Author Archives: oinsketta

Death sneaks in again

It is sometimes tempting to call the workings of our corporate world evil.  A ninety year-old woman, until her recent broken hip fiercely independent, lives out her last days in a bare bones hospital ward where her needs are ignored, though she is kept miserably alive, her tab paid by Medicaid.   There may or may not be a government agency that can help her.  Sekhnet and I lack legal standing to advocate for her, though I got two numbers today that may allow Margaret to advocate for herself.    

The ACA, which right-wing zealots and “Birthers” are still bent on abolishing as an illegitimate “Negro” plan, mandates that low income citizens buy private insurance on their state’s health exchange.  New York State of Health Marketplace was designed by Kafka, during an LSD nightmare.  The agency is run by an unaccountable political appointee director (Donna Frescatore) who has made it her agency’s policy for no worker to divulge her name.   They have no effective method of correcting their many errors, the wait for an “appeal” is months’ long.  

A more vexing collection of useless, low-paid motherfuckers I have never encountered, and I am a veteran of Adult Protective Services, the New York Housing Authority and the Housing Court’s Guardian ad Litem program.  I have seen hideous bureaucracies.   The unaccountable agency entrusted with providing health care to low income citizens in New York State is by far the worst.  

Had a nice chat today with a guy from NYS of Health Marketplace Appeals, Patrick, very patient– though even he had his limits in that regard.   My appeal should be conducted over the phone in a month or two, after that, presumably, I should be allowed to pay only what the law requires and not twice what the law requires, as I have been paying since an erroneous denial in January.

While talking to a social worker at the Department for the Aging, who spoke on the QT since I lacked legal standing to have the conversation on behalf of a mere friend, I had a call from Sekhnet.   Sekhnet has been overwhelmed and tearful lately, in part due to the steroids she’s taking for her breathing troubles.   She has been worried about my potentially dangerous kidney disease, and the fact that virtually my entire vegetarian diet is composed of foods, I learned yesterday,  very bad for compromised kidneys.  She’s been crying because Skaynes, our beloved cat, had test results the other day that showed his one kidney is in trouble, this in addition to a flare up of pancreatitis.  

I broke away from the kind, long-winded social worker, put her on a brief hold, and took Sekhnet’s call.   She was sobbing.   “Liz is dead,” she told me.  I expressed my sorrow, told her who I was talking to and said I’d call her right back.

Liz was the long-time partner of Tony, a gregarious fellow we met while he stood smoking cigarettes in front of Sekhnet’s building.   It emerged that Tony lived on the second floor with a shy, agoraphobic woman named Liz, a lover of cats (they hosted two former strays, Sid and Gus), and that it would be great for us to get together some time.   Tony explained that he’d have to work on Liz, and his work seemed to be a success.  We had dinner, after researching what Liz, a diabetic, could safely eat.   I think it was garbanzo bean pasta we finally made.  (To be strictly accurate, this dinner occurred after we returned from our trip).

Shortly after we first chatted with Liz and Tony, Skaynes began vomiting frequently and rarely coming out of his bed.  We were scheduled to leave for a two week trip to Israel in a few days.   Liz, Tony and our old friends’ son Avram generously stepped in to take care of Skaynes.   They wrangled the cantankerous cat into his carrier and ferried him back and forth to the vet for treatments.   The treatments were daily for a week or more.  Skaynes recovered while we were in Israel, we got their medical updates by email.  Liz and Tony (and the indefatigable Avram) had saved his life, and enabled our long-planned trip to happen, and we felt very grateful.  

We got together with them another couple of times.  Then they were having troubles, Tony had resumed drinking, after years on the wagon and in AA.  Liz had a past that included drug addiction and she could not tolerate this relapse.  There was tension.  Tony moved out, moved back in, was on a job in New Jersey when he had a fatal heart attack.  

Liz affected an air of stoicism, but the tragedy made her no more zealous about checking her diabetes monitor.  She’d been found in a diabetic coma before.  Tony said the beeping of her monitor annoyed her and she’d often turn the machine off rather than do what the beeping was reminding her to do.

After Tony died, Liz lived alone with Sid and Gus, in the apartment owned by her mother.  Her mother lives in Florida and needs money, is in the process of selling Liz’s longtime home.  Packages sat outside Liz’s apartment door for days at a time.   I followed up with Sekhnet who contacted Liz.  She was reassured when Liz finally returned a call, sent her some adorable animal emails (Liz volunteered at a cat shelter) with a funny note and also inquired about Skaynes.     More packages outside her door the other day.  Sekhnet could get no answer from Liz lately.  She convinced a neighbor with the key to have a look today.

The neighbor discovered Liz’s dead body.  One of the cats was sitting next to her dead body.  The cats had not been fed for several days.  The last email from Liz, about a week ago, noted that a dog will sit sadly by their master’s dead body and starve, too depressed to eat.  A cat will do the same, until they get unbearably hungry and start eating the dead master’s face.   The neighbor fed the cats and called Sekhnet.  

When I got off the phone with the social worker I called Sekhnet back and did my best to soothe her, though there is not that much real soothing to be given under terrible circumstances like this.   The world can be a cold and cruel place and one must count oneself fortunate only to be fighting with corporate cocksuckers, while Death, smug and implacable, waits with the infinite patience of one who has never been denied, to snuff out your last breath.

Goodbye from the Skeleton

black vulture-Coragyps-atratus-001

“Listen, Elie, I can’t tell you how gratifying it’s been to have these conversations with you, talks we should have had when I was alive, but it’s time to say goodbye,” said the skeleton of my father from his grave outside of Peekskill, the cursed little town where his misery began.

 “You know, your hard work in turning these 860 pages into a book begins now, and I see you’ve been dancing around it, that look on your face, writing about this fucking reality TV huckster, and that politically adept blowjob master judge who put you through hell years ago, and everything else.   I don’t have any advice for you about how to tell my story, but I have to think that talking to me, at this point, is no help.”  A black vulture soared by overhead, as if on cue.  

“You know, now that I’m thinking about it, you should probably go back and cut just about every word you put into my mouth.  That’s probably half of the 800 plus pages right there.  Leave the characteristic things I used to say, like calling a cheap car a ‘shit box.’   Schwartzappel drove a shit box, you rode in it once, you know exactly what I’m talking about.”

“As I’m trying to give you advice I realize I really have none to give, I never tried to write a book.  Think of it like a funeral oration, maybe.  You recall how you admired the way I conjured Eli and Arlene at their funerals?  For a moment each one was alive in that hall, standing there like themselves right next to their dead bodies in the coffin.   Look, Elie, if I could have winked at you from my coffin when they took me out of the hearse and popped the lid to make sure you were burying the right guy, I would have.  You recall the shards of pottery on my eyes and mouth?   The five or six day white beard I was sprouting?  … I know I’m not helping.”  

People don’t attempt this, what I am trying to do.  

“Don’t question that, Elie, it’s in your nature, and it’s within your power.   Most people don’t spend as many hundreds and thousands of hours polishing a talent as you have with your writing.   Lives of quiet desperation, Elie, look around at the people you know, running, running, running.   I used to say of Caroline that she always ran a full flight pattern, she was always frantically taking off, touching down, taking off.   When you live that kind of frenetic life your demons take care of themselves, except perhaps when you lash out, or crash your car, or whatever.   You have slowed your life down to carefully examine things.  You may not be getting paid, but it’s not like you aren’t working hard every day.”

Fucking hard work, Brownie.  

“Yeah, listen, I get it.  You have a weirdly gigantic sort of ambition, I have to say.   Here is a father who was in many ways a monster to you and your sister, and you are paying him the respect of putting the jagged puzzle of his three-dimensional human contradiction of a life together.   You recognize the truth of what I admitted as I was dying– that by two years old my life was over.  It was true to me, because I could never recover from the brutality I experienced in the beginning of my life.”  

