Author Archives: oinsketta

Happy Erev Yom Kippur, y’all

Tonight is considered the beginning of the holiest day of the Jewish year. New Years 5784 was nine days ago. Tomorrow dawns as Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the tenth and final day to make amends with people we’ve hurt before the Big Guy upstairs closes the Book of Life, after reviewing our deeds and inscribing our fate for the year. He seals the book at the very last moment of Yom Kippur, a day of fasting and praying, before everybody in temples everywhere rushes home to break the fast.

This Book of Life is a poetic conceit from hundreds of years ago when it was conceivable, in a preliterate age, that an actual Creator of the universe, with a long white beard, sat on a heavenly throne and personally looked over everyone’s deeds (in the manner of Santa, now that I think of it) paging through a gigantic accounting book with a page for every human. Depending on the humility, honesty and goodness of each, the Holy One wrote out the indelible karma of each person for the following year.

Down here in the world of free will and dirty human affairs, even the most disinterested Jew pays at least some attention to Yom Kippur. Sandy Koufax, a completely secular Jew, famously sat out a World Series start that fell on Yom Kippur. After Koufax shut the Yankees down the following day, Mickey Mantle asked his teammates if there wasn’t maybe another “Yom Koufax” before the end of the Series.

Personally, I don’t give a rat’s ass for the rituals of my religion but I take its moral values seriously. I take the main theme of Yom Kippur seriously — I try my best to make amends with those I’ve hurt, extend forgiveness to those who ask me for it. I always fast on Yom Kippur, along with millions of Jews, religious and secular, worldwide. My rationale for fasting is that with so many billions hungry every day, many starving to death, I should be ashamed if I can’t go without food for one twenty-four hour period every year.

There is an extra chill to solemn Yom Kippur for me this year. The group of old friends, who always gather to break the fast together, the place we’ve gone every year for thirty years, has made it clear, after we narrowly got a last minute invite last year, that I am fucking dead to all of them and to their children. DEAD. No conversation is possible with a stinking cadaver, which is what I am to them, their friends and their children. Nothing this accursed zombie has to say can be heard, according to the ancient, sacred doctrine of “I know you are, but what am I?”

One among them, a long time good friend of ours, was recently diagnosed with stage four cancer. My gestures of friendship are awkward, I was told, my tears are not welcome at his funeral, unless I heal the damage I’ve somehow done to two people too damaged to acknowledge their own destructiveness, and to the rest of the group, also unforgivably hurt on their behalf. Don’t I understand how excruciatingly painful it is to everyone for me to stubbornly refuse to pretend that none of the destructive behavior they reflexively engage in ever happened?!! Apparently not.

Hopefully the implacable, perfect First Couple’s first born is out of the psychiatric ward and doing much better now. Hopefully my old friend with the terrifying prognosis will get some blessed medical news. Hopefully the good thoughts of a dead man will be taken to heart by an imaginary all-powerful, all-merciful, infinitely just and loving Big Guy as He hunches over the gigantic Book of Life tonight and tomorrow, making His final notations, before He seals everyone’s fate for the year.

May you be inscribed and sealed in the Book of Life for the year you deserve, y’all.

The duty to do the right thing

Your righteous anger, your pride, the terrifying depths of your crippling childhood injuries, does not relieve you of your duty to do the right thing toward people you care about. Anyone who is not a psychopath knows the difference between right and wrong, though this line is easily colored over by strong emotions and righteous group think.

You can find yourself at the end of a once beautiful relationship, with no further obligation to endure what has soured into mutual contempt. That happens between humans sometimes, it is impossible to unsee contempt once it is shown to you by someone you trusted. This is very sad but sometimes, in human affairs, as inevitable as death itself.

Once you feel contempt directed at you from someone you love and trust, the hurt and betrayal you feel is usually transmitted right back to them. Faults you have long overlooked in your dear loved one transform into unresolvable obstacles to love, as do your faults to them. It is difficult to keep feeling generous toward someone who treats you with contempt. Once this transition happens, the odds are very low of overcoming it and restoring the relationship to what it was before mutual hurt corrupted it.

Finding ourselves at an ugly juncture with loved ones who hurt us does not relieve us of our obligation to act in the way we know is right. The hopelessness of a situation, until it is revealed without any further doubt — like when the Nazis began machine gunning Jews who showed them their humanity and soul power, as Gandhi advised them to do — does not change your moral obligation to do what you know is right, to refrain from doing what is hateful to you. It is OK to kill a Nazi who is trying to kill you, to defend your life and your loved ones from Nazis, once the killing starts, it is even praiseworthy to do so. It is never OK to become a Nazi.

The human dilemma, how to continue to act attuned to your higher nature when you are suddenly thrashing in a toxic sea of the lowest human impulses. There’s a riddle that will keep an honest person awake at night, especially during the ten days when we are commanded to make amends with those we have hurt and with those who have injured us.

