Author Archives: oinsketta

State of Perpetual Decrepitude

In October, 1781, American and French forces routed the British and their mercenaries at Yorktown, a decisive turning point of the Revolutionary War.  Joyous Americans gathered to celebrate amid bonfires, speeches, and general revelry amounting to the ceremonial sticking of a fork into King George the Third.   Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Father of Our Country, George Washington, to congratulate him and to beg off on attending the festivities.  His reason survives:  he would have come, he wrote, except for “the state of perpetual decrepitude to which I am unfortunately reduced.”  The Author of Liberty at that point was 38 years old and temporarily retired from politics.*

In a state of perpetual decrepitude myself, the line spoke to me.  Looking for a thread to unite the hundreds of pages I have posted here, it may be that state of perpetual decrepitude.  The phrase has some poetry in it, I think, and the urge to type “perpetual decrepitude” is hard to resist.  Resist I must, though.  Onward!

what that decrepitude sounds like today

de·crep·i·tude

(dĭ-krĕp′ĭ-to͞od′, -tyo͞od′)

n.

The quality or condition of being weakened, worn out, impaired, or broken down by oldage, illness, or hard use.  
Noun 1. decrepitude – a state of deterioration due to old age or long use

dilapidation
deterioration, impairment – a symptom of reduced quality or strength
noun
1. decay, deterioration, degeneration, dilapidation The buildings had been allowed to fall into decrepitude.
2. weakness, old age, incapacity, wasting, invalidity, senility, infirmity, dotage,debility, feebleness, eld (archaic) the boundary between healthy middle age and total decrepitude

decrepitude

noun

The condition of being infirm or physically weak:

debility, delicacy, delicateness, feebleness, flimsiness, fragileness,fragility, frailness, frailty, infirmity, insubstantiality, puniness, unsoundness,unsubstantiality, weakliness, weakness.

* Fawn M. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, An Intimate Biography,  Norton paperback p. 149

Therapist in Training

“You went to dental college to have a bridge made?”

“Yes,” he said, voice muffled by the swelling on the left side of his face.  

“You seem surprised that there were complications.”

 “One hopes for the best,” he replied miserably.

“Reminds me of a young therapist I had once.  It cost me a fraction of what an experienced professional would have, and I reasoned that she was being supervised and that I was the one who’d have to do the hard work in any case.  How much could her inexperience have hurt me? I remember telling myself that.”  

His friend inclined his head quizzically, his face too inflamed to make unnecessary utterances.  

“Early on I brought her a drawing book of mine which she flipped through.  I explained to her that this is how I saw the world, flashing vignettes of creative inspiration and how important drawing and other creative expression was to me.  She nodded and asked why I don’t try to sell them.  I explained my feelings about creativity in service of commerce, my misgivings about doing creative work for clients, particularly the wealthy and tasteful.  When I was done explaining she pointed out that Hitler had been a frustrated artist.  It didn’t occur to me to ask if she was suggesting a career in politics for me.”  

His friend grimaced, grunted meaningfully.  

“Yeah, I know.  Anyway, she came up with a great restatement of my essential problem, which I’ve never forgotten.  I told her how difficult it was for me to get anyone to appreciate the beauty and potential of the simple, radical educational model I’d come up with.   Friends would nod sympathetically while thinking of gentle ways to convince me it was long past time to do something else.  She said to me ‘so, it’s upsetting to you that your friends are not able to be affectionate to the imaginary dog you love.’  I thought of siccing my imaginary dog on her young ass, but stared past her at the wall, thinking of ways to say nothing.”  

“And you question my wisdom in getting a bridge from a…. ouch…” and he closed his eyes, faced screwed up in pain.  

“Yeah, I know,” I said, “we are often much more droll than we realize, aren’t we?”

excerpt from the transcript

“If you’re not insane why are you in this laughing academy?” she asked with a challenging smile.  

“I’m not in a laughing academy,” I said.  

“Ha!” she said.  This cracked her up.

“Nothing like a girl who appreciates her own wit,” I said.  “I’m glad you find this funny.”  My profession of gladness snapped her right out of it, the frown returned to her face.  

“This should cheer you up,” I said.  “A fragment of the transcript of my intake interview.  Listen to how it reads so naturally like someone speaking.”

