Author Archives: oinsketta

Priapic Corporatism

The corporation, American jurisprudence holds, is a person.   It is a sort of idealized rugged individual type person, having no need for anything but profit.  It also has an insatiable, if impersonal, sexual appetite, with the legally constructed and indefatigable organs to sustain this voraciousness endlessly.  

What makes me think of this today?   A call from a female robot, threatening to cut off my health insurance if full payment is not made by January 30.   This was especially aggravating since I’d made full payment on January 21 and had the email confirming payment.   I snarled the command to connect me to a representative and then was put on the queue as if I’d called the 800 number.

If you are an Anthem customer or member of the Freelancer’s Guild, press one, if you are a health care provider, press two, oprime el tres si no entiendes ingles, then muzak interrupted by the standard, sincere, reminders about how important my business is and urging me to stay on the line.

My blood began to simmer as the ten second muzak loop continued to blare.  Welcome to America, land of the bottom line– our only business is business.  You powerless cocksuckers will wait on hold to be placed on hold while the corporation gives you the chance to find out why you were threatened with cancellation of a policy you have already paid the premium for.

In only ten minutes Mark is on the line, apparently having a hard time making out the spelling of my name.   That D, he asks if it is a G.  “D as in dog,” I say and he hears E.  D as in David works.   Then I go through a similar exercise with my first name, he reads back an Aleutian name instead of the one on my policy.  In a moment he sees the same confirmation of payment I am looking at.  He asks me to please hold for just a few minutes while he checks something.  

“I’m not going to hold, I’m going to get a call back from a human being apologizing for this aggravating error by the corporation you work for,” I tell him and he agrees.  “Do you have my callback number?” I ask him and he says he does, reads me back the number of the robot who called fifteen minutes earlier to inform me that my health insurance is about to be terminated for nonpayment of the January premium.  I give him the correct number, he promises to call back in a minute, and I begin shoveling a cubic ton of snow, snarling as I do.

In a moment he calls back.  Empire generated bills for two month cycles in 2015, this one was for January and February.   Presumably for corporate convenience, saves money on billing, like using robots to call customers and nag them for payments, instead of wasting humans who have to be paid to make these calls.  Since I’d only been required to pay January’s $471 and not the $942 that would have paid for my excellent Obamacare health insurance through March 1, I’d paid only half of the bill, the half I was legally required to pay.   You get the math here?  Pretty straightforward.  

I thought of the ungodly mechanical sexual apparatus of the American corporation, and how it thrusts endlessly onward, upward, downward, sideways, relentless and insatiable.  And I saw another American president, this one very articulate, witty and smooth, smiling next to it, admiring the vigor of the machine that makes him an obscenely wealthy and powerful man.

Apathetic Paralysis

“Don’t say ‘can’t’,” she said again.  “It’s not that you can’t do things, you can.  It’s that you don’t make yourself do them.”  

“A distinction without a difference,” he said.  

“No,” she said, “saying ‘I can’t’ means you’re incapable of doing them and it is far different from not making yourself do things you are clearly capable of.”  

“Is it really?” he said. “If I don’t do something I am clearly capable of, something I want to do, something it frustrates me not to be doing, doesn’t it mean, for all practical purposes, that I can’t do it?”  

“It means you won’t do it,” she said.  “It doesn’t mean you can’t”.

“The beggar says to the woman in the mink coat ‘please help me, I haven’ t eaten in three days’….” he said.

“And the woman says ‘force yourself”.   Yes, you are very witty, Shlomo, but better to use your energy for seriousness at the moment,” she said.  

“Energy?” he said.

The conversation was a circle, it moved like the hands on a clock that had long ago given up trying to keep time.  It would move in a circle and stop, sit in the dark, and when the light went on again, it would continue to pointlessly circle.

 

Game for Suckers

Here is a snapshot of the rules of this game for suckers.  

Put your savings in a bank, the way one was encouraged to do for generations by thrifty adults.  Your savings will nowadays earn less than 1% interest and you will get a 1099 at the end of the year with this interest ‘income’ on it.  This interest gets added to your taxable income and you will pay the same rate on it as you do on the rest of your income.

