Author Archives: oinsketta

Chapter 60 Be the change you want to see

If you find yourself in a fight with someone close to you, feel threatened and believe there is no way out, you will fight to the death, or flee forever. If you are in conflict with a loved one, and knowthat experience and adult insight offer you more tools to resolve conflict than you had as a child, there is hope of healing.

In the first instance, the fatalistic belief that nothing ever changes for the better will keep you at war. In the second, there is a real chance for peace, if the other side also believes in learning from past mistakes, accepting human foibles, acknowledging the importance of reciprocity, mutuality, adjusting better to the other person’s actual needs.

My father, for whom the pain involved in trying to make his life less painful, a life rooted in hellish abuse and deprivation, was unimaginably intense, always argued that people cannot change themselves in any fundamental way. Those who “work” in therapy, he said, are merely deluding themselves, real change on a deep level is not possible. You cannot change your inborn nature, he always insisted.

I argued against this hopeless proposition, pointing to the improvements people I’ve known have managed in their reactions to frustration, sorrow, guilt, bitterness, the need to blame others. I offered my own changes for the better, my improved control of my temper, for example. He always dismissed the so-called change as self-delusion, which he could always prove, for many years at least, by goading me until I finally lost my temper. That was his triumphant proof that nobody can really change for the better. See, you claimed you can control your temper, but I can make you lose it, you haven’t learned to control shit! Even when I eventually learned not to lose my temper, it was only an act I was performing, one he could easily demean as superficial, self-deluded performance art.

Relentless in his unshakable opinion, as anyone arguing for fatalism must be, my father always argued that people might succeed in changing some superficial aspect of their behavior, but their fundamental nature was as innate and unalterable as mortality itself. His position, I have to say now, is a supremely depressing, deterministic one.

It is also characteristic of someone who cannot be wrong, no matter what. My father was right for himself, as I realized recently. He could not change, the first step involved was crippling to him. The same goes for anyone stuck in the narcissistic person’s tragic trap – either seeing themselves as perfect and never wrong or abjectly, humiliatingly unworthy of love and self-respect.

For someone who lashes out in pain and believes experience plus insight can lead the way to changes that will result in less pain, change is a tangible goal. You can learn to control your angry reactions, for example, and with practice you can become better at it. This step forward can lead to another, and so on. We are all works in progress, if we’re willing to work with our limitations, talk things out and learn new things. Except for those who truly cannot change because acknowledging the need for change involves looking at things that are terrifying to them.

Someone who lashes out in pain and cannot be wrong must believe themself perfectly in the right whenever they are in pain. They are in pain simply because they are the victims of some fucking devil. That devil must be killed. There is nothing that can be done except to identify, isolate and kill the source of pain.

If your emotions are inflamed, in a conflict with the wounds of a traumatic past reopened, and you can change, you have a chance to learn to redeem a ruptured relationship. If your emotions are on fire, in a painful conflict, and you are certain that change is impossible, you are simply fucked up and beyond the reach of redemption. All that is left is retribution against the devil who has wounded you.

If you also cannot be wrong, you must convince everyone else in your life that the person you are in a conflict with is 100% in the wrong and irredeemable. If a person is a piece of shit, has done horrible things to hurt you, and people can’t change, as you know deep in your heart, that’s all she wrote, set and match!

From time to time I try to imagine the accusations against me that caused a group of friends of fifty years to unanimously agree that I was beyond redemption. How atrocious my crimes must have been! The anger could not have been more unyielding if I’d molested all their children, repeatedly, while brutally blackmailing them all into eternal, shameful silence, while I’d been poisoning everyone’s food and drink for decades while lying with every fetid breath I exhaled as I pretended to be funny and angrily denied I was the living incarnation of Adolf Hitler, with a field of corpses to prove it and very proud of myself for what a sly pretender I am.

For someone as evil as this, unless they apologize to everyone they’ve been raping, assaulting and trying to kill for years, admit their heinous crimes and despicable nature and beg for the mercy of the jury, there is not even the remotest possibility of forgiveness. Welcome behind the scenes of the greatest, deadliest shit show it has ever been my horror to participate in!

