Author Archives: oinsketta

A Thought on Frederick Douglass and Justice

If you read the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, you will have no doubt you are in the presence of a towering refutation of the racist lies of American slavery.   You will understand, within a few paragraphs, why teaching a slave to read was considered such a serious offense.  To compare a man to a barnyard animal when that man can speak and write as eloquently and powerfully as Douglass does, shoves the smug comparison back down the ignorant comparer’s throat.

I received an email yesterday comparing our Founding Fathers to the Jewish warriors, the Maccabees, who drove the forces of Antiochus out of ancient Israel, a rebellion celebrated in the rare nationalistic holiday of Chanukah. The speaker gave the pertinent details:

 “The 167 BCE Jewish rebellion led by the Hasmonean (Maccabee) family against the Seleucid/Greek Emperor Antiochus (IV) Epiphanies, who was determined to ruthlessly uproot Judaism and replace it with Hellenic values.”

The Founding Fathers and the Maccabees, he said, were determined, idealistic, brave, visionaries who prevailed for freedom against powerful enemies in spite of the massive odds against them.   Their truth goes marching on, the email intimated, as does the connection between American democracy, a light unto the world, and modern day Israel which embodies the ancient code the Jews gave to the world.

As I read the email I thought of the same speech being delivered by any number of true believers.   Every true believer believes their cause is uniquely just, that their greatest leaders are determined, idealistic, brave visionaries fighting often impossible odds against evil enemies intent on their destruction.  One woman’s freedom fighter is another woman’s terrorist and so on.  I replied that I wondered how someone like Frederick Douglass, who gave a famous speech on July 4th, 1852, years after his own escape from an American slavery still heartily underway, might feel about this discussion of American Freedom and the Light unto the Nations bit.

My friend wrote back that she meant to read a bit more about Douglass, but that it was her impression that he was a “‘Jeffersonian-type’ thinker,’ always able to see the whole picture and understand the context of the times.”

I wrote back suggesting she read more from the pen of Douglass and then ventured, in my opinionated way:

For him to have been a Jeffersonian-type during slavery would have been like a guy in Auschwitz taking a nuanced view of Hitler.  I think even Jefferson’s most privileged house slaves probably were not enlightened enough to see the “big picture” and be consoled by the idea that in just a couple of hundred years there would be a black president.  

Here is the heart of the speech Frederick Douglass delivered on Independence Day 1852:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

The whole speech is here.

footnote on Messianism

These days it is easy for a person with any scholarly inclination and an internet connection to almost instantly clarify shaky memory and insert a citation, as here:

The readiness of the Jews to believe the messianic claims of Sabbatai Zevi may largely be explained by the desperate state of European Jewry in the mid-17th century. The bloody pogroms of Bohdan Khmelnytsky had wiped out one third of Europe’s Jewish population and destroyed many centers of Jewish learning and communal life (Cohen 1948). There is no doubt that for most of the Jews of Europe there could not have been a more propitious moment for the messiah to deliver salvation than the moment Sabbetai Zevi made his appearance.

source

If you click on the Khmelnytsky link above you will learn, among other things, that a town less than 100 miles from Vyshnivets, where the families of my maternal grandparents were shot and left in a ravine, is named after the famous Ukrainian nationalist.   I had previously known Khmelnytsky only as an infamous murderer of Jews, though it turns out he did many other notable things in his life.  The killing of Jews, in the larger account of his notable life, can be relegated to a footnote.

