Author Archives: oinsketta

Just watched a JFK documentary on PBS

And watched him deliver, in black and white movie footage, these words from Ireland, in the early summer of 1963, the last summer of his life:

George Bernard Shaw, speaking as an Irishman, summed up an approach to life.  “Other people,” he said, “see things and say ‘why?’.   But I dream things that never were, and I say ‘why not?’”    
 
The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities.  We need men who can dream of things that never were, and ask “why not?”
 
Dig it.

Do You Get It?

Talking approvingly about the progress among the compromises made by the Obama administration to pass the puckishly named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in the context of America 2015: driven by profit, corporations as people with feelings too, money as speech, ad buys win campaigns, politicians vying at the corporate trough, etc. is like talking about the success of advocates against the spread of slavery in 1856.

“Half of the new territories won’t allow slaves as a result of our hard work here today,” the successful advocate would say proudly, “that’s progress.  Not ideal, I know, but given the facts on the ground:  slavery perfectly legal under the Constitution, constitutional amendment impossible in a nation divided 50/50 into partisan camps that hate each other, wouldn’t be surprised if there’s an armed war between these two gun toting factions protecting their interests… we were LUCKY to convince Congress not to allow slavery in half the new territories.  That’s success today, and we should celebrate instead of looking at the damn glass half empty.  Hell, we have enough problems trying to wipe out the buffalo herds so we can destroy the Indian culture on the prairies that we need for Manifest Destiny….”

“Do you fucking have fucking Tourette’s?” she asked me.

“Maybe,” I said, “but doesn’t everybody?”

500 foot foul ball

“Sometimes,” he said, squaring up in the batter’s box and not taking his eye off the old coach who was trying to show off his once major league fastball, “you just feel like hitting the fuck out the ball.”   He squinted and fluttered his fingers on the bat handle, the bat remaining steady.

The  pitch sailed in high and outside, he made no move to chase it.  The coach grunted from the mound.  “For Christsake, you coulda hit that.”

“Not 500 feet, Bush.  Give me something I can turn around, give the fans a show.”  said the batter.

The coach went through an ostentatious series of pitcher’s tics on the mound.  Made the motions of loading up the ball, the motions of sneaking these motions past the umps and the opposing team.   The batter didn’t smile at this, nor did he feel impatient.  He just waited, like a Zen archer getting ready.

The next pitch was reasonable, a strike, with just enough on it to make it a little bit of a challenge.  The batter uncoiled and sent it on a rising line toward the lights.    The pitcher turned to watch it go, his body language said “fuck!”

The ball landed in the upper deck, in one of the last rows.  It had traveled 500 feet.  It was foul by about 25 feet.  The batter nodded, the pitcher raised his eyebrows.  If there had been a fan in the stands he might have jumped up.

Mind Bending Irony

That the loudest cries for freedom, liberty and the right of every man to the pursuit of happiness came from men who held others as slaves… and that these slaveholders cursed the mother country for reducing them to the wretched condition of ‘slaves’ by forcing unfair taxes upon them… and that these men, all the time owning other men, created a republican democracy based on ideals almost unimaginable in their day…. that while they ensured by the construction of their republican democracy that the rabble would not get the final say– by ingenious devices like the Electoral College– 

“Do you have a kind of Tourrets, sir?”

Excuse me.  Who is asking that?

“Does it matter?  Wasn’t it you who not ten minutes ago wrote that the best thing to do when the mind was exhausted was shutting down the computer and clearing the mess on the desk all around the screen?”  

Isn’t that a rhetorical question?

“Are you answering a question with a question, rascal?”

Aren’t you?  

“I know you are, but what am I?   Why are you asking me?  Clear your desk.”

 

Clear Your Desk Top

There may come a time when your mind, worn tired by struggle, will sit and refuse to move forward, even an inch.

At such a time there is no harm to turning your attention away from the computer, and thoughts of inspired action, and clearing the chaos on your desk.

A Foolish Belief in Democracy?

The young Thomas Jefferson, shortly after he married the widow of Bathurst Skelton, three years before becoming the Author of Liberty, increased his wealth threefold.  He became the master of Bathurst’s 135 slaves [1]  (Jefferson had inherited only 50 from his parents) and added 11,000 acres of property formerly held by Bathurst [2] to the 5,000 he had previously inherited.   To say that young Thomas Jefferson was born booted and spurred to ride the backs of his saddled countrymen would not be entirely unfair.  His marriage to the wealthy young widow added luster to both boot and spur.

