Author Archives: oinsketta

Slowing Down

Like the drag of age on the muscles, gravity, the wind, an ever more giant hand in the chest, I notice a diminution of my energies lately.   This could be nothing more than a little good natured depression, checking in to keep me honest.   It is the other side of creativity, after all, despondence when the creative impulse wanes.

It is possible, when ideas are flowing and possibilities seem endless, to see the world as a kind of infinite feast.   During such times you are not troubled by the concurrent reality that this world is a truly infinite feast only for connoisseurs of carrion.   Your vultures, rather clever birds, and hyenas, often regarded as cowardly, are the most well-known beneficiaries of this unlimited smorgasbord.  Although these intelligent birds and plucky scavenging wild dogs will soon enough go the way of the Dodo Bird.

It becomes an uphill push to sustain enthusiasm for any long-term project in the complete absence of positive feedback.  It is like anything difficult– if you have one stout supporter, one person deeply interested in what you are doing– that is often enough to get you through a sluggish period.   In the absence of at least one person who truly gets what you are trying to do– the wall you hit periodically will look like the end.  

This is just one more reason that most people prefer the rewards of working hard every day at a job that pays them decent money, and hopefully also provides a sense of satisfaction,  to the day-dreamy reward of playing a perfect guitar part, or drawing something beautiful — for no pay.  “Then ’tis like the breath of an unfee’d lawyer, you gave me nothing for it,” says the Fool to King Lear.

Looking for inspiration, one resorts to superstition.  I was born in The Year of the Monkey.  I once read a blurb about everyone born on this every twelfth year Monkey year.   We are clever, can be very sociable, even charming, we have a million ideas, but we rarely are able to follow through to see any of them to fruition.  My father was a Rat.   Rats have all kinds of complementary traits to the Monkey, but not framing everything as a war is apparently not one of them.   I don’t really remember much else from that paper placemat of the Chinese zodiac I read in the Gran Via on Dyckman Street many years ago.   The Gran Via itself, run by Chinese Spanish speakers from Cuba, is long gone.

I had a long email debate with an old friend, a very clever fellow (also a Monkey, it occurs to me now) over the issue of American torture.   He argues by habit and he’s very, very good at it.  It is sport for him, as well as his vocation.  I grew frustrated by his continual deflection of my points about the so-called Enhanced Interrogation program, by his refusal to accept any point I made, instead making endless deft lawyerly pivots.  In the end, exhausted by this futile exercise with a devilishly clever Devil’s advocate, I wondered aloud if, in order to clinch his debate victory, he was going to start actually torturing me.   “Oh, but I already am!” he wrote back, wry as you please.

I had a long chat with him recently about  a matter that has been torturing me for some time.   It came at a particularly inopportune time for him, I realized immediately after making it the subject of our dinnertime conversation.  I dropped him a line to apologize for belaboring the point at such a bad time for him.  He assured me that he was always pleased to be a sounding board and was glad I feel free to continue discussing such things with him.   I took the opportunity to send him another copy of a piece I wrote about it, something too private, ironically, to post here.

In the thinly fictionalized story I had set up my dilemma from another angle, having a narrator tell the story from her point of view, dismissing mine while revealing all the pertinent facts in the least malignant light to herself that she could provide.  The story is about a ten minute read and I’m unable to tell if it presents a fair sounding story or if the narrator is a hapless puppet with grotesquely visible strings clearly grinding my ax for me.

Everyone I know is somewhat familiar with the outlines of the story and the personalities involved.  In seeking a reader who could read the story objectively, someone who didn’t know any of the players or the events, I asked a good friend of a good friend if she’d be willing to have a look.   She agreed at once, told me she’d be delighted to read it.  I emailed it to her eighteen days ago.  

After about ten days, hearing nothing back, I wrote to tell her I wasn’t looking for literary input, just a general impression on two things: is the narrator credible and is she sympathetic?   I had an immediate apologetic reply about a particularly hectic week, assuring me that she was looking forward to reading it and that it would be her pleasure to give me her take on those two things. 

Since then, and after his assurance that my ruminations on this long standing situation didn’t faze him at all, I sent the piece to my old friend, recounting the story I have told just now about the reader who has been very busy but assured me again she is anxious to read the short piece.

I had his reply immediately:

I would be happy to read it, and offer my feedback!

To which, several days ago, I responded: Hah!

The world is a fucking hoot, to those not too bloody and bruised to wink at its puckishness.   A couple of days of ten hours of sleep ought to bring out a bit more of its wicked humor, I would hope.  Otherwise, I fear, this recent listless, sore kneed limping I’ve been doing may turn out to be the harbinger of something more ominous.

 

 

Nuance, Context and other quaint notions

There are knee jerks that are almost impossible to resist.   Those knee jerks, now amplified and encouraged by our own private on-line and mass media cheering sections,  rule our world today, certainly our politics.  Right is right and evil is evil and if you try to defend evil I will swat that shit away and wag my finger like Dikembe Motumbo under the basket, as your shot winds up in the third row.   Don’t try that shit in my house!

When I hear somebody say that  God told them to do something, and that thing is bombing a water filtration plant and hospital in a far away land (because the dictator of that land is a modern-day Hitler), causing children to die along with their elders, my knee jerks.  That kid in Florida, Trayvon Martin, when the vigilante with the gun stopped him, whatever the guy with the gun may have said to him, why didn’t the black kid just say “yes, sir.  I’m up from Miami, visiting my family, sir” and get to live another day?  Knee jerk.   When the president does what he’s on record as saying his predecessor was an idiot for considering…. boing, there goes the knee.

Flash the cards, there is no shortage of them.  Abortion: murder of a human soul or a hard choice in a situation where an unwanted child will otherwise come into the world to live a life nobody would wish on it     If you believe God said abortion is murder, that’s the end of the story, bub.  It’s murder if the fetus was put in a thirteen year old’s womb by a rapist, or by the coercion of a sleazy, criminal relative.  Murder if they held the girl down and took turns punching her and raping her.  Murder because, every soul was created by God and the soul comes into being at the moment of conception, because God loves every soul.  

