In fairness to Lennox Hill Hospital, they did give me a long list of side effects to watch out for– cold/flu and high blood pressure among them. I’ve never seen my blood pressure this high, day after day, even after doubling the dose of my blood pressure medication (at my doctor’s suggestion), but they did warn me. Fair enough. I just learned that it will take up to two months after my immunosuppressive treatment to see if my kidney disease is in remission. Oh, well.
I don’t suppose my high blood pressure could be at all related to the recently announced deadline to re-apply for private health insurance by December 15th (if I want health insurance on January 1). I have the choice of continuing to pay 500% to 1000% more than the law requires for a person of my income, as I did this year, in hopes of getting better health care than I did in 2016, or once again finding all new doctors to continue treatment of my kidney disease and skin cancer. Oh well, just part of living in a Free Market in our exceptional nation, I suppose.
The thing that riles me today, of all things, as I ponder the real possibility that going mad may be my best option, is fucking Mike Pence. Google “Pence on concealed carry law” and you will quickly learn that he is rated A by the NRA. Just scroll down the first page of hits:
He voted in favor of national concealed carry reciprocity, a policy that would … Pence further undermined Indiana’s already weak gun laws – which pose a dire …
Authorizes a person who has a valid permit to carry a concealed firearm in one state and who is not prohibited from carrying a firearm under federal law to carry …
Or, go no further than this one, the third:
NRA-ILA | Freedom Fighter Mike Pence
Oct 26, 2016 – Pro-gun candidates don’t come any better than Mike Pence. … amendment that allowed law-abiding gun owners to carry concealed in national …
The NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, at the link above, approvingly quotes Freedom Fighter Mike Pence (one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s…):
In stirring language, he said, “No state has the right to legislate away the blood-bought constitutional right of every law-abiding American to protect their person, their family and their liberty.”
He noted further, “This decision is a victory for the Second Amendment, but as a 5-to-4 ruling among the justices, it also sends a warning. The Supreme Court is closely divided and at least four of its members would not extend a basic constitutional right to all 50 states. For that reason alone, the nomination and confirmation of any Supreme Court justice requires careful deliberation to ensure that the members of the high court will protect the rights handed down by our Founding Fathers.”
With Hillary Clinton’s contention that “the Supreme Court is wrong on the Second Amendment” and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s stated intent to overturn Heller, Pence’s words of warning resonate even more today than the day he said them.
OK, we know that Mr. Pence, who while running for Congress in 2000 advocated diverting funds set aside for indigent HIV/AIDS patients to “programs for those seeking to change their sexual behavior,” is famous for being a slippery, deniable advocate of Gay Conversion Therapy [1]. This is a debunked, one might say medieval, method for turning sinful homosexuals into God-fearing straight people by an intervention that makes the homosexual see the evil of his or her sexual preference and become a normal heterosexual.
Mr. Pence is an extremely religious Christian, we are told. He believes that every abortion is an act of murder and signed a law as governor of Indiana making burial or cremation mandatory for every aborted fetus or embryo.[2].
Now, far be it from me to say that someone who believes things like these is fucking insane. The degree of an individual’s religious fervor, even fanaticism is their own concern. Arguably only our business if that religious person imposes those views in a lawmaking capacity. But let’s get back to guns, a subject less fraught with emotionalism, superstition, faith and bigotry.
What is this concealed carry reciprocity? It is a turning on its head of the old States’ Rights argument, the long time rallying cry of conservatives everywhere. States’ Rights is a relic of the Civil War with roots that go back to the days of the Articles of Confederation when states kept control of virtually everything and were very zealous about what powers, if any, they’d cede to the federal government. States should have the ultimate say on what goes on within its borders, most Americans seem to agree. States today maintain control of most of their legal affairs, business, civil, criminal and family laws, etc. except where there is an overriding need for a superseding national law. Nowadays most Americans recognize that in certain important matters, like, for example, the treatment of former slaves and later so-called Civil Rights matters (more properly called Human Rights, as many have said), citizen’s rights can only be protected by federal law and federal government enforcement. Regulation of dangerous working conditions, pharmaceuticals, toxins in the environment have traditionally been the realm of the federal government.
Look, we know one shouldn’t look for any kind of consistency, or even logic, in political ‘ideology’, particularly now in the Post-Fact age we are expected to live in, but this National Rifle Association initiative, to expand the state right of concealed gun carrying (and these aren’t rifles they’re concealing, by the way) into every state in the US by ‘reciprocity’, is inconsistent beyond reason or even madness.
Here’s the logic for overriding the will of states who want to limit guns that these otherwise States’ Rights advocates use: State A, say Mississippi, passes a law that allows citizens to walk around with licensed guns concealed on their person. Now I have a damned valid Mississippi license to carry, why should fucking Massachusetts have the right to prevent me from carrying my legally concealed legal gun when I go to Boston? States rights have nothing to do with it! It’s a matter of basic damned comity. My Mississippi driver’s license allows me to legally drive in every state in the union, why do some states get to arbitrarily deny me my blood-bought constitutional right to carry my licensed concealed gun?
We already have plenty of gun-friendly legislation in various states, but this is not enough for those who truly believe the right to have and use guns is the “blood-bought constitutional right of every law-abiding American”. Look no further than ALEC’s “Stand Your Ground” which is the law in roughly half of the United States. Written to give legal grounds for shooting someone you reasonably fear anywhere you may encounter them, all a peaceful citizen who doesn’t believe guns are the best way to solve the problems of fear and violence can think about it is “what the fuck?!!” But there it is. Under this law a citizen can jump out of a car, confront a black kid on the sidewalk, feel reasonable fear when the kid tells him to fuck himself, shoot the kid to death and be exonerated at trial under “Stand Your Ground.” USA! USA!!! Tip of the cowboy hat to the Koch boys and other funders of ALEC, and to the legal eagles at ALEC who drafted the nifty bill/law.
