Author Archives: oinsketta

Context Again

Without context it’s impossible to intelligently evaluate anything, to truly understand anything.   Think about that for even a second, in a world too busy to consider context.   Should we make the wall higher?   Should we make it illegal to pay women less than men?   Shall we allow homosexuals to marry?

Depends where the wall is.  Sometimes making a wall higher, say between the ocean and a seaside villa, creates a death trap.  If the waves are high and the villa is flooded, high walls will retain enough water to drown everyone.  Why are women still paid less than men for the same work?   What the fuck is up with that in 2018, seriously?   As for the gay newlyweds, if one is dying the other now has full legal rights at the hospital, hospice and thereafter.   I’ve yet to see anyone explain how gay marriage destroys American families, outside of Louis Black’s wonderful explanation.

Black gives us the context that shows us exactly how gay marriage destroys normal, heterosexual families.  He himself was an eye witness to this, he said, and it was a horrifying and illuminating moment.   Two gays (husband and wife, presumably) sneak up on an American family having dinner.  The gays are dressed as ninjas and silently enter the dining room where they immediately start fucking each other up the ass.  And then: boom!  Another American family, completely destroyed.

At least it’s a story, anyway.  A good story is the essence of what homo sapiens wants, a story that will tell you what the right thing to do is.   Murderous religious fanatics are coming to kill us, therefore we must do the following things to defend ourselves.  Make the list.   It makes no difference how nonsensical some of the tactics are: take the newly liberated and unemployed en mass to the notorious prison where their former dictator used to torture people and torture them.  Explode potential terrorists at a wedding in a “signature strike”, even if no actual terrorist targets are present at the wedding.   Hit the funeral for those killed at the wedding as well, just to be sure.   Do not wonder why the surviving friends and family of the killed might hate our freedom.

The whole project of trying to become wiser is about gathering context, making connections, seeing a certain cause and effect to actions.   A child learns not to burn his hand on hot metal by burning his hand on hot metal, once.   The cause and effect are immediate and dramatic there and the context instantly understandable — the hot metal is fucking hot and will burn you.  Many of the events unfolding on the news seem random and unrelated, unless you see them as part of ongoing history, parts of the seemingly inexorable march from one epoch to the next.

We homo sapients need a story in order to act.  It doesn’t matter how stupid or wise the story is, either.   One pervasive story we all know is that a good person gets up early and works hard, earns every moment of leisure.   Most of us seem to believe this is true.   It shows an industriousness and eagerness to tackle the day.   It also shows… what?   Is it really morally better to wake up at 6 a.m. every day than to go to bed at 4 a.m.?   Alas, this is something I will never know for myself.  

I am constantly aware of how we are so often denied context.  Often this concealing is done because transparency would bring shame to somebody, like revealing that a man had beaten his wife for twenty years.  Maybe the wife had beaten him for twenty years.  Anyway, something shameful there, nothing to see!  What are we to make of the cup of hot coffee the wife suddenly dashes into her husband’s lap one morning?  Weird shit happens!   People snap, for no reason!   Or, if there is a reason, for those who insist on such quaint things as reasonableness, it is a long, long story subject to many interpretations, many interpretations.   Who among us really knows?  Who really knows?

We have a society more and more influenced by simple, maddening stories, told without nuance or context, to people who are eager to confirm what they already believe. Hillary Clinton, obviously she had a child sex business out of the nonexistent basement of that Washington, D.C. pizza shop.   Now the context: Hillary is a liar and a criminal who needs to be locked up.   If you chanted “lock her up!” along with Mike Flynn you will not need coaxing to believe that Hillary kept young sex slaves for high rolling left wing whack jobs to use, Afghan high society wannabes.    The fucking hypocrites!   So you read the story on your feed, drive up to D.C. with your gun and arrive at the pizza place to liberate these child sex slaves, as any decent person would have done.

Watch the news, you are seeing the first draft of history.  What is reported, what is followed up on, what is not reported, what is not followed up on. There are sponsors to please, for virtually all of the mass media, and so certain items, bad for business, must be downplayed or omitted entirely.   One thing all seem to agree on, to watch the corporate talking heads: when the president blows shit up, launching deadly warheads on powerful missiles, the man is presidential.   That it is a meaningless attack, its only context being that in a moment of anger the president authorized millions of dollars of killing technology to be unleashed… well, God Save the POTUS!   No context here… just vigorously stirred patriotism.