True believers are hard to have a conversation with.  There are no facts you can put forth that will allow them to see things from another perspective.  I’m not singling out hypocritical Christians, doggedly defending the rights of fetuses while letting the little unwanted newborn fuckers fend for themselves.   I am just using rigid religiosity to illustrate this larger point about belief that is impervious to discussion, nuance or context.  We all believe what we believe and we justify those beliefs according to our ability to rationalize.    

I am floundering today, as I try to make this vague yet obvious point clear.  If we omit nuance and context in a discussion, we are just talking opinionated shit at each other. Nuance is the first casualty of absolute moral certainty, any sense of a larger context is killed at the same time.  Not to say there aren’t principles worth fighting for– personal integrity is one, it seems to me, but even there, choosing your battles is very important.  This black and white, red and blue, us and them world we live in is the divided, divisive hell it is for many reasons.  High on the list is a massive failure to acknowledge nuance and context, particularly on the other side of our own beliefs, when talking about particular issues. 

I was surprised to learn, as I was writing a long manuscript about my father’s life, trying to draw every lesson I could from his tragic example, that it is possible to identify with the feelings of a desperate, trapped woman who viciously takes it out on her baby.   The feelings, I say, not the actions.  It’s impossible to identify with the actions, I think.  The actions are despicable, whipping a baby in the face, there’s no defending that.   The feelings, odd to realize, are quite readily understandable.   That’s some fucking nuance right there, dear reader.  Let me try to make it as clear as I saw it that day.

A relative I never met, who was portrayed to me only as red-haired, tiny, very religious and with a terrible temper (also a great cook), turns out also to have whipped her infant son in the face, regularly.   It was part of her daily routine, breaking this toddler’s spirit.  I always assumed she was a psycho, which she most likely also was.  But one day it dawned on me, how tortured this woman was when she began taking it out on her first-born son.    It doesn’t excuse what she did in any way, but it sheds light.  Light is the only antidote to darkness.   It shows a path out of what she was trapped in, even if one didn’t exist for her in 1926 when she began her lifelong persecution of the boy she called “Sonny”.

The man she fell in love with was driven away by her brother and her sister-in-law.  It was nothing personal for them, nothing against the young man who loved her.  It was strictly practical.  Her marriage would have meant the loss of their indentured servant and they weren’t ready to give up their live in maid.   Years later she was forced into an arranged marriage with a man who seemed to be brain damaged. He’d been knocked in the head many times by his own angry step-mother and nobody will ever know if this deadpan man who died young was brain damaged or not.   He couldn’t make a living.   They lived in a filthy, teeming slum, the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in 1922.   Every day the woman woke up to this horror.   Somehow she got pregnant.  The baby girl died shortly after she was born.  

At some point the heartbroken woman got pregnant again.   This time the tiny woman gave birth to a gigantic son.   We can imagine the pain of this childbirth.   The baby looked exactly like the idiotic husband who had knocked her up.   He looked at her with that same dopey expression.   One day the woman snapped, whipped the baby in the face with the thick, heavy, burlap wrapped cord of her iron.   It apparently felt good.  Maybe the only thing in her life that did.

I’m not being a lawyer for this evil mother.   We’d like to think a mother like this today would be in the hands of an excellent psychiatrist.   That her child would be getting help recovering from his trauma.  But what I’m digging for here is Nuance.   Not that she’s in any way right to act in this vicious way, but in order to understand her pathology, on the way to hopefully making life better for all involved, we have to fully know the context of her actions.

I rattle on about this subject tediously often, I’m aware.   We live in a world where every message we get, every bit of news, is curated, structured to support one polarized point of view or another.   It is extremely rare to get the full story about anything, from anyone.  I am always looking for a way to make the point about nuance and context that is not partisan.  I do this animated by the Anne Frank-like faith that most humans, in their hearts, are not haters.   That we are all basically good.

I believe this even as I hate any U.S. president who rains death on people who have no power to do anything but agonize and die, or if they manage to survive, fear and hate.   Few problems have ever been solved by the application of massive deadly force, whether you call it “Freedom on the March” or by any other high-sounding name.  It is of course business as usual,blowing shit up is a driving force of capitalist profit making.  

I felt a surge of hatred when Bill Clinton sent missiles that blew up civilians, destroyed infrastructure they needed to survive.   That same hatred surged through me when George W. Bush ignored millions of us marching in the frigid streets and launched “Shock and Awe”, later declaring victory and lynching Saddam after shooting his two hideous sons in the street like dogs.   As for the massive civilian deaths?  Killing civilians is now blandly called “collateral damage” nothing to get excited about, certainly no war crime, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.   Barack Obama’s extrajudicial murder of the radicalized American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and his teenaged son Abdulrahim a week later– same deal, along with all the other deaths our recent president inflicted on unknown brown people on his secret kill list.

Can we have some fucking nuance, a little context so we can discuss these things intelligently instead of just using force to kill things like Terror, Evil, Haters of our Freedom?  Our previous president told us we were looking forward, not backwards at the architects of  our recent crimes under international law, you know, because we are, uh, taking the high road.   To be totally honest, we tortured some folks, what are you going to do?   Good folks doing some bad shit, with the best of intentions.  

Make American Great Again.   Hope and Change.  Make America Great Again, again.  The slogans change, a few of the proponents of government violence change with each administration, but the song remains the same.  Fuck nuance, fuck context, it feels good when our leader bombs the shit out of some fuckers who might very well be evil.  If nothing else, they really do appear to hate our freedom.  Even pundits who usually seem to have a reasonable grasp of world affairs go momentarily gaga when the president blows some shit up with a huge show of force.   It doesn’t seem possible to me that we are a nation of such stupid motherfuckers.

The evidence is not strong that we are not, but I am always digging for it.

 

 

Lunch with cousins (& the grasshopper and the ant)

My ninety year old cousin Gene introduced me, at his birthday party yesterday, as his only living relative.    His wife, sister and daughter were also there, along with a brother-in-law and a son-in-law,  but his point was taken.   His father, one of eighteen siblings (nine of whom lived, for a while, at least) was the only one who made it out of the caldron that was Hitler and Himmler’s Europe in the 1940s.  His father had survived by sheer luck.   An uncle in the U.S. had sent his future father a ticket for a steamship.  This was around the time of the First World War.  That uncle died shortly after the thirteen year-old arrived in America.  That was it for that side of the family.   No trace was ever found of anybody else, and Gene searched on at least two trips to Europe.

