Author Archives: oinsketta

Short version

Wrote this as part of a futile letter I am working on, an exercise in trying to digest something that is indigestible, addressed to the chef and server of the unpalatable dish.  I don’t know if it has any interest, but it’s a much quicker telling of the encounter laid out in the previous post, and I will most likely delete it from the letter I wrote it in:

P.S.

I wrote this letter right after an encounter at my local post office. The encounter illustrates a personality type, all too common, that gives no quarter in defending why they are right and you, whatever the facts, are actually the asshole.

My rent check, in the landlord’s mailer, was returned to me, the stamp cancelled and no other explanation. Went to the post office to have it delivered.  The monkeylike clerk wordlessly studied it for a long time before telling me I needed to talk to the supervisor. The supervisor also studied the envelope for a moment.

“Must not have read the address,” he said, pointing to the address printed on the business envelope. “Machines, we use machines, sometimes they make mistakes.” I asked him to expedite delivery of the check, since it was now a week late. He told me he couldn’t expedite anything, only “overstamp” it and put it back into regular mail, unless I wanted to pay for overnight delivery.  He apparently thought I was being a dick, because he’d already admitted a machine had made a mistake, that it was nobody’s fault, and yet I was still demanding something from him. “Haven’t you ever made a mistake?” he asked me.

At this point, the guy who should have simply said “this shouldn’t have happened, I’m sorry for the hassle. I’ll hand cancel this, put it on the truck and make sure it gets delivered tomorrow, the address is only five miles from here” was staring at me like I’d just taken a piss at his window.  He slid a paper with a number he said was for complaints through the window, told me his name. He refused to give me a receipt or any proof I’d re-mailed my returned envelope to my landlord. Told me he could only give me a receipt if I paid for it.

The number on the form turned out not to have an option for “complaints” and the waiting time was 40 to 50 minutes to speak to a human. I have no idea if this dickhead gave me his actual name, whether he put my letter in the bin to be sorted and delivered or into the garbage bin. How would I know how much of a vicious psycho this guy potentially is, particularly after I finally told him to fuck himself after he told me he could only give me a receipt if I paid him? He’d certainly showed me a nice snappy catalogue of politely sociopathic traits.

With a stranger who is an asshole, this is standard behavior: never sympathize, or admit any wrongdoing, give a reason that sounds reasonable enough, deny any obligation to fix the mistake, put the complaining consumer on the spot by blaming him for being a hypocrite, and a complainer, tell him to fuck off, politely, give him a fake number to file his fake complaint and make up a name for yourself.

A loved one who does this is in a different category, no?  Do you want the lesson your kids get to take with them in life to be that trust is a delicate, transactional illusion, that to live you have to learn to tell yourself, and others, any lie that makes it possible to conceal shame and manipulation?

 

Anger Update

Be reluctant to declare victory in the war on difficult emotions, my friends.   It is important to remember that battling our powerful lowest impulses is a constant wrestling match.   I had a nice reminder of the hubris of claiming victory yesterday, and the letdown in vigilance such hubris often causes, when I momentarily lost my verbal shit in the post office yesterday.   This came a day after delivering learned comments about recognizing the signs that you are about to get angry, taking a breath and pulling yourself back from the explosion.

My rent check, in the printed mailer provided by my landlord, was returned to me several days after I mailed it.  It was postmarked and returned with no reason for its return anywhere on the envelope. I brought it to the Post Office today to have its delivery expedited.   The woman at the window studied it for a long time, turning it over and over in her hands, peeling back the stamp, turning it again, her lower lip hanging down pensively. After a few minutes of this, and before she could reach for a magnifying glass, I pointed out that she was not going to find any further information.  I told her it was a rent check, returned to me in error, and that I needed it delivered as soon as possible.   She asked what day I had mailed it, when it had been returned to me.  She looked blankly as I told her “I mailed it Tuesday,  it was returned Saturday” then consulted her phone, presumably for a calendar.   After a long pause she looked up at me without expression, slid the envelope back to me and sent me over to her supervisor.

The supervisor looked at the postmarked envelope, turned it in his hands, shrugged and told me maybe the printed address had not been read through the window.  I pointed out that it was quite legible, printed in caps, in fact, and in the place where every business correspondence is addressed.  He countered with “machines, these are read by machines, which sometimes make mistakes.”  

He told me he could not expedite delivery of this erroneously returned mailing, then, when I appeared dissatisfied with this answer, asked me if I had never made a mistake.  I told him, of course, we all do, but that in the case of this properly addressed, properly posted letter I hadn’t made a mistake, the Post Office and its sorting machines had.   I was asking him to correct this mistake.  He said all he could do was send it again, by regular mail, and that hopefully it would go through this time.  He told me he would draw arrows directing the machine’s attention to the place where the address is on the business envelope, that hopefully it would be properly routed by the machine this time.

“Arrows,” I said, “directing the machines to the ordinary place for an address.  Presumably these arrows will get a postal machine to remove its head from its mechanical ass and sort the envelope properly this time.”

“Those are your words,” he said, unnecessarily.

 When I  still appeared unsatisfied, realizing he was dealing with an angry, implacable dick, he slid a postal form, PS Form 3849, under the glass and told me if I had a complaint, to call the number on the form.  The move removed any doubt I had about being in a conversation with an immovable asshole, in this case one named Umar, but I managed, for a time, to maintain a grim cool.   