“Trite as it is, I offer the fucking Hitler example.   The young mass-murdering demagogue was repeatedly brutalized by his autocratic, child-beating father.  It doesn’t let him off the hook for becoming a psychopathic mass murderer, but it explains why someone with his genetic set-up, beaten regularly, became a mass-murdering psychopath while a guy like Dick Cheney just became fantastically rich and sinisterly powerful, the thousands of faceless brown people he had a hand in killing were not the point of the exercise, as it was with Hitler.”  

“You know, you try to understand your feeling of helplessness, while doing everything in your power to push the feeling out of your head.   If I could seem tough, and get people to respect me, I thought I was powerful.   It was the theory of a two year-old, kind of like this reality TV huckster posing as the president now.  If you blow shit up, and glare defiantly at the cameras afterwards, you are presidential.  Real strength, Elie, is being vulnerable, being unafraid to connect to people, relate to them as equals.  But my nerves were too flayed, too often, too young.   You go to your mother for comfort, as you see those tiny kittens in Sekhnet’s backyard do, that’s nature.  Your mother is holding an improvised whip and lashes you in the face with a look of implacable hatred on her face.  Try that one on…”

The black vulture made another lazy circle in the blue sky above the graves.  I wondered briefly what he was looking for.  I think he was a black vulture.

“Well, all this is neither here nor there.   You probably ought to finish that letter to A.G. Schneiderman, get your arguments out there to have government oversight of the unregulated health industry in New York State.  You then should finish that book proposal your old friend’s friend the literary agent might be interested in.  I notice you sent nothing out for publication or rejection, as you vowed to, by the twelfth anniversary of my death, two days ago, but that too is neither here nor there,” the skeleton waved his hand absently and looked up.  

“Is that a black vulture or a turkey vulture?  Neither here nor there, Elie.  You need to take care of your health, too.  Don’t fuck around with that kidney disease you have.  Get your skin cancers taken care of.   Eat healthy food, sleep enough and continue riding your bike.  You heard that great Moth story by John Turturro the other day, we think we are in control of our lives, but we are largely not.   In the end I have no good advice for you, Elie.  How fucking sad is that?”  

No sadder than a lot of things, dad, and less sad than some things.

 

Rigid Hierarchy — how it looks to a Commie

We don’t often question hierarchy as an organizing principle, or reckon how destructive its effects often are.   The ranking of humans by their importance, arbitrary and unfair though it often seems, is simply the way it is, like a lot of things we ask God to grant us the serenity not to worry about.  Hierarchy is ubiquitous in human affairs, going back to before recorded history, one suspects.   Societies based on competition and conquest are particularly hierarchal.  

You can picture dozens of examples.   At the top of the pyramid is a person, or small group of people, with vast power.   The will of these at the very top, often praised, guides the actions of everybody below them.  At each level people give orders to those below them and are responsible for making their immediate superiors look good.  Responsibility flows in one direction, bottom to top.  Each group of supervisors are accountable only to their more important superiors.   If they carry out their orders diligently and produce the desired metrics they might be promoted to the next rank.   Every tyranny in history has run on this model, just as every corporation does, every army, virtually every human organization you can think of, organizations that do little or no harm, even organizations that do the most good.

Hierarchy is one of those principles that seem inevitable and organic.  It seems to have arisen from nature herself.  In the jungle there is the hierarchy, we are taught, a King of the Jungle , the top predator.  The Catholic Church has a Pope, the corporation the C.E.O., the school the Principal.   When Capitalism was rising to strangle every other possible view of economic and cultural organization its rationale was as scientific as Phrenology or Eugenics, as irrefutable as Manifest Destiny: Social Darwinism.  

Charles Darwin articulated a once-controversial theory of evolution based on species changing to adapt to changing conditions.  This theory, backed by long historic and ongoing evidence, is no longer controversial among educated people [1].   Under Darwin’s theory of evolution, those individuals of a given species best able to adapt to the changing conditions survive to reproduce, their offspring who inherit these new traits have the best chance of surviving and reproducing and so forth.  There was nothing moral about evolution, it was based on natural selection, adaptation to the changing environment and survival.

“Survival of the Fittest” became the self-justifying credo of modern titans of industry, Robber Barons, the greediest, most determined and most able to amass great wealth.   Their offspring, they believed, were genetically fittest to inherit everything.   Though we may have cause to lament this arrangement at times, we don’t seriously question it, it has always been thus.  You had prehistoric tribal leaders, ancient warlords, kings, all flowing, one imagines, from obedience to the first homo sapiens who figured out how to use a devastating new weapon to kill and didn’t hesitate to use it.  

I am not thinking of hierarchy now just because I heard the president on the radio affecting tremendous, unshakable nonchalance as he danced around an interviewer’s questions.  Some see this man we have as president now as the personification of our sick society, the embodiment of everything wrong with our culture.   He was born wealthy, privileged and entitled to the best things money can buy.  He is boastful, the most boastful, he has the best boasts.   He is often untruthful.   He does not keep his word, although sometimes he does.  He does, he really does keep his word, always?, no, but sometimes he keeps his word, he keeps his word.  He surrounds himself with others born entitled as he was, like his daughter, his son-in-law, also born very, very rich because he’s a very great person.  His cabinet of billionaires dedicated to dismantling the protective agencies they were appointed to head, same deal.  The best people.  Those in his administration who are not very wealthy are very, very loyal.  They supported the president when many considered his candidacy a joke.  Who is laughing now?  Are you laughing?  I don’t see you laughing.

It would be an easy place to go in a discussion of the downside of hierarchy, but let’s not go there.   I want a simpler, more mundane example to lead off.  Your average public school in America.   The individual school that the inexperienced, platitude-choked, religious fanatic daughter and wife of billionaires now in charge of the Department of Education has vowed to privatize.  Forget her, for a moment, if you can.   We are looking at the individual school, say twenty, fifty or a hundred years ago.

The original theory of mandatory public school was to educate all children in America and give each one a real chance to participate in, and contribute to, our democracy.  The public education system produced some impressive results at certain times.  My alma mater, The City College, was once known (long before my time there) as the Harvard of the Poor.  CCNY produced many illustrious alumni in a wide range of fields, including ten Nobel Prize winners.   It remains a shining example of what low-cost or free education can do for motivated citizens.  The GI plan after World War II that gave many poor veterans college scholarships and brought many into the middle class is another example.

Public education was almost never available to all, and it was also never truly a meritocracy.   Early advocates like the genius Thomas Jefferson spoke of raking the educable few from the rubble of the masses (a phrase I got from my father, and is apparently, if one believes Google, only cited on this blahg, several times over the years).  The actual Jefferson quote, in advocating the common school, was:

“By this means, twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually and be instructed in Greek, Latin, geography, and the higher branches of arithmetic at the public expense, creating a new generation of leaders without regard to wealth, birth, or accidental condition.”  

Hierarchy, again, but at least here it is proposed as some sort of meritocracy, if you can stand the stink of the poor who are not actually slaves owned by superior people, have someone rake out a few brilliant souls from the shit and you can send them to an excellent and exacting public school where they will have the opportunity to prosper.  A scholarship for those who, but for the unfortunate accident of their birth, would deserve to sit among the greatest of our nation.  

This is not the place for a discussion of the hypocrisy and failure of this exalted vision of creating a true democracy by giving all young people a good education.  It is enough to agree that the original impetus for public schools was largely a noble one.   Give a child a good, solid education that instills a lifelong taste for learning and you create an intelligent, productive, problem-solving citizen.  In the process of doing this you will find that the rate of brilliance among the children of the poor is about the same as it is among the children of the rich– once we correct for the damage done by things like malnutrition, poor prenatal care, the violence of slums, PTSD, parental despair and the like.

The American public school, which served millions of poor children, particularly once child labor was made illegal (around 1930, shockingly enough) and schooling compulsory (Mississippi, we learn from Wikipedia, was the last state to do this, in 1918)  was designed on a factory model.  

