pieces read by a dozen people here and there?

Better to go out to the garden, or on a plane to a beautiful place where I can forget, for a few days, at least, the relentless corporate killing field our world has become.   If you live well enough, you can get yourself to forget that the only thing necessary for evil to flourish is good people doing nothing.  And now, a word from our sponsor.

 

[1] It is noted by war historians that the Confederacy, whose soldiers fought bravely, usually against larger armies, only lost the war because of the numerical superiority of the Union, and its superior wealth.

[2]  In fact, in the moral contest between sharks and the masters of the earth who named ourselves “wise ape”, the sharks win.  Human commercial fishing outfits routinely catch sharks in nets, cut their fins off, harvest any other salable parts of the mighty fish, and toss them back into the ocean to drown.  Sharks maim and kill a handful of humans every year, in their desire to eat.  Since humans tell the story, sharks emerge as vicious corporate persons, except infinitely more primitive.

[3]  this is a wholly invented bit of dialogue, a paraphrase made under my unofficial poetic license.  OK, Sekhnet?

Loneliness (for fun and profit)

The loneliest woman in the world married the most gregarious man in the world.  She told me, during the last conversation we had face to face, that at the time they met and got married he was very lonely and isolated too.   The man was a good friend of mine, and over the years I got to be good friends with his wife as well.   He was a kind, generous person, full of good cheer, an excellent host who really enjoyed company.  The time we spent together over the years was always full of laughter and meaningful conversation.    Sekhnet only got to spend a few fleeting times with him, but she immediately felt like she’d known him always.

In a vindictive turn on the phrase my father used only to make my mother tearful, “don’t worry, Evvy, only the good die young”, my friend died young.   Suddenly, stopped at a red light just off the freeway in Berkeley.   When the light turned green his passenger said “Howie…” but Howie was already gone.  His life had winked out like a candle flame in a soft breeze.

There was a lot of crying over Howie’s sudden absence, which came about a month before my long-suffering mother breathed her last breath.  I spent many an hour on the phone with Howie’s widow.  She felt abandoned by their large circle of friends, things were getting worse at work, her old enemy had been steadily climbing the corporate ladder and was now sabotaging her at every turn.   I noted at one point that I’d never heard Howie speak badly about anyone, a remarkable thing, we agreed.   We both marveled for a moment about this saintly habit of the departed and then wondered what we’d talk about, if not for badmouthing people.  

Then her complaints would continue, the treachery of those who’d always pretended to be her friends, how everyone had turned their backs on her, while feigning great love and concern.  The details were endless, the proofs she advanced very damning.  I was as sympathetic as I could manage.    

I remembered well my own mother’s loneliness after my father died.  My mother was bright, interesting, a sociable person with a great sense of humor, but my father, it emerged as soon as he was gone, had been the social glue that bound people to my mother and father.  Funny, in a way, because he always professed to be a curmudgeon who’d rather spend his time reading and my mother was the social director who arranged all the dinners and visits.  Until my father died, and the calls and visits abruptly stopped.   So I was in touch with Howie’s widow regularly, recalling how painful the isolation had been for my mother after her mate was gone.

Howie’s widow could be demanding, as I learned, shopping for and preparing the buffet for Howie’s unveiling, for example.   She didn’t always show gratitude, I began to notice, while doing nice things for her.  Over time our friendship began to feel more and more like a one way street.   Her mother, someone who’d given her a lot of grief, died after a period of dementia.   I loaned her a great book on seeing the larger picture after the death of a parent, even a difficult parent.  I wrote her a letter to go with the book.  She took the book and letter without comment.   On three separate occasions in the years afterwards she told me she’d look for the book, which she hadn’t read, and send it back to me.  I never saw my original, annotated copy of Death Benefits again.

Here is the kicker, and I notice, as it is not the first time, that a missed call is later cited as the fatal proof I didn’t give a fuck about somebody.   The first time that happened was when a former good friend, a mentally ill guy with vexing emotional problems and an unbearable amount of self-hatred, broke a promise at a very trying time for me and then left me a missed call afterwards, instead of an explanation or any kind of apology.  He claimed he’d left me a “missed call”, at any rate, my phone had no record of the call.   I was hurt at the betrayal, and angry, and didn’t return the “missed call” I hadn’t known about for several days, something that was then thrown in my face by this pant-load while shabbily blaming the emotional standoff on me, you dig, for being too petty to return a “missed call”.  That my phone recorded no such missed call was but a trifle for someone determined to defend himself at all costs.    

