Also today [May 5], at a meeting to announce that Washington, D.C., will host the 2027 National Football League draft, Trump confirmed that he suddenly decided to announce he was reopening Alcatraz because the word sounded strong. “It represents something very strong, very powerful in terms of law and order. Our country needs law and order. Alcatraz is uh, I would say the ultimate, right? Alcatraz. Sing Sing and Alcatraz, the movies…. Nobody’s ever escaped from Alcatraz and just represented something, uh, strong having to do with law and order. We need law and order in this country. And so we’re going to look at it. Some of the people up here are going to be working very hard on that, and, uh, we had a little conversation. I think it’s gonna be very interesting. We’ll see if we can bring it back. In large form, add a lot. But I think it represents something. Right now, it’s a big hulk that’s sitting there rusting and rotting, uh, very, uh, you look at it, it’s sort of, you saw that picture that was put out. It’s sort of amazing, but it sort of represents something that’s both horrible and beautiful and strong and miserable, weak. And it’s got a lot of it’s got a lot of qualities that are interesting. And I think they make a point”
I grew up in a home where incoherent positions were taken regularly by our parents during our nightly standoffs at the dinner table. I was told over the years, with no uncertainty, that at three days old I silently declared myself an implacable enemy of my innocent father. My parents, both highly intelligent and well-educated, believed this to the day they died, eighty years later. As a result of this kind of mind-numbing idiocy, from two otherwise smart people, I have a lifelong intolerance for incoherence, particularly when it is being asserted as a fact you’d better goddamned believe, because I insist it’s true.
Spirited debate is sometimes necessary to resolve a disagreement. This process is not always easy or fun. But with good faith we can often thrash out solutions to difficult problems by producing arguments that persuade the other person to consider their position from another angle. This ability to reason a way to compromise is what enables democratic government to function. It stems from mutual, if sometimes grudging, respect and a recognition of objective reality that serves as the baseline for discussion and negotiation. It is the ability to reach consensus, and the logical methods used, that tyrants attack with everything they’ve got. The main weapons of tyranny are incoherence, fear and violence.
Incoherence is absolute, rigid, brazen, unblinking, it never changes its tune. Compromise is never possible when faced with an incoherent position defended to the death. The project of those who argue incoherently is total domination. As a matter of logic, it is impossible to reason with somebody who is rigidly irrational. If they offer no proof of something baseless that they insist is true, and they insist it’s true loudly and proudly anyway, you will never find common ground on anything.
This is the dilemma we find ourselves in today as Americans. One of Charles Koch’s most respected Libertarian thinktanks, The Heritage Foundation (author of Project 2025), maintains a database of election fraud going back to 1982. The documented incidents of voter fraud comprise a microscopic, statistically insignificant fraction of all votes cast. Even Bill Barr, as despicable and bellicose a Christian hypocrite as you will find anywhere, called MAGA claims of massive voter fraud bullshit.
Still, you will hear endless claims of widespread voter fraud used to support various voter suppression schemes in every state controlled by a gerrymandered MAGA legislature. If you can’t win at the ballot box, make an incoherent, but relentless argument, about the need to defeat widespread fraud. Anyone inclined to believe that Blacks, Muslims, Asians, college students, city dwellers, college students, naturalized citizens, gay people, environmentalists, humanists, atheists, those manipulated by Jewish practitioners of the Great Replacement “theory”, enemies of the anonymous, all-seeing Q, child blood drinking pedophiles, etc. commit voter fraud in massive numbers does not need proof. That there is a database, even if it has only 1,200 cases of fraud out of a billion votes cast, is enough to convince them.
It seems to me there are two basic kinds of people in society. One needs, above all, honest, mutual conversation, they are open to changing their minds in light of new information from a trusted source. The other kind is willing to accept lies, no matter how absurd, if there is something to be gained — money, membership in a group, prestige, power, being on the “winning team” — and they tend to be rigidly faithful in their beliefs. Black and white thinking characterizes this second type, a certainty that makes logic irrelevant. This kind also demonstrates a willingness to do whatever must be done to feel part of something greater than themselves.
I’ve heard this incoherent style called the dance of rage. The part of the brain that processes logic and can put things into cause and effect sequence is disabled if the anger center is inflamed. If you need to be right, above all else, you will fight to the death with any weapon that comes to hand. You may not be able to win a debate based on what actually exists, but there’s nothing stopping you from insisting on something that clearly doesn’t exist until the other person’s head simply explodes. If you can’t make the other person’s head explode, physical violence is your next best option, provided you have the numbers on your side.
You can’t reason with someone whose mind is closed. You may be able to find common ground, with enough skill and persistence, since we are all humans and have similar basic needs. Common ground is great, but often not enough to move the needle much. When you see that someone is prepared to assert incoherent talking points in order not to be wrong, that’s a pretty good sign it’s time to smile, wink and say goodnight.