This was the time, as I urged my friend the other day, to notice the signs that this was going badly, not going to end well, the physical signs that fight or flight chemicals were flowing, the familiar, climbing feeling that generally happens when I find myself confronted by a robotic attitude, by some insistent jerk sitting behind bullet proof glass who won’t back down no matter what.  This was the time to walk away, there was clearly nothing to gain in this interaction.

All he could do, he told me again, was “overstamp” it and draw arrows on the envelope pointing the machine to the address, and hopefully it would get there, by regular mail, in a few days.  Unless I paid extra, there was no other option available to me, nor anything else the post office would do, or had any obligation to do.  “Feel free to make a complaint,” Umar told me, giving me his name.    I told him to overstamp it and send it again.  He did.  I thanked him for his time, through gritted teeth.

Walking out of the post office I was steamed.  After walking about a block I realized I should have gotten a receipt of some kind of the re-mailing, in case of future trouble with the landlord (and to avoid a $25 fee to stop the original check, in the event the letter didn’t make it the several miles to my landlord’s office).  

As I turned to go back to the Post Office I passed the ongoing standoff over a parking spot.  On my original trip to the Post Office, fifteen minutes earlier, I’d seen one car backing in to parallel park as another nipped in quickly from the other direction.   Neither car could get into the spot now, and neither driver was willing to concede an inch to the other.   The two drivers were locked in their positions, neither one backing down, while a traffic jam built up behind them, a bus trying to make a turn was now blocking all traffic on Broadway.   Horns were blaring.   “The human condition,” I thought, as I entered the Post Office again, to enact my part.

Umar would not come to the window, though he saw me standing at the window.  I called him and pounded on the bulletproof glass with my fist as he disappeared around the wall.  I continued calling his name in a loud belligerent voice.  When he returned, affecting the unflappability of the perfect asshole, he refused to give me any kind of receipt.  Impossible, he said, unless I paid for it.  I then exploded.

“This place is fucked up and you are the fucking supervisor of it!” I snarled idiotically, if also accurately, and stormed out, banging the door hard enough to break it.   A moment later it occurred to me that his next move would be to reach into the bin, retrieve my letter with the rent check, rip it neatly in half, ball it up and toss it into the garbage.

The “complaint” number he gave me had no option for complaints.  It was not a complaint number.  The wait to speak to a human was “40 to 50 minutes”.   I found myself flooded with fight or flight chemicals as I searched the web for how to make a complaint against customer-relations challenged civil servant Umar, to protect myself if he did the angry thing and destroyed my payment to the landlord.  He could also simply have left it on a shelf, to sit for a few weeks.

I called the federal agency that oversees the Post Office, spoke to a very sympathetic woman (whose name I foolishly did not take, though she gave me my case #) who assured me this will be investigated and an email would come back to me within 3 business days.  She told me it was a good move on my part to have photographed the returned envelope, and that I should hold on to the photo.

Odds are Umar didn’t rip it up, the landlord will have it the day after tomorrow, cash it by 3/20 and done and done.  In the odd event that he did ‘go postal’ on my check to the landlord, there is at least a record, a complaint with the federal office that investigates alleged improprieties by postal workers.  For whatever that might be worth.  

But if that impenetrable wall of glass hadn’t been between us, and Umar had stepped toward me, I can’t say for sure, in spite of not being a fighter, in spite of my conscious attempt to remain peaceful, that I would have been able to resist what nature would have been imploring me to do.  I’d had fair warning as things went from fartlike to actual shit, but it was no help in this instance.

This is one reason anger is such a dangerous thing.  It is waiting, always, particularly for those of us who were victimized by angry adults when we were children, and anger can almost always convince you that you are 100% correct in your reaction.  Umar had probably had a shitty day himself, didn’t feel like being reprimanded by some snotty, disgruntled customer for a simple mistake he had nothing to do with.   When the customer poured salt on his shit-sandwich of day by telling him “if you had said ‘this shouldn’t have happened, I’m sorry for the hassle, we’ll get this over to your landlord ASAP,” Umar could only claim he had said that.  “I told you I was sorry,” he said sullenly, then slid the fake complaint number under the glass by way of saying “lick my unwashed, crusty asshole, sir.” 

There is no winner in this kind of transaction.  It is best to keep them short and to the point, though that is far more easily said than done.   Remain humble, do not proclaim that you have surmounted the ugly thing that will soon be ready to bite you in the ass again, hard, and with very sharp teeth.

News Tidbit — Who’s Afraid of the NRA?

After the Parkland Florida mass shooting by a disturbed teenager who posed in a MAGA hat, killing seventeen with a legally purchased semi-automatic AR-15 assault rifle, the President convened a bipartisan commission and had a camera crew record their discussion.   He suggested at the February 28th meeting that raising the age for purchase of AR-15s from 18 to 21 was something that had to be considered.  In a widely televised segment he chided a Republican who criticized this common sense, (though hardly problem-solving), idea for being afraid of the NRA.  

Trump is not afraid of the NRA, why would he be?  The gun nonprofit donated $30,000,000 to his presidential campaign, according to many,  more than $21,000,000 according to MSNBC, though the real number may be a much more modest $10,000,000 or so.   Let’s say it was only a few measly millions.  The point is, it’s not as though the NRA owns Mr. Trump.