Howie’s widow used a similar ploy in the end to make me the asshole who’d viciously rejected her.   I had a missed call from her.  She had been calling, I learned a few days later, to tell me she was coming to New York, but she left no message, sent no email or text.  Once in New York, a day or two before she was leaving, she called to chide me for not caring enough to call her back in time.   I arranged to be available the following day, but she never called back.  I left her a message and I assume she flew off to California pissed at my betrayal.

I heard how hurtful my betrayal had been to her months later, when mutual friends were in New York.  They’d been asked to find out why I had so coldly rejected our old friend.  I told them the story and have heard nothing since from, or about, our rejected friend.

Loneliness, my friends, is a curse and often its own reward.  This woman is very active on Facebook.  I am not, in fact, I hate that shit, for too many reasons to list here.    Another mutual friend called to give me shit a few months ago for missing his mother’s funeral.   I told him how sorry I was, that I hadn’t known his mother died.   He told me it had been on Facebook.   He then gave me some grief for not being a good friend to Howie’s widow, now almost ten years after Howie’s death.   I explained, but it was no use, he wasn’t buying it.   Most likely she’d announced on Facebook that she was coming to New York, but I was too much of a self-absorbed asshole to even check her Facebook page from time to time.   He told me he’d call me back the next day, and that was the last I heard of him.

Loneliness has been monetized, friends, if you want to verify how much, just look up Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth.   I was recently at a free dinner Sekhnet had RSVP’d to attend, hosted by some financial company.   One of the speakers flashed a slide and mentioned the FANG stocks, very valuable positions in any respectable portfolio. I glanced over at Sekhnet who gave me a sly smile at the term FANG, which encompassed some of my most hated mega-corporations.    The slide showed the logos of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google.  

Every FANG stock is part of the increasingly monetized loneliness of our digital world.   Don’t go to a store, or even talk to anyone on the phone, order shit from your computer, have a slave deliver it to your door for free.  Use a device that marks you as a cool person with money to burn — sure, you can buy cheaper versions of the products Apple sells, but you can’t be COOL if you do.  Don’t interact after work, go into a cocoon, chill and binge watch shows without commercials on Netflix.  Down the fucking list of FANGS.

One of the many reminders, this apt acronym, of the vicious power of loneliness to drive commerce and finance a comfortable retirement, if you are properly positioned with FANG to do so.  God bless these United Global States of corporate personhood.  

 

Mistake in my father’s eulogy

I wrote the eulogy of my father following the guidelines of the man who was conducting the funeral:  give the facts of his life, sprinkled with a bit of his personality.

My father read the New York Times obituaries every day.   Shortly after my father died my uncle handed me a long obituary he’d written and told me to contact the NY Times and have it published.   With my hands full, writing the eulogy, trying to coordinate the funeral 1,200 miles away, I smiled as I took the pages and gave my uncle the famous, ever so gentle silent  “fuck you” he’d no doubt received many times before.  My father never had an obituary in the NY Times, as far as I know.

I suppose I am making up for that now, or trying to, in setting down everything I know about the old man, part wonderful friend of underdogs everywhere, part monster.  

I recently read over the eulogy as delivered at the funeral.  The guy conducting it got a couple of details from my aunt and uncle that he added.   He added in some prayers, which he chanted beautifully.  But most of it were the words I’d written about my father.  The facts of his life sprinkled here and there with hints of his personality.

I saw one asshole mistake in there, a mistake I can easily forgive myself for, under the circumstances, but an assholish mistake nonetheless.   I refer to my father’s lifelong friend Benjie as “a colleague he met at Camp TY”, in the context of the two of them, along with my mother, opening the restaurant Tain Lee Chow, which they operated for a number of years.   I don’t even mention his good friend’s name.  What the fuck?  This is the guy I mystified right after my father was buried by a comment he had no hope of understanding as anything but the kind of weird “fuck you” I’d recently given my uncle about his absurdly grandiose obituary.  The details of that bizarre dis are here.