I was tickled, if I might say, by the deadpan, almost New York Times-like, objectivity of the beginning of this description of the dim Jewish view of Cossack hero Bodhan Khmelnytsky, situated at the very end of the Wikipedia account of his distinguished life and career: 

Jewish history[edit]

Main article: Khmelnytsky Uprising § Jews

Jewish history‘s assessment of Khmelnytsky is overwhelmingly negative because he used Jews as scapegoats and sought to eradicate Jews from the Ukraine.  Between 1648–1656, Khmelnytsky’s rebels murdered tens of thousands of Jews.[29]  Atrocity stories about massacre victims who had been buried alive, cut to pieces or forced to kill one another spread throughout Europe and beyond.  The pogroms contributed to a revival of the ideas of Isaac Luria, who revered the Kabbalah, and the identification of Sabbatai Zevi as the Messiah.[30] Orest Subtelny writes:

Between 1648 and 1656, tens of thousands of Jews—given the lack of reliable data, it is impossible to establish more accurate figures—were killed by the rebels, and to this day the Khmelnytsky uprising is considered by Jews to be one of the most traumatic events in their history.[31]

 and, speaking of footnotes:  

  1. Whether Khmelnytsky was or wasn’t a noble is still uncertain. He himself claimed nobility when it suited him, and it wasn’t often disputed by his contemporaries. Chmielnicki himself once wrote in the letter to King Jan Kazimierz that he was “born Chmielnicki”–however, that surname was never associated with the Abdank Coat of Arms hesed. His father, a noble himself, was married to a Cossack woman and according to the Polish Statute of 1505 that might have put Bohdan’s szlachta status under scrutiny. There are other theories: that his father or grandfather were stripped of their noble status or–perhaps most controversial–the theory of 19th-century Polish historian Tomasz Padura, who claimed (without giving sources) that Chmielnicki’s father was a Jewish convert to Catholicism.

 

Bummer

Forty years ago it was not uncommon for teenagers, in the shifting winds then blowing, to believe the miraculous was about to happen.  You didn’t need a weatherman, as the song said, to know which way the wind was blowing.   The world was changing for the better, many, young and old, believed, the proof of it seemingly at hand.  

Few gave a thought to, or even knew about, the many Jews in the mid 1600s, certain that the Messiah was among them, who’d sold all of their possessions and waited excitedly to be delivered to the World to Come.   The Messiah, a charismatic mystic named Shabbtai Tzvi, faced with a sword, chose forced conversion to Islam over completing his proclaimed mission, and so, instead of the blissful End of Times, the Jews endured hundreds more of years of persecution.  (footnote in following post).  Nobody in those heady days before the dream collapsed was dwelling on the death of idealism that so often follows the intoxicating flush of inspiration.

The reader will forgive, perhaps, the depressing digression. Such digressions were commonly forgiven at the time I am writing about, the very early 1970s, the days of excess we think of now as the 60s.  If you were to take a time machine looking for the sixties, you’d probably want to go to around 1970 to find those colorful days in full flower.  Set the machine to 1962, say, and you’d find most white males still had crew cuts.  The songs played on the radio in 1963 would provide another shock.  In 1964, to give but one example, you could still be killed for advocating integration in parts of the country that insisted they had the right to treat their Negroes as they saw fit and to hell with the Supreme Court and the so-called Department of Justice.   

Now we smile or smirk at the quaint beliefs that animated the hippies, the rejection of materialism, the belief in peace and love, the embrace of brotherhood.   When we want to mock people we speak of them sitting down with people who hate them to sing “Kumbaya”.  Back then, large groups of people sat around a singer with a guitar, their voices rising in a chorus to sing the African song of friendship and brotherhood.  We no longer speak of “brotherhood”, except ironically.  It’s a word from a bygone era, quaint as a windmill.

The bummer I am thinking of was a bad LSD trip I witnessed in around 1972.  The house was empty of parents, the trip had been planned out, the drug secured.   The acid was dropped.  The potential of this drug to open the doors of consciousness, to expand the mind, was well known and in those days many pursued it avidly.  Robert Crumb is among many who attribute their radical shift in consciousness to LSD.  Crumb reports that he ate it regularly in the late 60s and he describes it as fueling his mad creativity.  Jimi Hendrix is another who credited LSD with unlocking his consciousness.   Purple Haze was a love song to the psychedelic named for a popular form of LSD.  