The young workers (students) arrive at the same hour, assemble in the yard, line up by class, where they are traditionally ranked by their achievement and behavior, and file silently into the school.   As a body they rise to solemnly salute the flag and the republic for which it stands.  A bell rings to tell them work time has started.   Another bell rings when it is time to switch to the next task.  They file into a cafeteria at the programmed time.   The assemblies in the auditorium are carefully managed to create a sense of community, or, if you are more cynical, conformity.  The bell rings, like a factory whistle blowing, and they exit the building en masse.

I hated school when I was a kid.  Particularly the rigid structure of the place.  I chafed at everything I found stupid, arbitrary, seemingly designed only to stifle the imagination.  I recognize now that I had the good fortune to attend one of the best public schools around.  It was a small public school in a wealthy neighborhood (we lived just on the other side of the figurative tracks) with very high academic standards, where classes were small and the school was of a size that virtually everyone knew everyone else.  

I was in elementary school when the battle over integration was being viciously fought by passionate partisans.  My mother’s good friend, a fellow-integrationist, sobbed after receiving hate mail addressed to Commie (which I found hilarious) and Nigger Lover (which somehow did not seem as funny, even though the word ‘nigger’, another word I’d never heard, seemed as intrinsically funny as ‘commie’).  Those black kids who were finally bused in got a solid education, particularly compared to the inferior one they would have gotten in their unconstitutional ‘separate but equal’ shithole in the segregated areas of Queens where they lived.  

Leave aside the School to Prison pipeline, the punitive system in which unruly students are treated as young inmates to be controlled rather than young minds to be guided toward the things that will excite their imaginations the most.  I want you to consider the average public school in an average neighborhood in any city in America.  I have worked in about a dozen of them, in New York City, maybe a few more than that.   Here is the hierarchic aspect I want to highlight.  

Teaching in these schools is famously difficult and demoralizing.   The attrition rate for new teachers is very high.  A small number of dedicated teachers go on long enough to become excellent teachers.   These people, mostly women traditionally, are unsung heroes.   They are artists, skillfully improvising with the young souls in their care to teach many things.  I have nothing but admiration for great teachers, teachers who inspire a love of learning.  Having tried teaching for a number of years, I am very aware of how much talent, dedication and generosity go into becoming a great teacher.  

If you work in a system as overwhelmed with difficulty as the public school system in a nation grotesquely divided between the increasingly wealthy and the increasingly poor, there are two different career paths.  One is to do the extremely hard work of becoming a great teacher (while also practicing social work, mediation, psychology, nursing and a number of other disciplines).  The other path is to get out of the classroom as quickly as possible and take the courses and tests to become an administrator.  

Not every person who opts for this second career path is a complete asshole, though many are.  Let me make that more precise:  not everyone who opts to become the boss of other teachers, without having mastered the difficult art themselves, is a complete asshole, the vast majority, sadly, are.    Ask any teacher you know, particularly those who worked in multiple schools.  The excellent principal is as rare as the excellent teacher.  

The trouble is, while a mediocre or poor teacher is a plague upon thirty students, a mediocre or poor principal is a plague upon the entire school, every teacher, teacher’s aid and student– and all of their families.   The public school (and private schools, I think, with their ‘head masters’, are roughly the same) is one of the most black and white top-down hierarchies around.    Principals who spent as little time as possible in the classroom, finding the path upwards by taking tests, seeking promotions to special jobs, doing favors for the more powerful, showing their reliability as politicians, have almost unlimited power over teachers.  It is just the way they do it in most school districts.   One asshole principal can demoralize an entire school community and they are accountable, luckily for them, only to the political powers in the school district who appointed them and signed off on their virtually unlimited power. 

I am reminded of this example of the principal unaccountably at the top of a hierarchy largely because of a comment I once heard from a perceptive parent. I ran a program for elementary school kids ages 7-11 where the children performed every aspect of dreaming up and creating original animation.  It was a workshop that hummed like a beehive, a community of peers that worked together, rotated jobs and solved problems together.   A father came to pick up his son as the workshop was still in progress.  He stood at the door smiling and I went over to say hello.  He told me how much his son, a friendly and creative boy who did wonderful animation and also was featured on many soundtracks, enjoyed the workshop.  Then he said “I love that it is so non-hierarchic.”   I’d never thought of it in those terms, but, damn, he hit the nail right on the head.  

We live in a competitive society where certain people get to outright cheat.   This class of people, some born to it, others determined to enter it, makes the rules to maximize their advantage in the rigged game.   I long to spend some time in a room with people doing what they love where nobody needs to dominate or be in charge.   There is an intelligence in a group of people that needs no firm hand telling it how to think, what the best way is.   You don’t see it in action often, which is very sad, but you can see it once in a while.  A group of old friends sitting around where nobody needs to be the boss.

Ah, but listen to me go on…

 

[1]  With our usual caveat:  the theory of evolution is universally accepted by educated people except among Republican presidential candidates who are obliged to challenge it for political reasons as they cater to a vast group of American Christian fundamentalist voters who resist anything about Creation that contradicts the word of God, as they are taught it.

Anger, like longevity, has its place

My father, like most people who were viciously abused as children, was subject to rage.   When he was treated unfairly, received shabby customer service, when he confronted the most brutal things his government was doing (he spoke less of this category as time went on) when he felt disrespected, he could be angry for days at a time.  He’d marinate in his anger and hurt, ruminate, as they say now, chewing on the indigestible cause for his righteous rage like an agonized ruminant.  

He sometimes experienced physical manifestations of his anger and frustration.  During my childhood his psoraisis, which covered much of his body, would sometimes flare up.  His skin would crack and bleed, the tar baths and light treatments he took at home would no longer help and the only relief would come in a hospital.  In the hospital, the pressures on him and his frustrations greatly reduced, with only the job of getting better to focus on and many treatments employed, his tortured skin would recover within a few days.  

Being the son of an angry man, a father who often took his frustrations out on my sister and me, with projection often coming into play (my teenaged acne was my hate and rage oozing out through my pores, for example), I made overcoming my own anger a lifelong priority.  Yet any reader of these posts will quickly see that, while I have spent a long time consciously practicing my secular version of ahimsa, I am still angry enough to, for example, wish horrible retribution on pampered people who cheer America’s military might while ignoring the indiscriminate slaughter of innocents during air strikes of dubious military usefulness.    It is not a gentle thing to opine that it will take having their own children reduced to chopped meat in a drone strike to give them any insight into the highly destructive evil they are applauding and, in some cases, profiting from.

I realize now that it is not always desirable, or even possible, to avoid anger.   We are correctly taught that the only thing necessary for evil to flourish is for good people to do nothing.   Evil, injustice and indifference must be opposed.  It is best, of course, to do it effectively, without violence or escalation, without letting oneself be consumed by the anger.  Ahimsa includes speaking calmly and clearly to evil and indifferent people and being steadfast in continuing to do what needs to be done to change the intolerable situation.  One thing that is necessary for operating this way, or at least very helpful, is a like-minded community, or the whole-hearted support of at least one other person.

Driving in the rain with an old friend the other day the subject of anger came up, as it occasionally does between us.   Raised in a home where he was also subject to irrationally harsh treatment at one second’s notice, it is not necessary for either of us to make more than a quick reference to set the stage for a story of a near-confrontation with an abusive type.   We both have become better at dealing with overbearing, abusive types, but the frayed nerves and the childhood reflexes, the palpable danger of reacting emotionally to the situation, are all still very much there.  

He seemed mildly amused that I was “unable” to refrain from telling a harsh truth to a bureaucrat, the head social worker for a hospital where a ninety year-old friend of Sekhnet’s languishes in misery.   I acknowledged to the social worker that the old woman was difficult, pointed out how depressed she was, but was obliged to express my doubt that the social worker was taught in Social Work school to blame the patient for her own unhappiness.  I included this opinion in an email seeking, for a third time, an answer to a straight-forward medical follow-up for the old woman.  My friend smiled and shook his head, here I was, still unable to keep myself from throwing a little sterno on the old fire.

I spared him most of the details, just told him I was responding to a bad email written by a non-responsive jackass who was abusing a friend of Sekhnet’s and blaming an old woman for her situationally appropriate misery.