Benjie had done nothing, outside of being the son my father never had.   Benjie, for his part, found the father he’d never had.   It was a blessing for both of them.   I was an ungracious jerk to reduce Benjie to a faceless business partner.  How easy would it have been to add “my father’s lifelong close friend Benjie”?  Outside of that mistake, I think the rest of the eulogy was pretty good.  I have cut and pasted it below, since it apparently is nowhere else on this blahg.

 

EULOGY 

Israel I. “Irv” Widaen was born June 1, 1924 to Harry and Eva Widem in NYC.   The Widem family lived on Henry Street in Lower Manhattan for the first few years of his life. 

They moved to Peekskill when “Azraelkeh” was a young boy where he grew up poor with his younger brother Paul.  Began kindergarten in Peekskill speaking only Yiddish, played sports, mastered English, graduated from Peekskill High in 1941.   At least one member of Irv’s class went on to serve as Mayor of Peekskill.

Irv was a member, as was Paul, of Boy Scout Troop 33 of the First Hebrew Congregation and they marched together in Peekskill parades under a banner representing the First Hebrew Congregation.  

He was Bar Mitzvahed (and attended post-Bar Mitzvah classes) in the downtown First Hebrew Congregation on lower Main Street, where services are still conducted to this day, even though the “new” synagogue is on upper Main Street, where a plaque on the front of the new synagogue memorializes Harry and Eva Widem.  

 Growing up he idolized the Jewish slugger Detroit Tiger first baseman Hank Greenberg. His identification with Hank Greenberg was so strong that his schoolmates called him Hank and referred to him as Hank in print in the High School yearbook. He remained a lifelong Detroit Tiger fan.

Drafted into the Air Force in 1943 where, in spite of having almost no mechanical aptitude, he was sent to mechanic’s school and attained the rank of sergeant. He served after the war in Germany where his crew had a mutt they named “Schicklegruber”.

It was during WWII that his name became “Widaen” while the rest of his family remained “Widem”.  A spelling mistake on his birth certificate, relied on by the draft board, resulted in the new name.

 Irv graduated from Syracuse University on the GI bill with a BA from the Maxwell School of Diplomacy and Public Policy, and went on to a doctoral program in American History at Columbia. While at Columbia met Evelyn Mazur who lived downstairs from his cousin Dinch Stamper and her family on Eastburn Avenue in the Bronx.

 According to him it was love at first sight.

 Evelyn was the most beautiful woman he’d ever met and her love changed his life.

 After initial resistance Evelyn was won over and has always maintained that Irv was the most brilliant, funny, caring and wonderful man she ever knew.

 The couple moved to Queens after living for a while in Manhattan.  Eliot was born in 1956, followed by Abby in 1958.

 Irv taught Junior High School, then High School – at Martin Van Buren in Queens. At Van Buren he was the G.O. advisor and won the esteem of many a high school student.  

 In the early days of school integration in Queens Irv went from school to school to speak to hostile white parent groups about the need to bring black and white students and their families together.

 He was more than once pelted with the proverbial rotten vegetables and traveled with a police escort. His addresses to school principals were greeted with similar enthusiasm.

 He was selected to be part of a “Mod Squad” unit at the NYC Board of Education that intervened in riot plagued schools once integration began.  

 Along with a folk singing blond female WASP, an ethnic Italian, a Hispanic and a couple of Blacks, this mutton chopped secular Jew rounded out the Human Relations Unit.

 As Coordinator of Pupil Programs he designed and implemented sensitivity workshops that used role playing, and team building workshops conducted with humor and insight to teach the leaders of student factions to stop fighting each other.

 His team won over these hardened inner-city teenagers and peace reigned in the schools, until the students graduated and their little brothers began killing each other a few years later. He became a master of street talk, jive and playing the dozens in those years.