Granted the NRA is a very powerful conservative lobbyist. Granted the American love affair with the gun goes back to the earliest days of colonization, when the only cure for lawlessness was a brave man with a gun who was not afraid to shoot when decency and public order was at stake. Or, say, in a field where sullen black slaves might seek to threaten and physically overtake the overseer. That overseer, without an Equalizer, as the Colt .45 revolver was called, would be dead meat in any slave revolt. One man with a gun that could fire six shots in a row was a match for any three muscular brutes with bad intentions. Same goes for godless savages intent on thwarting America’s God-given Manifest Destiny. You want to scalp our women and children? We have gatling guns for you motherfuckers.
I am idly wondering about the beliefs of devout men like Mike Pence, one unhealthy heartbeat away from becoming the most powerful man in the world. He is loved and supported by the Koch Brothers, the two billionaires most responsible for making their father’s lunatic fringe right wing vision a reality, and he is loved by the National Rifle Association. He is a devout Christian who seems untroubled by the fact that, on average, 33,880 Americans die every year by gun shot [3]. Jesus may weep, but Mike Pence is clear eyed about it.
He is a Christian who would, first of all, dispute that number of annual American gun deaths as gun nut propaganda. The actual number is indisputably way, way less than 33,880 [4]. Say we take the inflated Brady Campaign numbers, on the high side it’s more like 10,000 Americans a year outright murdered by people with guns. It’s not fair, as the NRA consistently insists, to include the 21,037 gun suicides a year. That wildly skews the numbers. How is that fair? If someone uses a gun to blow their own brains out, isn’t that the fault of the crazy person? How do you blame the God-given right to own a gun for that? So unfair! SAD! Skews the “facts” completely, inflates the numbers artificially. Guns don’t kill people, especially when those people are only hurting themselves. Partisans will point out that American suicide by gun is 800% the world average [4]. Exceptional, you have to admit, but nothing to do with the annual number of Americans killed by guns.
So as you follow the news of the Mueller investigation, watch the noose tightening around many of Trump’s lawyered up inner circle, tingle at the seeming inevitability of our provocative, supremely unqualified president being designated, like Nixon, an “un-indicted co-conspirator,” remember that this white haired Christian soldier, Mr. Pence, is one heartbeat away from doing a Jerry Ford for all those best people unfairly targeted by relentless partisans. And then going on to be chief executive according to his conscience, and the consciences of billionaires David Hamilton Koch and Charles de Ganahl Koch.
And, like I say, madness may actually be a not unreasonable way to go. If you’ll excuse me, I have to try to expectorate more of this greyish white gunk.
[1] quote:
Vice President-elect Mike Pence has also appeared to support conversion therapy. When he was running for Congress in 2000, Pence’s website declared that money set aside by the federal CARE Act, to help indigent HIV/AIDS patients, also be “directed toward those institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior.” (The Trump transition team has not responded for a request for comment.)
[2] quote:
Indiana Governor Mike Pence signed House Enrolled Act 1337 into law on March 24, 2016, a hulking piece of “kitchen sink” legislation that the National Network of Abortion Funds called “one of the most vicious omnibus anti-abortion bills the United States has ever seen.” Among its 31 draconian provisions is a requirement that miscarried and aborted fetuses must be buried or cremated.
Mandating interment means that women accessing abortion would be forced to state in writing how they want the tissue disposed of. The fetus would then receive a burial-transit permit and be transferred to a funeral home, where a funeral director would oversee its final disposition. These absurd requirements load additional administrative and logistical burdens on clinics. Further, says Jennifer Dalven, director of the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, “these laws are certainly attempts to shame and stigmatize women who have decided to have abortions. Telling them that the embryonic tissue has to be cremated or buried signals that the state is treating the embryo or fetus as a person.”
[3] On average every year in America
33,880 people die from gun violence
- 11,564 murdered
- 21,037 die from suicide
- 544 killed unintentionally
- 468 killed by legal intervention
- 267 die but intent was unknown
[4] see, for example USA Today
Dribs and Drabs
What the fuck are “drabs”? What are dribs? Fucking cliches… some of ’em with roots lost in the mists of time.
Yesterday, in the USA, a transgender politician, a former journalist, unseated a thirteen term douchebag in Virginia’s House of Delegates election. The defeated 73 year-old Republican douchebag had referred to himself, apparently, as “Virginia’s Chief Homophobe”. Doesn’t that old cocksucker know that homophobe means somebody who fears homosexuals? What a fucking adorably ignorant faggot…. Congratulations to newly elected Danica Roem, you go, girl!
But I digress.
Cabin fever slowly roasts me as my lock-down in Sekhnetville continues. I wasn’t told when I went for the immunosuppressive therapy two weeks ago, not by doctor, nurse, medical technician (though Sekhnet points out that SHE told me), that I could be randomly fucked up very easily with no immune system. You’d think it could have been printed on a card every first time patient could be handed, along with the list of their expected side-effects:
“You may very well feel absolutely fine when you leave here today. Do not be fooled. Your immune system is suppressed, you are susceptible to every bug out there. Stay out of crowds, restaurants, public place of all kinds, for a week. If you go outside, carry Purel and use it after touching anything someone with a fucking runny nose may have touched or sneezed on. Pretend you are the Boy in the Bubble for the next few days.”
“Common sense, (idiot),” says Sekhnet, hammering home the implied “idiot” with an uncannily Alice Kramden-like facial expression.
In other news, good for Puerto Rico saying “no” to Whitefish Energy. Look, I don’t know if it was a corrupt no-bid $300,000,000 contract to some people closely attached to the corrupt Trump administration, but their prices, if nothing else, looked a little suspicious. Something like $300 an hour for the guys doing the electrical work on the ravaged island. Forget that Ryan Zinke, Trump’s Secretary of the Interior, is from Whitefish, the small Montana town where the two person corporation is located, or that Zinke’s wife, Lolita Hand (if that is her name), and the wife [1] of Whitefish Energy CEO Andrew Techmanski are facebook friends. Zinke and Techmanski (great name for a guy with a tech company, man) both say there was nothing improper about how the contract was awarded. Shouldn’t that be the end of it?
I’m reminded of the standard for judicial recusal from a case. If there is “the appearance” of impropriety, a judge must recuse him or herself from ruling on a controversy before her/him. For example, if the judge is close personal friends with one of the parties, has gone on vacations with them, flown in their private plane, etc. during the pre-trail period, there is an appearance of impropriety and the judge is supposed to recuse herself from judging the case. Although the judge might very well be able to rule fairly and dispassionately on the merits, it looks bad if she stays on the case. The “appearance of impropriety” standard is an element of fair play that is intended to give people faith in the impartiality and integrity of our legal system.