With all this inherited wealth, and in spite of an eloquently expressed life long hatred of tyranny,  which compelled him to risk being hanged as a revolutionary, and his deep moral opposition to slavery, the Author of Liberty should have had the luxury, more than fifty years later, of freeing his remaining 130 slaves in his will, as the Father of our Country had done.  Sadly, that luxury was denied to him.  John Adams, who comes down to us far less heroically than Washington and Jefferson, and not nearly the moral equal of either (in the simplistic popular imagination), never owned a slave.  But that is another rant for someone else to go on about some other time.

Fictional, aspirational president Josiah Bartlet, of  The West Wing TV series, is fond of learned quotes.   He quoted Jefferson some time toward the end of season six.   “A man’s management of his own purse speaks volumes about character,” he said.   And it struck me anew: motherfucker!  

The reason Jefferson could not free his slaves, as he heartbrokenly regretted he could not do toward the end of his life, is that in spite of his great inherited wealth, his management of his own purse was less than perfect.  His love of luxury far exceeded his  ability to pay for shipments of the most expensive French wine, the finest Italian furnishings, the clothes made for him by the greatest tailors in Europe, the magnificent horses he rode, the no expense spared constant remodeling of his gracious and beautiful home, Monticello.

He had racked up impressive debts over the years of his long, luxurious life as a philosopher king.  If he had freed his slaves, instead of bequeathing them as property to his daughters, he would have left his progeny penniless.  The shame of that outweighed any other qualms he might have had.  Even leaving aside the several slave children he fathered with the illegitimate half-sister of his late wife, his long-time slave mistress Sally, (unacknowledged during his life and indignantly denied on his legacy’s behalf for a century and a half after his death) let us say, in unison: motherfucker.   History is kinder to him, by far, than I am.  No doubt.

My meditation on the man who bravely declared the self-evident truth of human equality leads me to wonder about my ongoing belief in the idealistic democracy he played such a large role in shaping.  I continue to believe in the importance of our public institutions.  Most large steps forward as a People were the product of principled government initiative in response to overwhelming events and popular agitation. Think about the use of the Interstate Commerce Clause and the courage and determination of both activists and jurists in the federal courts to end centuries of racism at law.  (Much work remains to be done there, but that’s not the point.  The laws needed to be changed, the government acted to change and, in some cases, even enforce the laws.  A triumph of democracy.)

The importance of principled government action is confirmed for me over and over as I watch the ongoing failure of profit-driven business, our so-called Free Market, to solve any of the pressing problems of our society.  Exponentially increasing the wealth of a few makes the country’s wealth look good on paper, but human lives, like baseball games, are not played on paper. Wall Street’s health in most cases has little to do with healthy lives on Main Street.  

Without a pragmatic and honest government to unite and inspire us we have no hope of solving the biggest challenges we face as a nation, as a species, as a planet.  I am probably even in the majority in this opinion, of those with the leisure to consider the question seriously, and who do not stand to lose wealth by taking this position.  Not that it makes much difference, if my belief in democracy is a silly as other fond beliefs of childhood.

Leave aside the damning fact that our highest court has decided that, Constitutionally speaking, and as intended by the Framers, money is speech in a land where 97% of all political campaigns are won by the side that spends the most money speaking.  Has there ever been anything like democracy for most of the history of this nation, the world’s first modern experiment in government of the People, by the People and for the People?   At isolated moments, perhaps, the best aspirations and highest motives of our citizens have become enshrined in our laws.  Sometimes these isolated moments are decades or centuries in the making.

Slavery and lynching, two practices long protected by American law, the former embedded, obscurely but robustly, in our Constitution, the latter winkingly left up to the states to, er … uh, regulate, are now universally reviled.  Today nobody but the hybrid of a moral cretin and a talking jackass would make an argument in favor of slavery or lynching, though both were the law of the land for generations.  Medicare, once unthinkably controversial, is now something even the Tea Baggers want the government to keep their hands off of.  Social Security too, at one time renounced as part of a Socialist plot, has become something most retired people rely on, at least in part, and value as part of a decent society’s social safety net. Not long ago homosexuals were hunted down and locked up, today they legally marry in many states. Millions are in jail today for preferring marijuana to alcohol as their drug of choice. [OK, I know, an exaggeration, please see note… 3]  Democracy does over time move forward, although more often than not only after excruciatingly long struggles against powerful, organized, determined, well-funded forces. 

