Category Archives: Ahimsa

Reminder: this too shall pass

This is the view from my desk, out the window of the room where I am tapping out these words. Our bodies were just about recovered from the last strenuous session of countless lifts of shovels heaped with snow, a few days ago. Woke up a few days later to Groundhog’s Day, the movie. Got to say this for the snow, it’s beautiful this time. The last batch did not sit so perfectly on the branches of the trees.

It’s easy to forget, when you are faced with the forced lifting of something heavy, that this is not your life, or your fate. It’s a few hours, a day, a week, a month, a season. In the case of 2020, a year. In the case of the last four years, a few decades. Everything passes.

It’s easy to forget how odd and disorienting it is living through a deadly, airborne plague. It’s actually hard to remember once common things, like sitting in a room with a bunch of people you like but don’t see often, somebody cracking wise and everybody laughing. It used to happen all the time, the odds say it will happen again before too long.

It is not easy to remain philosophical during catastrophic times, though remaining philosophical is always a good thing to do. Yes, we are living in an age of worldwide insecurity, terror and rage — an age of terrible suffering on a massive scale. Yes, many millions around the world are freaking out, getting unreasonable, desperate, violent, authoritarian. The terror and rage is somewhat understandable, given the circumstances. This is a challenging epoch we are in, a bad patch, historically bad times. Unreasonableness has become the rule in many places. That doesn’t make it right, of course, but the reasons for it are pretty plain to see.

I usually chalk it up to the insatiable desire of a few entitled people, with the means and the power, to have, literally, everything. Pursuing this urge to have everything requires convincing millions that this arrangement — 1,000 for me, 1 for the rest of you suckers to share — is what nature intended. This convincing has never been easier to do than during this age of mass, instant “social media”. It may seem like a simplistic premise, but the unsatisfiable greed of those few in position to do either great good or terrible bad, explains much of the misery in the world.

I think of it like the old story of the fisherman’s wife and the magic fish, a parable about the inevitable misery that comes from an irrational, insatiable desire to have everything. A former girlfriend’s guru compared this unquenchable urge for ever more to a deer chasing a mirage of water as it dies of thirst.

The fisherman, a poor man, catches a remarkable looking fish. The fish speaks to him, telling him that if he shows mercy and throws him back that he will grant the poor fisherman any wish. The fisherman puts him back in the water, telling him this wish is too important to make by himself, that he must consult the wife. The fish tells him to go talk to his wife, promises to wait.

The fisherman talks to the wife, goes back to the fish. Tells the fish they want a beautiful house, with indoor plumbing and heat. The fish says fine and when the fisherman returns to the hovel there is a beautiful house, with indoor plumbing and heat. The fisherman and his wife celebrate.

Of course, it’s not long before the wife becomes dissatisfied with what now seems like a modest wish. “Go back to the fish,” she tells her husband.

When he returns it is drizzling. The fish agrees to turn the beautiful house into a magnificent castle. The fisherman returns to find the beautiful home is now a majestic castle.

It soon dawns on the wife that a castle without servants is not a very good deal. “Go back to the fish,” she says. Now it is raining hard as the fisherman conveys his wife’s request to the fish. The fish seems a little impatient but provides the servants.

You can see where this story is going, and where my analogy is going to go right after. Each request for more — soon it is power the wife wants, she needs to be a duchess, then a queen — is accompanied by worse and worse weather. In the end the fisherman is standing at the end of the dock in a raging hurricane, waves splashing around his legs, telling the fish sheepishly that his wife is no longer happy being the queen, she wants to be God. “Go back to your wife,” thunders the fish.

When the fisherman finally gets back home the wife is furious, dressed in her old rags in the original hovel.

We have people among us who are the fisherman’s insane fucking wife. Their voices are much louder, their breath much worse, than the rest of us. Depending on your prejudices you know who these people are. I am thinking of particular people, or corporate “persons,” owners of vast wealth who literally feel they are entitled to all the wealth in the world. This is a long discussion, perhaps, and this post, about remaining philosophical during challenging times, is not the place to make my case. If $100,000,000 is not enough to allow you to enjoy your life to the fullest, is $100,000,000,000 going to somehow help you in that regard? Just asking.

We have a certain amount of choice about certain things that torment us. We can exercise this choice to reduce the irrational urges we are all subject to sometimes. An undisciplined boy millionaire who craves respect and attention grows up to be a young adult “playboy” who brags in the media, like a comic book hero, about being the greatest winner in Gotham City. Then he needs to be at the top of the Forbes wealthiest list. Being rich and famous is not enough to fill his bottomless emptiness, of course. “Go back to the fucking fish, you fucking fucks,” he tells his lackeys. Being the president, of course, is not quite the same as being the king, or God. “Go back to the fucking fish, you worthless pieces of shit!” he thunders, as he sends a mob to decapitate the government he is about to lose control of.

It’s not just him, of course. There are a few thousand just like him. There’s a genius who makes $70,000,000,000 during a pandemic and tells his workers (and the independent contractors whose tips he steals) to suck it up and get back to work and if they don’t like the conditions — fuck off and die. There’s another guy who makes a similar bundle, stubbornly (and counter-factually) arguing that Americans are smart enough to decide for themselves whether one of the two major political parties is run by a cabal of Satan worshipping child raping cannibals. Just because millions of people hear this arguably extreme claim hundreds of times a day, on his platform, it is not, legally or morally, his concern. While literally billions of people live in desperate poverty, a shitload of the world’s wealth is in the hands of a fairly small group of super-wealthy guys who are unaccountable to anyone but the shareholders. We live in a hyper-competitive society that has only one true value — the bottom line.

People of good faith can argue both sides of this proposition about systemic unfairness, I guess. There is nothing inherently wrong, perhaps, with one person having more wealth than can be spent in a thousand lifetimes while millions of others live precarious lives, bundling ragged, hungry kids into their outdoor beds, while tens of thousands die deaths every year that could have been prevented, if only they could have seen a doctor, in the wealthiest nation in history. It is an abstract question of morality, perhaps, whether we just have to accept injustice as the way it is and has always been, no matter how vicious it sometimes is.

Those are arguments for another day. Discussions, really. If we are arguing about these general principles of fairness and mutual responsibility, the day is already lost. If Reason cannot guide us to be reasonable, it’s set and match. It may be set and match already, only time will tell, though the odds at the moment say that we won’t be meeting in a death camp (worst case scenario) but rather in a room full of people we like where someone will crack wise and we’ll all be laughing again (one of the better case scenarios).

To the extent you can, be of good cheer. Remember, this too shall pass. Here, it’s almost time to gear up and get to shoveling again, if only to dig out a couple of our feral cats trapped out back in this winter wonderland.

Letting Go of the Past

The idea that it’s necessary to let go of the painful past is very big in the self-help world. “It is never too late to have a happy childhood,” we are told, among other encouragements to let go of the bad things in the past and gratefully embrace the many beautiful things about our present lives. As a general principle, letting go, not constantly reliving the hurts we’ve experienced is healthy, essential to living our best lives and to protecting our loved ones. The devil, as always, is in the details of how we actually do this.

Letting go of hurts of the past is a theme I chew on frequently, having a decent amount in the past to let go of. I feel my daily connection to history, for better or worse, and my personal stories, funny and terrible, which support my view of the world. Seeing the value of these memories, I am reluctant to simply let the past go. I feel like there are lessons in these stories, endlessly repeated; learning we need to extract and digest to move forward. It’s important to view the past in its complexity, considering the terrible things beside the inspiring ones. My once-large family was massacred back in 1943, during dark times in Ukraine and Belarus; pruned down to a very small family that lives and prospers today in the USA and in Israel. Both things are equally true.

I think of this theme of letting the past go in personal terms every time I encounter how hard it has always been for me to accept the the loss of a longtime friend. I understand that certain estrangements are inevitable, and we can see them coming most of the time, but also, a world of associations and shared memories are irretrievably lost each time. Each loss of a longtime friend is a little rehearsal for death.