The details: instead of providing the results of the eye exam the woman had a month ago, and telling us why new glasses were not being made, as she promised, the head social worker once again promised to follow-up but spent most of the email detailing what a stuck up, miserable, uncooperative snob the patient is, how she refuses to make friends and to participate in the many monthly programs they periodically hold for patients.  A tour de force of blaming the victim, the best defense a good offense, ’twas like the breath of an unwashed asshole, venting. [1]

The old woman feels isolated and imprisoned.   She is depressed by the objectively depressing situation she finds herself in.  Many of the other patients on her hospital ward are demented, many speak no English.  The services they receive are minimal.  The food is rich in white flour and potatoes, noodles and potatoes are often served on the same paper dinner plate.  An independent, health-conscious and active woman into her late eighties, she fell and broke her hip and is now spending the rest of her life locked in this far from ideal Medicaid ward, a place she had no hand in choosing.  

Her one refuge was reading, but she can no longer see well enough to read.   After much exertion by Sekhnet and me, an eye exam was scheduled for her.  It took a few months but was finally done on March 25th.   She heard nothing further from anyone after the exam.  We followed up.  The head social worker responded that she would follow up to see what happened.  

When we followed up a second time we were treated to a long analysis of what a difficult, stuck up asshole our miserable friend is.  The question of her vision was never dealt with, except by another reference to following up with the medical department.   The social worker’s prose is appended at the bottom, read it for yourself.  She is a wonderful example of her type and very eloquent in expressing it.

This would seem to be a small evil, unless you are an old woman with no other options, kept against her will, in a Medicaid ward at a bare bones hospital on the Lower East Side.  I’d be within my rights, I suppose, to sarcastically thank the head social worker, who wrote to tell us she will no longer answer our emails since we misconstrue them and accuse her of writing things she never intended.  If you have the stomach for it, read her masterful prose poems below, judge for yourself.

I’d be within my rights, I suppose, to write, my toes still almost on the edge of the high road:  Hopefully you will never find yourself old and helpless and at the mercy of a merciless bureaucrat.   If you did, it would only be karma, and if that offends you, I deeply apologize for speaking the unflattering truth.

And cc the entire non-responsive correspondence to the director of the hospital, the hospital’s patient advocate (if any), the State Ombudsman, NYC Department for the Aging, the NYC Public Advocate’s office and anyone else who might give a rat’s ass or make this unaccountable corporate “social worker” have to defend her actions and non-actions.  

True, it seems like a lot of energy to spend, energy that might be better spent elsewhere, unless you consider the understandable despair of this abandoned old woman at the mercy of a system that clearly sees her only as a source of Medicaid payments.  Suppose she needs lasik surgery– that would probably come out of the Medicaid payments otherwise payable to the hospital for her maintenance.

The same way I find it impossible to forgive the unrepentant self-justifier, who, instead of acknowledging hurtful behavior, defends it with energetic hostility, anger at this type is still unavoidable to me.  The one thing to consider, in the case of this particular career bureaucrat gatekeeper, is if trying to hold her accountable will make things better or worse for our friend Margaret, locked up under the supervision of this creature.  

I would truly like the serenity to be able to stop thinking of galling, seemingly unresolvable, things like this, but they sit across my throat like sharp, jagged bones.  This is one of three or four such bones, crosswise in my craw right now, most related to the near impossibility of finding decent medical care at any price, and it is the only one I can theoretically do anything about at the moment.   Here the creature speaks for herself, in response to why there is still no report on the eye  exam, and then on why she will no longer answer our emails:

[1]  Ms. H_____ has rejected every attempt to have her involved in additional social situation.  She finds everything we offer beneath her.   Attempts to pair Ms. H______ with other residents (who have similar backgrounds and interest) to share stories and or for stimulation usually ends up with the other resident feeling bad about themselves because Ms. H_____ feels that they are not educated enough or somehow not smart enough for her.  I not sure what else the staff can do but continue to encourage Ms. H______ to engage and continue to invite her.

Getting Ms. H______ to attend her appointments is not without challenges.  She usually tells the staff that she will go later or tomorrow.  The staff reminds Ms. H_____ of the appointments in advance but still are faced with the stalling and delaying suggested by Ms. H_______ the day of the appointments.  The ophthalmologist has not indicated any need for eye glasses on his last consult 3/25/2017, I am asking for additional clarity as to why.  The team is aware of her upcoming appointment with the dentist on 4/20/17.

Ms. H______ is on the list to receive pet therapy, however pet therapy is a special event and not offered often.   I cannot tell you when the next pet visit will be at this time.  The recreation therapy department head is aware of the request and has assured me that Ms. H______ will be involved in the next pet visit.

her last email, which opens with a classic “if-pology”, if you are an asshole, I am truly, deeply sorry:

Good Morning

I apologize if that is how you and Ms. W______ have read into my email.   I was  stating facts of her behavior, I never blamed Ms. H_______.  Staff continues to encourage and support Ms. H_______ well-being.

Further updates to you and Ms. W______ will be done in person and with the team from now on.   I don’t want any further misunderstanding that emails often lead to.

I thank you for your response and continued support of Ms. H_____ and the Staff here at ______.

Oh, there will be no further misunderstandings, dear, none whatsoever.

More Dead Children

Democracy Now reports today that nine more children were  reportedly killed on Monday, outside the Syrian city of Tabqa, near Raqqa, as American-led coalition air strikes blew the shit out of their families.    Two of the kids were babies, one a toddler, the other six months old, too young to toddle, but that’s the price of freedom, one supposes.  Also the price for being born in ISIS’s capital in Syria.   It is best if we don’t think of collateral damage as having names, though Amy Goodman recited the names of the two youngest dead and showed photographs of them.

I know the number of dead children in the link to the Minnesota Public Radio article above was less than nine, the mass-media is pretty hard-pressed to keep track of all the civilians reduced to collateral damage over there.  In fairness to them, Americans have more pressing things to worry about than dead kids in some far off war-zone, even if we ourselves are killing them.  The mass media reports on what people want to know about.  Here’s a recent one from the NY Times, which can’t be faulted for not covering every such terrible event.  

I am beyond being sickened at the cheer-leading by wealthy mass-media talking heads every time an American president rains down death like a super-virile psychopath winning a video game.  Pundits of many political orientations raise their voices in a chorus of awed praise when an American president launches an impressive number of explosives and the explosions look dramatic.  “Now this despicable, divisive weasel is finally OUR PRESIDENT!” they gush in unison under the rockets’ red glare.

There are, I assume, rare strategic situations where we have good intelligence that a particular group of very bad actors, bad hombres, you know, are in the final stage of planning some mass murder.   A rare strategic situation where we know with virtual certainty that by killing these people, and even any innocents around them, we will prevent mass killing of many more innocent civilians.  Not many people, not even a ‘bleeding heart’ like myself, would object to lethal state action under this rare, unambiguous, self-defense scenario, killing a few violent ones to prevent a much worse slaughter.  

That said, “killing your way to peace” is generally just a way to kill and spend billions keeping the lucrative killing machine killing.   Killing for peace is like fucking for chastity, as the old anti-war t-shirt used to read. The scenario where you drone the actual murderers as they are on their way to commit mass murder might be as rare as the ticking time bomb hypothetical used by patriotic American tough guys to justify America’s use of torture.  

You know the one: to save a football stadium full of innocents who are sitting within range of the ticking time bomb you have to torture the bomber til he gives up the location of the bomb and the code to disarm the bomb.  

The absurdity of this scenario is underscored when you consider the high-minded, committed type of fanatic who would plant such a bomb and be willing to die to serve his perverted notion of the holy.  

The other side of this argument —  that we must be as violent as our most violent enemies — of course, is that even though neither of these situations might ever have happened, it doesn’t mean they are not real hypotheticals. This logic is an example of why it is almost always pointless to argue with true believers.  They will stop at nothing.

