Author Archives: oinsketta

CV

“Might you send a resume so that I can get to know you a little better before we meet on-line to work on your business idea?”

Might if I had one, dollface.   Will whip one up for you now.

58 years old.

BA (history and philosophy) and MA (creative writing) from CCNY.   JD from Rutgers Law School-Newark.   Member of NYS and Federal Bars.  Quit drinking 2005.  Don’t hang out in bars or with members of bars, though I pay my membership dues.

Driven since childhood to create things that connect to other humans.  Guitar at 14, added piano, bass, ukulele.  Writing continually, rarely fiction.  Drawing and painting since age three or so.   Common denominator– having skills in these areas is nice, but not very nice, or even understandable to society at large, unless monetized.  Years spent ignoring this brutally obvious fact.  

Taught public school, mostly third grade, for about five years, the average attrition time for NYC public school teachers at the time (it is two years now, I hear).  Loved the work, got on well with students, colleagues and parents, couldn’t survive the bureaucracy.  Bureaucracy felt the same about me.    Odd jobs, including tutor to a couple of teenaged R & B stars, a challenging, interesting gig while it lasted.

Common denominator:  bringing out the hidden potential of students by engaging their creativity and giving them leave to run with it.    

Law school and a reluctant career in law, mainly in NYC Housing Court, considered by many to be the most contentious court in the country.   Found myself there by default, mostly standing in the shoes of tenants the court deemed unable to adequately represent themselves.  Low pay and high stress, the stakes were often homelessness.  Lack of entrepreneurial zeal needed to make more than a subsistence living as a self-employed attorney led me to find a path to helping in the way I am best equipped to help.  

Envisioned a non-hierarchic program, imagining the children in Harlem schools where I worked, where the students would be listened to and supported as they worked together to demonstrate the depth of their imaginations and desire to learn.  Spent one year figuring out how to do all facets of simple stop motion animation, inventing portable animati0n rig that fits in a backpack and duffel bag, sets up in five minutes.  Next two years spent doing approximately one hundred workshops, the bulk of them in NYC public schools.  

Gratified that it works immediately, as designed, wherever I set it up.  Discouraged by the lack of general excitement I’ve been able to generate about an engaging educational program that children love.  The workshop in action is a self-propelled, humming beehive where children invent and cooperate freely.  Without an effective sales pitch for recruitment, sites and funding, the program, no matter how excellent in the many tests, cannot survive and grow.  I have just about every skill and potential needed to advance this program, but for expertise as a salesman.

 

Now, of course, I need to edit this so as not to hear the shriek, the virtual leap out of the virtual skin and the frenzied clip clop of the skeleton carrying off the terrified skin as it was animated in Casper the Friendly Ghost.  

The facts, ma’am, nothing but the facts.  Varnish those facts with a thin veneer of pleasantly scented bullshit and then we can talk.

Self-love and avoiding human toxicity

In a poisoned world a baby must learn what to avoid in order to survive.  Avoiding what will kill you is as important as acquiring what nourishes you.  The adults around can help or hinder that learning, or, more commonly, do both.

“You’re seven years old, for Christ’s sake, it’s time to stop acting like a chid. Start acting like a man.  I can’t stand that whining.  Man up, for fuck’s sake.”   There’s a clue for a bright young kid that something in this relationship should be avoided, or at least discounted.  A more subtle clue, perhaps, than several grunting lashes across the child’s face, but a strong clue anyway.  

“You’ll be whining to some shrink about how your parents ruined your life,” he predicted through the door, locking the latch on the outside of the punishment closet.  “‘It was all my parents’ fault‘,” he said raising his voice an octave into a sniveling whine.  “You keep wailing and see if you get out of there today” said dad. 

Humans are not primarily rational actors.  We like to think we are, but the things that drive us are largely irrational.   Fear drives us, rational or not, it is a powerful mover of people and nations.  Fear’s first cousin, Anger, drives us to do irrational things with an urgent sense of righteousness.  Other emotions not amenable to any sort of logical review are frequently at play in human affairs.

Driving to a friend’s funeral on a busy interstate in Connecticut in January, hours ahead of schedule, the driver plunged across a white lane to enter the HOV lane.  The passenger behind the driver noticed we were accelerating past 80 to enter the HOV lane.  The white lane turned out to be white because it was a thin layer of snow over a five mile long sheet of ice.   Invisible under the ice was the herringboned “do not cross” lane between the traffic, doing close to 80 on a dry highway, and the cars in the HOV lane moving slightly faster than that.  When we hit the ice the car skidded, swung, did a 360.  It is a miracle that the driver was able to pull out of the skid, do another donut among three lanes of speeding traffic, and get us safely to the far shoulder.  

A second equally gigantic miracle: that none of the drivers catapulting along were looking at their smartphones, GPS maps, video screens or other glowing devices instead of directly at the road ahead of them during those perilous seconds.  Our survival was miraculous, and I wrote about it at the time, and when we got to Boston I praised the driver over and over for saving our lives, when, of course, (though it didn’t dawn on me til later), her unthinking idiot move had put us in mortal danger to begin with.  She knew it, though, and winced every time I recounted the story, thanked her for saving us.  She asked me not to talk about it any more.  

