Author Archives: oinsketta

We Get the Government We Deserve

Democracy, when it’s bought and paid for by very wealthy people and corporations, does not concern itself with the trifles faced by isolated individuals.  It rightfully concerns itself with taking care of the customer, who is always right.

For example, if you are an individual with newly diagnosed hypertension, and have a follow-up appointment with your long-time doctor scheduled for January, you should not worry that he is not on any of the new insurance plans offered by Obamacare.  After all, you can drop dead of a heart attack, or have a stroke, any time and with or without a doctor’s supervision.

None of my long-time doctors seem to be participating in any of the insurance programs being offered on the NY State Health Exchange.  So I could enroll and pay for insurance today, and look for new doctors in the next few weeks.  Or I could not sign up today and just pay the fee of my long-time doctor for a visit in January.

The NY Times reported today that the deadline for enrolling in a health insurance plan has been quietly extended by 24 hours, in light of how screwed up the enrollment process is, how poor the buggy $600,000,000 website still is.  Of course, the government did not announce this extension officially, since they don’t want people to wait for the new last moment to crash the website.  One notes (though the NY Times did not)  that the NY State of Health website was shut down last night at midnight, until 8 a.m. this morning, for “routine maintenance”.

There is no doubt that Barack Obama is a brilliant man and a skilled self-promoter.  He ran two winning national ad campaigns:  YES WE CAN (you’ll find out who WE is)  and CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN (if you’re gullible and/or desperate).  A black friend snorted when I reflected on the man’s seeming lack of discernible moral or political convictions– “who did you expect the first black president to be?  Malcolm X?” and she laughed a bitter little laugh.  

Plus, it must be admitted, the man has, through no fault of his own, stirred up an unprecedented degree of violent opposition just by being a black man in a nation built by black slaves.  The unexpurgated “n-word” is still in wide use, and very often in the air when opponents speak of Mr. Obama.

So, maybe I should not be so harsh on the president, even though he lied when he said “if you like the health care you have, you can keep it.”  After all, when pressed, he apologized for lying– doesn’t that make it much better?  How often does any politician or person in power actually apologize?  It takes a big person to admit he lied, does it not?

In fact, I’m sorry now that I am not more grateful for the great job our Nobel Peace Laureate President is doing (murder of civilians and widespread PTSD from drones notwithstanding).  Just wish I could make an appointment to see my doctor, after seven years of paying up to 25% of my income for health insurance that no longer is offered.

Perspective

I am always stunned, though of course, I should’t be, at my age, at how a few facts on the ground can change one’s perspective.  A thought that gives real hope can be the catalyst.  An intelligent comment by a supportive person.  A satisfying conversation with an actual human being on the phone, taking the time to answer all of your questions and sell you the product you need, with a 45 day money back guarantee.  A piece of solid new information that ends the wondering, which can be as exhausting and unproductive as a tongue poking and probing a disquieting new hole in a molar.

If we are lucky enough to have another person in our life to provide a few of these things, when the impulse for most of us is to try (and fail) to solve the problem and then worry along with the worried party– and a hell of a party that is– we should feel truly blessed.  

I vow to always try to be that person who gives what is needed to others in need, though it’s a mighty hard vow to keep, I vow it again, to always try.

If we are lucky enough to remember how quickly and stunningly our perspective can be shifted, from fear and worry to hopefulness, we are lucky enough indeed.

On The Other Hand

The odds go down for the solitary swimmer for every additional individual doing jumping jacks on the swimmer’s back as he makes his way through the cold, deep water.  Can’t stop to count ’em now, if you will excuse me, please.

More Than One Person Can Do

Teams usually struggle to do what I am trying to do alone.  I know this.  It is sad enough to break a man with a vision that is already coming true.  The things I see every day in the animation workshop make me realize how powerful the tool I’ve created can be.  I watch kids transformed by the process of working together creatively.  Competition dissipates, short attention spans expand, kids unable to sit still focus to get something right on the computer.  I hold the children to very high standards in producing their own work, although in sly and sneaky ways.  It is sometimes amazing what goes on in there, the startlingly original animations that such young kids produce.

The jobs I am doing can probably not all be done by one person.  I am exhausted, often swimming in icy water that is also very deep.  If I can’t exactly see the other shore, I know the direction.   If I stop moving forward, I’m sunk.  So I keep going and try not to waste energy crying about how much easier it would be if someone with a motor boat, a rescue blanket and a hardy spirit would pass by and let me climb aboard.   Can’t wait for that at the moment, the water is bone chilling.  But there is warm sun on the other shore, I can practically feel it on my face.