So you have Antonin Scalia on TV, after he refused to bow out of a case involving his good friend, the aptly named Dick Cheney and his secret energy task force meetings that preceded the disastrous deregulation of energy in California. Scalia was a brilliant guy, quick on his feet, with a smart mouth on him. He was apparently personally a very warm and lovable person, odious as virtually all of his sickening reactionary pontificating from the bench generally was. A young female reporter asked Scalia, since he had just returned from a hunting trip with Cheney, if there wasn’t an appearance of impropriety in sitting in judgment of a case involving Cheney’s claims of executive privilege, state secrets, go fucking fuck yourself, etc. Scalia didn’t miss a beat.
“I think it’s a sad day when Americans question the impartiality of the Supreme Court,” said the affable Justice snippily.
It was a sad day in America, without a doubt. Doubly so because the reporter was unable to say, “granted, sir, it is a sad day, I agree, but that was no answer to my question. I asked you about the standard for recusal, which is the “appearance of impropriety” and why you have not recused yourself from this case involving your friend Vice President Cheney. What do you say in answer to that, you smart-mouthed bastard?”
Of course, there’s no point to living in a dream world, right? I don’t know if Zinke had anything to do with the contract for Whitefish Energy, and I don’t know anything about Zinke’s character, except that the fact Trump appointed him to a powerful government post does not speak well for it. As no less an authority than George F. Will said recently (I paraphrase, but barely), anyone who is associated with Trump is irrevocably soiled with a stink that can never be washed off. Ah, here he goes: Pence is a reminder that no one can have sustained transactions with Trump without becoming too soiled for subsequent scrubbing.
Well, wash my mouth out with a fucking bar of fucking soap, I have to go make some more tea and put socks on, the temperature seems to be dropping in here. I feel some post nasal drips and drabs a comin’.
[1] Techmanski’s wife, Amanda, is listed as one of two managers for Whitefish Energy Holdings LLC. She is a registered nurse, records show, and last month she touted on Facebook a new job she was starting as a nurse practitioner.
With Amanda Techmanski as a manager, Whitefish was listed as an “economically disadvantaged woman-owned small business” on a federal Energy Department contract it won in July for a small transmission line repair in Arizona. The company’s registered address also goes back to the couple’s remote Montana home.
A prior business venture in the last decade ended poorly for Andrew Techmanski, records in Britain show. In 2009, he resigned from a business he had helped form three years earlier to string electric lines. The company folded less than two years later, and some debts remained outstanding last year, according to records.
The World is Easy Enough — when you handle it right …
Mr. Bockstein was most pleasant during our less than ten minute conversation just now (most of it on hold, granted, while he looked under the file number on the letter he mistakenly sent me). He soon told me to forget about that letter, it had been sent to me in error.
The initial wait to speak to him was less than 40 seconds, which is great. The wait when he looked up his erroneous letter to me, after I explained I’d received it in error and read him the reference number he’d assigned, was less than five minutes, again, quite reasonable. The letter under reference number 1369393, it turns out, was not responsive to my complaint. OK, mistakes happen.
“Obviously it was meant to go to somebody else,” I said when he confirmed that his letter about my complaint against two entities I’d never heard of had been sent to me by mistake, “my concern is that I wrote a long and very detailed policy-related letter to the Attorney General and I’m not sure why I was getting a response from your subdivision of his office.”
“Do you remember what it was about?” he asked me. “Because I’m not finding…”
“My letter was, the cover letter was two pages and there were about twenty pages of attachments. I was proposing legislation to remedy some terrible oversight problems with healthcare and the administration of the PPACA in New York State, and my letter…”
“Hold on, hold on,” he said, still trying to make sense of why he couldn’t find any trace of my complaint in his system. Then he confirmed the spelling of my name and asked me to hold. This time he remained on the line as I waited. He was breathing in an exasperated manner because his computer was apparently buggering him while I held. He let out one long, loud, exasperated exhalation, then continued to breathe more or less normally as I waited for him to find my name. He let out another exaggerated breath and said imploringly “come on, computer, will you please?” It was nice to be speaking to a human being, I thought idly to myself.
“OK,” I finally said, “so actually, my question is how can that letter be placed in the hands of an assistant that reads policy and proposed legislation-related letters for the A.G.?”
“Well, that would have to go to… hang on a minute…. did you file a complaint?”
“No, I never filed a complaint with your bureau.”
“You didn’t file a complaint about Healthfirst and the Marketplace?”
“No, the letter discussed Healthfirst, and the Marketplace, and a number of other things. It also discussed Blue Cross/Blue Shield and some systemic problems… basically it was a description of the cul du sac of consumer help that anyone who has any problem with health insurance finds himself in in New York State and it was proposing several ways to…”
Mr. Bockstein, whose computer had apparently just released its uninvited, amorous, two-handed grip on his waist interrupted to give me the good news. “Your complaint was assigned to one of our advocates. Her name is Jennifer Lonergan and she will be responding to you based on your complaint. As for that other one, just ignore it.”
“Well, I mean, I can certainly ignore it,” I agreed, “but I, you know, I was hoping it was not the end of a letter I spent a lot of time writing.”
“No, no-no, no, no,” assured Mr. Bockstein at once, “your complaint has been assigned to an advocate, it’s being reviewed and the advocate will respond to you.”
I confirmed the spelling of the advocate’s name, he gave me my correct file number and I thanked him very much.
“OK,” he said affably enough.
My recording ends with a long exhalation by me, a moment after I pressed disconnect to end the call with Mr. Bockstein.
“The Era of Strategic Patience is Over”
Watching Amy Goodman’s War and Peace Report just now, while feeling semi-shitty from this antineoplastic agent doing its thing in my cells, yesterday’s pronouncement by The Best President, in the context of threatening to annihilate North Korea: “The Era of Strategic Patience is Over” kind of captured it all for me.