She read:

And it was an object lesson to me about the power of apology. It was like, the feeling of hurt was dissipated instantly. And I felt much better friends with him because he empathized completely  with how hurtful what he did was and he, as quickly as possible, made it go away. 
 
I said earlier I believe in the power of apology and forgiveness and all that, and it was a sad trait in my family: my sister, my father,  my father’s first cousin, my grandmother, they had a very hard time forgiving.  And that’s kind of unforgivable to me.  I’ve seen 30, 40, 50 year grudges in my family and so that incident with my friend was really like a light going on in a room.
 
“Kind of unforgivable to you,” she said handing the paper back with the most deadpan of expressions.
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Elizabeth Warren

“powerful interests benefit from a system that is complicated and opaque”

Elizabeth Warren was deemed too controversial to head the new federal U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau she’d called for.   This agency would investigate complaints by ripped off consumers,  give them a way to get compensated when their powerful fellow-citizens, corporations, take advantage of them in a predatory way.    President Obama decided the confirmation debate on the floor of a Congress intent on thwarting his every idea, even ideas they agreed with, would be futile and politically costly.  He nominated a less controversial person to head the agency, appointed him during a recess and that was the last anyone heard of this bold new agency.  Nobody’s fault, a defender of Mr. Obama could say, just the sad reality of the highly polarized wedge issue politics of the day.

Elizabeth Warren ran a successful campaign for the senate in 2012 and took office in January 2013. I get emails from Senator Warren from time to time.   I like what she has to say very much, and what she consistently seems to fight for.  Here is a great quote from her I heard last night, apparently made over a year ago:  

“I’ve been in the senate for nearly a year and believe as strongly as ever that the system is rigged for powerful interests and against working families.  We could talk about a lot of ways the system is rigged: lobbyists, campaign finance, the court system, but I want to raise a specific issue that we need to spotlight:  how much powerful interests benefit from a system that is complicated and opaque.”  

A system that is complicated and opaque.  Well said.  Other adjectives come to mind as well, but she cuts through to the essence, resisting the urge to use words like convoluted, deliberately confusing, obfuscatory, immoral.  Ask a financial genius to describe the industry-wide scam that torpedoed the economy in 2008, the bundling, tranching and reselling of toxic “derivatives” that were somehow swapped for the tremendous profits of few, and the bankruptcies of many, after being rated triple A investments by rating agencies that were essentially paid to give these false and misleading ratings to poison.    The genius would have a hard time describing it in a way anyone not trained in the industry could understand.

Although, the simple fact, after the fact, is that a massive fraud was perpetrated, industry-wide, arguably under cover of complicated and opaque law, and nobody was ever forced to return a dollar of the billions and billions transferred from retirement accounts and life savings to the personal wealth of already very rich executives and investors.  The opaque, complicated and loophole strewn laws these wealthy interests agreed to so that a future tsunami of financial highjinx does not roll over us lack the simplicity and effectiveness of the FDR-era law* they had repealed in order to perpetrate this massive transfer of wealth.  

Glass-Steagall, the repealed law, prevented a major financial crisis for more than 50 years (they’d previously happened every 15 years, culminating in the stock market crash of 1929), until loopholes began appearing under Reagan in the 1980s.  Shortly thereafter we had the Savings and Loan Scandal.  Once the law was repealed (under Bill Clinton’s watchful and practical eye) we had the first world-wide financial disaster since 1929.  An amazing coincidence, no?   

The devil is in the details and if the details are complicated, confusing, opaque, impossible to parse– voila, the devil is free to cavort as much as he likes.  Here’s one that struck me from Elizabeth Warren’s recent email about regulation to curb the interest rates of student loans:

“Since last year, nearly a million more borrowers have fallen behind on their payments. Altogether, students are now struggling with $100 billion MORE debt than they were a year ago.

Student loan debt was an economic emergency last year – and now that emergency is getting worse. That’s why I’m reintroducing the Bank on Students Emergency Loan Refinancing Act. Join me in telling the Senate Republicans: Student loan refinancing can’t wait another year.

” … I don’t kid myself: Refinancing loans won’t fix everything that’s wrong in our higher education system. We need to cut the price of college, to reinvest in public universities, to shore up federal financial aid, to crack down on for-profit colleges, and to provide better protections on student loans.