Keep on pushin’, as my man Curtis Mayfield used to sing.

What They Didn’t Teach Me At Home

My parents saw the world as pretty much black or white.   “Love me, love my dog,” their favorite cousin used to bark, when complaining about assholes who wouldn’t let his Boxer, or later his Husky, come into their houses.  He’d have nothing more to do with people like that. My parents were the same way, dividing the world into kindred souls and people to avoid.  My mother was a bit more flexible, my father quite a bit less, but both drew a strong line.

And so I was left to slowly, haphazardly, learn about nuance, and things besides loyalty and reflex.  I had a lot to learn, and, truthfully, didn’t learn much in my first five decades.  Here’s one just occurred to me, something I wish I’d have learned in time to help me make a living.

When I practiced law I participated in a program that provided paid legal counsel to clients of the NYC Department of Aging.  I represented a few senior citizens in various cases, for a flat fee of maybe $1,000 a case.  The seniors didn’t have to pay, several were very nice, and grateful, a few others were demanding and nuts.  Then there was the octogenarian interior designer who lived on MacDougal Street.

He’d been there for about fifty years, on the top two floors of a now very desirable building in Greenwich Village.   You entered his apartment on the fourth floor and to get to his bedroom, as one imagines others sometimes did back in the day, you climbed a steep flight of dark wooden steps through a door-sized opening cut in the floor of the apartment above.  It was a very nice pad, and rent controlled.  He paid a few hundred dollars for the two apartments.  Each one was now worth at least $2,000 a month to the landlord, if they could get the old interior designer out, close up the floor, put in new fixtures.

His mother had died and, as the only child, he inherited her house in Pennsylvania.  The landlord learned of this and decided to try to evict him on non-primary residence grounds.   They served the eviction papers on him and he freaked out.  I was appointed his lawyer.  It became clear that his landlord was taking a shot in the dark, hoping to scare the skittish old man and buy him off cheaply.  The landlord had no case.   The indicia of primary residence are things like: address for all correspondence, where you vote, the address on your drivers license and passport, ties to the community, the fact that the apartment you rent is your main home and that you are there for the majority of the year.  Every factor was in the old interior decorator’s favor.  The apartment was his primary residence.   The attempt to evict him was a cruel thing to do and he was anxious, angry and beside himself to be hauled into court by his long time landlord.

Once he calmed down, it emerged that for the right price he was prepared to retire to his ancestral home.  The ordinary buy-out is calculated on the difference in rent over five years.  If he paid $400 a month and the landlord would be able to get, say, $4,000 a month, you’d get the difference and multiply it by 60 months, in this case $3,600 X 60 or $216,000.  Every month after that, in perpetuity, the landlord would be collecting gravy.

The landlord’s attorney was a vicious scumbag, the kind of lawyer that gives the profession such a bad smell.   He puffed that the era of six digit buy-outs was long in the past (it was not) and that $50,000 was a fair offer (it was not).   He conducted interrogatories and a deposition, which took me and my client many, many hours to comply with.  I should have put my foot up this lawyer’s ass– beaten him at trial and then told him to pay up if his client wanted the apartment so badly.   I was thinking that way, too.

One evening I sat in the bank with my client waiting for the bank to produce some records we needed to give the landlord’s attorney.   “Can you believe we are sitting here on a Friday night waiting for papers to give to that fucking Jew bastard K___?” he asked me.   I gave a blank look and shook my head.  I am Jewish and don’t like to hear that kind of talk,  In fact, I have so rarely heard it that I am unprepared to respond each time I do.  I tried to let it pass, agreeing that the lawyer was a bad man, but he was determined.

“That fucking filthy, Eastern European kyke…” he hissed, and this time I didn’t look at him at all.

We settled the case for $50,000 and I took a third, my biggest payday as a lawyer, but a fraction of what I should have made.

Rewind in light of nuance and perspective:  I could have said “Jimmy, I share your distaste for K____, he’s an anti-Semite’s caricature of a Jewish lawyer, no question.  But I’m Jewish and that ‘filthy Eastern European kyke’ business doesn’t sit well with me, old boy.   I’d expect a bit more sensitivity from someone who, walking lightly in his loafers in a day when one could be beaten or killed for it, should know what it’s like to be a member of a despised minority.”