  In a case where you could have targeted the nineteen fanatics who were about to blow up the airliners and all the people on 9/11– sure, bombs away, kill them all.  Fuck ’em, drone ’em, drown ’em.  Bring ’em back to life, kill ’em again, repeat.

Most of the airstrikes being launched by our military are nothing like that, though.   The MOAB (“Mother of All Bombs”, tip of the hat to the lynched Saddam Hussein for that great name), that giant American bomb exploding a square mile of Afghanistan a week or two ago — the one that made this shaky, greedy, deliberately ill-informed president suddenly appear so irresistibly presidential to the mass media– nobody knows what that was for, exactly, though we must say, it appears to have served its intended public relations purpose.

I don’t wish anything bad on these talking heads on TV who applaud indiscriminate, dramatic destruction, nor on the career politicians who advocate and applaud unlimited murderous airstrikes.    Oh, actually, just one bad thing, a drop of Biblical-style justice.  Let their young children be accidentally reduced to chopped meat by missiles launched in American-led coalition airstrikes, you know “friendly fire” collateral damage.   Might change the timbre of their fucking hosannas to American presidents who commit these things once quaintly considered war crimes.  Might make them slightly more circumspect about beating the war drums and cheering into the megaphone when the president blows things up, or when the going starts getting tough for them.

Detention

New York State has a little known legal procedure called Article 78.  Article 78 allows you, once you’ve “exhausted all administrative remedies” with a government agency, to apply to the court for relief if you’ve been deprived of something without a good reason.   The government agency, like most private businesses, which are given tremendous latitude with the profit-based “business judgement rule”, can show virtually any reason for its actions.   As long as there is any reason at all, even a theoretical one, you lose again.   The burden is on you to show that the decision is based on nothing at all, is, in fact, “arbitrary and capricious,” in the words of Article 78.

Presumably if the ruling is simply arbitrary, too bad.  If the decision is capricious, without also being arbitrary, it is upheld and you are, once again, shit out of luck.  You must prove that no evidence to support the decision against you was submitted, that your evidence was ignored, that the agency didn’t follow its own policies, that your opportunity to be heard was utterly devoid of any of the niceties of due process.   Arbitrary and capricious is a low bar, in fact, it’s a bar painted on the ground, almost anything can drag itself over it.   Still, it’s surprising how many bureaucratic decisions are both arbitrary and capricious.  

The punchline, of course, and you know there has to be one in our puckish legal system, is that the statute of limitations to bring an Article 78 proceeding is arbitrarily and capriciously short, either 90 or 120 days, depending, and good luck figuring out which applies to which agency.  Once your SOL is up you are SOL*.  

There is also no requirement that decisions subject to Article 78 review inform you of the existence of Article 78.   That would give people who are arbitrarily and capriciously fucked an unfair advantage, obviously.   The best thing to do, if you know a lawyer who tells you about Article 78, is get your papers ready to file in court before the decision against you is made.   

I am thinking of Article 78 out of the blue, another example of the way our laws are set up, with every appearance of fairness and transparency, but written as compromises with the powerful to favor those powerful entities who like their sex with or without consent.   Many of the indignities suffered by masses of people are covered under the maxim de minimis non curat lex, “the law does not concern itself with trifles.”  I was in court today, on jury duty, and I was reminded of the whole hideous enterprise as I bided my time waiting to be dismissed from service.

At lunchtime I went over to Chinatown, passing under part of the Lower Manhattan Detention Center.   I recall it was still being built in 1991 or ’92 when I took my third grade class from Harlem to Chinatown on the A train.  The parent chaperones didn’t show up on the day of the trip, and against the advice of all of my colleagues, me and about eighteen little Harlemites made our way, on a very hot day,  to amaze the waiters at Hop Kee with the kids’ skill with chopsticks.  It was a great trip.  

On the way back to the A train we passed the Detention Center, then still under construction.   A worker was hosing down the wet cement.  Fatima, looking thirstily at the splashing water, asked me if the man would give them a drink.  I said I had no idea, suggested she go find out.  She asked him and he smiled and patiently held the hose as all the kids drank their fill.   Fatima was delighted with herself and told me happily, her face gleaming with water, “see, Mr. Widaen, it never hurts to ask!”

That detention center was at the time named for Bernie Kerik, a crony of Rudy Giuliani.  Giuliani, a glory seeking, autocratic, former federal prosecutor, was mayor of New York at the time.  He told his cops to take no shit from punks on the street.  Under his watch the city quietly paid millions in police brutality cases, and no doubt saved just as many millions in cases that were never brought, like the ones where all the punks/victims were deported.  Kerik was Giuliani’s friend and enforcer.  

The complex of holding cells by the criminal court was called the Bernard Kerik Detention Center while it was being built and for years, until, in fact, the very day Kerik was sentenced to prison time for being a flagrantly corrupt and lawless asshole.   I saw the next day that the sign had finally been changed.   I think it’s called the Lower Manhattan Detention Center now.  I passed it on the way to and from lunch today.  It got me thinking about detention.  

An abstraction to most Americans, the lock-up is  also brutal reality to millions of Americans.  We have more people locked up here than any nation in the civilized, or even uncivilized, world.  A chart I saw the other day, based on FBI statistics, shows that 46% of the current American federal prison population is locked up for nonviolent drug-related offenses.  This site has some good charts and articles, click through the charts midway down the first page to see some eye-popping statistics.  (“The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic” — attributed to Stalin).

My point is, in America, for the crime of preferring one recreational drug over another, you can be locked up for a long time.   In 2017, under a law pushed through by Nixon to punish and incapacitate his hated enemies, hippies and blacks, to fuck them up in perpetuity, going on fifty years now.  It’s the law, so be assured there is nothing arbitrary and capricious about it.

The power of state violence is an awesome thing we are all grateful for when it is used to save us from violence, from predation.  Some people are violent criminals and need to be taken off the street.  Forcing a non-violent person, who threatens nobody, to lie on the ground at gunpoint, shackling them, shooting them, locking them down, are not things to be done lightly.  Except that here, increasingly, they are, by militarized police departments for offenses like disrespect and running to escape prison time for the illegal drugs in your pocket. 

I felt like a fish in a frying pan today during seven boring hours on jury duty– the full power of the state and its armed agents ready to slap me down if I did something stupid.   Imagine being locked in a cage, subjected to the violence of the state day after day after day, say the wrong thing and get a crack across the face.  Your word against mine, maggot.   Solitary confinement for you, asshole. Picture being locked up awaiting trial and sentencing to a long term in the slammer because you like to drink scotch rather than bourbon.   USA!  USA!!!!

 

*  Louis Armstrong recorded a tune called SOL Blues, Shit out of Luck Blues.  SOL is also a law student abbreviation for statute of limitations, the timeframe for bringing a legal action.

Tin Soldiers and Nixon’s Coming

Not what I need to write today, as vugging tempus sneakily continues to fugit, but this is on my mind and won’t take long.   Americans don’t learn much from history, as even a quick glance back to the not too distant past will demonstrate. 

In the early twentieth century many American workers were, apparently, heavy drinkers.  Their lives were hard, no laws protected them at work, they weren’t paid much.  When they got paid, many of them went and got drunk.  Saloons were everywhere, as were stories of families destroyed by drink.  A temperance movement, led by militant women and Christian soldiers, supported by xenophobic elements who hated the hard-drinking immigrants, managed to organize and pass an amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibiting the manufacture and sale of virtually all alcoholic drink.  

Prohibition was, by every account, a dismal failure, it did not even curtail alcohol consumption.  It gave the consumption of illegal alcohol a titillating cache, made it cool, added a naughty thrill to getting tipsy.  Prohibition failed in every respect but one — it created a class of super-wealthy criminals who organized their businesses to provide illegal booze to anyone who wanted it — and millions did.  These mega-criminals did not hesitate to arrange bloodbaths when necessary to protect their lucrative empires.   After twelve or thirteen years of futility, at the depths of the Great Depression, another amendment to the Constitution ended the failed experiment in legislating “morality”.