Although I know the reasons for it, it bothers me each time that I could not find a way to reconcile with a couple of old friends and fond acquaintances in recent years. You could say that our lives are the stories we have lived, have told ourselves are true. People come to different conclusions about what is most important in life. Sadly, sharp differences of opinion (accompanied by drifting apart, taking friendship for granted and fading empathy) can prove insurmountable obstacles to a mutually beneficial relationship.

This leads me to once again consider how personal the political actually is, (political views are based entirely on our personal feelings about the world around us), and how political the personal can be, for the same reason. I hope to work through this “letting go” idea concisely today.

There are at least two ways of letting go of things that hurt us, as true in personal life as in political life. We can forgive and forget, using love to move forward without the need to rehash everything that hurt us in detail. This is a kind of Christian forgiveness, turning the other cheek when we are struck, as Jesus, The Prince of Peace, advised his followers to do [1]. Another way to let things go is to separate ourselves from people who hurt us repeatedly. This second way involves making hard decisions about who is accountable for what and what, realistically, is likely to happen going forward if we simply forgive and forget. Once we have done this, it is easier to let go of that troubled part of the past, though, of course, it is not as simple as that.

The difficulty of letting go of strong feelings is most easily seen in the context of physical violence against us, which is often a criminal matter best dealt with by a court of law. If someone beats us to a pulp and then asks us to please let go of our anger against them for their mistake, are we required by any moral power in the universe to agree to this? In the case of violent physical assault, there is an understandable emotional limit to a human ability to “let go of the past,” no matter how compelling a general case there is to be made for the idea.

The advice to let go of the pain and forgive can preempt the idea that you have a right not to be violently assaulted by someone who then tells you to get over it. There is a process you have to go through, once you are victimized, to first live with your rightful feelings and then separate yourself from that feeling of helplessness in the face of torment.

When a MAGA mob ransacked the Capitol recently chanting “Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!!!” elected officials went into hiding from rioters calling for the execution of one of Trump’s most loyal sidekicks for the crime of not overturning an election he was powerless to overturn. There were also calls to shoot Nancy Pelosi in the head. During the several hours of rioting (as federal troops were told to “stand down and stand by” as Mr. Trump watched it unfold on TV) NY Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez wound up taking shelter in Katie Porter’s office where they barricaded furniture in front of the door to keep the lynch mob out. Ocasio-Cortez recently revealed that she had been a victim of sexual assault in the past. Imagine how extra “triggering” a shouting mob kicking at your door might be if you had been violently assaulted in the past.

As a general principle we might all agree that nobody should ever be placed in the situation of having to barricade themselves into a room to try to protect themselves from a violent lynch mob. We might all agree to that, I think (when I say “we”, obviously I’m not talking about members of the lynch mob and those very fine people who support the mob’s right to violent anger.)

Here is a seemingly subtle thing that seems irrefutable to me now, coming back to the personal. If someone in your life is unsympathetic to your situation once in a while you can (and should) indeed let it go, overlook it, be generous, write it off to their being preoccupied with their own problems. We can’t all be empathetic all the time. It is different, and a sign of trouble, if the person is repeatedly unsympathetic and also quickly turns to blaming you for any challenging situation you find yourself in. If this happens with any regularity you will find yourself in a destructive cul du sac of contentiously conflicting perspectives. In my experience this self-perpetuating conflict can often be irreconcilable, since each party is certain that they are being mistreated by the other. If you can make no progress toward getting the other person to see the harmfulness of their stance, it is time to hop out of that deadly dead end.

It matters little what the other person’s argument is against your feelings, particularly if the argument is aggressive, angry and unyielding. Once you see that the other person will never yield, won’t concede anything to your expressed feelings … it’s time to go. Someone who is capable of empathy, and self-reflection, and who really cares about you, will find a way around their need to be right, in the interest of making a lasting peace and ensuring a mutual future. Again, true friends are very rare, especially when times are toughest. You should try not to fight about things, most things are not worth it. Once the fight takes on an abusive feeling — time to go.

As in personal life, so it is in politics. We are being told that Trump’s refusal to accept the will of the voters, his insistence that, in spite of bipartisan agreement about the fair election, and all of his lost voter-suppression and voter-fraud lawsuits, he won in a “landslide”, his raging lies about a “stolen election” that led to a rampage that could have resulted in the deaths of dozens (“only five” died directly, two Capitol Police officers took their own lives shortly after– three more dead than BENGHAZI… hmm…) including the executions of Pence, Pelosi and others, is something to “get over”. In the name of unity and healing, you understand.

As in politics, so it is in personal life. If someone beats you up, then asks forgiveness, then beats you up again, then asks forgiveness — what is the proper response? An understandably human response is to mercilessly kick the shit out of him next time he raises his hand to you, if you have the power to do so. Another, much more practical, response is walking away from the person, not letting them within punching and kicking distance. In either scenario, you accept the hard truth that this person who claims to love you is a violently angry person who can’t help taking it out on you when he feels up against it all. In no case is it a healthy response to simply get over it, until it happens next time.

Countless spouses and mates stay in these kinds of abusive relationships, being profusely apologized to by someone who will, in time, beat the shit out of them again. People stay in these kind of abusive relationships for many reasons, mostly related to fear and a feeling of not really deserving any better from their mate. Every person who stays convinces themselves of the same thing: my mate loves me, it’s just understandable human weakness that leads to the abuse. “I would be a monster not to forgive, look at those tears… ”

We can, and should, healthily let go of many things from the past that trouble us. Awareness of abuse isn’t one of them. The only thing to learn to do about abuse is to recognize it when it arises (it is not always as obvious as a fist to the face) and take steps to get far away from the perpetrator when it persists. Being out of harm’s way is the first necessary step to letting it go. The rest, friends, is much trickier, but we will never get to it while still in the cycle of endlessly replenished anger.

[1]

How often this Christian turning of the other cheek is done in reality, and how effective it may be if one manages to do it, are separate questions. For one thing, responding to mistreatment with love presumes the presence of the Divine in the person who struck your cheek.

Tucker Carlson speaks the truth!

Here is the mind-twisting fact about truth — it is versatile, it can be used just as righteously for good or for ill. The truth, plainly stated, will be agreed to by virtually everyone who hears it.

Here’s one: if you let somebody take over your mind and beliefs, they will be able to control you.

There is no question that this is true. The devil is in how this truth is applied to the larger discussion/argument. It depends completely on who the somebody is that is trying to control your beliefs. Are you warning against Charles Koch and his ilk controlling you by controlling the information you get and what you believe or George Soros and his?

I can find no fault with the absolute truth of the following statement by right-wing provocateur/opinion journalist Tucker Carlson, a celebrity newscaster and culture warrior I generally disagree with. In the clip below, Tucker’s statement is followed by opinion journalist Medhi Hasan, putting his finger on the larger problem — the mainstreaming of crazy beliefs across the conservative right. Hasan rightfully identifies that alarming trend as one of the big stories of our time:

Take Tucker’s comment by itself, out of context. It is hard to dispute the truth of it. Tucker is absolutely right, if a dictator takes over your mind, you are his mindless slave. When I read this to Sekhnet (omitting the reference to Q) she guessed Malcolm X had said it. I thought that was a good guess, Malcolm surely made the same point many times. Here’s Tucker:

(The real threat is a forbidden idea, it’s something called Q-Anon.) [1] Your mind belongs to you, it is yours and yours alone. Once politicians attempt to control what you believe, they are no longer politicians, they are by definition dictators, and if they succeed in controlling what you believe, you are no longer a citizen, you are not a free man, you are a slave.

Like so much in life, the entire enchilada is in the framing, the context, how the indisputable statement is used to support the argument it proves. Change just one word here — “forbidden” (the left doesn’t want you to know about this idea) to “dangerous” (if you believe this blood curdling fantasy you will do just about anything to save innocent children from these sick fucks who richly deserve death) and there is no problem at all with what Tucker said. It is 100% true. Add in some kind of indisputable right to act on your belief that you are fighting a powerful cabal of blood drinking child rapists and you have a different proposition.

