Category Archives: Ahimsa

I understand, but sorry

It’s sad, but also freeing, to understand that while somebody you care about can’t help their anger, feels they must behave as they do, their misery is also no excuse for things they do that become intolerable to you. What you can’t tolerate, you can’t tolerate.

“But if I can’t help it, it can’t be my fault!” the person might cry.

OK, but if you can’t help doing it over and over, and won’t talk about it, and I can’t stand it, I can’t help you either.

It’s as tragic as untimely death itself, but the math of it is pretty straightforward.

Isolation is bad for the health

Isolation, particularly if it also involves an inability to move around freely, is a form of torture.  Solitary confinement has finally been identified by the UN and various human rights organizations as torture.  Take away a person’s freedom, their ability to interact with other humans, and the outlet of vigorous exercise, and you’ve got yourself a nice, self-sustaining torture room.  Economical, too.

Humans, like many animals, are highly social creatures who take comfort in being together.   Being isolated with only your own thoughts, fears and moods as company will eventually drive a person mad.  The beauty of isolation as torture, from the sadist’s point of view, is that, as long as you are also immobilized, you cannot make it stop.  All isolation requires is silence from everybody else, which is easy enough to accomplish in our competitive, hectically busy world.  You just have to whisper a few specific, ugly things about the person you’ve isolated to anyone who might have been sympathetic, sit back, and watch your handiwork.   

People undergoing torture will do anything to make it stop.   To picture how destructive long term isolation is, think of its chilling political implications.  Here in the Home of the Brave (TM) we have tens of millions of isolated, grumpy old Americans riveted to on-line “communities” where their millions of new virtual friends all believe that adrenochrome, the mythical element in a terrified child’s blood that fuels the lust of “woke” cannibal pedophiles while infusing them with ungodly strength, is the demonic currency of the global plan, by you know who, to enslave all white nonpedophiles.   If they are that powerful, and capable of that kind of satanic atrocity against innocent children, what do they have in store for the rest of us?

On a personal level, I woke up with a slightly larger sense of isolation today.  The scared feral cat I had patiently gained the trust of, and who I fed every day as he rubbed his head against me to be petted, is lying dead outside the window, apparently clipped by a speeding car the other night as he waited to cross the street he’d crossed countless times.  

I had been giving two more old friends of fifty plus years the benefit of the doubt for the last few months.  Even as I suspected, during their long silence, that a good outcome from this benefit of the doubt was doubtful.   Today I woke up to more silence, a goodbye kiss from Sekhnet (off to the city for a couple of days) and then, ruminations.  I thought of another unanswered WhatsApp I finally sent out yesterday, after no comment on my upcoming knee replacement surgery text,  “understood, you believe I am unforgiving and dishonest” sent to a close friend I’ve known since we were fourteen.

Do the math, a fifty year friendship with friends since we were teenagers, and you will see another example of the obvious:  childishness is not limited to young kids.  We are sociable, we are also clannish and our choices are subject to whim, peer pressure and narrow self-interest.  Some are immature from cradle to grave.

I had two unsettling conversations with my lifelong friend, months back.  In the first, she lambasted me for being unforgiving, unloving, and torturing two dear old mutual friends who loved me dearly.  When I protested that she’d been told an unfair, untrue story, gave my account of the senseless conflict that was being pinned entirely on me, my “defensiveness” proved my guilt to my old friend.   I had the creepy feeling I was the defendant in a witch trial.

“You’ve worn me out,” she said as she got off the phone to have dinner.  

A few weeks later the theme was my dishonesty.  She told me that if I really can’t forgive these cherished lifelong friends, who clearly love me, I have to be honest enough to tell them.  Neatly, the entire mountain of bat shit had been piled on me.  Not only an unforgiving, loveless, torturing prick, but a lying one too.    My character had been assassinated, this old friend was talking to a despised, stinking corpse.  I seemed to be the only one who didn’t realize I was already dead.

I understand now that what sent the old friend who set this all afoot into a rage was that I was probably the only person in her life who, in fifty years, had never contradicted her about anything.  I was always easy to get along with, even when she was being mercurial, controlling, judgmental, I always understood and never took anybody’s side against her.  Suddenly, during a tense “vacation” with her and her husband, worn out by days of mounting stress, I seemed to be defying her — for the first time ever!  This “et tu, Brute” moment made her fly into a rage and have a full blown shit fit.  And thinking about it, what safer target for her rage, that had been building for a long time, amid the endless Covid crisis at work and awful, mounting tension with her husband, than the one person in her life who had never made her feel bad about herself?

From her point of view, as she angrily explained whenever I brutally tried to resolve the conflict, she never got angry, never did anything wrong, she only apologized to me the morning after I claimed she was mad because I was clearly so weak that I’d been hurt by nothing after I’d been so threatening and aggressive and completely to blame for any “tension” I perceived.  I was also stubbornly unwilling to take responsibility for causing all the bad feelings between everyone there.  From her husband’s point of view, whatever she said, that was his position.  If she said something different, that was his new position.  

While I spent a year of torment trying to fix a broken friendship, and preserving their privacy (since I truly didn’t understand how things had come to this ugly pass), these determined winners were working overtime to control the news cycle and destroy my good name among everyone we knew in common.  Of the two stories about our falling out, their ever-evolving one and the one we’d all lived, one makes much more sense than the other.  This could be a big problem to these two respectable, sociable people, make them look shamefully imperfect and less than 100% admirable.  Intolerable!  They went to work, passionately confiding in everyone we knew in common the story that left them the complete victims of me, an unaccountably vicious asshole. 

