Author Archives: oinsketta

When Thomas Jefferson’s beloved daughter didn’t write to him

Aggrieved that her beloved father had retired from retirement to get back into the intrigues of early American politics, mounted a vigorous and all-consuming presidential campaign and moved from Monticello to the nation’s capital, Martha took a break from their lively correspondence.  When she did finally write after he was elected president she did not congratulate him on his win or make any other mention of the presidency.

Damn!

Thomas Jefferson, now president, was long accustomed to keeping his darker passions subdued.  In fact, most biographers site his whipping of his horse bloody as one of the only outward signs of anger he ever showed.   His beloved daughter’s silence finally got to him, though, and he wrote to her:

“It is a terrible thing that people will not write unless they have materials to make a long letter when three words would be so acceptable.”1

Dig it.

1: Thomas Jefferson, An Intimate History; Fawn M. Brodie  p. 327

America, America

I must find something to occupy me more productively during the long working day. Come home after work too tired to think, with a feeling of accomplishment or even just relief to be done, get a paycheck.   This unpaid uphill life I’m living is too challenging.  

Having a simple, self-evident and overdue idea: that kids in trouble need to be listened to, need to be allowed to play, make creative and editorial decisions in relation to their learning — testing it a hundred times, watching it succeed everywhere — what the hell is that balanced against its failure to thrive, against the vast landscape of intolerable annoyances that can only truly be surmounted by unqualified success, or, in the meantime, a dedicated spiritual practice or an all-consuming job?  That it might well help every child it touches?  Succeed against the odds or shut the fuck up, loser.  

Why for example get worked up about the details of the new trade bill President Obama is trying to fast track through Congress?   Up or down vote, you don’t need to debate the details, it’s bipartisan.  

Personally, I have other things to worry about, like the $507 bill for last month’s twenty minute session with the Nurse Practitioner ($180) and a blood test ($327).  I have to take a walk and arrange a meeting with an ombudsman or patient advocate at Columbia Doctors, see how far I can negotiate it down to a reasonable number.

“Sir, $327 for a blood test IS a reasonable number, approved by Empire Blue Cross under the terms of the PPACA, as is $180 for a consultation with a medical professional who, arguably, should not have been on Google perplexedly searching for ‘pink mucas’ for the bulk of your short meeting, shouldn’t have offered to do a rectal exam she knew — when asked– would tell her nothing, and who should probably have asked about your recent diet, stress, changes in life, exercise, sleep and so forth instead of just making a referral to a specialist– particularly since the questions she didn’t ask turned out to be keys to solving your bowel problems, as you did on your own. But your bill has been negotiated on your behalf and approved by the insurance company and is legal, mandatory and collectible under the PPACA.  If you have a problem with it, talk to your congressman.  You owe us $507 and since you have insurance your argument about being treated as uninsured, and allowed the discount we often give to such patients, is flatly absurd.  Unless you’d like the bill turned over to our debt collector, like many before it, pay it now.  How would you like to pay, cash, check or credit card?”

I don’t know, for the life of me, why I’m not making a call now to make arrangements to have that fun discussion instead of tapping here.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement is no doubt a massive and complicated bill.   The president gets hot when he’s accused of keeping it secret.  It is not secret, he insists, any member of Congress can make an appointment to go read it.  They simply may not bring staffers with them, may not photocopy any part of it or remove it from the restricted reading room, may not make notes or discuss its terms with anybody with clearance who hasn’t seen it.  That’s what fast-track means, up or down vote — “yes” or “no”– there’s no need for debate.  Plenty of Republicans are already on board to vote “yes”.  What the hell is the problem with the liberal wing of the president’s own party?

Maybe it’s the lack of public debate?  I don’t know.  Secrecy, and even semi-secrecy, has a bad smell in a democracy where an informed electorate is supposed to be involved in the decisions made on its behalf.  We all know this is a bit of a myth, but still, secrecy is a slap in the voters’ faces, and it smells bad.  

When Vice President Cheney and President Bush could not stall the 9/11 Commission beyond November 2002, they set conditions for speaking to the commission. They would go before the commission together, not be sworn to tell the truth, nor would they testify, no notes, no recordings, everybody on the commission was sworn to keep whatever they said secret.   Struck me as a deal a couple of mafia dons would make, if they owned the court system and the police force.  Sunlight is the best disinfectant for abuses of democracy, as well as hateful free speech, except, apparently, when it shines into the dark side where it doesn’t belong.  Some things are best kept secret from a skittish electorate that can’t handle the truth, is the theory.