Authoritarian Personality Dysorder

I have avoided using psychiatric language to describe the personalities and autocratic actions of old friends who have acted badly, but I can’t resist making a suggestion for the next DSM, the official bible of psychiatric diagnosis, since it already contains diagnoses like “temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria” – an affliction of young children and adolescents who unfairly blame their parents for their own inability to control their little fucking tempers and then get depressed about it.

I guess the thing to do is create a list of signs, symptoms, if you will, that define this personality disorder, or perhaps, to give it a bit more gravitas, dysorder?

Authoritarian Personality Dysorder, diagnostic criteria

1) An unshakable belief that there is always only one right answer to every question. A concomitant belief that your answer is always the right one.

2) An absolute entitlement to be obeyed without question.

3) The perception that criticism of any kind, even mild questioning, is defiance.

4) An entitlement to do whatever is necessary to punish defiance and enforce obedience.

5) A belief that every action you take to maintain absolute dominance over others is fully justified, in fact, righteous, perfect and unassailable.

6) The firm conviction that compromise of any kind is humiliation. A request from a loved one to compromise is treason, a capital offense.

Of course, it is easy enough to dismiss this new diagnostic category as simply a restatement of others, among them American Asshole Disorder, Fucking Dickhead Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Oppositional Defiance Disorder, etc.

Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, in The Body Keeps the Score, describes his work with trauma patients. Most patients’ psychiatric diagnoses appeared to flow directly from their attempts to deal with trauma. For example, a child who is regularly raped by a highly respectable parent may display signs of Temper Dysregulation Disorder with Dysphoria. It is pretty natural for a child abused this way to be angry, irritable and depressed.

When van der Kolk proposed new diagnostic criteria for some childhood diagnoses, and an approach that included identifying possible trauma as the root of the behavioral disturbance, he got a curt letter from the august board that revises the DSM informing him that he seemed to have pulled this provocative idea out of his own ass, without copious clinical trial data to back it up. His own work continues to show the value of addressing the actual underlying traumatic injury, while the DSM continues to diagnose these behavioral disturbances the same way.

We note that until 1973, the DSM listed homosexuality as a diagnostic category of mental illness/personality disorder. The first DSM, published in 1952, listed it as a mental illness. In DSM-II, published in 1968, being gay was still considered deviant, but it was now a personality disorder rather than a mental illness. It took pressure from gays who did not agree with being diagnosed by the American Psychiatric Association either way, and others who agreed with them, before a 1973 vote to remove homosexuality as a diagnosable disorder. Just to say, none of these diagnostic categories, most based strictly on a list of observable symptoms, are carved in stone.

So why not have Authoritarian Personality Dysorder added to the next DSM? Probably because the authoritarian personalities who always preside over such decisions would be fucking furious, dysregulated and dysphoric.

For this and other reasons, I refrain from using the popular, descriptive term “narcissist” to describe the characters in this story who cannot be wrong, cannot accept responsibility for hurtful behavior, and will kill you to prove that they are as blameless, with intentions always as perfect as those of the original authors of the DSM.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to try to give myself some at home electro-convulsive therapy as I wait for my next intake appointment at the mental health clinic where a skilled therapist has been highly recommended to me.

Every inch a Congresswoman

MAGA Representative Lauren Boebert, who outraged a few squeamish, stuffy, unfun audience members at a musical she was attending in Colorado by innocent behavior that included letting her date innocently pet her lovely breasts before reciprocating by rubbing the right place in his slacks, was eventually kicked out of the theatre. She downplayed the whole incident, laughing about her animated personality, but, bad for her, there was some unconstitutional video of her so-called public sex play, probably shot by a RINO or Democrat (disguised as the theatre’s CCTV). Here she is being escorted out. Wait, escorted?

And definitely not an escort, not the other day, not ever. USA! USA!!!

Boebert apologized for her behavior in a Friday evening statement.

“The past few days have been difficult and humbling, and I’m truly sorry for the unwanted attention my Sunday evening in Denver has brought to the community,” Boebert, as reported by the Colorado Sun.

Boebert added that her “public and difficult divorce” has created a “challenging personal time for me and my entire family”.

source

Neat paragraph on Elon Musk bio

from Jennifer Szalai, in a recent NYT book review

By “we,” Musk presumably meant Tesla in that instance. But Musk likes to speak of his business interests in superhero terms, so it’s sometimes hard to be sure. Isaacson, whose previous biographical subjects include Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs, is a patient chronicler of obsession; in the case of Musk, he can occasionally seem too patient — a hazard for any biographer who is given extraordinary access. At one point, Isaacson asks why Musk is so offended by anything he deems politically correct, and Musk, as usual, has to dial it up to 11. “Unless the woke-mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit and anti-human in general, is stopped,” he declares, “civilization will never become multiplanetary.” There are a number of curious assertions in that sentence, but it would have been nice if Isaacson had pushed him to answer a basic question: What on earth does any of it even mean?