I should be thinking happier thoughts, it’s true, sipping hot tea while chatting with a friend, keeping my blood pressure in check, I know. But I have cabin fever and can’t even go for my daily constitutional, as Sekhnet has me confined to quarters while my immune system is suppressed, at least until I am free of phlegm. I wonder, idly, if I ever will be free of phlegm. My chest sounded like a mischievously creaking pirate ship doing weird animal imitations last night, I never heard some of those sounds.
This bellicose, bragging windbag who is done with strategic patience is only the front man for the American fascist chickens coming home to roost, the triumph of the methodical Koch brothers fulfilling the fevered dreams of their rabid father, a founding member of the radical John Birch Society. He, like the Koch boys, is the product of inherited wealth and entitlement who, unlike those born to the manor who possess grace and dignity, also lacks noblesse oblige, not to mention empathy and decency.
A many times failed businessman who played an infallible captain of industry on a wildly popular scripted “Reality TV” show, he now has people saying former president Dubya was not as stupidly certain and misguidedly evil as everyone thought at the time. Impressive achievement, actually, when you think of it like that. George Dubya Bush, among other regrettable accomplishments, destroyed Iraq and Afghanistan and started the perpetual and borderless War on TERROR that we all take for granted today. No small achievement, that. Particularly for the munitions industry and those who buy and sell its wildly, historically profitable stock.
So, in Sutherland Springs, Texas yesterday, another maniac at the end of his personal era of strategic patience, took the initiative to kill a bunch of people who were inside a church. This is the kind of the thing we must have infinite patience for as a free society, we are told, the slaughter of random children in churches and schools. The reason is because when God inscribed those words in the Second Amendment they had nothing to do with state militias, or keeping slaves in check in places like South Carolina where slaves were in the majority and you needed a militia with guns to keep those motherfuckers from rising up against what they felt were unjust working conditions (and they did so a few times, mind you) — it preserved a sacred and deeply personal American right to have guns and kill any and everyone we fucking want to kill.
No sense being mad about it, or even sad. The gun itself didn’t kill anyone, it was the enraged mentally ill coward who used the gun improperly, who, by the way, had every legal right to buy, own and fire those guns, until someone else with a gun could kill him. It’s true he was discharged from the Air Force for being a violent asshole, beating up his wife and kid while enlisted, and spent a year in prison for the assaults before his Bad Conduct discharge (the military’s failure to link his imprisonment for breaking his step-child’s skull to the civilian criminal database was why he wasn’t barred from purchasing the gun he used to slaughter twenty-six, apparently) but why should that be held against him for the rest of his life?
If we didn’t get legislation to keep guns out of the hands of maniacs after that kid in Connecticut shot his own mother in the face a few times and headed over to the nearest elementary school to massacre kindergarten kids and their teachers — don’t hold your breath this time. Any Republican who supports sensible restrictions on gun ownership will be primaried out of office by the National Rifle Association, and plenty of Democrats are vulnerable too. On the other hand, is not the era of strategic patience at an end? I know my era of strategic patience is getting close to the fucking end.
The message is hammered home day after day. If you are a billionaire you are part of a despised and worshipped minority entitled to all the political influence you can afford to buy. The same goes for middle class people and the poor, buy all the damn political influence you want. It’s like the old Anatole France gem:
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.
True dat. The president sends his prayers to the folks of tiny Sutherland Springs, Texas who lost their five year old little girl, their fourteen year-old, the dead pregnant woman, more than twenty others. Back in reality, he sends his son-in-law, Jared, a younger, more self-contained version of himself, to personally thank the Saudis for buying all that top-shelf state of the art murder equipment from U.S. munitions makers, keeping Americans at work at what we do best– killing and advertising. It’s not our business that the Saudis are using American weaponry against the poorest nation in their region, creating a medieval plague of starvation and cholera in Yemen in the name of preserving their vast royal wealth and extremist Wahabist version of medieval Islam. Why hate on the Saudis just because they’re rich?
I’ve got to pull my mind out of this, somehow. I have to call Albany today, speak to Mr. Bockstein, find out how to get my letter to the Attorney General read by someone in his office who can describe it in ten words to the busy A.G. I have to drink more tea, this cup of coffee I just had will only DE-hydrate me when I need to stay well hydrated to keep my phlegm loose and flowing. There is a flow to all this.
You hear great athletes and musicians sometimes describe this flow state. In this state all their years of practice and learned excellence is able to flow directly, without thought or bidding. They see the entire court at once, hear the whole of the music, with every space breathing free and looking like an entire universe. Every pass they make in the flow state finds the hands of the person they throw it to, every note they play finds its mark, reverberating perfectly against everything else that is happening in that moment. This also applies to every other field of human invention. I understand the greatest scientific insights come during these states, as well as the greatest poetry.
This world we are living in right now is not designed, except for rare moments when we can pay to watch it at the highest professional level, to encourage real-time creative problem-solving, to have more people in a flow state. It is a system of masters and slaves. The masters are few, the slaves are the rest of us. We who are not the masters sometimes dream of some way to smash our chains. We wake full of hope some days, having dreamt of walking unencumbered by the heavy chains of a slave society. It is easy to dismiss this hope. It is essential not to. If for no other reason than to say: fuck them.
No Reason to feel like a Chump, Chump
My bad, really, in not beginning that letter to the NYS Attorney General’s office with an unmissable disclaimer: THIS IS NOT A BILLING COMPLAINT.
No wonder that a healthcare-related letter, complaining of the lack of any sort of government agency to resolve health insurance-related problems NYS patients have in New York State, would be dropped promptly on to the Healthcare billing dispute desk of the A.G.’s office. My letter, foolishly, began:
Dear Mr. Attorney General:
I am appealing to you for assistance, on behalf of many thousands of New Yorkers caught in a sometimes life-threatening situation regarding their healthcare. As described more fully below, citizens of our state have no government agency that intervenes in cases where patients are mistreated by the corporations we buy health insurance from. This is true even in cases of apparent fraud.
