Author Archives: oinsketta

A Slightly Odd Thought

Thoughts are more susceptible than most things to being, at the same time, reasonable and helpful and bizarre and unhelpful, according to the angle they’re viewed from, how the light hits them. 

In discussing whether I might actually be mad, trying to do the quite possibly impossible thing I’m trying to do, the teenage therapist and I seem to agree that the jury is still out.   Clearly, the most sensible thing to do is find something to do that brings in money.  If it’s something that also brings personal satisfaction, helps others, is enjoyable and challenging — that’s great.  But given the choice between earning a living or being in a constant state of turmoil over a ridiculously challenging thing requiring a good deal of self-reinvention while not bringing in a groosh or a kopeck… most people, on every shade of the elusive sanity spectrum, would choose the former.

I am ambiguously blessed, at the moment, not to have to occupy myself with the vexing question of how to pay my bills.  Five years ago I inherited enough money to support the average person three to five years.   Not lavish years, mind you, but average years for the average person living a modestly middle class life.  I have always tried to keep my expenses low, my options open for working the fewest hours in a conventional job.  Five frugal years later I still have money, riding on the “free market” roulette wheel like the trillions scooped off the slanted table the last time the richest and cleverest gamed the system prior to the “collapse” (or wholesale fraud, if we want to be more accurate) in 2008.  For the moment I am not worrying about that, though, of course, I probably should be.   My not worrying is another tick on the side of the ledger the jury may lean toward when deliberating over my relative sanity.

But here was the slightly odd thought that snuck up on me the other day.   I’m working strictly on marketing now, as much as I can, focused on presenting the workshop in a light that will make it hard for public school innovators in the de Blasio administration to resist.  This marketing work is also necessary for interesting and recruiting the best possible people to work with me on the program.   I’ve spent many hours removing all self-deprecation, self-doubt and frustration when I describe the program.  I’ve eliminated all references to the likely impossibility of my task.   I focus, when I can, on how well the program I designed works for its intended purposes.  

I am making my language terse, yet natural.  In the first minute I now summarily answer the most obvious questions: who I am, what brings me to the room and why this program is so important and valuable.   I am isolating the talking points, keeping them simple and rotating them, repeating each one enough times for the message to hopefully sink in.  You want to involve children in their education, make them eager partners in their own learning?  Give them a stake, let them learn what fascinates them and let them teach each other.   You really want children to become creative problem solvers?  Put them in a room full of art supplies and technology, with an exciting end-product they can enjoy, and adults who set things up then take a back seat, and watch what they do.   Etc.    

The odd thought, yes, I’m coming to it presently.  I’d been stuck for a while trying to complete the pitch.  I need to be able to present a snappy and memorable show during the structured yet natural twenty minutes I will get to pitch it some day.   Improvisation in a sales pitch is foolishly risky business, as I’ve learned in a gently brutal manner.  Wrestling with the technology to make the AV (I reveal my age with this anachronistic reference to “Audio Visual”)  side of the presentation has been an added frustration.  Every added frustration makes the mountain I have to climb steeper.  The fucker is already almost vertical, any steeper and I’ll have to find or design special shoes to allow me to walk upside down.  Another of five dozen, sometimes ridiculous, workarounds so far.  

But this week I was finally able to negotiate the last technical hurdles with the program I’m using to create the pitch (a total of five hours winning over ever more supportive and expert tech support) and it gave me the ability, at last, to record version after version and watch them back.  Recording myself was a useful bit of advice I received a few weeks ago when the very idea of watching my sluggish progress set my teeth on edge.  Being able to finally see my work played back eliminated the rehearsal-to-myself motivation problem, and the equally vexing one of finding someone to do me the favor of watching each version and helping me assess my snail-like progress.    

“Wait,” you will say, “you supposedly have an organization, a non-profit founded in the Spring of 2012.  Why do you still need to find people to do you a favor?  Call a meeting and….”  Shut the fuck up, would you, fuckface?  

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, ignore this well-meaning yet provocative clown and my client’s outburst as well.  My client suffers from acute Founder’s Syndrome, a well-known condition that eventually afflicts the CEO of virtually every one-person organization.     

Anyway, now that I can work on the pitch and watch it in progress it’s much easier to see transitions that are bad, points that are not made clearly, glitches, clumsily worded talking points and so forth.  Clearly this is the work of a committee, a team, but since I have neither, it’s taken way, way longer to complete.  Now that it’s finally not so difficult to see and fix weak points I’ve made good progress the last week and it’s now virtually done.  I’ll be presenting it to a successful non-profit entrepreneur on Tuesday and once more have the benefit of his experienced feedback.  He has mastered a pitch that is successfully selling a once one-man program related to mine.   My pitch is ready now, 48 hours before the meeting, though I plan to polish it a bit more, if I can. 

Now the slightly odd thought, after one last bit of set up.   I ran the short new segment by Sekhnet the other day.  It contained my freshly written “who am I, why am I here, why should you care?” rap.  She was distracted from my short personal and professional message by the flash of oddly unrelated animation on the screen.   She was right to be distracted, I could see at once.   I set to work making the proverbial enormous changes at the last minute.  Had I presented that first version to the social entrepreneur I’d have lost him in twenty to sixty seconds and he’d be bracing for a wasted 20 minutes with a clearly mad person with a single good idea and a hundred bad ones. 

