Author Archives: oinsketta

Rat in Solitary vs. Rat in Rat Park

People who feel powerless are sometimes prone to abusiveness, in addition to self-destructive behavior.  The only feeling of power they have access to is the power to inflict pain on a creature even more powerless than they are, or to do something to alter their state of mind.   Given the choice between endless pain and momentary relief from that pain, most will opt for the relief, however fleeting and otherwise regrettable.

“Dassum shit,”  said the skeleton of my father, “but, sadly, a universal truth.” 

Your mother, for example.   

“May she rest in peace,” said the skeleton in Yiddish inflected Hebrew. 

Look, the only image I  have of her is of an enraged religious hypocrite, a tiny psycho who mercilessly whipped her first born son in the face from the time he could stand.   

“Not an entirely unfair image of her, given what little you know,” said the skeleton.   “On the other hand, Elie, you realize that for purposes of this particular exercise in spinning your wheels while tap-dancing on a treadmill, I am more of a cardboard cut out of a skeleton than the actual mildly endearing character you have taken some pains to create over the last couple of years.” 

That goes without saying. 

“Then why say it?” said the skeleton.   

I know you are, but what am I? 

“Look, on a given day,  given that you are not going to earn so much as a copek, what is the best you can expect of yourself?”   

To get enough sleep and to be the best version of myself I can be, I suppose.   

“Fine, so like the good advice on that sign in the City College gymnastic rooms– work good hand-stands everywhere — you are working every day to keep your tools sharp?”   

As sharp as I can. 

“OK, fine.  You gave this piece a title.   So?”   

There is a little buzz, recently, about the opioid addiction crisis that kills more than a hundred Americans a day (no reason to dredge up the mere twenty or so U.S. military veterans, thank you for your service, who kill themselves every day).  The opioid crisis has become news because white people are dying in large numbers now.   It’s killing mostly working class and poor white people, not the children of the very rich, mind you, but still.  It’s not like it’s a deadly drug epidemic confined to ghettos where you can just bring in the national guard to keep that shit contained where it belongs.   

“Trump country is opioid country,” said the skeleton.   

The famous drug experiment about the nature of addiction was putting rats in cages and giving them a choice between water and drug water.  The drug water would get them high, and eventually kill them, but all the rats chose the drug water and eventually every one of them killed themselves with it.

This was held out as irrefutable proof that given the choice between the deadly pleasure of an addictive drug and a healthy drink of water every little experimental mammal would choose the drug that gave them pleasure.  There was another experiment where they had the rat’s brain hooked up to an electrical switch.   Put your paw on the button and get an instant orgasm.  Every rat died, of heart failure, with its paw on the button.   These experiments seemingly confirmed that some substances, by their very nature, are irresistible, physically addictive, soul-robbing and eventually deadly. 

Another experimenter, noting that the rats in these experiments were all kept in solitary confinement and given the single choice of drug/no drug, tested this theory by constructing a rat playground and doing the same test.  Rat Park, as he called it, was a place where everything a rat could want was found in abundance: ample space, tasty food, toys, exercise, other rats to interact with and have sex with.   The rats in Rat Park had the choice of water or drug water.  Few rats in Rat Park had much use for the drug water.   No rat in Rat Park ever died of a drug overdose.  They had too much else to do.  The experimenter concluded that drug addiction was a product of despair, of lack of a better choice. 

“Well, think of that kid you walked home in Harlem, the hell of his drug addict mother’s life, his baby brother’s life, his own.  What were the odds of him becoming a studious high achiever and moral exemplar for his siblings vs. pursuing a life of whatever short-term pleasure he could find?” 

Of course.   The thing is, according to Johann Hari, who described the Rat Park experiment in his excellent book and talks, a follow-up to the Rat Park experiment was never funded, it was never repeated anywhere.   There is no solution to the larger social injustices that lead to virtual mass solitary confinement and the choice of drug/no drug.   The people caught in that situation, millions of us here, billions worldwide, are totally expendable.  People who talk about this are sneeringly dismissed, by hardy Nazi types, as Social Justice Warriors, SJW, LOL!

