Category Archives: Ahimsa

Three comments from a reader

I rarely get comments on this sparsely read blahg.  Yesterday I got two.  I had an email for each, asking if I approved the comment for “publication”.  The comments were from the same person.  I read the first, and then the second.   The second email had this red warning banner at the top:

Screen shot 2019-06-02 at 3.13.02 PM.png

I see now that I have a third comment from Boxerpaws.   So I’ll answer them all here, to err on the side of safety.  I hope you read these replies, my friend, and thank you for your comments.

The comment on  this post

the IRS would have busted Pres Trump if they had found any wrongdoing. What Fred Trump did or didn’t do is irrelevant.

The IRS has a special unit that deals with the tax returns of very wealthy citizens.   Over the years they collected a tiny amount of money from Fred for his under-reporting income, undervaluing assets and other tax mistakes or violations.  Young Donald and his siblings were lifetime beneficiaries of Fred’s tax avoidance schemes and certainly knew, as adults, that he was fraudulently funneling money to them using fake corporations they were officers of, and his other tax dodges.   Did you read the massive NY Times investigative piece?  The Failing NYT was never sued by the president’s many lawyers, in spite of the threat printed in the article itself. 

President Trump will not produce any financial documents … because?   There is every appearance that the president is lying about the longest tax audit in American history.  His appeal of a judge’s decision in the Deutsche Bank case is another example of him being “the most transparent president in history”.  He has been known, on occasion, to lie.  This is something you have to admit, I think.

Also Fred, in old age, had lawyers summon Donald and the other siblings to make sure now President Trump’s plan to become sole executor of Fred’s wealth never happened.   Don’t forget how many times Fred had thrown in tens of millions ($400,000,000 in today’s dollars) to insulate his reckless (or audacious, if you prefer) son from multiple business disasters.

Your comments on this post

“Barr did what Mueller asked, but he waited a few weeks before releasing anything from Mueller.”  Barr had no requirement to release it at all. He released it both for public consumption and Congress.

OK.  But as the sentences that follow the quote point out, during those weeks Barr waited, with Mueller’s fully redacted executive summary and a letter from Mueller disputing Barr’s conclusion of “no collusion, no obstruction, exoneration” in his hands as of March 27, Americans were deliberately misled by Barr.   The narrative that Americans absorbed in the course of almost a month of redacting, in the absence of the details of numerous incidents of obstruction of justice that were laid out in the report (and in the executive summary) was false.  

Have you read the Mueller summary outlining the ten or more examples of obstruction ?  It’s a ten minute read, all Americans should read it.

Mueller told Barr in the presence of witnesses that the DOJ ruling that a sitting Pres cannot be indicted had no bearing on his decision. So which time did Mueller lie? The first time to Barr et al or the 2nd time at his ‘presser’. 2. there is no LAW stating that a sitting Pres can’t be indicted. It amounts to a DOJ guideline. Nothing more,nothing less. IF a sitting Pres couldn’t be indicted for a crime he could rob a bank/murder his wife and get away with it as long as he was in office. Use your head.

Let’s assume that Barr was telling the truth, and witnesses can verify that Mueller lied to him over and over at a meeting when he said under no circumstances could he have indicted President Trump using the evidence compiled in his report.   How does that change anything dozens of witnesses said, under penalty of perjury, in Mueller’s report?   Also note that Trump and Barr are the only two people we know of ever to accuse Republican Eagle Scout Mueller of dishonesty. 

Do we assume, if Mueller lied to Barr about that policy decision, and even falsely claimed that a certain regulation required him to abide by the OLC guideline about indicting a sitting president, that he’s lying about everything in his report, including all of the sworn testimony of many witnesses?  

If so, doesn’t the same assumption apply to President Trump, who sometimes lies?

The standard for impeachment is not the same as for a criminal trial — they do not have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the president committed crimes.   To remove an impeached public official from office they only have to show, to the satisfaction of the American people and 65 Senators, how he abused his power to undermine our constitutional system.

As candidate Trump himself observed, he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose any supporters.  This seems to be the case, if you ignore all the findings in the Mueller Report and focus only on whether Mueller lied to Barr about one key point during a closed door meeting.  

Let us turn to President Trump’s strong refutation of the Mueller report. Here is the president’s strong case that Mueller is a vicious enemy of his, with a giant “conflict of interest”.  

How am I not using my head?

Thanks again for these comments.

 

A few thoughts on thinking

The most satisfying and memorable kind of conversation is like a great catch.  The thought you throw to the other person is held for a moment and tossed back, with an interesting additional idea, and it comes directly into your hand, for a moment of consideration, before you toss it back.  There is a rhythm to this kind of chat, and no rush to talk.

What you just said reminds me of something eerily similar that happened to me years ago.  I mention it.  You raise your eyebrows, nod, yes, it’s very similar, but there is one big difference.  You elaborate.  I hadn’t thought about that, but, sure, that’s a very big difference, all the difference in the world, really.  

You can learn something important when a distinction is illuminated like that.  This kind of conversation is a way of thinking back and forth, of collaboratively considering things and shedding light on some of the mysteries of this mysterious life.    

Most talks between us are not so much this way, they are quick, many unrelated things come and go, threads pop up and disappear, shorthand is substituted for consideration, we move on, time is fleeting, we gossip, we vent, we don’t linger to converse in the more thoughtful mode every day.