One of my beefs with the Grey Skank, journal of record, is how faithfully it always seems to serve the narrative of the status quo.  Obama was portrayed, in its pages, as a principled man who made wise use of his secret kill list.   Almost never will questions of the morality, legality or efficacy of a president’s secret fucking kill list for extrajudicial execution by drone-fired missile be seriously raised by anyone on the Times editorial board.  That’s what letters to the editor are for, I suppose.  (Not to mention independent outlets for journalists like Democracy Now! and The Intercept.)

In the parade of things that will eventually drive me mad, the systematic denial of context is one of the biggest, most annoying floats.  If you don’t know that Iran had a democratically elected president that the C.I.A. and British intelligence arranged a coup to get rid of in 1953 (in fairness, they were defending their oil companies), you have no context for understanding the long antagonism with a country ruled for decades, against its democratic will, by a ruthless, U.S. supported, secret police-wielding monarch, the last Shah of Iran. [1]   The CIA admitted its key role sixty years later, in a report that came out in 2013, but, you know, for those first sixty years — nothing to see here!  

I wonder whatever happened to that copy of the recent American Torture Report produced by Congress that Obama designated for preservation in his presidential library, even though he agreed to keep it secret for a number of year into the future.  Obama’s move, problematic though it also was, preserved a vital historical document Republicans were intent on collecting all copies of and destroying forever.  A plague on all their fucking houses.

The Koch boys want to keep it simple.  It’s a matter of freedom versus totalitarianism.  That’s why they are Libertarians.  Keep everything absolutely free, maximum liberty for everyone, and make sure tyrants never make the rules, unless, of course, they’re our tyrants.    Nothing to see here!

The Long Riddle

There’s a great book, by the brilliant Jeanne Safer, that describes the many benefits of looking back at a deceased, problematic parent’s life for the excellent lessons we also learned from them [1].   It’s hard to see these valuable things while the difficult parent is still around.   After death, however, things become more clear.  Their life is now living in memory and visible for the first time as a whole: a character and a story with a beginning, middle and end. 

My father’s story is complex, on one level, but also brutally simple.  On the one hand, he was a brilliant, compassionate and complicated man.  He was also capable of monstrously abusive behavior towards his family.  

He would stipulate to “complicated”, by the way, he’d acknowledge that each of us has demons that pursue us, but that’s about as far he’d ever go looking deeply inward.  Until he was literally hours from  his death.  In those final hours he had terrible regrets about having seen the world as a black and white zero-sum war zone.  He lamented the lost richness of life, the colors, tastes and smells he had willed into nonexistence.  

My father’s life and death posed riddles large and small.  The most riddling of these riddles was how an intelligent, funny, humble, sensitive man could at the same time be a tyrannical brute to his family.   During lulls in the fighting we sometimes joked that sitting around the dining room was like being in a World War One battle, everyone crouched and angry in their stinking trench, machine guns firing, shells pounding away, bombs falling, chlorine gas rolling in…  

“At least it wasn’t mustard gas, mustard gas makes you blind,” said a man with few teeth, and then he gave a weird cackle.  “That’s what Hitler got a face full of before they carted him off to the hospital in Pasewalk right before the World War was ended by traitors.  You remember Pasewalk, that’s the little Pomeranian town where the smart-ass upper-class uber-patriotic Jewish psychiatrist lambasted the gas blinded Hitler as a malingerer, calling his blindness hysterical and “cowardly” — blah, blah, just another story to explain why Hitler was so happy when he finally got the machinery up to start mass killing Jews.”

My father would never drive a German car.  He could tell you, for every major German industrial product you might mention, exactly how they profited from the Nazi regime.  One maker of world-renowned automobiles built the pressurized tanks for the poison gas used in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, which was also the site of an immense chemical factory employing death camp inmate slave labor, owned by a huge outfit that now owns Monsanto as well.   That pharmaceutical giant paid the SS $1 a day for each slave worker marched over from Auschwitz, a nice deal for keeping production costs low and profits high.   

I can see my father’s life now as a whole.  It began in dire poverty, in a small town, with a father who had no work during the Depression, Jewish immigrants in a town where the Ku Klux Klan family ran the hardware store.  He experienced extreme trauma regularly during his infant years, being frequently whipped in the face by his tiny, angry, religious mother.   His father kept out of it.  Liberated by World War Two we see him, beaming, fit, dark hair and flashing eyes in a series of black and white photos.   He smiled for the first time in his life in those army photos we found after he died. They’d never made it into a photo album, there was a small pile of them to be assembled from a shoebox of other photos. 