But let’s start with the $1.3 trillion in outstanding student loan debt. Let’s start by cutting back on the interest payments that are sinking young people and holding back this economy. Tell the GOP: Let’s start with Bank on Students.“

The bold proposal that Republicans filibustered last year would limit the interest rate in this trillion dollar government sponsored industry to 3.9%, four times what savings banks pay to depositers, three or four times the interest rates banks are paying for two year CDs.   A quick check of mortgage and other loan rates shows rates below 3.9% for people buying houses or cars, or refinancing homes.   I don’t know what rate investment banks and corporations are paying to borrow money these days (as close as I can tell this is the federal funds rate, lowered to 0.0-0.25% in December of 2008) but I believe the 3.9% interest rate is more than 10 times higher than that, if not infinitely higher.  

Ah, go fight City Hall, it’s complicated and opaque, you know what I’m saying?  But let us end with Elizabeth Warren’s succinct 2011 refutation of the Libertarian worldview and her answer to the charge that in advocating for higher tax rates on the wealthy she is engaging in “class warfare”:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. … You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

source

NOTES

*  [in 1987] Thomas Theobald, then vice chairman of Citicorp, argues that three “outside checks” on corporate misbehavior had emerged since 1933: “a very effective” SEC; knowledgeable investors, and “very sophisticated” rating agencies. Volcker is unconvinced, and expresses his fear that lenders will recklessly lower loan standards in pursuit of lucrative securities offerings and market bad loans to the public. For many critics, it boiled down to the issue of two different cultures – a culture of risk which was the securities business, and a culture of protection of deposits which was the culture of banking.  

(and from the end of the PBS piece)

Just days after the administration (including the Treasury Department) agrees to support the repeal [October, 1999], Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, the former co-chairman of a major Wall Street investment bank, Goldman Sachs, raises eyebrows by accepting a top job at Citigroup as Weill’s chief lieutenant. The previous year, Weill had called Secretary Rubin to give him advance notice of the upcoming merger announcement. When Weill told [noted corporate cocksucker] Rubin he had some important news, the secretary reportedly quipped, “You’re buying the government?”

source 

If You Have Nothing Good To Say About Someone

“say nothing,” my mother always said.   Actually, that’s not true.  She may have said it once.  At any rate, not as often as she said things about people when she had nothing good to say about them.    If you would look for a real conversation with people over the internets*, I’d suggest you find something else to do.   Banging your head against the wall, in my opinion, is probably a better use of your time.  

Think of it, in an actual conversation, much of the time the odds don’t favor a meaningful chat– each person will talk about what excites or concerns them, or just as often what annoys or perplexes them, and if there is a back and forth, beyond this mutual telling of stories, that’s a big plus and a conversation to remember.   In writing, unless you are writing to another writer– and even then, the odds are against you — you can often forget about hearing much connected to what you were discussing.  If you curse, insult or use CAPS to browbeat the person you will sometimes get an aggrieved and defensive direct response, but, all things considered, this is not a useful strategy for having a productive conversation with someone.    Better to do almost anything else, including posting random thoughts and opinions in cyberspace.

I remember my friends’ bright, precocious daughter, at about age six, annoyed by her younger cousins at a family gathering, bursting out with “I hate those fucking little bastards!” and stomping out of the room.  My friend took his little girl aside and with infinite tenderness told her he understood that her little cousins were probably frustrating to hang around with, but that they bothered her because they loved her and wanted to be with her.   She stuck to her position that she hated them, but left open the possibility that she might soften her position.  I recall being very impressed that my friend didn’t even mention the language, he went straight, and compassionately, to why the girl was angry.  

But I have to say, I’m with the girl here, particularly lately.


IMG_0218

* As former president George Dubya Bush styled it

Good Advice From A Friend

At dinner with old friends last night I described the progress of my adaptable and energizing simplified animation workshop.  My friend smiled as he spoke of the many good uses for it, the almost infinite applications, how many different people and settings who would love to pay for something so wonderful.  He was happy about how far my original idea had come, even as he was struck by the difficulty of my struggle to figure out how to make it a viable business.