From their friends’ point of view, if they were both that hurt, and told the identical story, and Eliot wasn’t talking about it, then Eliot must be a sadistic, diabolical, lying, unloving fuck, no matter how he might use his silver plated lawyer’s logic to try to twist the facts, and love itself, to obscure that ugly truth.  No matter how well he’d hid this from us during those decades of carefree, seemingly loving friendship.

Most people, you may have noticed, prefer simplicity to complication.  It is a worldwide disease at the moment — there are only two choices in any situation.  It is either Red or Blue, Unregulated Capitalism or Totalitarian Communism, Systemic Racism or Senseless Rage, absolute forgiveness no matter what or an inability to love.  This is by design.  It is much easier for tyrants to rule unopposed if everything is phrased as a war — black vs. white, good vs. evil, God vs. Satan, love vs. hate and everyone is constantly provoked to fight to prove they are on the right side of these ephemeral absolutes.  The irresistible power of this divisive strategy is that a statement like “good people on both sides” when one side are Nazis and Klansmen and the other side is their intended victims, cannot be seen as a statement of moral neutrality.   Claiming there are good violent racists means that you agree with their plan.

Political tyranny is a vast human nightmare, and a necessary part of its hellscape is the terrifying personal isolation of all citizens, particularly if they don’t take part in the lynchings and pogroms.  Everyone is vulnerable, at any time, to being denounced to the authorities and subjected to the harshest punishment.  The same goes for the reign of personal tyranny, maintained by what is often called Narcissistic Abuse.  The person who can never be wrong has the same bag of tricks as any despot and the same reflex to deploy them to deadly effect if unquestioning loyalty to them is ever violated.  If you live within the social circle of someone who can never be wrong, who must always be seen as perfect, and obeyed, know that they have always practiced bringing others to their side against all enemies and get used to the taste of being vilified and cast out if you ever make them feel bad about anything.

Doesn’t make the bitterness of it that much easier to get used to, mind you, but it’s a good reminder that the world is simply the world, homo sapiens are not necessarily “wise apes” and that the only things we can really influence, on a good day, are our reactions to the ongoing shit show.  Cold comfort on a cold day, I know, but better than resorting to desperate acts, no?

Then, silence.

The problem with pathos and ethos without logos

If what I write here doesn’t touch your emotions, it’s useless.  The best writing will sometimes challenge your beliefs about right and wrong, make you see a complicated moral issue in a different light.  Our feelings are classically called “pathos” and our moral views “ethos”.  These two strands of human experience, emotions and trust, are huge and the successful appeal to them is of incalculable power.    Without “logos,” the capacity to set things out coherently, the other two are impossible to talk about, understand or resolve conflicts that arise between people of strong feelings and beliefs. 

Logos, without pathos and ethos, of course, reduces you to a well-programmed chatbot.  Logos by itself can be monstrous, as can any of these strands, in isolation. All three need to come into play in any persuasive presentation, though logos often rides in the trunk as the other two drive the car and scream out the window.

No meaningful debate is possible based only on passionate feelings and a strong sense that the other person is morally deficient.  There is literally nothing to discuss, beyond “I am very upset that you are such a moral cretin” and “I’m upset that you’re such an unreasonably judgmental asshole.”  Not a very long conversation, and one that can only end in disagreement, based on strong mutual feelings of moral repugnance.   The only things that we can really talk about, set out clearly for meaningful discussion, are facts, data, actual events, crucial elements of any true story.

Real life, of course, rarely involves a rational disagreement among philosophers, it’s a dirty, earthy business that sometimes ends in a lynch mob stringing up a big mouth just to win the argument.  “Who’s laughing now, asshole?” is not a very decorous question to pose to a dangling corpse, but there we are.  Cutting off the lynching victim’s body parts as they scream doesn’t prove you are right, except to your fellow enraged torch and pitchfork carriers.

Humans are a cultish lot, and it’s very easy to fall in with a tribe, particularly an aggrieved tribe on the march, in a moral crusade.  We are getting the full downside of this unreasoning cultish tribalism full-stink in recent years.   

In 2009 Congressman Joe Wilson from the great secessionist state of South Carolina (currently considering the death penalty for any pregnant female who refuses to give birth) snarled at the first Black president “you lie!”  The moment of internationally televised in-your-fucking-face disrespect made big news at the time.  Now much worse is said every day about Biden, to his fucking face, and the Big Lie itself is in hot dispute among the pathos/ethos crowd.  What is the Big Lie? 

The latest spin is that it’s the lie that “so-called January 6th” was NOT the fault of fucking Mike Pence!   Pence deserved to be swinging from that gallows, the fucking cowardly traitor who made the riot that never happened necessary … and what about Hunter Biden’s laptop, Fauci’s crimes against humanity and the fucking drag queens raping young children in public?

How do you talk to people in a rival cult, with all logic off the table?  It seems impossible.  It is certainly impossible if the technique for shutting you up is citing outlandish conspiracies to angrily contest every factual assertion you make.  The best you can do, when faced with a relentless, logic-free assault, is to say “understood.”  By “understood” it will be understood, even by a grimly determined foe, that you mean “have a blessed day!”    

And, by “have a blessed day,” that you mean just that.

The price of inheritance

The price of inheritance is obedience, to the exact degree demanded.   Dissident children don’t get shit, except for furious punishment while the bequeather is still alive.   Getting nothing, and being cast out of your family, is a very high price to pay for a fleeting feeling of personal integrity.