I also note how painful it must be to live in a world that is as hopelessly, painfully rotten at death as it was during the earliest painful memory. The belief that people cannot change is truly undefeatable in people unalterably deformed by crippling past pain.

When my father insisted that people can’t change, he was speaking with 100% conviction. He knew, as well as he knew anything, that someone like him, someone so deeply damaged that he could not be wrong, on pain of feeling utterly, contemptibly, self-loathingly humiliated and undeserving of love or respect, could not change. Being certain you cannot change will effectively prevent any effort to do so and keep you convinced, since if you can’t do something nobody else can, that people, all people, are incapable of making meaningful changes in their lives to have more peace and less war to the death.

As for somebody who makes a little positive progress toward a less painful life? KILL THEM!

The firehose of toxic, flammable diarrhea never rests

Steve Bannon, unkempt global fascist, is an enthusiastic advocate of an old propaganda technique espoused, if memory serves, by Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. The theory goes that if you flood the news with infuriating lies, one after another, at a dizzying pace, you will so confuse and enrage the populace that you can do whatever you like with them. The technique was refined by the Hitler team, led by cunning, supremely able Minister of Public Enlightenment Josef Goebbels. Chrump is the perfect avatar of this firehose of mendacity, lying as naturally as most people breathe, flooding the zone with shit and gleefully setting that shit on fire. You can’t keep your eye on the previous lies, or fix institutional problems, because the newest one is so incendiary and burning so hot.

The NY Times recently broke the story of a commutation Chrumpie signed hours before leaving office, one of hundreds of last minute pardons and commutations he likely sold (he is nothing if not transactional). This guy, Jon Braun, is a predatory lender and violence threatening thug who was finally beginning to serve a ten year sentence that had been delayed by ten years as he grudgingly began to cooperate with the DOJ against his predatory lending colleagues. Braun had a connection to convicted felon, and fellow recipient of Trumpie’s mercy for hire, Charles Kushner, father of grossly unqualified entitled idiot Jared, Chrumpie’s right hand boy (back when it was worthwhile to Jared to serve in that role). Alan Dershowitz, Braun’s attorney, made a call and Jared took care of their friend’s prison sentence. It was nullified by a stroke of the big guy’s pen. Braun went back to his old job and told DOJ to go fuck itself and its fucking investigation into predatory lenders. Here is Team Chrump’s perfect response to the NY Times revelation (actually this is in response to the Koch Network throwing its support behind Nikki Haley — the responses are pretty much interchangeable):

Kushner had testified to the J6 Committee that he didn’t know anything about the many tentacled plan to stop the certification of Biden’s victory on January 6. 2021 because he was busily working on pardons around the clock in that final month. Giuliani, or his assistant, described a profit sharing scheme for pardons that didn’t go through the office of the pardon attorney, as is traditionally done before a president issues a pardon. These pardons went for $2,000,000 each, according to this source, and if everyone was to pocket their share of this tidy sum it was important that the office of the pardon attorney not be in the loop. We’ve heard nothing more about this, or about the NY State case against Steve Bannon for bilking MAGA loyalists out of millions in his Build the Wall scam (Trump pardon erased identical federal charges against Sloppy Steve).

Every American convicted as a result of the Mueller investigation (witch hunt!) got a pardon from the Big Guy, in exchange for dummying up when it counted most. Nothing to see here, the president has 100% unappealable discretion to pardon anyone he wants, Joe Arpaio (contempt of court for telling judge to fuck off after she ruled his broiling, outdoor prison camps were illegal), Rod Blagojevich, Michael Milken, a bipartisan rogue’s gallery of infamous scumbags. As is the president’s absolute right, apparently, unless the DOJ were to challenge any as corrupt, for example as a quid pro quo for not cooperating with federal investigators (see for example, Roger Stone, his former partner Paul Manafort, Mike Flynn, et al). Nothing has been done to prevent misuse of the judicial system by wealthy weasels like Don (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh) McGahn, John Bolton, Trump and others to weaponize the delays appeals cause, allowing them to routinely moot legitimate, legal claims against them.

