Author Archives: oinsketta

Just One Question for the President

There are very rich, cynical people who, because speech has now been equated with money by the Supreme Court, can speak ten or a hundred million times more articulately than the average struggling mutt.    It is now common knowledge that the extremely privileged have unfettered access to lawmakers, who, dependent on their wealthy benefactors’ generous campaign support, will move mountains to privilege the advantages of the already privileged at the expense of everyone else.  

There are two brothers, the Koch brothers (pronounced “Coke”) who are only recently becoming well-known for their tireless, well-funded and influential speech against sustainable environmental policy, universal health care, collective bargaining, a living wage and many other things an unbiased person might consider basic rights of citizenship in a wealthy democracy.   The Koch brothers combined “worth” of about 100 billion dollars, puts them close to the richest twosome in the world today.  As anyone who has been following the news recently knows, it will never be enough to be among the richest people in the world today without making every effort to become richer still.

 

The Koch brothers stand to double their money when Obama quietly signs off on the other half of the Keystone pipeline (he’s already opened the southern half).  This pipeline will pump oil sludge, tar sand, the dirtiest form of nonrenewable fossil fuel, from Koch-owned lands in Canada to refineries and shipping points in the American south.   It will enable the profitable extraction of a very dirty and unsustainable fuel source that climate scientists (but, in fairness to science-deniers, only about 99% of them) say will put immense amounts of additional carbon into the biosphere.   It will accelerate climate change at a time when we need to slow it down, for the survival of life on the planet.  The extraction leaves behind a ravaged strip mined landscape and the toxic consequences are frighteningly far reaching; on the other hand, the Koch Brothers stand to make as much as $100,000,000,000 when the president quietly signs off.

 

My question is a purely rhetorical one that I will never have access to actually ask:  do you work directly for the Koch Brothers, my man?

 

I mean no disrespect to our president.    I love a Nobel Peace Prize winner with a sense of humor.  I’m just frustrated because he speaks so well and people want so badly to believe pronouncements that let them cling to the ghost of idealism rather than accept the evidence of even more eloquent and entirely consistent actions.  It’s depressing to judge this good man on the damning evidence of what he actually does, rather than on the strength of the uplifting things he has the talent to say.

 

And so it is with Obamacare, written by a lobbyist for the health insurance industry who has since gone back to work for that industry.   There are corrupt scumbags on both sides of the aisle, and in the aisle, and sliding slimily through the revolving door between lobbyists and legislators, everything oiled by the money, er… speech, of the legally created persons known as Corporations, entities whose only consideration, like the Koch Brothers, is maximizing profits.  If the corporation was actually a person it would be a psychopath.  And so it goes.

 

I received no invoice this month from Obamacare — which does not allow me to keep any of the doctors I’ve seen for years–  so I called on February 20th to find out how to pay.  Can’t do it on-line or by phone, it emerges, so the nice woman at the insurance company emailed me an electronic copy of their invoice, prepared 2/14 and not received by most consumers yet, with this maddening sub-punchline:

 

IMPORTANT MESSAGE: Our records show that you have not paid your premium for this month.   This premium is now overdue.  This bill includes your overdue premium in addition to the premium you owe for next month.  If we do not receive both of these premium payments by the due date set out on this bill, your coverage will be suspended.  Any charges for services (claims) will not be paid.

 

 So the consumer, not billed until the last week in February, deemed late and threatened with cancellation unless the “overdue” (payable by 2/28 at 5 pm. after all) premium and the preemptive March premium payments (payable by 3/31 at 5pm) are both mailed and received by the due date.

Punchline: there is no New York State agency, known to the operators and supervisors of the New York State of Health Marketplace, that monitors or oversees the business practices of the corporations that do business in that so-called marketplace.  

 

Nor is the hundred million dollar website easily navigable, or even updated, there is no on-line support to be accessed, nor any way to email anything to anyone at the Marketplace.   You can theoretically initiate a web chat, but that feature is not currently working.  The FAQ section, last updated in December 2013,  has nothing about complaints, grievances, appeals or getting help, outside of calling their overwhelmed help line.  

 

On the plus side, waiting times to speak to operators have gone down impressively, from over an hour to about ten minutes.  The operators are helpful, and overwhelmed and their hands are tied.  The consumers, well, can you spell SCAMMED, good citizens?  LOL!   Have a very nice day!