Yet Mr. Trump has walked back those tough, common sense comments (if only minimally impacting the larger problem) he made at the televised photo op to show his concern for American school children gunned down by other school children. He has since had a better idea.   He put billionaire Christian fundamentalist Betsy DeVos on the case, telling his Secretary of Education to come up with a plan to “harden” our schools against gun attackers.  

If inexperienced son-in-law Jared Kushner can solve the Opioid Crisis while streamlining government and making peace in the Middle East, why shouldn’t Secretary DeVos be up to the simple task of making our schools “hard” enough to resist attacks by determined white males with assault weapons?   Kids should be reminded every day, as they walk into fortress schools, what a dangerous place our once great nation actually is.

You may report ridiculous things in a straightforward, factual way, in the manner of the New York Times.   That reporting does not make the things reported any less ridiculous, or in this case, grotesque.   But, yo, whatta ya gonna do?

By the way, the NRA, with its powerful lobbying arm that has fought back virtually every gun control measure for the last thirty years, identifies itself as “America’s longest-standing civil rights organization”.  [46]    It’s been around since 1871.  You do the math.

Accepting Reality

I had a random thought just now, listening to the president’s bold new plan to meet his stable genius counterpart in North Korea (something the U.S. Secretary of State himself didn’t know about as recently as yesterday) that when I was growing up we knew virtually everybody on our block.

I thought of Sam Gerwitz, across the street, who my father told me was very rich.   He must have been, he and his wife had a little statuette of a jockey, a small white fellow (his face and hands may have been painted pink during my early childhood), on their front lawn.  He held a lantern illuminating the path from the sidewalk, a path to their front door with a large white column on each side.  He was exactly the kind of little jockey Frank Zappa sang about knocking off the rich people’s lawns in his gospel-tinged Uncle Remus.  

I thought of the Meltons down the street, their daughter Joy, and Pierre, their dog. My father came in angry one day after work, carrying his battered brief case. Pierre had apparently loped on to our front lawn and left a pile of steaming cannon ball-sized turds.   I don’t remember what kind of dog Pierre was, possibly a standard poodle, but my father was outraged that the Meltons let him run wild to gleefully defecate on the neighbors’ lawns.  Melton might have smiled, observing his dog taking the Arnold Palmer putting stance and letting nature take its course.  I just remember how outraged my father was, and who could blame him?

The point of these quaint recollections is that I could go down the block, certainly our end of the street, and name every family, and family member, in every house, the Bengles, the Ticks, the Weissmans.  Such is not the case for most children growing up today.

The Good Humor man knew our dog Patches and would front her a cup of vanilla ice cream (which he dutifully opened for her and placed within reach of her tongue) until a human came out of our house to give him the ten cents. “Patches would come running, along with all the neighborhood children, when the music from that truck started,” my mother reminded us.

In those quaint days on the leafy streets of Queens, New York, we led what seemed an idyllic childhood.  My best friend Michael Siegel and I built a series of forts (in peoples’ back yards), formed the Waterbugs– a secret society dedicated to running through every sprinkler they passed– made an intricate system of dams in the street when the sprinklers sent water in rivulets down the hill to Union Turnpike, played baseball in the street.   Nobody feared the Good Humor man, or any local shop owner, as far as any of them being a child molester.  It emerged, years later, that my best friend’s father was a pedophile, but apparently such a gracious host, so gentle and loved by the boys on the block that several stood crying as the cops led him away.

Not to imply by these sentimental little vignettes that life in those days was like the Great America our imbecilic president claims he’s trying to bring back.   Yes, I grew up in a stable neighborhood of well-tended lawns, on a quiet street where I knew everybody’s name.  But, as Woody Allen’s slippery character evasively answered in The Front, when asked under oath if he knew a certain suspected Communist screenwriter: when do you really know somebody?   Did the neighbors hear our screaming fights at the dinner table every night?

The public school I attended was segregated, a decade after the Supreme Court ordered an end to the racist practice.  I remember the first black children arriving at our school, on the E, F and G buses, at the end of a bitter war I also remember, during which my mother’s friend and pro-integration comrade Mildred Rose received a vicious letter with COMMIE scrawled across the envelope.  I recall Mildred’s horror as she told my mother, gasped the word COMMIE, the look of concern that crossed my mother’s face.  The word itself was one of the funniest things I’d ever heard. My friend Robbie and I began using it daily, calling each other and everyone else Commie and laughing at how it was always so fucking funny. 

Meanwhile, largely unknown to us, our government was engaged in an existential war on Commies everywhere, in the name of freedom, had been since a decade before our births.   In the name of freedom charismatic John F. Kennedy quietly sent military advisors and tons of weapons to help a corrupt Vietnamese regime fight the Commies led by Vietnamese nationalist hero Ho Chi Minh.    An invented pretext allowed Kennedy’s successor to escalate the war, a war to prevent all the countries of Southeast Asia from falling like dominos to Communism if Vietnam was lost to the godless Commies.  The “Domino Theory,” like “Manifest Destiny” before it, was good enough to sustain an unimaginably gigantic campaign of organized violence and mass murder for years.

Here is what I am getting to about accepting reality.   The reality then for me, as I became a teenager, was if the Vietnam war had continued another year or so, I would have had to figure out how to get out of the draft, like war-loving Dick Cheney, Dubya Bush and Donald Trump had, or be sent over there to fight for American freedom by burning the villages of Vietnamese Commie sympathizers on “our” side of the arbitrary line drawn on a map when the northern part was ceded to the Commies after the expulsion of the French colonialists not long before I was born.  