This abuse of the pardon power, aggravating, unjust and sickening as it is, is one among a hundred, two hundred piles of toxic poop Chrumpie left burning in his wake. There’s a new one every news cycle.

Trump channeling Hitler, raising the question among MAGA nation — why this sudden irrational hatred of the Führer? Trump’s plan to build concentration camps for immigrants, even the children of immigrants born here, to deport millions, the Fourteenth Amendment be damned. Trump’s plan to fire thousands of civil servants and replace them with servants who believe the 2020 election was rigged and who’ve taken a personal oath of loyalty to Trump (German: Führereid or Führer Oath). His repeated vows to get revenge on everyone from Rosie O’Donnell and Crooked Hillary to “the Biden Crime Family” and to weaponize the DOJ, as Biden, he insists, has weaponized it against him.

His grotesque, deadly mishandling, and continuing lies about, the COVID pandemic that resulted in further polarizing Americans and causing this great nation to have the highest COVID death toll in the world. The massive corruption involved in the pandemic relief money he handed out to wealthy people he liked. His open interference in the 2020 election by launching hundreds of pre-election lawsuits trying to stop mail-in voting during a spike in the plague and having his mega-donor postmaster general remove mailboxes and dismantle high speed mail sorting machines in areas where Blacks and other “undesirable” voters live.

The riot of January 6 itself, directly incited by his hourlong speech which included the immortal “when you catch somebody in a fraud you’re allowed to go by very different rules” (actual fraud, no, different rules and lynch mob, yes) and years of subsequent lies about the innocence of the rioters, valorizing those who attacked the police as true patriots he will pardon as soon as he gets back into office. The list is literally fucking endless, before we get to the Orange Polyps financial fraud (and already shuttered Trump University and Chrump Charitable Chrust), sexual abuse, hush money payments, illegal non-disclosure agreements and his limitless frivolous lawsuits, groundless motions and futile appeals designed only to delay adjudication.

In this environment, with the firehouse of shit blasting full bore all the time, amplified by right wing media and echoed in the corporate “liberal” media, it’s impossible to remember things like the reasonable plan to get rid of that Republican-minority benefiting vestige of slavery The Electoral College by having states pledge to award electors to the winner of the nationwide popular vote [1]. Or to restore something like the Fairness Doctrine for mass media, making it harder for partisan news outlets to pump out a stream of inflammatory lies, “opinions” presented as fact, 24/7. Or the group Biden set up to monitor online threats that was quickly shut down amid a flood of violent online threats.

Or to regulate hate speech and violence-producing lies on social media, because, to do so, according to the beneficiaries of hate speech and related lies, is to unfairly hobble one side of the political debate. A rightwing racist billionaire will bring lawsuits to carefully selected extremist judges to prove that Communists, Marxists, Jews and Fascist Thugs are illegally interfering with his right to run his own private social media company as he sees fit. The Senate is unable to abolish the filibuster or make sure that one potato-headed imbecile can’t block the presidential appointment of military leaders year after year. The list is almost endless, and this is by design.

You take a firehouse, connect it to the crusty asses of everyone you can find with projectile diarrhea, and blind ambition, you turn it on full and when the high power spray comes out, set it on fire. In a landscape of constantly replenished plumes and sloppy mounds of burning shit, nobody can focus on what needs to be done to hold the shit sprayers responsible and turn off the pressurized firehoses of mendacity. You have to admit, the plan works beautifully, if you can get over the stench.