The drug reputedly unlocked creative centers of the brain, disinhibited the mind in a way that led to amazing discoveries, revelations, enlightenment.  Of course, it had a famous downside: the bad trip, or bummer, hours of intensely painful suffering instead of a transcendent opening of the doors of perception.  The CIA had used this feature of the drug to derange the thoughts of people it suspected of being spies and more than one of these deranged suspects leaped through plate glass windows not caring whether they could fly or not. There was a tent at Woodstock where empathetic people quietly talked down people suffering from bad trips.  Bummer, a word still in common use, and with good reason, is a relic of those days.  

As this bummer I am thinking of progressed, the young man in hell, a hell as real as any, desperately turned on the TV and began staring at an insipid program.   He sat close to the screen and watched the show intently.  The insipidness of the program, and the desperation of watching it, were more than I could bear at the moment and I went over to flick the TV off. 

“No, please…” the young man bumming out said, reaching forward to cling to the television set.  “Please,” he said with an abjectness difficult to describe, “I need it.”  Nothing I said could persuade him otherwise.  I don’t recall how long he sat there, literally hugging the TV.  It may have been only moments, but in the memory of a man with a proneness to metaphor, it is a deeply seared metaphor.

We live in a culture narcotized by TV where drugs are now routinely prescribed to treat every ailment known to man, woman and child.  Higher consciousness is no longer a subject of discussion, except winkingly, in air quotes.  Literally millions of children are given drugs like Ritalin to make them calm the fuck down after a quick diagnosis of “pain in the ass”.   It is for their sake, and the common good, that they are medicated.  Some of them no doubt benefit from it.  Others, well, there will always be others.  We are no longer sitting around singing Kumbaya, my friend.

A final note on the bummer, the nature of our minds and our minds on drugs, from an address given by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., physician father of the famous jurist.  The quote has been rattling around my mind as I wrote this entry, and I provide it here for the wise to ponder, although, of course, one is equally free to enjoy a childlike laugh over it:

Here is an extended excerpt from the 1870 lecture of Holmes which was published in 1879 [OHMT]:

I once inhaled a pretty full dose of ether, with the determination to put on record, at the earliest moment of regaining consciousness, the thought I should find uppermost in my mind. The mighty music of the triumphal march into nothingness reverberated through my brain, and filled me with a sense of infinite possibilities, which made me an archangel for the moment. The veil of eternity was lifted. The one great truth which underlies all human experience, and is the key to all the mysteries that philosophy has sought in vain to solve, flashed upon me in a sudden revelation. Henceforth all was clear: a few words had lifted my intelligence to the level of the knowledge of the cherubim. As my natural condition returned, I remembered my resolution; and, staggering to my desk, I wrote, in ill-shaped, straggling characters, the all-embracing truth still glimmering in my consciousness. The words were these (children may smile; the wise will ponder): “A strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout.”

source

Marketing Genius Seth Godin speaking of faith

Krista Tippett has a show on public radio that used to be called Speaking of Faith.  It has an updated name I’m too lazy to google at the moment (time is money).*  Recently she interviewed ever quotable thought leader Seth Godin.

Seth spoke of his idea of ten.**  Send your idea to ten people you think will care.  If a couple of them send it to ten others, your idea begins to take life in the world.  If none of the ten forward the idea, or even reply, your idea probably has no legs.

And as we all discover, sooner or later, an idea without legs will always be stepped on and mashed into obscurity, no matter how simple and effective that idea might otherwise have been.

Keep it snappy and ready to ship, if you would find and sell to your tribe in our vastly interconnected world.

 

 

* it’s called On Being.  My time really isn’t money at the moment.