We spent five days with old friends in a beautiful rented house near Woodstock.  At one point I was sharing my long-running painful estrangement from my niece and nephew, my only two direct blood relatives, with one of my oldest friends.  I haven’t seen either one since my mother’s funeral in 2010.  My attempts to remain in touch have been mostly futile.  Now I don’t even hear back from either one when I reach out.  My friend, at a loss for any idea we haven’t already talked about, seeing how much this seemingly insoluble situation hurts me, looked at me with sad eyes and said “that’s very painful.”   I nodded and we sat there for a minute, just acknowledging how much this kind of thing hurts.

In the case of my niece and nephew I understand what they’ve been told by my brother-in-law and his wife.  Your uncle is an insane, judgmental, vengeful, lying prick.  He stole your inheritance when your grandparents died.  He will eventually kill you, if he ever gets the chance.  He’s a person incapable of love, forgiveness and honesty, though he pontificates at unbearable length about the importance of all three.  He is the lowest form of vicious hypocrite imaginable.  Picture Hitler, only much worse.

Fast forward a year and a half.

My periodic attempts to make contact with any of my old, formerly sympathetic friend’s three adult children, all of whom I have known since birth and fondly played with all during their childhoods, as well as advised and helped as young adults . . . crickets.

My own fault, really, since I refuse to acknowledge that to some people talking about conflict, with an eye toward preventing future strife, is exactly the same as viciously attacking them in their soul.   To speak about any kind of mutual role in conflict is to blame them, 100%, when they are unshakably certain that you are 100% to blame and a very dangerous fucker too, capable of all kinds of satanic appeals to love, fairness and vulnerability, which always come at their expense.  They will explain this to their children with passion, telling them to think of Hitler, only much, much worse.

I understand now that if you have a competitive view of life, see the world as black and white, win or lose, pride or humiliation, no compromise is possible with someone who does not do what you need them to do.   That’s just the way it is.  Keep whatever you want in your heart but keep any look off your face that shows defiance of a will that needs to be right.  Have as much integrity as you want in the quiet of your own soul, but show any glint of that and we’ll cut you dead as we cut our dear, old friend, Hitler, dead.  Clear enough for you, my beloved child?

To change or not to change

This dawned on me out of the blue yesterday, as my mind intermittently tries to work out another puzzle that has never made sense to me.   I realized that someone who lives in terrifying anticipation of unbearably painful shame and humiliation lives in a different, scarier, much more threatening world than most people.   In their world, someone they love, someone their children trust, can become an implacable Adolf Hitler clone in an instant.   Think of how terrifying that world would be to live in.

I had a long running debate with my father about whether people can change or not.  I believe that people can change, particularly if repeated, reflexive  behaviors keep causing you the same pain.  My mother confirmed the best of these changes in me over the years, but I myself know how much better I handle things like frustration, anger and depression than I used to.  

Change is certainly hard, it takes a lot of work and concentration, but it is possible.  When you can finally sit with your pain without crying out, you begin to see its causes more and more clearly.  If you see how your behavior, responding to a perceived threat,  makes the problem worse, you can little by little improve how you respond.   You will see cause and effect, understand the steps in behavior that lead to the bad result, and most importantly, learn to catch yourself before you react badly.  You will do a little better over time, if you are serious enough about changing things that torment you.   To believe otherwise is to accept that we’re doomed to a life of enduring constantly repeating misery.

My father believed that people cannot, on any fundamental level, change.   His position was that if you are born with a reflex to react with anger, that’s all she wrote about your ability to ever have significantly better control of your temper.  He told me, the night before he died, that his life had been basically over by the time he was two.   

He was referring to what had happened to him in those formative pre-verbal years before he could develop any memories at all, years that were all fear and pain.  This was a subject he never spoke of, but that I discovered a few years before he died when his older cousin Eli sadly revealed it to me. 

He angrily denied everything when I began to bring it up, denounced Eli as a fucking liar, but he acknowledged it the last night of his life. 

“Whatever Eli told you,” he said, referring to the beloved older cousin he denounced as an unreliable narrator and an idiot, “he spared you the worst of it.  Nobody could ever describe the true horror of the home I grew up in.”

What was this horror?  That he grew up in soul-killing poverty and that his mother was a tiny, religious woman with a Hitler-like temper and no threshold for frustration.   Whenever she got frustrated she took it out on the giant baby who had caused her such pain coming into the world, grabbing the nearest whip and lashing him across the face.

“In the face?” I asked my cousin Eli when he told me the story of watching his beloved aunt mercilessly whipping her toddler son.  He nodded with the saddest possible expression.

To my father, we are doomed when we start, however we’re born, whatever our predispositions, genetic tendencies and earliest experiences are, that’s essentially how we will always be.  What happens, according to my father’s view, is you put together a certain social veneer, you develop a talent for making jokes, have intelligent conversations, enjoy things like college sports, you can be fascinated by history, a one-time idealist and a keen student of politics, a philosopher, even, but all that is a social construct you make to cover whatever demons are churning inside yourself that you cannot change or influence in any meaningful way.  We are doomed, as the victims of whatever trauma befell us before we could defend ourselves, and there’s nothing any of us can do about, my father believed, until the last night of his life.

“Fuck that”, was always my position.  If you suffer from a terrible temper, would it not help to understand why you get so fucking mad?  If, say, your mother had repeatedly whipped you in the face with the coarse cord of her steam iron, when you were less than two, wouldn’t that be a good reason to be a bit touchy later in life?   Or, let’s say, you first went to kindergarten with 20/400 vision, legally blind, and no adult discovered this until you were about 9, when FDR mandated that poor kids should have free eyeglasses as part of the New Deal (legislation that also outlawed child labor in the US, when my dad was already 8, working age).  Up until that time you’d been regularly mocked as a big moron for not being able to tell an A from an F on the blackboard.  Got your first pair of glasses in third grade, and went on the honor roll from fourth grade on.   These details are important to consider before condemning yourself as doomed to having an explosive temper and having been a big dummy when you were a young kid, no?