[1]

However, a constitutional amendment is not the only means by which an alternative to the current Electoral College can be implemented. The most popular alternative is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC). Started in the mid-2000s, the NPVIC is a fairly straightforward system that capitalizes on the constitutional guarantee that states are free to determine the manner in which they award their electoral votes. The compact requires states to pass laws that would award their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote nationally. Under the current plan, states that join will not activate the compact until enough states have joined to total 270 electoral votes. That is, the compact does not go into effect until there is a critical mass of states for it to be effective.

source

First Amendment 101

No court, judge or prosecutor has suggested that the world’s greatest winner doesn’t have the right to say everything he said above, channeling one of his historical heroes. There is no gag order relating to any of his angry, paranoid rantings and projections that does not involve threats and intimidation of witnesses or public officials involved in his prosecutions.

He is free to do his dead-on imitation of the Führer, or to state that Hitler was a great person, and so unfairly misunderstood. He may describe in detail how he’d like to bring back an American version of Herr Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich, or even declare that he loves Hitler, as it was Kanye West’s every right to say, whether he meant it or not.

The First Amendment covers a lot of fucked up and despicable things a person could say or write. You have the ACLU defending fucking Nazis’ right to spread Nazi propaganda as a First amendment issue, which it is.

A category of speech not protected by the First Amendment is fighting words, words which are intended as nothing more than a pugnacious “invitation to exchange fisticuffs”. Words whose only intent is to create ill will, stir rage and cause a lingering threat of imminent violence are not protected speech. If violence happens once as a direct result of your speech, and violence happens again after a similar speech and violence continues to happen as a result of your speech, then your speech has been shown to incite violence and is no longer protected by the First Amendment.

The scope of First Amendment protections for your violence-producing speech will be argued about by well-paid First Amendment experts for hire until the next riot your identical lies produces, then it will be argued about again, because the precise scope of fighting words has been narrowed by the Supreme Court over the years [1]. Like the high bar the ethics-free nine built for finding corruption of public officials, which now requires an explicit, provable agreement that both parties knew the deal was corrupt before corruption may be found. USA! USA!!!

[1] results of a quick search for an update on the 80 year old Fighting Words Doctrine:

Fighting words are words meant to incite violence such that they may not be protected free speech under the First Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court first defined them in Chaplinsky v New Hampshire (1942) as words which “by their very utterance, inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.”

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fighting_words

The desire to heal vs. the need to win

If you want to heal a conflict with a loved one, you need to listen to everything they need to say and consider it carefully, without getting defensive or angry. This tricky process requires talking about harmful patterns in the past, behaviors on both sides that led to the conflict. No one (even fucking historical revisionists) can change the past, of course, but with the desire to heal a valued relationship we can safeguard each other’s feelings going forward — once we know best what the other person needs. We can only do this if we honestly hear what has caused the other person pain, learned our role in causing the other discomfort and anger, and both parties make merciful adjustments in the days ahead.

The need to win is much easier. All you have to do is assign blame. One side is right, the other side is 100% wrong. One side is moral, human, good, and perfectly justified in their anger, the other is wicked, inhuman, willfully hurtful and eternally, unforgivably unforgiving. Life, to a winner, is about convincing allies to support you in a war to the death. Do this repeatedly and you win. If you live in a culture of Narcissism, such as hyper-competitive America 2023, you are seen as a winner every time you righteously smite a hated enemy, no matter how many lies you must tell in order to “win”.

The reservoir of pain each of us carries inside ranges from a gigantic sea in a traumatized person to a fairly small pond in someone who was supported and treated lovingly in their formative years. We each maintain a wall that protects us from this pain in a variety of ways, some healthy, some harmful. Take a wrecking ball to someone’s wall and repeatedly smash that dam and you create a flood of pain that will sometimes drown a hated enemy. If there is something praiseworthy in doing this, I can’t think of it. Outside of being an undefeated winner in the psycho sweepstakes.

November 22, 1963 comes around this time every year

The official story, when it appears to have holes in it, when crucial details lack credibility, gives rise to speculation about an opaque cover story, something to hide, a cover-up.  This is as true in personal history, where for example one party will be blamed for all conflict, as in the larger history of the world.   In families sides are drawn every day and alliances are sealed with one sided narratives that close all discussion forever.  You can look at allies on multiple sides tomorrow over Thanksgiving dinner, except that the family members accepted as the worst villains won’t even be there any more.