Think of the stink that would have engulfed us if the enhanced interrogation program had not been kept secret, except for those members of a Congressional committee who got restricted access to secret memos, after agreeing, under the penalties for treason, not to disclose their classified contents. The memos, it turns out, justified everything by arguing that each enumerated torture technique was not torture if a doctor was present to make sure death did not result from it.  Imagine the outrage if the public had been let in on the details of that program!

We’re just finding out now about guys hung by chains naked, submerged in ice water, kept in cages half the size of a coffin, kept awake for days on end, in cold, and heat, and menaced by snarling dogs, and look how pissed off some of us feel.  Imagine if we’d known while it was being systematically done to hundreds, or possibly thousands, of suspected bad men held without charges in secret prisons scattered around the globe?  Imagine if we’d known that $81,000,000 in taxpayer dollars had been paid to two rogue psychologists to oversee this controversial, failed experiment in counter-terrorism?

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement  has at least one provision that some people will get upset about, rightly or wrongly.   I don’t know how we know about this provision, since the contents of the trade agreement have never been made public, but nobody seems to be denying that this is one of its provisions.  Ah, I see some traitor has apparently leaked a section of it, to Wikileaks, natch.

Corporations whose profit expectations have been diminished or damaged by laws or regulations of member states will be able to sue those state, local or federal governments, in special Investor-State Dispute Settlement tribunals.  The judges in these tribunals will be lawyers who have experience in the area the corporation works in, be familiar with the nuances of their profit expectations.   Many will have, without a doubt, worked for, or even still work for, these corporations.

“But it’s the same with the Security and Exchange Commission,” you will argue, correctly.  “The government lawyers there charged with catching financial shenanigans are the minor leaguers, the best of whom will get to work for the corporations they regulate for many times their government salary.  That’s the world, why be a weak little whiny bitch about it?  Make some money, you’ll feel better.”

The conspiracy theorists among us imagine the worst.  Alarmists and weaklings, one and all.  After all, NAFTA turned out fine.  And the draft provision for the Investor-State Dispute Settlement tribunals (see linked Washington Post article) includes, ironically, clear transparency rules, requiring that all cases brought under the TPP must be public.

The enhanced interrogation program, or torture program, if you’re being a pain-in-the-ass stickler for accuracy, even though it was far more extensive than admitted, even though evidence of some of the more medieval abuses was deliberately destroyed, even though it must be admitted that little or no actionable intelligence resulted from this widespread, systematic trampling on decades of evolving human rights law and the anti-torture treaties we championed, well, no harm no foul.  You can understand the need to keep that kind of shit top secret, just look at the harm the after-the-fact revelations have been doing.

Barack Obama is a good man, a brilliant and witty man.  He’s a funny, cool guy with everyone’s best interests at heart.  If he says this bill needs to be fast-tracked, who is a nation of obstructionist ignoramuses to say no?   Finally he has a truly bipartisan bill he’s trying to sign into law and stubborn members of the president’s own party are standing in his way.  Many Americans hate him simply because his father was African and, under the time-honored American code of racism, he is considered a black man.   I rest my case.  Fast track this shit.  Father knows best.

“Get a job, you bum!” a witty fan yells at the ump.

Abuse on the sly

I was a U.S. Census enumerator in the 1980 Census.  I went door to door in apartment buildings, knocking and interviewing households on a list I got from a supervisor.  The list was comprised of people who had not mailed back their census forms.  The answers to these census questions were used by Congress to apportion funds, based on population.  It was important work for the neighborhood, the eye contact avoiding, Amish bearded supervisor impressed on us the first day.  Because my neighborhood is largely Dominican, I quickly learned to shout “Censo” through the closed doors in response to muffled queries.  Most doors, when they opened, opened reluctantly, some not at all.  I didn’t blame them, I hate uninvited knocks on my door, after all, even though it made my job harder when they didn’t talk to me.

It was a commission business.   We were paid strictly by the number of completed census forms we handed in every week.   There was one guy who handed in exactly the same number every week– a large number, he was the highest earner.  He undoubtedly wrote them out sitting at his kitchen table, or in the local diner, making up the information that nobody else was ever going to follow up or confirm, as fast as his hand could fill in the blanks.  It is likely his answers gave our part of NYC the maximum federal dollars for population, since he was, clearly, a canny fellow.