Much of my childhood had been spent watching atrocities on TV, exciting war news about a war no more sensible, or justifiable, really, than the First World War.   The scores ran like obscene basketball scores across the bottom of the screen.  Yesterday we won 1,396 to 55.  We killed 1,396 Commies, they’d only gotten 55 of us.  Later we learned how the scores were arrived at:  kill any Vietnamese guy between 12 and 60, score one for us.   All presumed fucking Commies.

I remember seeing a marijuana-related piece on the nightly war news, which we sometimes watched during dinner on a small black and white TV with rabbit ears.  The piece was a brief aside about the rampant drug use by American soldiers in Vietnam (thousands came back addicted to heroin).  A couple of smiling grunts demonstrated the ingenious technique of using a gun barrel as a pipe for smoking inhumanly large lungfuls of ganga.  They’d create a burning pile of the weed at the top of the gun barrel and one soldier would blow the smoke forcefully through the gun barrel into another soldier’s mouth.  They called it shotgunning.  I remember the poor bastard who’d been on the receiving end of the shotgun, an American kid caught in an endless jungle war in toxic quicksand, falling over backwards laughing, expelling vast, thick plumes of smoke.  The news correspondent mentioned the name of the god-forsaken place they were sitting and signed off.

There was a massive anti-war movement, and I attended many mass protests as did most people I knew, but the war machine raged on for years.  Many of us marched out of outrage against what was going on, the horrors being committed in our names, and fear for our fate if this insane war was not ended.   Our leaders spoke high-mindedly about ending the war on our terms, Peace with Honor.  One slogan the anti-war folks had was “Killing for Peace is like Fucking for Chastity.”  After the American attack on Vietnam (which included vast quantities of chemical weapons like Dow Chemical’s Napalm [1], a flammable flesh burning weapon from hell)  finally ended our leaders realized an all volunteer army was better for morale, and public support of any war.  The end of the draft had the great benefit of depriving millions of a personal stake for protesting American military adventures to wipe out godless Commies (today the enemy is “terror”) wherever they might be hiding.

Accepting reality means, on one level, accepting that there is really nothing we can do about the irresistibly obscene profits of those who make weapons.  Can’t sell the goddamned things and have ’em sit in a fucking warehouse, governments ain’t going to go for that on the gigantic scale we need to make it worth keeping the factories going full-time, keeping everyone employed in the munitions industry.  Got to have wars, constantly, everywhere we can.  It’s a sad reality, but military force is the only thing these evil motherfuckers understand.  When Trump dropped “the mother of all bombs,” devastating a square mile of Afghanistan, he got a standing ovation from the spokesmen for a nation grateful that he was finally acting “presidential”.

Talking piece of shit and chief apologist for our culture of gun violence Wayne LaPierre reminded me the other day, with his snide dismissal of godless left-wing attempts to cynically exploit tragedy and manipulate the public after every single isolated and unfortunate high-profile mass shooting of school children, of a long dead activist whose name has become a snarling point for patriotic right wing pundits: Saul Alinsky.  I reserved Alinsky’s 1971 Rules for Radicals from the public library and a few days later picked it up at the branch that is scheduled for demolition, as soon as all the ULURPs are signed off on and the checks are all cut to interested parties.  

The book is a guide for practical actions to steadfastly but nonviolently change hearts, minds, practices and laws.  During his prologue Alinsky states emphatically that the revolution he advocates has nothing to do with Communist revolution, although Communists have written virtually all of the manuals for revolution in the past century.  He states several times that violence is not a sensible option for affecting positive social change in a democracy.   He points out the failures of every revolution by force, how quickly the new oppressors entrench themselves in self-perpetuating power.   He makes the point that social change, imagining and creating a better world, requires overturning many core beliefs of the status quo.  

The U.S., at the time he was writing, had produced 1,600 tons of nerve gas.   We weren’t going to use it, of course, but we needed 1,600 tons of it since the Commies were intent on converting every American to a slave.  Follow that logic, if you can.  That deadly shit, the kind of stuff that, if his forces employed it, would justify a righteous attack on the murderous Mr. Assad in Syria, is now at the bottom of the oceans, waiting harmlessly for God knows what.  Nerve gas is an inhuman, universally condemned chemical weapon, although, it must be said, the U.S. still produces and sells White Phosphorous, which burns unstoppably through flesh and bone and the use of which is considered, by many, to be a war crime.

How does the world get better?   By people of conscience organizing, imagining a better future, creating effective nonviolent battle plans, improvising smartly, using the mass media to further our narrative of how the world should be.  I have not read very far into Alinsky’s book, but it invites me to imagine the world and the kind of principled action he is talking about.   You can’t kill your way to peace anymore than you can fuck your way to chastity.  

When I was eight racist police chiefs were turning high powered hoses on blacks who were intent on voting, using public bathrooms, walking on the sidewalk instead of the street, not being lynched for the crime of making eye contact with their white superiors.  I am now sixty-one and racist government officials still fight the idea that just because significant numbers of unarmed blacks are killed by the police every year, in numbers grotesquely disproportionate to the percentage of blacks in America, that we have a systemic problem here.  The problem is not widespread racist injustice, according to these officials, it’s fucking agitators, lawlessness, troublemakers, whistleblowers, goddamned ‘citizen journalists’ with their video phones, malcontents, racist black terrorists, Commies.