 

**  from the transcribed Seth Godin interview:

So tell 10 people — there are 10 people who trust you enough to listen. And if you tell your thing to 10 people — if you send your e-book to 10 people — if you do your sermon to 10 people or show your product to 10 people and none of them want to tell their friends, and none of them are changed — then you failed. That you didn’t really understand what was good. But if some of them tell their friends, then they’ll tell their friends, and that’s how ideas spread. So it’s this 10 at a time — 10 by 10 by 10. How do you put an idea in the world that resonates enough with people if they trust you enough to hear it. That then it can go to the next step and the next step.

The truth would make them REALLY hate us

There’s a debate now, as there always is, when it comes to telling the truth– how much to tell and which version of the truth will be the last word on the subject.  In our bleeding America, this debate, when churned enough, often leads to veins popping out on necks, sprays of spittle and physical violence.

The present kerfuffle (a word VP Cheney dusted off to describe the brouhaha over his accidentally shooting an acquaintance in the face with buckshot while trying to kill tiny birds) is over how much to reveal about our recent torture policy.   An official government report is finally about to come out, a decade after the most extreme forms of ‘dark side’ interrogation techniques were systematically used against thousands of captured Muslims.  

The report concludes, from what we hear, that torture was routinely committed, even if deniability was maintained for the actual architects and engineers of the program.  It was more widespread, and even worse, than the designers of the program intended, the report concludes.  This conclusion is excessively fair, one suspects, to those who commissioned, mandated and legally justified the specific policies and techniques while urging their unsupervised use.  

The report is also said to conclude what every credible expert on interrogation always says:  no reliable intelligence was extracted through the use of torture, in spite of the muscular claims of ‘enhanced interrogation’s (torture’s)’ forceful public defenders.

Our president has already made things bad enough by admitting, with awkward candor, that, after 9/11, good Americans, with the best of intentions, and in genuine fear, well, “we tortured some folks.”  Just another example, his enemies will say, of the illegitimate tone deaf idiot making life harder for the lovers and protectors of the American way of life.

Here is the concern:  if murderous fanatics who already hate us intensely learn the actual details of the cruel tactics we routinely used against many, many Muslims who had nothing to do with fighting America, as well as some who did, they will have good reason to seek revenge.  Think of the incendiary propaganda too many actual details would provide the terrorists!   

America invaded Muslim countries under sometimes false pretenses, admittedly, ousted a few bad leaders (a good thing) and then humiliated, terrified and tortured many people, innocent and guilty, suspected of hating America and plotting to kill our citizens.  Fair enough, fair-minded defenders of the torture program will say, but why should any of that really be a problem now, so many years later? Mistakes were made, passive voices used, folks were tortured.  Nothing to see here, move on, folks.

The audacity of hope is one thing.  The audacity of “fuck you, asshole, what are you going to fucking do about it?” is another thing.  Then there is all that grey area in between, where the devil resides, in unspeakable luxury.

 

NY Times version of last paragraph:

The audacity of hope is one thing.  The audacity of “nuts to you, fool, are you going to do something about it?” is another thing.  Then there is all that grey area in between, where the devil resides, in unspeakable luxury.

 

A Ridiculous Fear

“What exactly are you afraid of?” she asked with mostly hidden exasperation.

“They’ll turn me down for the study,” he said.  

“But you don’t want to be in the study.  Don’t you keep sending people copies of that great review of the books exposing the lucrative hoax of psycho-pharmacology?”  

He nodded.  “I do, and I believe, as the cited studies show, that the placebo is 84% as effective as the patent drugs they prescribe, to maximize ease and profits instead of the difficult probing for solutions to the person’s problems.”  

“And you have already been taking a placebo for months, and noticing it makes you feel slightly better once you down it every day.”  

“I have, yes,” he said.  

“So what exactly is your fear?” she asked.  

“I’m afraid I will not present as depressed enough to qualify for the medication study, and I’ll be stuck in this semi-depressive state forever,” he said.  

“You realize how ridiculous that is, I trust?  You are against the medications, but afraid you’re not depressed enough to qualify for the medications…”  She looked at him and he shrugged, noncommittal.   “I can tell you one thing– you are depressing enough to qualify me for the study.”