“Look, Elie, tens of thousands die in America every year because the pharmaceutical industry spends untold hundreds of millions to influence public policy, to ensure that their profits remain as robust as humanly possible.   Big Pharma spends far more than the oil industry.   The fucking NRA spends a tiny fraction of what Pharma pays out every year in campaign funding, and the NRA holds the Grand Old Party hostage.  Any Republican who speaks the first half of the sacred Second Amendment– A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State... gets primaried out of office at the next opportunity.   The NRA version of that Amendment is, simply, ‘The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed’.    As you know, a hundred thousand or so dead Americans a year, from guns, opioids, lack of health care, is a small price to pay for freedom and democracy.” 

Yes.  The maddening thing is that there is no possibility of even having the discussion, based on the actual merit and harms of each position.   By way of government response we have a pompous little asshole, our nation’s highest law enforcement official, pronouncing that no matter how stupid, outdated or erroneous the law, we will enforce it to the strictest degree to make sure our people are protected from the evil of a selected drug.   

“Well, of course we will.  And that allows ongoing selective, color-blind enforcement of the politically motivated law and the continued disproportionate incarceration of black and brown citizens and their literal disenfranchisement in many states.  No vote for felons, bitches.  What’s mysterious about any of this, Elie?”   

No mystery, dad.  Just… fuck. 

“Stay sharp, boy, and keep your eyes on the prize,” said the skeleton, pantomiming a sleepy oriental pulling on an opium pipe, as he slouched back into his soft grave.

Transparency is Crucial to Understanding

The lack of transparency, so prevalent in our unapologetic, commercial win-at-any-cost culture, is a bone crosswise in my throat.   It comes up again and again, from the secret “dark money” that decides our elections, to secret national killing policies, to toxic family relations rooted in shameful secrets, and it gets to me every time.   Shameful secrets shamefully kept usually create more shame, lack of trust and other serious ills.  Doubt this at your peril.   

Without transparency we do not have enough information to make informed decisions, our conversations are about what we suspect is the case, rather than what we can actually see and understand.  Without a truthful report of the actual, verifiable facts, all we know are the rumors we suspect are most likely true.  We then act accordingly.

I offer a petty but recent example to stand in for the damnable reflex toward opacity, which is also a reflex toward small-mindedness and obstinate certainty.   The certainty of the lynch mob.

A baseball player, born in Cuba, hits a home run off a top pitcher in the World Series.  The pitcher is of Japanese/Iranian ancestry and grew up in Japan.  The hitter circles the bases, gets back to the dugout, flushed and laughing, and, sitting on the bench makes a ‘racially insensitive gesture’ which instantly becomes national news and results in the player’s five game suspension (longer than the usual suspension if he’d literally charged the mound and tried to punch the pitcher in the face).   

After the game Yu Darvish, the pitcher who gave up the home run (and was knocked out of the big game not long after) and then was victimized again by racism, was surrounded by reporters after the game, under bright lights.  He had just pitched terribly in the biggest game of his career.   The reporters wanted to know how he was feeling about the racist gesture.   Through an interpreter he made an admirable reply, under great pressure:

“Including him and I, nobody’s perfect. Everybody’s different. We’ve just got to learn from it. He made a mistake, and we’ve just got to learn from it. We are all human beings. It’s just learn from it, and we’ve got to move forward.”

Remarkably mature comment, I thought, particularly under the pressure he was under at the moment.  The Cuban player apologized immediately, expressed great respect for Darvish, said he could never get a hit off him, regretted what he had done after the home run.  He released this statement:

Screen Shot 2017-10-30 at 1.37.00 PM.png

 

I did a search to find a video of the racially insensitive gesture.  I found it immediately.  I had to scroll through the video to find the gesture, two talking heads were clucking at length over how terrible what we are about to see was.   As though they were preparing us for grainy footage of a klansman tying up a terrified child he was about to string up in a tree.   Trigger warning:  please be advised, what you are about to see may really, really hurt. 