But therein lies the cleverness of the skilled propagandist. Take a true premise nobody can disagree with — if your leaders control your beliefs you are their slave. Then, since that’s self-evident, and we all value our freedom — well, follow me, it’s a short step to convincing the gullible that whatever they believe, no matter how wildly improbable, no matter how demonstrably false, is their god-given right to believe and that no godless leftwing radical so-called “Truther” has the right to say anything about a fervently held belief of yours. They may not judge you! It is a matter of belief, not intellectual analysis. In many ways, belief is more powerful than mere knowledge.

This relates closely to the true concept that it is impossible to argue with a feeling. A person may be right or wrong to feel the way they do, but the feeling is real, and the feeling colors everything else in the conversation. The reality of the feeling must be dealt with first, before the facts of the cognitive matter at issue can be productively discussed.

At the risk of being tedious with a personal example I’ve offered before, here’s a scenario that illustrates this feeling/fact split to yer proverbial T. Watch how the end of this interaction with a very smart, intellectually capable friend, mirrors what Tucker stressed in that clip — the right to your belief is the thing that matters most. It is worth infinitely more than preserving your dearest lifelong friendship.

After my health insurance was illegally terminated for the first time in 2020 (the second time was during April of the pandemic), an old friend calls me to challenge me about my anger, which he says is disproportionate, out of control and which, my old friend stresses, concerns him greatly, as it’s very unhealthy for me to be so angry. He was angry about an email he got from me. He called my email snide and inaccurate, said it revealed an unfair anger directed at him, which was, in any case, totally misplaced.

After I managed to avoid a violent argument with him, declining his loud challenge to tell him to “go fuck himself” and we talked further, he conceded that my email had not actually been inaccurate, but that it was still somewhat snide, he said, particularly coming from someone who claims to be dedicated to ahimsa, non-harm. I do claim to be, and try to be, mild in my emotional reactions, to the extent I can be. There is a great value to not giving in to anger, whenever you can manage to. There is even value to the exercise when you fail.

Over the next few months we did an increasingly frustrating dance for clarity about whether I had a right to be angry about anything. It ended in him snarling at me and hanging up the phone in frustration at the implacability of my “righteous” anger. At one point he thanked me for my generosity in not blaming the blow up on him. That gratitude was soon outweighed by unbearable grievance.

In the course of our long email attempts to salvage our mortally wounded friendship, I mentioned the concept of Complementary Schismogenesis, which our impasse seemed to vividly illustrate (I know of no better illustration, actually). I wrote:

There is a dynamic called Complementary Schismogenesis — two people in an emotional cul du sac, locked in a conflict both want to solve, each of their best efforts to resolve things making the schism worse.   Their conflicting styles and clashing emotional needs exacerbate the problem.  One, when upset, needs a period of quiet to think, the other needs more talk, immediately.  

A:  “I need quiet to think, then we’ll talk” confronts B’s “I need to talk right now, then we can be quiet.”  And here we go loop de loo.

Empathy should, ideally, not have to be requested, especially when a friend is up against a concrete circumstance that is both frightening and unfair, is at wits’ end, and cries out for help.   A can say: but this IS me being empathetic;  B will say: feels like you being defensive.   

A hurt feeling does not go away because an intelligent, analytical friend says “you really shouldn’t feel that way, it isn’t healthy, cortisol’s a killer, I don’t understand why you have such a strong feeling about this thing that happened to you, you seem disproportionately angry.  To make matters more upsetting, you’re not explaining it very well, I don’t know what you actually expect of me since you’re not being clear and you’re also not letting me get a word in, even as you unfairly accuse me of things I can’t even understand.  Can I defend why I feel this way?  Do I get a chance to defend myself against your unfair charge that I’m hurting you?”    

A feeling may turn out to be unreasonable, and when it’s shown to be, after its intensity has faded a bit, hopefully the misunderstanding is over and a lesson learned — but the time to debate the validity of the feeling is not when the strong feeling is still incomprehensible to the friend who keeps demanding a rational account of why the strong feeling is not unreasonable.

In our case, the more times he told me he had no idea what my issue was and asked me to please explain again, the more pointed my explanations became as I had to tamp down more and more frustration at his inability to understand or empathize — and his repeated refusal/inability to engage with or respond to anything I wrote.

That was probably the single factor that made me more and more pessimistic about saving our long friendship — his silence on any point I raised. Though he repeatedly asked for my thoughts, and further clarification, and I’d expressed several times how hurtful silence is to me by way of response, his only response to anything I raised was silence, and telling me he still didn’t understand why I was so unforgiving. When he eventually told me he was sorry, for whatever he might have done that was hurtful, my position remained that accepting an apology for something you insist you don’t understand the hurtfulness of is a piss-poor sign for the future of a mutual friendship.

Predictably, in hindsight, my analysis fell on deaf ears, in spite of several attempts at simplifying, clarifying. I heard nothing back on any point I raised — including how hurtful I find it not to be responded to — only more genuine confusion about what I was actually talking about, what exactly had hurt me so much in his series of inadvertently hurtful acts. All this as though I do not express myself clearly. He simply would not even allow that I express myself with reasonable clarity.

My friend claimed that although he regarded me as his closest friend, loved me like a brother, he truly had no idea why I’d been upset. He expressed pessimism that anybody could truly understand what is in the heart of another person, even someone he’d been friends with for fifty years. I spent many, many hours writing and refining my replies to him, in hopes of getting through to his analytical mind. We were in the realm of feelings, though. Accordingly, he wrote that in spite of our long conversations and many words by email, I’d never given him any hint as to why I felt it necessary to be so mean to him in the end, after being so mild for many years. The long correspondence, from his point of view, was simply me trying to angrily out-lawyer this longtime successful litigator with lawyerly tactics. That was a battle the experienced litigator was not willing to lose.

In the end, for him, it all came down to me being, as originally charged, irrationally, disproportionately angry, and hurtful, and a supreme hypocrite unforgivingly insisting on the righteousness of my maddeningly superior nonviolent viciousness, directed at my innocent friend who loved me dearly, and unconditionally. He was totally justified in feeling as though I’d simply reamed him for no reason (“reaming” was the metaphor he chose, I never touched the boy, your Honor…). In the end, he wrote, I hadn’t given him a single clue as to the basis for my feelings, or convinced him of anything. He closed his final email by noting that he had searched our many emails in vain for “any clue” of what the hell had made me so insanely hurtful to him.

So, again, you can be as smart as you like and analyze things as clearly as you like. State them simply, boil them down to a point nobody can disagree with — nobody should tolerate being hurt by a thoughtless friend, even one who claims to love you. Then it is only a matter of framing and delivering your irrefutable conclusion, based on an unshakable belief: it is the fucking Jews (people like me, for example) and angry Blacks who are the real tyrants and oppressors!

Beware of people who often express hatred, suddenly bearing indisputable truths. These truths will be put to their usual uses, for better or worse.

[1]

This sentence, by itself, means little: “the real threat is a forbidden idea, it’s something called Q-Anon.” It seems to be a statement — someone, possibly Tucker (?), believes the real threat is this forbidden idea. Why is it a forbidden idea — because it is objectively bad? Because it is so ugly, inflammatory and improbable as to be unthinkable? Because, while there is no proof of any of its claims, it so easily leads to violence against the evil conspiracy set out in the idea, if you believe the forbidden theory? To forbid is to censor, to cancel, to negate someone else’s freedom of inquiry and belief.

The Q-Anon “idea” is simple enough at its root: Q is a highly placed insider of secret identity who states that Donald John Trump is the only person who can defeat an evil conspiracy of very powerful elites [top Democrats, Hollywood celebrities, wealthy liberal donors] who are pedophile sex traffickers who occasionally drink the blood of their innocent young victims. These are extremely dangerous pedophile cannibals of amazing cunning who are also, horrifyingly enough, child-murdering cannibals.

Just an idea, you dig, the details of which are constantly evolving through a kind of online crowd-sourcing. Just like Liberal Cancel Culture, you know, to “forbid it”.

Why Martin Luther King, Jr. had to die

It’s worth remembering, the day after most of the nation recalled, and many celebrated, the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., that although his courageous advocacy led to changes in the laws of this great nation, his moral message did not touch many.