Turned out her father, invariably described as a dangerous maniac, had taught her sister and her, every icy weekend during their teen years, how to master an out of control car skidding wildly on ice.  This exercise was done in frozen parking lots in New Jersey until both of the young drivers mastered it.  Hearing this, the only explanation for our survival, I said “Hail Murray!”  I owe my life to Murray and will always be grateful.

The other day, offered a ride home by the husband of this same driver, our mutual friend jocularly asked who was driving.   The driver who’d performed the miracle on ice flashed angry, betrayed eyes at me and hissed that I had apparently told everybody the story.  I smiled, pointed to heaven and said “Hail Murray!  God bless Murray!”  I later thought of how difficult it would have been, for anyone, when asked about the funeral, to omit the dramatic story of how we had nearly died on the way there, but for the divine intervention of the dangerous Murray who’d prepared his daughter to perform the miracle that saved us.

It put me in mind of my brother-in-law, to whom I’d innocently loaned my life savings after he lost a well-paying  job for a fraud that wasn’t his fault, the first of several identical cases over the next thirty years.  This was before I learned that this highly intelligent, funny man was also insane.  After spending all the money I’d loaned him he announced that he couldn’t pay me back for a long time, he owed many people money and he had to pay them back first.  My father was among his creditors, my money had gone, in part, to repaying part of my father’s loan to this con man.  

“Don’t tell your father,” he told me sternly, and then, when I expressed disbelief that he would have the gall to demand this, he made the case that I was a whiner who couldn’t keep a confidence.   Which put me in mind of the sexually depraved priest, righteously instructing the boy that God would be very angry at the boy if he told anybody what the priest, a man of God, had caused the boy to do.  

The world is strewn with booby traps, thin ice over a toxic lake waiting to dissolve your bones.  It is the work of many years to learn to navigate these dangers, unless we have an excellent teacher, like Murray was to his daughters in the realm of driving on ice.  Murray, clearly, did other things to make things much more difficult for his daughters.  But in that respect, teaching them to come out of a skid on an icy road, “hail Murray!” I say, and thank God for his excellent, life-saving instruction.

Murray, of course, also instilled that reflex to anger, which flashed in his daughter’s eyes at the betrayal of someone who would cavalierly reveal such embarrassingly personal details to everyone.  “You can’t keep a secret!” the eyes screamed, as righteous as a priest betrayed by a seductive young parishioner.  

My commitment to mildness dictates that I do not blast back, tell this overworked, striving person on multiple treadmills that she’s ridiculous to express anger at something anyone would have done, chide her for her many promises unkept, important emails unread, her half dozen soft and harder betrayals.  

“You should have told her,” insisted Sekhnet, thinking about a specific, inexcusable promise unkept, even after I pointed out that she was literally in the hallway outside the apartment when this five second exchange took place.  Avoiding toxic exchanges is as important as learning which frozen lakes not to venture out on to.   Learning, learning all the time, the best we can do in this world of a million designer poisons.  It is far better than giving in to righteous rage and setting traps for those who have done us wrong.

 

 

 

 

It Makes Perfect Sense

On the day after marchers clogged downtown NYC to protest America’s lack of a real response to catastrophic man made climate change I take a moment to set down, in my aggravatingly simplistic Devil’s advocate way, why the status quo makes perfect sense.  In the process you will no doubt see the folly of protesters who lack the economic clout trying to get serious attention from a government run by the private dollars, speaking loudly and freely, of those who do.

Let’s look at this from the point of view of the industry that produces and sells the amazingly lucrative products that result in the pumping of carbon into the atmosphere.   It may be true that carbon emitted by millions of cars, trucks, trains and airplanes increases the greenhouse gases that are warming the earth and already creating great climate disturbance.  May well be true, though those great climate disturbances may also just be part of a natural cycle or the wrath of a vengeful God.   It may also be true that an industry based on extracting an ever decreasing natural resource from deep inside the earth is a bad long-term business model.  Let’s also admit that could probably be the case, eventually, though you must also admit you don’t have a viable alternative plan at the moment.

Now look at it from an economic point of view in the here and now, from the perspective of the Oil and Gas Industry and those whose vast fortunes are based on its ongoing prosperity.   The internal combustion engine, powered by fossil fuel, made most of human progress in the last hundred years, a time of unprecedented human progress, possible.  We transport things from coast to coast, around the globe, fly airplanes everywhere, commute long distances to jobs, travel in gas powered vehicles to beautiful places for holidays.   Our economy depends on this wonderful engine, which is powered by the transformed and processed remains of dinosaurs.  Industries related to automobile and other gasoline powered transportation employ literally tens of millions.  