There are some people who reveal an ugly side of themselves, often at the worst time for you. You cannot unsee the ugliness of contempt once it reveals itself to you. It’s human nature to make excuses for that person, if we love them, but once an ugly pattern emerges, with the insistence that only you are to blame for any bad feelings, wishful hoping will not change the person you are making excuses for or your relationship with them.
Just because you love dogs, and dream of having an affectionate lapdog, that love doesn’t turn the fish struggling in your lap into a dog. The fish will always die, no matter how many beautiful, friendly fish you try this with.
I had a childhood friend I haven’t seen for many years at this point. He called periodically and we spoke calmly about things in our lives. The reason we don’t see each other anymore is that in spite of provoking me to anger every time we met, for years, he refused to acknowledge this, instead insisting that I have a problem with my temper.
We all have a problem when we lose our temper, but that is another story. We do not all provoke our closest friends every time we get together with them. We also don’t all reflexively fight to deny that we are doing anything bad to anybody, ever.
I urged him several times over the years, if you see me start to get upset, hear my voice tighten, see my muscles tense and my face redden, pump the brakes and let’s change the subject for a while. He doesn’t know how to do this. It’s not his problem. It is mine, as he always reminded me. So, in the end I finally did what I needed to do not to be provoked by someone who can’t help himself. I stopped pretending this handsome fish was a cuddly lapdog.
He is, sadly, unable to view his actions, and the actions of others, with the same clarity. To him we were still friends, somehow, because I took his calls and we talked on the phone once in a while. I always like talking to people, it is one of my favorite things to do.
I like comparing notes on what we’ve learned over our aging lives. He listened as I recited hard lessons I’ve had to learn. This made him feel close to me, that I was always honest with him, and talked in a relaxed, nonjudgmental way. I didn’t mind talking to him, but that’s a much different thing than us being friends.
Friends comfort each other during painful times. Friends ask good questions when they don’t understand something. Friends extend the benefit of the doubt when the other one is off kilter, gently find out what’s wrong, how they can help. Friends accept responsibility when they hurt their friend. Friends make sure that ill-feelings do not fester in their dear ones. Friends are responsive, and honest, when a friend expresses unhappiness with the way things are.
Not all friendships can always be saved, though some can. No friendship can be saved if one friend is always blamed for any conflict, unless the blamed person is a masochist.
If I tell you a sad story of death, with a terrible lesson I reluctantly had to learn, and you reply that it was a beautiful story of life, with an inspiring lesson that is the opposite of the lesson I described, what can I possibly say, without being dishonest, that will make us friends again?
I described my mother as someone with intermittent empathy. She could be very empathetic but she could also be completely oblivious to what other people needed or wanted. How, the therapist asked, can someone be intermittently empathetic?
My mother was beaten down by her mother. An only child, raised by a talented, demanding, strong-willed mother whose entire family had been murdered in Ukraine when my mother was fifteen, she bore the brunt of her mother’s sorrows, terrors and frustrations. Her father was sympathetic, but also dominated by my grandmother, he could only do so much to protect his daughter. My mother clearly grew up with a lot of pain and anger she constantly had to push down. As a result she had a very low threshold for frustration and flew into anger very easily.
My father had it even worse than my mother. His mother, a tiny, religious maniac famous for her uncontrollable temper, literally whipped him in the face from the time he could stand. On his deathbed my father finally acknowledged the damage this had done to him. “My life was basically over by the time I was two,” he said in a raspy, dying man’s voice.
When my father flew into a rage my mother was always quick to join in. It is, I understand now, a primitive, childish reaction, the same one that animates any lynch mob. Another person’s righteous rage, forcefully expressed, gives you permission to vent your own righteous, often inchoate, anger. As a child I was regularly exposed to this tour de force tag team of parental immaturity. There was little I could do, during an onslaught, outside of telling them both to fuck off. This response, of course, made their anger all the more righteous and me all the more deserving of it.
Intermittent empathy works like this. Hours after the bloody conflict, when my mother was calm, and by herself, I’d sometimes be able to present my side of the most recent dinner table battle. I’d lay out what happened from my point of view. She would listen. Sometimes I’d be able to persuade her that I’d been treated unfairly. When I was able to get my mother’s understanding, I felt her empathy. I have to believe that this intermittent empathy probably saved me from my sister’s fate. My sister, never really having experienced either of our parents’ empathy, until late in life when our father became her chief ally and emotional and financial supporter, became exactly the dreaded parent that tormented and damaged her as a child.
I had a close friend, call him Flack. He often expressed his torment at how difficult it was to get empathy or support from his superficially charming wife, call her Gina. He told me many times, with a lot of emotion, how humiliating it was to have to beg for things from a life partner who should give him those things without being asked.