“What a mean thing to say to a depressed person,” he said.

“Well, gee,” she said, “I’m no psychiatrist or anything, but, scary as this will no doubt be to you, you seem to present just fine, making jokes, watching movies, following the news, showering every day, your weight staying the same– you could lose 15 pounds, you know, it wouldn’t hurt you– you’re not sleeping 3 hours a night, or ten.   You’re just…. how do I put this gently?”  

“This should be good,” he said.   

But he never got to hear it, the phone rang and she leaped nimbly off the hook to talk to a friend for an hour as he tapped the screen of his iPad, spelling words against the clock, losing badly, and playing again, badly, then again.

 

angell_1-062311.jpg

I Give Up Part 5

The buzzing from the chip was just wrong, as was the headache.   They had fine tuned the technology to the point that any annoyances were intended, and I resented it.

“You make a fair point,” said the supervisor, motioning to an unseen technician.  Abruptly the buzzing and headache stopped.  

“14,000,000 people ahead of me on the crucifixion priority list, you say?” I said.  

“Easily,” he said, “so many other things had a better chance of killing you before the state got around to rooting you out.”  

“I should have invested everything I had in lottery tickets,” I said.  

“Would a few million dollars have made things any different for you?” he asked.  

“I could have hired the people I needed to make this thing work,” I said.  A bird flew by, one of the last.  It cast a small, flickering shadow on the floor in front of me as it passed.  

“Tell me more about this thing,” he said.

“The wealth of our country was built by slave labor and the cheap labors of exploited people who were hungry and desperate in the countries they came from.  The people who collected the lion’s share of the wealth, the same ones in charge today, had as many qualms about taking what they wanted as a hungry lion has about eating a zebra.  The new theory of evolution was cited, ‘survival of the fittest’, much more flattering than ‘survival of the most ruthless’.  Sciences were conjured, measuring skulls and skeletons to demonstrate the innate inferiority of one race, why others were fit to subjugate them.  The science of race was invented, a laughably unfunny race to bolster racism by any means necessary.”  

“I did tell you to take your time, but I didn’t mean this,” the supervisor said, showing only a glint of impatience.

“If I had a million dollars I would hire a highly skilled business partner, after interviewing a dozen, or maybe fifty, to find one who can understand the idea and help me bring it into the world on a larger scale.  It’s a simple idea that proves hard to explain, market or justify: children in slums deserve to be listened to as much as the children of the well-to-do.  In an elite school you get an ear, in a slum school a barked command.  The child of the wealthy is nodded at with an indulgent smile, the child of the poor is told to get in line, fold their damned hands, shut the fuck up.”  

“And this is your problem why, exactly?” the supervisor asked, not without sympathy.  

My theoretical diagnosis in the DSM XIV draft suddenly appeared in my mind, like a hologram, turning itself to catch the light from different angles.  It actually looked beautiful, the light catching the grooves in the letters, playing across the serifs.  This is the world I will miss, I thought with a sudden pang, these ineffable little miracles of sensory experience.  The tiny rainbows shining through the prisms of light hushed me for a moment.  The supervisor watched this too, grateful for the break.  

“But all good things must come to an end,” I said to him.  I was thinking of Sim Kessel, a French Jewish middleweight who uttered this line to excellent effect in his wonderful, but now out of print, Hanged At Auschwitz.  The former French underground fighter had reached the point in Auschwitz where he became what they referred to, bizarrely, as a ‘Muslim’.  That was the point where the fight was finally gone, the will to live exhausted.  ‘Muslims’ stopped eating, lost weight, became glassy-eyed skeletons and died.  Kessel was many kilos below his fighting weight and had that glassy look, started giving away his moldy bread and weak, stinking soup.  