 He moonlighted as the Director of the Nassau/Suffolk region of a Zionist youth group called Young Judaea. He later went on to become director of their national camp, Tel Yehuda in Barryville, New York.   He directed the camp for more than a decade and became national director of Young Judaea.  

 He influenced many teenagers during his years as director, and kicked more than one of his son’s friends out of camp as well.

He also kicked his son out of camp once.

With a partner he met at Tel Yehuda he opened the first Glatt Kosher Chinese restaurant in Queens. He ran “Tain Lee Chow” for several years with his partner and a Chinese chef, named, coincidentally, Mr. Chow.

 He had a lifelong commitment to Social Justice, Animal Rights and the environment. He loved animals and he and Evelyn always kept a dog as a pet.   He did not care for cats.

 He was to the end of his life disgusted by the reactionary trend of American politics.

An avid reader of the New York Times — and a daily reader of the obituaries — once he retired and finally bought the computer his wife lobbied for, he added about five daily papers to his reading list and spent two hours a night on the internet. He subscribed to Sports Illustrated and followed college and professional football, basketball and the Detroit Tigers.

 He had suffered anemia and weakness for the last two years.   He always maintained that medical care in Florida was the worst in the world and that old people were treated as fungible cash cows. His final experience bore this out.

 In spite of seeing as many as seven specialists a month for years, he died from a cancer that went undiagnosed until he got to the emergency room.

 On Saturday, April 23, as Evelyn prepared the fish and matzoh ball soup for their quiet seder meal, my father woke up from a nap yellow with jaundice and unable to lift his head off the pillow or move his legs.   He was rushed to the emergency room.  

He was diagnosed immediately by the doctor who palpated his swollen abdomen, as swollen with cancer-related acites.

 He died the following Friday late afternoon from a badly damaged liver that led to the shut down of his kidneys a day or two after he was hospitalized.

 Once certain that medical intervention was futile he chose hospice care and died within a few days. His condition was inoperable, his decision to have hospice care was informed and intelligent.

 He had no self-pity about the sudden news of his impending death and remained sharp, never losing his lucidity, even in his final minutes.

He died peacefully.

A personal note from his sister-in-law Barbara:

 “Irv was the best man at his younger brother Paul, and Barbara’s wedding 55 years ago.

 He was a man who could be depended upon with grace and compassion when a family member was in need.

 Barbara has everlasting gratitude for the manner in which he came to her assistance when both of her parents died suddenly.

 He and Evelyn were always gracious hosts when visiting them, whether at Tel Yehuda camp, their restaurant, Tane Lee Chow, in Queens) or sightseeing throughout south Florida.

 Their energy was awesome.”

 He is mourned by … [short list of names deleted] … and will be missed by many whose lives he touched.

 

Who gets to tell the story?

The cliché that history is written by the victors, as a rule, is hard to dispute.  We have to be a little careful about oversimplifying the categories of winner and loser, though.   Take the history of the American Civil War.   A generation or two after it ended the daughters and granddaughters of the great families of the South, the wealthiest families, the “best” families, in the popular parlance, became very concerned with how history would remember their glorious families.    An influential school of historians arose, largely supported by these well-born gals, who told the story the way they preferred it: a glorious history of high principle and protection of an inferior race who became predictably savage when liberated from the protection of their former masters.    

It may also be said that this history, written in the late 19th – early 20th century when most of the Confederate monuments were being erected to the heroes of the violent rebellion against federal tyranny, gave a moral fig leaf to a new generation of American racial terrorists.   The history is only now being written of the long, bloody decades of lynching and intimidation that went along with this sanitized, glorified version of the antebellum south and the Civil War.   It became cool, and often politically smart, for glory-seeking white racists to become “knights” in the Ku Klux Klan, membership soared nationwide after World War One.  Nothing like a good old-fashioned beating, mutilation and death by torture to remind everybody of their places.  The lessons of this brutality, even as it was most often kept a local secret, were not lost on anyone.