Sentimentality and Friendship

Sentimentality often gets a bad rap, and thinking about it for a moment it’s not hard to see why.  The word is used disparagingly, indicating a mawkish attachment to things like the fallen out of use “mawkish”.  Sentimentality is usually thought of as wistful nostalgia for things that are no more and can usually never be again.  The sound of a ringing telephone in an old black and white movie, a sound a majority of people alive now have never heard, may raise a sentimental feeling in those of us old enough to remember this familiar old tone.   It used to mean someone (we were never sure who) was calling.  Now, it means little, except as a sentimental trigger to a smaller and smaller group of people.  

And to those who are too young to feel sentimental about the former sound of phone calls, any number of puzzles present themselves, in the odd event they notice and recognize the expressions on old people’s faces when the old tone is sounded.  Why would anyone want to go back to an era before we could know who was calling before deciding whether to pick up the phone?  To an era where we couldn’t choose the way our phone calls would announce themselves, customize the ringtones (which seldom involve a ring) to indicate certain callers.   Why would anyone be sentimental about an antiquated, boring and completely outmoded ringtone?

In extreme cases, which are not at all uncommon, sentimental attachment to things, places or people can be crippling.   Life is change, and change is often very scary, always carrying a whiff, for those with the nose for it, of the final change from life to not life.  Clinging to the familiar is easier by far than embracing the unknowable, and this clinging can take many forms.   The smart women, and men, who make the foolish choice to remain with a complete and enduring asshole who sometimes displays an endearing or redeeming trait.  I’m surprised to see how much of my own inability to move my life most productively forward is hampered by fear of change, of the sometimes irrational desire to preserve things (or at least a paralyzing reluctance to tackle winnowing), such as the perhaps 10,000 drawings that are woven into the shifting wall-to-wall mat of mostly papers covering virtually every surface in my neglected apartment.

I’m thinking of sentimentality at the moment in connection to friendship.   Some friendships are saved out of almost purely sentimental motives.  Not to say that such friendships may not also have valuable aspects, it just causes me to wonder about them.   In moments of solitary self-pity (as opposed to convivial group celebrations of self-pity) things that are basically good are viewed in a purely negative light.   What are we to make of old friends who insist we behave as we always behaved, whatever hard-won changes we may have made in the intervening years or decades?   What about friends who insist on their right to insist on their rights, no matter what the consequences of such insistence are?  Or friends who always serve themselves first, taking a slightly larger portion and making semi-humorous observations about their unflatteringly doglike behavior instead of being more mindful, less selfish?

I wonder, thinking back, about old friends I’m no longer in touch with, people it seemed I might become friends with and never did, new friends I was intrigued by, before they disappeared.  Deep friendship is rare, true enough.  Social friendships are valuable too, for one thing they take us out of our own thoughts for a while and place us in another space where brooding is not much of an option.

And I think sentimentally about a time when I did not see everyone I know or can imagine as some kind of slave, many of them in an almost constant low-grade fury.   This fury may be anger, self-hatred, terror, envy, unslakable thirst for vengeance, denial, an all-consuming sense of inferiority and competition, or what have you.  We humans swim in a sea of it, particularly in our competitive materialistic culture where the war of each against all constantly rages, or however Thomas Hobbes put it.  

Hard sometimes not to be sentimental about my formerly more humane view of the world, when this bracing fact of distracted, fleeting, compulsive life was not so much in evidence.  Look at our nonchalance toward things like torture, mass poverty, mass infant and child death, famine, genocide, out of control greed and destruction for the obscene profit of a very few, our powerlessness and the ways we console ourselves that we are still good people.  

Try not to be sentimental about a time when you may have seen this miraculous world more innocently, and mainly as a world of unlimited potential for miracles.  It is still that, however hard it may sometimes be to see it that way.

Somewhat Ironic Careers

We’ll leave my law license out of this one, I found a scrap of paper just now that had these words on it:

Human Relations Unit Sensitivity trainings led by my sensitive, brilliant father — always on guard against attack.

There were riots between ethnic groups in the NYC public high schools in the 1960s.  Jets and Sharks, they’d square off and rumble, with violent consequences.  A bloody nose or knife wound seems quaint by today’s standards, but my father’s mod squad would be called in and they’d find the leaders of these gangs and take them off to a weekend retreat.  Role playing, a chance to hear each other, guided trainings done by a multi-racial, multi-ethnic team of idealistic former teachers.

“We were pretty successful at stopping the violence at one high school after another with the kids we worked with.  The school would be peaceful for a year or two, until the kids we’d worked with graduated and their little brothers and sisters started killing each other,” my father told us, about the time he left that job for another equally stressful one.

Then, at dinner, the master of human relations and sensitivity training would go to work, reflexively doing what he could not help doing better than almost anyone else in the world. The insensitivity sessions the poor devil ran over dinner were legendary and unforgettable.