I told him about Reggio Emilia (described in previous post) and the schools in NYC that follow its model.   A good fit, he agreed, and saw as stubborn folly, a clinging to misguided beliefs and political prejudice, that I’d even hesitate to work with them just because the parents paid $39,000 for their kids’ kindergarten tuition.

“I treat patients on welfare, and I can afford to, because I also treat patients with gold plated insurance.  You can’t work for the poor unless you sustain yourself somehow.  Take rich people’s money!  They’re the ones who have the money!  If they’ll pay you five times what the public school can afford, work at one rich school to be able to serve more poor schools.”   I heard his point and granted it, told him I’d think about it, but he could see I was not sold.  He was pained that I’d need to think about such a no-brainer.

“People become addicted to what they are used to, old patterns are very hard to change.  You have always struggled, you’re used to it, it’s a habit and you don’t want to go out of your comfort zone.  You need to look at the bigger picture, if your idea that you’ve worked on for years to bring to this point is to flourish you have to get out of that struggling mentality.”  Again I raised my eyebrows, nodded, though we both knew in some way he was talking to the pens in my shirt pocket.    

I raised something Sekhnet had mentioned the other day: people with connections and good business sense seeing the great potential of my workshop and promoting and selling it as their own invention.  Who, I thought, is likelier to steal my invention:  the art teachers at a posh school with unlimited resources and successful artist and business parents on the board or the overworked teachers’ aids at some of the slum schools I’ve struggled in, the schools I am targeting for this program?  The innovative private school would then get to take credit for the thing I’d created to showcase the heartbreaking creativity of children of the poor marked for failure, prison and early death.  Bird wins, one more time ladies and gentlemen.

“Justifying your habitual struggle, that’s all,” said my old friend.  He may have been entirely correct, although I think he also understood how much work I still have to do with marketing, packaging, promoting, fundraising, recruiting, social media and so on before I can claim to have created a business or program, rather than just having carried out an promising idea.

I don’t want to do this program for the children of the rich.  Call me a damn redneck, what can I say?

First Person

There is such a thing as too much solitude, no question.  Many people have it — while some good souls find themselves dragged under by the endless demands of others with little time left for themselves.  The sword is sharp on both sides, and like anyone with a bit of sense knows, it’s best to stay clear of the edges of sharp swords.   Moderation, in media res, and so forth.

“You have to get out more,” she said.

“Without a doubt,” he, I, they said.    

I did some research on a humanistic educational theory that parents developed to bring a love of life and beauty back to the young children of their war torn region. Reggio Emilia, as it is called, centers, like my program, on listening to what the children care about and helping them pursue it in all its colors, flavors, quirky child-driven nuance.   Used mostly for very young children, it sets them on a path of loving nature, and creativity, and gets them in the habit of treasuring and following what they love.   Following what children love was not a major characteristic of life under Mussolini, or Hitler, for that matter.  Following what you love, with attentive adult guides, is probably the best way to learn, though.

I was concerned, before I first started doing the workshops, that today’s children, watching an unprecedented amount of flashy content on TV and other screens, would not be creative, would ape what they see in video games and the like.   I was relieved to see the creativity flow with little reference to the media they consume all day.  In mixed groups, girls and boys and different ages, even violence, a signature of our culture, was not pronounced in the animation they made.  Kids played with the materials, experimented, thought up ideas, tried them, piggy backed on other ideas.  They were protean in their creativity and had little inclination to look back and refine even their most brilliant ideas; they had new ideas they wanted to try out.

First person– everybody is the protagonist of their own life, wants to be, needs to be appreciated as unique and special, even if only by one other person.  The billion blahgs and facebook pages demonstrate this deep human need to be seen as special.   Now we’re back to Reggio Emilia.  Each child in that classroom is treated as a unique and equal partner, no more fascist hierarchy where obedience is do or die. Some kids are verbal, some kids are builders, mechanics, engineers, some need to move all day, others to sit quietly.  Reggio Emilia, from what I can tell, embraces these differences, recognizes the value of each style as having something important to contribute, lovingly encourages the individuality of each kid in the context of a caring, sharing community.

I sent two friends my quick reaction to the tuition of one of a couple of NYC schools that practice the Reggio Emilia approach.  I prefaced the number with a “youch!” or an “ulp!”.  One friend wrote me back that everybody’s got to make a living and suggested I was being stubborn and foolish for not working with people who share my beliefs, even if they work for the children of parents who pay $39,000 tuition for kindergarten.  He had a point.   The other fellow sent me a link, which is here.  