I have no doubt he would have taken pains to apologize.  He would have put on a great show of being mortified.  Then I’d shake his clammy hand and we’d vow to take the piece of garbage to the cleaners if he wanted his damned apartment back.

Instead, I said nothing, thought “fuck him” and spited myself by taking a fraction of what we both should have been paid– and letting that filthy Eastern European kyke have his way with us both.   Another proof that I was never cut out to be in business for myself as a lawyer.

How Nazis Almost Always Win

45,000 Americans who die every year for lack of health care, diagnosed in the ER in terminal condition from diseases that could have been cured with timely intervention, is but one price we pay for freedom.   15 times the number of people who were killed on 9/11, this number evokes little terror for most people.  Probably as many Americans die by gunshot, traffic accident, many other causes.  45,000 preventable deaths a year in the greatest country on earth, because of an inadequate profit-driven health care system that also provides the most modern and cutting edge medical treatment in the world, is not seen as a major problem. 

We all know American health care, compared to that in the rest of the industrialized world, is broken.  There’s a strong argument that the cause is the “free market”– you get the health care you can afford to pay for and that unbridled competition is preferable to any kind of government regulation in delivering the best product to consumers.   Obama’s bold plan, to leave fewer Americans dead in the ER from preventable diseases, was a compromise with the “free market”, based on the plan of the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation and drafted by the health insurance industry.  Is it better than what existed before when there were virtually no rules for what health insurance corporations could charge?  Probably.  Is it an excellent way to control out-of-control health care costs in the US and the crisis in American health?  Probably not.

But I have to sign up.  So I call 1-855-355-5777, the help line.  They can help you if you are an employer, an employee, a navigator, a broker or all others.  It turns out, if you are “all others” that the menu is only for generic help, there does not seem to be anyone who picks up the phone at any of the options, even though a recording apologizes for longer than usual wait times due to overwhelming demand.

So you initiate a screen chat with a nice woman named Sonia.  You ask the specific question that is hanging up your application, disabling you from applying before the 12/23 deadline. Sonia writes back that screen chat personnel are not authorized to answer such questions and that you should call the help line, 1-855-355-5777.  This number, of course, puts you in an endless loop, as far as I can tell, since there seems to be no place to wait your turn to speak to a representative, unless, perhaps, if you are a navigator, broker, employer. 

I tell Sonia I was unable to get any information in several calls to the help line and ask if perhaps a “navigator” can help me navigate enrolling in Obamacare.  She gives me a bunch of numbers, I call each one and I leave my name and number seven or eight times.  I’m told by one place that the wait for a navigator call back is about a week.  At another place I’m given an email address I check twice, to contact a navigator by email.   I get this message when I try to send my email:

Error   The address “marcia@manhattancc.org​” in the “To” field was not recognized. Please make sure that all addresses are properly formed.
I take a chance and add a dot and get this:
Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:     marcia@manhattan.cc.orgTechnical details of permanent failure:
DNS Error: Domain name not found

I leave her another voice mail, but I’m not optimistic.  I call the help line again, and have the same experience.  I hang up the phone muttering about how the Nazis always win.
Here is how they do it:  they are relentless in opposing what they hate.  They want to string it up on a lamp post, drown it in a bath tub, and they say this over and over, boldly and publicly.   They take no prisoners.  They call what they hate the most destructive and dangerous thing in the world.  They urge their followers to use any means necessary to destroy the dangerous and destructive thing before it kills them.
So in the case of this deeply, possibly fatally, compromised “Affordable Care Act”, they can scream from the rafters about the ineptness of government to solve problems, and then when you go to get your problem solved, and the government’s help line is not helpful and the on-line government help cannot help you solve it, you realize again: this is how the Nazis always win.
Somewhere the CEO of a health insurance company is smiling as his $25.000,000 bonus check is delivered to him by a young boy dressed as Santa Claus.  And somewhere the fat ghost of bloated Hermann Goring sneers, doing his best impression of our own Dick Cheney.

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Why So Many Kids in Slums Get Shot

We live in a society where a monetary value is placed on every life.  The lives of those who are born wealthy are placed on a much higher level than the lives of those who are born poor.   Better health care for their pregnant mothers, better places to live, better schools, better food.  When the kids are teenagers, the children of the wealthy are firmly on one track, the children of the poor are on the other.  