In light of all this, can I really be angry at a president who campaigned by appealing to the highest ideals and hopes of many of our citizens and continues to talk the talk, though often obliged to speak less than the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, while ruling in slavish obedience to the corporate bottom line?  Sure I can, but I don’t know how fair it is.  He is not the only “sell-out” to find life much more complicated as the indebted to campaign donors leader of the free world than he may have wished it to be.  Bill Clinton is often considered the greatest Republican president of the last fifty years, though he was relentlessly attacked as a liberal.  Heck of a liberal Bill was, really.

If Jefferson could have freed his slaves, you just know he would have done the right thing, even as the management of his purse showed most of what we need to know about the actual content of his character.

It bears repeating, as was done a few times on The West Wing:  we campaign in poetry but govern in prose.  Call me strict, but I believe  the Author of Liberty should be judged by his own formulation– ditto this well-spoken idealist we have in there now.  

When someone who talks like a psychopath, or a slave holder, acts like one, I know how to react.  I am mobilized, adrenaline flows.  I’m angry, maybe, but not hurt.   I certainly feel no surprise, no betrayal of principle or trust.  When someone talks like a true and compassionate friend, and acts exactly like the guy who talks like a psychopath, and people around me act like he’s still our true friend — it robs me of hope.  It crushes my soul just a little bit more.   Makes me feel something I strongly resist believing:  that my faith in democracy, in the power of the  People to see the truth and walk toward the light, may be entirely foolish.

I don’t believe that, deep down, but, damn, these complicatedly nuanced idealist motherfuckers who eloquently speak our fondest hopes make it hård.

 

 

[1] These 135 slaves were inherited from Martha’s father John Wayles, not Bathurst Skelton, and in 1773.  Among the slaves was Betty Hemings and her last daughter by John Wayles (she had six of his children), the baby Sally.

[2] He inherited the 11,000 acres from Wayles, too.  I just like writing Bathurst Skelton and didn’t have my copy of Fawn M. Brodie’s excellent, groundbreaking 1974 Thomas Jefferson; An Intimate Biography at hand when I wrote the post earlier today.  (see W.W. Norton softcover, pp. 80-87)

[3] Fine, not millions locked up for pot.  But read these shameful statistics.   Could a democracy spend the more than $51,000,000,000 annually that goes to the endless, senseless “War On Drugs” any more wisely?  How about 10% of it to make sure no old Americans are ever forced to be cold, or homeless, or eat cat food?

On Forgiveness and Sincere Apology

 
On Forgiveness and apology, their interaction and the relative power of each, I often think of an experience from decades ago as one of the best illustrations of the amazing healing power of a complete apology. 
 
It began with a comment a friend dashed off back in the age of snail mail, in response to a badly recorded guitar solo on an early Ray Charles tune (that later was retooled with new lyrics and became the gem “Hard Times”) I’d sent him on a cassette.  I’d pointed out the solo and commented that the blues solo in the jazzy setting was something I admired, was trying to learn from, or something to that effect.  My friend wrote, a phrase I remember being greatly stung by, although it has no sting anymore: “no offense, pal, but that solo was so amateurish, I thought it was you.”
 
I called him, mightily peeved, and when I read him the offending line he sounded truly aghast (might have been a good act, but it worked) and it became clear at once that he’d had no intention of saying what he appeared to have said (or at least he skillfully and immediately conveyed that impression).  He told me he understood how terrible the words sounded, that he would have taken it the same way I did.  He agreed the words as written were hurtful, told me he hadn’t intended the offense, said he was sorry.  
 
The relief was instant, and I think the empathy– that he would have felt as I did, that it wasn’t crazy of me to have been a little offended — was a key to that.   I did not have to weigh for a second whether to forgive him or not.  The insult had not been intended, or so I was convinced by his clarification, and the hurt of it disappeared immediately.  As hurt as I’d been by the artlessly phrased line, I was grateful for and instantly relieved by the apology.  I recall the immediate effect of the apology clearly to this day, decades later. 
 
It is a rare experience, the one I’ve just described, not just for me but for anyone.  People rarely apologize for anything in our In-Your-Fucking-Face, Asshole, Culture, the most common facsimile being the annoying “if-pology” (a tip of the chapeau to Harry Shearer, who may have coined the useful term): if you were offended (why not let the passive voice be used for further distance from responsibility?) then I’m sorry.   Sorry if you were pathetic enough to need my stinking apology, in other words.
 