Several hours of concentrated work later I had a 49 second animated clip that I can actually link to this post (later) explaining who I am, why I am here and setting up why my program is something you should check out.   These simple questions had been impossibly ticklish ones for me to answer.  I knew the new version was pretty good.  Ran the less than minute by Sekhnet.  “I like it,” she said, after a little laugh at 0:20 where I’d inserted a little bark of levity, “it really shows how much work you did developing the program”.   Went back to work, tweaking a couple of things I noticed while showing it to her.  I fixed several other small weak links in the pitch.  

At the end of a very productive day I stood at the mirror shaving.   As I watched myself I noticed a small twinkle in my eye.  In that small moment of satisfaction I glimpsed an entire universe of truth and I had this odd thought:   it’s easy to have ideas and it’s morally satisfying to have ideals;  living them is the hard part.  I don’t personally know many people working as hard to live their ideals directly, to see their unique ideas mischievously afoot in the world.   It is hard, maybe impossible, work, but it’s the best work I could hope for, it occurred to me in that moment.  I am also blessed, by pure luck of circumstance, to be free and able to pursue it for as long as I have been.  

I pushed aside the thought of all of my more successful friends, figuring out how to live well doing things that are also important, or sometimes not;  pushed aside the often odious comparisons that come so naturally to all of us here in the Free Market.  

I am free, the twinkle in my eye reminded me, and lucky to be doing important work for which I am uniquely suited.   I’ve learned to savor the small but crucial moments of reward that are invisible to most people.  This could be a sign of madness, of course, seeing these tiny, isolated moments as a blessing, but I prefer (in the custom of all madmen) to think not.   It’s crucial to drink fully of every life-sustaining moment of reward we feel in order to persevere in any difficult undertaking.  I’ve learned to suck every drop of  juice from these rare and subtle moments of reward one must be vigilant to enjoy. 

If my life is harder, harder to explain and less materially sustainable than the lives of many people I know — these are all part of the price the world extracts from those who dream of a more merciful society and struggle to make these dreams real in the world.   There is a price to be paid for being different, clearly, and it’s not just a theoretical price.  Part of that price involves the occasional questioning of your sanity.  

It was an excellent moment in front of the shaving mirror, even if, at the same time, a slightly odd thought.

But… besides that, Mrs. Lincoln, this is still the greatest country in the world

Those in our great and wealthy nation who are cruelly fucked need to understand it is usually nothing personal.  Truly.  Nobody gives a shit about you as an individual, that is what the cruel part of cruel fucking is all about.  You as a person are erased, but it’s nothing personal.   The mistreatment was not meted out to you as an individual, so don’t get so individually indignant, man.   Let us look at the case of American blacks, for example.  Let’s take a short historical look at this cruel fucking, see if we can put it in perspective.

We should all be able to agree that the deliberate murder of perhaps ten million African ancestors during the mass kidnapping of slave laborers to the New World was an inhuman atrocity.   As bad as the Holocaust with a capital H was, and as many millions murdered, the sickening carnage of the “Middle Passage” makes any decent person want to vomit as much as the black and white film of rubbery skeletal cadavers being dumped down chutes in the death camps does, or Henry Morgenthau’s contemporary accounts of the nauseating brutality of the genocide Turks inflicted on the Armenians during WW I, or any modern-day version, for that matter.   There is no comparing mass murders, they are all the same.   Done with that argument, OK?

We can agree, one would hope, that slavery was an unmitigated evil that caused irreparable harm, while creating and concentrating vast wealth, and led eventually to a cataclysmic outburst of mass psychosis in which three quarters of a million, mostly poor, Americans lost their lives in combat, (more than the total of American dead in all other wars combined)  another quarter million dead civilians, not to mention the countless maimed, amputated, brain damaged.  The war was fought, as most are, to preserve the privilege of the wealthy who stood to lose a fortune, and their genteel way of life, if slavery was abolished.  There was talk, for a time, about 40 acres and a mule for every freed slave, to minimally compensate them for their centuries of unpaid labors and to put them on their feet as free families.   Nothing was ever done about that, there were soon much more pressing problems for America to deal with.   After the war the nation went into the worst economic depression in its hundred year history, at the end of which the robber barons made untold monopoly fortunes.  For the masses of all colors — mostly misery.  

The only good thing about the Civil War– the end of slavery.  The 13th Amendment made slavery illegal under the U.S. Constitution, except that the Supreme Court quickly put the 14th Amendment, enacted to protect the rights of freed slaves, into a judicially crafted ninety year deep sleep.  While the 14th Amendment slumbered the Ku Klux Klan put on the kind of horror show that hate-filled sore losers with weapons are apt to put on, if not restrained by the law.   A century of terrorism, protected by state laws upheld by the Supreme Court’s perverse 1873 14th Amendment ruling (the resurrected 14th has been in place now for fifty years and tens of thousands of cases brought under it), which gave the former rebel states, who had taken up arms against the nation they seceded from, the last word on the treatment of its citizens, including former slaves.

It is not surprising that the lot of former slaves was hard in the former Confederacy.  