He had, or had not, been at the Paul Robeson/Pete Seeger concert in Peekskill back in 1947.   Within a few years both of his parents would die young, be buried in the pauper’s section of the First Hebrew Congregation cemetery and he’d be working for the NYC Board of Education, as a history teacher with a bent for social justice, and married to the woman who would become my mother and his wife of almost 54 years.

Starting in 1956 I had a front row view of the long riddle that was his life.

 

[1] Death Benefits by Jeanne Safer

Extractive vs. Regenerative Economic Models

Few of us question the status quo on essential matters that seem beyond question in a free society, like the necessity for constant war, eternal poverty, other plagues of human misery like desperate addiction and mass incarceration.   One reason is that we don’t have the language to ask these questions intelligently, even if we know something is sickeningly wrong with the way business as usual is conducted.  If you come across the right term, as I did recently from an activist — “extractive economic model,” and consider it against her alternative, “regenerative economic model,” you have the beginning of your question.  Spoiler alert, the irrefutable answer to this well-framed question, if you are not very, very wealthy and have some means to influence people, is “oh shut the fuck up, you fucking loser fuck.”  Nonetheless…

The great fortunes of some of our greatest families are founded on wealth they had workers extract from the ground.   This model for ‘creating wealth’ continues unabated to this day, with the tireless extractors of wildly lucrative fossil fuels still raking in vast fortunes every year.  In fact, with the new corporate tax break, Exxon and their ilk will keep many additional billions in the coming years for their essential contribution to the bustling world economy.  Same for the Koch boys and the industrious geniuses who invented the invasive, highly toxic hydrofracking procedure to extract safe, clean, lucrative, natural gas from deep within the earth. 

Back in the days when America was great, and people of means could own other human beings, the economy of the South was based on non-food cash crops, cotton and tobacco, that required massive manpower to harvest and which also depleted the soil.  Plant any single crop long enough in the same place and you end up destroying the soil.   That’s why crop rotation has been around for thousands of years.  That was one reason the Planters (that’s what the slave-driving motherfuckers were called) were so keen to add new slave territories to our great nation, they had destroyed the soil of the south growing the same two highly profitable monocultures every year.  

It’s just the way we do business here.   There are externalities attached to most enterprises that create vast wealth.  The death of the Amazon jungle, the lungs of the planet, is considered (by winners) a small price to pay if it allows McDonald’s to continue selling healthy three dollar meals to poor people, and reaping massive worldwide profits.  We live in an extractive economy, extract what you need, as cheaply as possible, to ensure maximum profit, and sorry about any lifeless ecosystems we leave behind.  Read the fine print, also, you can’t sue us in court but we can hire an arbitrator together to tell you you have no rights a wealthy corporation is bound to respect.  In the worse case scenario, like in the battle between big oil and local activists in Nigeria, you can just hang a few of the local leaders and the rest of the protesters will go away.

But this is all just bellyaching.  Until, perhaps, you have the alternative model to present: the regenerative economic model.   Regenerative grows back, extractive removes with no thought or hope of replacing anything. Regenerative is the essence of sustainability, Extractive depletes unto extinction.  Regeneration supports living creatures, extraction eventually kills them all.  

“OK, fine, Mr. Idealist, a sustainable economy is better than an earth-raping one, but where is the money in your precious regeneration?   Extraction has a long proven history of profit going back to the Conquistadors who forced natives to mine and give up their gold.   In fact, it goes back way further, to when great conquerers just extracted what they wanted from loser cultures who went whimpering under the sword.”  

No argument there.

“So, sir, with all due respect– why don’t you fucking shut the fuck up you fucking loser fuck?”  

I couldn’t say, sir.  I suppose it is not in my nature. 

Waking from Unsettling Dreams

In the first dream I was in and out of a bar that was headquarters for a violent motor cycle gang reminiscent of the Sons of Anarchy.   The tough men and women in there tolerated me, nobody seeming to even notice me.   I didn’t interact with anyone, I was just there, passing through.   I don’t know why I was there, I wasn’t drinking and rarely enter bars of any kind in real life.   I returned to the bar several times in the course of the dream.   

Around me fights got out of control, people were killed.  Some of the dead bodies were displayed outside the bar in grotesque positions, reminiscent of the crucified left as grim examples to others considering defiance of Rome.   At one point in our history crucified bodies were displayed in long lines, to the horizon.   It was a terrible dream, although I felt myself to be in no danger.   

In hindsight, the violence seemed virtually random, I could have been next, except that nobody paid any attention to my comings and goings.   The bar, I realize now, was set on curving, residential Marengo Street in Jamaica Estates, a place I visited often as a child.  

