Category Archives: Ahimsa

Intermittent Empathy

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 kinds of anger

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.  

Psychopaths do not all literally kill people with their own hands

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.”

source (for both quotes above)

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.

Writing as pain relief

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.

To trust or not to trust?

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.

Our Age of Bullying Narcissism

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.)

 

https://youtube.com/shorts/u7VZlBfay84?si=kHPVItgi1nnhZW1I

MLK Day 2025

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.

The psychopathic worldview

From the personal to the political, there are some people who cannot be wrong, no matter what they might have done. A mountain of evidence, a clear chain of cause and effect, the corroborating testimony of 250 eye witnesses, incriminating statements they themselves repeatedly make — angrily reduced to the satanic work of sick, evil haters determined to unfairly persecute them, out of pure, blind spite, malice, irrational hatred. The person who can never be wrong must remake the world into a place that always serves them without question or contradiction, in order to make themselves feel irrefutably right, no matter what.

It’s disorienting, especially at first, to realize the relatively small role rationality, common sense, plays in many lives, in mass politics and in history. In the name of an abstract higher cause, masses of people will reflexively reject the facts, cause and effect, all appeals to human empathy, if it suits their larger need to belong, to feel righteous and correct. The Capitol policeman crying out in pain as an enraged mob crushed him in the doorway he was defending during the January 6 riot? Bullshit, a paid crisis actor pretending to be in pain, a cynical play by evil commies to blame perfectly peaceful tourists they want to viciously paint as trespassing rioters! That eyeball gouged out of another officer’s head? His own fault for fighting true patriots in the name of a sick, insane cheater and traitor!

An infuriating lie is effective because it is short, conclusive, easy to repeat and impossible, once repeated over and over, to disabuse people of. “They’re eating the pets!” was a laugh line for Kamala and millions of us, but it was instantly memorable and damn good for fundraising, for turning up the already boiling pot of outrage against imagined hoards of disgusting vermin who are raping young white girls and poisoning our nation’s blood [1]. 

The professional liar has a transactional, self-serving view of other people. It is a transgressive thrill for fans of the liar that reality itself must conform to the liar’s framing and the so-called truth, that a lie can instantly render what did or didn’t actually happen impotently irrelevant. The liar “owns” his hated enemies with his infinite ability to change the facts on demand. The power of a venerated liar’s reframing is that it blurs then obliterates every other narrative. Truth and lies are transactional commodities just like anything else employed in the art of the deal. To millions among us, increasingly, objective truth is whatever we most fervently believe to be true. That belief does not make things that actually happened disappear, but the belief that they disappear is good enough for most people.

The psychopathic personality, with its insatiable need to dominate and feel superior to others, can never be satisfied in the way most people are satisfied. If it has $10,000,000,000, it must have $100,000,000,000, $1,000,000,000,000, because it is intolerable that some other greedy bastard can have more billions than they do. What will they do to achieve their endlessly out of reach goal? Everything you can think of and many things you can’t imagine. No price is too high for others to pay for the realization of the powerful psychopath’s blind desire.

We have a front row seat now to watch these sick fucks in action as they take positions of power in the new government. The incoming president will have a cabinet full of them, and there are hundreds more waiting in the wings when he starts firing this first batch. For every George Soros, a wealthy man with a social conscience, there are a hundred billionaires who will embrace any Nazi, klansman or Putinist who promises them even more wealth and power. Robert Reich published this clip from the 1930s NY Times as an illustration of what we are seeing right now among our “greatest citizens” and their corporate avatars:

I recently got an email containing the perfect encapsulation of the absolutist worldview of someone who can never be wrong. I’d written in detail to a cousin about a lifelong conflict with my father, a man with many great qualities, and an uncontrollable need to never be wrong. I provided many examples of the senselessness of this long war, of my many attempts at reconciliation. I included quotes of my father’s genuine regret, right before he died, sadly acknowledging my many unrequited attempts to make peace over the years. He harshly berated himself for his inability to reciprocate, and expressed terrible self-loathing for having turned our relationship into a battle to the death instead of being an empathetic father capable of a loving, mutual relationship. He explained what I already understood, that he acted this way because he was crushed in his soul, finished for life at age two, as he put it, by a furious, violent mother who beat all hope out of him.

The response I received from this cousin struck me as a textbook illustration of the psychotic worldview. In short, clipped sentences it stated a series of irrefutable facts, the world as he understood it. Conspicuously absent was any reference to anything I’d written, any question I’d posed. Statement: the father I’d portrayed, Irv #1, was essentially my unrecognizably distorted creation, the product of my angry, conflict-prone personality, divorced from lived reality and entirely my burden. 

The person this cousin had experienced, who he dubbed Irv #2, had absolutely nothing in common with my Irv #1. Irv #1 and Irv #2 were irreconcilable entities and no matter how much information I provided him, how many quotes of Irv’s actual deathbed regrets and self-recriminations, he would never see anything but his pure, loving view of the very best of the man. I would never get any acknowledgment of anything I ever said or wrote to this person, no conversation was possible — in describing my father truthfully, and with nuance, I had crossed into the dark side. I was now a betrayer of a loving memory and entitled only to a series of icy statements of fact.