A mass migration northward towards decent paying industrial jobs resulted in a large gathering of the descendants of slaves in the ghettos of major cities.  The decent paying industrial jobs eventually were sent places where the corporations could pay the workers less and therefore keep more of the profits.  Ghettos traditionally have the worst city services, worst schools, highest crime, highest unemployment rates, most repressive policing, and currently– a school to prison pipeline.  And as prisons are increasingly privatized, finally a profitable use for the bulk of these disaffected, often angry, sometimes violent, sons and daughters of the ghettos.  

So while some of us felt proud recently that America had its great post-racial photo-op, a very accomplished and unique half-black man is currently president, it is good to keep things in perspective.   It’s not post-racial in ghettos and housing projects, or in prisons, or on Ivy League campuses or in corporate board rooms.  This country is as divided in many ways, including matters of basic civil rights and race, as it was immediately prior to the Civil War.  Millions of Americans, of all races and every national origin, are simply, how to put this tastefully?… fucked.  

People who are the recipients of sex they did not consent to are often deeply disturbed by the experience.   That said, if it is done on an institutional level, and you live in a democracy where, unless your point of view has billions to spend selling itself via free speech, you have almost no voice as an individual and you must not take it personally.  You really must not take it personally, man.

Really, I mean… you know what I’m saying? 

Moods

Mood is a mysterious subject.  We have already seen that humans at times have little insight into why they act the way they do, although virtually all of us are pretty good with the rationales.  We do things for reasons, almost never without one we can swing like a cudgel or use as a shield, if it comes to it.  Sometimes the reason we do or don’t do things is strictly our mood.  We are all capable of amazing things when in a buoyant mood, it’s difficult to do even basic things when a hopeless mood descends.   Those with an abundance of what scientists call “the happiness gene”, which I always think of as the fucking happiness gene, may more often do things in a practical, rational, positive way.   There are no demons dragging them away from right actions, the things anyone would do if not hobbled by one mood or another.  For the rest of us, moods exert an influence as strong and invisible as the moon on the tides, the stars on the fortunes of the least lucky of Shakespeare’s characters.

I have been good friends over many years with people I now see as remarkably negative characters.  We had in common traumatic childhoods that did terrible damage.  They were raised by monsters, abused, molested, neglected, had to parent themselves as best they could.  That kind of upbringing leaves scars that are not always easy to overcome.  Being your own parent is a hard job, I can tell you from experience.  The first thing a parent must do for the child is not blame others for the situation the parent and child are in.  The parent must model resilience, and care, and healthy choices, must model problem-solving and transmit a love of the things in life worth loving.  

I remember my poor father on his death bed, trying to apologize for what a poor father he’d been, telling me poignantly he’d had no model for showing affection, he’d never seen it done in his childhood, by anyone.  “I had no idea how it was done,” he sighed.  He was being too hard on himself, he managed to instill a love of animals, soul music, social responsibility and other things in my sister and me.

The mood will be on the adult, like PTSD, when the child is challenging them– a flash of the coarse cord whipped across the face, the sting, the betrayal, the look of hatred in the mother’s eyes.  In the adult, like a cliche, the unjustly persecuted child cries out, and the parent may struggle not to react in rage.  I have seen it, felt it, been on the other side of it many times.   It leaves fingerprints on the young soul, without a doubt.  As Dr. Nadine Burke Harris pointed out in her wonderful TED talk (see block quote at the bottom of this post), repeated fear and trauma lead to the production of adrenaline and cortisol in amounts that do damage to the body, actually change the DNA.  

You may live in a beautiful mansion, be well-loved and respected at work, laugh a lot in your personal life, have an otherwise fabulous life, and, as in that wonderful Yiddish curse, the devil may also be chasing you from room to room in your mansion of a hundred rooms.   You may have the very best of intentions, and do little good for anyone, or yourself.  There are endless variations on this horrible theme and millions struggle the very struggle I am struggling to describe.  Rage, disguised as hopelessness, or terror, or Terror, disguised as pride, or anger, or other sneaky, powerful forces that sometimes bring a person to do stupid things, or cruel things, or senseless things.  Then there are also the extremes of this, full-blown mental illnesses and difficult to control mood disorders.

I think of a witty man I know who always smiles, always, always, ALWAYS has the very best of intentions.  He is a great humanist, a sensitive man, a great and humble soul, a soulful singer, a lover of children, a protector of the weak. This creative fellow with a thousand professional contacts always wants to know what he can do to help, will be in touch to apologize for not helping, ask again what he can do, be told again, not do it.  

“He’s insane,” my sister says after, months of his broken promises have passed, “you have to forget about him. He’s not going to help you.  Next!”   Good advice, truly.  Believe people’s actions, not their rationales, not their intentions, not what they say they want to do.   What stops us from taking right action?  Mood.

Some people find the support they need to help them over moments of doubt in difficult undertakings.  Having a positive person to bounce ideas off, to get a bit of courage from, is a great help in any endeavor.  Not everyone has these people in their lives. Lacking these lucky contacts, with only those who may wish well but watch with fear, one must persist alone and take much longer to do difficult things.  