Homo sapiens, the descendants of apes who now rule the planet, calls itself “wise man,” sapiens apparently meaning wise.   We are wise enough to combine in huge numbers, animated by abstract beliefs, and do amazing things.  Sadly, one of the most common and consistent of these things is organized mass violence against other groups of humans, against any species or ecosystem we choose.  We were wise enough to rise up, from an insignificant prey animal, and organize ourselves, collectively, during the geological blink of an eye, into the apex predator on the planet. 

When President Obama vastly expanded the drone killing program his people came up with something called the Signature Strike.  It might have been Cheney’s people with that innovative idea, I’d have to ask Jeremy Scahill [the program apparently started in 2008 at the end of the Bush administration– ed.]  [2].   The theory is fairly straightforward: certain actions in certain areas are the signatures of terrorists and militants.  When we detect a pattern of such things we send a drone to kill the unknown persons who are engaging in things terrorists tend to do.  When we count the dead bodies, any male body between certain ages is counted as an enemy combatant.  As simple, and effective, as the body counts in Vietnam.   You hardly need a scorecard to know that if we kill more of them than they kill of us, we are winning.

We homo sapiens are capable of amazing things, creating transcendent beauty.   We can move each other to cry using words, sounds, sights, tastes.  We can laugh, and make each other laugh, by these same devices.  We are also the most violent, insane, unbending motherfuckers on the planet.   Can you imagine a better future?  We must get busy finding others who share this vision, organizing, successfully spinning our vision of a better future correctly in the mass media, influencing the perceptions, confirming the most decent innate beliefs of our fellow citizens.  

Failing this, we’re all fucking dead, my friends.   The New York Times may put a nice spin on much of this, you know, how freedom and progress are on the march, and the world is a pretty good place, never better, really, if you can afford to buy the things that make it worthwhile, of course, but none of their bodies are on the line, until every human body on the planet is on the line.  Which, one could argue, is now.

 

[1] Here’s a surprise for you, gentle reader:

In the 1960s, the Dow Chemical Company re-partnered with Badische, the German company that had produced Zyklon-B, the gas used to execute people in Nazi death camps, and formed Dow-Badische. Dow-Badische created and produced Napalm-B, an updated napalm consisting of “25 percent gasoline, 25 percent benzene, and 50 percent polystyrene”.[9] After news reports of napalm B’s deadly and disfiguring effects were published, Dow Chemical experienced boycotts of its products, and its recruiters for new chemists, chemical engineers, etc., graduating from college were subject to campus boycotts. The management of the company decided that its “first obligation was the government.” Meanwhile, napalm B became a symbol for the Vietnam War.[10]

[2]  Signature strikes began during the Bush years, in January 2008, as the US intensified drone strikes in Pakistan. When Obama entered office in 2009, his administration picked up where Bush left off and exponentially increased the number of drone strikes. During his eight years in office, Bush launched 51 drone strikes in Pakistan and killed between 410 and 595 people. Obama, so far, has launched 419 drone strikes in Pakistan, alone, and killed over 4,500 people in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia since 2009.   (this was as of August 4, 2015)

source

Mars Attacks (and the Office of Government Ethics)

The 1996 movie, imagining an invasion by ruthless Martians, although arguably no masterpiece, has a few nice images that are useful today.  

The Martians walk the streets, assuring frightened citizens that they mean no harm. “We come in peace,” they repeat, as they vaporize the populace with their death rays.

 

Mars Attacks.gif

There’s a great moment with a farmer, clutching his shotgun, defending his home from the Martian. When a Martian tells him to put his gun down he says  defiantly “you’ll have to pry this gun from my cold dead hands.”  The Martian tells him his offer is accepted, and blasts him with the death ray.

 

Without comment, or any connection to what I wrote above (or this horrific gif), this from the current US Office of Government Ethics:

OGE’s Strategic Plan Charts our Course through 2022.

February 12, 2018

OGE’s newly released five-year Strategic Plan reflects commitment to our important mission of preventing conflicts of interest in the executive branch. Government leaders and employees take actions and make decisions every day that affect the wellbeing of citizens and people around the world. It is critical to our democracy that we have a strong ethics program so that the people trust that government decisions are made based on the public interest rather than one’s personal interests. Uniformity, accountability, continuity, and citizen engagement are central to a strong ethics program.

To that end, OGE commits to the important strategic goals of:

  • Advancing a strong, uniform executive branch ethics program;
  • Holding the executive branch accountable for carrying out an effective ethics program;
  • Contributing to the continuity of senior leadership in the executive branch; and
  • Engaging the public in overseeing government integrity.

Ensuring the impartiality of executive branch decision-making and enabling the public’s trust in its government is imperative and a shared responsibility vital to our democracy. OGE looks forward to working with all of its stakeholders to make progress on these important goals.

We invite you to read the full plan here: OGE’s Strategic Plan   

source

And God bless these United States.

Deriving Their Just Powers from the Consent of the Governed

Was it Sir Winston Churchill, Cold Warrior, who quipped that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the rest?  OK, it wasn’t really a quip, says Jeeves.  Churchill said it in the House of Commons in 1907, when the Cold War was just a twinkle in his witty eye, ascribing the comment to some unknown predecessor wit:

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time…

The central conceit of democracy (dēmos ‘the people’ + -kratia ‘power, rule’) is that informed citizens vote for lawmakers to act in their interests, according to the wishes of these knowledgable citizens.  This is the ‘consent of the governed’ part, from which elected legislators and executives ‘derive their just powers.’