An idiotic idealism had me send it, for myself and on behalf of other people many Americans believe are lucky to have any health insurance at all– and who are in danger of losing the shit care they currently have. I am not a campaign donor, or an Ivy League classmate of anyone close to the A.G., why would I expect my letter to reach such an important man? If I was a wealthy, connected person, what would possess me to write such a letter in the first place? Not being one, what did I fucking expect? Perhaps anything but the mistaken response I received:
But still. And although the letter is non-responsive to anything in my letter, it is easily enough straightened out. I could do it in couple of lines:
Dear Mr. Bockstein:
Thank you for your prompt reply to my long letter to the Attorney General, though it was clearly sent to me in error. My correspondence did not involve a billing dispute (though one section contained examples of a couple), and I never heard of St. Joseph’s Physicians or Oneida Healthcare, let alone had a billing dispute with either of them. Please transfer my letter, and the attachments, to the assistant for Mr. Schneiderman who reviews policy-related correspondence. Or let me know to whom I should address a new copy, to avoid a similar fate to copy number two.
Thank you, and have a blessed day.
No need to point out the obvious irony to the overworked Mr. Bockstein — that his idiotic ‘response’ to my letter is yet another stunning example of the administrative cul du sac I described in my letter as so infuriating and soul crushing to aggrieved low income patients of New York who have no government agency protecting them from the predations of the health insurance companies they are mandated to purchase healthcare through.
Or that bureaucratic responses such as his are particularly dangerous to patients being treated for serious major organ disease and already suffering treatment-related extreme high blood pressure. When your blood pressure is dangerously close to hypertensive crisis range, a letter like that, though polite, is the last fucking poison you need. Although it is good for me to keep in mind that the preventable death of an American who is not at least middle class is, as the law styles it, a trifle, truly. Nothing personal.
I rest my case, Mr. Bockstein. I’d make an idle threat to rest it in a venomous letter to the editor of the Grey Skank, but we all know how silly that would be to threaten. Theoretically, a tart letter to the editor quoting the AG’s response would momentarily embarrass your boss, who appears to be one of the few good guys, and who is tirelessly making a good name for himself with clear future ambitions. On the other hand, a short description of the callous, or at best, inept, functioning of his progressive office would only serve to provide more ammunition to the powerful and well-funded forces of reaction bent on returning this country to its former greatness.
I am left idly threatening to unearth my Louisville slugger, Joe Pepitone model. And fiercely pointing out that I can be up in Albany in the time it takes Mr. Bockstein to crank out a few dozen of these fine letters, man of peace and reason though I always aspire to be. At the same time urging Mr. Bockstein, for purely legal reasons, not to construe this as any kind of physical threat– I mutter it mildly and abstractly, for expressive purposes only, through a haze of monoclonal antibody side effects. Though, even in my asthenic state, I recognize that, truly, the many vexations of Americans with a low income, even the most theoretically easily preventable vexations, are strictly their own affair and attributable only to their poor choices in life.
You Can’t Make This Shit Up…
Which doesn’t mean, of course, it doesn’t make you want to smash the responsible parties in the face with a baseball bat, just once. As a man who tries to practice Ahimsa, non-harm to fellow creatures, the feelings this can produce are complicated.
Many things are complicated, granted. Our exceptional country, we can stipulate, has a sometimes spotty history for doing the right thing. We know liberals are always banging on about the extermination of the native people, slavery, atomic bombs dropped on Japanese civilians after back-channel surrender talks were in the works, segregation, a century of lynching, the “pre-emptive” invasion and destruction of Iraq, torture, drones, imprisonment of more than a million Americans for arbitrary crimes that harm nobody, a powerful, wealthy gun lobby that makes sure tens of thousands of Americans are free to kill tens of thousands of other Americans every year, blah blah blah– as if liberals never do anything wrong.
Our world’s most expensive health care system, its expense inflated by fabulously paid private insurance middleman as much as by high tech medical interventions and Big Pharma, vital industries which are sometimes judgmentally called ‘predatory’, allows tens of thousands of Americans to die every year over money issues, even under Obamacare. Oh, and intergenerational poverty and racism, and not paying women as much as men and not fixing that. OK, we’re not perfect, but we’re always trying to form a more perfect union.
Once in a while someone who thinks they’re smart tries, in the face of odds that say, overwhelmingly ‘shut the fuck up, anonymous, powerless asshole’, to write a cogent letter to someone in power who might be moved enough to address at least one systemic, institutional injustice. I was one such person recently, and I exerted myself mightily over many months, to craft a letter that was readable and proposed solutions to the institutional problems it detailed. I sent it to our activist, progressive, not publicity-shy NYS Attorney General. You can read the final version of my letter here, and the attachments to it here.
To my relief, I got a prompt response, from the Attorney General’s Division of Social Justice, no less. Here it is. You truly can’t make this shit up.
Of course, it would seem churlish of me to note that I’ve never heard of St. Joseph’s Physicians/Oneida Healthcare, nor, to my knowledge ever had a billing dispute with either one.
Hopefully I can remain calm and relatively civil tomorrow when I call this steaming pile of distracted dung, Health Care Bureau Intake Specialist Alexander Bockstein, and inform him that my letter reached his desk in error, as his did mine. I will need to strike just the right tone to get my letter into the hands of someone who will thank me for it in a manner a bit more on point, indicating they may even have read a paragraph or two of it. You know what I’m saying?
Fuck Me Blind…
As a kid who wanted to learn to draw well, and who studied a bit of anatomy (from afar, and bloodlessly), I naturally admired the drawings of Michelangelo Buonarroti. That guy was a genius, I’ll go out on a limb and say it. I read his poetry, which I admired for its dark invention– he once compared his life’s work to being a swimmer who crosses the sea, only to drown in his own snot. The fucker could draw, too. His drawing was sculptural, which is a sensible way for a sculptor to draw. He famously signed his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, disgusted by having been mercilessly drafted for the endless project by some bullying Pope with a sword, “Michelangelo, sculptor.”
He painted a wonderful self portrait, that I copied in gouache, when I was about twenty, and sent to my grandmother. She went into raptures over it, framed it and finally got her Aunt Shifra, the mother of internationally famous modern sculptor George Segal, of the ghostly plaster cast constructions, to admit that her grandson was a genius too. Shifra, it should be pointed out, was very old and probably no match for my strong-willed grandmother Yetta at that point.