The thing I am trying to do, the program elements now largely worked out, extensively field tested, an almost perfect machine for the job it sets out to do, is enormously difficult, maybe impossible for one person to do alone.  I may have almost all of the skills needed to do it, the question is will and the ability to conquer the mood when hopelessness descends.  Call a friend?  My friends are all concerned, none have any real idea how to help, if they were inclined to spend the time.  It is a subject better avoided.  It seems to them, as far as I can tell, that I have already failed to build this ambitious cathedral to my ideals, it’s three years already and instead of funding and real results I am gamely showing pictures of my dead baby as though the kid is doing wonderfully in pre-school, already headed to an elite private elementary school and on the way to Harvard.   It is mood, only mood, that stays me in my tracks most days.  The opinions of those who have no way to understand what I am trying to do, what I have already done, should not have any effect on me.

On the days the benefits of what I’m working on emerge to me unclouded, benefits for myself and the children whose talents I am hoping to showcase simple to see, I move resolutely and joyfully forward.   That I am often discouraged by the incremental nature of my forward progress, only a mood.  It behooves one not to be a moody bastard, particularly when engaged in a long-haul project that, no matter how helpful and close to completion it is, may well be impossible to carry out.  Then again, how not to be a moody bastard is a ticklish question I have not learned a very good answer to so far.

Normal

A year or two ago I saw a plainspoken philosopher speaking to Bill Moyers about our culture of cruelty.  I forget the insightful man’ s name, but I will never forget his comment after playing a clip of a campus cop nonchalantly walking along a row of seated peaceful college protesters and spraying them in their faces with orange mace from a huge, seemingly inexhaustible, canister.  The campus cop did this with the body language of somebody watering a garden with a hose.

“He’s doing this like it’s a normal thing to do,” said the philosopher calmly, but with appropriate horror.  He then showed a campus police force with a tank, surplus from our many recent and ongoing wars.  He detailed the widespread militarization of police forces all over the country, essentially an army of occupation in the many slum areas of our great nation.  Heavily armed SWAT teams in flak jackets and combat helmets, wielding automatic weapons, breaking down doors and storming in to break up illegal card games, apprehend dangerous people who are bagging marijuana.

Normal.   A frightening word in many ways, when you think of what is normal today.  It is normal for very wealthy people to want and be able to own everything, there is no shame attached to this normal desire, no matter the consequences.   It is normal for an angry or frightened person to defend himself with a gun — he now has a right to “stand his ground” in many states, even if he went looking for trouble and the ground he is standing on is far from his home and castle, the traditional boundaries of where he has long been free to defend himself with deadly force, if he could not flee to safety.  It is normal, depending on where you’re from, to kill your unmarried daughter or sister if she exchanges flirtatious glances with a man.  Honor killing, it’s normally called.

It was normal, in 1776 when Thomas Jefferson, with his gift for a felicitous phrase, was putting together The Declaration of Independence, the charter of American democracy that lit the torch of human freedom, for people of means to own other people as property.  We hold these truths, being wise men capable of holding more than one truth at a time, to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and so forth, and that, at the same time, we may hold great, easily liquidated, wealth in the form of human chattel.  I myself, he might have added, presently own a few hundred of them and I love ’em.

Of course, when I write this way it is easy to nitpick: nobody likes Honor Killing, or the grotesque inequalities between the 1% and the rest of society (except, perhaps, most of the 1%), or the American plague of carnage by gun masquerading as Constitutionally protected freedom (except for millions of American gun owners, the NRA and the politicians they purchase or rent), or slavery, for that matter.  But there is another side to these things, normal though they may also be, that makes discussing them a bit more complicated.  To denounce terrible things on the internet is about the easiest exercise there is.  Why not challenge myself, you ask?

OK.  Thomas Jefferson, it is safe to presume by his writings, had much better intentions than he was able to live out, though his life was, in most outward respects, normal and respectable for a wealthy Virginian of his time.   He probably truly loved the beautiful, light-skinned mother of his four children born over the course of their long affair.  Although each of these children was born nine months after a Jefferson stay on Monticello, each looked white and at least one had a striking resemblance to Thomas Jefferson, even though Sally was his chambermaid, even though each of the children was given preferred work in the manor house, and all were eventually freed (virtually the only of Jefferson’s slaves to have been released from bondage) the master’s patrimony of Beverly, Madison, Eston and Harriet Hemings was indignantly denied for 150 years after Jefferson’s death — and to this day, by some, almost 200 years later, in spite of the DNA match and other strong evidence.  

In a better world he would have married his devoted servant, a delicate and cultured woman fluent in French, as Jefferson was, loved her openly, embraced and educated his children and grandchildren by her.   In this world he quietly freed the slave children by letting the first couple escape when they came of age to do so — they looked white and were easily able to “pass” and assimilate into the racist society of the time– and freed the others in his will.  He had promised the slave mother, Sally, in exchange for the pregnant teenager’s agreement to leave freedom in Paris and return to Monticello as his slave, that he would free their children at 21 and he kept his word.  Sally too was discreetly freed not long after Jefferson’s death.  I have always held these deplorable things (excluding, of course, the promises he kept) against the Author of Liberty.

Here are a few little known but devilish details that help explain Jefferson’s dilemma.  Under Virginia law at the time, had Jefferson freed Sally she could not have remained in Virginia beyond a year and a day.  It would have meant parting with his long-time lover or seeking a court-order allowing her to stay, and giving good reasons in the court filing for this dispensation from the law.   The publicity would have destroyed Jefferson’s career.  