Keep your money in a diversified portfolio, as people who are more successful, or simply luckier economically, do, let a financial manager take care of the tricky details and earn an average, over time, of 7-10% annually.  Leave the money grow, it will come in handy later on.  The interest on this money will be taxed at a substantially lower rate than the rest of your income, if at all.

Game for suckers?  That’s so harsh.  As my father often reminded me, JFK famously said “life’s unfair.”  Dig it.

 

Reason vs. Rationale 2

Human beings don’t do anything without a reason.  Whether that reason is a prudent application of Reason arrived at after weighing various likely outcomes is another question.  You can see the reasons behind the actions of every villain in Shakespeare, though you may find them repellent reasons.  Nobody, even the worst people in the world, does anything for no reason.   With the possible exception of me writing this at this particular moment.

I have many other things to do, things that are pressing.  Yet I prefer to tap these keys, enjoying the clatter the keys make, a kind of kinetic music that is, at the same time, the opposite of kinetic.  I am wondering about reasons, and how they differ from mere justifications, while finding no reason to act, outside of massaging this keyboard.

A reason that is reasonable is different from a rationale, which is often giddily free of Reason.  “WTF?” texts somebody who has stumbled on unspeakable carnage.  “Freedom on the March!” bellows the rationale.

“Have you considered that you may have turned the corner, are headed resolutely toward the deep end?”

“Your request is denied,” he snaps, by way of reply.

“‘By way of reply’?” she asks.  “I am totally confused…”

“Confusion denied,” he snaps, confidently.

 

Jan. 2015

Protagonism Redux

In a society that extols the rugged individual who, by sheer force of character and relentlessness of will, prevails to reach the top of a chosen pyramid, it’s not surprising that so many of us are afflicted with protagonism.

Protagonism is a syndrome where I see and present the world from a heroic point of view, with myself as the fascinating individual at the center of the universe, my own actions and feelings featured in sharp relief and those of others serving as mere background color.  That everyone else may feel like the protagonist of their own lives, well, what do you expect?

In cultures that view the good of every one in the community as more important than the prosperity of any single individual, protagonism is an anomaly.  People in those cultures work together for the common good.   In our culture we commonly think of such people as fucking losers.

The rugged individual is a pretty shitty model for our ideal citizen, though.   That person is self-centered, ruthless, devoted to self above all else.   He tames the Wild West, sure, and amasses fabulous fortunes that will eventually fund philanthropies, sure, but he’s, most often, basically a prick you wouldn’t piss on if he was on fire.

Think of Samuel Colt*, inventor of the Colt .45, the Equalizer.  What did this innovative gun allow one to do for the first time?   Shoot dependably several times in a row, instead of one shot at a time.   How was this an equalizer?  It made the man holding the Colt the equal of several men who were about to rush him.  Say these men about to rush you were slaves, bitter about their hard lives and not afraid to die to take you with them, and you were the overseer with the whip and pistol.  Well, if you could only get off one shot, chances are these disgruntled slaves would kill you.  But with the Equalizer in hand, well, “how many of you boys are willing to visit Kingdom Come on the off chance you’ll be the lucky one to watch me die? Hmmmm?  Ah’m waitin’….”

Celebrity culture has a pernicious effect on us winners and losers down here in the cheap seats.  Do you have something to say that reaches beyond your own personality and desire for fame and fortune and into my life?  Lay it on me, something I can think about later, use in wrestling with my own mind.

Are you in it strictly for my applause and admiration?  Well, then it’s on you to deliver something pretty amazing every time.  A lot of pressure to be amazing, seems to me.

 

*  During the American Civil War, his factory in Hartford supplied firearms both to the North and the South. Later, his firearms were prominent during the settling of the western frontier. Colt died in 1862 as one of the wealthiest men in America.

According to Colt historian Robert Lawrence Wilson, the “lectures launched Colt’s celebrated career as a pioneer Madison Avenue-style pitchman”.[7] His public speaking skills were so prized that he was thought to be a doctor and was pressed into service to cure an apparent cholera epidemic on board a riverboat by giving his patients a dose of nitrous oxide.

source

What We Are Doing Here

As a young man, tortured by much of what went on around me, I spent a lot of time alone, mulling things over.   I learned to play guitar, found my way around a piano keyboard, drew, wrote– all solitary, expressive things I did in any quiet spot I could find.  Outside of those hours, my life seemed to be, as Albert King sings in Born Under A Bad Sign, one big fight.  