The JFK assassination, an event sixty years old today, was followed by an investigation that reached conclusions many still have trouble accepting.  There are loose strings and troubling details that were poorly, if ever, explained in the Warren Report.   Hence, conspiracy theorists.  

If you have a theory of a vast conspiracy, you are already in questionable terrain.  Such conspiracies are difficult to prove, impossible without hard evidence, and good luck getting your hands on that.  If powerful people all agree on a narrative and the official story officially puts all conspiracies to bed, that’s all she wrote, you fucking conspiracy nuts.

Also, keep in mind that if powerful people have a common goal, such as acquiring and keeping maximum wealth, they need never meet or speak, or coordinate in any way, to work toward that common goal with a variety of well-financed efforts.

I think of the aftermath of September 11th.  Unlike the day Kennedy was shot, and I was seven, I was an adult on September 11th and remember a good deal of detail about that shocking day and its aftermath.  The accepted story is that a full report was issued by an independent commission, after a rigorous investigation, and that the report explained pretty much everything about that atrocious attack.

President Dubya and Dick Cheney fought the creation of a bipartisan commission to investigate the terrorist masterpiece.  This fight went on for many months.  When a commission was finally put together the president and vice president refused to testify under oath, would only talk to the committee together, on the condition that nothing they said would ever be repeated and that no notes would be taken during their informal conversation.   (Think of Chrump’s meeting with his friend Putin in Helsinki, private, no notes, nothing to hide because, totally secret, as talks between two friends must sometimes be.)  Nothing to see here, yo.   

Unanswered in the exhaustive 9/11 Report:  why the Bush administration took no action in the weeks after getting briefings from their national security heads, hair on fire, even after a briefing paper entitled “Al Queda determined to use commercial jets as bombs against US skyscrapers” was presented to POTUS.   Who exactly traded airline stocks the night of September 10 into September 11, profiting by many billions of dollars?   Why was the US running training exercises in US airspace in the greater NY area on the day of the attack, the first day on the job for the NORAD guy responsible for calling in air defense against attack?  “Is this the training or the real thing?” he kept asking for crucial minutes, as he hesitated to scramble jets and intercept the hijacked planes, until it was too late to prevent the mass murder.   The plane full of wealthy Saudis, including bin Laden relatives, allowed to leave, unquestioned, while American airspace was still locked down.  Many other questions also come to mind, questions that have never been answered.

Erase all these troubling facts and you have an untroubling, even inspiring story.   Our enemies hate our freedom, were determined to strike at our heart, they tried to kill us, we killed them, the end.

This is the reason those who seek power, division and blind obedience to authority ban books and the study of history.   If you do that then American slavery never really had much of an effect on society and Black people are just irrationally angry assholes with nothing to complain about.  Gays are just pansies and whiners, so is anyone in pain about sex or so-called gender.  Rape victims forced to give birth to their rapist’s baby are selfish murderers.  Everything you can imagine is possible, if you remove all context.  

I call into the angry darkness all around:  do not let others remove all context.   Ask questions, discuss, think. Better to wrestle with things that are difficult and painful than to accept hateful lies told to benefit tyrants and make you shut the fuck up.

Why people hate lawyers

After 95 pages documenting the mountain of compelling evidence that then president Trump, loser of the “most secure election in US history” (Trump appointed maker of that statement immediately fired), intended to incite, and did incite, an insurrection [1], the violent riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 that disrupted the certification of Biden’s electoral college victory, the new judge, (appointed on January 10, 2023}, made her ruling about this particular insurrectionist’s right to be on the Colorado Republican presidential primary ballot.