My father might have said “maybe for a novel, or some kind of rumination on human nature, but for the average person trying to get through life, support a family, work two jobs to give his children a good life after the grinding poverty of his own life, all that is more than enough to have on your plate.  Besides, no matter how many of the hideous details you relive, the pain involved in putting that puzzle together to the extent that you would be able to change anything meaningful about your life, which you know I believe one can’t, is unimaginably terrifying.   Why feel that nightmare again when we can do nothing to change our lives, in any fundamental way?”

Circular logic if there ever was an example of it.  Logic, of course, is not the right word to apply to that analysis.  Though my father was capable of sophisticated logic, and was a skilled debater capable of arguing either side of any position, this loop was not an example of any of that.  In formal debating, debaters learn to strategically deploy logos (intellectual argument based on facts and logic), ethos (moral argument) and pathos (appeals to emotion).  The inner world people like my father cannot escape from is ruled by pathos.   Have enough unbearable emotion in your soul and the greatest logical and moral arguments fall off you like rain off the proverbial duck’s back.  

I understand now that for someone like my father, wounded in his heart as deeply as he was, change was impossibly painful to even consider possible.  He simply could not imagine putting himself through the unnerving pain that would have been necessary before he could try to change.  To acknowledge that anyone else could change, but that he couldn’t, would only have added to his shame and humiliation.  His position that people cannot actually change was psychologically necessary for him because, for him, it was true.  

Logos, ethos and pathos, the only one operating full tilt, in many lives right now, is pathos.   Strong emotions rule the world in this age of Alternative Reason.  His will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.  Amen.

Fucking hell.

Fascism is mass submission to a narcissist’s will

It occurs to me how on point the “arguments” of authoritarians are to the “arguments” of narcissists.  They are simple and direct frontal attacks on everything you believe.  They can be summarized as “I am right, only I see clearly, and no matter what you say, fuck you, if you show the slightest defiance I’ll kill you (and everyone you love) and make you regret you were ever born.”   

The essential, deliberate irrationality of fascist argumentation was neatly summarized in a recent conversation between Brian Tyler Cohen and the great Mehdi Hassan.  The Gish Cohen refers to here was a “creationist” who was famous for raising dozens of false arguments in a short time and overwhelming the person he was debating.  Since it is impossible to refute all fifty falsehoods in a given debate, the Gish Gallop leaves the impression in the audience that many of the false statements, since unrefuted, may well be true.  Trump is a first ballot Hall of Fame Gish Galloper and his MAGA cohort, wielding their high pressure firehose of excrement, all regularly use this technique.  Here’s Cohen and Hassan:

Cohen:  … referring to Steve Bannon’s quote about flooding the zone with shit, the writer Jonathan Rausch once remarked “this is not about persuasion, this is about disorientation”. He’s right, when the likes of Trump and Gish engage in the gallop, their purpose is often not to try to win over but muddy the argument for everyone involved so they can bewilder and confuse while hopping from one falsehood to the next…

Hassan:  yeah, and it also has implications far beyond rhetoric, debate, argument.  It also has implications for democracy, Brian.

Cohen:  It destabilizes everything because then you don’t know what’s true …

Hassan:  That’s exactly what facism thrives on.  If you read the works of people like Jason Stanley, they make this point.  The point of the fascist, the authoritarian, why they lie, why they discredit the media, why they don’t want to live in a reality based universe, why they want alternative facts, is not because they want you to believe them over the liberal or the progressive.  They want you to believe no one, they want to leave you confused.  And what happens then?   Then you are more susceptible to the strongman who wants to lead you into the light.

source

If you have ever struggled with a narcissist who angrily blames you for all bad feelings in the world, you have had a direct, bitter taste of the essence of fascism.  Who is the fascist strongman?  A malignant narcissist capable of unimaginable cruelty toward masses of his fellow human beings, someone who has never, ever been wrong about anything, and has a violent mob of fanatical loyalists willing to die to prove it.

Impossible letter # two (prelude)

The impossibility of the letters themselves makes writing them an almost impossibly steep uphill drag.  If your words have no chance of being heard by the other person, that’s literally all she wrote. 

If it’s already been demonstrated over and over that the other person will not listen to you, why would writing those same words on paper and mailing them have a better effect?  If you know your words will never be read, or, if read, never acknowledged, or, if acknowledged, never responded to, clearly you are attempting the impossible. 

Still, there are times when the letter may begin to form itself in your mind, seem like the best idea on the subject, impossible as it also is.   One benefit of exerting yourself to write an impossible letter, of course, is setting the issues out as clearly as possible for yourself as you write.

You hit on a new angle for presenting resolution of the conflict that disrupted a long, loving relationship, say the idea of introducing death, our inevitable fate in our declining years, as a way of playing a poignant chord.  To the person who will not hear, that is merely a crude emotional ploy for undeserved sympathy.  Now you are pathetically playing the violin to try to move them to feel sorry for you, even though you don’t deserve even a hearing after the unforgivable crimes you’ve committed.

Tender memories you offer as proof of affection are cast aside as manipulation.  A factual point you make is more proof that you are a joyless reciter of biased facts to support your insane lawyerly arguments.  A gift you send need not be acknowledged to be another offensive example of this kind of dirty emotional game.

The facts won’t work, no agreement is possible about the scope or nature of the conflict, no softening of a rigidly defended position, no acknowledgment of a mutual problem — and no appeals to caring, sharing, love and sentiment.