I fought with my parents whose limitations as parents left them prone to frustration and anger rather than able to guide or advise me or my sister in any meaningful way.   I spent decades fighting with many of the inevitable assholes one encounters almost everywhere.  

There is no shortage of angry assholes to fight with, if that’s what you are trained to do.  In fact, you’ll never even need to seek them out.  Bullies and jackasses will be irresistibly drawn to you in a crowd, seeming to know you are set up to struggle against them.  Each one will passionately make the case that you are the asshole.  It would take me decades to get enough insight into the idiocy of fighting with raging fools to start becoming a consistently gentle person.

I recall that when I used to sit down to write in my younger years I was bursting to write everything down, impatient to tell it all each time, get to the bottom of our existence here all at once.  Not only is this an impossible wish, it is self-defeating.  

The ideal writing session results in setting out one thing as clearly as possible, providing exactly enough detail and nuance to make the reader feel and understand that thing. In deference to the reader one also prunes away digressions, no matter how interesting the particular darling might be, if they might distract or confuse the reader.  Setting out one thing clearly, to me, is a good day’s work.

I’m reminded of this after reading something a very talented young writer posted recently.   It takes four or five very compelling story lines, summarizing each one in abbreviated fashion, and jams them together into one piece to tell an ambitiously global tale.  Reminded me of my own long ago impulse to try to tell everything at once, get to the bottom of what our lives and the things we learn here mean, if anything.  

Reminded me a tiny bit of Clint Eastwood’s latest, American Sniper, which reduces the most compelling mysteries of the story to a short vignette and a single line title at the end, while spending the rest of the time showing the simple heroism of a likable, honorable, driven man valiantly fighting to save his brothers in an unquestioned, horrific, war.  We see him suddenly cured of PTSD, smiling and hugging wife and children goodbye, heading to his car.  In the next frame, on black, a title summarily informs us that he was killed by one of the vets he was helping.  What?  Now we’re at his funeral and the credits are rolling.  What? Really, Clint?

I was around when this brilliant girl began to show her prodigious talents.  If I was feeling a bit more outgoing at the moment I’d reach out and invite her for a plate of dumplings.  I’d offer to tell her the rest of the story, for whatever use she might make of my view.  I was there on the scene from before she was born, a more or less objective adult observer, over the years her remarkable life began telling itself as a story.  

I’d also advise her to wait and consider, before publishing the piece, if it wouldn’t be better written as four separate pieces, each one including all the information the reader needs to see each complex story as three dimensionally as possible.  And to discard interesting side stories that distract, even alarm, the reader, and remove focus from the larger story being told.

And I’d remind her to be sure to tell each story with the satisfying amount of shading and detail she always has in her best work.  I’d stress the importance of mercy to oneself when telling a story.  Being unfair to oneself does not always seem unfair, but it is.  Unfairness is as hard to see in writing as it is to experience in life.   I really ought to call her.

Heartbreaking

Heartbreaking

 

 

What about this picture is not heartbreaking?   This little girl lived in a remote rural area where, from out of the sky, a Hellfire missile, launched from a circling remote control plane, killed everyone around her.  

The intelligence may or may not have been good that there were bad guys there, but the fragments of the missile found after the attack, falsely claimed by the cynical president of Yemen as launched by his government, were plainly identifiable as American-made.

Does it break your heart less to think that this little orphan girl will grow up hating the Americans who sent the drone to kill her loved ones, become a terrorist and deserve whatever fate a future administration may decide for her?

As The Walls Close In

Our happiness, or unhappiness, we are often reminded, flows directly from how we view the world.  That glass– half full or half empty?  Life, full of cool, even miraculous, possibilities or a grim waiting room for inevitable depressing decline and death?