She concluded that the oath mentioned in the Fourteenth Amendment, to “support” the Constitution, is very different from the president’s oath to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution and that, therefore, along with the President not being an enumerated officer of the United States listed in that clause, there was no problem with this particular insurrectionist being on the primary ballot in her state. All he is seeking is the highest office in the land, an “office” which was not mentioned specifically as an office in that clause in the Fourteenth Amendment. Here she goes, with the money shot:

313. Here, after considering the arguments on both sides, the Court is persuaded that “officers of the United States” did not include the President of the United States. While the Court agrees that there are persuasive arguments on both sides, the Court holds that the absence of the President from the list of positions to which the Amendment applies combined with the fact that Section Three specifies that the disqualifying oath is one to “support” the Constitution whereas the Presidential oath is
to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution, it appears to the Court that for whatever reason the drafters of Section Three did not intend to include a person who had only taken the Presidential Oath.


Which, of course, makes perfect sense…

[1] “Trump acted with the specific intent to incite political violence and direct it at the Capitol with the purpose of disrupting the electoral certification,” she wrote. “Trump cultivated a culture that embraced political violence through his consistent endorsement of the same.”

Two sides, at least, to any conflict

If you find yourself in a conflict with someone who says, over and over “nothing you can say will ever get me to change my mind or take your side” believe them. These are the words of someone unwilling/unable to resolve conflict, except on terms they will dictate to you. Accept the terms, or you are dead to them. They tell you this up front and every time they fly into a nasty mood and blame you for causing all of the problems between you.

This kind of person will be familiar to anyone raised by a bullying parent. The insecure, prone to rage parent cannot be wrong, so no matter what they do, no matter how neglectfully, hurtfully or abusively they may act, they will always blame the child. They bring this personality quirk into every relationship. They can be charming, generous friends unless a conflict arises, in which case the problem was created by the other side. If the guilty party does not back down, the conflict is inevitably fatal.

Living with integrity is much harder than going along to get along. You ignore your own pain at your peril. The body keeps the score, as Bessel van der Kolk demonstrated in his book of that title. Your sleep suffers when you feel abused, your blood pressure and resting heart rate rise, your digestion gets fouled up. If your suffering continues, beyond bodily manifestations of your psychic pain, and you continue to push the causes for that pain down, you eventually find your health compromised all the way down to your immune system.

Integrity is the best gift you can give yourself, challenging as it also is. When someone tells you they will kill you if you don’t comply with their demands and pretend their abuse is completely justified, you are dealing with what the literature calls a piece of shit. You cannot reason with them. Get away from them and save yourself. Being true to yourself means listening to your body while it is painfully telling you the score. The alternative is betraying what you know is right for the sake of an imaginary peace.

There may be two sides, or ten, to any conflict. But one of those sides is more true to what actually happened, makes much more sense, than the other stories. Learning to base your actions on reality is much healthier than basing them on the fond hope that those who treat you with contempt will come around to love you one day, if only you can find a way to their hearts. There is no way to the heart of someone so damaged they will silence others to prove they cannot be wrong.

Not all stories are of equal validity. Your body will tell you when you are being force fed a load of shit that will eventually kill you. Ignore this truth at your peril.

Y’mach shemo

There is an expression in Hebrew, y’mach shemo, which means “may his name be blotted out”. This expression is reserved for particularly heinous enemies of the people, murderous villains like Hitler, Himmler, Haman. People sometimes accompany this expression with a spitting gesture, or an actual huck toward the spittoon, to suggest the casting out of the hateful poison these inhuman types inject into the world.

I’m here to say, you have not truly lived until a group of your closest longtime friends agrees that your name needs to be blotted out, henceforth and until the death.

What crimes have I committed to make me deserving of inclusion in the worst people in history? Don’t ask. I made two people feel bad about themselves, forced them to lie just to defend themselves, was so relentless in my demand for “honesty” that a story equating me with Hitler was the group’s only alternative. After all, just because the oldest son of the couple I so mortally attacked was committed to a locked mental ward two days after he returned to live with his parents is no reason to make any judgments about their ability to be honest, loving, nurturing, supportive or vulnerable. How dare I bring such a viciously unfair idea into the world!