Empathy, of course, is at the top of the list of what each of us needs from our intimates. I’ve learned, since my execution at Gina’s orders, that Gina is an extreme case, probably a psychopath in her need to be right no matter what and her uncontrollable desire for maximum punishment of anyone who makes her feel wrong. Flack, it turns out, is the classic vulnerable narcissist, he will do anything for anybody at any time, even strangers, and he is heroic in these public efforts, but he is vigilant and quick to rage at anyone who might notice his rigid need to be seen as perfect.
No human has ever been perfect of course, but if you are damaged enough to believe you must be perfect, it’s probably impossible to recover from that. Empathy for the imperfections of others as a first reflex is ideal. I tell you I’m hurt, you ask me why. You listen, show you understand why I’m hurt. Then you can talk about the intricacies of the situation, propose solutions, etc. Empathy ideally comes first. It is the hallmark of our healthiest, most life-sustaining relationships. In my experience, with most people, empathy is often intermittent, as my mother’s was.
People are self-centered, defensive, distracted, react with solutions before they hear the problem, want to fix things before they know what’s broken. We are humans, puny earthlings. Still, empathy that has to be prompted by a clear, calm presentation, is infinitely better than what my old friend Flack has to contend with — token empathy conditioned on absolute obedience to the will of someone with very little empathy.
Given the choice, we’d all like empathy without having to ask for it. Also given the choice, real empathy we can elicit from someone else is infinitely preferable to the situation Flack finds himself in. With a mate incapable of empathy he is always required to peevishly beg for it, which he finds humiliating.
This eternal, reflexive humiliation leaves him angry much of the time, performing a lonely dance of brittle perfection. The only time he feels intimately connected to this woman he has bound himself to is when he is vindicating her honor by cutting off the head of an old friend she now insists is a deadly enemy. They are never closer than when he is manfully serving her need for revenge. For me, even the spottiest intermittent empathy beats that irresolvable fucking tragedy every day of the week.
There are two different forms of anger, one saves your life, the other destroys it in the end. The life-saving form of anger has an evolutionary/survival purpose. Suddenly flooded with adrenaline, cortisol and who knows what other miracle substances, you explode in a show of threat to scare off something that is threatening you. This anger, when successful in keeping you safe, is followed by relief. The flight or fight chemicals in your bloodstream dissipate and you go about your business. There is another kind of anger that is extremely dangerous to our bodies, our lives and the lives of those around us. This shapeshifting anger lingers, keeps your body coursing with fight or flight chemicals, which do great harm over time. This kind of anger is always ready to leap out when enflamed, often is not aimed at an appropriate threat, can’t be calmed, does not dissipate when the threat is warded off because the threat, which is internal, is never gone.
Anger that makes someone back off when they are in your face and unable to control their aggravating emotional reaction is good anger, anger necessary for survival, it makes the immediate pain stop. It doesn’t need to stick around after it has done its job. Seedj and I have expressed this kind of anger regularly to each other, especially during these recent hellishly aggravating weeks, when we have stepped over some line in our mutual pain and frustration and angered each other. Anger is not easy, not pretty, not clean but it is sometimes necessary, and when it is, if understanding and reconciliation follow as soon as possible, no harm is done. You can learn valuable lessons from another person’s explanation of what made them angry, learn to do better. Anger is particularly common when personal stress is running high, and aggravated by external events in the larger world, where, at the moment, every corporation and institution appears to be lining up, and ponying up big bucks to Dear Leader, to fund the gold-plated, gloriously violent MAGA swastika revenge parade that America’s greediest, along with the stupidest, angriest and most violent, are all spoiling for.
The anger that kills is the building set of grievances that gather, linger and are endlessly swallowed after occasional bitter complaining, constant passive-aggression, or violence, achieving nothing to resolve any of the causes. This inchoate anger is the unresolvable, constantly recurring, self-fueling anger that creates every cripplingly painful health problem Dr. John Sarno talks about. It has no end, is tangled in a self-hatred and self-blame that can never be surmounted, so it also kills relationships, including the crucial one with the self.
The vast majority of psychopaths, like the current acting administrator of the Social Security Administration, a formerly mid-level SSA dude named Dudek, may never have committed any kind of physical violence against anyone. He may display other marks of psychopathy, but, not to worry, the American Psychiatric Association does not even have a definition of this familiar personality type in DSM V. Here’s what this one boasted of recently on social media:
Dudek was a mid-level staffer at SSA until he won his position atop the agency by secretly cooperating with DOGE’s demands to review sensitive records after SSA’s head, Michelle King, stood in the way. “I confess. I bullied agency executives, shared executive contact information, and circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done,” he wrote on LinkedIn. source
Another apparently non-violent psychopath, this one a billionaire cabinet member purportedly vetted and duly confirmed on a narrow party-line vote, added this bit of clarification about the kerfuffle at Social Security and who is actually to blame for the confusion and possibility that for the first time since the social safety net’s creation, checks for seniors and the disabled will not arrive on time (back to Heather):
SSA oversees Social Security benefits for nearly 70 million people and, according to the agency, was expected to distribute about $1.6 trillion in benefits in 2025. For many people, that check is vital to survival. But billionaire Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick suggested that concerns about a stoppage in checks were overblown. He told billionaire podcast host Chamath Palihapitiya: “Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t. She’d think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling, and complaining.”