In the case of someone who has done terrible, objectively abusive things — and waits until hours before his death more than 40 years later to utter his first acknowledgment that he probably shouldn’t have acted that way, and apologizes for the first and last time– we’re presented with a different scenario. 
 
For my own mental health I had to figure out a way not to be angry at a father who, in a fundamental way, was close to insane.  My many attempts to have a dialogue with him over the decades were roughly rebuffed.  He was so damaged that he couldn’t help but inflict the damage he did.  He was unlikely to ever acknowledge it, and I’m sure he wouldn’t have been able to on his death bed either, if I’d stood there angry at him as he was dying.
 
Fortunately for both of us, in intensive therapy not many months earlier I’d finally put the connections together to realize that, given the atrocious abuse he’d endured, he was not capable of being a more compassionate person, that his life was a tragedy, and very painful to him and that my only play was letting go of my own anger to the extent that I could.  
 
As I stood there talking to him those last couple of days of his life I was aware only of doing what I could to make his passing as easy as I could help to make it.  I repeated the phrase “if you could have done things differently you would have” every time he raised the whip over himself for what a monster he’d so often been.
 
So I’ve lived those two sides of apology/forgiveness.  A sincere apology definitely helps a person to forgive:  I hurt you, I understand why you were hurt, I didn’t mean it, I was wrong, I’m sorry, I’ll try my best not to do it again.  Please forgive me.  Easiest case.  I try my best to quickly apologize every time I’m aware I did something hurtful to someone I care about.   
 
Forgiving when the person is unrepentant– I think it can only be done when there is a strong psychic reason, like the person is a parent, or sibling, or if not forgiving will drive you mad, something like that.   And in that case one has to go through something like the same process of ‘apology’ on behalf of the other before you can forgive: he underwent traumas that made him a monster, he didn’t intend to become a monster, if he could have not been a monster he would have done it, he tortures himself for his monstrousness, etc.  Only after that series of understandings is reached can one let go of some of the pain by forgiving, it seems to me.  And forgiveness is for ourselves, primarily, if we are carrying anger in our hearts.
 
Jack Kornfield, Zen teacher, tells the one about two former prisoners of war who meet years later.    “Do you often think about our captivity?” asks one. “I think about it every day, and whenever I do I think of going back and slaughtering them all,” says the other.   “Well,” says the first,”then you are still their prisoner.”  
 
Without the acknowledgment of injury, and a sincere attempt to make it right, there is only hurt and anger in the injured party most of the time.  In the case of rough characters who are not my father, I toss them aside if they repeatedly dismiss as neurotic over-sensitivity my hurt reactions to hurtful things they do.  Don’t want to talk about it?  Fine.  Have a nice day.
 
I can really relate to the anger of people living in a fifth or tenth generation of inherited poverty that goes back to slavery and the 40 acres and a mule they were promised but never got.   This immensely wealthy nation has never really given any sort of meaningful apology to its former slaves for the obscenely profitable monstrosity of the “Peculiar Institution”.  The shameful subject is most often daintily dismissed as unfortunate ancient history, though in my lifetime lynching was still a matter of “states’ rights”.  Those who call for reparations for centuries of slave labor are thought of by most whites as grand-standing polemicists, even though economists have calculated the almost incalculable wealth created here by slave labor, on behalf of the genteel “Planters”, some of our wealthiest and most powerful families.
 
“You … er, uh, n-words, are so fucking over-sensitive, we built housing projects for you, we give you money for nothing, let you get into college with lower SAT scores, still give affirmative action to a few of you, we even conduct investigations when a police department shows a pattern of racist harassment, brutality and murder against you — what the devil more do you want from us?”  only goes so far.  And how far it goes is nowhere.
 
Sorry.

Anger– by a high school student

Anger

that shit will

fuck you up

hold you down

make you do

what it wants

you to do

Fuck!  

Are you fucking stupid?  

Fuck him up!

The soft voice

that is almost always

wiser

is drowned in the roar

of Anger

foaming at the mouth

like Hitler.

Storms pass

birds start singing

everyone gets back

to work or siesta

but while Anger

whips the crowd

like a livid Klansman

it can be easy to forget,

pitchfork or torch

in hand,

that this popping veined,

spitting motherfucker

is a Ku Klux Klansman,

is Anger.