Somehow a friend with the power to help got him out of the mining brigade, where prisoners were marched many kilometers, in wooden shoes, to labor in mines so hot and airless that men drank their own urine to survive.  These Auschwitz prisoners were the ultimate workforce, they worked as though their lives depended on it and were completely disposable.  A capitalist’s dream, if you know what I’m saying.  

“Pick it up,” the supervisor said, making the old circular choo-choo train motion with his hand.

“Kessel got a job in the camp itself, cleaning the latrine ditches.  He was spared the long freezing marches he was too weak to survive, and spent the day scooping dysentery and other waste out of the ditches in buckets and carrying them to dump somewhere else.  Eventually he was….”

“I don’t really care about Sim Kessel,” said the supervisor.

“When he regained his strength they sent him back to the mines, and that’s when he said ‘all good things must come to an end.  And so I was sent back to the mines.'”

“Interesting,” said the supervisor without expression. “And now, please, the rest of the personal details.”

“You asked me why this brutally unfair arrangement is my problem.  I have no short answer.  I do not understand it myself, what drives me to try to help something far beyond my powers to help.  I imagined that if people saw the creativity, inventiveness and ingenuity of the children of poor people it might kindle some mercy in them.  I don’t know why I thought this.  The black eyed face of a little girl in Yemen, confronting a camera after her family was killed in a drone strike, tugs the heart the same way a boy surrendering to men with rifles in a ghetto does, is the look of a shocked Armenian girl in 1915 who has just seen her mother disemboweled by a Turk on a horse.”

“The point, Jesus Christ, the point!  Will you come to the goddamned point, man?” said the supervisor.

“Nobody can be expected to give a shit about anything that is not directly under their nose.  I was a blind idiot to think that anyone would be interested in and moved by the creativity of children being raised to become inmates of our privatized prisons.  People are preoccupied by a thousand other things, nobody can be expected to give a shit, unless, perhaps, it’s their own kid, doomed to early death or a long stretch in prison for the crime of being born in shit city.  I don’t know what I was thinking.  Just fucking crucify me, then, if you’re in such a fucking hurry.”

“I apologize,” said the supervisor. “I should not have snapped like that.  Very unprofessional, as well as discourteous.  I know this must be stressful to you.”

“Not at all,” I said, displaying another hallmark of my disease. “I came here to give up.  Like Sim Kessel giving away his rotten bread, I don’t care anymore.  I can’t explain why I cared in the first place.  You’re right, my mother’s right, I didn’t make the world.  I am not responsible for anybody’s misery but my own.”  

“Oh, but you are.  You are responsible,” said Gandhi, suddenly popping up like a jack-in-the-box.  His smile was very sad and serious.  “You think you can give up, let yourself be executed and be done with it?  You cannot.  Think about it, man.  Speaking to the man who will turn you over to the technicians of death, the last human in the chain, you are still trying to explain your responsibility.  If you take it up, it is your responsibility.”  

“Fucking great…” I thought, and through hidden speakers all around came my thought.

“Fucking great…” the speakers said in my voice, with a nice natural reverb that reminded me of playing my guitar in the resonant stairwells of public schools in the battered city where I grew up.  The voice emerged in surround sound, really clear and with great suppleness.  It actually sounded beautiful, in a weird way.

 

I Give Up Part 4

The chip, which can, of course, be used by the implanted citizen as an internal alarm, can also be activated by the network which can assign it various functions.  So I found myself instantly, alertly awake– with a splitting head ache.

“Ah, good to see you awake,” said the supervisor cheerfully, as I struggled to sit upright, slightly nauseated and unable to rub my aching head with my hands still shackled.  

“No need for the soft cuffs, officer,” said the man mildly, and the plastic restraints were snipped off my wrists.   I pushed myself upright and rubbed my head, neither of which helped the throbbing in my skull.