This cousin is highly intelligent, has a scientific turn of mind, an engineering background, yet he couldn’t acknowledge that every person contains multiple aspects, strengths, weaknesses, conflicting desires, contradictory behaviors. We show different sides of ourselves to different people, at different times. Picture a Venn diagram showing aspects of the personalities of his two opposing, irreconcilable Irvs, there is always an overlap of desirable and undesirable traits, unless the person is that exceedingly rare outlier who is somehow purely one or the other. The response I got stated, essentially — I see black, you see white. There can be no ambiguity, no discussion, no room for compromise in this world, no nuance, nor any color. The very things Irv #1 bitterly lamented never experiencing as he voiced regrets the last night of his life. 

“I imagine how much richer my life would have been,” my father, Irv #1/Irv #2, said in a dying man’s voice, “if I had been able to see all the nuance, gradation and color in the world instead of seeing everything in harsh, childish black and white. The world’s not black and white, Elie.”

Human affairs is black and white only if you are damaged in your soul beyond the ability to perceive the human complexities and colorful, sometimes terrible, contradictions we all contain. Absurd as it sounds, this crabbed logic (A or B, never both) leads to propositions like — a philanthropist cannot also be a cold hearted criminal, even if there is ample proof that the person is, in fact, both of these things. 

The final appeal of the psychopath’s worldview is that, if you can accept it, all ambiguity and complication is removed from this complex, challengingly nuanced world. That this freedom from uncertainty comes at the cost it does is of little concern to people desperate for the righteous relief provided by knowing who to love and who to hate, without ever having to meet them.

[1]

See also:

I’m the bad guy

I keep forgetting this essential fact in a corporate society — the person with the complaint is always the problem. 

Who would you rather be, a wealthy, philanthropic, problem-solving job creator or a sniveling, powerless loser trying to lodge some niggling complaint?   Not much to choose there, really, in our either/or, winner/loser, black/white, powerful/helpless culture.   Then, among us puny earthlings, there is the personal sphere, the only thing we can sometimes control — how we act in response to stress.

If it weren’t for whiners like me who need to make a “complaint” any time they feel slighted, cheated, over-billed, underserved, physically or emotionally injured and all the other annoying signs of personal self-pity, corporations would never be troubled by the odd customer with a gripe of some kind.   Life is unfair, everybody, even the most powerful among us, has gripes.  De minimis non curat lex.  “The law does not concern itself with your trifle, asshole.”  Sounds more majestic in Latin.

Somehow, I take the fact that I am now a cripple personally.  When I use that ugly term to refer to myself (we prefer to be known as ‘person with a disability’ or something more respectful than ‘cripple’ or ‘gimp'[1]) I am describing a person who cannot walk a few steps without pain.  It is not uncommon for a medical limitation such as not being able to walk, after a knee replacement, with no available medical cure, to eventually make a person bitter.   I am now officially fucking bitter.

I obliged the wife yesterday by sending my dermatologist photos of two new skin growths.  I went on the MyChart of the corporation my doctor works for and sent a message.  My question was if either of these look suspicious enough to merit expediting my appointment, currently set for April.

After a night of interrupted, low quality sleep (ongoing pain, swelling and stiffness in my impeccably installed prosthetic left knee) that left me without REM, deep sleep, or any real rest, I woke today, Friday, to a text from the dermatologist’s office with a Monday morning appointment (90 minutes from here at that hour).

I hadn’t heard from my doctor. It generally takes a few days, and she always gets back to me. There was a notation on the portal, when I logged in, that my doctor had not yet seen my note. Somehow, somebody (a fucking bot driven by AI is my best guess) scanned my note, saw the words “expedited appointment” and put me on the calendar for Monday morning.

Annoying, but easily remedied by calling to cancel the appointment.  In hindsight I should have just texted “N” to “not confirm” and been done with it.  I was already cranky from another shit night’s sleep, the inability of the medical profession to fix the new problem they had caused for me, and everything related to the pain, physical and emotional, of being unable to walk.  I made the mistake of not texting “N”, instead calling to find out if there was some reason for this sudden emergency appointment.

As is the case whenever trying to talk to anyone in a corporate medical office, it was a gauntlet of ads, unsolicited advice about their convenient website and hold music.  I hung up angrily after a few minutes of a five second loop of hold muzak played over and over and over.  The wife, seeing me upset, moved in to help me out.  At one point, when she had someone on the line, she began to cry in frustration and overflowing sympathy for my aggravation.  I took the phone, explained the situation, canceled the appointment, handed the phone back to the wife.  Ten minutes later she was still making nice with the very nice clerk at the appointment desk.  The doctor was seeing other patients, but would personally call me at her earliest opportunity, she let me know.

I didn’t need a call from the doctor.  I’d make an earlier appointment if needed to after I got her response on the portal.  There was no need to trouble the doctor, there was no need to trouble myself, and yet, the call went on and on until I finally lost my shit and began screaming, as I do in the shower sometimes when I’m alone in the house and my knee is screaming along with me. 

The wife is now hurt, and I am a brutal fucking bitter asshole, in addition to an ungrateful one who snarls and yells at someone who is only trying to help me. 

Have a blessed day, y’all.  May this cautionary tale remind you to be the best person you can be, and remember to make nice after you lose control of your frustrations.

[1] Across the board, people with disabilities generally agree that words implying the person is a victim of their disability should be avoided. For example, it is recommended that people choose phrases like “they had a stroke” instead of “they are a stroke victim” or “they suffered a stroke.” These negative phrases can imply that the person is passive to their condition.         

source