Then, I saw it.

The player is on the bench, smiling from ear to ear, excited after his World Series home run.   He appears to be sitting by himself on the bench, there is no other player in the shot.  He turns his head, shakes his ridiculous hair-do, lifts his forefingers to the sides of his eyes, laughs.   The micro-gesture takes a nano-second, literally.   

Luckily, since this happened during an internationally televised sporting event, we have multiple camera angles and slow-motion so we can get a good long look.  Let’s slow it down and show it from the left, look, Bob, both hands.  He used both hands, yeah, you see that left forefinger?  Definitely a two handed racially motivated attack on the Japanese pitcher.  I did see that, Kyle, both hands, yeah, he used two hands, definitely.    The fingers didn’t actually touch the eyes, Bob, but you could see the intent there, clear as day, here, let’s see it from another angle.  Yep, it’s racially insensitive, all right, Oh my Lord, yes it is.

I watched as it was replayed several times in slow motion thinking “what the fuck?”   It was unlikely that Darvish, the intended victim, even saw the gesture, unless he was staring, unblinking, at the Houston bench instead of pitching.  The full mockery was done and over, based on the video which showed the same horrible gesture over and over, in the matter of perhaps three quarters of a second.   Then the mob of reporters investigate, put Darvish on the spot to act like a mensch after the worst outing in a big spot in his distinguished professional career, shelled and out of the game in less than two innings.   The new baseball commissioner later gets big praise for a prompt Solomonic decision:  the racially insensitive player will be suspended for five games, without pay, next season, but will be able to play the remainder of the World Series.   

I sent the video clip to a friend who wrote back, with characteristic slyness:

I was triggered by that gesture, so I’ve been in my safe space. I may come out tomorrow.

I sent the clip to another friend a few hours later.   He emailed me back that the clip was unavailable.  It had apparently been taken down by the copyright holder, or the account terminated by youTube, or both.   See for yourself.

So we are left, without the ability to judge the offensive act itself, with the instructive moral lesson that we do not tolerate racial insensitivity in our great nation.   Which, of course, is true, self-evident, in fact.  America is a land of exceptional equality where race is never a factor in anyone’s behavior.  The proof is our president, if you need proof.   Never a less racist person in that Oval Office, except, arguably, Woodrow Wilson, maybe. 

Seriously, how about we make the author of that racially insensitive gesture do a sincere public service announcement about how hurtful racism is, show it during baseball games.   The lost five games of salary that is part of his punishment, let’s put those tens of thousands of dollars to good use by donating it to an organization that fights racism.   How about something meaningful?  Instead of this pious fucking feel good bullshit.

Those Americans killed earlier this month in Niger, what’s the deal with them?  They are part of the now thousand American force initially placed in Niger as advisors in the War on TERROR by… oh, gosh, Barack Obama.   We never heard about that.   We never heard about the drone strikes in Yemen, until disloyal Americans like Jeremy Scahill investigated and revealed that American, not Yemeni, drones had launched those murderous, if mistaken, strikes.   How many countries are we doing that in?  Top secret, commie.  Campaign donors who give more than $5,000 to a political non-profit are granted anonymity in the exercise of their First Amendment right to political self-expression.  They’ve earned it.   

Well, we have to take our symbolic victories where we can.  Thankfully, that fucking racially insensitive Cuban motherfucker got what was coming to him.

NOTE:

Gurriel will lose $322,581 of his $12 million salary next year, which the Astros will donate to charitable causes. He also will be required to undergo sensitivity training during the offseason.

Darvish said he couldn’t decide whether Gurriel’s suspension was appropriate, but he said that he understood why commissioner Rob Manfred didn’t impose it during the World Series.

Darvish said a Dodgers employee informed him about Gurriel’s gesture, which was caught on television, after Game 3.

“I didn’t think it was going to be this big of a deal,” Darvish said. “But to me I wasn’t that frustrated at that point when I saw it the first time.”