Let’s take a quick look at the bottom line and we’ll evaluate who is the foolish party in this debate over whether man is really destroying his home by allowing carbon to flow freely from smokestacks and exhaust pipes.    From the dawn of the automobile the oil business has been a gold mine.   Billions and billions in profit are made every year from the production and sale of this liquid gold.  As the supply gets smaller and smaller, and demand rises, the price only goes up.   The immutable law of economics.  Talk about a business model!   If you were an executive in an oil company, or an investor, rich beyond your millionaire father’s wildest dreams, with a product whose supply is ever diminishing and whose price has tripled in the last decade, would it not behoove you to spend however many millions it took to convince people that those who march in protest of the unfettered use of this miraculous product are misguided idiots, at best?

They hate our freedom, you will say, and it will certainly be true that they hate yours.   They gullibly and blindly believe the vast majority of scientists who have studied the climate and are constantly issuing alarming findings about ice caps melting, sea levels rising, droughts, floods, murderous super storms, raging wild fires.  What do you call someone who is alarmed by supposedly alarming news?   That’s right, an Alarmist.   These are Climate Alarmists, freedom haters.   If you had to use one word it might be Communists.   You see, if they had their way, free enterprise would be ended and we’d all be back to using horse drawn carts.  It is far wiser to be skeptical when so much is at stake.  After all, we have scientists too who will tell you this is all ideologically driven liberal alarmism.   They will say, with no equivocation, that carbon produced by human activity has nothing to do with the natural cycles of climate or the wrath of God.  And the wrath of God will surely be upon those who hate freedom.

If a kid has a genius idea for a website he sells for a billion dollars, the pressing question on the minds of the business community is– how will he make even more money for his invention?  How will he keep it relevant, monetize it more efficiently, keep it moving forward, dynamic, maximize its profitability?   A billion dollars may look good on a balance sheet, or in a headline, but what is this bright 27 year-old’s next move?  The pressure is on the young man now, you see. The engine of our economy does not rest on making a fortune and living a life of good works, doing what you love, living on your fortune.  The engine of our economy does not rest– it drives ever forward, onward, upward.  And the engine it drives is powered by gasoline– and never being satisfied to have merely enough.

Flowers for Algernon

There is a novel with that title by Daniel Keyes, later made into a movie, first published as a short story in 1959.  It is the story, told in diary form, of an experimental surgery to increase a retarded man’s intelligence.  The experiment works wonderfully, as it did on lab mouse Algernon, and Charlie Gordon, the first human subject, a barely literate simpleton in the first entry of his diary, quickly develops into a genius.

I can give you all this detail not because I have a fantastic memory, except for the bare bones of the Flowers for Algernon story, which I read 50 years ago, but because we now have the impeccable digital memory of the internet that allows me to refresh my recollections of the details, quickly learn details I hadn’t known before, and link you to the actual text.

I am thinking of the story, also known as Charly (the title of the Academy Award winning movie), because of its tragic dramatic arc.   Charlie Gordon, a man with an IQ of 68, undergoes an experimental surgical procedure to increase his intelligence.  He goes from semi-literate janitor to an eloquent genius with an IQ triple his original one.   His brilliance complicates his life, but he is grateful for it, until he sees Algernon lose all his post-surgical intelligence and wind up in worse shape than he began.  

Charlie Gordon’s fate is tragically clear as Algernon, now his pet, quickly regresses and dies, to Charlie’s, and the readers’, great sorrow.  The flaw in the experimental surgery that his own research discovered is confirmed.  He feels it all slipping away and we watch, his journal entries deteriorate and his new found powers slip away.  In the end he is as he was before, even a bit worse, and the last thing he asks for is for someone to put flowers on Algernon’s grave.  

What starts with all the promise in the world, ends with Charlie as he was before, even a bit worse off.

I am thinking of this Algernon phenomenon in relation to my great experiment. Against the odds I singlehandedly created and conducted a program that worked exactly as I imagined it could.  I was in one school, where it went well, as it did in the three other schools where I launched it, at a reform school and even at the sessions for chronically ill adults.  

At its peak the workshop was active in three schools.  Then two.  Then one.  Then none.  It’s hard not to see that as backwards progress, lose the optimism that kept me chasing the miraculous aspect of what I felt I was beginning to accomplish.

I don’t remember if Charlie Gordon was beset with self-pity as he felt it all slipping away, though it’s hard to imagine that feeling could have been absent from his journal.  In my own case, it is entirely possible, one hopes, that after conducting 100 successful workshops, making several short promos of students at work featuring their original animation, writing increasingly concise and descriptive materials about the program, that I will get the business and funding help I’ve needed from the beginning.  

It is not impossible, after all, that the New York City Agency that helps small businesses recruit, train, fund, negotiate government contracts and so forth, will provide exactly the help I need to make the program a success, in spite of the daunting odds.   Not impossible that one of the mentors I wrote to on the new NYS business mentoring site will one day get back to me, offer valuable guidance.  Not impossible, no.  There’s every chance I will complete the short on-line application for NYC Business Solution’s help as soon as I finish posting this.

But I still can’t help thinking of Charlie Gordon and that mouse Algernon today.

Infinite and Finite

In our finite world scarcity and competition for limited resources are facts of nature, taken for granted.   We are hard-pressed to see the world we live in except in terms of winning and losing.   Most drama in our world centers on the burning question of who will take the lion’s share and be safe in their home and property and who will starve or die young of preventable diseases or violence.    Most live anxiously in between, taking distraction and pleasure where they can, and there are people who will kill you for the money in your pocket.