Add those restrictions up and you get one impossible letter.  The letter itself, no matter how well you craft it, has zero chance of persuading that person of something they are programmed to reject, if you can even get the letter read.  If these letters ever are actually read, you will almost never get any acknowledgment.  In the rare case that you do, it will be to use the letter as a stick to poke you in the eye with.

A few months back I sent a letter, a last attempt to make peace, during the ten days after the Jewish New Year, days set aside for settling debts, seeking forgiveness, making amends.   I wrote this letter after my old friend, a Jew who prays at dawn every day, in the manner of the most orthodox Jews, stormed out of a restaurant a few days before Yom Kippur (the day religious Jews believe that God inscribes the future for every human for the coming year) when I “blindsided” him with a conversation about forgiveness that he didn’t want to hear, was not able to think about without becoming indignant.

A few days later I sat down and wrote him a letter I somehow didn’t yet understand was impossible.  I felt better once I’d set the thoughts and feelings down on a page.  I actually slept better right after I mailed it, the burden of fixing a long friendship suddenly turned to senseless, total war off of my shoulders.   The issues were clear enough, the letter was simple and short. The next move now belonged to my friend and his wife (I’d written and mailed a short note to her, assuring her of my love).  I had three or four nights of untroubled sleep for the first time in a year, since our sudden, traumatic falling out.  

2:45 a.m, a few days later, my phone rings.  My friend was very upset, he’d received my letter and he couldn’t sleep.  He wasn’t going to talk about anything in the letter, or what particularly upset him, but I was apparently again unfairly using my power to express myself clearly as a way to oppress him.   Close to tears he told me he’d sat down and written me long letters on at least six occasions, letters he never sent me, or even mentioned to me.  He was very hurt that I didn’t seem to appreciate that at all.  And so on.   

What do these impossible letters have in common?   They ask the reader to be fair, to consider another point of view, and the mutual hurt and damage involved, when the reader believes he has already been more than fucking fair.   Impossible letters require that the recipient hold a letter they feel is written by Hitler and read it dispassionately, calmly, open to being persuaded by Hitler’s golden words.

The common factor, I realize at my advanced age, is that all these letters involve an attempt to counter the determined narratives of people bent on never feeling humiliated again.   If terror of shame and humiliation causes a person to build and cling to a persona that can never be wrong, all perceived criticism is a deadly attack that must be repelled with overwhelming force.  An untrue statement they make is not a lie, and it is humiliating to be called a liar, they are merely defending themselves reflexively and if the truth is a sharp, deadly weapon they parry it by first denying it.   Narcissism 101, baby.

Take any story insisted on in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is not true.  The lie that Biden stole the 2020 election, with the help of many powerful traitorous Republicans, debunked 1,000 times, thrown out of every court, the fairness of the election confirmed with broad bipartisan acknowledgement.   Can a political party continue to insist that the election was stolen, that rioters were fully justified to attack police and stop the joint session of Congress to prevent the certification of a rigged election? 

They can if they’re mad as hell, and if you’re mad enough to assault police you have to believe you’re right, and if you’re right, how can you listen to fucking assholes who tell you you’re wrong?  You know what you do to them? Bash them in the fucking face.  Take away their right to vote.   Those who assaulted the cops were right to do so, the ones convicted of violence are viciously persecuted political prisoners, etc.

If you find yourself on the other side of a narcissist’s visceral terror of shame, watch your ass. In the end, the best you will be able to do is write an impossible letter to their children, trying to explain that they sre not alone, weighed down with deep, vaguely understood hurt it will take them decades to begin to understand, if ever, but that there are adults out here, willing to listen and talk, who do not share their parent’s maniacal determination to blame them for everyone’s unhappiness.

Anger, anyone?

Anger is a common, dangerous emotion, a momentary draining of all goodwill and the ability to think.  It’s at the root of all violence, and it always makes the violent person feel completely justified while they are raging. 

At the same time anger is an important warning system that can tell us when to get out of a combustible situation. 

Complicating this complex emotion even more:  show anger and you are instantly seen as the aggressor, no matter how relentless the provocation may have been, no matter how reasonable and patient you may have been before getting angry. 

The most pernicious anger, in a certain way, is the anger that is always repressed, denied, justified as not being anger at all.

There are people, my mother was one, who fly into a rage if you mention their anger.  It’s not, in their mind, that they get mad, they are just outraged that you would unfairly accuse them of something that couldn’t be further from the truth.   My friend Mark Friedman was a great example of this angry denial of anger.  He would fold his arms across his chest and glare churlishly at any suggestion that his anger may have played any part in his most recent conflict.  In my experience, anger deniers often seethe quietly at the suggestion that they are experiencing anger and may not be seeing things clearly because they’re angry. They tend not to scream or punch you.

Hey, we call it getting mad.  “Don’t get mad, get even”.  Anger is, actually, an evolutionarily important form of temporary madness. It plays an important survival role, but it can also disable certain functions. There is the famous experiment where researchers wired the insula, the part of the brain that lights up when you fall in love, have a creative idea, are in a flow state, and when you get angry.  They have you answer some moderately nuanced questions and tally a baseline score.  Then they make you angry and watch your insula light up.  They ask similar questions and find that you are basically unable to answer or answering them “fuck you!”

This is the engine fueling the vast profitability of social media — keep the person angry, they keep clicking and the ad revenues keep cah-chinging. 