Who gets to tell the story?  In American politics mass media pundits (even drug addled ones), with no background in anything but self-promotion, are more influential than our most well-read, well-spoken, deepest thinking scholars.  Put the scholar on one side, a defiant blowhard on the other side, and America gets to watch another egghead get put in his fucking place.   It is a kind of thought crime here, basing your thoughts on too many fucking facts.  Fuck you and the fucking facts you rode in on, asshole!  You think you’re better than me just because you’re smart, and devoted to knowledge, and actively seeking facts and something you claim is truth?  I got your truth right here…

 Who gets to tell the story, even in your family?  Put any spin on it you like, dismiss the version that makes you feel bad.   No need to ever feel bad, just write anything bad out of history.  See how simple it is?     Most people I know, like my highly intelligent, idealistic father, eventually give up after enough time banging their head against the imperatives of our frequently merciless world.

I wrote the book about my father.  Not yet a book, it is a collection of stories and conversations, evoking the times, conflicts and the complicated spirit of a gifted man who did not fully enjoy his gifts, who died full of regrets.  More regretful than angry, even at himself.  How’s that for a deathbed surprise, dad?   The lifetime of rage and denial yields to the reality that death is hours away, your thoughts became more and more focused on how you missed out on the most beautiful parts of the ride your gifts might have otherwise provided you.

 “Oh, give it up, Elie!” says the skeleton of my father.   “Better to go through the hundreds of pages you’ve already written, picking likely lottery winning passages, pasting them together into a scroll.   Your lifetime of rage and denial will end in your own terrible regrets, when death is closing in on you, that you never managed to sell your book, be interviewed by Terry Gross.  I hear your man Leonard Lopate got canned for some likely sexual impropriety or other, so you missed that boat.   Keep paddling, Elie, is all I’m saying.”  

Righty-oh, dad.   I remind myself, while I’m wondering about who gets to write the stories we all come to believe, that there are many ways to see a given thing, a given person.   Not to say that every point of view is equally valid, equally interesting, equally revealing.  Can we separate a devoted Nazi’s beliefs from his watercolors?  I mean, the guy may have been a supremely gifted watercolorist, a regular Winslow Homer, but he was a major fucking Nazi.  A Nazi, dude, those beautiful watercolors were painted by an officer in the SS.    Nazi watercolors, dude.   Ain’t dassum shit?

The best artist I ever knew, a few nights before she died, expressed this very clearly.  She had no truck with Nazis who were otherwise very artistic people.

Selections for Sheila

My second cousin once removed, Sheila, recently asked me to send her what I’ve written about my father.   Sheila was always treated to the best of this likable man, his irreverent wit, his intelligence on every subject of consequence, his charm, his idealism.   I told her I’d send her a link to the 1,200 pages I’ve written in my two and a third year wrestling match with this gigantic subject.    

Then I thought better of it, picturing her struggling helplessly in that dense jungle of unorganized prose, and began going through the unwieldy manuscript, making some selections, almost at random, to give her a picture of the whole project.  I saved a 53 page chunk as “Selections for Sheila”– served with the personal touch, don’t you know?

She wrote back to tell me she liked what she’s read so far, though much of it was painful to her.   She’d had only the most generalized idea of the darkness in his early life and no inkling of the dark side he often retreated to in the company of his wife and children, the overarching tragedy of his life.  

I’ll refer you back to that post a few days ago for my thoughts on writing, why, and how and what for.   Bukowski wrote a great poem about real writing that is hard to argue with.   It is not the praise of another reader that makes a piece of writing worth reading, it is the writing itself.  Writing with passion and care is its own reward, sickening as that also is to say in a world where so many empty, ill-considered words are churned out by people well-paid to churn the vomit out, often with the help of ghosts who do the real work of making popular, bankable idiots sound relatively intelligent.   That said, having a reader or two who gets what you’re trying to do, appreciates the work involved– priceless.  

After I sent it off I looked over the Selections for Sheila and immediately wondered where a few important stories were.   At one point the manuscript had a table of contents and an index, to help me locate things.   That was hundreds of pages ago, I couldn’t keep up with the administrative tasks associated with the writing– the pages piled up too fast.   OK, I am… how to say?… I don’t like certain kinds of hard work.   I can work for two hours or more taking rough edges off a few paragraphs, increasing the clarity of what I am saying, adding an illustration where it will help the reader see something I haven’t been able to make clear enough.   To some people this kind of work is unthinkable.  To me, most other kinds of work are unthinkable.  