The worst form of government, except for all those other forms.  Better than a King, I’d wager, even if the king is a nice guy.    The king’s son will as often as not be an entitled, unempathetic asshole.   Ruling by Divine Right, God only knows what the motherfucker might do.  Military dictators, as a rule even worse than fucking monarchs.  You don’t like the way they do things?   “Take this malcontent to the secret detention center and let him bitch there, with the electrodes on.”

Modern democracies are huge, which is one great modern weakness in the noble idea of rule by the will of the people.  Elections are mediated, and decided, in the mass media.  Voters, when they show up, cast their votes for the people who raised the most money by making promises to wealthy donors, who looked the best on TV and had the most convincing ads right before ballot time.   We can see the problem with this.

 Look no further than our bald headed commander-in-chief with that beautiful mane of carefully architected hair who flaunts every rule and norm of  democracy.   “I don’t do ethics, boner breath,” he smiles when the head of the government ethics office resigns in indignation after the new president gives a cheerful fuck you to the Office of Government Ethics.

Even Dick Cheney, famous for his smirking fuck yous, his contempt for critics, his no-bid contracts, his huge vault of top secret classified documents, his dark-side operations, his embrace of torture, his impatience with those who questioned his right to do whatever the fuck he needed to do to keep America safe, well, even Cheney finally conceded he had to go into a room, hand in hand with President George W. Bush, and testify secretly, and not under oath, to the 9/11 Commission he and Bush had fought for so long.     Not to praise that evil fuck in any way, it’s only that even in comparison to Cheney, this new asshole is one very bad hombre, ethics-wise.

Taking potshots at Trump is easy, and I choose not to do that anymore (within reason and the limits of my restraint).   He is a symptom anyway, a gigantic cancerous chicken coming home to roost.   The scarier deal is that most Americans are now convinced of our utter powerlessness in a democratic society with one set of laws for the powerful and another for the powerless, where deals are made by the strong and must be tolerated by the weak, the great masses of us.    

This works even on a neighborhood level where mass media coverage is not such an essential factor in who gets elected.   A few weeks back I went to the Audiencia Publica in my local intermediate school, about the massive rezoning plan now on its way to action.   The local politicians kept a low profile, most of them already committed to the massive development plan worth tens or hundreds of millions to wealthy developers and their cronies.  Their representatives (several sent secretaries to speak) were booed, as was the one oily, double talking fuck who appeared in person, manipulated his way into speaking first (among 150 speakers) due to “prior commitments”, and reiterated he is fighting for the greater good.   He was booed as he left right after speaking.  I watched another local pol, who didn’t speak, eating a bowl of free rice and beans from a table in the back of the packed auditorium.  I remembered that smiling asshole from the time I went to speak to him.

I dutifully wrote my statement for the “record” and realized, not long after, that while the Audiencia Publica gave local citizens a chance to vent, pump fists, raise signs, yell our approval or anger, that my words would not even be printed out for future use as scrap paper.  Not a single ass would be wiped with my hours of composition.  The locals have nothing to say on this issue.  Fuck the locals.  You don’t like the new plan?  Get the fuck out, you homeless asshole!

Deriving their just powers from the consent of the… wait, the consent of those who pay for their expensive campaigns.  It’s just a fact of modern democracy– it’s how much positive attention you get in the media, how well your team spins your personal ambitions as altruism,  how nicely you clean up to be packaged and sold as “authentic”.  The politician who spoke at the Public Hearing began his five minutes with two straight minutes of Spanish.  This was to show his authenticity to those who had been booing him a moment earlier, and would boo him again when he concluded his mealy-mouthed English speech.

“We got nothing,” I realized, when I was done counting up all the arguments I had made.   Loss of historical character of neighborhood– nada.   Increased crowding, air pollution, additional subway headaches — nada.   Closing and demolishing the neighborhood library as part of a gigantic rezoning plan– nada.  All perfectly legal, as attested to by the permit application numbers and the entire semi-public process of making these decisions.   “Above your fucking pay grades, you grousing cocksuckers,” the local Dominican city councilman might as well said, and to the hecklers “que tengas un buen dia, comemierda motherfuckers.”

Let us be brutally honest here (and what is honesty without just a whiff of brutality?) on the one side are people who want their quiet little neighborhood to remain as it is, pretty much.  Enemies of progress.  Not a penny to be made with that sort of attitude.  On the other side, every possible argument and upwards of many, many millions of dollars, with plenty to go around to anyone with any power who might also have any qualms.  A slam dunk.   “Have a nice day, shiteater motherfuckers!” they all say in unison, although, without uttering a sound, the consent of the governed, of course, being the place from which all just power in a democracy is derived.

Neutrality vs. Objectivity

Heard a great distinction just now, made by Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks, interviewed by Larry Wilmore.   Cenk describes a trick the status quo media often uses to avoid delving too deeply into the actual issue at hand.  They pretend objectivity and neutrality are the same thing.   He uses a sports analogy to demonstrate how laughable it is to elide objectivity and neutrality.   

Objective:  The Lakers played the Spurs and the Spurs won 100-90.

Neutral:  The Lakers played the Spurs.  The Lakers say that they won.  The Spurs say that they won.  Oh well, I guess we’ll never know! 