Here’s an even more devilish detail:  Jefferson’s mentor and lifelong friend George Wythe had, after his wife’s death, a love affair with a one-time slave of his, Lydia Broadnax.  Wythe freed her, got the legal paperwork in order so that she could stay in Virginia, and may have had a son by her (this is Fawn Brodie’s conclusion, disputed by others based on Broadnax’s age when the child was born).   What is undisputed is that the free-born mulatto Michael Brown was tutored by Wythe, that the teenager was  very devoted to Wythe and that the aged Wythe provided well for him and Lydia Broadnax in his will.  

Learning of this, Wythe’s grandnephew, who had stolen valuable books from Wythe’s library and forged Wythe’s name on checks, outraged on being written out of the will, his inheritance going to people then normally known as niggers, promptly poisoned Brown, Wythe and Lydia Broadnax, killing both men.   They died agonizing deaths over the course of almost two weeks.  The woman survived, but was prevented by Virginia law from testifying in court to seeing what she understood too late: the young man putting arsenic in the coffee.  Other blacks had seen the grandnephew dispose of arsenic before his arrest and from his prison cell (he apparently had a lot of it) but they also were prevented by Virginia law from testifying in court. 

The murder trial in Virginia was attended by great publicity, and Wythe’s grandnephew, skillfully defended by zealous attorneys, glad for the exclusion of black eyewitness accounts and using inside knowledge of the perfunctory autopsies to create reasonable doubt, was acquitted of all charges.   You can imagine the outrage in Virginia had a white man been sentenced to death for killing the sort of people Wythe’s grandnephew had killed.   George Wythe, although a famous and respected legal mind, one of the greatest Virginians of his day, signer of the Declaration of Independence, beloved of Thomas Jefferson, recipient of the largest funeral in Virginia up to that time, was also someone who taught Greek and law to a free black boy, and treated the kid like a son, after all.

If Jefferson had a sudden, crazy, fleeting thought about marrying Sally and legitimizing their children, the last chapter in George Wythe’s distinguished life story would have put an end to that.

And so it goes with each of these “normal” things.   There are reasons, always.  Even if the reasons are later seen to be immoral, insane, vicious– they are the underpinnings of law at the time, they form the moral norms of the era.  

Fifteen or twenty years ago, when Israel used a drone to blow up a car and execute some people Israel claimed were terrorist masterminds, there was a lot of controversy over this extrajudicial killing.  For one thing, it was illegal under international law at the time.   It is one thing for a team of daring secret agents to get up close to cunning, uncapturable terrorist masterminds (or, depending on your view, freedom fighters), through skill, guts and determination, and quietly inject them with something to induce a heart attack.  Or slit their throats.  Or sabotage the brakes on their car before engaging them in a high speed car chase over dangerous terrain.   It is a different thing altogether to have a robotic plane flying by remote control to distant places to kill people who are blips on a computer screen.

Again, when Israel first practiced these extrajudicial executions by drone, it was extremely controversial. Today it is perfectly normal, as plain and unobjectionable as a glass of cool, pasteurized milk. The president of the United States today looks at a list of names of people to be killed extrajudicially and says “go ahead.”  One day one of the names on the kill list is of an American citizen whose father has brought a lawsuit in US federal court to stop the expected killing by drone.  The president, in this case, consults with legal experts, decides there is a perfectly valid exception under American law, the killing is legally justifiable, and, anyway, no court will ever hear the case.  Done— kill him.   A week or two later the guy’s teenage son, also an American citizen, shows up on the list — or maybe not.  “What the fuck?” reasons the president, if he hesitates at all,  and on his order the strike is carried out and the American kid is also killed.  We’ll never know how it went, since everything to do with the kill lists is highly classified.

“He should have been more careful when choosing his fucking father, the little bitch!” was the administration’s entire public response to the question of how do you kill an American boy with absolutely no ties to terrorism?   The president’s press secretary said it smirkingly when asked about the execution of the boy and three friends who were eating at an outdoor cafe in some remote region of Yemen.  A total of eight were killed by that missile, we’ll never know who the others were, except that, apparently none were the target, an Egyptian al-Queda member.

In a perfect world, I walk up to the press secretary, clench my right hand and break his nose.  “You can give a better answer than that,” I would tell him encouragingly, helping him up off the floor like the nonviolent devotee of Ahimsa that I am.  Then the White House press corps and the international TV audience would get the real answer.

“We killed him by mistake, we had no good reason for killing him… his name was never on the kill list, he was collateral dam…. uh, he was another innocent civilian killed in our endless, borderless war against Terror, I mean… one of perhaps thousands of nameless, faceless people killed for the crime of living somewhere our intelligence determines is also home to those who hate our freedom enough to plot to murder us.  It just happens we later learned his name, and that he was a 16 year-old American, that he’d done nothing wrong, and that he was killed with other boys who probably had nothing to do with terrorism, along with four others who it is not worth talking about.  Look, mistakes are made… the passive voice used…. oh, goddamn it, leave me alone!!!”

That would have been a perfectly normal reaction.  Much more normal, at any rate, than what I have been doing so far today. 

If You Believe…

What is the harm in believing your adoring maternal grandmother and seeing yourself as a talented person uniquely qualified to leave something worthwhile for society when you go?  