It is the mechanism at work in MAGA-world, in someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene’s brain.  She shows up at a meeting the other day, sits next to a Republican election expert who confirms that there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election.  She immediately, very pleasantly and confidently, tells him that thousands of dead people voted in Georgia in 2020, that there was widespread Democrat [sic] fraud, that Trump won Georgia by a huge margin, that this guy is no expert at all, basically that he can kiss her privileged white ass.  The clip of her owning this RINO probably goes viral (Marjorie leaves the meeting immediately after creating this contrarian content, according to the election expert) and Marjorie is back in the gym, having herself filmed heroically doing pullups and pushups, for another social media/fundraising post.

If you are mad as hell, and believe Biden is a commie puppet on the payroll of his son’s laptop, you’ll receive a jolt of energy watching Marjorie angrily tell this RINO cuck so-called expert to suck it and then watching her powerfully work out in her crossfit outfit.  That’s how anger fuels anger and keeps the loop of denial of anything but your anger going.

Anger removes cause and effect thinking, you simply can’t track back to follow an argument that does not conform to what your anger is telling you is right.  Anger is an insistent bastard, if it is fed, and one of its main tricks is making all nuance disappear.

Here’s an aggravating example I‘ll try to describe dispassionately.  There has long been a hellish standoff between the Israeli government and the Palestinians.  You can call it many things, but none describe a good situation.  The far-right government in charge of Israel now, like the far right everywhere, is fueled by anger and fear.  The Israeli right is angry that the anti-semitic world is unfairly villainizing Israel for protecting herself and they fear that the countless enemies of Israel will destroy her if she is not strong, vigilant and aggressive in fighting all enemies. 

Anti-semitism is on the rise worldwide and there are millions who hate both Jews and Zionists, so they are not crazy to feature these things.  It is only their “solution” that is… well, that fuels the very things they fear and hate.

Many supporters of Israel, even ones who dislike this far-right cabal that has been in charge for a while, chafe at the word apartheid being used to describe things like the series of security checkpoints Palestinians must spend hours a day lining up at to enter and leave Israel, the two sets of roads, the inequitable distribution of water in the occupied territories and so on.

Without taking sides or a position, and refraining from calling the unholy Israeli coalition of ordinary authoritarians and religious extremists a bunch of fucking Nazis, I will describe a tactic used by supporters of Palestinian rights (and it is beyond denying that millions of otherwise innocent human beings live in atrocious poverty in crowded camps and cities).  It is the same tactic that brought down the apartheid government of South Africa:  Boycott, Divest, Sanction.  Many liberals call for this pressure to be placed on Israel and there is heated debate about this tactic. 

On the plus side it is nonviolent and it already worked to end brutal segregation in South Africa.  On the minus side, it stigmatizes a fellow democracy and doesn’t guarantee a just resolution of an intractable crisis.  Bernie Sanders, for example, has repeatedly stated that he does not support BDS against Israel.

Lobbyists for Israel have called for a law here in the US making it a felony for any company to support BDS.  Under this proposed law, if you are a corporation, business or wealthy individual and you endorse BDS — even if not practicing it yourself —  you are guilty of a felony punishable by a large fine and in some situations prison time.  Bernie Sanders, for one, is against this law and has stated his opposition publicly.  One obvious problem with the proposed anti-BDS law is that it criminalizes otherwise protected First Amendment expression.

But, Bernie Sanders, in the minds of many, because he opposes this extreme law, is an antisemite and self-hating Jew who supports BDS.

This math is so easy to do if you are angry.  Nuance is impossible to see when you’re mad.  There is no difference, when your insula is glowing from anger, between someone opposing a law that does violence to the First Amendment and someone who supports the worldwide strangulation of a great democracy and the end of protection of all Jews everywhere from annihilation.

Never Again.

Anger is a motherfucker and the most destructive emotional force we are up against.  It can be fanned into flames that will burn everything you love.  Any lie is good enough to support indignation and one lie builds on another.  The angry mind can’t make distinctions, which is why a constant “FUCK YOU!” is a perfectly valid response to anything you don’t want to hear.

Impossible letter number one, draft two

The first impossible letter I wrote and posted recently, while currently also impossible to get to the recipient (she hasn’t yet responded to my email of eight or nine days back), suffered from a major flaw that was spotted by a friend who read it.  There was a long passage detailing my fatal falling out with her parents.   It was good for me to write, was the clearest explanation I’ve been able to give for the unresolvable conflict, but it did not belong in the letter to the daughter. 

My friend’s comment was a good reminder of the importance of a second and third set of eyes, and someone else’s life experience, on what you are working on. Precisely the input that is missing on most internet content posted by random posters.

I selected the two page section in question, cut it and pasted it as an appendix I indicated was “available on request.”  If she wants the details, she can ask.  Assuming she would ever find a reason to reply to Adolf Hitler after he brutally murdered both of her saintly parents.   Here is the rewrite, still impossible, and still with a fairly dim view of her deeply damaged parents, but with a slightly better approach,  and more readable for the changes, I think. 

Dear T:

This note will have to stand in for the conversation I’d hoped to have with you for the last fifteen years or so.  Writing to an excellent writer makes me a little more hopeful that you will take in the message I am trying to convey.

The summary version: you need to let yourself completely off the hook for harmful childhood conflicts in your family. Although the blame was generally placed on you, these conflicts were not mostly your fault.   Forgiveness is a great gift to give yourself.

I can’t recommend it highly enough and I hope to convince you how indispensable it is.  It comes, in part, from looking clearly at the past and drawing honest, merciful conclusions about life.  It follows an understanding that is often impossible to come to on our own. Hopefully you can add what I’m telling you to your understanding.