Other things in this world are infinite and as precious as clean water.   Empathy is infinite, if allowed to flourish, and it saves lives.   The gift of being listened to, heard and understood, having someone take the time to understand — a sadly rare gift that costs nothing to give and is potentially infinite.  Imagine the pain and violence that could be spared, if a person on the edge of rage had only had someone to hear how much they were suffering and ready to give even a small comfort.

I heard a great radio interview a few weeks ago with a woman who worked in an office in a school.  A distraught maniac came into the school with an AK-47 and 500 rounds of ammo, ready to kill and then, as the maddening saying goes, “turn the gun on himself” or commit “suicide by police”.  She was the first person he encountered there, and she was in the midst of a day of great personal trouble already when he walked in.   She saw his agony and spoke to him kindly, told him he was loved, called him sweetie, assured him that his life was going to be better than it felt in this terrible moment.  She wound up calming him enough that he didn’t shoot anybody, didn’t turn the gun on himself.  

Many gun-toting maniacs who barge into schools are far past the point of hearing anything, the kindest words in the world will be cut off by their gun shots.  But her actions that day saved many lives, including her own.  They don’t make a movie about her, but she’s a greater hero than most that movies are written about. Antoinette Tuff is this hero’s name.  In looking her up just now I read that a few days ago they sentenced the 21 year-old with the AK-47, who shot at police before Tuff talked him down.   Looking at the photo of the beautiful Ms. Tuff, and reading about her hard life before her heroic moment, they might very well make a movie about her.   She has a book out now and is doing the interview circuit.

Also infinite, the violence rage produces.  It is as inevitable as the “fuck you” many in a hurry, or dealing with their own troubles with no time left, might feel reading something like this on some fool’s blahg.  Abstract bullshit with rose colored shades on, where is the actual content?  Oh, wait:  it’s better to be amazingly kind than to be a common fucking bastard, eh?  Deep.

Our minds create the world we live in, it is said.  The organ of mass media plays upon our senses, all the time, selling without rest, pulsating in our pockets, on a billion screens, it’s echoed by the crickets chirping in the darkness.  All of human genius is focused on perfecting this ever more incredibly sophisticated sales machine.  We cannot see our world without seeing the inevitable — war, competition, violence, hatred, revenge, infuriating piety.  Infuriating piety is as bad as the rest of the plagues, it’s maddening to listen to someone piously announce the difficult truth, presented with a pious idiot’s simple mindedness, leaving no room for discussion.  The certainty of pious people can be maddening, that’s understood.

Picture two kids and their prospects for a happy life and I’ll duck back behind the curtain.  One child, when she wakes afraid in the dark, has an adult who comes, puts a soft hand out, speaks quietly, listens and reassures. The other child wakes afraid in the dark and is met by an angry adult who waits for the child’s wailing to get out of control and then barges in snarling “you’d better shut up or I’ll give you something to really cry about!”  

That this goes as well for adults as for children is too self-evident to even try to show.  It is even more important for children, clearly, and for the future of life here.

Isolation Chamber 

 

Solitary confinement is probably the cruelest form of incarceration, as has been noted in many contexts and by various schools of experts.  

Youthful offenders subjected to periods of solitary confinement may suffer irreversible damage, to pull a dramatic sounding, likely indisputable, fact from a nether cavity.   Routinely, for disciplinary reasons and others, teen prisoners in America are shut into cells by themselves and allowed to stew for days or weeks.   It is very cruel, but apparently quite usual, just the way we do business here in the U.S.A. these days.

 “Ah, another soapbox!” says my old friend.

“Just so,” says I.   And I’ll tell you something else, isolation is not an isolated problem restricted to forced detention.  Look at the wild popularity of social media, which is neither, strictly speaking, social nor media.  It is a constant contest for attention in a distracted world that has only so much attention to pay to any of its hundred million media creators.  How often do we note that people with 10,000 friends on Facebook don’t have one to call when they are feeling down?   140 characters, gaily and bravely tweeted out to the world, somebody…. follow me.   Into the breach, follow me!!   Hello? Can I get a tweet back?  Retweet?  Ping?  Hello?

 “Turn that burner down, partner, your pot’s about to berl over, and you’re sounding a bit… crazy…” my friend says.

 “’My friend’…” I think, recalling Napoleon’s great remark, to his diary, about friendship.  After noting that he regards man as base coin existing merely to gratify his passions he records that he fully realizes he has no true friends, only people who suck up to him because he’s powerful, charismatic, etc., he sniffs to his diary “as for me, you don’t suppose I care?”

 “To his diary, you say?” says my friend, getting the ironic point I will belabor briefly now.  Napoleon denied that he needed friends, intimacy or anyone to confide in.   He denied it to his best friend, the journal he confided his most intimate thoughts to.