 

source

Insightful discussion of drug addiction and the destructive “war on drugs”

This guy, Johann Hari, wrote an excellent, comprehensive and very readable book called Chasing The Scream, about the almost unimaginable horrors of the misguided century-long WAR ON DRUGS.  His book lays out what he learned about the nature of drug addiction and the best policies to help addicts.  He contrasts these successful programs with the endless War on Drugs which winds up killing addicts, and many others.   Here he delivers a talk that distills the book (which I highly recommend) into a smart 14:42.   

Mala in se vs. mala prohibita

I was once friends with a judge, a very smart man, who hipped me to this important distinction, which goes back to to the roots of Common Law– the principles our legal code is based on.   There are two kinds of crime: the malum in se— a common sense crime that is morally wrong and hideous in and of itself (cutting the limbs off a healthy baby only to cause agony comes to mind) and the malum prohibita, a crime that is a crime only because a law makes it so.   

It is a distinction most people never even consider.   For purposes of sometimes racist law enforcement in America, for example, by those who cry out for “Law and Order!”, no distinction is visible between these two very different kinds of law.   It is part of the ignorance and self-righteousness of fucking racists who rail against criminals and it’s the driving force behind America’s world leadership in mass incarceration and criminalization of the poor.

In 1925 in America it was illegal to buy or consume whiskey or beer.  That was Prohibition, when the Constitution was actually amended to make that the law of the land.   The experiment went badly and was abandoned about 13 unlucky years later when the Constitution was amended again to repeal that disastrous attempt to “legislate morality.”   

What was the moral issue being legislated?    Not that it was wrong to have a drink of alcohol once in a while, but that it was a grave social ill for masses of poor men to spend all of their pay getting drunk, starving their family and beating them.  There had been a widespread epidemic of drunkenness and violence among mobs of underpaid American working men in the decades before there were any labor laws in the country.  It was a massive social problem, the unfortunate synergy of hard work, poverty and alcohol. 

It turned out not be a crisis that could be cured by banning alcohol and locking up people who wanted to drink it.  After a bloody criminal reign of terror that made millionaires of criminals who organized into national syndicates to circumvent the law, and a social problem only made worse by an ill-designed law that criminalized a popular form of recreation and punished everyone (while causing millions of Americans to hold the law itself in contempt), the nation came to its senses and the law was changed.

During Nixon’s first term as president he needed a harsh law to enforce against a generation that hated him.   Nixon is on tape referring to his many enemies by words I shouldn’t write here unless I put them in quotes: “fags”, “homos”, “kykes”, “niggers”, “spics”, etc.   Nixon could not make a law to imprison these despised minorities directly, so he targeted something many of his more outspoken enemies enjoyed: marijuana.   The Controlled Substances Act criminalized the use of certain drugs according to their “dangerousness”.  Marijuana was placed in the most dangerous category of drug: highly addictive and with absolutely no medicinal value.  It remains there today, in spite of its many known medicinal uses and a wide consensus that it is no more harmful, is even far less harmful, than alcohol.  The Controlled Substances Act, enforced strictly, allows the police to arrest people en masse, under a federal law, if they are smoking pot, say, during an otherwise lawful political protest.

Remember mala in se and mala prohibita.   If you criminalize something, like marijuana, it gives you license to stop and frisk someone you suspect might be carrying it.  If they resist a search, a policeman can legally use a bit of force.  If things escalate, and the suspect (suspected of a malum prohibitum) tries to run, rarely, if ever, will a cop be prosecuted for shooting the fucking defiant criminal in the back.  

I am thinking of this in context of the current president’s most recent noise about doing something about the opioid crisis in the United States.  The crisis was created largely by overprescription of deceptively marketed, highly addictive prescription opioids sold in a lying, multibillion dollar pharmaceutical scam orchestrated by a very rich executive of dubious morality, a person who will never be held accountable anywhere, a scumbag named Richard Sackler.   Trump spoke of the opioid crisis, during his campaign, to audiences in poor areas where hopeless people were turning to opioids in despair, and they cheered, because the lying Reality TV superstar was promising people in the rust belt and coal country that he’d give them their shit jobs back when he was president.   