In Michelangelo’s self-portrait, and in my crude copy, his flattened nose stands out prominently in his thoughtful, slightly grim face. I’d read about that broken nose, he got it as a kid. The story I knew was that Michelangelo, who could always draw, was mocking the drawing of an older classmate in Lorenzo de Medici’s stable of talented youths. The other guy retorted by busting the arrogant young genius’s nose.
There are other versions of the story, as I later learned, one being that Michelangelo was a fucking saint and the older classmate, Pietro Torrigiano, by name, was a jealous hot head. Indeed, no less an authority than Wikipedia supports the hot head theory, noting of Torrigiano “his career was adversely affected by his violent temperament.” I should read a bit more of that entry.
But then I saw this sculpture by the jealous hot head Torrigiano and immediately thought “fuck me blind….”
Actually, just read the rest of the short, ambiguous entry on Pietro Torrigiano and all I can say is “what the fuck?” Talk about swimming across the ocean only to drown in your own snot…
Dr. Goebbels’s Wet Dream
“Go ahead,” said the skeleton of my father, “I don’t really care how little this has to do with my life, or my story. You seem intent on telling it, so go ahead.”
Well, you read the NY Times cover to cover every day, along with several other periodicals. You followed the news religiously, read a dozen or more papers on-line every day once you had a computer. You were an avid student of history. Is history not an ongoing horror show we can’t look away from?
“Fine, go ahead, I said,” said the skeleton, with a yawn, or a silent scream, “Tell them all about The Poisonous Dwarf and his pioneering efforts in mass political marketing. Luckily for me, I’m dead.”
This belongs in the book, dad, somehow.
“If you say so, you’re the poor fuck whose got to try to sell it.”
In November 1923, when my grandmother was pregnant with the fetus that would grow up to be Irv Widaen, a little known rising star of the militant German Right, Adolf Hitler, jumped the gun and tried, with two thousand armed followers and a popular right wing general, to violently take over Munich, and subsequently Germany. When my father was a newborn, Hitler was sitting in comfortable Landsberg Prison, a kind of white collar lock-up, dictating a few hundred pages of rabid slavering to his obsequious, dim follower Rudolf Hess and his future driver and founder of the SS, fucking one eighth-Jew Emil Maurice.
Placed on trial after the failed putsch by the world’s model democracy in post-World War One Germany (“described after the fact as one marked by ‘supine passivity'”, added the skeleton of my father) Mr. Hitler had performed brilliantly in court, in front of a sympathetic reactionary judge, and increased his Twitter following a thousand-fold. He was world famous overnight. He did so well at the trial, performing as a passionately outraged patriot, that he ended up serving less than nine months of his five year sentence for high treason, during which hideous gestation period his ill-hatched best seller Mein Kampf was completed. [1]
“Oh, this is really darling, Elie, you’re doing this like a creative writing story,” said the skeleton, turning away.
By the time my father was nine Mr. Hitler had maneuvered his way into absolute power, seizing on a fully constitutional measure, under the admirably democratic Weimar Constitution, to pass an Enabling Act and make himself Fuhrer under the Emergency Powers provision triggered by the burning of the Reichstag, the German Parliament, a politically expedient fire the Nazis almost definitely set, and beheaded a Communist dupe for, shortly after the Nazis rose to prominence in the government, with that famous 39% mandate.
“Convoluted, moreso, I daresay I think not you could have woven, if woven we can say, that long run-on sentence,” said the skeleton absently. “Hitler, coyly exploiting the AUMF of his day to do his damnedest.”
The point, the point, then, the accursed fucking point. Hitler, a pretentious autodidact and the smartest moron in every room he dominated, gathered around him a band of fiercely loyal men. Among them was the club-footed Doctor Joseph Goebbels, whose doctorate, I believe, was in German literature, the equivalent of my Masters in Creative Writing. The fanatically devoted Dr. Goebbels was not the ideal Aryan, being small, dark and crippled, but he was the ideal wing man for Mr. Hitler, and reportedly the shrill little bastard, referred to on the street as “The Poisonous Dwarf”, had sex with many women, in addition to his devoted wife who bore him a brood of little Goebbelses. He was Hitler’s Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, and in this capacity, and as head of German arts, cinema, radio, news and all mass media, he wielded tremendous power in the Third Reich.
“The Thousand Year Reich,” said the skeleton.
You can see movie clips of his speeches to the German public. As despicable and clearly psychotic as Hitler is in similar clips, you can see, if you look hard enough and catch certain moments, a bit of Hitler’s charisma. Goebbels, on the other hand, was only the confirmation of war criminal, ladies man Henry Kissinger’s famous quip about power being the ultimate aphrodisiac. It is an indictment of artistic ambition of all kinds to imagine anyone willingly submitting to The Poisonous Dwarf’s, eh, charms, but there you have it.
“The point, the point, Elie, the point,” said the skeleton.
Yah-vold, mein herr. Hitler recognized the necessity of political propaganda in selling ‘ideology’. He admired the Allies skillful and heartless use of outright and inflammatory lies to enflame their armies and their populations to vicious hatred of their enemies. He described and applauded it in the only lucid passages of Mein Kampf and consciously set about doing it in his own cause after his failed Beerhall Putsch in November 1923. He had a certain artistic flair for propaganda and branding– he came up with the Nazi flag, the dramatic red flag with the swastika in a white circle. Can’t beat that for a symbol.
“Can’t beat it with the femur of a dead Jew,” said the skeleton. “By the way, I’d appreciate not being used as a semi-comic prop right now.”
Yah-vold, mein herr. Goebbels, for all his many repulsive attributes, was a master of propaganda, he was the man for the crucial job of convincing Germans that Hitler was an infallible leader sent by God for a holy mission they should all be willing to lay down their lives for. In the end he’d do it himself, shooting, or perhaps poisoning, his wife, children and himself in the bunker on the day Hitler shot his dog, and Eva Braun, and himself. Tragic, really, that they didn’t do all that necessary euthanasia decades earlier.
“But you digress,” said the skeleton.
I’ve described this elsewhere on this blahg, I have no idea where and my current drug-induced asthenia prevents me from searching, but Goebbels was the first to grasp the importance of real-time public feedback in determining how to most effectively sell the Nazi version of reality to the public.