 I know very well I have no friends, I say to this apparition, this flimsy literary device, “my friend”.  To the extent that I can make people laugh, or think, or feel something, I am a wonderful guy and liked just fine.  Like Napoleon in power, I know I will have all the friends I need as long as I remain as I am.  I recall walking with a group of friends on a long hike a few autumns ago, first with one, then another. We caught up, exchanged a few anecdotes, touched base.  Before I left each friend they were laughing.  I left ‘em laughing, each one, and each in a unique way.   That’s neat, I remember thinking.

 “But you say these people are not your friends?” he asks.

 “You need to shut up too,” I say, very, very tough.

 Here’s the thing. I was in mid e-conversation just now with somebody about a business mentor, and setting up a meeting with a business solutions specialist when I realized I was no longer online. “Hello?”   I had a response ready to send to one, was phrasing one for the other when… “hello?”  The line was dead.  Silent.   The dreaded silence descended like a gigantic, hideous, world masking testicle.

 “There goes a gigantic, hideous darling you should murder toot sweet, that gratuitous and disgusting testicle image,” says a friend with a keen editorial bent.

 Isolation does things to a person who lives alone.   I can tell you for sure. The internet suddenly winking out looms like a major catastrophe to people who communicate largely on line.   Silence.

 Oh, you have plenty of people you interact with every day. I understand. You make sales calls, have meetings, colleagues, discuss business, consult, talk to clients, josh with customers, prospects, make dinner plans, plan trips, talk to waiters, drivers, talk to strangers while waiting on line at the movies. You chat up everybody, and I don’t begrudge you that small, important pleasure. I don’t even ask you to consider what I’m writing here—there is no reason to ask or to consider.

The entire exercise — gratuitous.   Maybe that subway poster advertising The School of Visual Arts back in the 1970s hit the mark and will always hit the mark: having a talent is not worth much unless you know what to do with it. Talent is worthless, they intimated artfully, unless you monetize it.  All art is commercial in a commercial society, you dig?

“Art…” Hermann Goring grunts in disgust, although he plundered more than his share of valuable Degenerate Art during the Nazi gravy years, “when I hear the word culture I reach for my gun.”

Hard to blame the Nazi bastard on that score, you know? I don’t own a gun, except for the metaphorical one I fire off here from time to time.

“You are a chattering rictus,” an observer observes.

“Yes,” I say, “but I’m sure you don’t want your guts blasted with this metaphorical Glock 9.”   End of that particular story.   I stop, turn full face and flash my adorable rictus, gentle reader.

 

Horrible Wiki with a Happy Ending, kind of

African-American resistance to lynching carried substantial risks. In 1921, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a group of African-American citizens attempted to stop a lynch mob from taking 19-year-old assault suspect Dick Rowland out of jail. In a scuffle between a white man and an armed African-American veteran, the white man was killed.

Whites retaliated by rioting, during which they burned 1,256 homes and as many as 200 businesses in the segregated Greenwood district, destroying what had been a thriving area.

Confirmed dead were 39 people: 26 African Americans and 13 whites. Recent investigations suggest the number of African-American deaths may have been much higher.

Rowland was saved, however, and was later exonerated.

Please Tell Me You’re Kidding Me

“So you, a man without a megaphone, with no idea of how to get a megaphone, have as your goal giving a megaphone to poor, feral kids who have no voice in the world?” she said, not as a question.

“An uncharitable way to say it, but yes,” he said.

“Are you starting with the ‘he’ again?” she asked, her smile catlike.

“I leave that to you to figure out,” he said.   These conversations with the internalized victimizer were tedious, but sometimes unavoidable.  The thing was to be patient with the cruel voice in his head, he reasoned.

“Yes,” she said, “be patient with the voice of reality, the voice of the world, the voice of sanity and reason, the voice you’ve made it your life’s work to be deaf to.”

“Of course,” he thought.   It was true he was taking a beating.  No rest in his slumbers, eyes tired as soon as he opened them, the world a slippery uphill slope from the time he put his foot on the floor by his bed.  He could not escape the several ironies, heavy as anvils, clumsy as tortured metaphors.  

“You are so talented!” his friends’ children often told him in childish amazement.  

“You should monetize your art,” many a shrewd friend of a friend had told him years ago.  “Get used to rejection and just keep sending your stuff out, it’s as good, or better, than much of the stuff that’s selling.  You can make a fortune, with persistence and a little luck.”    

It was never a dream, making a fortune, or being loved by rich people.   The dream, somehow, had been making a difference, somehow.  The dream always involved brooding over people, particularly young ones, who were irretrievably fucked by the bad timing and placement of their birth.  

“Bingo!” she said, “now look in the mirror.  Happy Birthday!”

“I take my spirit and I smash the mirrors,” he said, singing Jimi’s triumphant couplet.  The song died in the cluttered room.   There was much to do, but where to start?   He’d heard a spot on the radio about New York City Business Solutions, a great resource for small businesses at any stage of development.  Prematurely thankful for this piece of  luck, he went on-line and got the number.

“The number has been changed,” the recording said and he jotted down the new number.  This new number turned out not to be the number for the office he was looking for, but one in Harlem where he was invited to leave a message.  He left a cheerful message but had no answer on the third business day.