My grandmother and Gene’s mother were first cousins.   They had come over together right before the First World War on a steamship called Korfus die Grosse.  I never met that grandmother, my father’s mother, who died young before I was born, but I remember Gene’s mother very well.   Dintch was a bright woman with mischievous eyes and prominent cheeks that were often raised in a wry smile.   She also lived to be ninety or more, if I recall.   The rest of our family disappeared into that marsh south of the Pina River, across from Pinsk in what was then Poland and is now Belarus.   There is no trace of any of them, or even the muddy hamlet they all lived in, as far as any of us have been able to find out.

Gene explained our exact degree of cousinly relation yesterday.   Since my father and Gene were the sons of first cousins, they are, apparently, second cousins.   This makes Gene and me second cousins once removed.   I believe the same relationship exists with my cousin Azi in Israel.  His mother and my father were first cousins, so their children, Azi and Azrael (Israel), both named for their common ancestor, my father’s grandfather and Azi’s great-grandfather, were second cousins.   Or something– I’m pretty sure my analysis is faulty, now that I reread it.  I have never been good at this cousin business, probably because I have so few of them it never seemed to matter.

Chatting in the restaurant with Gene’s sister, I couldn’t help mentioning the 1,200 page manuscript I’ve drawn up grappling with my father’s life.  Gene’s sister has only fond memories of the witty, well-spoken Irv, and of my mother, another colorful character, an opinionated, earthy woman who loved a good story and a good laugh.   Gene’s much younger sister expressed interest in reading it, as Sekhent put the sales varnish on it, that it’s a story of history, and memory, and forgiveness and blah blah blah (actually, all she mentioned was history, but she strongly suggested the ms. is way more than a cv of an unknown man going on 13 years dead).

As is her way, Sekhnet pointed out to the group at the table that it is much easier for me to keep cranking out new pages than it is for me to figure out how to package and sell the book I’ve already largely written.  That’s the hard work, she pointed out, making the obvious a little easier for all to see.  Hard work, she made plain, is something  I constantly shrink from.    Like the grasshopper I am, think of that parable of the grasshopper who loves to play guitar, and mocks his constantly worried, constantly working ant neighbor (until winter comes and the grasshopper begs in vain for some food), I continue tapping here, instead of reading the whole thing and plucking out a succulent 15-20 page slice to send out to literary agents and get to the next step.

Since I have promised to send Sheila the whole megilla, I figured I’d seize the opportunity to select a strong 15-20 pages and send her those first [I sent her a random 53 page sampling– ed].   It will be much easier for her to deal with an appetizing slice than more than a thousand pages of sometimes rambling prose.  

In my experience, people have a very hard time reading even a five page story, unless it’s published somewhere, in which case they are all pleased to send a good word.  I need to cut out a strong section to get to the next stage.  How I will do this, I have no idea.  I do know I need a cup of strong coffee before I get started.  That is the very least I need.  You hear me, Sekhnet, goddamn it?

Erased from History

Many assholes dream of immortality,
making an indelible mark on this world.
Most of us just want to live,
admire the perfect blue gradient the sky sometimes is,
play music, cook something tasty,
laugh hard once in a while.

Overbearing assholes want everything —
they want to own that perfect blue gradient,
devour all they see.
they build monuments to themselves
and hire guards to beat people
who lean against the monument
or look at it with insufficient awe.

My people have no graves.
killed wholesale,
there was nobody left to bury them.
A tiny handful
lived to have headstones,
four grandparents,
my parents,
the rest
as the world said of them at the time
“fuck ’em.”

Nobody alive now even knows their names.

In ancient Egypt
the rulers were chosen by the gods.
when the gods withdrew their favor from
one dynasty
and bestowed it on another,
workers from the new dynasty
would go into the tombs of the earlier rulers
and scrape their faces off the walls of the tombs
erasing them from history,
fucking up their afterlives.

It’s hard to feel sorry
for motherfuckers who walked on carpets
made of living human bodies,
but I know the feeling
of being written out of history

My concern is not for a time to come
it is for now,
the time remaining
to each of us right now,
that lush wink of a cosmic eye.

Second Round of Public Hearings on the Rezoning of Inwood

Manhattan Borough president Gale Brewer apparently has to sign off on the Rezoning Plan that developers are pushing to fully monetize the quiet, bucolic village on the northernmost end of Manhattan Island.   It is a multi-billion dollar plan and unknown parties stand to make a real shitload of money if the gentrification plan goes through.

The Borough President will make her recommendation to the City Council on April 25.   She sent all Inwood residents a very well-designed brochure that lays out the bones of the proposed plan, with a map showing where developers will be allowed to build mixed use apartment buildings of up to 295 feet tall.   My street, I learned, is considered part of the Upland Core and apparently will not be rezoned for any building higher than the current six story limit.

At the meeting last night I asked for the deadline to submit a written statement in opposition to this rezoning plan.   Friday, April 13, the day after tomorrow, I was told.  So be it.   Thought I’d start a draft here, as I don’t have much time to get it done and submitted:

Dear Borough President Brewer:

Please vote NO on the current rezoning plan for Inwood. 

At minimum, please recommend severing the fate of the Inwood Public Library from the larger rezoning plan.   The issue of demolishing our public library for private profit warrants its own debate.  Our children, and all of us in this working class enclave, deserve no less.

For starters, thank you so much for the beautifully designed mailer with the map.  I think the formulation:  no rezoning = gentrification, bad rezoning = gentrification needs one more equation:  current rezoning plan = wildly accelerated gentrification.     It was a great help to read the steps of the process and see the layout of the planned changes and the extent that high rises will be allowed to spring up in our historically low-rise district of Manhattan.  The opacity of this developer-enriching plan has been a major problem all along.