Anyone with a problem with the behavior of a psychopath is just a whining, complaining bitch to be bitch slapped by the psychopath. I am very sensitive at the moment to the issue of psychopathy, having been recently “treated” by a top urologist, charming, reassuring and a master salesman, who, truthfully told me (the only true statement I heard from him, with the knowledge of hindsight) the “minimally invasive” surgery would tear tissue in my urethra, and it tore such tissue (as my pain and difficulty urinating, since the removal of a catheter and “leg bag” I wore for a week, confirmed).
Hours after the surgery he told me he’d have to do a TURP, the one he’d sold the “dilation” as a way to avoid (knowing my concern that a TURP at this point would almost certainly end my sex life), since the dilation clearly wasn’t the surgery indicated, as he saw instantly the first time he actually looked into my bladder with a cystoscope (during the unnecessary, urinary tract lacerating surgery I’d just endured). Psychopath and motherfucker both, this unaccountably unethical asshole (unless his procedure left me with a permanent, legally cognizable injury, the jury’s still out as my ability to urinate waxes and wanes).
The main hallmarks of a psychopath are steely determination, lack of regret, adeptness in gaining control over others, self promotion, acquisition, particularly of wealth and power over others, a driving need to be the un-contradictable final word on everything. They are often charming, always persuasive, attuned to the needs of others in order to exploit them, they make great salesmen. The bulk of the titans of corporate boardrooms, and most CEOs, are psychopaths. They seem to make great leaders because they are bold, fearless risk-takers and they project a supernatural level of cool self-confidence, which is comforting to subordinates.
Until their real nature is revealed. They have no concern for the well-being of others, no regret for anything they’ve done, and they maintain a righteous, vindictive rage, unabated, over years, even decades.
It’s hard to read the signs sometimes, since psychopaths are generally adept manipulators who will tell you exactly what you need to hear.
Even if the signs are as clear as this one, in the lobby of my psychopathic former urologist’s office. In fairness to him, his office is part of the nation’s largest network of corporately owned humane, caring, supportive, patient-centered urology practices in the United States. The Supreme Court-created corporate person is a psychopath since it is only obliged to make the most money for shareholders and minimize liability for harm it does in pursuit of profit by any means necessary. Though my sloppy former doctor is the top dog in his office, I guess the “boss” made him put the sign up, they probably have one in each of their hundreds, if not thousands, of compassionate healing centers nationwide.
Make no mistake, and you certainly don’t need me to remind you of this, life provides each one of us with steady doses of various kinds of pain. Today mine is mostly located in my urinary tract, aggravated by a coudé catheter placed after a surgery it seems unlikely I needed in the first place (with a second catheter inserted in an ER after 7 stressful hours straining to urinate the next evening after removing the first). It is day four of the catheter and piss bag, and I must say, it is uncomfortable, occasionally painful and a fucking drag in many different ways.
There are all kinds of pain. Every kind of pain is made worse by enflamed emotions. The realization that the pain we are suffering, the result of someone else’s thoughtlessness, is unnecessary, could have been easily prevented had we not misplaced our trust, is maybe the most tormenting thing we can learn about our pain. In the hours after leaving the ER the other night I was in a rage against the negligent, confident, smiling surgeon who’d done no tests, relying on tests done by a prior sociopath who had done no tests either, before forging ahead blindly with surgery under general anesthesia. I sincerely wanted to punch his lights out. This rage certainly made the physical pain I was experiencing much worse.
I have found, and I confirmed this again the other day, that sitting in a quiet place and writing out a schematic of what is going on, explaining it to yourself as simply and directly as you can, as if you were talking to a sympathetic friend, can give substantial relief from the emotional part of pain.
My initial angry writing was a torrent of what happened to me as a result of a ten minute surgery I spent 14 hours in the hospital for (4 of them in the ER correcting the painful condition I was left with), why it was all so gratuitous, and inexcusable, and disrespectful, and avoidable and sickening and fucked up. That menu of gristly details went on for a few pages. I then emailed my cousin, an expert in medical malpractice, and briefly laid out my case for a breach of the legal standard of care that a doctor, even in a soul-dead corporate medical culture like ours, owes to a patient. These writings gave me slight relief, to have the ugly details set out on paper.
It was the following day, when my anger had cooled slightly, along with the inflammation of my abused urinary tract, which had been torn by the “non-invasive” procedure (first do no harm), that I was able to distill the pain down to the principle of trust. Much of the pain I was feeling was about a violation of trust. What is trust, how do we know when we can trust somebody, what do we do when someone proves they can’t be trusted? Turning to these philosophical questions, illustrated with details of two lying, defensive, unethical doctors who blamed their patient for their own inattention to the patient’s best interest, reduced my anger by a substantial margin. I felt much better after writing this.