Sure, blame the parents. It’s always the parents’ fault when the adult child suffers from depression, is susceptible to self-doubt, self-sabotage, cannot form lasting friendships, according to the most childish among us. I am among the most childish, according to the hideous story of my irredeemable evil that justifies the blotting out of my name forever.

Every gathering of people who have written me off as deserving of permanent enmity, you know, for being such an unforgiving, smart, formidable fucking enemy, is like another funeral for me. The accursed name of the justly hated corpse will never be spoken aloud in mixed company. No question about me will ever be asked again, nothing I have ever said or done by way of empathy, humor, sensitivity, kindness or generosity will be recalled.

Only the danger I pose to the community of those who must accept the well-established, if slightly twisted, version of my threatening aggressiveness must be kept in mind. After all, if they could blot my name from history, what can they do to yours, fuckface?

Tribalism erases doubt

It is terrifying to feel isolated in this cold, chaotic world, and a great relief to find your tribe. That tribe may be small and specialized, other guitar players who love Jimi Hendrix and Django Reinhardt equally, or the gigantic tribe of a religious or national identity group. A tribe may be just a group of old friends who love each other, laugh together and comfort and support each other in times of pain and sorrow.

One benefit of membership in a tribe is the erasure of doubt — tribe members get absolute certainty. You belong, and that is the most important thing about tribalism, a beautiful thing you need never question. Disagreements may sometimes happen among members of a tribe, but the main thing is that we are a tribe and have a bond, and common values, that transcend our individual disagreements. The tribe has an uncomplicated view of the world, of life, usually a simple turn on love vs. hate or good vs. evil, which all members take as true, the tribe being on the side of the gods in every case.

In my small tribe of guitar players, people I’ve rarely ever met, half-tone bends are very groovy, as are whole tone double stop bends, if you know what I’m saying, standards and three chord vamps are equally cool. These are core tenets of our beliefs. (Sadly for me, both of my electric guitars are out of commission, so I can’t work on Si Tu Savais today with the looper.)

Research shows that people with a supportive group around them tend to live happier, less stressed, longer lives. If you have a few true friends, even one or two, you have a better chance of thriving than someone without good friends. If you come to hate somebody, and manage to alienate their friends from them, you have exacted a wonderfully effective revenge, increasing their pain and isolation and actually shortening their life expectancy. Bingo!

The American epidemic of loneliness, no doubt also a worldwide problem, leads lonely people down rabbit holes to join with other lonely people. You have nobody you can call when you are in pain, nobody who will answer your call, listen, make you feel connected to another person who cares.

Capitalism has devised an addictive cure to this lucrative loneliness: “social media”. In your painful isolation you can sit at your computer, or with your phone, and find many people who feel just like you, are as angry as you are about the same things you’re mad about. What a relief to find a tribe! The more you check in with your millions of new friends, the less alone you feel!

Think of the giant room full of guys Mohammed bin Salman has working for him, sitting behind computers, each one controlling a thousand spam bots and fake social media accounts, writing and disseminating messaging for the tribe. 100,000 likes for something you already agree with, minutes after posting, the algorithms have tailored each message perfectly for your opinion and those 100,000 likes tell you you’re not alone. An hour later a million of you, in perfect agreement! What you believe is shared by millions and millions, so how can you possibly be wrong?

The beauty of tribal identity is also the ugliness of the world, the reason the history of mankind is written in the blood of helpless victims. My tribe can beat up your tribe, bitch. My tribe is right, no matter what, and your’s is wrong, no matter what! The life of each member of my tribe is of infinite value, your tribe, which hates mine, are all vermin. Suck on that for a while.

When allegiance to a belief system conquers all questions of right and wrong, the stage is set. There is nothing the group can do to somebody outside of the group that you will question. There can be no mercy for evil. If you have any hesitation about what your tribe is doing, just remain silent. All your tribe needs to continue marching is for you and other waverers to keep your hesitation to yourself. After all, if you express dissent you risk expulsion. Expulsion from the tribe leaves you in the cold, alone, and ready to die before your time. Beware!