To cite one example to stand in for the rest, the almost unreadably legalistic “Whereas” “Whereas” of CB12’s approval of this proposed development plan.   The lack of readily digestible information on the full scope of this plan that will further enrich unnamed developers and provide new market rent apartments for up to 80% of the 14,000 new Inwood residents is a major impediment to intelligent public debate.

I moved to Inwood more than forty years ago.  I used to bike up to play softball in Inwood Park and fell in love with the sleepy little village of Inwood and the sprawling, beautiful nature reserve.   My first lease for my rent stabilized apartment was $182.  My stabilized rent today is $805.   My neighbors upstairs and downstairs each pay at least twice that, even though each has a ‘preferential’ rent taking some of the sting out of it for them (since the landlord claims he could legally charge them even more).

There are many problems with the plan, including most obviously, the massive crowding that will occur as a result of the new density proposed by those who profit from building high-rise market rent buildings.  You noted that there are currently 16,000 rental apartments in Inwood.   The construction proposed in the rezoning plan will bring in 14,000 new residents, most of them willing to pay “market rents” of $2,000-$2,500 and more.   It doesn’t take a mathematician to look at these numbers and see how drastically, and disproportionately, the proposed plan will increase crowding in Inwood and otherwise affect the character of this quiet, working class family neighborhood.

The new high-rises and large influx of new market rent renters will make the rezoned neighborhood suddenly “hot” and seen as a great real estate deal in Manhattan.  This will give private landlords of existing buildings even more incentive to harass and evict tenants.   This is already a major problem in Inwood, and would become much more severe, once the profit motive gets the shot of steroids this accelerated development deal would instantly deliver.

Beyond overcrowding, loss of affordable housing, displacement of long-time residents, more stress on an overtaxed antiquated infrastructure (including the ancient sewers), increased car traffic and pollution, increased subway crowding on already underserved lines, there are other ominous features in this gentrification rezoning plan.

One is the continued silence on the question of the Inwood Library.   We were told by the representative from the EDC that a wonderful new library will be provided in the common space at the base of a massive new high-rise to be built on the library’s present footprint.   The credibility of the EDC is not bolstered by its touting of the $30,000,000 improvement of Highbridge Park, a park 1.4 miles south of Inwood (Google maps), as an example of how this plan will improve life for residents of Inwood.  They also made a bold and ridiculous claim about 100% affordable housing in development along with a new modern branch of the Inwood Library (see EDC “fact sheet” Inwood NYC Snapshot.)

Why is it necessary to demolish our library for the profit of a private developer who seeks maximum return on the largest possible number of units in his new 80% ‘market rate’ building?  What is the plan for the year or more of construction of this massive new high-rise?

Most of our overcrowded local schools do not have libraries.  The Inwood Public library is an invaluable community resource.  Presumably, according to advocates of the rezoning plan, including the EDC, it will be an even better one several years from now, when the children of the well-to-do new residents will be able to take an elevator downstairs to pick up their books.  What of the interim?

I am filled with a sense of futility about the fate of my neighborhood.   I have seen the massive displacements in every other area of the city where accelerated gentrification plans have been approved.  We have seen wealthy powerbrokers ramming neighborhood-killing deals through reluctant, ill-informed, politically weak citizenry going back to the days before Robert Moses was even a malevolent glint in his father’s eye.  

I had hopes for something better under Mayor de Blasio, although the forces acting on him, as on our compliant local Inwood politicians, most of whom sent representatives to speak for them rather than face the massive crowd at the CB12 meeting, seem to suggest that, well… there are forces that are just too powerful, well-connected and relentless to resist.  Political reality, I suppose, in an era when gigantic political donations are considered free speech.   We have an administration in Washington full of people who have lobbied for and profited from favorable government regulation, brazen about the appearance of impropriety in their dealings, being the beneficiaries of our two-tiered winner vs. loser approach to justice.   Our current president, as a developer, was the recipient of $885,000,000 in tax abatements and other breaks to build luxury buildings, much of this public generosity coming at the expense of New York City (source: NY Times 9-18-16)

Your opening remarks at the Public Meeting of April 10th gave me the hope that you understand and are sensitive to the dynamics of this rezoning plan, and its likely fallout for Inwood residents should it be implemented.   As I’ve noted, I’m not optimistic about the combined comments of all the current residents of Inwood amounting to a hill of beans in this discussion.  Not when put onto the balance against the powerful forces of progress and economic growth who stand to reap untold millions on this plan.

Their representatives speak of freedom on the march, open spaces, open waterfronts (the Hudson is already open, there is a long public park there), new community spaces, universal pre-K, a gleaming new lobby library, etc.   They pitch this as progress, but, as one panelist pointed out to deserved applause, the plan will benefit mostly the newcomers and absolutely come at the expense of many current residents of Inwood.

It is my weary hope that you will defy the expectations of the powerbrokers and real-estate profiteers and vote against this insatiably overreaching rezoning plan. Whatever else this plan might be, it is not designed in the interests of those of us who currently call Inwood our home.  

At minimum, please recommend severing the Inwood Public Library from the larger rezoning plan. The issue of demolishing our library warrants its own debate. Why is public property being ceded to a private interest?   The closing of the library, even if only for a year or two (an eternity in a young child’s life), deprives the people of Inwood of a community resource vital to education and democracy itself.   Selling the public library to a private developer merits its own discussion.    Our children, and all of us in this working class enclave, deserve no less.

It’s Really About Who Gets to Write History

My father, who had a lifelong fascination with history and politics, taught me early about the importance of putting dates on things I wanted to remember.   As a boy I showed him a drawing I was proud of and he asked me if I’d written the date on it.   It struck me as an odd thing to ask, to do, it had certainly never occurred to me.  Then he asked an illuminating question.  

“Well, it may not matter to you tomorrow, or next week, when you did this particular drawing.  But what about if  you find this drawing five years from now, or twenty years from now?  Wouldn’t you like to know when you drew it?”   It turned out I would.  

He also taught me to make sure I put a date on any newspaper articles I clipped out. This brought home to me the fascinating idea that time passed, things happened, took their historical place in a long sequence of events, later creations were created based, in part, on earlier ones, more dead people died, others took life, many things happen every day.  All these things had a specific time when they happened.  Like right now, the way I can type April 11, 2018, the day it is now and the day it will never be again.