Writing that gave me a better frame to look at my current frustrating situation through. This same analysis can be applied to many things in our current world, where liars are frequently rewarded with great power and those who cling to the truth are seen as somehow weak and contemptible. We don’t need to make an explicit connection to a corrupt and threatening new status quo to consider the basic question, an important one for everyday life: how do we know when we can trust somebody?
I have to say, in passing, that a new detail installed by WordPress on a page they no longer support (this particular design), the automatic, intermittently undefeatable “group blocks,” makes editing almost impossible once you’ve gone on to the next paragraph. I will have to go over this again on my phone to make it more clear, and the thought of that extra step makes my irritated urethra clench a bit. What is it with these fucking tech bro motherfuckers, who know better than any of us what features we want suddenly disabled, what new inconveniences coders like Big Balls will insert into formerly useful apps to make us appreciate their dull genius even more than we already do? I see now that there are three dots that can be clicked on, in addition to the normal options for formatting, and one of the options in that second pulldown menu is “ungroup”, which allows editing, but it took me weeks to discover that fix of something that wasn’t broken before in any way (and the fix of their new ‘improvement’ doesn’t work every time, as it happens). Nazi fucks.
Anyway, my point here is to underscore how helpful it can be to sit and sift through aggravations, with as few distractions as possible, and by writing and clarifying, readjust your perspective. The expression of your point of view, and the knowledge that you have set it out plainly and understandably, provides that crucial feeling of being heard, if only by yourself. If you need to explain it to someone else, you have a link you can send them, and the confidence that they will grasp what is eating you and why it is reasonable that you are feeling in the hands of cannibals.
At the moment there’s no medication I can take for the discomfort and intermittent pain of having this irritating catheter in my body, strapped to a piss bag I’m constantly having to drain. There is a kind of self-healing in laying out the good reasons for my anger and considering how to protect myself from anything like this ever being done to me again, no matter how adept the smiling psychopath is in presenting it as my best and least invasive option for curing a medical ill.
I recommend it to you, my invisible friend, as an exercise that can go a long way in self-soothing. Once you get yourself into the habit, it becomes a fairly straightforward path to partial pain relief. In the context of severe pain, I have learned, partial relief is nothing to sneeze at. Whatever practice you can develop for calming the enflamed emotions that accompany all pain is helpful. Try writing for a few minutes the next time you can’t get the thought of smashing someone’s smug face out of your mind. If it reduces your pain by 30%, you can give yourself a gentle, loving pat on the back.
Once you realize a person is prone to lying, trust is often a self-destructive option. Until you see this pattern of untruthfulness clearly, the question of trusting or not trusting can be tricky. I think humans want to trust the people around them, this appears to be a default setting. We homo sapiens are a communal, if also often communally irrational, species, after all, and community is based on trust.
When you’re a helpless infant you have no choice but to trust the people taking care of you. This trust is rewarded if you’re nurtured with care. Trust can be shattered forever if you learn you’ve been continually pissed on by your caretakers and told to shut up and stop whining about a little rain falling on your head. Most of us have upbringings that fall somewhere in between. Knowing when to trust and when not to trust is often only learned by hard experience. We put our trust in somebody, in their expertise, and sometimes that trust is revealed to have been misguided. The question: how do we know in advance that we can trust someone?
We tend to trust people, I suppose I generalize from my own habit, who are relaxed, friendly, show a sense of humor, make the proper sympathetic facial expressions, and react reassuringly, when you express concerns. The obvious problem is that these are all the behaviors of the best conmen and almost all manipulators and compulsive liars.
I’m thinking about this because I had a consultation with a friendly, reassuring, good humored and very likeable urologist back in August. We left the office very impressed with him. He assured me that during the tests I was going to have two weeks later I’d be under comfortable “conscious sedation”. I was relieved to hear that since having devices shoved into your penis is not always comfortable, and is usually done without any palliative measures. The standard line is that most patients tolerate it. You wince a bit, maybe groan, at the insertion, and the rest is fairly tolerable. But I was glad to know I’d be sedated, the better to wince less, and maybe not have to grunt.
When I arrived for the tests, and asked about the conscious sedation, his nurse expressed frustration that he always tells his patients they will receive conscious sedation when his office NEVER gives conscious sedation, does not even have tranquilizers they can give patients. She said he probably thinks it makes his patients more relaxed. I didn’t need to convince her that learning, at the moment of your test, that the doctor lied to you is the opposite of relaxing. I endured a ninety minute ordeal with this gentle, determined nurse, as she tried, unsuccessfully to insert catheters into my urethra to drain my bladder for the test.