Yesterday, on Martin Luther King Day, Trump’s administration, in one of its final official acts (outside of executing a record-shattering number of federal prisoners), put out a 41 page book report called The 1776 Report. Written as a refutation to the “liberal” narrative (see the NY Times 1619 Project, for example) that we long tolerated a brutal and dehumanizing form of race-based slavery and have a lot of racial healing to do in this deeply racist nation, the 1776 Report purportedly refutes the idea that there is any institutional racism in this great and idealistic nation. Written in the incomparable prose of angry anti-immigration troll Stephen Miller, it has already been characterized by historians as of a piece with the rest of the deep thinking young fascist’s pronouncements and policies, informed by his masters’ uninformed views of history, race and genetics.

I’m not interested, at the moment, in how debunkable this provocatively released (had to be on MLK Day, y’all) report is, how many historians have already come forward to attack it as the amateur ahistorical attempt to rewrite history that it is. I am thinking about the difference between truth-telling and endlessly repeating lies in the service of what is blandly called “ideology”.

The word ideology gives a veneer of respectability to otherwise disprovable, often ridiculous “theories” that underly “ideology”, ideas that are not actually worthy of serious discussion (“Trickle down economics,” “Birtherism” “child-blood-drinking pedophile elites running the opposition to Trump” etc.) appear serious. “White Supremacy” is an ideology, as is “fascism” as is “Movement Conservatism” as is belief in “the Unitary Executive”. All serve a view of the world, based on protecting certain minority interests, always at the expense of the interests of vast populations. Each “ideology” extolls one group while vilifying and marginalizing a much larger group.

Martin Luther King pushed for social change using nonviolent mass protest based on Gandhi’s satyagraha [1] “holding firmly to truth” or “truth force”. The principle is based in ahimsa, non-harm, which requires a person to hold firm in her quest for justice, to be direct in expressing opposition to injustice, but not to use violence, in fact, to be willing to suffer injury yourself, to bring about the desired change. Satyagraha works, when it does, by awakening the sleeping conscience of society to oppose immoral harms it tolerates.

King and his colleagues brought white racist willingness to inflict every brutality on Americans who sought to simply have the same rights as everyone else to TV screens across the world. When masses saw vicious dogs loosed on peaceful protesters, bloody beatings, high pressure firehoses used to push terrified protesters against walls and shop windows, millions were sickened. Moral pressure increased to change some of the worst of the in-your-face unfairness of “Separate but Equal”. Legislation was eventually passed, after the assassination of JFK who came fully aboard the anti-racism train late in his presidency, protecting Voting Rights, fair housing rights and other rights long denied the descendants of former slaves.

JFK had a tricky relationship with MLK, and initially kept his distance from him, in part because J. Edgar Hoover, unprincipled anti-Communist crusader and longtime FBI director, wrote a secret memo to the Attorney General (JFK’s brother) alleging that MLK was a communist sympathizer. The allegations were false — the ‘information’ it was based on was laughably thin, one adviser of King’s had once been a member of the party, but had renounced his membership years earlier (leaving aside Americans’ right to membership in any political party we choose) — but Hoover stood by the truthfulness of the memo smearing King as “red” and refused to divulge sources, citing top secrecy that even the president and Attorney General were not cleared to have access to [2]. The more things change…

King came to see that racism, poverty and militarism were inseparable parts of the same implacable monster of injustice. Integrating public accommodations across the country was a small step forward that didn’t address the underlying causes of great human misery in the wealthiest country in history. The reason we have racism in America is closely related to the reasons we have massive wealth inequality and widespread poverty in the land of abundance. It doesn’t take a communist sympathizer to grasp this. Militarism, using overwhelming deadly force to “pacify” and to “solve problems”, is the irresistible force that allows injustice to persist, as the military leeches hundreds of billions of dollars needed to mount a serious program to alleviate poverty. The problem is not “white” vs. “black”, the problem is a society that allows vast inequality and massive poverty, supported by “ideology” (like a belief in white superiority) and deploys overwhelming deadly violence against those who express any problem with the arrangement.

A year to the day from King’s Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam speech in NYC, coincidentally we are told, a lone gunman silenced King’s voice with a gunshot to the throat (actually, the sniper’s bullet hit him in the cheek [3]). Listening to King’s Vietnam speech you hear simple truth spoken, truth which has been confirmed by history, truth even more undeniably true when seen against our wars in Iraq, Panama, Afghanistan, death by drone, all the proxy wars, like the brutal, current American-backed Saudi war in Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East.

The plain truth of the speech, and our government’s perpetuation of the same brutality over and over since VIetnam, makes King sound like a prophet. The speech also marked King as a dangerous “trouble maker”. Major media (the NY Times and Washington Post among them, of course) attacked him as straying from his lane, destroying his credibility, his legacy. He was marginalized after that speech, monetary support for his cause withered as a result of the widespread media criticism, yet he persisted. He was organizing a biracial Poor People’s Campaign when he was murdered by yer proverbial lone gunman.

Here is some of what he said in the speech that marked him as a man worthy of silencing. See if you can find fault in it. I can’t, particularly in light of the countless equally “controversial” uses of overwhelming American military force, often on the shakiest of grounds, since.

… At this point, I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called “enemy,” I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else, for it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after the short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long, they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America, who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words, and I quote: “Each day the war goes on, the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism,” unquote.

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play.

The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways.

In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war and set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement.

Part of our ongoing — part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under the new regime, which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country, if necessary.

Meanwhile — meanwhile, we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task: While we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment, we must continue to raise our voices and our lives if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative method of protest possible.

These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

the rest of the speech is here

[1]

Satyagraha, or holding firmly to truth, or truth force, is a particular form of nonviolent resistance or civil resistance. Someone who practices satyagraha is a satyagrahi. The term satyagraha was coined and developed by Mahatma Gandhi. Wikipedia

[2]

This was discussed at length in the excellent Kennedy and King, the President, the Pastor and the Battle of Civil Rights, by Steven Levingston. The book is a fascinating, detailed, suspenseful account of the dramatic push and pull during that struggle for human rights. I highly recommend it, particularly in the audiobook version, which is read by a very talented reader.

[3]

The bullet entered through King’s right cheek, breaking his jaw and several vertebrae as it traveled down his spinal cord, severing his jugular vein and major arteries in the process, before lodging in his shoulder.

source

How to Never Heal

Pro tip: NEVER, EVER, ADMIT YOU WERE WRONG!

In a world where we all make mistakes, sometimes very hurtful ones, I’m glad to have a disposition that allows me to forgive people. That may sound funny coming from a man who felt he had to cast many old friends adrift over the years, but it’s true. All I need to be able to forgive is a sincere expression of regret when somebody I care about hurts me, their understanding of why I was upset and an assurance they will try hard not to act that way again. Reconciliation can’t happen without truth. If I won’t even acknowledge that I acted badly toward you, when you spell out exactly why you were hurt by my actions, repeated actions in many cases, what hope can you have about the comfort of our friendship going forward? Think about it.

How not to heal: refuse to hear what the other person is concerned with, no matter what, focus on your own counter-grievance, press it over and over. When they complain, tell them they are whining snowflakes, oversensitive, passive aggressive pussies. “I elbowed you in the Adam’s Apple for the fifth time this week — BY ACCIDENT, ASSHOLE, as I already fucking told you!” is an explanation that attempts to bully you into accepting your powerless in the relationship. “I’m not wrong, YOU ARE,” is an asshole’s first response most of the time.

People who are not comfortable apologizing will often “double down” in the sickening gambler’s phrase we all learned during Mr. Trump’s regime. Apology, admittedly, requires a moment of putting yourself in the other person’s shoes, recognizing that you too would feel hurt, followed by an act of humility — contritely asking forgiveness — that makes you vulnerable. Ironically, it takes a certain amount of strength and self-confidence to apologize, even when you know you’ve hurt someone.

Insecure people have a very hard time admitting they are ever wrong, especially when the result of their actions is set in front of them. By reflex they feel attacked, become defensive, counterattack. It is the only play of someone too insecure to acknowledge the possibility of being mistaken. We are living through a prime public example of what I am thinking about in interpersonal terms and it has us at the brink of being angry enough to actually begin murdering one another.