Tens of thousands died of opioid overdoses last year, about 150 Americans are dying opioid caused deaths daily now, according to the CDC.   Trump signed an executive order in March, scrawling his name bigly on an order creating a commission to study how to best end this crisis.  We heard little more about it (the super-qualified Jared Kushner was at one point tasked with ending the crisis, remember) until he once again rightly called it a National Emergency in an August speech, and promised, with his usual sincerity, to take immediate steps to deal with it.

The other day he ordered his Health Secretary to get busy fixing the opioid crisis, calling the crisis a National Public Health Emergency.  A man with a shaky grasp of nuance, the president may or may not have known that the funding for a National Emergency (which his own commission urged him to declare in July) can tap into billions, while funding for a Public Health Emergency can tap into a fund of only $57,000, at present.   You can read about that here, if you have the stomach for a short article.

Here is the official position of the Trump administration on our nation’s overall drug crisis, voiced by Jeff Sessions, a man deemed too racist to be confirmed as a federal judge (imagine how fucking racist you have to be not to hop over that bar):

AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this year, Attorney General Jeff Sessions vowed a major revival of the so-called war on drugs. This is Sessions speaking at the Department of Justice headquarters as he rescinded two Obama-era memos that encourage prosecutors to avoid seeking inordinately harsh sentences for low-level drug offenses.

ATTORNEY GENERAL JEFF SESSIONS: Going forward, I have empowered our prosecutors to charge and pursue the most serious offense, as I believe the law requires, most serious, readily provable offense. It means that we’re going to meet our responsibility to enforce the law with judgment and fairness. It is simply the right and moral thing to do. … And we know that drugs and crime go hand in hand. They just do. The facts prove that so. Drug trafficking is an inherently dangerous and violent business. If you want to collect a drug debt, you can’t file a lawsuit in court. You collect it with the barrel of a gun.

(the rest of an excellent discussion  is here)

Now let’s parse Sessions’ statement for just the ten seconds it deserves.  We have laws that allow us to punish people for a legislatively created crime.  Let us harshly punish these criminals who are, by definition, committing crimes, and often deadly crimes in furtherance of their other crimes.  “It is simply the right and moral thing to do,” says the moral dwarf, simply, citing irrefutably circular logic based in an unamended Nixon era law. 

I’ve often thought the proper term to refer to an outspoken homophobe is, simply, “fucking homo,” though I know it would not be politically correct to do so — as well as offensive to my gay siblings.  Think about it, though.   A loud anti-Semite should be publicly referred to (by Jews, of course, only by Jews, yo) as often as possible as a “fucking kyke”, I think.    What would hurt these hateful types more than constantly being referred to as what they hate? 

Tempting as it is to call the racist Attorney General, our nation’s top law enforcement official, a “nigger” (and what could be a crueler blow to the pride of this prissy, racist bitch of the southland?) I’ll refrain in the interests of not alienating anyone who would be offended by the objectively offensive term.   What would be the point of my giving such offense, suh?  It would simply not be the right and moral thing to do. 

Then again, right and moral are such problematic terms, as we see every day.   And mala in se and mala prohibita are often two very, very different things, the latter often driven by political calculation, preservation of privilege and perpetuation of lack of same.   Look at our prison population for a moment, and see the disproportionate lock down and disenfranchisement (another desired outcome by the Sessions crowd) of minority criminals who pled guilty to selectively enforced mala prohibita involving randomly criminalized substances. 

Makes me wanna holler.

How To Kill Creativity

Perhaps the single most important thing to do, if you wish to extirpate the creative impulse, is to remove joy and spontaneity.   Replace that flush of love that makes somebody dance with a formula to master that will allow them to know exactly where the beat is that they are dancing on.   When dealing with a young person, crushing, or perverting, a love of creativity is fairly easily done.   Take something like singing, which most people like to do and do quite naturally.   