I can see a few pitfalls in that sentence:  the blinded grandmother with her six dead siblings, dozens of nieces and nephews never seen, described in Yiddish letters that stopped coming in 1942 or ’43, buried with everyone else in that ravine to the north of town, has many reasons to be unreliable.  

My grandmother (my mother’s mother, not the one who whipped my infant father in the face, I never met that one, she died before I was born) was a talented woman, a dressmaker who could see a garment, remember it, buy the material (as she always called fabric) and put one like it together in a few hours, cutting with large scissors, working at her sewing machine and mannequin.  After she retired, between copious draughts of straight vodka, she could go with a wealthy neighbor to a fancy Miami Beach store and look at dresses.  They could pick out the general cut of one, the neckline of another, the detailing on a third, the material of a fourth.  She never made a sketch, kept it all in her head. Her customers always loved the dresses she made, but does that make her an authority on talents that uniquely equip one to tackle and carry out the impossible?   Hardly.

I believe that everyone possesses talents, many of which they are unaware of.  This loss to the world is largely the work of our capitalistic society — only major league talent that can beat the competition is talent worth paying for.  Everyone else with your unmonetized talents — you got a hobby you like, good for you.  I had a grandmother who wanted badly to believe that her only grandson was a genius destined for fame and wealth. She needed to believe it more than most grandmothers, with only her daughter, her granddaughter and me the last shot at keeping alive the genetic line.   I have not kept alive the genetic line, except in myself so far, though my sister has a daughter and a son.  

Back to my belief that many people have great talents they are unaware of, an example:

I was riding in the back seat of a car, behind the driver. There was music on the sound system, it sounded good, a woman singer or two harmonizing beautifully.  I knew this music, but was not aware of the version with the harmony singer on it.  I discovered it was the driver, singing live with wonderful pitch and a great voice, a woman who does not consider that she has any musical talent, a woman who’d be embarrassed if I told her how impressed I was.  Her husband, unaccountably and nonchalantly, also has a great voice, a remarkable memory for a tune he’s heard once — yet, also, no musician.   It mystifies me with these two: all of their children play instruments and are excellent singers.  Yet they…. well, I wouldn’t understand, as they tell me, since I’m a musician.

I consider talent a near universal thing, every individual possessing some particular gift, and it is sad to me that here in Free Market World so many of these talents are hidden, wasted, not contributing wonderful things in every area of life.   There are untapped and valuable talents beyond the easy artistic ones that come to mind.   Some have an innate talent for organizing information, a talent for talking soothingly to groups of people, a talent for seeing the larger structure and fixing problems others would take a long time to put their finger on, a talent for making people feel comfortable, for bringing out the best in them, a talent for peace, a talent for happiness, a talent for enjoying the best things in life.   These are all talents that, if cultivated and freely expressed, would make the world a much better, happier, more contented and peaceful place.

“Ah, there you go, typical… fucking dreaming again, as if utopian socialism ever had a chance in reality,” a reasonable voice will say.  “The world is the world, Darwin was essentially right, it is survival of the most cunning and ready to murder their rivals.  One look around shows the counterfactual nature of your absurd, idealistic, wish.   Evolution itself argues against it.”

Unless survival through increased insight and interconnectedness is true evolution– learning from mistakes instead of compounding them by revenge.    

“Oh, they will shoot you many times if you say that loudly enough, my friend, if you ever get enough attention for your wishful views, which, thankfully for you, is unlikely in any case,” says the voice of reason.  

“I’ve always held that seventeen bullets to the torso for speaking a powerful enough truth clearly is worth the price paid by those who smolder, volatile and ready to blow, living lives of desperate and unreasonable compromise under intolerable conditions.”

“Mmmmm…. a talent for the felicitous phrase, a talent for justification, a talent for recasting clear failure as something actually laudable…”

A talent for talking to myself.  A talent for ignoring certain hard realities as long as I can and then recoiling from them.  A talent for finding myself in a loop, shaking my head and going, “damn…..”

Back to my original question: is it mad, if you are uniquely situated to help, to carry on in spite of the seeming impossibility of success?   If you have an idea that can help people in need, develop it into a program that can contribute something constructive to the noisy and often misguided conversation being hollered all around, can give some joy, fun and sense of accomplishment to kids who are presently doomed to lives of tragedy that will seem longer than their twenty years…. do you not have a moral duty, if you have the means to carry out the program, to soldier on?

“You expect an awful lot of yourself,” says a device, weakly.

I have the tools.  I have the program, done successfully now one hundred times.  I have the written materials describing it, a curriculum, a website… I…. I….

I remember meeting my grandmother’s first cousin, George Segal.  George, creator of life-sized plaster casted people posed in evocative dioramas, is remembered today as a giant in American sculpture.   I met him twice as an adult, once in passing at a gallery on 57th Street, we walked west together toward Columbus Circle, and shortly thereafter as his guest at his farm in New Jersey.   He took me into the converted chicken coops, huge sprawling studios, rustic but comfortable even in winter.

“Your grandmother was very good for you, and very bad for you,” he observed sagely when we were sitting alone in one of his studios.