In the case of the many Republican politicians continuing to support the president (many by their silence) in his endlessly repeated lying claims of massive electoral fraud (he made the same claim when he narrowly “won” in 2016, millions of dead people voted then too), they are sticking to their stories [1].

That their story may make little or no sense, less important than having a story. As more and more terrible facts emerge, like sickening details of the violent riot incited by their leader, seen by everyone, the stupid cover-stories about the sudden need for unity, or Antifa, or Trump learning the first lesson of his life, become more and more ridiculous. They simply can’t stop now, not after their tireless, valiant campaign has finally brought us to to bring about this sickening, anti-democratic zero-sum political moment. Now even a violent riot by insurrectionists planned and fomented by the president can be … a… a teachable moment? — a step forward on the road together? They need a story. Any story is better than no story, wait, here we go.

To hold Trump accountable for planning and inciting a riot, inviting an angry mob to D.C. on January 6th to STOP THE STEAL!, sending the stirred up mob down to the Capitol while he instructed federal law enforcement to stand down, in hopes of seeing Mike Pence (so disappointing!!) swinging from the gallows and the heads of his other enemies on pikes (“Hi Nancy, hi Chuck!! Hi, Shifty Schiff! who’s laughing now?”), would– eh, DIVIDE THE COUNTRY! That’s it — yeah, Democrat traitors, look who’s trying to divide the country now, shameless partisan hypocrite zealots!! We’re trying to heal here, you libtard commie fucktards, and you’re… so… goddamn mean and hypocritical — and vindictive! Admit you’d do the exactly the same thing if you had the election stolen from you, or even claimed repeatedly and falsely that it was stolen from you!

As I watch this heart-sickening theater, personal feelings are being vigorously stirred. Two friends from childhood did exactly this move in recent years. One simply by refusing to admit that his reflex to make me angry had anything to do with him, the other by telling me he had no idea why I was upset with him, repeatedly asking for an explanation for why I was so hurt and then attacking me for explaining it in such a brutal way. In short, two smart people incapable of great insight into themselves, unable to behave any better than they did and angry at being unfairly expected to. Each now has the consolation of knowing that I was finally the cruelly self-righteous, heartlessly unforgiving asshole who put an end to a long, beautiful friendship. I don’t begrudge them, it’s all they’ve got.

I was telling a friend recently that I’d truly have no problem forgiving either of them, if they would only own up to what they’d done, and kept doing, that was so hurtful to me, promised to try to do better. If the first guy had a breakthrough in psychoanalysis and called to tell me he realized that he was actually, unconsciously, often trying to provoke me to rage and was sorry about it, I’d be playing guitar with him the next day. The second guy is a slightly harder case, because although he initially thanked me for my mildness in stating my grievance without accusation the first couple of times, he remained specifically unapologetic (he claimed to have no understanding of why, exactly, I’d been so upset) and non-responsive, repeatedly telling me I still hadn’t made myself clear, pushing me for clarification, and then blaming me for clarifying things, which was very hurtful and made him feel terrible! A more complicated kind of asshole than the first guy, still, I’d be glad to forgive him, if he contacted me with even a soupçon of insight into how his actions, and his constant doubling down, had finally aggravated me beyond endurance.

Politics is personal, its roots go back into our formative childhoods. Social scientists have run tests to determine the basic personality types of the typical liberal and the typical conservative. Here’s a test. Take these traits and assign them to one side of the political spectrum or the other: obedience, loyalty, harsh punishment, self-sufficiency, individualism. If you said “liberal” you pass the test. How about these: fairness, reconciliation, mutual help, community. If you picked “conservative”– how right you are!

We embrace the worldview that comports with our upbringing, or sometimes rebel against it hard, like Stephen Miller (whose family, survivors of Hitler, is anti-fascist). If dad taught you that the Bible said “spare the rod, spoil the child” and took every opportunity to not spare the rod, well, you are more likely to have a certain view of the righteousness of harsh punishment and retribution. If mom instilled a conviction that food should be shared equally by everyone at the table, that no-one should ever go hungry, or get less than somebody else, there’s a different fundamental lesson about what is truly important in life.

I knew the families of these two guys I grew up with quite well. The home life of the first was an endless exercise in restraining and repressing very understandable anger. The mother, a woman of great charm and intelligence, is a compulsive (though often harmless) liar and something of a manipulator. The father, an equally charming person, was treated like a rebellious child in their home, and acted chastened much of the time. This daily humiliation was disguised as a deep love that nobody could deny. The second kid was raised by an openly autocratic father and a narcissistic mother who worshipped his uncompromising dad without question. My friends had little chance to learn any life lessons at home but what they did. Both of these boys, as men, endured rough marriages that ended in ugly divorces.

You can understand these unfortunate backstories and, still, it doesn’t sit right (my home life was as bad or worse in many ways), in a world where we can work to gain more insight and change things about our lives that torment us the most.

I am prone to anger, and it is my daily work to get better at not succumbing to it, work I consciously do. One thing I’ve learned is that when you cannot solve an interpersonal problem with someone, it is crucial to simply walk away. That applies in the moment you are getting mad as well as longterm, of your decision to stay in an aggravating arrangement with little emotional counterbalance. To conclude that proneness to anger is simply my nature, and there is nothing I can do about it, would be an abdication of any moral responsibility or agency on my part. What they used to call a “cop out” in the sixties — it’s not me, man, it’s undeniable, immutable genetic-social necessity!

To return to my personal examples of the problem of making peace with people who have lost the ability to see things from your point of view: the first guy will endlessly deny his anger and his unconscious provocations, make it everybody else’s problem that they are so angry all the time — a stance that is, frankly, infuriating. The second guy will do pretty much the same, actually, though in a much more sophisticated way. They will both be right, eternally. And so be it.

It is beyond our powers to change any of that, least of all in someone else, particularly a person who sincerely believes we can really not do anything differently, or better, than we’ve always done. It reminds us of the role our native dispositions play in our outlook, I guess, and whether you’ve had the luck to have at least one parent love you unconditionally.

Back to “politics”, the sword hanging over all of our heads. As the US nears 375,000 dead of the pandemic, it’s clear that the president, who has snapped that he has no responsibility for it, doesn’t care. He cares about overturning a rigged election he has produced zero proof was in any way improper. He clearly DOESN’T CARE IF YOU DIE and he’s not going to address taking reasonable steps to prevent the wild spread of COVID-19, in fact, he’ll weaponize disease prevention itself and insist on super-spreader events like that mask-free tour de force of domestic terrorism he hosted last week then inflicted on the Capitol.

The plain fact that the leader of the wealthiest nation in the world, whose infection and death rates are 5X higher, by population (4% of world population, 20% of infections) than anywhere else, clearly doesn’t care about stopping the spread of this deadly plague, by itself, should be a compelling argument for removing him under the 25th Amendment. It’s depraved, if not outright insane.

Oops, there I go again, angrily dividing this poor, ravaged country!

Back to the promise of the title: How to Never Heal. Focus on a grievance and being the victim. Nurture those painful feelings, no matter what.

In the case of aggrieved Trump followers, let’s take one major strand of their belief system — that the unreasonable, pushy demands of America’s coloreds endlessly claiming racism in America are a crock of crap. Here’s what you do, Trumpie, hit back with history. FACT: the ones who were slaves, the black ones, were freed more than 150 years ago. Fucking get over it! You people are fucking animals, look at you! That’s why we had a phalanx of National Guardsmen in full anti-riot gear guarding the steps of the Lincoln Memorial as you passed by in your protest march — because you are insane, violent savages who will never be satisfied no matter how many rights we give you and you would have attacked even the sacred statue of Abraham Lincoln, the best friend you ever had until LBJ, if given the chance. Nothing will be enough for you, until we are your slaves. Now get out of our way so we can go hang Mike Fucking Pence.

There you go, it is as easy as that. If you are determined to be right, even with a grievous self-inflicted wound, even if it means being a moronic, self-deluding puppet screaming against your own best interests, it is very simple to do. Take the three easy steps again: focus on a grievance, nurture it, justify it, no matter what; repeat as necessary. You can thank me later.