Form a group of children, call it The Singer’s Group.  Make them sit quietly while you tell them all about the joy of singing, the history of human song, the mammalian love of vocalizing going back to the songs of the whale and before.   Then, tell them what they will sing and instruct them, note by note, pausing to point out wherever they have overstayed a dotted half note. 

By this procedure you will find out two things: which children are most anxious to please their teachers and their parents, and which are most hellbent on being creative at any price.   

It’s just me, probably, but I would infinitely prefer to play in a room full of the second kind of child.

 

Cross section of a piece of shit (a few pieces, actually)

 Patrick Radden Keefe  in the current issue of The New Yorker:

Richard Sackler worked tirelessly to make OxyContin a blockbuster, telling colleagues how devoted he was to the drug’s success. The F.D.A. approved OxyContin in 1995, for use in treating moderate to severe pain. Purdue had conducted no clinical studies on how addictive or prone to abuse the drug might be. But the F.D.A., in an unusual step, approved a package insert for OxyContin which announced that the drug was safer than rival painkillers, because the patented delayed-absorption mechanism “is believed to reduce the abuse liability.” David Kessler, who ran the F.D.A. at the time, told me that he was “not involved in the approval.” The F.D.A. examiner who oversaw the process, Dr. Curtis Wright, left the agency shortly afterward. Within two years, he had taken a job at Purdue.

source

USA! USA!!!

I got a kind solicitation from a bot/person recently who wrote, of a fairly incoherent first draft of an ambitious recent post on this blahg:  

Would it be OK if I cross-posted this article to WriterBeat.com? Therev is no fee; I’m simply trying to add more content diversity for our community and thought this was insightful. I’ll be sure to give you complete credit as the author. If “OK” please let me know via email.

I visited the site, and read this insightful piece:

How to debate the subject of inequality with liberals

by Ari Silverstein Oct 2, 2017 – 8:22am

Of all the issues that separate liberals from conservatives, I’d argue inequality is the one where the two sides are the furthest apart on.  Typically liberals vent about the pay of corporate CEOs or bankers and compare their salaries to minimum wage workers, teachers or anyone that gets paid less.  Then they advocate for higher taxes on the rich or higher minimum wages as the means to fix inequality.  Conservatives usually counter with something along the lines of “the free market should decide what we make for what we do.”  Many than add “In America we promise equal opportunity not equality of outcome.”

If you’re a conservative, never say something like that!

It’s impossible to have equal opportunity for all.  The rich will send their children to the best schools, their children will then exit without the burden of debt and be handed a good paying job from a successful relative.  In other words, opportunity to succeed for the wealthy is bound to be far superior to the opportunity of success for the poor.

My advice to all Republicans/conservatives is to embrace inequality as being something completely healthy and natural within any capitalist system.  Only under socialist governance is the liberal dream of equality possible and we all know what socialism does to economic growth.  Of course liberals will counter by saying that “inequality has gotten worse” but they’ll fail to count the increase in food stamps, unemployment, housing assistance, EITC payments.   But now we’re into the weeds, stick with the concept that equality isn’t something to be celebrated and there is no such thing as equality of opportunity.

Good point, avoid the specifics and stick to the fact that some people just have to be brutally fucked so that others can have obscene wealth in a society whose laws are written by their paid hacks.   Made me hope Ari isn’t Jewish, reading this, though, his name suggests otherwise.   We Jews have enough trouble being a light unto the nations without this kind of insight.  (I’m only glad he didn’t get paid for the article).

I’m also hoping the philanthropic Sackler motherfuckers who have profited so handsomely from the opioid addiction/overdose crisis are not Jewish.  I guess I may have to read the rest of this article. 