“Here you go, courtesy of the WordPress version of Jeeves, you put this up in May,” said the skeleton, “to wit:”
Back in Hitler’s time his party made unprecedented use of social feedback to continually adjust and sell their policies. Every speech Hitler gave was heard over millions of radios. Every listener’s reaction was reported up the chain, each apartment building had a captain, every block had someone who reported these reports to a gauleiter higher up the food chain, to Goebbels himself.
Dr. Josef Goebbels, Reich Minister for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, quickly had feedback on how the public was buying a given load of crap from candidate Hitler and later from the Fuhrer. Having, and being able to analyze, such data is crucial in selling anything, marketers run ad campaigns based on these invaluable insights. Political campaigns are about branding and marketing. The side with the most emotionally effective “messaging” wins.
Fast forward through almost a century of politics, commerce and technology to Josef Goebbels’s wet dream. On the internet, an international entity virtually everyone in the world who is not in dire poverty uses many times a day, individual choices are continually collected and analyzed by algorithms to target specific demographics for marketing purposes. It’s done instantly, silently, seamlessly. I am, for example, what emotional right-wingers would instantly recognize as a commie, anyone who reads a bit of this blahg can see at once that I am a man who hates unregulated capitalism. But I am a commie who plays guitar and ukulele, draws and loves well-designed, reasonably priced, one-handed folding knives. My friends may not always recall these things about me at birthday time, but Google and Amazon never forget these enthusiasms of mine. I get colorful reminders on-line all the time.
What Goebbels and Hitler pioneered in the years leading up to, and all through, the Thousand Year Reich, real-time political market research, is now within the affordable grasp of every politician or salesman of any and every stripe. So when you see these cocksuckers from FaceBook and Google dancing in televised senate hearings about why they didn’t recognize that 126 million FaceBook friends would see false and damaging political ads purchased, in rubles, by Russian troll farms, well, what is there to wonder about?
The religion of our great nation is the bottom line, expressed through the indomitable will of the Free Market. These are the winners, the most brilliant and successful businesses in our country, on a par with the pharmaceutical and fossil fuel industries. Who is some elected cocksucker in the senate to question the practices of user-friendly multibillion dollar corporations that most Americans rely on for access to virtually everything?
“OK, Elie, calm down, you’re not winning anybody over here,” said the skeleton.
There’s nobody to win over, dad, you should know that better than anybody. The big bucks are made confirming the confirmation bias, selling masses of scientifically selected individuals exactly what they themselves most fervently want to believe, based on their constantly expressed preferences.
“You make a not unreasonable point. Now go take a nap, Elie, I have to lie down myself.” And, with a dramatic flop, he did.
[1] Hats off to Wikipedia for this brilliant paragraph:
From Hitler’s perspective, there were three positive benefits from this attempt to seize power unlawfully. First, the putsch brought Hitler to the attention of the German nation and generated front page headlines in newspapers around the world. His arrest was followed by a 24-day trial, which was widely publicized and gave Hitler a platform to publicize his nationalist sentiment to the nation. Hitler was found guilty of treason and sentenced to five years in Landsberg Prison.[3] The second benefit to Hitler was that he used his time in prison to produce Mein Kampf, which was dictated to his fellow prisoners Emil Maurice and Rudolf Hess. On 20 December 1924, having served only nine months, Hitler was released.[4][5] The final benefit that Hitler accrued was the insight that the path to power was through legitimate means rather than revolution or force. Accordingly, the most significant outcome of the putsch was a decision by Hitler to change NSDAP tactics, which would demand an increasing reliance on the development and furthering of Nazi propaganda.[6]
Side effects
Last Friday I spent five or six hours being infused with a drug called Rituximab, or Rituxan, in hopes of curing my idiopathic kidney disease before it does permanent damage to my kidneys. “It’s very well tolerated,” said the nurse who slipped the needle into my arm, using some perverse version of the passive voice. I read the manufacturer’s information sheet she gave me, scanned a long list of mild-seeming side effects. A dozen uses for it were listed, none related to the kidney in any way.
The other guy in the infusion room was fighting death, and death had the upper hand, there was no way he was going to beat it for much longer. He had a lot of stories, twenty-nine, Iraq and Afghanistan vet with a rare, incurable autoimmune disease he got after an IED attack (one in a million, he said, won the genetic lottery for that one) and not ready to fucking die.
I left feeling fine, and grateful to be feeling fine. I felt fine Saturday, and Sunday. Monday and Tuesday too, for that matter. Though, in hindsight, Tuesday I was feeling unaccountably weak, a bit of the old asthenia, it seems, as I took a slow stroll to Chinatown and back. Asthenia was a listed side effect, it means weakness, it turns out. Also, in hindsight, with my immune system suppressed, I probably should not have been on this crowded public conveyance late Saturday night.
Tuesday’s delicious meal in an old Chinatown haunt, and the two mile roundtrip stroll, may also not have been the best move, in retrospect. Tuesday night I came down with a bad cold, which soon turned into the mother of all colds. Was thankful for the snot channel I carve above my mustache, it came in very handy over and over as I went through a box of tissues. Sleep was hard to come by, as breathing was a challenge in a lying position. I got up many times during the night. I coughed so violently that I pulled some muscles under my ribcage I didn’t even know were there.
I reviewed the list of known side effects, which included “night sweats,” explaining why my shirt was wet when I got up to make another cup of tea at around four. Also alarming was the big spike in my blood pressure, consistently in the range just below where they urge you to seek immediate medical attention whether you have other symptoms or not. It’s still very high, apparently another known side-effect my doctor was surprised to hear about when I checked in with him last night. 5% of those treated with Rituxan get this effect, apparently, and of those, 60% are in my age range, but the doctor probably doesn’t study the FDA reports on-line the way a worried patient would. And, dramatic but largely forgotten now, the left calf that swelled suddenly to the size of a lumpy football, though that righted itself overnight. Well-tolerated, of course, being a relative term to describe an immunosuppressive drug that doesn’t completely knock the shit out of you, like the stuff my companion in the infusion suite was getting.