Good point, I thought.  Excellent description of one of the common tricks employed over and over in our commercial media/political landscape.  You don’t want to piss the sponsors off. 

Moms Demand Action

I heard a great interview (conducted by former U.S. Attorney Preet Barara on his podcast) with Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, now a nationwide organization with more than 4,000,000 members.   You can hear the entire interview here.   From Moms Demand Action’s website (clickez zis link):

WHO WE ARE

Moms Demand Action was founded by stay-at-home mom Shannon Watts on December 15, 2012, in response to the devastating shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The organization quickly flourished into a leading force for gun violence prevention, with chapters in all 50 states and a powerful grassroots network of moms that has successfully effected change at the local, state and national level. In December 2013, Moms Demand Action partnered with Mayors Against Illegal Guns to unite a nationwide movement of millions of Americans working together to change the game and end the epidemic of gun violence that affects every community.

Shannon Watts has educated herself on the issue, and on the numbers.  Once more I am reminded how important having the actual facts and the data are in any complicated discussion.  In any talk about our violent gun culture, we need to take the actual facts of the grisly fucking case into consideration, in order to, as Barara pointed out, prioritize our efforts at fixing the problem.  

For example, I had the impression that semi-automatic weapons, and the automatic ones created by using a “bump stock,” were responsible for much of the American gun carnage.   Wrong, those killings amount to something like 2% of all gun murders in the U.S.   Still a fairly large number, but banning assault weapons would leave 98% of all American killings by gun untouched.  

Not to say it’s not important to keep powerful combat weapons out of the hands of maniacs, out of any hands, but it is perhaps more important to make sure no domestic abuser gets to legally carry any kind of fire arm.  For every rich white fuck who rents a hotel room as a sniper’s nest and rains bullets from his fancy assault weapons on a crowd gathered to enjoy some music there are apparently as many as 49 incidents where somebody with a documented history of violence just takes a handgun, delivers a line from an action movie, and shoots somebody in the face.

Kids that torture small animals grow up looking for bigger game to torture.   We don’t generally help these miserable kids, we smack them down.  There is a lot of free-floating anger in this world, in our country, a place in which more and more people are increasingly without attractive options, or any prospects, really, more and more of them locked up in gigantic numbers for small, seemingly insignificant crimes (like a bag of marijuana, or having an attitude with a frisking cop) while the wealthiest white collar criminals coyly flaunt their immensely profitable crimes, are interviewed smiling on TV, are appointed to high government positions, never at any time in danger of prosecution.  We live in a society that, in many ways, fundamentally makes no sense — outside of creating profit and wealth for an increasingly small number of winners.  

So belief systems arise to explain the vexing irrationality of society.   Napoleon noted that religion is what keeps the poor from killing the rich.  Another old chestnut is the common historical belief among countless millions that all of our troubles come from some fucking minority group that is causing all the problems, or from mouthy women who don’t know when to shut up, or baby birds who think they are so fucking cute.  

As a young school child I was bullied by a sadistic older kid named Larry Zimmerman.   He menaced me at the bus stop every morning when I was six or seven years old.   I don’t recall him ever punching me, although he may have, but he made it viscerally clear as he grabbed the front of my shirt that he’d like nothing more than his fist concussing my frightened little face.   After a while, and an eventual visit from my father to the bus stop, Larry lost interest in bullying me.  Years later, walking home from that same elementary school, I passed Larry squatting on the sidewalk.  As I walked around him I saw that he was busy slowly decapitating a baby bird that had fallen from a nest.

In Junior High School Larry hung out in gym class with a kid who had a hook for one of his hands.   The crew cut blond kid with the hook was cruelly mocked by classmates who called him “Captain Hook” and shit like that.   Larry got the boy with the hook up on a rope, his feet clutching the big knot at the bottom of the rope, just slightly off the ground, and pushed the kid, brandishing his hook face-high, into groups of boys in their gym clothes.  Hell of a scene.  At one point Larry stepped back, directly into me, and fell on the ground.  I recall the calm feeling I had looking at him on the ground as he looked up fearfully, seeming to recognize me.

I don’t know what eventually happened to the poor bastard, but I suspect things did not work out that well for him.   By sheer happenstance, I learned that the boy with the hook grew up to be a very handsome and charming man.   A friend was chatted up by him on a bus, and she gave the report, confirming that his name was Paul, that he was our age,  had grown up in Queens, gone to my Junior High School (the one I own).    A kid who is a bully at eight, decapitating baby birds at eleven, gleefully pushing a classmate swinging from a rope to terrify kids with his metal hook… these are all signs that this fellow probably should not be given training in firearms or a license to carry a gun.

The big problem when you have a competitive country run by well-paid, highly skilled advertisers, industry lobbyists and spinmeisters, where everything related to corporate profit is falsely framed as an issue of “liberty” and “freedom,” is that we lose the ability to look at the bigger picture.  The National Rifle Association calls itself American’s oldest Civil Rights organization (it dates back to 1871, not long after the end of the Civil War many are still fighting).  

True or false on the NRA as freedom fighters is, of course, a matter of your perspective.   Thirty million dollars in campaign contributions to Trump in 2016 may give you some idea of their commitment to justice, fairness and responsible gun use.   There are many NRA members who are not deadly fanatics, I am sure, but good people who just want to go to the range and keep their aim true.   Angry people who want guns to protect themselves from human animals who need to be shot have civil rights too, I guess.  We can say the same for members of fraternal organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, formed only a few years before the NRA Civil Rights group.  The Klan is entitled to due process too, when they are accused of crimes and things like that. 