History is the procession of selected events seen through the lens of what happened before and after the event.   It is this connecting of the things, giving context, explaining the origins of and the events that flowed from the thing, that is the heartbeat of history.   We humans are geniuses of rationalizing, we invent perfectly plausible reasons to support a case we can make, if pressed.  So the history of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency can be told as an idealistic, progressive one, or a particularly racist one during which the Ku Klux Klan rose again and Americans were whipped up by a skillful propaganda campaign and marched off to die in a senseless European war.  

Of course, Wilson’s presidency was also both of those things and more.  Historians tend, like the rest of us, to take sides.   You can be in the school that defends the violence in the former Confederacy as a natural, human reaction to the savagery of former slaves, or you can be in the school that documents and excoriates the violent  racism that halted government services for former slaves in a very short time and ushered in a century of racist terrorism.  It’s hard to be in both camps. History is a moral exercise for those who write and defend their version of the story.  

The building blocks are the events, the facts, things that actually happened, though they may be in dispute or, often, covered up completely.  If we are missing an important thing that happened, a promise that was violated, an unprovoked series of attacks that called for pay back, it’s impossible to understand why two countries go to war, two people begin punching each other, how a problem finally gets worked out.  Assembling the pertinent facts is an important part of figuring out this convoluted, iridescent, free-style human conga line we call history.   

Fact:  We know that on (or around) July 4, 1776 the British colonists in North America served notice of their demand for political independence from the King of England.  The Declaration of Independence speaks of the burning need to dissolve long time political bands and bonds of kinship, language and affection and blah blah blah.   Self-evident truths we hold so, re freedom and equality, as opposed to King George III, [1] who was a merciless fucking tyrant (fact or not fact).  

Fact:  I was momentarily uncertain about what number George the English King our forefathers rebelled against was.  I remembered George III and then wavered.  I suddenly thought it possible he was George IV.   Some part of me just wanted to type IV, I realize now, because it is Roman numerals and it’s cool the way you subtract the lower number from the higher by putting it in front.  

We can all have this verifiable hard info instantly in 2018.   It took me literally five seconds to fact check the correct name of King George III, the bloke our Founding Fathers rebelled against.    We are in an electronic age where everyone who takes a few seconds to do so can instantly be as factually accurate as the greatest minds of the past.  This is now done in seconds.   It behooves every writer of nonfiction to do it frequently.

 For one thing, nothing hurts your credibility as a narrator as instantly as a factual error.   If you say you’ll never forget where you were when you heard Malcolm X was murdered on February 21, 1973, anyone who knows Malcolm was killed in 1965 will instantly know you are full of shit, at the very least about the date.   Those eight years between the event and when you say it happened were full of rich, charged, explosive days.  A billion significant things happened in those eight years of turmoil and hope.   America was one way going into the 1960s, what can be considered the old, conservative way that the MAGA hats dreamily dream of, and another way entirely coming out of the 1960s.   To many it felt like a revolution.  It certainly was a dramatic swing of the pendulum, from 1965 to 1968, to 1969 and into the early seventies.  It has swung hard the other way ever since, IMHO.

The other reason to be accurate is because you can.  Because it is good, in a discussion of any problem you are trying to solve, to have all of the available information on the table.  That’s one reason the increasing lack of transparency in our corporatized society, in our government, drives me mad.    There was a massive U.S. government surveillance program in operation for years.  The conversations and private emails of millions of us were recorded and stored in a searchable database.   Criminals and terrorists were already wary of this kind of shit and generally took measures not to communicate by unsecured means.  The rest of us were not wary, and had no reason to be, as our private communications were being intercepted and stored by the billions.  

Our presidents gave inspirational speeches about our freedoms and our high aspirations as a great democracy, even as secret prisons existed where people were secretly tortured in our names, even as drones killed countless people in several countries, quietly, discreetly.   Even as we were all being illegally spied on by our own government in a massive data mining operation directed against everybody.

A citizen named Edward Snowden made this information public, at the risk of his own life and/or freedom.   Obama said he would prosecute Snowden under the Espionage Act of 1917, amid bitter arguments over whether Snowden was a traitor or a patriot.  The Espionage Act Wilson signed into law criminalized what, to my understanding, would have otherwise been protected speech if it arguably “aided and abetted our enemies” in a war declared mostly for American ambitions on the world stage (and the recovery of billions loaned by our banks to England, France and other “good guys” in that war).  

The Espionage Act carries the death penalty (though I don’t recall anyone being convicted and executed, though a few popular outspoken opponents of the World War spent years locked up behind it).   Under his own legal rationale and precedent, if Obama could have directed a missile at Snowden he would have been within his new presidential rights to have Snowden reduced to a pile of steaming chopped meat.  Other American citizens met that fate even though they were not charged with anything, let alone a crime that carried the death sentence.

Facts are all we have to defend us against incoherence.  They are not magical tools, but they’re the only ones we have to make sense of what is otherwise incomprehensible.   When you read a well-researched, well-told history you get the feeling you understand more than when you read something you cannot help thinking is a bit stilted, written by a partisan.   Was the Klan really the modern-day equivalent of the knights who protected Christendom from infidels as Woodrow Wilson seemed to believe?   (Well, maybe so, if you think about some of the excesses of the Crusades).  I don’t have a ready example at the moment, but hopefully you can take my point.   

When you are given a story with a piece that just doesn’t make sense, you are probably being given a story with a crucial fact or two left out.   This happens quite regularly.   I will tell a story of outrageous, unaccountable customer service in my local post office; the postal supervisor will tell a story of an unappeasable customer with an angry attitude who would not give him a break, or listen to reason, and in the end told him to go fuck himself.   Both stories are true, and even accurate, but both stories leave out crucial pieces that are harmful to the storyteller’s version of events.  

If I hadn’t been frustrated with the lack of acceptable service, or even an explanation for that bad service, things might have gone differently.  Since I grew increasingly frustrated, every time the supervisor called me “sir” it was like he was jabbing me with a sharp blade.   I countered with a tart legal argument about my contract with the Post Office.  That must have enraged the supervisor, who had no answer except ‘machine error.’   Since he’d been repeatedly stabbing me with the indisputable truth and a dozen “sirs” and I was not backing away, the supervisor had to turn up the icy politeness.   An asshole dance needs to be danced by at least one complete asshole, but it usually involves two.