Last Thought to My Son

I am sure you noted this, but after  I was done writing that piece yesterday I realized it myself.   

I believed that people can’t change.  I also couldn’t give my children most of what kids need as they grow up.  It was just a handicap I had, something I had no control over.  When I was dying, seeing you so mild, I pretended to believe in change for your sake, to belatedly give you some little piece of what you might need.  I pretended.

It just hit me, being able to pretend for someone else’s sake … a big change.

Talking to My Son After My Death

Eight, almost nine years in, I’ve learned a few things about this death business, and though I don’t think often of life, as such, in the way that living people do, I am slowly moving forward.   I have been able to hear certain conversations and have plenty of time to muse about them, all the time in the world, literally.   Yesterday you spoke of my attitude on my death bed and it struck me as poignant, the way you believe in certain things, and I’m going to address some of those beliefs now.

We had a life long debate about whether people could really change themselves.  Your upbringing was hard, I was there, I saw it from the beginning, before the beginning.  I played a big role in making that upbringing hard, of course, and am acutely aware of the obstacles I placed in front of you and your sister, how much heavier than necessary I made the rocks you push up the hill of your lives.  

We cannot know, in some cases, what it was exactly that made our parents monstrous in the way they were.  The stories from Europe were shady, muddy, obscured by smoke, and filth, and terror, they ended in the murder of everyone left there.  I never got any details of how bad my mother’s life, may she rest in peace, was in that benighted little hamlet she left twenty or so years before it was wiped out by the Nazis.  You found out, through diligent research, that she used to whip me in the face from the time I could stand, so something that was done to her filled her with violent rage.   I appreciate the times you’ve said it’s a testament to my character that I never whipped you and your sister in the face, that it would have been understandable.  I did equally terrible things, we both know.

As for our almost forty year debate on whether people can or cannot fundamentally change their natures, I have a few things to say.  Problem one was our adversarial relationship, which largely foreclosed meaningful dialogue, and that was my fault.  I projected many things on you when you were a baby and it set things in a very bad cast.  I thought, for instance, that the way you stared at me from your crib next to the bed was accusatory.  I can see now that this was an insane point of view.  It came from my own carefully repressed terrors.  The world is full of terrors, especially if your caregiver was a violent enemy.  I have to apologize again, though I know you will say it’s not necessary.  So we have the adversarial relationship standing in the way of a real discussion, turning it into a black and white fight to the death.   The next problem is one of framing, the definitional problem.  How do we define meaningful change?  

It was your position that changing your outward behavior and reactions is a significant change for the better.  I always countered that you may change how you act, but never how you feel deep down while you are acting.  This is a clever debating tactic, perhaps, particularly if deployed with the skill I had to deploy such arguments, but beside the point, I can see now.  It also effectively ends discussion of the nature of meaningful change.  Of course how you react is significant, and changing your reactions is hard work.  Of course you will have the same feelings deep down.  Or maybe not.

I heard you say yesterday that the most recent troubled old friend you had to take your leave of (remember how you used to condemn me for casting people over the side?  I guess you understand now that it is sometimes necessary to do this) left you with different feelings than past leave takings.  You said you have no anger toward this person, just sadness.   That’s real progress, I think, on an inner feeling level, and I found it credible, too.  I salute you for this.  

The insight that you may have been left with a sixty pound boulder to push up the hill, difficult but possible, and your former friend a hundred pound one, difficult and impossible for a person to roll, is probably correct.  On many levels you continue to make progress, and on some fundamental levels she has made very little and is still very angry, critical and a bit ruthless– to herself and everyone else.

But the reason I set bone to paper today (no pen here in the grave, sad to say)– and I am conflicted about it now, is to address your feeling that I had changed on my deathbed, and so gave the final proof that people can change.  Deathbed conversions are a cliche, of course, and they are a cliche because they happen so often.  We are faced with the finality of death only once, no matter how many times we may fear it in our lives, when it actually approaches there is no mistaking it.  When the end is near nobody can predict how they might react.   Some see it as a blessing, and I have mixed feelings about that, although, to speak plainly, death has been pretty good for me.  It’s true my consciousness is a bit hard to express now, and I can’t guarantee further communications, or even the end of this one, but in some ways it’s not bad.  No worries, for one thing.