Oh fuck:

Arthur and his brothers, the children of Jewish immigrants from Galicia and Poland, grew up in Brooklyn during the Depression

Oy yoy yoy…

In 1997, Arthur was posthumously inducted into the Medical Advertising Hall of Fame, and a citation praised his achievement in “bringing the full power of advertising and promotion to pharmaceutical marketing.” Allen Frances put it differently: “Most of the questionable practices that propelled the pharmaceutical industry into the scourge it is today can be attributed to Arthur Sackler.”

Snapshot of a Complete Asshole

I should not let myself be distracted, I should not let myself be distracted…

A couple of weeks ago four U.S. servicemen were killed in Niger.  Two were named Johnson, one black, one white.  One was named Black; he was white.  Why they were killed in an unarmored vehicle in Niger, although the military is still actively investigating the weeks’ old the incident,  is obvious — fighting a secret worldwide war on TERROR.  Duh!  

We must, we are told, wage a relentless and borderless war against TERROR and be eternally vigilant until we have killed all of those violent extremists who hate us enough to resort to TERROR.  Our leaders have kept us all aware of this terrible, uh, fact since the World Trade Towers came down and the Pentagon took a hit in the fall of 2001.  

The WAR ON TERROR, although plainly impossible to win with military force alone, has been used as the excuse for a lot of inexcusable mischief, mayhem, murder and manipulation, but that is another story for another time.

The body of one of the four dead Americans, Sgt. La David Johnson, was apparently not found until 48 hours or so after the ambush.   When the four dead Americans were eventually sent back to the U.S., their coffins draped in American flags, the widows, at least in the case of La David Johnson’s wife, Myeshia, were not allowed to see the dead bodies inside the coffins.   Maybe it was because they were beyond recognition, I don’t know.    La David Johnson’s widow cried that she was prevented from seeing so much as his hand, to be sure it was really him in the box.

Our president called the widow of La David Johnson.  A condolence call, of a certain style.  The widow was apparently not consoled by the call.   Our president called the widow a liar, claiming angrily that he had fucking consoled her.  (In fairness to the president, he claimed only that he’d been very respectful, that she was lying about him not remembering her husband’s name and that a “wacky” congresswoman who’d SECRETLY listened in on the call was a fucking liar). *

He had his four star general Chief-of-Staff John Kelly make a long televised speech, during which Kelly lamented the lost dignity of our society, the mistreatment of women included, how nothing is sacred anymore.  Kelly then surrendered the shaky moral high ground he was shifting on, claiming that the self-aggrandizing Democratic politician listening in to the president’s call to the widow had been eavesdropping, that the nosy Representative had deliberately distorted the president’s words of condolence (Kelly neglected to mention that the widow and the representative were in a car together, or that the call was on the widow’s speakerphone, creating the impression that the Florida representative had a sinister ability to wiretap at will), was an “empty barrel”, talking shit, a lying partisan viciously trying to politicize a tragedy, someone who had falsely claimed credit for securing funding for a new FBI headquarters in South Florida.   

(Although, in fairness to everybody, and not that it’s a gigantic detail in the overall hideous picture — except coming from the mouth of a general speaking in the context of respect for the fallen, and perhaps to the family and colleagues of Jerry Dove — the second murdered FBI agent referenced by Kelly was named Jerry Dove, not Duke as Kelly said.  You’d think somebody on the general’s staff could have hit Google to fact-check the speech before Kelly gave it, wrote the correct names of the two dead heroes on a card for him.  No attention to detail in President ADHD’s post-reality administration. SAD!). [1] [2]

The widow was interviewed shortly after Kelly’s news conference.  She explained that the congresswoman, a long time mentor to the family, had been in the car when Trump called and had reported the president’s remarks accurately.   

Our thin-skinned, bottomlessly needy president attacked Myeshia Johnson vigorously on Twitter for not being grateful for something that had been very difficult for him.   He might as well have called her a lying cunt.   We would expect no less from the man, but still.

 

* Screen Shot 2017-10-26 at 12.53.42 PM.png

Adroitly done, Lyin’ Don. 

Facts?