It becomes clearer and clearer to those born in slums that life in America is not necessarily a meritocracy where anyone can win the lottery.  They learn quickly that there are winners and losers, and the odds against them winning anything are maybe 1,000 to 1.  Kids start to give into despair: drugs, making as much money as possible on the streets, carrying guns, getting pregnant, shooting other kids who they perceive as disrespecting them.

We can say that it has always been so, but rarely has the difference in outcomes been so stark or the violence and hopelessness kids in poverty face so brutal.  The children of the poor have less opportunity than they did 40 years ago while the children of the rich, as a group and individually, are fantastically richer.

I don’t know where Jay Z grew up, but I know he is married to one of the most beautiful and famous women in the world, is a millionaire many times over and recently started a side business as an agent to the stars.  His first client Robinson Cano, recently signed a $240,000,000 contract to play second base for the Seattle Mariners.   Jay Z defied the experts in securing this huge ten year contract for his 31 year-old client, who had been offered more money per year by his team, the Yankees.  Jay took his percentage of $240M instead of a piece of $175M.  In the American schema, he won big time, got his client what nobody thought he could, a contract many feel will become an albatross for the team that committed to paying a 39, 40 and 41 year-old $24,000,000 a year for his services.

I saw the clip of Robbie at a news conference in Seattle, looking hurt, explaining why he didn’t sign with the Yankees, his first choice to play for.   It took me a couple of days to make the connection, and then to begin shuddering anew at the horror, the goddamned horror, of the society we live in.

“I felt the Yankees disrespected me,” said Cano, looking truly sad about it.

The Yankees as an organization have always been jerks, big time, more often than not they act like the corporate assholes they are.  But I wondered about a raise from $15,000,000 to $25,000,000 a year being a sign of disrespect.   Then it hit me.  Jay Z.

That’s how an agent wins, getting his client the biggest contract, period.  Jay needed to make a splash in his new business.  If his net worth is, say, $50,000,000, you can understand why he’d want to add some zeros to that as quickly and publicly as he can– it’s a matter of respect.  (I just googled my man’s net worth– the bitch is worth $500,000,000 according to Forbes– same thing applies about adding zeroes, he’s only halfway to being a billionaire, after all).

“Nah, Robbie, they don’t respect you, man,” I can hear Jay Z telling the impressionable Cano as the negotiations started.  Jay Z and his Yankee hat, Jay throws the hat on the floor.  “True, and I’m sad to say it, you know I love the Yankees, but Ellsbury for virtually what they are offering you?   Are they pulling our dicks, Robbie?  Ellsbury for Cano?  Really?”  Jay is no doubt a persuasive man with a story, hitting that note of disrespect like the master Hip Hop producer he is, and at the end of the day, as they say, he was cashing his share of $240M rather than the insulting $175M the star’s current team was offering.

Now Robbie will cash a winning two million dollar lottery ticket every month for the next 120 months, instead of just for the next 84.  Big difference, right Jay?

The principle of the thing makes me want to holler, like whenever I see a great actor on a TV commercial.  The guy made $15,000,000 on his last movie.  “Oh, but he probably got a million bucks to make this 30 second spot, it took him an hour, and he gets a check every time the commercial airs.  Why wouldn’t he do it?”

The only reason I can think of is to send the message, no matter how quietly, that not every person who has talent and becomes rich is a whore.   Or maybe to send the message that one can be content to win the lottery every few weeks, without making an extra million on the side whenever possible.  Or, I don’t know, because so many kids in the slums are killing each other because we live in a society with only one value— get as much as you can and don’t worry about losers calling you greedy– and they ain’t never going to amount to much by that vicious bottom line.

Pitch

wehearyou.net uses animation, and careful listening to children’s ideas, to get students working and learning together.   The workshop serves New York City public school children who take to it like ducklings to water.   
 
Kids get to draw, sing, invent, sculpt, improvise, drum, plan, produce and refine their ideas.   They are supported by helpful adults.   They master all technical aspects of stop-motion animation: lighting, framing, photography, staging, sound recording and editing.   The group organically organizes into small teams that solve problems as they arise.   
 
Working in a creative beehive run by their own imaginations, they think they are playing.   And, of course, they’re doing that, too.

 

No Surprise, Really

Yesterday, when the ten year-old began flashing several singles and getting other kids to chase him I put a soft hand on his arm and asked him to please not start acting like a hyena.  He laughed at this, naturally, and was for the most part unable to subdue his inner hyena.   I took him aside when we got upstairs and explained his importance, as the main editor of the animation, and how I needed him to focus and fix some badly cropped frames from the previous session.