He called 311, which gave him yet another number, which connected him to someone in the wrong office, a bright young man named Adam who promised to set things straight, and by the end of the day, spoke to the supervisor of the proper office who cheerfully promised him an appointment that week, which would be set up by Carlos, cc’d on the follow up email.  

“Thanks so much,” he wrote back three business days ago.  Perhaps they construed it as sarcasm?  

“Are you not used to the fact that virtually nobody ever gets back to you on matters of any importance at all?” she asked, yawning ostentatiously.  

“I’m going to call Adam back at the Lower Manhattan office,” he said.  

“Sure you are….” she said, letting her voice trail off annoyingly.  “Oh, by the way, that excellent application you wrote to the New York State Small Business Mentor Program, did you ever hear back on that?  It was really a wonderful description of your program and your needs, very well-written and positive sounding.  You put on a good act, anyway.”

“There were some business mentors in Utica, Buffalo, Ulster County, Onondoga County, Syracuse and other places who were sent off as automatically generated possible mentors…” he said.    

“Did you ever hear back from their help desk after you checked ‘please help me with this application’?  Did you ever get a return call on your voice mail seeking assistance?”

“I said, I’m going to call Adam back at the Lower Manhattan Office,” he said with great determination.   What he was thinking was ‘somebody tell me you’re fucking kidding me with this fucking shit.’

 

 

 

Trying to Negotiate an Old Friendship in A Partisan Nightmare

I have known this woman since childhood, when she worked with, loved and, later, was psychologically pummeled by, my father, who sometimes couldn’t help delivering an onslaught of blows to someone who loved him.   Back then she was a member of MENSA, a folk-singer who hated war and intolerance, and an outspoken leftist who worked hard at a difficult and idealistic job in the newly integrated NYC high schools.   When she moved out of NY, some time after the disillusioning ugliness with my father, I lost track of her.   Fond memories led me to look her up on the internet some time before my father passed away.  As I recall they had an amiable chat about old times a few months before his sudden death.
 
It is a few years before he died, the wreck of the smoldering World Trade Center is still emitting its foul, toxic smell.  I get an email from her describing the recent political revelation she’s had.   The world is dangerous, we are surrounded by deadly Islamic enemies intent on slitting our throats, and destroying Israel.   She has moved from her former political stance and embraced the politics of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.  They are friends of Israel and not afraid to do what is necessary to combat enemies from hell.
Though she considers herself politically independent, most of her views align with the right wing in American politics.  She supported the invasion of Iraq, supports torture, would defend Sarah Palin’s unfairily maligned statements, is critical of the Liberal Media and disgusted by liberal guilt.  She asks, since all of her former liberal friends have cut her off, if we can have a reasoned discussion of politics.  She tells me she’d greatly appreciate it.  
It turned out we could not have a reasoned discussion of politics.  The aggravation of trying to have one led me to cut off communications with her finally.   Years later we resumed emailing and agreed to leave politics out of our correspondence.   It has been a 99% excellent correspondence since.
 
In the name of seeking common ground, she once in a while sends me a political piece she thinks I might agree with.  Most of these pieces originate from passionate people who do not attempt to give a nuanced view of what they are describing.   Although I delete many, I find myself beginning to reply to some of the more incendiary ones.  The substance of most of my critiques is about the emotional nature of the emails, the citing of convenient facts and the omission of any that might weaken the emotional punch.   I write and don’t send these, there are a few in my drafts folder.  
 
It’s pointless to send them, since it has been her practice to respond not to the substance of my reply, but to the righteousness or veiled anger in it and it’s pointless, and poisonous, to get back into the emotional cul de sac of partisan back and forth.  I do not believe a police choke hold that results in the death of an unarmed citizen is ever an appropriate action to take in response to a non-violent crime.  Though she would probably agree with that statement, she would probably also see some nuance there.
 
She sent one recently with a photo captioned “this is what a broken orbital bone looks like” and it was horrendous.  The side of the guy’s face was bashed in and all around his smashed eye socket it was a hideous purple, the color of a flayed cow’s torso.  The photo illustrated an email slamming the notorious Liberal Media for repressing this photo of the officer who shot the threatening black thug in Ferguson, MO. in self-defense warding off a vicious and deadly attack.   I wrote back pointing out that the caption of the photo hadn’t claimed it was a picture of the officer who shot the kid, and that it was surprising the right wing media wasn’t showing this photo everywhere.   I suggested it might be a hoax and, after a few moments on google, sent her a post identifying the subject of the photo as a race car driver after a 2006 accident.   She wrote back aghast, but still didn’t appear totally convinced, that photo or not, the kid hadn’t bashed in the cop’s face or done something else violent that justified the officer shooting him to death.
 
Since I greatly value this woman’s insights in all other regards, but can’t stand any more right wing emails, I asked her again, with a long explanation, not to send me any more political email.  I wrote the following to her.   She wrote back that she promised not send any more and underlined everything in my email that she agreed with, just to show how much we can still actually agree about even contentious things.  Naturally, I found the things she didn’t underline very interesting.   
 