The second dream shook me up in a different way.   I’d invited a former good friend over, among a group of people I’d invited to my apartment that evening.  The former friend in question, I’ll call him Andy, had demonstrated to me in real life how little our friendship meant to him, how superior he felt to me and how illegitimate and pathetic he thought my feelings of hurt were.  During our last conversation he was unrepentant and even bullying, over the phone.  He may have been equally unrepentant in person, but I doubt he would have tried to bully me face to face.

This dream was unsettling to me for reasons unlike the couple of other bad dreams I’ve had where this guy shows up.   In those dreams I am shaken up afterwards by the palpable feeling of violence I experience.  He does something provocative and I react with anger, shove him, slap his face hard, kick him after knocking him down.   This shakes me up because I am dedicated to being as nonviolent as possible in word and deed (not that I’d meekly let someone attack me, don’t get any ideas).  In the most recent dream it was much different.

He’d set fire to some things in my kitchen and several of us struggled to put the flames out.   I knew at the time that this pyromania was a manifestation of his mental illness and not anything malicious directed at me.  Like with my often vicious father, I realized he could not help himself.   Others at the gathering reacted with anger, I didn’t.  When they began verbally attacking him I told them that I’d invited him and that he was my guest just like they were.   

As I was defending him he lit another fire and I took a cooking pot and banged it loudly on the wall next to his head.  I yelled at him.  I scared the shit out of him.  He disappeared.  We managed to put out the new fire.  Then I heard sirens, which grew closer and closer.  Somebody called out that someone had called the fire department. 

I opened the door and Andy was standing in the hallway, a shattered expression on his face.  He told me sheepishly that he’d called the fire department.  I took this as the best apology somebody as damaged as he is can offer.  I patted the side of his face and a fireman stepped through my front door.     I assured the fireman that the small kitchen fire was under control, he made a quick round of the apartment, signaled his colleague and they took off. 

This dream was fucked up in more ways than I can count.  

I was fairly wide awake, after very short sleep, and I succinctly recounted the dreams to Sekhnet, who was getting ready to go to work.   I mentioned to her that I had to find a new nephrologist, most likely, to follow up with the treatment of my kidney disease.   The need to find yet another new nephrologist is likely because my fucking health insurance changed in 2018.  She asked when I was going to make an appointment to see the Integrative Medicine doctor I’d spoken to months back, a man trained to view the body/mind/emotions as a holistic ecosystem [1]. 

My kidney disease, while eventually deadly, is not serious enough to inspire big pharmaceutical research dollars to be invested in it.  Its cause is unknown to science.  The specialists I’ve visited are blind men clutching the elephant’s tail, ear, leg, penis, promising the darts they throw in a dark room have a decent chance, as high as 30%, of curing what will eventually kill me, if not cured.

Maybe that’s all the unsettling dreams were supposed to do, wake me up and remind me to find a new nephrologist, take perhaps a thousand dollars and go visit this holistic doctor.   We are all heading toward death.  In my case, this kidney disease may not even be the thing that eventually kills me.   

Having this disease is enough to wake me up, though, and not want to waste time.   Writing something thoughtful every day, until I can figure out how to get some of this organized and read, and get some money for it, seems to be the most productive use of however many days or years I have remaining to me. 

Isn’t that the challenge of every human life?  Finding a meaning that gives beauty to the colors around us, music to the sounds we hear and excellent taste to the food we eat?   Satisfaction in our work, pleasure in our play.   A sense of connection to others that makes us cherish them as beings as precious as we ourselves are.

 

[1]  ho·lis·tic  (adjective)

PHILOSOPHY:  characterized by comprehension of the parts of something as intimately interconnected and explicable only by reference to the whole.

MEDICINE:  characterized by the treatment of the whole person, taking into account mental and social factors, rather than just the physical symptoms of a disease.

 

Losers Walk

In touch football back in Cunningham Park, a game in which I was once knocked briefly unconscious on the opening kick-off, the team that had just scored a touchdown would say to the other team “losers walk.”    The team that had just been scored on would walk the length of the plotted out field and wait for the kick.   It’s as good a metaphor as any for our competitive society, except that losers do not wait for the next chance to score, they are are simply expected to keep walking.  

I wonder, as I did when I heard an interview with a remarkable man named Mohamedou Ould Slahi, author of the bestselling Guantanamo Diary, how people viciously fucked by our society manage to retain their full humanity.  Mohamedou, mistakenly detained on suspicion of terrorist connections, spent fourteen years in an American hell, underwent every kind of torture, and in 2016 was released to go about his business.   “Have a nice day,” said the guards as he was released.