 Around the time Prohibition was showing itself to be a dead end another intoxicating substance was targeted for prohibition.   Cannabis grew like a weed, is called ‘weed’, and was enjoyed by many the same way martinis are enjoyed at the country club.  It gives users a nice buzz.   It was a favorite drug of Mexicans, jazz musicians (“Negroes”) and other outsiders.   It was targeted by some of the same xenophobic, racist fucks who had driven the Prohibition bus.   It was criminalized as part of a lifelong crusade by a powerful and unlikable fellow named Harry Anslinger, Assistant Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Prohibition (1929) and Commissioner of the new Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930-1962.  

Anslinger was the genius behind such masterpieces of public enlightenment as “Reefer Madness” a terrifying (or hilarious) depiction of the unspeakable evils that flow sensuously from the inhaling of these poisonous, anti-American vapors.   I remember watching that film through a haze of marijuana fog at the Elgin theatre, around 1972.  Much of the dramatic dialogue was drowned out by the guffaws and cackles of the crowd, high on the evil weed.

I remember Anslinger from a report I wrote in high school on the prohibition of cannabis, which he called “marihuana”, to emphasize its subversive foreignness.    I wrote the report under the influence of ‘marihuana’ and I remember how wry I felt the next day when I handed it in.   Anslinger was a dick.  Like many white men of his time, he was free with his hatred of blacks, Mexicans and other ‘outsiders’ and would never dream of not saying the entire “n-word”, as was his right back then, as it is now, after a quick glance around.  

Among his other accomplishments, Anslinger had the ailing Billie Holiday handcuffed to her hospital bed as she was dying to make sure she faced justice for her abuse of drugs Anslinger had crusaded against.    This was after years of persecuting her by denying her the right to earn a living (no cabaret license to perform in clubs) after her arrest for heroin possession.  He had similar campaigns, although less successful, against musicians like lifelong viper Louis Armstrong. 

A few decades later we come to President Richard Nixon, a socially awkward man of great intellect, fierce anti-Communist HUAC (“House UnAmerican Activities Committee”) prosecutor, a suspicious, even paranoid, man hated by the progressive forces that were at the time in ascendance.   He may not have welcomed the hatred of those who hated him, as the cheerful FDR famously did, but he was determined to prevail over them.  

Nixon won impressive electoral victories in part by courting racist southern Democrats with his “Southern Strategy” that brought these angry states’ rights conservatives, who’d been betrayed by LBJ and his federal Civil Rights legislation,  into the Republican fold (where they remain to this day).  Nixon shrewdly realized he could further divide the country, and more effectively rule it, by criminalizing the favored drugs of those who hated him, giving him a truncheon to smash them with.  He could use the law to vilify them, raid their meetings, break up their demonstrations, jail the lot of the lawless fucks.   The law was the Controlled Substances Act of 1970.   It classified illegal drugs according to their danger.  

Schedule One was for the most dangerous drugs:  heroin and marijuana, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms.   These drugs, according to the law, had no medicinal value, were highly addictive and very dangerous even under strict medical supervision.   On Schedule Two we have drugs like crystal meth, cocaine and prescription opioids, less addictive, less dangerous drugs with some redeeming values, according to the drafters of the Controlled Substances Act.   There are also schedules 3, 4 and 5, progressively less dangerous, but still highly regulated, drugs.  The CSA was passed in 1970, at the height of the anti-war and Civil Rights movements (and the birth of the environmental movement– the first Earth Day was in June 1970), and, unaccountably, remains the law of the land to this day.   I was probably writing that report on fucking Anslinger around the time the CSA became law.    

Nixon, we learn, was drinking more and more heavily, eventually getting drunk every night, as the pressures of being a divisive and largely hated president began crushing him.  The “Silent Majority” loved Nixon, because he was tough on crime.  One of the crimes he was toughest on was illegal drug use.  The drugs he declared war against did not include the ones that have done the most damage over the years, the ones currently causing the most death and misery: meth, opioids, alcohol.  He declared war, primarily, on the Schedule One drugs, heroin the preferred drug in ghettos nationwide, perceived and characterized as a “black drug” and marijuana, the drug of youthful rebellion against guys like Nixon.

In 1973 Nixon created the Drug Enforcement Agency.  What good is a law without a powerful, militarized agency to enforce it?   Zillions of dollars, and many lives destroyed by federal drug convictions and long prison sentences (overwhelmingly for black and Hispanic drug users) later, Nixon’s war on drugs still rages.   It is responsible for, among other things, a vast, violent Mexican drug network and vicious drug cartels everywhere illegal, highly-demanded drugs are produced (except in California, where the scene these days, I’m told, is fairly mellow).

In recent years the trend has been to recognize that marijuana is far less dangerous than methedrine, cocaine, prescription pain-killers, even alcohol. There are a host of proven medical uses for cannabis, proven in spite of the decades-long government-imposed difficulty of obtaining it for medical tests.  Still, it’s on Schedule One and, under the CSA, the DEA has the power to break down your door if a neighbor smells weed.   It doesn’t happen much nowadays, but federal law would allow it.

As an attorney I’m required to take Continuing Legal Education credits every two years to keep my license.  Being forced to take these courses is a gratuitous kick in the balls, particularly to an attorney who is not in active practice.   Most of these courses are awful.   In the current cycle I took a series online about the marijuana laws.  The courses were somewhat interesting, if also horrifying.  I learned the history of the CSA and how it pre-empts local laws about drugs.  State drug laws must be carefully crafted not to conflict with provisions of Nixon’s CSA or the federal government can sweep in with SWAT teams and fuck stoned people up, whatever the law of the state may otherwise allow.  The Obama administration had a policy of not interfering in state law on the matter of marijuana.  The new administration is overturning all of Obama’s policies, including this one.

Criminal law under our federal system is a matter for the states, each state has its own criminal code and penal laws.   Conservatives, like the Confederates who left the Union over the issue of slavery, generally are champions of “states’ rights”.   The theory is that the locality should decide what laws it wants and which it doesn’t.   There is a certain logic to this position in a nation as large and regionally diverse as ours.  One notable exception to this local rule, in the inconsistent world of modern conservatism, is enforcement of federal drug laws.  

We were treated recently to the strains of this modern conservative inconsistency delivered in the dulcet tones of the new attorney general, a southern boy once rejected from becoming a federal judge for his selective color-blindness, who stated flatly, like Nixon before him, that “good people do not smoke marijuana.”   I’m sure he’s right.  

In fairness to the Attorney General, nobody has ever proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III has any connection whatsoever to organized racists like the Klan.  The guy just gives you a sneaky feeling about his sympathies and lack of them.   He was appointed by President Trump, a man of supremely flexible principles, who rewards loyalty, and Sessions has demonstrated fierce loyalty, so there’s that.  

Justice Neil Gorsuch, by the way, was the fifth and deciding vote the other day to let Arkansas execute a death row prisoner, who just happened to be black, right before time ran out on the drugs they’d use to kill him with– never mind testing the DNA evidence against him.  Just sayin’.

Anyway, just a whiff of which way the wind is blowing for those too impaired by murderous drugs like weed to know how… what was I talking about?

 

Goodbye to an All-American Blowhard

We get mad.  Even the most even-tempered among us lose their temper from time to time.   The human condition, you might say, is to get mad when enough shit has been heaped on us, or we are brutally misunderstood, or betrayed, or when our noses are rubbed roughly in our powerlessness.  

Angry people admire and tune in to folks who can articulate their anger for them.   Anger, along with its kissing cousin terror, both of which justify the unthinkable, is a driving force of the economy, politics, of many human associations.   Find a spokesman who can speak the exact language of rage for your demographic and you can make millions and rule.   Literally rule, yo.  So it is with the superstars of hate radio and, in the case of the equally talented, fair and balanced hate TV.  

You have guys like Rush Limbaugh, a notorious war-supporting draft dodger opioid addict and serial violator of our draconian drug laws (laws he supports, when applied to bad people), bloviating (a word he brought back into common parlance by his example) with “talent on loan from God” about the plague of horrific lawlessness committed by “feminazis” and other despicable enemies of the common man and woman.    