We live in a country whose citizens have long been led to believe that there is closure available through deadly violence.   The history of the old West is one example, watch any Western.   Most action movies follow this simple formula: establish good characters, establish evil character, have evil character inhumanly torment and kill some good characters, surviving good character gets gun, cathartically kills evil one.  Roll credits.  America, I hate to point out the obvious — shooting the evil fuck in both knee caps, kicking him hard in the face, in the ribs, in the balls, shooting him in each hand, taking a knife and inflicting a deep wound in his torso, and leaving him to scream and whimper as he bleeds out, will not bring your murdered family members back to life.  You think you will feel better after you torture the evil, murderous fuck to death?  I don’t know.  But that’s a persistent myth in the nation we live in.  It’s a central part of our culture.  

Is cathartic revenge the best way to address the heart-rending problem of murderous violence against innocents in a society as brutally unfair as ours?  Probably not.  But that’s a big reason we allow people to buy as many guns as they want.  Freedom, yo.

Lydia T. Shize-kopf

My father had a playful side to him that popped into view once in a while.   Before he was married he used to wrestle with his little cousin Azi, a man who looks uncannily like him.   Azi was Uncle Aren’s grandson.   Azi told us recently that when my father got engaged, and brought his finance over to Azi’s house,  Irv took young Azi aside and explained that they wouldn’t be able to wrestle so much anymore as Irv now had a new wrestling partner.

My father rarely passed up a chance to hoist a small dog by the armpits and slowly rock the dog back and forth as the stiff armed dog gave him an uncomfortable look. I can perfectly see the look on my grandparents’ Chihuahua Bunny’s face as the little dog endured this odd swinging exercise.  Bunny’s arms and legs would be stiff, face staring unblinkingly at the man smiling and swinging him back and forth on the fulcrum of the little dog’s armpits.   There was nothing sadistic in this playful routine with the dogs or with the young Azi, for that matter.   My father had a good sense of humor and a playful streak that sometimes got the best of him.

“Lydia T. Shize-kup!”  he would suddenly say out of nowhere.   Her last name meant ‘shit head.’   He would say no more about Lydia, just her name, and it always suggested to me a hidden world of the man’s playful imagination.   “Jonathan Trrrrrrah-ahhhhsk!” he would say out of nowhere, rolling the “r” and giving a broad Germanic stretch to the “a” — another whole story never told.  Sometimes he’d ask, overly cheerful and to nobody in particular “have you relatives in Chermany?”   I was in a vast cemetery the day before my sixtieth birthday, strolling with friends in a historical graveyard in Brooklyn.  One of the graves was of someone named Trask.  I couldn’t help but chuckle as I heard my father’s exaggerated pronunciation and photographed the headstone for my sister.    “Seedy Moronni” was another one.   Each of these characters the star of some story that would never be written, or even sketched out.

The names of these characters bursting forth suggested to me recesses of my father’s imagination that were largely hidden from even him.   It reminds me of the way he’d sing, tunefully and with style, a tiny snippet of some song he loved.  “I-iiiiii wish you…. bluebirds….” he would croon to my mother in a Sam Cooke cadence as she served dinner.  Just those few notes, never anything more.  The songs he loved were pretty much worth loving.  Some of them I didn’t hear full versions of until years later and they turned out to be songs I learned and played.   “I’ve got a house, a showplace, but I can’t get no place, with you…” snapped off at the end of the phrase.    I Can’t Get Started is the name of that one, Ira Gershwin lyrics to a tune by Vernon Duke.  One of the few reactions to my guitar playing I ever recall from my father was his enthusiastic smile and calling out the name of the tune when I played the first few notes of  Do Nothing Til You Hear From Me.

I am writing these thoughts on a day when my eyes are tired, my hands and feet are tired, my legs and back are stiff.   Along with thoughts of my father’s mostly unexercised imagination are thoughts of my own taxed imagination.  I am at a loss to imagine how to proceed, on days like this.  My mind suddenly fixes on my medical predicament, which is unfolding in slow motion.   More tests the end of this month might or might not show my kidney function still unimpaired in spite of the persistence of all the side effects that alerted me to my mysterious, idiopathic kidney disease in the first place.  $88,000 worth of immunosuppressive liquid buys you a 30% chance of remission.  The upcoming blood and urine tests will show, perhaps, whether I have been lucky with regard to my kidneys.   On days like this, there is not enough coffee in my mug to fully wake me up.

“Lydia Sheiss-kopf!!!” shrieks the skeleton of my father, out of nowhere and with unaccountable mirth.

Trump takes a bold stand

Make no mistake, the president is taking this long American epidemic of gun murder to heart.  He argued that the legal age for buying an assault rifle should be raised from 18 to 21.   He got a lot of flack from the NRA for this draconian proposal, but so far he hasn’t backed down.   It’s been almost 24 hours.

I feel so much better now knowing that the president is fighting to keep American school children safe.    Not sure I agree that more guns in the schools is the best answer to protecting kids from death by gunshot, a position the president shares with the NRA, but that’s what makes a democracy, I guess.

I also loved what the president said the other day: “you come into our schools, you’re gonna be dead, and it’s gonna be fast.”    

USA!    USA!!!!

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