The supervisor, a thoughtful looking man, scanned my history from the chip. “You are not a bad person,” he told me reassuringly.  “There is no violence or criminality in your past, outside of some ill-advised verbal outbursts and the incendiary images you have committed to writing over the years– you know, those ironically intended things you write in high emotion that can be interpreted as actually, say, advocating the murder of various government officials.  You and I, and any person who looks at it for more than a moment, know you never actually advocated the killing of anyone.  Even those, as you have pointed out precisely and with great fairness of mind, are deserving of death.”  

His kindness disarmed me, as it was intended to.  I found myself almost tearful as I sat before him.  I tried to keep my mind blank, focused on his words alone.

“Unfortunately, nobody looks at these things for more than a few seconds, as you know.  And you are not here for those writings anyway, it’s much more subtle than that.  You are, in fact, a kind person with the best of intentions.  Anyone can see that.   Why don’t you tell me, for the record and also, as one human being to another, why you felt it necessary to surrender for crucifixion?   It appears you could have easily avoided it, you are probably about number 14,000,000 on the priority list for this special handling.”

“Sonderbehandlung,” I thought, the German term stamped on Jewish passports in the extermination years.  It meant “special handling”, Nazi code for “expedited for extermination”, one of the several German terms of art from those years I was familiar with: vernichtungslager, wir scheissen auf die freiheit, lebensunwertes leben, entartete kunst, arbeit macht frei — all similar in spirit.  

“Ah, the Nazis, always with the Nazis,” the supervisor said nodding with a sad smile.  “They did an indelible number on you and your family, didn’t they?   Not only shooting a whole bunch of them in the back of the head, virtually all of your mother’s side, leaving their bodies in a ravine in the Ukraine, not only disappearing your father’s side, and their entire lice-ridden shtetl in Belarus across a small river from Pinsk, wiped off the map without a trace, but invading your mind so thoroughly that to you all government authorities are capable of becoming mass murdering monsters, all populations their witting and unwitting accomplices.”  

He had a pretty good point, I had to give him that.  A society that is OK with millions of people dying so that others can have low cost slave labor?   A society that imprisons more people per capita than the most ruthless totalitarian states on the earth now?  A society that goes shopping for luxuries they don’t need as….

“….as millions of children go to bed hungry in a country that throws away countless hundred dollar a plate dinners in fine restaurants in the very cities where these kids eat paint chips to fill their bellies…. yes, the doomed children.  Always the doomed children, isn’t that what it is?  Tell me your plan, why you deserve to be crucified.  There’s nothing I can do to change your fate, you understand, but I’d like you to be able to get it all off your chest, as best you can.  There is no rush, take your time.”

And I began composing my thoughts, to tell him exactly what it was about my idealistic plan that marked me as a man worthy of the cruelest public execution a private contractor could perform for a government entity.

I Give Up Part 3

“Your messianic thoughts led you inexorably to this day,” said an articulate mercenary binding my hands with plastic cuffs, a bit tight for my taste.  

“Things will always be too tight for your taste,” he said, displaying an alarming clairvoyance.  I shook my head as it dawned on me: there was nothing supernatural involved, the chip was transmitting directly to the network and all he had to do was smile and repeat my thoughts aloud.  A parrot correctly outfitted could do it, although, in fairness to the mercenary, not develop those massive biceps.

We dream when we are young of freedom to attain the things we dream about.  There are higher impulses that it just seems right will prevail.  

“Right,” said the centurion, bored, pushing me forward now, “righty-Oh.”

I suddenly found myself thinking of terrible things few caring people care about, in a stream: the doomed children of the poor my mother correctly scolded me are an obsession of mine, unjustifiable state violence, thousands killed by secret American death squads in Viet Nam under the Phoenix Program, on suspicion of being enemies of democracy, circumvention of American law after 9/11 to blur the lines between covert and clandestine operations, eliminate the requirement to disclose covert assassinations to Congressional committees  and allow for new American death squads to operate secretly in as many countries as unaccountable persons appointed by the president deem necessary to protect our freedom here at home.  