I, however, was raised to be an honest idiot, and so I walked to each apartment the required three times, at different times of day, times I duly documented in my sworn-to log, before filling in as accurately as possible an ‘estimated’ questionnaire based on asking a neighbor, or like my more successful colleague, my best and fastest guess seated at my kitchen table or on a park bench.  It was pretty dull work in any case, bubbling in circles with a number two U.S. Government Census pencil.  The memorable moments were very few, but there is one that stayed in my head and came up yesterday with sudden and disturbing clarity.

I was 24, and I recall one good-looking young woman being openly seductive, shifting on the couch in her scanty nightgown, which slipped off her shoulders and receded at the bottom to show most of her smooth, caramel colored skin.  Her skin was lovely, and her body nicely formed.  She had a pretty face, too, and smiled invitingly, sitting close by the spot she’d patted for me to sit, but I was hesitant to be seduced, only partly because she didn’t speak any English.   She asked me in Spanish if I was married, and I shook my head slowly with a small smile accompanied by the jarring thought of her jealous lover turning the key in the lock as I leaned in to kiss her, or worse, a few minutes later.  

But the visit I recall even more vividly was to a married couple in another building.   The very friendly man opened the door with a big smile and a welcome the guy from El Censo usually didn’t get.  He may even have offered me a beer, which I would have thanked him for but declined.   I recall thinking this fit, self-possessed, likable guy in the immaculate wife-beater was what’s known as a man’s man.

Behind him in the tidy kitchen was a woman with a tear-streaked face, her eye make-up a mess.  She made desperate, pleading, mad-looking gestures behind his back.   He was very relaxed, but kept an eye on her too.  Whenever he noticed the histrionics she quickly hid whenever he turned to her he would shrug to me and casually laugh it off.  “She’s very emotional,” he told me with a smile, his raised eyebrows adding “you know what I’m talking about, my man, I know you know.” 

He quickly and efficiently answered all the census questions while she said nothing, stood behind him mugging like a mad woman.  

“He’s going to kill me,” she mouthed distinctly behind his back as I wrapped up the questions and put the clipboard back into my official plastic U.S. Census satchel.  

I had a moment of confusion then, cognitive dissonance of a sort, but there was now no mistaking where I actually was, nor the sharp pang of fear I still recall.  The strong, friendly man in the wife-beater was actually a wife beater.  If I let on that I knew, he would kill both of us right there in the kitchen, the reality of that hummed electrically in the air.  Calling the cops once I left wouldn’t be the end of it either, it was her word against his, and I’d already seen how that would play when the cops arrived.  

The cops would clap him on the back and thank him for the beers as they went out smiling, especially back in 1980 when people were not so aware of the dynamics of domestic violence.  If the guy even spent part of a night locked up he’d get out and come directly to find me, which would not take long, I lived alone a couple of blocks away.  When he spotted me he’d yell “cabron!”, race across the street, catch me by my collar, beat the shit out of me, break both my arms and my legs too.  The smell of fear was all I smelled as I smiled and shook his powerful hand.

I am not proud, all these years later, that I did nothing, even as I know there was not much I could have done.  Today I probably would have done something, I like to think.  I have done brave things for weaker people in such situations a couple of times since.  Plus, times have changed over the decades, the cops today would not necessarily roll their eyes at the emotionally worked up woman and or uncritically buy the calm, easy patter of the affable guy.  

And yet– people live in terrible situations, not to blame victims for being victims, mind you, but people, for twisted psychic reasons they themselves are mostly clueless about, place themselves in hells that they stay in, like that apartment I visited… like crummy and beautiful homes everywhere, behind the walls and doors of which unspeakable cruelties are routinely and systematically committed.

The sometimes grotesque effort to survive

Survival against the odds sometimes takes on a grotesque aspect.  

“How is that thing even still alive?” a person will say, wonder mixed with horror, watching the dried out, half-eaten creature dragging itself along by its remaining limbs.

The will to live is strong and does not, after a certain point, obey the dictates of good taste.  It is no surprise that we sometimes prefer to look away.

Blessed Are The Peacemakers

A peacemaker takes people in pain and anger and, if she is good, leaves them with less intense bad feelings, able to picture a time when they will reconcile and forgive each other.

Many people want to make peace, but it is an art few people master. Inartful attempts to make peace remind me of Rodney King’s “can’t we all just get along?”  Convincing people to pretend it was all a misunderstanding and that everybody actually loves each other is not peacemaking.  There are situations where this may be the case, mutual misunderstanding leads to war.   But until the hurts are acknowledged, you might as well just squirt lighter fluid on the smoldering ashes.