Of course, this kind of either-or thinking, so prevalent in our culture, can be as unproductive as it is simplistic.   It’s true we are better served taking pleasure from small things than being tormented by what Professor Bukowski astutely called “that swarm of trivialities that can kill quicker than cancer, and which are always there”.  But our lives here are complex and, at least for some of us, defy the kind of easy logic that tells us it’s better to look on the bright side than the dark side.   Better to be active and productive, solving problems as they arise, than paralyzed by shifting, hazily understood affective disorders.  These mood disorders, a quick check of the internet informs us, can not be detected by medical tests.

When I was a kid Batman was on TV, a colorful, campy live action version of the comic book.  Many episodes ended in a cliff-hanger, the Dynamic Duo trapped in a room with the water rising, the floor and ceiling slowly moving toward each other to crush them, the walls, spiked with swords, closing in.  Viewers were exhorted to tune in next time at the same bat time, same bat channel.

The walls closing in would begin the next episode, and just as things were a second from fatal, Batman’s ingenuity, gadgets, fearlessness and physical prowess would save the day.  They’d get out of the trap and go kick the bad guy’s ass. 

I struggled out into this frigid day with the image of the walls closing in.   The walls are not closing in.   Metaphors are one thing, the walls actually closing in are another.   I did a little research to see if the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy study was still going on at a local psychiatric institute.  I’d been given a doctor’s name and number yesterday, more than a month after I’d made several inquiries.  I called and haven’t heard back yet, so I did a bit more research about the study on-line.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is, and I couldn’t say it better myself:  a “structured, short-term, present-oriented psychotherapy for depression, directed toward solving current problems and modifying dysfunctional (inaccurate and/or unhelpful) thinking and behavior.”[1]

I’d prefer this action oriented, insight based approach to the usual psycho-pharmaceutical one so often endorsed by well-paid, highly respected snake oil salesmen.   You can read a thorough review of the effectiveness and testing of these pills here.   Placebos, it has been demonstrated, are more than 80% as effective as the patent drugs for treating things like depression, dysthymia, anxiety disorder.   (Which reminds me, I have to stop putting off reordering my organic placebo– it always gives me a tiny jolt of hope when I take it every morning).

I read about the study and was suddenly stopped in my tracks.   The first step, after a psychological evaluation to determine your level of affective disorder, is to pop you head first into a long, claustrophobic metal tube, where amid frightful banging, your brain will be scanned to get an image of the “before” brain.

“Fuck that,” I found myself saying, shrugging out of my skin and preparing to hop on to my skeleton, waiting alertly on all fours, to gallop off screaming into the night.

The Trouble with Education

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”
                                                          — H.L Mencken

 

I once heard a humanistic woman on the radio explain that the root of the word education is the Latin educare, “to bring forth from within.”  Let me check that for you almost instantly on these here Internets:  

Verb[edit]

present active ēdūcō, present infinitive ēdūcere, perfect active ēdūxī, supine ēductum

  1. I lead, draw or take out, forth or away.  [quotations ▼]
  2. I raise up; erect.

Etymology[edit]

From Latin educatus, past participle of educare (“to bring up (a child, physically or mentally), rear, educate, train (a person in learning or art), nourish, support, or produce (plants or animals)”), frequentive of educere, past participle eductus (“to bring up, rear (a child, usually with reference to bodily nurture or support, while educare refers more frequently to the mind)”), from e (“out”) + ducere (“to lead, draw”)

Whoops.  A little information, as always, a dangerous thing.  I prefer the simple, evocative definition offered by that humanist on the radio many years ago.   The word education, she said, is derived from the Latin, educare, which means, she said, “to bring forth from within”.  

Education includes a lot of things and is used more and more interchangeably, in our increasingly materialistic, profit-driven world, with training.   Making education a synonym for training reduces this wondrous exercise to its most mechanistic sense.  Therein lies a big part of the trouble we encounter when trying to have an intelligent discussion about education.  Defining our terms and framing a conversation go a long way toward understanding what we are actually talking about, and the defining itself is a great and perplexingly fraught undertaking.

Education, though we all know it when we are being properly educated, is as complex an idea as we can conjure. It is complicated further by being part of a partisan political debate driven by the love of money, and vindication of the philosophy of the “free market” and its propents’ relentless drive to prove the superiority of private entrepreneurial enterprise over public endeavor.   Education is entangled in politics, wrapped in the tentacles of ideology, market forces and institutionalized inequality.  