Somewhere in my many haystacks of papers I have the furious letter he wrote me after that visit.  You can practically feel the clench of his teeth at the monstrousness of someone who wanted to be an important artist but felt himself superior to the guardians of taste, the wealthy art collectors and the unctuous subculture that curates their collections.  They certainly did not deserve the bitter anger of someone who hated them but felt entitled to their money and respect.  These taste-makers were some of the greatest and most generous people in the world, he pointed out through clenched teeth, and worthy of respect and honor, not scorn.  

It had certainly worked out well for him.

 

Making Sense of Seeming Senselessness

My father, for lack of a closer example, and being dead, also, a perfectly cooperative one, never recovered from the traumas of his childhood, which were many.  

He appeared urbane, had a series of pretty good jobs, with some prestige, bought a nice home, had the respect of many people.  He had a great, dark sense of humor, he was witty, and very well-read.   He could converse intelligently on just about any subject.  He was affable and had an easy rapport with children.   He loved animals and took good care of any he came across.  The only tell of his early traumas was his need to fight and to win every fight.  

He was Fred Astaire in an argument, very light on his feet, smooth, quick, almost impossible to imagine anyone doing it better.  If you were not the object of his arguing it was hard to find fault in his smart, stylish ability to dispatch an opponent easily.  He never seemed to break a sweat or exert any effort at all.

His need to win every argument was the giveaway I noticed fairly early on.  I tried every way around it, since I hoped for more out of our relationship than an occasional laugh and the inevitable bludgeoning arguments, but until I was in my 40s, and had learned something about reining in my emotions, I had little chance of success.   I spent years piecing together the clues to what had made him this way; they did not yield themselves easily.   In the end, and aided by my discoveries, I was as good as the old man at making my points.  Law school put the finishing touches on it, because as much as anything else law students are relentlessly drilled in the smelly art of prevailing.   The prevailing party wins it all in court, the other party loses all.  Elegant in its simplicity even if grotesque in many of its implications.   

The old man needed to win, and if you were keeping score, he seemed to win virtually all of the time.   There was a cost attached, but he was glad to pay it.  A punchline of sorts will give you the point I am hoping to make here, if  I prepare everything for you correctly.  

My father’s first cousin Eli was American born (his mother died giving birth to him) and a rough and combative character who was incredibly warm and funny if he loved you.   If he didn’t love you he had no hesitation to thunder, turn purple, and possibly bash you in the face.   He did this even to people he loved, sometimes, though he and I got along well.  Our frequent disagreements sometimes turned his face purple, brought white spittle to the corners of his mouth and a ferocious panther-like expression to his face, but we never came to blows or stopped talking to each other.  “Eli and your mother fought all the way from Georgia to New York,” my father once cheerfully said of a car ride up from Florida.  Nobody loved each other more than Eli and my mother did, or fought each other more passionately.

Toward the end of his life Eli gave me some crucial background into the hitherto inexplicable behavior of his Aunt Chavah, my father’s mother, towards her oldest son, my father.  He did this to give me some insight into my father, and it worked.  Eli had gone with his father to the dock where a ship brought Chavah from Europe and they picked her up in his truck.   It was love at first sight.   Eli was a handsome young man and Chavah, the aunt he was meeting for the first time, was a red headed beauty who loved him immediately.    Her older brother, Eli’s father, was not as loving, even though he’d paid for her passage from Europe.  She was expected to work off the debt as a servant in his house.  

Her indenture went on for a few years, and would be continued after she had children and moved back to Peekskill (my father and his young brother dug their nails into the snake plants they were forced to dust, in an ongoing attempt to kill the succulents).   During her first years in service there she fell in love with the Jewish post man, also a red head.  He wanted to marry her, but Eli’s father broke that up.  “His bitch-on-wheels second wife would have lost her slave,” Eli pointed out.  

A few years later, when it was past time for her to marry, they arranged a marriage as mysterious as they come.  I have no idea who made the match or how the two sides even met each other.  The groom was a man from a primitive, dirt floored farm near Hartford, Connecticut who most considered dull.   Eli described the deadpan face of this man who died before I was born as “two eyes … a nose and a mouth”.   He then imitated a face that was just that.  

Eli insisted his uncle by marriage was very funny, and incredibly subtle, he’d simply had the life beaten out of him by a cruel and violent step-mother who hit him in the head with heavy boards and whatever else came to hand.  According to Eli, my grandfather had mentally checked out at a certain point to save himself.  The way Eli told it, he seemed to be the only one who could see this inner life in his new uncle.  My grandfather Eliyahu comes down to me as a tragic man who, having endured a very hard life, and great abuse from his step-mother and then his reluctant and furious wife, died young of liver disease though he never drank alcohol.   

Chavah, who had always had a temper, seemingly went into a permanent rage once ensconced in her horrific new life.  They were incredibly poor, even by the standards of the day in the crowded slums of the Lower East side.  After her illiterate husband lost his herring delivery job when the horse who knew the route died, and he returned at the end of his first day with the new horse with a wagon-load of undelivered herring barrels, Eli and his father drove down to NYC and picked up the hapless little family:  pregnant Chavah, Eliyahu and their little son Azrael, usually rendered Israel.