I suddenly had the image of that young man in Ferguson, Missouri who had been shot to death back in 2014.  His large body, lying in the street for hours while they dug up evidence of why he deserved to be killed, shot so many times even though unarmed.  The National Guard was called in, anti-riot squads, tear gas, tanks, “we will control the angry crowds and protect private property by any means necessary,” vowed the governor, echoing Malcolm X grotesquely.  

“The governor didn’t say ‘by any means necessary’, jerk-off,” smirked my captor, nudging me forward.

A video of the large young man committing a misdemeanor, stealing cigars, shoving a tiny clerk, not long before the policeman confronted and killed him, was soon released and shown repeatedly on every TV station.  Perhaps, it was theorized, the unidentified cop knew he was dealing with a dangerous criminal, confirmed when the kid possibly used the f-word to the policeman, or even the explosively provocative n-word to a plainly white man.  No white man should ever be expected to abide being dismissed as a ‘nigger’, especially by a black kid.   Who could blame the large cop for his rage, for pursuing the wounded kid fifty yards, already shot, and making sure he was dead?

Why this image came into my head, I cannot say, but I saw the photos as they’d been shown on the news:  the white officer with his close cropped hair, the black teenager with a motor board on his head, a high school graduate who would never need to buy books for college.  

When a grand jury declined to prosecute the police officer, let all the facts come out in a trial, they seemed to have decided the peace officer had already suffered enough.  The riot squads were called back in, instead of 1,000 mediators, peace makers, a commitment from the government to demilitarize civil police forces, do something about the disproportionate police killing of young black men and find solutions to long-standing racial problems it pretends no longer exist.  

“Yes, I know,” said the mercenary, helping me along now with the muzzle of his gun, “we are a society that uses deadly violence to answer every question.  Given the choice between protecting human dignity and protecting private property we always choose the latter.  It’s sacred.  Do you have any more questions, sir?”  The expression on his face was so sincerely quizzical that I almost asked him about L. Paul Bremer.

“Nobody cares about L. Paul Bremer,” the soldier told me. “Yes, he fucked everything up in Iraq after the perfectly executed Shock and Awe campaign freed Iraq from a modern day Hitler.  His first idiotic error was Order 1, the de-Baathifcation.  Sure, it was stupid, in hindsight, or even with average foresight, to fire thousands of doctors, teachers, nurses, civil servants because they’d been forced, by Saddam, to be members of his political party as a condition of their employment.”  He looked at me thoughtfully, and I could see him further considering what I was thinking of asking.

“Order 2 was an even bigger disaster, I’ll grant you that.  Disband the Iraqi army making 450,000 trained soldiers suddenly unemployed and without pensions in a country where an occupying power was breaking down doors, taking people to be tortured in Saddam’s former torture prisons, where the power grid had been destroyed by American bombing, where hospitals for the masses of wounded and sick were understaffed as a result of Order 1 that fired the best doctors, nurses and administrators in Iraq?  Big fucking mistake, huge mistake, unless your aim was to create an insurgency.  I grant you all that, sir, now just keep moving.”  This time the muzzle of the gun pushed me a bit more emphatically.

“And was Bremer a complete asshole to issue this statement to the suffering people of the Iraq that he was busy anally violating in ways no less brutal than his predecessor, Saddam:  We are going to fight them and impose our will on them and we will capture, or if necessary, kill them until we have imposed law and order upon this country?  Granted, granted, granted: complete asshole.  But Bremer retired soon after to a lavish estate and hid what might have been, to a lesser man, his shameful failure at a variety of luxury properties he and his family owned.  I mean, hasn’t the man suffered enough?”

And, truly, why was I even thinking of these things as a cross was waiting for me across town?  To my left and right I could see others, already crucified, writhing as they tried to die.  Mercifully, their vocal cords had been severed to minimize their expressions of suffering.  If you lead a life that takes you, inexorably, to your execution, have the decency to at least…

The butt of a rifle, expertly deployed, made my chip fall silent.