Discussing the proper aim of education, or even the proper meaning of the word proper, is difficult.  Education in the abstract is often simplified to mean a course of study leading to a lucrative and/or meaningful career and/or a productive life.  In this limited sense there are metrics that can be brought into play, data that can be massaged to support arguments and ideology.  Intelligently discussing education and its ultimate goals is not the work of a moment. Nonetheless, I will try to make it that now.

There are those, of which I am a starkly cautionary example, who believe that many people are born with potentials and passions they never become aware of and so never develop, enjoy, inspire others with.  The role of the teacher is to guide the student, to bring forth from within, to inspire a lifelong love of learning and self-development.  The old “give a man a fish” line from Maimonides springs to mind:

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

Maimonides

I didn’t know that quote was from my man Maimonides until just now.   Cool.   You can learn something every day!  And it is a pleasure, and a thrill.  And instilling that pleasure, and that thrill, is the enduring work of our most memorable teachers.

For many, my words would mean a lot more, resonate longer and more roundly, even result in a pay check and professional status as an opiner worth noting, perhaps, if I was writing them from my study in a nice home somewhere rather than from the crowded rent stabilized apartment I inhabit, more like a demented person’s overstuffed, out-spilling closet than the den of a thoughtful person.   That this is beyond the point is beyond the point.

I paint you a picture then, to make you think, and disappear into memory, like every good pedagogue should do.

A man is invited to create a showcase for the program kids come to after a day of school, where they take over a dingy public school classroom and turn it into a buzzing beehive of creativity.   He is invited to do this by the woman who has witnessed this transformation weekly and smiled on it each time.  The same kids who were wild and fussy during the school day are excited, focused, working together, planning, performing a variety of tasks related to a crude form of actual alchemy.   At the end of each session they watch on the computer screen what they’ve made with their own hands, chuckle, remark, pack their bags and head home.

Inexperienced at presenting his idea to an audience, the man creates a fairly shabby showcase for this workshop at the request of the woman who has hired him.   He muffles his written remarks, losing his place on the flapping pages each time he tries to make eye contact with his small audience of parents.  He has technical problems showing the examples of student work, fumbles, bumbles, mumbling excuses during each amateurish delay.  

By these failures he will learn exactly what to avoid next time, how to make this presentation effectively, but in the moment, to the people in the room, it is like watching a grown man struggle not to drown in a shallow puddle on the sidewalk.  At the end of his endless fifteen minute performance few in the room have any sense that this fellow is a teacher of a certain vision who has created a simple but ingenious program to make animation that the children themselves run.  

Then, after asking for comments and seeing none, he smiles and invites the parents to join their children in the creative workshop.   The children leap out of their seats as though shot from guns and deploy themselves in every part of the room.  Here a group draws and cuts things out, a kid works with clay, others arrange things under lights while others hover above and photograph the choreography frame by frame.  Children sit at the computer, inputting frames from the cameras and starting to edit.  Others put on headphones and animatedly listen back to a soundtrack they are working on.  

This little demonstration of purposeful autonomy by the kids is worth the price of admission.  It shows the thing itself in action, in its most elemental form.  “Show me, don’t tell me,” the writing instructor always says.   As for describing how the thing works, the best way is simply to show it in action.  Then, as the prosecutor says at the end of the presentation of evidence and witnesses at trial:  the People rest.

It should be noted that the man’s failures during his presentation are an object lesson in how people actually learn.  You learn by failing, as the cliche goes.  These embarrassing mistakes will not be forgotten or repeated the next time.

Swimming against the prevailing tides, beside the gigantic, ocean churning ships of wealthy and influential people like Bill Gates, the tired swimmer sputters and struggles for breath.   If he can manage to keep swimming there is every possibility of his making it to a desert island where he can show the thing in action– to a group of very interested and exotic birds.  Huzzah!

The Self

That voice, speaking up for your deepest beliefs, fondest hopes, telling your dreams.   In the noise of the noisy world you may sometimes have to listen carefully to hear it, but don’t stop listening for it.