I wrote:
 
I want to err on the side of not having to engage any of this ‘political’ stuff.  I’d rather not have to parse or vet any of it because so much of it just upsets me.  I have enough in my life at the moment to vex me without fear of opening an email from you containing something upsetting.
 
The deeper horror, to me, someone gravely injured by a childhood lack of response and honest engagement, is that most of this stuff is just a way people express their anger and doesn’t lend itself to productive conversation of any kind.  Any comments I make are met with complete silence most of the time, like in the recent case with the hoax article.
 
It surprises me every time I get something from you, an otherwise thoughtful, sensitive and insightful person,  that is clearly a reflexive jerk of the right wing knee– like the recent one claiming the black kid who was killed by the cop in Ferguson, MO. bashed the cop’s head in and deserved to die, in spite of the easily discoverable truth or falsity of the incendiary– and false–  assertion.   
 
We live in a violent, polarized society that is going the way of all empires, it seems, one ready example: militarized police forces in riot gear and tanks use tear gas against American protesters that would be a war crime if used on a battle field in war.   Our country is as divided, hypocritical and poised to kill each other as at any time since the Civil War (what was so civil about it, I wonder).
 
In the midst of our fear, rage and powerless we focus on what we believe to be the source of our problems.  To the right it is the entitled “takers” those race baiters who wear their victimhood aggressively and demand “reparations” who pay nothing and demand everything.   To the left it is the moral descendants of the slave holders, extremely rich and powerful people manipulating everybody else to increase their already extreme advantage:  no teacher contracts beyond one year, “right to work” no unions, fight “minimum wage” increases, no abortions for any reason, cut food stamps and other safety net programs that keep millions of children and seniors from hunger and starvation, stop funding the EPA, unlimited guns for the free and privatized prisons for the bad guys, alcohol yes, marijuana no, stop hating our freedom and engaging in class warfare, your envy is sickening. 
 
There is truth in both of these views, though you and I weigh the relative truth on very different scales.  No more, OK?
 
Make love, not war, as you Californians say.  Do you understand what I’m saying?

 

Peace, out.


Ixnay on Ein-May Ampf-Kay

The other day I was reminded that I’m no Vonnegut, nothing like the writer who started writing as a corporate PR man, who worked long and diligently, and faced years of rejection and lack of appreciation, to make himself into a marketable commodity, both his writing and his folksy wit on the speaking circuit.  After many years of hard work he wound up well paid and beloved for both.  Today I was urged not to use the word “struggle” in the title of the book I might work on, if all else fails, as appears may well be the case, my imaginary city burning as I fiddle here.  

“Not ‘Struggle'” my friend said, to remind me of what I myself noted a few weeks ago here– people don’t want to read about a losing, against the odds struggle, unless the protagonist miraculously prevails, in which case he becomes an inspiring winner and the story an uplifting fable about the power of individual imagination, resourcefulness and perseverance. 

I assured him I’d call it something else, tempting as it is, as I indisputably struggle, to puckishly riff on Mein Kampf, after the shortened German title editors insisted on as an improvement of the original “My Struggle Against Seven Years of Lies and Hypocrisy and the Fucking Jews and Other Filthy Maggots Who Want to Bugger Me Even Though I Have Never Enjoyed Buggery of Any Kind and I’ll Kill Anyone Who Says I Like To Take It Up The Ass!“.  The future Fuhrer was persuaded that the book would sell better with a strong, forceful, more succinct title.  “Those first two words, so powerful and perfect!” he was assured obsequiously, “the rest of the title, excellent though it also is, would be a distraction, and hard to fit on the spine.”

“You lay it all out so beautifully in the book, Adolf, no point giving away all that for free in the title. Build the suspense a little.  Make them buy the book if they want all that,” another cajoled, fawningly.  The author of that book, a strong-willed mentally deranged autodidact who had dictated it to a functional illiterate, was not a man to be trifled with.  He was a writer who needed flattery more than most.  In later years he’d have men hung by piano wire for offenses far less grave than second guessing the best title for his own book about his unspeakable struggle against forces hell bent on making the world a nightmare.  In that department, he was an expert.

“Did something bad happen to you today?” she asked, eyes looking sad.

“Shut up,” I said.

“You’re no Hitler,” she snapped, turning back to her computer game.

I understand.  Anyway, Mein Kampf was a main source of Hitler’s livelihood until he went on the public payroll years later as Chancellor of Germany.  It was a best seller in Germany during those wild years.  The best selling book that nobody ever read, it was a popular wedding present and also given for birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, confirmations and, by black-humored wags, bar mitzvahs.  Try reading it some time.  It’s impossible to get through more than a couple of pages, although the short section on propaganda is breathtakingly chilling and very well presented. 

Much as I am biased against him, horrific as his own nightmare childhood undoubtedly was, as much as I hate the man, if I’m being totally honest here, I have to give him this much:  he was a visionary as far as how to sell an idea to the public and he forever changed the way it’s done by most governments and virtually every advertiser of political campaigns:  

You want to influence the masses with facts and reason, logic and persuasion?  HA!  You stupid bastard, I’ll hang you from a meathook by your ass!  You want to influence the public, my friend?  You stir their emotions, shake their emotions, stomp violently on their emotions, mainly their fear.  You TERRIFY THEM!  Yes, that’s what the Allies did, inspired terror and hatred of the German army in the World War.  That was the right thing to do!  