The doctor came in, sweaty and smiling, and asked how I was doing. I told him I was wondering what happened to my conscious sedation. He had a fit, denying he’d ever said that, essentially calling me a fucking liar. In that moment I knew I was done with this asshole, and managed to remain the adult in the room. I quickly calmed the angry baby down and got him back to business. He told me he wouldn’t do further tests, telling me my urethra was already irritated enough for one day.
Then he wrote a detailed report, which I got a copy of and which was sent to all of my doctors, not mentioning the unsuccessful catheterization, but stating “patient tolerated procedure well.” It then gave detailed findings of two tests this motherfucker never did. He billed Medicare for them, and I got bills and a statement from Medicare confirming the charges and what they paid. Medicare did not seem concerned about the fraud, it was virtually impossible to report it, even as determined as I was to.
My next urologist was also affable, smiling, quite chill, with a sense of humor and all the other indicators of a nice guy you could trust. He was openly horrified by the doctor’s false report I presented to him and suggested I contact HR at the place his unethical colleague worked. (No doctor is going to suggest a disciplinary complaint to the state licensing board). He did no tests, described a non-invasive surgery that should correct my urinary problem, I postponed the procedure once to have a fuller discussion of it. He gave me a detailed theory for why this procedure was better than the standard alternative, which I’d had years earlier, to great life changing effect. I had the procedure Thursday and left the hospital with a catheter and piss bag on my leg, as is common after this kind of surgery.
There was a complication when I removed the catheter the next day as instructed. I was unable to urinate at all. After 4 hours with a full bladder, and the constant urge to urinate, I wound up in the ER where I was “fast tracked” and it only took another 3 hours to have the painful urgency to piss out 600 ml of urine relieved by a new catheter.
I was sore, irritated and in need of advice afterwards and called the number the urologist had smilingly touted as a 24/7 doctor on call, no worries. I left increasingly agitated messages. Five messages and five hours later, at 2:45 a.m., I got a call from a bot, instructing me to go to an ER and have the ER doctor contact their on-call doctor.
I called again when I woke up and got a fairly quick call back from the surgeon himself. He sounded indignant to have been defamed the way I’d spoken of him in my increasingly agitated messages. He told me I had a poor recollection of our detailed conversations prior to the surgery. I was in a pissing contest with a skunk, only my piss was dribbling slowly into a leg bag. I asked him why he hadn’t done any pre-surgical tests before doing what seems, at the moment, and in light of what he told me after an unnecessary surgery. He was able to see with the scope that, contrary to his prior test-free opinion, there was no scarring from the previous procedure and that I’d likely need the original procedure repeated soon in any case. ) He told me he had the notes of recent tests from my previous urologist, the tissue of lies he had attached to my file in the hospital. He made numerous other excuses and told me how busy he was doing Saturday surgeries at another hospital. I sensed there was not a trace of his winning smile on his face as he defended himself and his perfect recollection.
So, quite naturally, as an irritating drip of urine intermittently leaks through the painfully re-inserted catheter into the leg bag, I am musing about trust, when to trust, who to trust, if you can ever trust someone who is employed by a demanding bottom-line driven psychopath, which is what every corporation is. After all, this guy is the director of his clinic, part of a chain across the US, the largest corporate provider of high quality, infallible, humane, patient-centered urologic care. You can read all about it on their fucking website.
Or just listen to their compassionate on-call doctor, who phones you personally at 2:48 a.m., a mere five hours after your first of five distress calls.
We are, sadly, living in a renaissance of openly proud public psychopathy. This appears to be a worldwide phenomenon, with influential American culture presently at the epicenter of this plague on humanity. Bullying is an expression of deep inferiority that is easily seen, on a superficial level, as a kind of strength. It is the kind of strength that only destroys. Bullying inhibits and stunts the best intentions, and higher natures, of everyone around the bully.
My personal take on people like Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, Elon Musk’s elected second in command, and their stinking ilk is that they are driven by self-loathing that makes them cruel and punitive. They are primally wounded, to be what others see as childish, egotistical freaks; their grandiose mission in life is gaining power to punish the world for their humiliation. If they have the power to control and destroy others, they imagine they are important and safe from the self-hatred that animates their need for attention. If I humiliate you, who’s the humiliated one now, asshole?
I have come to this understanding through painful personal experience, being ostracized by a group of my oldest friends, based on lies told by two of them. My two closest friends, during a tense holiday the four of us spent in a rented house, were quietly at each others’ throats. The pressure mounted as the wife tried, and largely failed, to please her dour, quietly angry husband by micromanaging every moment of our vacation. Trying to help ease the escalating tension between my two old friends was a fool’s errand, and I paid a dear price for trying.
A laser beam of silent rage was fixed on me by the dear friend I considered the sister I’d never had, over a senseless, minor, easily fixable conflict. I wound up blamed for the entire disastrous vacation, I’d ruined a beautiful time on the second to last day by venting frustration in an inexcusable way. I’d uttered the forbidden f-word in front of these two silently vying prigs. It was that expression of visceral vulgarity that became the focus in the days, weeks and months afterwards. My uncontrollable temper, abusiveness and purported inability to forgive became the grounds for my righteous assassination by an extended group of friends of fifty years, the proof was in my own violent words.