As I wondered why my back teeth were suddenly aching Sekhnet reminded me that flu-like symptoms were on the list and that this sometimes happens when you have a bad flu. I suddenly thought back to a visit with my cousin Eli, not long before he died, of a cancer his children thought it best not to tell him was killing him. He had a fentanyl patch on and complained of the side effects. “Read the fucking list,” he said, handing me a long scroll as I walked in.
Dry mouth? yop. Constipation. Yep. Diarrhea? Yop. Heart palpitations, painful urination, trouble breathing: yop, yep, yip. I must have read the first fifty of them, every one of which he had. I got to irritability and he snapped “what the fuck do you think?!!!” He didn’t have that much longer to be irritated, as it turned it, he was dead a week later.
Thankfully all I’ve got is a bad cold, elevated blood pressure and a bit of the old asthenia. Going to try to get some sleep and then call the nephrologist, see if this miserable cold takes me off schedule for the second and last round of this wonder drug a week from today.
Nazi-style mass rally in NYC, February 20, 1939
“Well, you recall I told you about this rally at the old Madison Square Garden, the German American Bund mounting a mass rally, those documenting it taking a page from Leni Riefenstahl, the cinematically talented Mitläufer,” said the skeleton of my father. “I was fourteen at the time, and it felt horrific enough to me to read about, but, you also have to consider the rest of my life at the time. It was just another sharp lash of the whip, among an ongoing flurry of lashes.” The skeleton looked out to the line of trees in the distance.
“You know, if we could have talked for another 60 or 70 hours or so that last night of my life, I would have answered all your questions about this pro-Nazi rally in New York City right before the war, about the first attempt and rescheduled Paul Robeson/Pete Seeger anti-fascist concert in Peekskill after the war, violently attacked by the Ku Klux Klan and their merry fucking ilk, rocks through car windows on this road behind me, the one that runs past this boneyard,” the skeleton sighed, pointing over his shoulder. “We just ran out of time, Elie.”
I remember you mentioning this Bund rally at the Garden, but it’s one of those flickering black and white moments in long ago history…
“Well, not so long ago, it happened within the living memory of your father. You discovered many things trying to reimagine my life, things that shocked you. No child labor laws in the United States when I was a child, how about that one? If the economy had been better, I could have spent my early years as a fucking chimney sweep, or whatever the equivalent in 1930 Peekskill would have been. I’m glad you carried on my interest in history, Elie. It’s some fascinating shit, even if the bullshit way the story is often told removes a lot of the mystery and excitement from it, makes it a tool of the status quo instead of an instrument to readjust it.”
Those Confederate monuments, for example, were mostly erected decades after the Civil War, in the early twentieth century, when the genteel society of the South was recasting history in a more forgiving, glorious light that blamed the damned freedmen for their savage inability to act like humans, depicted Reconstruction as an atrocity, and recast the violent defenders of the philosophy of the Peculiar Institution as glorious idealists. The Dunning School of history justified segregation, on racial grounds, while vilifying the federal government’s attempt to reconstruct the former Confederacy.
“That cocksucker William Archibald Dunning cast a long shadow, having the imprimatur of my prestigious alma mater, a few of his disciples were still in the history department at Columbia when I was there, making their nuanced, intellectual arguments that blacks, being like children, were fit only for the protection of the states that knew them best. One of them wrote that Yankees at the time of the Civil War and afterwards could never truly understand the Negro, uh, ‘nigger’ actually, having been given a false impression of their capacities by ‘Fred Douglass’.”
Motherfuckers. People don’t know anything about the devilish details of history writing, who its ideology serves, behind that smug impression of seeming objectivity, who it fucks.
“True dat,” said the skeleton.
But let’s stick to other Nazis for the moment, dad. A friend sent me a link today to a short, chilling movie someone put together from found footage of the February 1939 German Bund Rally. It was posted the other day by The Intercept.
“Do tell,” said the skeleton, turning to fix me with a hollow eyed look.
The Intercept published a thoughtful article featuring a short film of the Bund rally. The piece is called ‘A Night at the Garden’ is the Most Terrifying Movie You Can Watch This Halloween. The article is excellent and the six minute movie, in which the footage is allowed to speak for itself, is indeed fucking terrifying.
“I see, fascinating shit,” said the skeleton, watching the clip and then speed reading, as was his practice when he was alive. “It’s worth mentioning, since you’re so terrified, that there were five times more protesters than American Nazis out that night. There were 100,000 on the streets around the Garden, protesting their rally, and that the police were on the side of the protesters, and that this was also the high water mark of the German American Bund’s pro-Hitler rally business.”
“On the other hand, I notice Jon Schwarz points out how this rush to organized hatred can happen to masses of desperate humans in a society that ‘rolls snake eyes ten times in a row.’ He generously estimates that we’ve, or rather, you’ve, only rolled snake eyes now four times in a row, gives you good odds for avoiding the worst. I don’t see much reason for optimism. This lying, cringingly insecure snake-oil salesman you have there now, while he’s just a clownish figure-head prone to talking and tweeting directly out of his ass, is doing the bidding of the same larger, implacable forces that brought you every mass tragedy in history.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself, dad.
“Ha ha,” said the skeleton, “I’m glad you’re feeling game enough to still joke about this, Bozo. On the other hand, comedic detachment may be the only escape valve you poor fuckers have at the moment.” The skeleton removed his left hand and playfully whacked himself in the face with it, deadpan all the while.
Jesus, dad, that’s disgusting.
“Aw, don’t be such a sourpuss!” said the skeleton. “Look, Mueller is starting to close in on some of these motherfuckers. Look on the bright side, Elie. Maybe President Orange will not get the chance to pack the Supreme Court with any more extreme right wing zealots. Of course, they have to get the Koch Brothers’ boy Mike “make the homos normal” Pence out of there too, and hold a new election, and nullify fifty year-old Neal Gorsuch’s confirmation as a Supreme Court justice for life and all the rest, on the grounds that the president who nominated him was, truly, illegitimate, particularly if he has to pardon himself for conspiracy to commit treason, but it’s a start.”
I just looked at him.
“Yeah, I know,” said the skeleton, using the detached left hand now to smack himself up side the head.