But anyway, what you saw as proof that I was capable of changing can be chalked up to the Grim Reaper grinning at me next to the bed.   Your sister was probably right– if I’d have known about the liver cancer six months earlier, as opposed to six days before I died, I probably would have still waited until that last night to tell you the things I finally told you.  Who knows?  Your construction is more generous, that I would have come to those final realizations much earlier, have lived those last months differently.  Due to the collective genius of Florida doctors we will never know.   Your manner was indeed different in that hospital room, and I have to admit, your kindness to me, the way you kept trying to let me off the hook as I was apologizing to you for the first and last time, may be seen as proof that you were right about people being able to change for the better.

I don’t bring this last point up to undermine the progress you have undoubtedly made, at least I don’t think I’m doing that.  It may be that we actually can’t change after all, though.  Maybe I will always have to undermine you, in some way.  

You told me, in the last real conversation we had, your last attempt to open a dialogue two years before I checked out, that my milder reactions to you had greatly improved our relationship, even if the inner feelings were the same.  That I respected your wish not to be constantly bad-mouthed, often in the guise of giving fatherly advice, meant a lot to you, you told me.  You offered this as proof that even I, someone who did not believe in change, could make changes.  

At the time desperation forced me to be cruel.  I actually laughed, scoffing at your naivete, telling you that my superficial change in reaction merely masked unchanged inner feelings.  I drove the nail in by adding that if I ever honestly told you what I really felt about you it would do irreparable damage to our relationship.  You could see that as just my desperation talking, and that would be fair, but I also didn’t have the insight to know any better.   Which is a deeply embarrassing thing to have to admit now, almost nine years after my death.

But the point is, what if my behavior on my deathbed, the way I expressed regret, wished I’d been able to change, see the world in all its nuance and not just as a black and white fight to the death, what if all that was just a show put on to give you a fonder last impression of me?  A manipulation orchestrated by Death, who was approaching on roller skates?  You see, this possibility would mean that I was right, our changes are only acts, and deep down we are the same as we always were.  Some things that torment you mean nothing to most people, it’s the way these things were instilled in you as a young child.  

On the other hand, my stepping out of character to seek forgiveness that last night could be seen as proof that you were right, that by changing our reactions we can change the dynamics that have trapped us unhappily in our lives.  That my relief at seeing you mild, and not angry or condemning me, as you had a right to as I went towards the grave, freed me to act differently.

This is one of those conversations that could go on, I suppose, though, in the ordinary course of things, if two people are not adversaries, certain agreements can be reached and the conversation need not be an ongoing battle over decades.  I still think about my wish, that last night, that we could have had the kind of real conversation fifteen years earlier that we finally had the last night of my life.  Fucking tragic, I know.

It all depends on whose ox is gored

This is so self-evident it seems silly to point it out:  that we are concerned mainly with what concerns us directly, everything that doesn’t touch us directly is an abstraction we are often too busy to ponder.   I offer this example, just because it goads me not to, and there is nobody to express it to who can be expected to have much sympathy.

If we are in an existential, eternal war with violent enemies who are hell-bent on killing as many of us as possible, it is necessary to protect ourselves by any means we have. Wars that leave Americans dead and maimed are understandably unpopular, yet we are constantly reminded how important it is to world peace and our security to continue killing our terrorist enemies and their families.  Luckily we have the technology to kill by remote control.  This requires large, loud killing machines constantly circling in the skies our enemies live under.  If you have never woken in the night, in terror, your children screaming and scarred for life, it’s probably hard to get too exercised about President Obama’s extensive killing by drone program.  He was so eloquent in accepting his Nobel Peace Prize, you know?

Similarly, the president’s oft-expressed commitment to do what he can to slow Climate Change must be seen in context.  The oil companies, which have made record profits under his watch, where off-shore drilling has been greatly increased, previously sacred lands have been opened to drilling, America finally producing more oil and gasoline than it imports, are rightfully concerned about these oft-expressed commitments to slow the carbon poisoning of the earth, directly at the expense of the non-renewable energy sector.   With billions and billions of dollars hanging in the balance, it would be unwise for the president not to reassure the oil companies, which, after all, wield tremendous political power and influence.   So he makes a speech touting how much more oil we are producing and how important it is that we continue to drill, baby, drill.   Does that make him a hypocrite or a liar?  Not necessarily, the world is complex.

But here’s one I can’t seem to get out of my head.  I am one of thousands, or tens of thousands, or maybe hundreds of thousands, who has been directly effected by the president’s little white lie about his health insurance plan: “if you like the health care you currently have, you can keep it.”  As I’ve previously reported, he apologized for lying, and as his lie statistically effects only a tiny proportion of the people he lied to, you know, small harm, tiny foul.  De minimis non curat lex– the law does not concern itself with trifles.