My friend called a few days after our tense goodbye at the vacation house, saying “wasn’t that a great vacation?” When I reminded him of the rising tension, the anger, the coldness at our parting, he denied there was any tension at all until my explosion of anger made things suddenly uncomfortable for everybody. He told me he and his wife were very concerned about my abusive behavior, discussed it the whole ride home, were not sure they could ever forgive me. A few weeks of silence later my friend told me “I’ve walked away from friendships for less than what you did to me”. He did not elaborate. More outbursts of indignation followed, and months of silence from my other friend, his wife.
This should have told me everything I needed to know about my former friends. I should have recognized they were now determined, adamant adversaries. Today there’s no way I’d keep trying to save a dead friendship once confronted by this united show of implacable anger and contempt. Now that I can see it clearly, a curt exit is the only sensible thing to do. In my defense, at the time it was unthinkable to me, as it was for Seedj, that our two closest, oldest friends were beyond the reach of friendship. They were, but it was impossible to conceptualize.
It took a full year, plus a month or so, before I finally saw their desperation never to be wrong as the monstrous, relationship destroying force it actually is. Rage does not yield to peacemaking if the inflexibly angry party will not hear anything that might make them feel imperfect, or in any way bad about themselves. The party’s over.
We were going to celebrate the retirement of another dear friend. The whole group would be there, paying a few hundred dollars a seat into his favorite charities as he was honored. The four of us had not seen each other since an ugly ending to an evening we’d spent together, five months earlier, when the woman who sternly told me that she and her husband had a contract never to call each other names, called her husband a name that stung him like an electric current. Then she smiled at me mischievously. When I made an oblique reference to it, they immediately got up from the dinner table and walked away. We hadn’t seen our close friends for five months, though I continued to try to get through to my friend, the husband, who I saw from time to time.
It would be impossible for me to pretend that all was well, and joyously celebrate our friend’s retirement, without being able to talk through our ugly impasse first. I challenged my friend and he dragged his wife down to hear what I had to say, a few days before the joyous retirement party. She had a prolonged temper tantrum. I’d put my phone on the table and recorded the session, to be sure I’d said what I needed to say. One part of me understood I might need the verbatim notes for later use. One problem I’d had in trying to make peace was that the story my friends told continually changed. There had been absolutely no tension in that house until I’d violated everyone with the fucking f-word. My friend had never flown into a prolonged silent rage at me, my aggressive hostility made her “get her back up”, understandably. I was the one with the anger problem, not them.
I found myself listening to part of the recording yesterday, while trying to master some editing software. My friend denied my challenge had forced him to bring his implacable wife to the table (though clearly it had). I was not the one restraining my temper, it was him, and his patient wife, he told me testily. I heard myself make every good argument, and listened to reactions that made no sense, except to deflect any responsibility from themselves. Yes, they conceded, for the first time, eight months after the fact, it had been tense in that vacation home, because the wife had been compelled to scramble, and micromanage, after a planned dream European vacation was preempted by Covid restrictions. I was mistaken about the anger between them, I apparently hadn’t seen anything. My friend told me they often go a week at a time, living in the same house, angry, silent, avoiding eye contact.
It would be a few more months until things came to their, inevitable in hindsight, ugly climax. In the days following painful knee replacement surgery my other close friends in the group made it clear they could never forgive someone like me, a person who can’t forgive. What I had done to their dear friends could never be forgiven.
It is said that the victors write history. They write it in the blood of their victims. My understanding of this dynamic, terminally wounded people who can never be wrong uniting others in their cause, using their power over others to feel better about the immense pain of their condition, runs deep. It could not have been illustrated more clearly than in the accusation, from someone who wasn’t there, that I’d “deliberately tortured my closest friend for over a year to bend him to my will.” My patient peacemaking efforts were doomed from the start, and I was then defamed, because I didn’t recognize the severe emotional disabilities of the people I was trying to make peace with.
So it is with the leaders and mythology of MAGA. They had every right to riot at the Capitol because they truly believed the lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from their persecuted candidate. It was a Day of Love. Legitimate Political Discourse. Those who assaulted and grievously injured police that day — persecuted martyrs, victims of a weaponized DOJ. Virtually everything MAGA stands for is a lie. Putin wants peace, the dictator Zelensky is the aggressor. Medicaid is bankrupting a country of over 800 billionaires. This is always the pattern with these terminally insecure motherfuckers. Zelensky, in countering one or two of the aggressive lies snarled at him during a photo op/pressure session, was trying to “litigate” in public, according to mascara wearing man’s man JD Vance.