Which reminds me of what sent me to write this in the first place.   Who gets to tell the definitive story?  Clearly, in world events, we must piece together history as best we can, according to our knowledge and our prejudices.  What about in our personal life?  Surely that is a sphere where we can exercise some control that is impossible when understanding and assessing, say, the strange and fabulous career of Donald Trump. [2]

Much in human life is inexplicable, we don’t always proceed by logic or common sense (see, e.g., footnote 2  below).   Some things are explainable and make sense, if we have all the facts.  That affable, funny, affectionate father of yours that your mother spent years enraged at?  Did you know how he regularly put you are your siblings at risk, gambling all of his money on stupid bets that never paid off, resorting to illegal means to get the funds to place these all or nothing bets?   Ah, without that hidden fact, how can you ever understand your mother’s anger?  It was righteous anger, she was mad for a good and concrete reason– every time she was lied to and had to bail the liar out of a legal jam by working overtime to pay his debts.   That he never expressed remorse or gratitude?  The rancid cherry on top of the shit pie.  But we all smile and pretend we understand, even the things we will never know.

The facts matter, they really do.   They are all we have by way of understanding any sequence of events.   As for those who write the final history, they are free to highlight or omit any fact that advances their story.  The feeling of being written out of history?   There is nothing like it.

 

 

[1] I originally called this man King George IV, then had merely to click the first words of the sentence “King George” before “during revolutionary war” popped up and I instantly confirmed that it was indeed as my hunch had it, George III, the guy mad with Porphiria who had his physicians running through the palace halls carrying covered pots containing his stools.  

[2]  I have been wondering lately about the current president’s ill-fated actions in Atlantic City some years ago.  He opened a casino that was very successful.  He had boxes of hundred dollar bills sent to him whenever he asked.  Then, for whatever reason, he opened a second casino, a competitor to his first.  The second one did well too, there seemed to be plenty of business for both.   He then decided to build the world’s largest, most luxurious casino, his Taj Mahal, and borrowed $675,000,000 to build it, at 14% interest.  The Taj opened and it was only a matter of time before all three were bankrupt.  

One can only wonder: what the fuck?   I am at a loss to imagine the rationale, outside of hubris and boundless greed, for opening three businesses to compete against each other, particularly when the first two are making excellent money. There are facts we would need to know to understand this colossal WTF, facts it is unlikely any of us will ever learn.  The story itself tells us a lot, even without the missing WTF?

Crisis Actors and other liberal BULLSHIT

Human imagination is a powerful force in history. Imagination has led to as many great developments in human history as horrific ones, but some of the horrific ones have been doozies.

Why are there so many climate catastrophes in recent years?   Most climate scientists believe these are related to the warming of the oceans, the melting of polar ice, the many signs that our earth’s climate is undergoing an inexorable and deadly shift due to man’s pollution of our biosphere.   

Of course, those scientists, we are angrily informed by self-named Climate Change Skeptics, also hate our freedom, job creation, industry, progress itself.  Occam’s Razor: in the absence of evidence to the contrary, the simplest theory — the one that relies on the fewest assumptions– is usually the best.  Imagine this simple Birther-like truth: God has brought this destruction upon us because we tolerate abominations, like two women loving each other as though one were a man.

Nonchalantly homosexual historian Yuval Noah Harari (LOL!) in his brilliant Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, points out that one of the key things that has allowed homo sapiens to transform itself from an insignificant prey animal into the earth’s alpha predator is our collective ability to believe, organize and act, often with deadly violence, based on dramatic, imaginative stories told passionately enough. 

A young woman in Palestine, a virgin celibately married to an older man, was impregnated by God two thousand years ago.  The child, God’s son, preached a doctrine of love, tolerance, forgiveness, generosity, kindness, peacefulness.   He was then nailed to a cross where he died an agonizing death before being resurrected a few days later.   The most vocal and politically active of his organized American followers today are often intolerant, unforgiving, ungenerous, unkind, warlike.  Jesus weeps beside His father, a deity who is now insane with grief.

The horrific examples of mankind’s imagination at work in the world are too numerous to do more than feint at.   Why were more than fifty million people killed in a five or six year period seventy years ago?[1]  In large part (in Europe, anyway) because one charismatic genius of self-promotion convinced a powerful nation that Jews, Communists, Homosexuals, Gypsies, Slavs, Foreigners, Negroes, Hipsters were responsible for all the evil in the world and needed to be eliminated (or, in the case of the Slavs merely enslaved) in order to Make Germany Great Again.   Now this man, Herr Hitler, was just a lightning rod for these strong feelings, he could not have come to power if the time wasn’t absolutely right, but the time was right, and the rest, as we say, is history. 

We humans are suckers for a good story, a strong, simple story.   Countless billions have been made retelling the eternal human story of suffering and catharsis:  an individual is subjected to a violent trauma, their entire family is killed, but they defy the odds and prevail.   The second act of the story is their undeterrable search for the killer, the finale is their slaughter of the killer, which makes them, and the audience feel immediately  better.   

We collectively rejoice when a violent, evil fuck is violently put down.  If we honestly believe the mother gets relief when she finally hacks the murderer of her children to death, that she’s really all better after she gets her revenge, we are a bit simple-minded, but that’s not the point.  Catharsis through violent revenge is a compelling story, something the Hollywood dream machine runs on, it sells a million tickets, even if it doesn’t hold up well to even a soupcon of scrutiny.  The mother who has violently kicked this particular evil bastard’s ass still has her dead children.

This is all pretty self-evident stuff, like the God-given truth that we are all created equal.   Sit in the back of any criminal courtroom in the U.S. and you can see in very short order how self-evident this truth is, just watch who gets arraigned and picture the other equal citizens who will never be.  As God’s prophets have reminded us:  we reap what we sow.  Unless we are members of a historically despised minority swept up in a nationwide dragnet to keep privatized prisons profitable, or very wealthy, well-connected job creators, way too big to jail.