Making peace is hard, often impossible, but blessed work, and the principle is simple and universal.

The first requirements are humility and empathy toward the parties. Judging the angry parties does not help make peace, only understanding the harsh reality of their feelings does.   The peacemaker cannot make peace (except in the case of the Colt .45 sardonically named The Peacemaker, which left the quarrelsome party silent at the end of the session)– the peacemaker can only bring calm, patience and listening skills to a situation from which these elements have fled.

The power of calm, patience and listening cannot be overstated.  It is aggravating not to be heard.  “I know what you are about to say and you seem unwilling to admit the possibility that you’re completely wrong,” is a poor strategy for a would-be peacemaker.  

Good luck to those who would be peacemakers, the impulse is commendable.   Few things in this troubled world are more blessed than making peace where there was implacable hostility.  Don’t forget, though, to check your own frustration at the door before you attempt it.  That’s all I’m saying.

Excavation

I should be excavating the foot deep surface of my desk.  I have misplaced a very nice new 0.9 mm mechanical pencil and it’s bugging the hell out of me.  I hate losing things, and don’t often lose things, in spite of the swirling chaos in here.   I’ve looked everywhere, superficially.  It has to be somewhere under this nest of papers all around the computer screen.  Why this reluctance to tackle these heaps of papers?

Is it related to the reluctance to tackle more difficult things?  Brooding over an inability to tidy is preferable to thinking about the vexing impossibility of the larger challenge, I suppose.   People build huge edifices to protect themselves from the things they fear the most, like the reality of their eventual extinction.  Lives are spent busily making monuments to the self that will vanish without any other trace when the animating light goes out.  Denial of death is not just a deadly river in Africa.  

“You are riffing hard on the back pedal, son, because you fear to take even a mincing, tiny step forward,” says Hmmmm.  

A worn out device, like the rest of these devices… observes one to none.  

I give a fleeting thought to a lamentable thing.   In reaching the limit of my forbearance, when an old friend’s obliviousness finally cut me too deeply to tolerate, I lost something rare that I valued greatly.  Whatever else his flaws, he is a quick-witted fellow I never had to worry did not follow a divergent remark.   Lightning quick to catch on, which made it a pleasure to banter with him.   This feature, oddly, was one of the best things about my father, whose sense of humor was similarly dark, irreverent and instant.  Interestingly, both of them were often driven by self-hatred.

Speaking quickly and unchecked is a pleasure rare in this world, where we often have to explain, pull punches, consider the other person’s squeamishness and taste before riffing.  It was like rare moments in jam sessions where the kernel of an idea would pass, lightning quick, and we’d be on it at once.

Oh, well.  Time to get back to work rolling this hoop down the joyful road.

To Prove I Was Not Depressed

To prove to someone who loves me and worries about me that I was not depressed, I made a doctor’s appointment I had been putting off making.  

My ailment was digestive, or rather, excretory, and had not been particularly terrible, but was a change for the worse and had persisted for a few weeks.  She kept urging me to see a doctor, rather than find out, God forbid, I had colon cancer only after the disease had too firm a foothold to dislodge.  Since I kept mentioning it, she kept reminding me, with mounting exasperation, that I should see a doctor.

My doctor was on vacation, but his nurse practitioner would be able to see me fairly soon.   My experience with this woman was mixed, she was defensive, short-tempered and had a wavering attention span.  She asked questions and did not listen all the way through the answer.   She scolded and defended herself instead of cutting to the chase and solving the problem.   I’d felt very mature overlooking what an unlikable person she could be on a previous visit.  My gut told me not to bother with her, but my gut was also giving me problems the internet had no ready answers about.  

In any case, I knew my doctor would probably only refer me to a gastroenterologist.  One of my hesitations of getting involved with doctors was paying unknowable fees of hundreds of dollars to a referring doctor, and even more to a specialist, to have a series of diagnostic tests I’d also have to pay for “out of pocket” though I pay a premium to an insurance company every month.

I purchase Obamacare, a small, deeply flawed step towards controlling health care costs and lessening the unconscionable number of Americans who die for lack of affordable health care.  One frustration of this Great Compromise is that a consumer can’t find out the price of an office visit until the office she or he visits submits a bill to the private health insurance company.  The insurance company sends a copy of the claim to the patient and informs the doctor’s office of the negotiated rate and the patient gets a bill.  I have a folder full of these bills, many of which I am not responsible to pay, some of which are in collection against me.  The difficulty of finding out which I owe and which I don’t is a vexation that is bad for the health of everyone effected by this complicated private health insurance law.