Needs to be calmed down

not followed

screaming

into the dark night.

Integrity 3- imaginary dialogue

“Do you realize how it will look if I have an executive from the second largest health insurance giant in the country write the new health care law?”  

“It’s not as if the chairman of the committee who is tasked with crafting the law has clean hands either. Max Baucus took almost $5,000,000 in campaign money from that industry in the last five years, Mr. President.   He’s a Democrat, that’s bona fide enough for your average supporter.  He’s one of the good guys in this partisan knife fight, as far as they know.”  

“But a staffer who was an executive at Wellpoint until a couple of weeks ago?” asks the president, “how will having her as the primary author of the law, the architect of Obamacare, look to my supporters?”  

“Believe me, you’ll be as safe as an octopus in a cloud of ink on a dark night, sir,” says one of the president’s closest advisers.  “Only a few Americans will ever even hear the name Elizabeth Fowler and, of that few, even less will care.”

“But the bill before me is plainly a gift to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.  We get a  concession on ‘pre-existing condition’ because we’re delivering potentially 40,000,000 new customers to them, mandating the purchase of insurance while agreeing to very gently regulate how much they can gouge patients.  Increasing deductibles to almost $2,000 out of pocket for people 150% above the poverty line.  Pay an insurance premium every month to a private company and then reach into your pocket to pay the first $2,000 of your medical bills before insurance kicks in?  Is this the Hope and Change I campaigned on?”

“Whatever law you pass will be put up for repeal dozens of times, they’ll drag it through every court in the country, shut down the government over it.  The opposition, you may have noticed, is truly rabid.  You can pass Romneycare, or Nixon’s plan.. well, no, not Nixon’s plan, you’d look like a Socialist… but you can pass the Republicans’ own plan, Mr. President, and they’d come after you with torches and pitchforks.  Your supporters will realize you were in no position not to compromise.”  

“Even though we have the Senate and the House, I have to take the only plan that truly makes sense, a buy-in to Medicare, off the table right at the start, ensure that insurance company and pharmaceutical industry profits will be as robust as before, in fact, make purchase of private health care mandatory, in legislation that still leaves millions of Americans uninsured?  Is that what you’re telling me, Phyllis?”  

“Yes, sir,” she says.  

“I realize I’m arguing with myself.  I’m a charismatic campaigner, I’m accomplished, my ideals are beyond question.  I was voted into office on a wave of hope.  Is this really the best I can do as president of a country longing for real change, desperate for hope they can believe in?”  

“At least you weren’t a governor, sir, when you were running.  You were spared going back to your home state to execute a brain damaged murderer on the eve of the primary.”  

“I suppose I’ll have to make do with that,” the president says, closing the folder on his desk.  “What’s next?”

Integrity 2– imaginary discussion

“I ran against the anti-democratic secrecy of Cheney and Addington.  I promised, many times as a candidate, to run the most transparent administration in history.  I promised I’d protect whistle blowers.  The Bush administration classified literally everything, used sovereign immunity, state secrets, national security rationales, intimidation, the pressure of jailing, lawsuits and everything else, to keep crucial information from the People, from the electorate.  Cheney had a safe in his office big enough to hold half a dozen detainees, for Christ’s sake.”

“That second Bush Administration dramatically shifted the public’s right to know to a need to know basis.  They shifted the traditional burden on government of showing something needed to be secret to the burden on the public of proving it should not be secret.  Tricky for the public to do that when they don’t even know there is a secret.   Testimony by the President and Vice President at the 9/11 Commission was top secret, no recording, no transcript, no notes.   Commission members sworn to secrecy.  What the hell was up with that?  Scandals and war crimes were reported in government reports, the reports were classified.   The press was used as a megaphone to broadcast government policy.  I vowed that my administration would reverse that anti-democratic crap.   Now you’re telling me we should try this American journalist under the 1917 Espionage Act, like the guy is a spy during wartime for doing research for his story on CIA torture?”

“It would send a strong message, Mr. President.  We are still obliged to work in the shadows, sir.”

A long pause.  “Ah, hell with it.  Tell Holder to use the stinking 1917 act.  We can’t ask for the death penalty under it, can we?”

“No, Mr. President.”

“Wait until my supporters get a whiff of this…”

 “Our country is so divided, and your opposition so virulent and irrational, Mr. President, that your supporters will defend you, no matter how foul the cologne you might be obliged to douse yourself in from time to time.”

“Get out of my sight….”