My father used to get a perverse kick out of listening to the brazen Limbaugh, a facile liar undeterred by any fact put in his way.   My friend Tex was horrified to report that his daughter heard Limbaugh, alone of all American domestic radio programming, on Armed Forces Radio when she was stationed in the Middle East.  The echo chamber for millions provided by the well-funded merchants of rage and state violence.   Good for business, good for jobs, good for America.

Now, I come from a long line of oppressed people, all but four of them in my grandparents’ generation slaughtered, so I’m not really one to talk.  I don’t feel the same robust identification with the ruling class of our great nation that those who pump their fists at Trump rallies do.  Change the names and these hateful ideologues could have been ordering the extermination of my family, just like German and Ukrainian leaders, back in ’42 and ’43, ordered the torture and murder of my whole extended family, with very few exceptions.  Oversights, really, they’d have liked to have killed us all.  

So, I am prejudiced and I take it personally when I hear of more than 1,000 dead civilians in Syria and Iraq this month, killed by America and her allies, described casually as collateral damage, the price of freedom, the price the anonymous dead must pay for our new president to be applauded for being presidential.      

By the way, I don’t put all the blame for the massive increase in civilian deaths on this shaky new demagogue we have in there now.   It did not surprise me to learn that in December our outgoing Nobel Peace Prize laureate president, knowing the kind of creature who was succeeding him, authorized military commanders on the ground to have more autonomy to call in air strikes and so forth.  

When the fighting against ISIS, or ISIL, or whatever their brand is today, was not in densely inhabited population centers, fewer civilians died.  Now that the fighting is downtown, commanders cannot always control how many innocents will die in a given air strike as, no matter how smart the bomb, kids and old people are going to get in the way. 

I don’t take it as particularly good news when one hypocritical, sanctimonious purveyor of hate goes down.    They are cranking out newer and better models of these types all the time, market-tested and ready to cash in on rage.

Still, I thought this nicely conducted chat between Russell Brand and one such recently demoted blow-hard was very well done.  Brand makes many good points and is occasionally very funny.   How much you enjoy it will depend, in part, on your threshold for hateful pontificating.  Personally, I loved seeing an intelligent and thorough refutation of every idiotic point the millionaire blow-hard manfully made.   Enjoy!

Tempus Vug It (Part Two)

“But wait a second,” said the college kid, a bright young man with an inquisitive mind, “if you already got this old man the deal that anyone would have wanted you to get for him, why is this judge busting your balls?  Is a judge allowed to just do that?”    

I was impressed by how simply he stated this question of fundamental fairness.  

“Well, actually, strictly, legally, no, not really, a judge can’t just randomly dance on a lawyer’s balls, beyond a certain point.  It would be an abuse of discretion for the judge to give the lawyer more than a little bit of shit, even worse in  the case where the lawyer had provided his client with the highest degree of professional service.  So, the plain answer to whether a judge is allowed to just do that?’ is ‘no, not allowed.'”

The young man looked up at me quizzically, his expression confused, open-minded and ready to laugh.  

“I understand,” I said, “I know that sounds confusing, because I am a lawyer, I’d done my job diligently, and I was getting random shit from some snippy young cloaca of a judge, something the judge is not allowed to give to an attorney for no real reason like that.   Here’s the thing: as a Guardian ad Litem, even though I am a lawyer, I am in court in that instance not as a lawyer but as a friend of the Court, someone to advocate on behalf of the respondent who cannot adequately advocate for himself.  Strictly speaking, I appeared in those cases as the tenant, not the lawyer for the tenant.”  

“OK,” said mother and son in unison, neither of them grasping the fine, somewhat mad, legal distinction I was talking about.  

“I have to give you a bit of history.  Does the name Eleanor Bumpurs mean anything to you?”  It didn’t, the young man hadn’t been born when the tragic New York City story had been in all the papers, his mother had been living in California at the time.

I told them the terrible 1984 story about the agoraphobic Brooklyn woman with severe mental problems shot to death in the front hall of her NYCHA apartment by the law enforcement officers who were trying to evict her.  She’d been summoned to court for nonpayment of something like $100 in monthly rent.  She may have missed two or three months rent by the time they summoned her to court.  She never appeared in court, so she lost automatically and they sent her the paperwork telling her she had to leave or be evicted.   She’d been refusing to pay because, among other things, Reagan’s people were leaving cans of human feces in her bathtub.  

After Ms. Bumpurs was killed, and the settlement paid to her family, the city brass put their heads together.    There is no legal allowance for a right to free court-appointed counsel in eviction cases.  This is based on a peculiar, legally attenuated, definition of the word ‘jeopardy’.   Jeopardy, for purposes of a constitutional right to counsel, is when you face the possibility of imprisonment for a year or more.  Homelessness is considered a bad roll of the dice, constitutionally, not ‘jeopardy’ for purposes of triggering the right to court-appointed counsel.

“That’s very fucked up,” said the young man.

Yes, but they found a work-around, in the wake of the Eleanor Bumpurs shooting.   The Chief Administrative Judge summoned the wisest minds of the new New York City Housing Court, bastard step-child of the New York City Civil Court.   They came up with an excellent work-around for the usual right to counsel business that would protect tenants like Ms. Bumpurs from her arbitrary and capricious state killing under cover of law, or at least from homelessness that could be prevented.  It was an excellent decision.    

They created the deeply flawed Guardian Ad Litem (“protector for the suit”)  program,  a good program that had a series of distracted, part-time, ineffective administrators.  The judge would appoint a “GAL” to stand in the shoes of a person not able to adequately defend themselves against an eviction attempt.   In the early years, lawyers did most of the Guardian ad Litem work and it saved Housing Court judges from a great deal of grief, dealing with lawyers instead of mad tenants.   The program also had the effect of providing capable court-appointed lawyers for indigent, vulnerable tenants facing eviction.  

Initially most of the Housing Court GALs were lawyers, but I believe that presently no GALs are lawyers.  There is no requirement that a GAL be a lawyer, and as time went by, and GALs were treated by the court with less and less respect, and paid a modest flat fee for an often enormous amount of work, sometimes including multiple Orders to Show Cause and a dozen court appearances, it became untenable for lawyers to act as Housing Court GALs.  A list of modestly trained free-lance citizen GALs took over for the lawyers, and problems with the program began multiplying.

“Yes, OK., but, in court, aren’t you still a lawyer?” said the college boy with a smile.

I tell the boy that I am, indeed, but that de minimis non curat lex, as they say — the law shits on your little troubles.  I then recount the story my mother told me of a man she had some business with.  She’d asked my legal advice, and I’d given it to her firmly and simply as I could.  I told her exactly what she needed to tell him.  She somehow told him exactly the opposite of what I’d coached her to say.   She protested that her son the lawyer had told her to say exactly what she had said.   “Your son must be the dumbest lawyer in New York,” said the man, not unreasonably.   Now, in the context of that story it’s up for debate, in the context of my life story, he has a pretty strong case.

I described how virtually all of my work was standing in the shoes of tenants deemed unable to adequately defend themselves against eviction.  I am in court not as their lawyer, but as them.  They have already appeared in court and the judge has decided, or an inept agency called Adult Protective Services has moved the court that the tenant cannot effectively advocate for themself.   It may be because of some mental problem, or a strong personality quirk, or physical infirmity, advanced age– it just has to be an articulable suspicion that the person needs someone else to play the part of them for the legal proceeding that could render them homeless.

So, at any given time, I am standing in the broken backed, smelly, perforated shoes of twenty or thirty such poor devils.  I’d say 75% truly need the help, and appreciate it, 15% are too crazy or otherwise debilitated to connect with and the other 10% are professional grifters who get thousands in back rent paid on their behalf every few years so they can spend all their money on booze, or prostitutes, or whatever it is that makes their lives worth living.  