The nurse practitioner spent much of our twenty minute meeting searching the internet for information on an odd symptom I had already researched: pink mucus.  She meticulously typed in every aspect of our conversation for her on-line records but, although bowel conditions are often effected by such things, never asked about changes in diet, circumstance, stress, sleep, mood.  She had never heard of pink mucus in the stool.   She was concerned that she’d never heard of this.  

“Shall I do a rectal exam to see if you have a hemorrhoid?” she asked.

“Would an external hemorrhoid cause this symptom?” I asked.  

“No,” she answered, “but an internal hemorrhoid might.”  

“Would your exam be able to tell you if I had an internal hemorrhoid?” I asked.  

“No,” she admitted.  I declined her invitation for a rectal exam.  My rectum was already fairly sore, in any case, inflamed, in fact.  She advised me to use soft, moist wipes instead of toilet paper and sent me for a blood test.

She had no other advice whatsoever, except to get to a GI doctor ASAP.  I reminded her I’d had a recent colonoscopy (a “fully covered” preventive service they are still billing me for…) and that it was therefore unlikely that I’d developed a serious condition in a matter of months.   I also knew, from my research, that diagnosing bowel trouble was a matter of ruling out a number of conditions and a likely diagnosis of IBS which is famously triggered by stress.  

I was also not looking forward to paying hundreds of dollars to have these things ruled out.  In any case, it didn’t feel like an emergency situation and the symptoms had not become any worse over those weeks.

A snippy phone message arrived two days after the visit urging me to get to the specialist ASAP.  A couple more snippy messages followed, one informed me there was an inflammation shown on the blood work.  Each message urged me to go see the specialist ASAP.   I’d been out of phone range, upstate, and didn’t get these until I got back to the city.  I called the office a few days later and had a copy of my blood test results sent to me.  They were mostly within the normal range and arrived without any accompanying comments.

Punchline # 1:  consciously changed my sloppy diet back to a more regular high fiber one, got some more physical exercise, completed some challenging work that had been dogging me, got a few nights of decent sleep: pink mucus and other symptoms gone, problem solved.

Punchline #2:  bill from Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act for twenty minute visit to distracted nurse practitioner, plus three scolding voice mails: $180.  

Everybody’s got to make a living.  God bless America, y’all.

Five Year Anniversary of my mother’s death

May 20th, 2010, was my mother’s 82nd birthday.  She was in a quiet room in Hospice by the Sea, fading fast.  Her angry, haggard, bitter upstairs neighbor slipped a card under the door that morning, wishing her a happy birthday and wishing her many more years of health and happiness.  I brought the card to the hospice and gave it to my sister.

“She’s nuts,” said my sister handing the card back to me next to the bed where our mother was asleep, the expression of death already on her face.  Toward the end of her birthday our mother slipped into a coma.  

A religious Jew my mother had long known, and fought with regularly, but with great affection, called to check in on her.  I told him she was in a coma.

“It’s the mark of a tzaddik (righteous person) to die on their birthday,” he told me.   A woman who didn’t believe in God, intensely disliked the often false piety of religious people, was dying as a tzaddik.   The thought gave me a smile, would have tickled my mother, perhaps.

I told the man that we’d decided to honor her wishes and have my mother’s body cremated.  He tried to talk me out of it, saying she’d want her skeleton to repose forever next to her husband’s in the plot reserved for her.   I told him she’d talked about her desire to be cremated several times over the years and recently expressed a terror of being buried and eaten by worms and insects.  I had assured her this wouldn’t happen.  He told me that Jewish law was against cremation, and so on.   To his credit, he didn’t insist beyond a few short arguments.  

When I mentioned that the cemetery where their burial plot was forbade burial of ashes (many Jewish cemeteries allow this practice) he said: “that doesn’t mean you can’t bury her ashes there” and described a stealth burial.   I liked him for that.

My mother, always somewhat stubborn, refused to die as a tzaddik.  She truly didn’t believe in that kind of thing.  She breathed through that last night, into the morning, and died today, one day after her birthday, five years ago.

I don’t recall feeling gloomy or somber on the previous anniversaries, perhaps I did.  But this one has got me a little bit glum, I have to say.

Happy Birthday, Mom.