Elon Musk Wants to Save Humanity. The Only Problem: People. https://nyti.ms/3sTPLUX

From Chapter 42

So I can only take the lesson from other people I have loved who, I find out in the end, can never be wrong. They all lash out the same way when they feel defensive, they will effectively kill you to prove that they can never be wrong. Once you’re dead you have to finally shut the hell up, they don’t have to listen to another mortifying word.

I don’t know what it is with this type. Actually, I do. It’s irreparable, traumatic damage done to them early and persistently, disabling them so badly that they cling to a fragile belief in their superiority and are compelled to destroy whenever their projected virtue feels threatened. This type also, of course, is very easily threatened.

They understand the world as black and white, win-lose, zero sum.  They resonate with other winners who are easily threatened, and they band together with them. They all intuitively grasp the basic rules and boundaries — when threatened, they form a herd and protect each other because they’re all the same kind of animal. They understand the extreme dangerousness of life, the finality of rage, the importance of social status, the limitations of love, trust and friendship in the same way, and they love, trust and befriend each other in the same conditional way.

I have known a bunch of this type, and it’s taken me sixty-seven years to recognize the infernal consistency of this tribe they are all perfect examples of. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of their predictable moral certainty, when the time inevitably comes, trust me. 

from Chapter 45

My Samsung phone has a quirky habit of intermittently making “stories” out of a succession of photographs. These little slide shows are accompanied by cheesy music, feature random fades, wipes and other effects and are punctuated by enthusiastic pastel graphics with cute expressions that might really delight an eight year-old Korean girl.  Sometimes these stories are wildly inappropriate.  A group of photographs of bloody toilet bowls and urinals, when I was tracking how often I peed blood, and how long each spell took to pass, comes to mind.  Set to a peppy little pop tune with a particularly inane melody, and mischievous winking emojis, it was a classic of its kind. I got a real kick out of the hematuria story.

There are a number of stories with photographs of three people, our heads close together, smiling, playfully holding each other‘s chins, poking each other in the cheek, putting devil horns behind each other’s heads and so on. The three smiles are very genuine, sometimes the heads are caught in the moment one or all are laughing.   They’re set against a number of backdrops.  A beautiful snowy forest, with the three dressed in full winter gear, with hats and scarves and pink cheeks and noses. A summerscape with glittering water in the background, me wearing a Hawaiian shirt, the other two in T-shirts. There are nighttime shots with the Brooklyn Bridge behind us, one with a slightly pissed off camel looking over our shoulders . . .

. . . I saw a few of these Samsung photo stories lately, after I switched to a new 5G phone in a vain effort to restore phone and internet service in my suddenly dead zone apartment. One after another, three happy faces, sometimes pushed against each other, best friends forever.

The idea that this easy, loving friendship could ever not be was unthinkable to all of us, never occurred to any of us, until our first outbreak of conflict and the incredibly painful aftermath.  Now the unthinkable has become the new normal.  Not only are we no longer friends, but I am, to everyone we knew in common, a walking cadaver, stinking, grotesque and scary.  I am approachable on pain of death, as they have made clear to everyone else.   The stories they’ve created and told about me would put the Samsung story bot to shame!

It strikes me now, trying to show our specific friendship, rather than sketch it generically, how difficult it is to describe something so natural, flowing and seemingly right.  It’s as hard as trying to capture my affable, intelligent, witty father’s monstrousness — there was no single snapshot that could illustrate it, no broken bones necessitating a trip to a midnight ER or anything like that.  So it is with my once dearest lifelong friends and their extended social and family circle.  

All I can provide is the Samsung story version of something that seemed so vital, precious and eternal, but which turned out to be as brittle as the thin crust of ice toward the middle of the frozen pond that laughing children are about to drown in.  The best I can do now, looking back with a bitter understanding I never wanted, is make my warning to the other children as clear and memorable as I can.

Note timestamps on January 6th tweets by Chrump

Below is an example of how Twitter tried to police itself before a superior, empathy-free, insanely acquisitive, fascist-friendly billionaire disrupter freak bought the public forum, fired the moderators, made it hate-friendly, invited Chrumpie back on and renamed it X.

Note the timestamps on these January 6. 2021 tweets by the former president for a sense of how well the old company, with its full team of moderators, was able to vet thinly veiled calls to an active mob to lynch public officials. The real time response was underwhelming, in light of the American carnage that was going on between the provocative tweet and when it was marked “disputed.”

2:24 PM as thousands of deluded patriots broke through police lines and overran the Capitol looking for enemies to lynch

7:24 pm, Twitter leaps to flag Chrumpie’s wink, wink call to lynch Pence! Eh, stolen election claim “disputed”…

Those who believe in moral norms, in basic decency, often become food for the most determined predators, who use their immense size to devour everything in their path and will wipe their mouths with your norms long after your last screams have died out.

There are five hundred thousand times more of us than of them, so let’s go fuck ’em up, eh?