My need to tell you this was kicked into high gear a few years back when a concerned C referred me to your final piece on that website you worked for.  In that emotional essay you painted the picture of yourself as a problem child who had inflicted great harm on your family by being an asshole. Why you felt that way is understandable.  For one thing, your parents, as I have now seen up close, are pros at presenting a united and unyielding front, no matter how strong the merits of the position they are opposing are.

Making this letter a bit more ticklish to write is the indigestibly tragic fact that your parents have judged me a person unworthy of their love (I know, in their version I did that to them).  A year or two ago this letter, making a simple point about self-mercy, would have come from a beloved family friend.  Not the case today. The short history (which omits occasional thoughtless treatment and abandonment over the years that I never made an issue about) is that after a few days of an increasingly stressful Yom Kippur holiday in Woodstock, your mother lost her temper at me and your parents had to rewrite the history of fifty years of friendship (details available on request).   

As you recall, I was on the scene for your entire childhood. You were a musical prodigy.  Your parents didn’t want you to have the miserable, high-pressure life of a child star, they wanted to prevent you from possibly becoming a monster and having an unhappy adulthood.  Their solution, classical piano lessons, was not a particularly good one, but it was done with good intentions.  

I’m sure your parents were unaware that Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney (and the other Beatles), Stevie Wonder, Taylor Swift, Paul Simon, Aretha Franklin, Django, Jimi and other wonderfully creative composers (I suspect Joni, too, but couldn’t confirm it) can’t read music. Reading music, to your parents, was essential to being a competent, professional musician and songwriter.  Therefore, classical piano lessons and a succession of frustrating, frustrated, piano teachers.   Sadly, your parents didn’t understand that love of music, and playing and inventing it purely out of love, is the best way to develop a talent like yours.

You showed your genius early in life, earlier than you can remember.  I was at the dinner table at 181st Street when you sat on your dad’s lap.  Vogel was there too, and recalled this also when I reminded him of it years ago. You were a curly haired two or three year-old.  Your eyes twinkled as you got my attention across the table.  It was like you were saying “watch this, are you ready?” Then, a moment later, almost with a wink to me, you instantly sent your father into a spasm of anger.

Soon thereafter he went into therapy to learn how to avoid becoming the kind of angry, destructive parent his mother had been.  When he was satisfied he wouldn’t traumatize you the same way, he stopped therapy.

I’ll try to give you the schematic view: whatever happened to H [T’s paternal grandmother] as a girl to make her H (the dark side of her) led to her short temper with your young father, her lack of control as she slapped him hard in the face whenever she got angry.   All very bad shit, no question, terrible and inexcusable.  

I’ve told your father the story of my eventual breakthrough in therapy (aided by my father’s first cousin who gave me the heartbreaking image of my father, as a toddler, whipped in the face repeatedly by his psycho mother) that allowed me to, not exactly forgive, but come to a useful understanding.  

I came to see that my anger at my father was only hurting me (and certainly not helping him, though fuck him).  Bad as it was, he’d done the best he could.  I was still pissed, but, fortunately, I had enough emotional distance and understanding to be present and compassionate when my father was suddenly on his deathbed.  I was no longer going to reduce him to the sum of his inadequacies as a parent.  I had no case against him to argue, only sorrow.   Luckily for both of us, we had one great, decades overdue, honest conversation the last night of his life, and then he was gone.  I kept urging your father to work toward this point in his feelings about his mother, while there is time.  It is a fucking tragedy to have this kind of deathbed reconciliation and to be left thinking of all the wasted years of senseless warfare that could have been avoided by mutual forgiveness, all the love foolishly lost.  

Your father can’t forgive his mother.  As a partial result, he can’t forgive himself.  Even as he understands it comes from his mother’s irrational demands, he feels he needs to be perfect, anything less is a torment to him.  None of us are perfect. 

When we hurt people all we can do is apologize and try to make amends.  It is the same with ourselves.  When you’ve done everything possible to fix a broken relationship, for example, and nothing is helping, in the end you have to let yourself off the hook for your “failure” or you go mad, turning the anger on yourself.  The only thing to do when someone you love is truly sorry about something they did to you is to accept their apology, forgive them, as you forgive yourself.  Can’t forgive yourself?  Can’t really forgive anyone else, or love them with their faults. 

Would you have been a more prolific, protean composer if you hadn’t had those years in the straitjacket of involuntary classical piano?  Who knows.  We are all responsible for our own lives and our actions.  That’s not the same as taking the blame for things that are beyond our responsibility and ability to fix or make right. 

I was tortured for more than a year trying to make peace with your parents.  The days before the next Yom Kippur, it turned out, were not right for the honest conversation we needed to have, your father got angry that I suggested it, stormed out of the restaurant.   I kept thinking there was something more I could do, some big life lesson I still needed to learn.  More patience, more kindness, more goodwill, more benefit of the doubt, more dispassion, more love. 

One day I read Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer, an excellent, thought-provoking book about Mormonism and the hazy boundary between genuine religious inspiration and psychopathy.   At the sentencing phase of the trial for a Mormon who claimed he’d killed his wife and daughter because God commanded him to, the guy’s lawyer made the case that he was mentally ill and shouldn’t be executed.  Krakauer quotes the defense attorney:

When narcissists are confronted by people who disparage their extravagant claims they tend to react badly.  They may plunge into depression or become infuriated.  When narcissists are belittled or denigrated they feel horrible.  They have this sense that they’re either grandiose, perfect and beautiful people, or absolutely worthless.  So, if you challenge their grandiosity “they respond with humiliation or rage” (DSM IV).