And in the general scheme of things, not being able to keep my doctors, including the ones following me for cancers I’m likely to get, and the one who was monitoring my possible hypertension recently to decide on the best path to keep me from having a stroke, and shit like that, well… pretty much trifles.  That my copays have tripled?  Another trifle.  I am a whiner and it behooves me to stop whining and find some new doctors, get my medical records transferred and shut the hell up, you know what I’m saying?

Sending A Bright Soul down into our world of Darkness

My friend the rabbi told a story at our friend’s funeral that explained our friend’s shortened life pretty well.   A rare and luminous soul is created in heaven and the angels stand around admiring its beauty.   As this is a rabbinic tale, there is immediately a dispute among them about the proper fate for this beautiful soul.

“This soul is too pure and perfect to be sent down into a world of darkness,” say a group of angels, “we must keep the soul here with us, where it will not be battered in the corrupt world below.”

Another group of angels petition God to send the soul down to earth, arguing that the light it will bring to the world of darkness is urgently needed.

God considers and explains that he indeed created the soul to spread light and love, and do good works, in the world below.   He decides that the soul will be born in an earthly body and live below in the world of troubles, to help refine the world through good deeds.  Reassuring the angels who want to keep the soul in heaven he adds “but his stay will not be long, since it will not take such a brilliant soul very long to complete his mission and he will be back here among us before you know it.”

The angels agree that every single day he is on earth, doing justly and spreading light, is a blessing.

As, indeed, is the case.

Symptom of Terminal Capitalism

After a young man named David Karp sold his internet creation Tumblr for something around a billion dollars the questions began.   Forbes asked how Karp would face the challenge of monetizing his somewhat idealistic invention, you know, because selling something for a billion dollars is only the first step in the insane dream that is today’s runaway capitalism.

I suppose Forbes was correct to ask that question, it’s a burning question its readers want to ponder– how do you turn one billion into two and then a hundred billion?

It may just be me, but living in a society that values and honors only the accumulation of vast unneeded profits, and wilfully ignores the misery the system creates, dismissing as externalities people poisoned, children starved, homes destroyed, the world made uninhabitable, hope effectively removed from millions and millions of lives, it grinds me down sometimes.

Evil is not only the deliberate bad things done to torture others, it is also the blind focus on acquiring more than can be spent in a thousand lifetimes and the vicious damage it casually causes out here where only the fittest are fit to survive.

On the other hand, I have to be thankful that runaway capitalism doesn’t give a rat’s ass about me and leaves me to live my life, as much as I can, by my ideals.   

The Primary Feature of Depression

Crippling beyond all the other debilitating aspects of a depressed mood is the pervasive feeling of hopelessness.   Without hope, you know, might as well throw in the towel.  Things are horrible and there is no hope, no chance, of things ever getting better, in fact, they are getting noticeably worse.  The darkness is complete and there is no hope for another sunrise, though the sun might very well rise again the next morning.

Hope can be extinguished in different ways, but it is a regular and gigantic feature of depression.   Depression is said to be rage turned against the self, and I think it probably is.   If the self-rage is there, and fear, and loss of hope– and no gentleness in how you handle your disappointment or frustration– good luck to you, baby.  

False reason creeps in to justify the certainty of depression.  If I try this it will go badly, things will be even worse, what’s the point?  And truly, without hope there is no point to trying to do anything differently.

I remember this dilemma well, and without fondness.   Pain every day, all day, no reason but suffering.   Bunk dat, man.  No reason to punish yourself.  But learning how not to inflict that on yourself requires faith, which comes from hope.  No hope?  Good night.

More Framing

I have been corresponding with the widow of my recently departed friend.  It has been a small but tangible comfort to both of us.   I mentioned to a friend the role she seems to have played in reorganizing his friendships after they got married, helping to root out his long-time best friend and old friends like me.  I literally saw the man five or six times since his wedding close to 30 years ago.   It was not that I didn’t get along with the wife, I did, I remember her as gracious and hospitable the two times I visited them at home not long after their marriage.   That said, it seemed clear that she had other plans for his social life than getting to know and welcome his old friends.   This is not uncommon in married life, sadly enough.  My friend wrote back “she sounds like a real bitch.”  I wrote back “not anymore, if she ever was.”      

Shall I be angry, and sad, and lament all the music unplayed, the laughs unlaughed, the help I might have been able to give them during his long, terrible death?   Pointless, all of it.  There is plenty to be sad, angry and full of lamentation about, but how does it help anyone?   You know what helps?  Giving and taking comfort now.  It is all that remains to us that is useful and good after a rare disease mercilessly rips someone we love out of our lives.