He focused in spurts, while blasting the soundtrack over the tinny computer speakers.  I set him up with headphones, which momentarily decreased the ambient racket in the room.  Then, with the cans on, he got inspired and began screaming into the mic.   I was determined to record interviews with kids to use as part of a promo I am going to make today, come hell or high water.  

I took the first kid into an empty classroom across the hall where he answered some questions in a very clear and articulate manner.  The only improvement he could think of to the workshop would be less yelling.  He clarified that he meant the yelling of the children and, as if on cue, the loud barking of the hyena-boy, arguing with the other adult, in the hallway right outside the door.  “Case in point,” I said and the boy nodded.

I went into the hall and gestured for the angry kid to come in, to the relief of the adult who was trying to reason with him.  He came into the room howling about how much he hated her, how he was going to get her fired, etc.  I asked him to sit down and try to relax, I had other interviews to do and needed it to be quiet.  I began the interview with the next kid, his best friend.  As the interview progressed I saw it was hopeless, the interviewee insisted on answering in a series of funny/stupid voices and kept looking at his wild buddy to see if the funny voices were working.  The hyena rattled a box of pencils, muttering, trying not to be distracted from his misery. 

I asked him to stop, he couldn’t.   I moved the pencils away from him and told him I was going to interview him next, and he was fairly quiet for the remainder of the short, useless interview with his pal.

When the two of us were left in the room he was sulky.  “You said you would only interview me,” he insisted, out of the blue.   “Everybody says I’m not special,” he complained.  

“Nobody who knows you could say you’re not special,” I said.  “You’re one of a kind.  Don’t listen to anyone who says you’re not special.”

“My teacher told me again today that I’m not special,” he said.

“She probably meant not special in the sense of being treated differently from everyone else.  Special has different meanings, you know.  You’re quite special, and she knows it, but at the same time, she has to treat all her students the same way or people would start saying she was being unfair,” I said.

The interview didn’t go that well, but he was more subdued by the end.  “Did you crop those frames I asked you to fix?” I asked him as I took him back across the hall.

“Yes…” he said with annoyance.

I did another interview.  When I came back in he and his buddy, and another ten year old, were screaming with headphones on, some noise I later eliminated from the soundtrack.  I scrolled through the animation and found the second batch of frames I’d needed him to crop.

“Oh, I forgot those,” he admitted.

“When you’re done I want to show you that app I was telling you about,” I said and took a very articulate ten year-old across the hall to interview.  Her answers deserve a little promo film of their own.

By the time I got back I realized it was useless to try to interview anyone else.  I took the editor out in the hall, handed him his headphones and showed him an app on the iPad.  I spent no more than 40 seconds demonstrating how to create a drum track, bass part and melody line by moving a finger around the ingeniously designed screen.  The app is called Figure and it’s intuitive and a lot of fun.  I told him I was not 100% clear on how to use it with Audiobus, which I’d set up, and I left him to figure it out.  (He basically did, by the way.)

When it was time to go I went over to get him and said “nice program, huh?” and he seemed quite happy.  When I pulled the headphones out of the iPad, a full musical track was playing and I couldn’t easily shut it off.  It took me a moment to silence the orchestral chaos.

Then the usual struggle ensued to get the room cleaned up, and it eventually was, and the other adult left with half the group and I was putting the last few things away as first the editor and then his best friend asked for my help with their shoes.  The editor’s lace had come out of the eyelet, and there was no way to shove the frayed lace back through to tie his shoe.  Fortunately for him, he’d given this problem to a problem-solving adult who took a pair of tweezers out of his keychain Swiss Army Knife, managed to pull the lace through and tie it within a minute.  Then it was his friend, with knotted shoelaces on the boots he’d kicked off on entering the workshop.  Over my shoulder I asked the other stragglers to pick up this or that, tuck those chairs in, throw that in the garbage, please.

At 5:05 I put on my coat, my heavy pack, picked up my duffle bag and headed to the door.  I passed the candy wrapper I’d asked the editor to pick up.

“Why didn’t you pick up this wrapper like I asked you?”  I said, picking it up.

“I didn’t hear you, when did you ask me?” he said, distractedly.

“When you were ignoring me,” I said, to a round of bright smiles from the other three young stragglers.

And, of course, when I later heard the music track the kid had made, I was quite blown away.  Very restrained bit of playing, a lot of space between the drumbeats, the bass line and the odd, frenetic, poignant little melody.