On the other hand, if you want to heal, for some reason, there are a few necessary steps. You have to be honest. You need to honestly discuss the things in the past that have led to the harmful situation we find ourselves in now. You have to acknowledge terrible things that happened (beyond a nonchalant “we uh tortured some folks”, if you know what I mean) and commit to fixing them. You have to listen carefully, be open to all proposals for improving things, if you want to have real reconciliation. If you want to correct injustice you have to first look at it fairly, listen to the voices of those who are being hurt by it, remove from the conversation those who are intent on perpetuating unjust practices.

If you want to be right, of course, just blame the pitiful losers for wanting to be victims when YOU ARE ACTUALLY THEIR VICTIM! You know what I’m saying?

USA! USA!!!!

[1]

The New York Times, channeling The Onion (America’s Finest News Source), reported on its front page earlier today (they removed the headline in the last hour, during updates, so I paraphrase:) Supreme Court Declines to Fast-track Trump Election Case. I was too slow to click on it while it was up, and it can’t be easily found (searching “Supreme Court” on the buggy NYT phone app doesn’t do it) but, seriously– WHAT THE FUCK? What fucking Trump election case?

One from the vault (Sensitive Dog)

One from the Random Acts of Senseless Creativity files. After I thought about this track an hour ago I went looking for it, a journey through a labyrinth of old emails and various digital booby-traps. After a few small wrestling matches with the technology, I was able to place it here, where it can be found easily next time. I was happy to locate it and I’m glad to pass it on.

The underlying track for this is called Dog on a String, composed and performed by Paul Greenstein sometime after the turn of the twenty-first century, if memory serves. This was an improvisation I recorded, back on April 14, 2006, apparently. All parts were played for the love of making the track and for that reason alone.

For me this over-the-top jam captures the thrill of interactive invention — the joy of improvising over a groove you’re really digging.

Our ability to find joy and improvise has been sorely tested in the isolation of this COVID crisis. Mutual, playful improvisation, a vital part of human interaction, a free delight of life, fades during dark times, the habit of playing happily — another casualty of the pandemic. Playing together gives us joy, undeniable but easy to forget, sometimes. This track reminds me of how much fun play is.

Paul’s track was a delight, I greatly love that mysterious, soulful Indian singer, all of Paul’s parts are superb (if several lovely ones were drowned out by the overloud distorted guitar, sorry about that). It is also beautifully engineered, everything is exactly where you want it to be in the mix and the EQ. I’ll ask Paul for the original track, so I can post that beauty for you to hear.

Listening to this track I hear my excitement, the enthusiastic variations inspired by the sheer fun of following a wildly idiosyncratic groove.

Sensitive Dog starts with a dog lover’s question for Cesar Milan, who then considers the best way to interact with a dog who is very sensitive. Odd to say, I couldn’t tell you what key it’s in, I had no idea when I was playing it, most unusual for me, I followed the singer as best I could.

There are suboptimal notes, which I can’t begrudge someone inventing parts over a track he is greatly loving as he plays. If you don’t let yourself be distracted by the mistakes and take in the entire 1:56 as a piece, I think you’ll get what I’m talking about.

My only regret is the mix. If someone had been sitting at the controls (there were no controls, the overdub was recorded off the small amp that was also playing Dog on A String) and adjusting the volume on the distorted guitar, to allow Dog on A String’s many subtle nuances to be appreciated, the track would be infinitely better.

To me, the track is still cool, instant time-travel to a moment of great fun. A reminder of a vital thing, sadly easy to forget during dark days — the joy of carefree play with someone you enjoy. I hope you find it so too.

What are we doing today, baby?

As universally hated Lyin’ Ted Cruz and now eleven other brave Republican Trump supporters in the Senate (the most highly placed members of the Sedition Caucus) call for an emergency special commission to immediately audit undisputed votes in an election certified in every state (and recounted a few times in several) that only Trump the Kraken insists was rigged, stolen, corrupt, fraudulent, a lie, a big fat complete Communist con job, #StoptheSteal! I wonder “what am I going to write about today?”

I certainly ain’t writing about Lyin’ Ted, the despicable guy with the unsexy wife, whose father killed JFK and whose ancestors, people are saying, nailed up Jesus. Fuck him and his vile, seditious crew (note, this may be the first time the wildly unpopular Cruz is the leader of any crew, way to go Ted).

I’m also not going to mention the provision of the National Defense Authorization Act, vetoed by Trump in the first Trump veto overrode by the Senate (never too late to do the right thing, I suppose), that makes it criminal for federal law enforcement agents to cover their name tags while performing their duties or otherwise operating as unmarked, unaccountable thugs [1]. Who’d have thought such a measure was needed in our nation of law?

This was likely one provision of the military budget bill that outraged the easily angered Trump — if former Attorney General Barr says it’s perfectly legal and reasonable to use chemical irritants, batons and a horseback charge by mounted federal law enforcement, with covered name tags, to break up peaceful protests (Washington D.C.) or to have heavily armed, generically uniformed goon squads jump out of unmarked rented vans and grab dangerous anarchist, God-hating protesters off the streets, force them into unmarked vehicles, without identifying themselves as law enforcement (as federal agents did in Portland) who is the goddamned Congress to usurp the massive powers conferred by Article Two?  Fuck that noise, everyone knows Trump wishes he’d been a real dictator, instead of a Twitter dictator. Today is Sunday, a day of rest.

So, like, what do you want to talk about?

Is this an example of you talking to yourself?

Hah, no, it’s an example of you talking to yourself.

You got me there, comrade.

You’ve been noted, around the house, because, during this tyrannical COVID lockdown you no longer live alone in your apartment where passersby in the hall and in the airshaft have no inkling you’re not muttering to somebody else, that you are, in fact, carrying out grunted conversations with yourself…

Nay, that would be YOO, muchacho.

Hah, OK, you got me there! Anyway, she mentioned these grunts I seem to make as being pretty regular, constant, apparently. From the other room she hears the conversational-sounding grunts, she says.

Hmmm, we always imagined that these internal conversations were in your head, my head, our heads.

Well, that’s imagination for ya!

By the way, I admired your restraint above in not mentioning fucking Acting head Homeland Security stooge Chad Wolf, declaring that unrestricted federal military force was necessary in Portland because violent anarchist terrorists were out of control (he used the term “violent anarchists” 60 times in a short speech when he got to Portland), including those hundred or more bitches, the mothers of these violent anarchists, who came out to form a peaceful barrier between unmarked assault-attired federal officers and their fellow citizens. And, you know, got gassed, the wall of mothers.

OK, OK, calm down. “‘No reason to get excited,’ the thief he kindly spoke.”

Yeah, I suppose that’s true. Good to have you here to calm me down sometimes.

Yes, yes indeed, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Neither would I. By the way, it was determined by the government office that determines these things that fucking Chad Wolf had been in the “acting” role longer than was legal and that his authority was now being exercised contrary to American law.

Look, you know better than most people, when you’re dealing with childish, irrational assholes with authority accountable only to somebody exactly like them, you just have to cut them infinite slack.

I know, I know…

So?

Fuckface likes “acting” loyalists in charge of everything. “I like ‘acting’,” he said nonchalantly, with his characteristic frankness. They don’t have to be vetted or confirmed, their lack of credentials for the job is immaterial, they are accountable only to his moods, can be used as needed and discarded like the disposable toilet paper they are, you can fire them at will and nobody will even care!

Basta, bastardo!

Right! I did cook a nice variation on Divya Alter’s delicious mixed vegetables in cashew curry sauce an hour so so ago. Came out really delicious, creamy, with a nice mushroom accent.

Let’s not talk about that, you ruined lunch, you heartless fuck.

OK, well, anyway, it was nice talking to you, as always, I have to get on with some random creative pursuit now.

There seems no way to stop it these days.

True dat.

Have a nice day, man.

You too, bubba! Nice talking to ya.

[1]

OK, obviously not “criminal” but Congress stated that federal authorities must “visibly display” their name tags when operating in public. Clearly there is a great deal of play in the word “must”.