I just wanted to write a few words about this great leap of human imagination that we are recently hearing put forth as though it is a credible idea: “crisis actors”. 

Remember that story about the maniac in Connecticut who supposedly shot his mother in the face, armed himself to the teeth and went into a nearby school to murder as many kindergarten kids as he could?  It was, we are now being told, a “false flag” operation.  A set up.  To take away our guns.   Yeah, brilliantly simple, actually.   

The rabid left wingers got actors, paid “crisis actors”, to play the supposedly crying parents, the traumatized teachers who were unable to save all their kids.  It was all bullshit, you see, there was no maniac with a semi-automatic weapon raining death on five year-olds at the Sandy Hook Elementary School.  It was typical liberal bullshit, they want you to believe these stories they make up to advance their agenda, so they pay people to pretend there is a crisis that needs addressing.   The only real crisis, of course, is these cynically lying haters who want to steal our liberties.

Look how eager the godless, left-wing corporate media is to gobble up these fake news stories.  You see how they do it?  Show the best of these paid crisis actors over and over and over, whining, crying, tearing their hair, rending their clothing in fake grief.  Who among us has a heart hard enough to resist the tears of the grieving parent of a tiny child who was shot to death?

That’s what these merciless fucking freedom haters are counting on, don’t you know?   That’s why these crisis actors are never lacking for work.  It’s like that godless Jew Saul Alinsky told his followers: exploit whatever is happening to advance your cause.  You must galvanize and organize the community around dramatic, traumatic events. 

And as every unscrupulous, Kool-aid swilling, partisan fuck knows, in a place where there is no chaos to exploit, create it.   Do you see how dangerous this is?  I’ll bet you thought those people you saw recently crying about dead high school kids on TV were real classmates, real teachers, real parents.  Hah!  You fell for it again.  Crisis actors paid by foreign born billionaire traitors like George Soros to take our guns away.

Theodore Herzl, a man with an iconic beard and a dream for a Jewish State, at a time when Jews everywhere were unsafe in the places they were allowed to live (a few generations before the slaughter of most of the Jews in Europe) famously said:  if you will it, it is no dream.  So true, provided you have the money, connections and political smarts to back up your will. 

In the contest for power, those who capture the imagination, feed the emotional needs of the audience, create a compelling story people will line up to hear told, those people will always kick ass.

Imagine a world where that principle was a bit less relentless, if you can.

 

[1]    World War II fatality statistics vary, with estimates of total deaths ranging from 50 million to more than 80 million. The higher figure of over 80 million includes deaths from war-related disease and famine. Civilians killed totaled 50 to 55 million, including 19 to 28 million from war-related disease and famine.

What is worth reading, worth writing

I was flipping through a sketch book yesterday, one I keep in the inside pocket of my winter coat, and noticed many notes I’d stopped to make while listening to podcasts as I walk.   I listen to several history podcasts, a few of which strike me as particularly good because they appear to have no political ax to grind.  As a character played by the great Dennis Hopper once told a character played by the great Christopher Walken, about reading history, “I find that shit fascinating.”

It seems to me, particularly in our current political culture where opinionated “partisans” speak loudly and with supreme confidence from their unwashed lowest sphincters, that the facts of what actually happened when have an important place in the conversation.   I know this marks me as somewhat eccentric.   Many people I know prefer to tune out, rather than talk about, the many aggravating, gigantic subjects that are rubbed in our faces daily.  After all, you know now after a few words where somebody stands on all the most important issues of the day, even the most ignorant are today reflexive “ideologues”.

It feels to me like knowledge actually is a kind of power.  Since we are all potential photojournalists now (think of cellphone videos of unarmed black men shot or choked to death  in confrontations with adrenalized cops), I snapped this photo of a page from my sketchbook on the creeping E train to Sekhnetville last night (hence its less than perfect sharpness, sorry, Sekhnet).  

20180405_204726.jpg

With another click I inexplicably wassupped it to a friend, as the train sat in the darkness near the 67th Avenue station because “there is another train ahead of us.”  A few moments later, as we crept past the next local station,  my friend tapped back words to the effect that, oy!,  I need to read a good novel, take a long walk in a beautiful place, have a vacation.   All true things, but, also, I take this page as an example of these fucking ugly facts not beating my brains in.

The unnaturally Confident Genius-in-chief, a guy with an inferiority complex a mile wide and infinitely deep, has recently called, speaking of talking out of unwashed nether sphincters, for the death penalty for “drug dealers.”   The drug dealers he is referring to are people like the illegal spirits dealers who grew rich and powerful during Prohibition.  The ignorance of the Tangerine Idi Amin (tip of the skull cap to Larry Wilmore) on this notion of solving our epidemic of drug addiction by executing drug kingpins is multi-leveled.   

Why are so many Americans addicted to drugs that make their pain seem to vanish?  The folks who get addicted, it seems to me, have no hope of anything better than making their pain and desperation disappear for a few hours.   The great pleasure of the initial drug experience for addicts, the pleasure that gets them hooked, apparently disappears rather early in addiction.  From then on the game for addicts is not really played for kicks, it’s all about the desperate compulsion to get the drug into the bloodstream to prevent feeling like complete shit.  

Drug addiction is an affliction of despair, of hopelessness.  Give those people an option for a life of connection with others, a productive life of hope and laughs, most of them will choose not to be drug addicts anymore.   This has been seen in place after place where the problem of drug addiction, a disease most addicts are genetically predisposed to,  has been addressed intelligently.  In America we prefer tough love, these criminalized fucks need to spend a few years locked up with violent sociopaths.

I jotted down an arresting stat: more American deaths by drug overdose in 2016 than total American KIA in years of the war in Vietnam.   Fuck.   We beat that record in 2017 and are on a pace in 2018 to beat last year’s record for Americans dead of drug overdose (unless Jared Kushner can find a magic wand to cure the opioid crisis while making peace in the Middle East and avoiding prosecution for what appears to be a string of financial crimes). 