The author of the linked piece describes the Reggio Emilia philosophy, lays out its origins in a war ravaged Italian village, and describes its embrace in some of the most expensive private schools around.   It goes on to suggest that maybe the approach would be appropriate for children raised in the war torn slums of our nation.  My thought exactly.

I have been chided for my prejudice against the fucking striving rich before, and will certainly be taken to task for it again.   In its way it’s as bad as being a racist, I suppose, to assume that because you devote your life and energies to the maniacal acquisition of wealth you are a shallow person.  Everyone wants the best for their children, after all, or most people do, and the children of the wealthy have as many needs, and troubles, as the children of the poor.  Well, maybe not quite as many, but close.   You can have a parent who is a treacherous and destructive asshole either way, for one thing.  

Of course, your odds are much better of having a frustrated parent wallop you if you grow up in a dangerous slum where that parent fights a war every day to put macaroni and cheese and chicken nuggets on the table than if you grow up in a comfortable situation.  A nanny, governess or other caretaker will be much more circumspect about socking a kid, in my experience.  But this is a cheap paragraph, its point minimal and somewhat peevish, so let us move on.  

“Round things up, Bubba, you have a lot on your checklist to do before you set out today,” an imaginary chaperone chimes in.  

The children of the poor are a problem to be dealt with, whereas the children of the well-to-do— them that’s got shall get.  Schools for the children of the poor generally suck.  The kids come to school with all kinds of problems the schools are not equipped to deal with and society clearly has a lot of other priorities– and not a whole lot of use for the masses of poor people who live and have kids in slums.  The parents and grandparents of these children are not equipped to deal with many of their problems, how can the children be expected to file in, sit quietly and read books, not fight?   How can public school teachers be expected to be teachers, mediators, social workers, child psychologists able to treat multiple patients at once in real time while motivating the fifth and tenth generation children of the hopeless to do well on the standardize exams most of them will fail?  

So public school comes to stand in for “school for poor people’s kids, hopeless prison prep schools” and alternative schools, pitted against the public ones as competitive Free Market models, often funded by the public dollar, are seen as the solution for everybody else.  A handful of the best of the poor kids, able to get scholarships or vouchers of some kind based on merit, get to go to these schools and — will you look at how well they seem to do!  These scattered successes by poor kids given the chance to succeed are touted as proof that public education has failed, like the rest of non-privatized social endeavor in our democracy.

Sure, it’s a question of priorities, but it’s also, as many will be quick to point out, just the way things actually are in a free and competitive society.   Few will be more than momentarily enraged that a group of powerful ideologues plunged the US into an unprovoked decade-long war, based on a new casus belli, “pre-emption”, to the tune of hundreds of thousands maimed and killed and trillions of dollars spent, literally.  Trillions are each one thousand billion.  Unlimited money for liberty, not a cent for tribute!     

“You’d do better to wrap things up than to go on in this vein, everyone knows you’re mad as hell, barking mad, in fact, woof! woof!, but like the rest of us you’re just going to fucking take it,” says whomever.  

Yes, of course.  And I have a long list of things I need to do now, excuse me.

Hypothetically Speaking

“Hypothetically, in theory, I can, or, say, one can, ward off encroaching insanity by the application of reason, by carefully thinking and clearly writing one’s way out of dark corners,” he said.

“Stipulated, hypothetically and in theory, for purposes only of this conversation,” said his friend.

“But say that a necessary part of this warding off process is the acknowledgement, by at least one other person he respects, that these efforts could indeed ward off encroaching neurasthenia,” he said.  

“Sounds like the poor devil may have already gone round the bend, if this is his condition for trying to heal himself, a compassionate partner, so to speak, in warding off the inevitable,” said his friend.  

“Well, that may be so.  But what if the person has gathered around himself a small group of people so niggardly in this attribute of empathy, so challenged by their own lives, so easily wearied by the eternal demands of this struggling devil, that his efforts, by the very design of his own little support network, are doomed?” he said.  

“Well, it would appear, then, that he’s doomed,” said his friend.  

“Oh, dear,” he said.  

“Yes,” said his friend.