Poem

I spend my days
with a dying cat,
conversing with
a talkative skeleton  

The cat is brutally cute,
but mean as a snake,
the skeleton is witty and
sometimes insightful,
but long, long dead

I am clearly the
one
pulling his strings
in conversation
as the cat looks away

My friends, shed no tear
for me
I’m doing what’s needed

there is no greater calling.

 

Tying Up Loose Ends

“Well, you know, Elie, the idea of closure is pretty much a fantasy,” said the skeleton of my father.  “I mean, it happens once in a while, I’m sure, but it’s so often featured in popular drama that we’re led to believe it’s something to expect.  Closure is like hitting the perfect bullseye in a darkened room, it’s the dazzling exception, not the rule.   At least that was always my experience.  If you’re looking for closure here, you may be at this for the rest of your life.”   

He had a point.   

“I know you’d rather continue this conversation than do the hard work ahead of you to get paid, get this book finished and out into the world.  I don’t blame you for that– though, of course, when I was alive I’d have been the first to give you shit about your inability to finish your project.   And having a long history of incomplete or failed projects, it would have stung you like a squadron of angry wasps.   I’m not going to do that, it’s not my point here.  Two years is not a long time to work on a first book, particularly as ambitious an undertaking as this one.”

That’s kind of you, dad.  Better late than never, I suppose, even if I do have to put the words into your mouth myself.   

“Well, that’s the way a lot of things work, Elie,” said the skeleton.  “Maybe that’s your closure right there, writing a better ending than life handed you.  Although, to be honest about it, I think our last conversation gave you a better ending than you yourself could have written.”   

It was a kind of closure, actually.   To be told, with virtually your last breaths, that I had been right, or at least trying to do the right thing, all along, while you’d been the angry adversary too frightened to be a human being.  Nice dramatic arc to that senseless struggle, eh?   

“I told you how much I regretted having seen everything as black and white, as a zero sum game.  It’s the worldview of a fucking moron.  I should have been smarter than that,” the skeleton shook his head on a rattly neck.

“Well, anyway Elie, we’ve got to wrap this up.  I’ll leave you with a very simple example of how easily anyone of our deadly conflicts could have been avoided.  Take our long bitter argument over whether people can change or not, obviously if I was not being an eternal two year-old, of course people can change, many things about themselves, we see it all the time. And of course, there are also inborn dispositions, innate talents and disabilities, a disposition to be unafraid, or easily deterred.  The tendency to get frustrated easily — you can learn to do better but the tendency will always be there, waiting for a moment of weakness. 

“It was idiotic of me to fight for some ridiculous absolute victory in a complex argument with a lot of validity on both sides, instead of just allowing for the human nuance that can, and should, be part of every intelligent exchange between two people.  You made some excellent points, I made some, why not take the best of the two points of view, learn from each other, instead of strafing and dropping bombs?” 

You’re preaching to the choir director, pops.

“So look, one tangible result of this long war we had, the history of our tormented family, the screaming atonal opera around the dinner table every night, is that this book you’re working on has to be a bestseller, in your mind, or you will have failed again.  Failed in telling my story, failed in doing something amazing and award-winning.    Hitler will have won, our large family massacred and consigned to the septic tank of history for nothing, no fucking McCarthur grant for you, genius boy.  That’s partly on me.”   

Not any more, dad.  You’re resting in peace now.  All that shit is on me, and I’ll take it.  Put it in a to-go bag, would you?   

“Taking it home to Whippie the Slave Dog, are you?” said the skeleton.

Yep. 

“Tahn-gah-NYEE-eekah!  Tuss-KEEEE-geee!   Brrrritish Emmm-pire!” said the skeleton, in an outburst of unfathomable glee. 

“You have stuff to add to this account, and even more to subtract, but, take a tip from a wise old skeleton and wait until you get your advance before you start that hard work.   You’ll have your hands full first just preparing a succulent enough slice to help you get an agent.”     

Righty-Oh.   

“Nighty night,” said the skeleton, with what could have been a wink.