Fuck me, I thought.  That’s where the desperate fear of humiliation and ongoing, defensive displays of indignation and anger come from.  To your mother, who seemed freshly enraged that her humiliating apology was seemingly ignored when I got upset at the next hurtful thing she supposedly did, and your father, neither of whom I’d ever imagined might be narcissists, there is no middle ground.  They are either good, perfectly admirable people, or they feel utterly worthless and humiliated. 

No wonder they kept getting angry whenever I tried to talk painful things out with them.  In their zero-sum world our falling out HAD to be my fault, 100%. If I didn’t accept that, I was leaving the door open to a terrifying nightmare for them, that they had done something wrong that deeply hurt someone they thought they loved and that therefore they were unworthy of love themselves.  That was not going to happen, and they’d do everything necessary to make sure it didn’t, including assassinating my good name and killing our long, deep friendship.  Hell of a price to pay, no?

Conflict between people who love each other should not be hard to resolve, a little vulnerability on each side, a willingness to listen to the other person and do better handling their feelings in the future. Resolution only becomes impossible to resolve when the need to feel justified, perfect, beyond criticism comes into the picture, becomes the entire picture.  As you sagely said to me at the second seder “never disagree with M.”

Your mother, during her crabbed Woodstock apology that she did not behave better when I aggressively threatened her, by making her feel defied, noted that I’d made her feel the way she used to feel when she was fighting with you. And, BINGO! I realized I had to write this letter one day.

Like you, I was the “genius” of my tormented little family, and also, the eternal adversary of a prosecutorial parent who needed to “win” every conflict, in my case my father.   On the last night of his life my father was filled with regret and was finally vulnerable enough to recognize the many times I’d tried to make peace with him over the years.  He beat himself for being too fucked up to reciprocate.  I did my best to reassure him that he’d done the best he could, that if he could have done better he would have.  He was grateful for my merciful attitude, and I was grateful to hear him apologize for the first and only time in his life.  But what a tragic fucking “healing” it was, I closed his dead eyelids as the sun was setting the following day.

Maybe my estrangement from your folks, and the insight that finally made me stop flailing against it, adds a compelling dimension to this letter.  Something that should be fairly straightforward for people who claim to love you to fix “Eliot/T, we understand why you were upset, why you lost it for a second, why it was so hurtful to you when we wouldn’t accept your apology, why you needed to say what we would never let you say, it was wrong of us to angrily shout you down, not to mention not showing any appreciation for you reacting with love instead of anger each time one of us snarled at or threatened you…” proved impossible for them.  Now that I had that framework from Krakauer I had a way to understand the life or death stakes that made it impossible for either of them to make concessions that are unbearable to their self-image.

The really grievous injury, when people you love who hurt you don’t accept responsibility for causing you pain and insistently blame you for causing their anger, is the abandonment, and threat of making that abandonment permanent, afterwards. You can either accept all blame, take your beating, and move on like nothing happened to you, or it will get even worse for you. In the end, your only option (outside of truly realizing you are not to blame for your hurt feelings) is taking it out on yourself – or, as in the case of a broken friendship (much harder to do with a family member) getting out of the way of future blows.

Although my recent experience with your folks likely resonates with your own, I’m sorry if it intrudes on what I’m trying to tell you. Let me keep this letter directly about you and the challenges you face.  You recall that powerful moment from Goodwill Hunting when Robin Williams, as the psychiatrist, keeps repeating to Will “it’s not your fault.”?  It’s not your fault, Talia.  Sometimes we need to hear it from an objective observer, I was there very often and I watched everything with absolutely no ax to grind (to resort to cliché, just for the hell of it).

We are all sometimes, and in some ways, assholes.  The assholes who do their best to make amends and can truly forgive themselves, without conditions, love themselves (and others) the best.   I don’t mean forgive yourself no matter what, fuck trying to learn and do better and fuck everybody else. I mean forgive yourself, ultimately, when all the thinking and analyzing are done, and every demonstration of good will is exhausted, realizing you did the best you could, if you did, or, if not the best you could, maybe the best you could have done under those bad circumstances. 

Years ago my parents’ best friend, Arlene, took me for a walk at sunset, on a beautiful hill overlooking a verdant river valley soon to be “developed” by “developers”.  She lit up a tiny pipe, we each took a couple of hits, and she laid something heavy on me that turned on a light in the universe for me.   She told me to put what she was telling me in my pocket, think about it, that it might take a while to sink in.  

“You know your parents are my best friends,” she said.  I did, there was never more laughter in our house than when she and Russ visited.  The laughter would come up the stairs to our bedrooms, along with the smoke from Arlene’s chain smoking.

“I know you carry the burden of feeling like you are a disappointment to your parents, that you feel like you are the cause of their unhappiness and have to do something remarkable with your life to make them happy.  You need to know that your parents are very unhappy people, having nothing to do with you.  You don’t need to carry the heavy weight of their unhappiness.  You should put that burden down, it’s not your fault and it’s not yours to carry.”

No need to put that one in my pocket.   It was like she’d reached up and pulled a string to turn on the light.  We need to see what is our’s to own, and try to fix, and what is not.   The simple truth of it, obvious as it also was, once Arlene said it out loud, almost immediately illuminated the start of a long path out of a particular misery that had always been completely unnavigable.  

I have wanted to pay that blessing forward for forty years.  Whether I have done so now is up to you.  

If you get back to me, remind me that there is one more piece of this puzzling turn with your parents that I want to run by you and your brothers.  While it is almost certainly impossible to resume our friendship (the breezy social version I offered at D’s wedding apparently infuriated them), for the reasons I’ve set out above, I still care about them and have a specific concern about your father’s health, which doesn’t belong in this letter.   Not that there’s anything I can do about it, except bounce it off his kids.

My best to J.

Love,

Abe