I am not anti-social, I like people, for the most part, enjoy interacting with people (animals too, for that matter).  I am open to people, let me say that.  I spend most of my time alone.   No single thing is as important to me, or makes me feel more like myself, than the time I spend by myself, focused, concentrating on making something as clear, or elegant, smooth or rough, as I can make it.   Craft has become one of those quaint notions in our fractured tabloid culture, but hold a beautifully finished wooden spoon in your hand once in a while, run your fingers over it, and you will feel what I am talking about.

I’ve always loved that Chekhov story  “The Bet.”   Chekhov wrote it when he was 28 or 29, a young man already two thirds of the way through what would turn out to be a short life (he died at 44).  Read it yourself, (click here) if you haven’t, it’s quite short.   The bones of the story:  a wealthy banker bets an idealistic guy who claims to love life and the pursuit of knowledge above all else two million dollars that he can’t stay locked in a room for fifteen years without any human contact.  The idealist takes the bet, on the condition that he can have musical instruments, books and writing materials brought to him whenever he asks.   He suffers terribly at first, constantly playing the piano, then learns several classical languages, reads the classics in their original languages, he studies a wide range of subjects, including the collected wisdom of the world’s religions.

I’ll save you the spoiler alert, in case you haven’t read that story, but I have always related to that character Chekhov created.   The banker is just the crass way of the material world, the pondering reader is the soul of the human world.  It doesn’t embarrass me to make this simplistic statement.   I am already too far gone.  

I am now collecting pieces for Selections for Sheila Two.  Hopefully one day a literary agent will be moved by an unsolicited packet of pages culled from those selections.  The agent will skillfully introduce my pages to some corporate person I wouldn’t piss on if they were on fire.  I won’t have to piss on them– they’ll give me money instead.

Now, back to collecting pages for Selections for Sheila part two.

Note to the writers out there — and a good one from Charles Bukowski

Wouldn’t you know it, five seconds, maybe ten seconds, after I hit “publish” on the previous piece, peevish about the long delay getting back to me by someone who promised to read something I’d sent her, I get a notification beep in my pocket.  I swear to your false gods, it was a few blinks of an eye.  An email from her, with an excellent reason for the delay, and some intelligent comments on the piece.

I appreciate her email, even as I also realized, as soon as I’d read it, that it was just an opinion.  Like mine, like anyone’s who clicks a thumb up or a thumb down on any of the 100,000,000,000 daily posts on the internet or any of its social media tentacles and capillaries.  Hey, Gangnam Style got a billion views at one point, probably has two billion by now (3,140,146,265 views and counting, grazie, Jeevsie).  Does that make it the greatest youtube video of all-time?   

Who gives a fuck?  The audience you write for is your own cultivated taste, served to the most intelligent, subtle-minded reader you can imagine.  It’s easy to forget that, particularly when the winds are stagnant and you’re getting the toxic stink full snout.  A friend sent me this poem by the great Charles Bukowski, which reminds us all of this, and more.  Kind of says it all (I have emphasized the stanza my friend pointed out).  Bon appétit:

so you want to be a writer?

Charles Bukowski, 1920 – 1994

if it doesn’t come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don’t do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it for money or
fame,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don’t do it.
if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it,
don’t do it.
if you’re trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.


if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you’re not ready.

don’t be like so many writers,
don’t be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don’t be dull and boring and
pretentious, don’t be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don’t add to that.
don’t do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don’t do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don’t do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

 

From sifting through the madness for the Word, the line, the way by Charles Bukowski. Copyright © 2003 by the Estate of Charles Bukowski. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins. All rights reserved.

 

source

Note to HarperCollins and the Estate of Charles Bukowski:  please forgive this Fair Use of your copyrighted Charles Bukowski poem (and thanks for keeping the old boy in print for us all).   

If you deem this zero profit use a copyright violation, please have your lawyers contact my literary agent’s attorneys at … what did I do with that damned business card?

Better yet, read some of the recent shit on this site and let me know what kind of contracts you’re offering bitter fucking writers these days.