Musical Interlude

This early pandemic recording (May 2020) seems a good Christmas offering, something about Tony Bennett, the singer who made this lush pop tune popular back in the Eisenhower days, even before my time. [1]

To me this tune is a great example of a great arrangement, you really can’t do the proper accompaniment without playing the two main parts. The chords are basic and provide a pleasing harmony to the melody. But it’s the line the piano is playing against the chords (a clever arpeggio of the chord), it turns out, that gives the song its swing, its groove. The melody, applied over the top, even loosely, cannot help but be at its most beautiful, set off this way by the other two parts. My Christmas elf’s hat is off to the arranger of this great tune.

To the musically hip, check out a fatal flaw in the underlying loop, every time the top comes around (and dig the riff from Santana’s first album in the bluesy final chorus, and a guest vocal from Sekhnet at the very end).

[1]

“I Left My Heart in San Francisco” is a popular song, written in the fall of 1953 in Brooklyn, New York, with music by George Cory and lyrics by Douglass Cross and best known as the signature song of Tony Bennett. Wikipedia

Reservoir of Rage — and Silence

Rage is a famously difficult subject, which is why I’m trying to take some ways of expressing it one at a time. Reframing, for example, is an essential technique for angrily dominating someone in an argument. Silence, in the face of a friend or family member’s expressed concern, or in answer to a direct request for a conversation, is one of the most potent weapons in the war of rage. It has the virtues of being subtle and deniable (there are MANY reasons for silence), but it is also highly effective, dramatic and deadly, in my experience.

Silence can be a great blessing, of course, like when an overbearingly loud noise finally stops. When quiet descends we feel our breathing calm, we can focus and concentrate. Silence (as opposed to blurting something) can often be very useful when confronted with vexation, it gives you time to gather yourself, deliberate and react more productively. Silence is golden, as those prone to uttering cliches will sometimes say in a quiet moment.

Silence can also be used as the ultimate, uninterruptible, elegant last word in a spasm of rage. One obvious beauty of using deathly silence this way, (to the practitioner), is that it’s the anger expression technique that keeps giving, the silence will continue to irk the other person until they can forget about it and the meaning of the silence itself can always be debated, ill will denied vehemently.

Silence is just silence, the practitioner will insist if confronted, though it might feel like the “silent treatment” to an oversensitive eternal victim type. “… and, you know, though it might well be possible that my silence actually does express my utter contempt for you, you overweening baby, you will always get an unwinnable argument from me about why you are totally wrong to construe it that way. It’s just silence… no meaning to it whatsoever, it’s all inside your messed up head… and typical of you to blame me for the outpourings of your corroded imagination.”

The genius part of this defense is that it’s often true — people fail to respond for many reasons, including being busy, distracted, overwhelmed, truly not knowing what to say. I used to be offended when I heard nothing back from friends I’d send random bits of gratuitous creativity to. Now I understand there is no intention to be hurtful — most people have no experience with a need to feel creative and simply don’t know what to say when someone sends them a thirty second bit of original music. Musicians know that “nice” is a perfectly satisfying reply if they like the thing, but, most people feel overmatched to respond to a drawing sent out of the blue, an incoherent bit of calligraphy, a poem, or whatever the fucking thing is. “Nice” seems mechanical, I guess, something original probably seems in order, and what to actually say to someone who insists on “sharing”– I have no idea.

For our purposes here I am talking about the silence that is a refusal to speak, after being asked to. If you ever experienced this kind of bruising silence, you know what I’m struggling to bring out here.

It is an integral part of the game of rage to always have an argument ready to justify your anger and the actions it caused you to take. (The passive voice, we note, is always good in this case: righteous anger caused me to do this, it was clearly not my choice to be so provoked by you, asshole!)

The argument an angry person makes doesn’t need to be sound or have any chance of prevailing based on what actually took place, the only point is to contest the other person’s right to their feelings. Anger is a zero-sum game — one winner (innocent, 100% right), one loser (infuriating asshole, 100% wrong.) It’s an angry fool’s reductive way of looking at life, but there it is.

This readiness to fight, and the devilish quickness to justify any harsh action, are hallmarks of the perpetually angry person. That raging reflex to deny, no matter what, is what is so infuriating about people addicted to that intoxicating surge of righteousness anger provides. Compulsive Contrarians will fight you angrily, out of an insatiable need to fight, no matter what the cost, to the death and beyond.

To be clear about the kind of anger I’m talking about, it is an unyielding reflex to remain angry and to win the fight. We all experience anger, it is an inevitable part of our condition here as humans. Unfairness, disappointment, bad luck all make us mad. A mark of maturity is being able to keep these things in perspective, to learn to fix what we can and not dwell forever on everything that makes us angry.

The kind of anger that demands the regular harsh punishment of others is an attitude toward life. It hardens into a stance of eternal grievance, a much different, more destructive force than what is released when we sometimes get pissed off at the ordinary frustrations we all have to deal with.

Martin Luther King Jr. famously said “forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a permanent attitude.” We need to be ready to forgive, when the time is right, we have to stay receptive to another person trying to make amends — hence, the permanent attitude. Being ready to accept an apology is a philosophical stance. The same goes for letting go of, or holding on to, anger. We can stay focused on a grievance forever, and act accordingly, or learn to repair what we can and coexist with things that enrage us but that we can do little about, without being mad and ready to fight all the time.

Back to the angry use of silence in situations where dialogue is needed. Political examples of this, the brazen refusal to honestly answer a straight question, for example, are ubiquitous. No point to cite specific cases, there are too many every day, every hour, to start naming. Besides, our current political idiocy is too sickening and bringing it into the discussion is a distraction that will take us off course. I’ll stick to the personal here, keep it clean and straightforward, in hopes of making a point worth making.

The epoch we’re living in now is a worldwide Age of Anger, (or Age of Rage, if ya like a rhyme on yer page) to an extent not seen on this scale in almost a century. Since we’re all forced into offense so much of the time, by news designed to make us angry (and watch the ads [1]), it is best to see anger as the personal thing it always is. Anger is personal, totally, for every person who feels it.

Working to understand our own relationship to our personal anger, and what specifically makes us mad, is probably the best we can do, and a first step toward making our own lives, and the lives of those around us, less contentious. It’s also one of the hardest things to do, especially if you’re prone to getting pissed off. We live in a world of constant provocation at a historical moment when the dial is turned up to 10 all day long (and all through the night).

Here are a couple of examples of angry uses of silence from my life, as succinctly as I can lay them out (I’ve written about each of these vexing kerfuffles here when they happened.)

Let’s recognize first that silence can have different meanings, depending on how we were raised. These meanings determine our feelings about silence and our sensitivity to it. In some households silence may be a proper initial response to a perplexing question. It can indicate respect, the person is thinking deeply about your question and will give a considered opinion after they have thought things through. In another home you’ll be taught that silence as a reply means “never,” the silence about your expressed concern will go on until the next time you bring it up, when it will be answered by an identical pointed silence and so forth, ad infinitum.

Nobody who expresses a concern likes to be ignored (nobody that I’ve ever met, anyway). It is a cruel thing to do to a child (or a person of any age, actually). It amounts to neglecting them emotionally by ignoring their fears, desires, questions and concerns. Is it as cruel as daily beatings, making the child go to bed hungry, humiliating the kid publicly? That depends on how diligently silence by way of response is wielded.

In my own life I’ve come to understand, as a fairly old man, that what I thought of as my father’s relentless cruelty (he made very effective use of strategic silence as a weapon) was in large part his relentless inability to do any better than he did. He was the victim of unspeakable abuse in a home ravaged by poverty, ignorance and rage. He did the best he could, I understood finally, though his best did a good deal of damage. This understanding of my father’s helplessness against his pain and anger came only after a lot of pain and conflict in my own life. My eventual understanding of his limitations erased virtually none of it, but it makes the world make much more sense to me.

As he was dying my father made a seemingly incomprehensible request, asking me to understand that, in a real sense, our long war was “nothing personal”. I thought about this Zen koan for a long time before its meaning emerged. His mistreatment of me had nothing to do with me personally — he would have done the same thing to any child of his, no matter who he or she had been. He was reiterating what he’d said earlier that last night of his life: it had been him, not me, who created most of the intractable problems between us. Our endless war had little to do with me personally.