It is a crisis when more people in your country die of drug overdose every year than of gunshot wound, in a country that leads the world by a hefty margin in deaths by gunshot.  The asshole solution: kill the drug dealers.   Duterte in the Philippines does it, why not our own populist president?   So unfair, how come the dictator of a third rate country gets to kill drug dealers, extrajudicially, and the American president, the most powerful man in the world, can’t?  Unfair!   SAD!  It is this two year-old’s level of sophistication that is being brought to bear on our nation’s most vexing problems by our most powerful citizen.  

If the president had a nimble, smart, loyal team of lawyers like Cheney and Bush did, guys who secretly redefined “torture” to make it, arguably, legal for Americans to practice against enemies real and theoretical, he’d soon have the tool in hand he needs to execute drug dealers without trial.  There is already a precedent, two American presidents have openly used it, of killing ‘enemy combatants’ without trial, evidence or any kind of charges against them.  

Obama openly did it to two or three American citizens.  Spin it right, there’s absolutely no problem doing it, you can even joke about it at a press conference, like Obama’s spokesman did when an innocent American teenager and his friends were turned into chopped meat in a remote area in Yemen.   Cheney’s lawyers gave us the president’s absolute right to designate people ‘enemy combatants’, place them on a secret kill list, and have skilled American gamers take them out by remote controlled missiles.  Constitutional law professor and idealist Obama gave the president the right to do this to selected Americans who could be designated ‘enemy combatants’. Word up, Trump.

I pause to reflect on the words of an Iraqi-American doctor, speaking to Brooke Gladstone recently.  He said that when people are not held accountable for their crimes it gives permission for the crimes to continue indefinitely.   When Obama took the famously “high road” on American torture, looking forward and not back (while nobly and folksily admitting ‘we tortured some folks’), he gave the architects and drivers of the recent, widespread American torture program the eternal gift of ongoing silence.  

These creatures who made their bones torturing, first the meaning of the word and then actual humans, continue to live successful lives.  The two fucks who wrote the infamous “torture memo”, government lawyers who claimed it is not torture unless the pain is as severe as the failure of a major organ system, are today quite prosperous and well respected.  One is a tenured-for-life federal judge, the other a tenured professor of, I shit you not, Constitutional Law, at Berkeley.  The two psychologists who reverse engineered the torture program from the SERE manual, and were paid over $80,000,000 for their important work?   Well, they finally had to cough up a few million to private plaintiffs, but that case settled.  Hush money paid, they can get back to their fabulous lives as fabulously wealthy American psychologists.  

Nothing to see here.  Look, we have two completely different systems of law here, one system of justice for the powerful and well-connected, another for losers.  What is news about any of this?

OK, then, who are the Sacklers?   A family name I have a hard time recalling, they currently own Perdue Pharma, a name I can usually recall easily.   I have written about this fabulously wealthy American family, headed by at least three generations of doctors, at least one of whom was an award winning pharmaceutical marketing genius   You can get the bones of their story here, with a link to a thorough, and sickening article about these evil bastards.   Jewish doctors who would make their Nazi colleague Josef Mengele tip his hat to them, if I may be explosively hyperbolic for a moment (nobody here to stop me, I notice).  

What is so evil about the family that created and falsely marketed Oxycontin as a time-released, and therefore low probability of addiction alternative to the other prescription opioids on the market?  For one thing, their widely trumpeted and hugely lucrative claim, inexplicably allowed by the FDA, was total marketing hype not backed by any research at all.  Users intent on getting high have only to crush the pill, et voila, no more time release.  For another thing, the guy at the FDA who approved the false and misleading package insert went on, by sheer coincidence, to work for Perdue Pharma at many times his former salary.   For another, these high society altruists made literally billions on the sale of this overprescribed miracle drug that has been a big driver of the Opioid Crisis.

Many Americans who get addicted to opioids start with a pharmaceutical opioid they, or someone they knew, had prescribed to them by a doctor.  These pills can be quite expensive.  Hard for a drug addict to afford after a while.  Heroin is a cheaper alternative.  In a nation that has no safety regime for illegal drugs, the heroin users buy can be 25% heroin or more, or less.  Enterprising drug entrepreneurs are able to make heroin much cheaper to produce by stepping on the product again, cutting it with more powerful, and much cheaper, fentanyl.   A shot of heroin with enough fentanyl mixed in is deadly.   The addict never knows how strong the white power they are injecting is until it is too late.   Some places have drug testing sites where addicts can find out how powerful the shit they are about to shoot is.   These places are extremely rare in our country, if they exist anywhere. 

As far as executing drug dealers, or even keeping them in check, the Sackler’s corporation has been successfully sued in a couple of states, and settled these suits for many millions, on the condition of absolute secrecy: all research, testimony and evidence in the case must be sealed.  This means every state Attorney General who wants to sue the Sacklers must start at the beginning, pay for all their own medical experts, witnesses, research.   In fairness to the family, they are now worth billions and so are immune from the normal process of criminal justice.   That weasel selling Oxycontin by the pill?   Shoot him dead, a bullet through his fucking head!

The cartoon AR-15 then checks in reminding us not to be so fucking judgmental.  Guns don’t kill people, you know, people using guns do.  It’s like a highly addictive pill in brilliantly marketed form.   If you are not a damaged person, you can use this product safely.   The only wrinkle is that we are, virtually all of us, damaged persons.   Part of the human condition.  

I have been consciously pursuing mildness and non-harm for the last few years.  I was raised in a family where abuse was a common way of showing love.  I have had to deal with anger, otherwise anger will deal with me.  You don’t go from someone who will reflexively scream back at mistreatment into a calm, philosophical person without waging a constant battle, without remaining focused on quieting the reflex to rage.   Sekhnet will frequently remind me that I believe I am doing better in this than I actually am, but she did not know me thirty years ago.

So given a society based on advertising, acquisition, fairly rigid class status, competing, judging, having two sets of laws — a generous one for winners and a viciously punitive one for losers– we all are on our own to do the best we can.  I’d love to read a great novel on a lush green lawn somewhere, with a perfect sky overhead and the lapping of water over rocks in the background.   That is a beautiful part of life: relaxation.  I love to relax.  But there is also work, and this shit, which I also find fascinating, is mine.   Even if I am not currently being paid for it.