Is brutality simply human nature, as defenders of our most inhuman practices say, or is disregard for basic human needs the perversion of a ruggedly competitive zero sum economic system that reduces everything to its monetary value?    I wonder about this in connection to many of the things that plague us.  Remove the profit motive and is there any debate about anything on this list?

  • The climate on the earth is rapidly and drastically changing, as easily seen by the wildly escalating natural disasters.  Human activity plays a major role and we need to reduce the pollution that is fueling it before vast swaths of the earth are uninhabitable.  The U.S. Defense Department has expressed concerns over the social upheavals these changes will cause. 

  • All humans need medical care from time to time.  Preventing disease is better than curing it.   Tens of millions of Americans should not suffer from preventable diseases of poverty and despair, like diabetes and other obesity-related fast food diseases.   No human being should die because they can’t afford health care.

  • Every human needs food, clothing and shelter.  Nobody should be forced to live on the street because they’ve lost their job and their life savings.   No child should starve to death.

  • There are millions in our own country without meaningful work.  Many are in despair.  Programs to train them to provide excellent care for the aged, work with troubled youth, provide physical therapy, repair the infrastructure, work in a dozen other fields for the general good, could put all of them to work in meaningful jobs that would allow them to feel productive and positive.

  • Prisons are for locking up people who pose dangers to the rest of us.  Nonviolent people convicted of possessing or selling arbitrarily banned substances do not belong in prison.   If anything, they need treatment.

There is one argument against all of these.  “Who is going to fucking pay for all of this pie in the sky you fucking Commie son of a fucking bitch?”   

A friend recently told me he didn’t think I was actually a Commie.  In the strict sense of believing that any of the Communist countries in history have been much better than our freedom loving capitalist countries, true, I am not a Commie.   But in the sense of believing that every human being has the same intrinsic value, and that the Winner/Loser dichotomy we live under is the creation of greedy, entitled psychopaths and those who aspire to be like them, color me red, comrade.

I hold this shit to be self-evident:  being born wealthy does not make that kid’s life worth more than a child who goes to bed hungry every night.   This is true even if our society places a wealth-calibrated monetary value on every human life.   A human life is of infinite value, as Immanuel Kant noted.   Why is any of this debatable? 

The right of somebody to acquire $75,000,000,000 with no reciprocal obligation to anybody is unquestioned in our society.  If fucking Mark Zuckerberg, creator of fucking Facebook, had announced, once he made his first $50,000,000,000, that he was giving the rest of any money he made to fund a program assembling the best minds he could find to solve social problems, to provide pathways to meaningful lives to millions, he’d be considered a saint.  And a fool.  On the other hand, that $25,000,000,000 could already have funded programs that could help solve a lot of despair.

On the other hand, as we say here in America:  that’s true freedom, baby, never having to give a shit about anybody but yourself.  The American dream, having “fuck you money”.   Buy the entire beach on a Hawaiian island, bring lawsuits to make sure no natives trespass.  That’s fuck you money.   

Some people struggle to understand why there is a vicious, incompetent person with no apparent moral values in the White House.  Look around.   We live in a society that has two sets of laws, one for the rich, one for everybody else.  “One for winners, one for losers, fair is fair,” as our CEO-in-Chief might put it.    We operate, I learned without surprise in law school, under the American Rule: in American courts, with very few exceptions, everybody pays their own way.   

In many other countries victims of borderline frivolous lawsuits, brought only to harass and harm to the other party, are repaid for the cost of hiring expensive lawyers to defend themselves if the person who sued them loses on the merits.   Under the American Rule everybody pays their own legal fees, and, win or lose, losers walk.  That’s why somebody like the president can sue whoever he likes, on virtually any grounds his lawyers can pull out of their collective, extremely well-paid asses.  The only ones who lose those expensive cases are the losers, even if they “win”.

A loser, for example, like that innocent Canadian we sent off to Syria for a year of extreme interrogation shortly after 9/11 changed the moral universe.   When the Canadian government awarded Maher Arar $10,000,000 for their part in his unspeakable ordeal they added $1,000,000 for his legal fees.  The money he would have spent if the lawyers who got him the settlement had actually charged him for their hundreds of hours spent getting him legal relief.  In the US this loser’s lawsuit was thrown out.   It was thrown out for many reasons, take your pick.   The American Rule, yo.    Losers walk.