Our commanders were no different than others, in fact, a few vomited when they saw what the fucking Turks did to the Armenians (don’t get me started on the Turks, or the Armenians, for that matter).   But our propagandists took the high road in the Great War and lost the war for hearts and minds, the war itself, even though our military was far superior.  They idiotically stuck to the truth, told our people that we were a superior culture and a great nation and that we deserved to win because we represented the highest values civilization had so far attained, and the Americans, English and French were inferior and contemptible.  All true, but useless as engines to drive war machines of hatred and revenge.

The Allies were smart and effective, they were ruthless and not hobbled by quaint scruples about what was true, sportsmanlike, decent.   They knew that  primal fear and visceral hatred motivate far better than intellectual appeals to pride and contempt.  They used any lie they could think of to make their people, and their troops, fear and hate the Germans.  The filthier the lie, the more brazen and sickening the lie, the better.  The Allies had it right, alas!

FEAR and HATRED, I’ll say it again, that’s the goal and the more explosive and terrifying the lie, the more gigantic and atrocious the lie, and, YOU KEEP SCREAMING IT UNTIL THEY ARE QUAKING IN THEIR SMELLY BOOTS, the better.  You get them TERRIFIED!   TERROR!!!  You fill them with nightmares until they shit themselves.  BOOO!!!   VOOO-OOO!!!!!  Then they will listen eagerly when you tell them what they must do to save themselves, they are ready to obey, march in columns to kill.   Their savior will assure them with absolute confidence:  we will face this fearsome enemy together, bravely, our complete and glorious triumph is preordained by GOD.  Follow me and we will KILL THE MONSTER!  And they will lean forward, hushed and expectant, to hear the details, commit any acts necessary to KILL THE MONSTERS!!!  You have them in the palm of your hand, agents of your will, if you keep them in terror. And simple, terrible, unimaginable lies endlessly repeated are the best way to keep them terrified.

Not long after Hitler outmaneuvered the rest of the complacent German right and had himself named Chancellor, the Reichstag, the German Parliament Building, went up in flames.  The man who started the fire, amazingly in twenty places simultaneously on several floors of the huge building, was captured, tried and executed.  The convicted arsonist, a Dutch Communist named Marinus van der Lubbe, is referred to in at least one famous historian’s account as a “Dutch half-wit”.  The lone arsonist was tried and beheaded, although symbolic justice was eventually done.

The Reichstag fire was as instrumental to Hitler’s dictatorship as the 9/11 attacks were to extreme right wing American politicians who seized the chance to consolidate all kinds of special extra-constitutional powers in their executive and themselves.  The Weimar Constitution needed no revision the day after the Reichstag fire– an Enabling Act,  triggered by the national emergency, was immediately passed and Mr. Hitler ruled under the emergency powers granted by the unamended Weimar Constitution until the day twelve years later he killed his newly wed wife and his beloved dog and shot himself in the mouth.  It must be noted that it’s hard to blame him for those final acts, though he might have spared his wife and his faithful Alsatian.  And at the risk of sounding opinionated, the only shame is that he didn’t put the gun in his mouth twenty years earlier.

And also, at the risk of sounding opinionated and slyly insinuating, both, I note that it was not until the massive and sweeping Patriot Act was passed immediately after the attacks on September 11, 2001, that the word “Homeland” came into general use here to describe the land of the free and the home of the brave.  Naomi Wolf, in The End of America, pointed out that this was a direct translation of Hitler’s preferred term for the German Reich, die Heimat.   Ditto “war footing” which we were on until Shock and Awe began, which was another Nazi coinage, kreigsfuss.   Not for nothing, I’m just saying.

But I digress.

We live in a world made black and white by paid haters on both sides, and the hissing flames are tended by the hate profiteers, self-made millionaire professional dealers in partisan hatred.  There is a bottom line, non-negotiable and debated not with an exchange of reasoned arguments, but emotionally, from roaring throats with veins distended.  Freedom or tyranny!  Liberty or Death!    In theory freedom is the right to do whatever increases your happiness or protects your interests without harming others.  Tyranny is force used ruthlessly against the exercise of freedom.

There’s theory, and each side marshals its simplified version of the truth to support their ‘theory’, loaded and problematic terms like “the free market”, “democracy” and “justice”  are angrily spat back and forth into the open spittoon of public discourse, and then there’s reality on the ground.  It is in the reality on the ground, as both sides argue deafeningly over the moral high ground, where faces are being stomped into the dirt with heavy boots.

Thinking back to my friend’s excellent advice, I’ll leave the word “struggle” out of my title and work with something like “Love and the Empowering Echoes of Hope”, something that might sell in liberal arts college bookstores.  He’s right, to hell with the incessant Hitler jokes.  Hitler was an asshole, and about as funny as a meathook to the old trapezius.