One crazy old guy, who loved cocaine, lived with a crack addicted hooker and the two of them, for whatever reason, moved their bowels into plastic bags that were left all over the vermin-infested apartment.  In court, the part of this insane bastard, who was not required to show up in court at all, was played by me, over the course of many months.   My pay for this court-appointed role play was a flat $600, whether I appeared once or a dozen times.  Most often I had to show up at least four or five times.   

As a result of this quirky system that required me to do an ongoing tap dance in front of judges while the overwhelmed agency dithered, and the interminable delays in Adult Protective Services providing services, which caused me to appear month after month after month on most of these sad cases, some judges regarded me with a certain distaste.  Articulate, capable and despicable.  In the way that certain bitter people come home after a bitter day and kick their cringing dog, lawyers that were in my line of court-appointed work were available for booting, whenever the pressure mounted on certain of these judges, those least endowed with what we think of as judicial temperament.  

 

“So you’re telling me that you are unwilling, are refusing, to go see the tenant, to meet and consult with your ward?” demanded the judge, at 12:42, as the clock was running out on my poor mother’s plans for lunch.  

This was right after he asked me why I took the case if the tenant only spoke Spanish and I spoke almost no Spanish.  He didn’t it like him when I told him his court attorney had assured me the language issue was not a problem.  At any rate, I had to speak to his worker at Adult Protective Service to work on his case plan anyway.   Whatever I did for him in court was based on what APS would be able to eventually do on his behalf.   There were only so many ways these cases turned out: pay the money, cure the nuisance, get an Article 81 guardian.

He didn’t like any of that at all, that I kept having all the damned answers to everything he threw at me.   He could not afford to look bad in front of those two law students, I suppose.  He told me he would not sign the stipulation and that he was adjourning the case to allow me to go visit with the tenant and then report back to the Court, which is how he referred to himself, with legal precision if not humility.  This is the way a judge did it, he demonstrated to the law students.    Josh put a hand on my sleeve, regarded me sympathetically, urged me quietly to remain calm as snarls began forming on my lips.  He put his hand on my shoulder as we walked out of the courtroom at 12:45.  

It was at best 50/50 that I’d make it down to the NYCHA Part in time to find who I needed to adjourn that last case.  By 12:40 people started heading off for an early lunch, though the courtroom was technically open until 1:00.  I had visions of not getting out of court until 3:00 or later, because this immature weasel of a judge had made me wait ninety minutes to force me to do something unnecessary, something that could not help my client in any way.  It would, of course, show that he covered his ass with the letter of the law, which is no small thing I suppose, and there was nothing I could do about it anyway.  

The top of my head blew off just as I reached the door of the courtroom.  Shoving the door to the hall open I snarled to Josh, not using my inside voice at all, “why is he being such a fucking dick?!!!”  Josh, a man built like a bull, quickly pushed me into the hall and pulled the door closed behind us.

(to be continued, as tempus fugit)

 

Tempus Vuggin’ Fugit

A guy is playing a distorted electric guitar through a wah-wah pedal– some groovy rock and roll guitar, as the freaks used to say.  I remember doing that, over a simple three chord vamp highly conducive to every possible bluesy invention.   4-14-06 it says next to the title of the song.  Eleven years ago yesterday! Jesus, tempus really do fugit.  

I am walking up a long, steep hill from the Hudson River to a graduation party.   My mother, now dead almost seven years, was alive and I was talking to her on the phone as I walked.  It was June, sunny and humid, and I didn’t notice how hot, until I arrived at the party soaked to the skin.  My host gave me an iced drink, a mojito, maybe.  It was cold and delicious and I was dehydrated, it went down in a couple of draughts.  I had another.  I just about emptied the sun-room, walking in glistening as if just doused with a fire hose pumping sweat.   Two remained, a mother and her son.  The woman asked how I was doing.  As I began the third cold mojito it all flooded out. Talk about fire hoses.  

My mother was toward the end of her long death, my daily calls to her in Florida the highlight of her days, my visits even more so.   I’d just spent a solid month with her, every waking hour, the second two weeks in New York.  Towards the end of that month I had to take care of several court cases and an imperious young judge solemnly read me the redundant letter of the law, although I’d already done everything in anyone’s power to protect an old man from eviction, had, in fact, indefinitely put off the eighty year-old’s inevitable eviction.  

The young judge was performing for two law students he had on the bench with him, to show them what a judge’s day is like, how he conducts business.  As the law students looked on the young judge read our agreement and agreed I’d done everything anyone could have done in this case, that the stipulation was not only reasonable and well-drawn, but the terms where generous, under the circumstances of the $13,000 in rent arrears.   He refused to sign off on it, though, which is what I needed him to do so I could dash off to the NYCHA part and get out of court before it closed for the lunch recess.

“Judge, with all respect, I don’t have any other arrows here in my quiver.   The only thing APS can do for him is get him an Article 81 Guardian.  The guardianship application will stay the Housing Court proceeding until someone can place him in alternative housing.  I wish there was another plan, but he has no income, is not a U.S. citizen, owes over $13,000 in arrears.   We can’t get a grant to pay the arrears, Article 81 is, sadly, the only option.”

 

“Yet,” said the judge seriously, “you didn’t bother to ever meet with the tenant to find out what his preferences might be?”  

“Judge, again, with respect, this tenant is not a U.S. citizen and he has no income.  Technically, APS should not even be taking his case, which I should not mention on the record, except that Josh is a good man and won’t make an issue of it.   I didn’t meet him because his preferences are not at issue here.  If he said, for example, that he wants to move to Hawaii and have APS get him airfare and several months rent in Hawaii, how would I be able to do anything but what I am doing to protect his interests?”

“So, you refuse to meet with the tenant you are representing, or bother to even find out what he might want,” said the judge, for the record.

“Judge, again, how does what he wants enter this discussion?   He hasn’t paid rent in over a year and has no money.  The only way to prevent his immediate homelessness is by having APS apply for an Article 81 guardianship.  I will undoubtedly write an Order to Show Cause, maybe two, before they complete the Article 81, but when the time comes, I will do that.”   Josh nodded, told the judge the same thing.

The judge began digging through a pile of papers on his desk there on the bench.  He dug for a while, as I looked at Josh, and tried to keep my face as composed as possible.  The court room clock now read 12:20, if I didn’t wrap things up here soon I’d have to come back to court at 2 pm to adjourn my last case.

My mother was waiting for me in Queens for lunch.  I had five cases on the calendar and was done with all of them, but this case and one in the NYCHA part that could be quickly adjourned with a stip I’d sign and have the NYCHA attorney submit for us both.  I had one foot out the door as Josh and I wrapped up the stip, it was about 11:20, I was in good shape for getting to my mother in Queens by 1:15 or so to take her for lunch.  Not after an almost hour wait to have this important judge allocute the stipulation between two attorneys.

The stip Josh and I wrote could not have been improved by the most eloquent and exacting jurist.  The judge himself was not disputing that.  The agreement covered everything, the landlord was owed a tremendous and exact sum, and that, in light of the impossibility of the tenant ever paying (the only way to end a nonpayment eviction proceeding staying in the premises) a judgment of possession would issue to the landlord and a warrant of eviction would also issue forthwith, to be stayed thirty days, or maybe it was even 45 days, for APS to complete its application for the Article 81.   Everyone knew this sporting agreement meant my having to make at least one emergency application, two months from now, to stop the scheduled eviction.  

It was around 12:30 when the judge found what he was looking for, a memo from his boss.   The court officer took two copies from the judge and handed one to me and one to Josh.  The copies were so degraded it was hard to make out the words on them.   The judge struggled to read his own greyed out copy and finally found the language he read aloud.  The memo advised judges, in light of the vulnerability of tenants represented by Guardians ad Litem, particularly the crop of new GALs without legal expertise, to make sure their robe was extra long in the back.  

“To cover their asses,” I clarified to the college boy, when he raised his eyebrows quizzically.  His mother nodded, horrified but very interested in the jarring collision that was about to happen in Part A of the New York City Housing Court.

(to be continued, as tempus fucking fugit)