That one and a half year-old taken to his new home in Peekskill was my father, and terrible damage had already been done to him in the airless little slum apartment he was born in.  His mother had already given birth to a girl, a still born.  The baby may have lived a day or two, nobody alive now can verify this.   The newborn baby was dead and buried and then some time after that my father was born.  Chavah was tiny, my father was a huge baby.   Chavah hated her husband and seemingly carried a long building grudge against this large baby as well.  Whipped him from the moment he could stand, preferred method rough burlap wrapped power cord from her iron across his baby face.  Whap!   Stop looking at me, she might have screamed, in Yiddish.  Whap!

Eli, by then 18 or 19, and in their house all the time, had seen it himself many times.  My two year-old father cowering as his mother rattled the drawer by her seat at the kitchen table where she kept the heavy, stinging electrical cord.  “By then all she had to do was rattle the drawer and your father would….” and he imitated a terrified boy, standing at rigid attention, cringing as he waited for a few lashes in the face, averting his eyes.   I had a sudden, immediate insight into why my father was so relentless about never losing a fight.   And a flood of sympathy for the poor bastard that had been impossible to feel when he was bullying and hectoring and paying any price to win.  

I tried to hint at these things the next time we met.   “Eli’s full of shit!” snarled my father.   “Ask his kids what kind of father he was, he is so full of shit.  His kids hate him.  Sure, listen to his twisted version of history, he’s a great historian, he knows everything, he’s the expert on every subject, a man of great insight into everything.  A fucking bullshit artist — did he tell you about the many millions he made that he was screwed out of, always somebody else’s fault?  I’m sure he did.  His fantasy stories will answer all of your questions.  He’s a fountain of wisdom,”  and so forth.

And now the punchline, of sorts, that you have been so patiently awaiting.  After two years of inexplicable fatigue, my father found himself, the first night of Passover, waking from a nap unable to move and severely jaundiced.   My mother who had been heating up matzoh ball soup and getting ready to serve dinner,  called an ambulance.  The ER doctor knew immediately what the learned endocrinologist, hematologist and cardiologist that my father saw several times a month had been unable to figure out:  this patient is in the very end stages of terminal liver cancer.   He went into the hospital on the first day of Passover, a holiday of eight days, and was dead before the holiday commemorating the perilous journey from slavery to freedom ended. 

On what turned out to be the last night of his life I visited him in the hospital, stood by his deathbed where I found him waiting to talk.  After the pleasantries, and after he asked if I’d brought the digital recorder (we were both glad I’d left one there in the care of his wonderful nurse) the first thing he said was:  

Eli hit the nail on the head, everything he told you was true.  Only he probably didn’t paint it as dark and nightmarish as it really was…  

Then, the man who had insisted all his life that childhood was something an adult leaves behind in forging his own independent identity and life, said:  my life was over by the time I was two.  You don’t recover from that. 

I have been over and over this terrain many times, probably told versions of this very story a dozen times right here on this gratuitous blahg.  I’m thinking about it now because I had a reminder yesterday of the essential incomprehensibility of much of human behavior, particularly our own.  

An old friend expressed dismay that his loved ones sometimes don’t seem to realize that he has nothing but the best of intentions, no matter how else it may appear.  It saddens him that his old friend, and his wife, cannot easily see his good will and instead misconstrue things motivated by the best of intentions as antagonistic or hostile.   Those actions he intends to be supportive that are sometimes misread as provocative, a vexing human mystery.  

 As for my father, he expressed his very sincere regret that he hadn’t explored the many gradations of life instead of seeing everything as a black and white zero sum fight to the death.  He mused momentarily and sadly about how much richer his life, and the lives of those he loved, would have been had he seen the world in all its subtle variations.

He expressed this sorrowful insight perhaps seventeen hours before the sun went down and, in the orange and pink embers of a beautiful Florida sunset, the silhouettes of palm trees outside the hospital window, his last breath went out and no more came in.

One Note Samba

I’ve noticed over and over that in our society the crime of not monetizing things that can bring profit is considered  even more heinous than proposing socialist sounding solutions to long-standing social problems.  It is not hard to notice, as everything around us is being constantly monetized, but every time I see a new example, like a bird hit in the knee with a tiny rubber mallet, I begin to tweet my sour one note samba.
 
“This is just a one note samba,” sings Sekhnet, rolling her eyes and walking into the other room whenever I begin the familiar song.
 
Several sweaty miles through 93 degrees with my laptop on my back the other day I stopped into the lovely mall at 59th and Columbus Circle to use the bathroom and enjoy the air-conditioning.  Last May I stood at a vantage point on the second floor balcony where I photographed out the high glass wall to the statue of Columbus and people coming and going, up and down escalators.  It was a beautiful shot of the city through floor to ceiling windows and a sea of humanity captured against this spectacular backdrop.  I shot a cool stop-motion movie from there and noted it as a great place to take vivid city-scapes.
 
I stood at the same place yesterday and saw with a shudder that some fucking genius has monetized that vast open space, two wide 40 foot tall banners advertising Glaceau Smart Water now block most of the view, though you can still spy Columbus propped on his pillar in the narrow slice of sky visible between them.  If you hold your head just right.
 
They’d be idiots to refuse the half million a year Glaceau pays them to advertise their product in that striking spot.  Why would anyone turn down that kind of money?   What would you rather have, a fucking view few even notice or a half million dollars?  Duh!