We are all living in an age where these severely damaged, destructive motherfuckers are ascendant, even admired by millions. In a better world, we’d treat them as damaged people who deserve our compassion. Here in reality TV-land, it’s hard to do. They reject compassion, having never experienced its healing power. They seek only power and obedience to their will. They continually demonstrate their contempt for the weak, the powerless, the gullible and appeal to violence. Hard to have compassion for people, no matter what their tragic personal history, who want to rule like Hilter did, but with more loyal generals who don’t sometimes get out of line and try to kill them.
It is important to recognize that lying is essential to the whole Nazi enterprise. A bully has no right to treat others with contempt, except in the bully’s subjective view that he is the righteous victim and everyone else the cause of his torment. Every word these creatures utter, almost without exception, is a lie calculated to stoke violent loyalty. Lying is necessary to advance a narrative that makes no sense in light of the truth, of actual cause and effect. USAID saves thousands of lives a year, and feeds and clothes millions of starving children, protects children from polio, in poor countries that gain goodwill toward the USA. There is less waste, fraud and corruption in USAID than in the illegal “agency” of young hotshot hackers pulled directly out of Project 2025’s ass, adorably dubbed DOGE (branding is everything).
The truth is getting roughed up in this current one-sided fight, but it is crucial to see what we are up against and counter the lies at every turn. Democrats, a cautious corporate party, have been very disappointing in this regard. It is up to we the citizens of this besieged democracy. Here’s MAGA enemy Anthony Fauci, from before his security team was publicly removed from him by agents of Elon Musk and his pet orange man/boy.
(Pardon the glitch, couldn’t embed the video, which appeared with a command, from a Google bot, to prove you weren’t a bot, then didn’t let you. Click the link, the pitch is important, brief and well-said.)
As the nation observes the national holiday of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (and racist legislators in Alabama and Mississippi also celebrate gentleman traitor Robert E. Lee), a billionaire-studded contingent will be on hand, in a warm room, the paying crowd and mass of police outside freezing, to witness the historic swearing in of a president who stole top secret government documents as he left the White House after fomenting a many tentacled criminal conspiracy culminating in a violent insurrection to prevent certification of his election loss. Never in American history has this 1933 German scenario been played out: a ruthless and vindictive dictator, hellbent on absolute power, found guilty of major crimes, implicated in deaths, being sworn in as the lawful head of state. Brings to mind this expressive gif:
We have had racist presidents before. I was taught that Woodrow Wilson was an important progressive president who started the income tax and was the moral force behind the League of Nations, forerunner of the UN. What every Black person I’ve ever discussed Wilson with already knew, I had to learn. Born in the South in 1856, he was a boy during the Confederacy and the Civil War. He hated Blacks and ordered the resegregation of the federal civil service as soon as he got into office. He also hosted DW Griffith, director of the groundbreaking 1915 cinematic epic Birth of A Nation, at the White House. Griffith screened the first film ever shown at the White House. I was subjected to much of this film as a graduate student and will summarize what I saw.
After the Civil War, down in the persecuted southland, Blacks were strutting around, completely out of control. They were rich, and gaudily flaunted their wealth, lording their newfound power over the downtrodden whites, who they bullied. Good Christian white folks were being dominated by these overbearing Blacks and were legitimately intimidated, particularly since the Blacks were backed by a hostile army of Union soldiers with rifles and bayonets. White women were in constant danger of rape by the out of control, savage Black men. It is likely that more than one struggling white woman was dragged off to be defiled off screen by the savage Blacks, as the white men watched in hopeless horror.
In reel two or three a noble group of selfless modern day knights arose, to protect female Christian purity from these sick, depraved former slaves, now domineering oppressors. They rode in on horseback, looking absolutely ridiculous in their stylized Ku Klux Klan regalia, the piano music swelled (it was a silent film) and soon these heroes were giving holy hell to the Blacks, who richly deserved it. My classmates and I were all relieved when the long class was over, though the film had another hour yet to go. The professor tried to get us to stay, I don’t think any of us did.
The racist progressive Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States and klan sympathizer, had this comment about DW Griffith’s groundbreaking masterpiece:
So the upcoming horror show with the current cast of depraved and destructive psychopaths, while sickeningly real, with their ability to write history in something much more powerful than lightning (for political purposes), also has to be kept in perspective. Extreme enough pain can jar us out of apathy and despair and mobilize us to find a cure.
When the finality of an ugly, senseless conflict with a group of my longtime friends, who refused to consider the truth before pronouncing an irreversible death sentence, became painfully clear to me, when the brutal irrationality of it hurt badly enough every single day, I had to wake up. Waking up from a nightmare and recovering yourself can be hard, but if the nightmare is hellish enough, wake you it will.
This upcoming shitstorm will wake enough of us up to fight it to a standstill and disable it in 2026, or indifferent fate will allow the very worst of human possibility moving forward. For me, I don’t intend to leave any of this up to fate.
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