If I was traumatized, as a young kid, to suddenly learn about the Nazi death machine, by seeing black and white film clips of a guy wheeling a wheelbarrow of jiggling skeletons and dumping them into a pit of corpses (an image that caused me to vomit), and agitatedly asked my father about it, what did I really expect him to say? He was not emotionally equipped to say what he probably wished he had:

“You saw some of the most horrible images in human history and you’re asking a terrible question that the greatest minds in the world can’t really answer. You’ll learn about racism, scapegoating, the terrible violence angry mobs are capable of when whipped up by hate-filled maniacs. You’re right to be upset, especially at age eight when you have no way to put any of this into context. I’m sorry you saw those clips that I tried to spare you from seeing, I know you can’t unsee them, but believe me, a lot of the horror you’re feeling right now will start to fade pretty soon. We humans are very adaptable, you’ll feel much better tomorrow, I guarantee. I understand why you vomited, you were right to vomit. You’re safe now, and we can talk more about this later. As you have questions, just ask and I’ll do my best to explain what I can.”

Instead, frustrated and overwhelmed, my father snapped that he’d warned me not to see that goddamned movie, forbade me, in fact, but I never fucking listen to him, that I’m a drama queen always trying to claim a special right to feel like a victim. He told me angrily that just because many members of our family died (people he referred to as “mere abstractions!”) at the hands of Nazis and their helpers, it gave me no special right to feel in any way like a holocaust survivor, and so on.

He was overwhelmed, upset, not at his best, would have felt shame if I played a recording of what he had said to “console” his young son. Obviously he’d much rather have said something along the lines of the more humane response I set out above. On the bright side for him, it was years before I asked again about the slaughter of at least 15 great aunts and uncles and their entire extended families.

You grow up, reach an understanding of things that hurt you and hope to do much better yourself treating other people well. As Hillel said: what is hateful to you, don’t do to others. As you also learn — it is best to avoid people who can’t do this.

If you send a professional writer friend a piece you talked about, something you hope to publish, pages he said he’d be happy to read and comment on, and you never hear back? Shades of that hurtful silence, especially after two or three follow-ups when you still don’t hear back from him. In the end, if the guy claims you’re the asshole for being upset after only three or four tries for feedback, that anyone but a schmuck would have persisted, that, in fact, he probably did read the piece, likely even replied at the time (it made no impression on him either way, understand) you know the story with him. It’s not personal, in a true sense.

If an old friend offers legal help with a painful legal situation you find yourself entangled in and winds up playing devil’s advocate throughout the aggravating weeks and months, then loses his temper a few times that you keep getting upset, then apologizes, but later feels compelled to tell you he only apologized because you are such an irrationally angry person that groveling was the only way he could get you to calm down — you have learned who your old friend is, on a primal level. He operates within a very narrow empathetic bandwidth, to put it charitably. When he claims to have carefully considered every point you raised about the sad pass things have come to, while responding to none of them (and insisting he’s still been given no clue), his hurt silence is predictable, and finally welcome.

On down the line, I have other examples from my own life but I think the point is made. Again, as the sage Hillel told the man challenging him to put his Jewish faith into a single sentence: what is hateful to you don’t do to someone else. We all know what is hateful to us. It’s a good principle to try our best not do it to others. When we know we’ve failed, we should be quick to express our genuine regret.

When you know your personal kryptonite (in my case silence wielded as a final response to an expressed concern) all you can do is tell the people in your life, when you feel them doing that, YOW! THAT SHIT IS MY KRYPTONITE, please don’t wave it near my face! When they know what hurts you most, they have the final choice about whether they will deploy it against you or not. They will decide what the silence at the end means.

Almost never is that silence the blessed kind that restores calm, unless they are silently figuring out how to take care of another person’s hurt feelings and are going to get back to you.

At the same time, with deathlike silence there is something healthy and refreshing about the way the ugly noise finally stops. In fact, there are few things better, when things have already turned ugly, than the peace that comes when somebody who sincerely doesn’t know how to treat people finally shuts the fuck up.

[1]

Thought for a future post:

The mass media has long known that “if it bleeds, it leads”– all the research has shown executives that a larger audience will tune in to breaking news about violence, murder, mayhem, teased loudly in an alarming headline. The more recent refinement to this theory was among Mark Zuckerberg’s great innovations in monetizing the universal human desire for connection: rage is contagious, spreads like wildfire and there’s fucking GOLD IN THEM THAR FUCKING HILLS!!!

Speaking of rage and gratuitous best-selling violence, I would love to punch that particular noxious piece of shit in his smug, grotesquely monetized face. I’m pretty sure Mark would like it, too. And if not, it will be nothing personal, I assure you.

A dip in the reservoir of rage

Years ago a friend of mine from high school was arrested for swimming in the reservoir up in the Bronx. At the time it didn’t seem fair, to arrest somebody simply for dunking his dirty ass in everyone’s drinking water. After all, the reservoir is huge in comparison to one person’s sweat and funk — they drained it years later and the sanitation trucks parked on its vast, dry bottom looked like tiny matchbox toys. There was a principle involved, I realize now, when cops pulled my hippie friend from the drinking water of everyone he knew and charged him with a misdemeanor.

Arguments can always be made for every possible position, that’s the thing to keep in mind. When you take someone to court, it is not essential that you believe your argument is better than your adversary’s, that you will almost certainly win. All you need is what lawyers call a colorable claim — you know, theoretically it is possible, if the court can be persuaded, to interpret this particular law this particular way to prove — or, if not prove, at least credibly allege — that the person I’m dragging into court is a fucking asshole!

Growing up with an adversarial father, who framed our arguments around the dinner table as a war that my sister and I would inevitably lose (how right he was!) I came to recognize specific techniques he used over and over to browbeat his overmatched little adversaries. A big one was reframing. It is such an important technique, and so ubiquitous in daily life and in politics, that I feel obliged to lay it out clearly today, for whatever use seeing it in black and white may have for you.

Framing an issue the way you want gives you a distinct advantage in any argument since it lets you choose the precise battlefield you prefer to fight on. A good frame provides the instant moral and strategic high ground. It is easy to do. Just tell your adversary “while you may feel that we are arguing over (choose whatever is actually bothering the person) what we are really talking about is (substitute the larger, different, more important issue that you want to discuss).”

You feel hurt by what you claim I did to you? Well, you hurt me much more than I ever hurt you! Do you hear me whining about your incessant, blind, “innocent” cruelty? No, what we’re really talking about is your need to always play the victim, your prudish readiness to be morally nauseated, your petulant penchant for punkish whimpering. Your essential weakness.

You may not “win” the argument, assuming there are dispassionate observers to assign a final score based on the soundness of each side’s claims, as in a high school debate tournament, but, well, there are rarely, almost never, neutral parties who will decide who won or lost a given debate. Much will depend on how well you frame and reframe the discussion, how calmly you seem to argue versus how upset the other person seems. As a general rule, the person who winds up screaming in frustration is considered the loser.

Your adversary will not like having their concern reframed into what you prefer to talk about, not at all. Use this natural aversion to being misrepresented to your advantage. When you see them becoming upset by your framing and reframing you will know you’ve gained the upper hand. In politics this is often referred to as “triggering” — you frame something in a provocative way to get the indignant squeal that proves you’re right. Well, maybe “prove” is too strong a word, in this context, as is “right”, but, who cares? Fuck the enemy, right?

A good preemptive blanket framing technique is to characterize your opponent a certain way and stick to that characterization, no matter what is said. Have your talking point ready — my opponent is a (fill in any derogatory term you like) and frame everything in the context of what that kind of person will predictably say and do. The main thing is to keep hammering this one note hard and steady: what would you expect from a (blank)? If this is done correctly, everything they try to argue must be seen through the lens of a (blank) arguing (blank) because they are so completely, idiotically (blank).

The reservoir of human rage is impossibly immense. We cannot imagine the limits of it. The quiet waters we swim in can easily be sucked into this bottomless reservoir by enraged actors, always lurking nearby. Once you are swimming in rage, the limits of what you may have believed you are capable of will be expanded to things you may later shudder to revisit. Such is our life here, among our fellow “wise apes”. May your better and better ability to not get sucked into anger be a blessing to you, and to the people you care about.