We can all remember specific conversations that were on a deeper level, that moved us, changed us even.   I recall one, during a bike ride with an old friend, when she told me something obvious and profound that I’d never thought of.  She put it succinctly, in a phrase, and it changed the way I saw things.  I had one, and only one, wonderfully deep, personal conversation with my otherwise fussy, distracted Aunt Barbara.  In the living room of my parents house, after everyone else had gone to sleep, the moments with her I value the most.

The desire for this kind of conversation is a big reason people love to read.   We have a dialogue, of a sort, with another mind, a mind who was driven to set things on paper, after combing them into the readable form we have in front of us.   I am reading a book like that now, a novel.   Full of what Zora Neale Hurston called “that oldest human longing”, the desire to reveal ourselves to another, to speak our deepest personal truths and be seen and heard as we really are.   Speaking is great, writing is a more refined version of speech.

This dialogue with the author is a big reason we read.  I knew nothing about Shoshana Zuboff except that she recently gave a few very interesting interviews about her mind-blowing book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.   I didn’t pick up the book because I wanted a dialogue with her specifically, the subject she wrote about was compelling to me.  It turns out she is not only a very perceptive and extremely well-read woman, she’s fucking brilliant, creative and extremely engaging.  

She reminded me of Hannah Arendt in the way her book was loaded with thought-provoking insights seemingly peripheral to her central idea. Of course, no insight is peripheral to anything, in the hands of a creative thinker and skilled writer.

Take this seemingly random peripheral insight from her book.   We in the West have long valued the idea of our own autonomy.   The principle that we alone, as individual moral actors, have the final say in what we think and do.   This idea, Shoshana Zuboff points out, is under great pressure now, in an age when systematically modifying our behavior, our choices, how we think and interact, is increasingly monetized by people who become billionaires by tracking our every impulse, particularly things like the desire to be accepted by others,  and directing these impulses toward personally targeted commerce.  

The ideal consumer is one who is not autonomous, driven by deeply held beliefs and a strong internal need to feel independent, but heteronomous.

Heteronomous?   What the fuck?

Shoshana Zuboff provides this great term as the opposite of autonomous.   Heteronomy is the external force, based on an overarching concept, that drives mass conformity.   This indispensable word is apparently a coinage of Immanuel Kant’s [1].  

Note: the digital technology that allows us to instantly search for and pull up information, opinion and historical (and ahistorical) details is a sharp double-edged sword, of course.  We are all very smart, in our information age, and capable, if we wish, of effortlessly fact-checking and quoting very accurately, when we have instant access to the world’s collected information.  We are not nearly as impressive when we have no cell reception and only memory and wit to rely on.   In this age anyone can tap in a quick search and come up with:

Heteronomy refers to action that is influenced by a force outside the individual, in other words the state or condition of being ruled, governed, or under the sway of another, as in a military occupation.

Immanuel Kant, drawing on Jean-Jacques Rousseau,[1] considered such an action nonmoral.[2][3]

It is the counter/opposite of autonomy.

Philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis contrasted heteronomy with autonomy by noting that while all societies create their own institutions (laws, traditions and behaviors), autonomous societies are those in which their members are aware of this fact, and explicitly self-institute (αυτο-νομούνται). In contrast, the members of heteronomous societies (hetero = others) attribute their imaginaries to some extra-social authority (e.g., God, the state, ancestors, historical necessity, etc.).[4]

source

 

The actions of a heteronomous person are driven not by an internal imperative to act based on a personal, individualized belief system, but by an external force.  The masters of the force that moves masses can make themselves all-powerful and wealthy beyond the dreams of the most wanton slaveholder who ever enjoyed the involuntary company of an endless parade of beautiful servant girls.

You get a notification and look into your cellphone screen to read a come on that a third party has sent to you.  Your smartphone, of course, has a camera with a sharp lens and you have, by clicking “accept” when downloading the app, already given permission for the app and any associated third parties to have access to that camera.   As you look at the come on, the camera captures your reactions.   A few revealing micro-expressions are taken and filtered through algorithms that tell the third party exactly what you are receptive to receiving as a follow-up.  Disgusted by the ad?   We are too!    We’ll send you the antidote!

In our surveillance age, privacy is sacrificed to “security” and convenience.   The genius of the world’s smartest man, Jeff Bezos, was implementing a system to exploit his keen understanding that by monetizing the laziness and poor impulse control of the average American consumer he could become the richest individual in human history.  

Shop, in the privacy of your home, in your underwear, for the specific things that will make you elegant, popular, the envy of your friends and enemies alike.  Pay an annual fee and become a preferred customer, you can receive this great stuff almost instantly.   They’re working on a way to have robots and drones get this stuff to you in virtual real time.   What a world!

As we enjoy the convenience of this cyber world we give up certain crucial things.   Human interaction has been changed by the always-on social media machine that converts the world into a data-driven high school popularity contest. The need for face-to-face play, improvisation just for fun, one of the great joys of human life, has been largely replaced by virtual human contact. Virtual human contact that allows third parties to monetize and profit from our need to connect.

Just as the female calf on the industrial diary farm never experiences the play that all young mammals have always enjoyed as they master a host of social skills, including the flirting that will lead to reproduction (these industrially raised young cows don’t need to learn anything, they’ll be artificially inseminated and give more milk than any naturally raised cow) [2] today’s teenagers are growing up in a less playful, far more precarious, world few of us could have imagined.   Except perhaps on our worst day in junior high school.

A world where everyone has a camera on them at all times, for better or worse.  Where, on a dare, or being flirtatious, at an age when people are searching for the acceptance of their peers, racy nude photos are taken, exchanged, live forever on servers in virtual clouds.   At the worst possible time in the life of a fifteen year-old girl a formerly trusted best friend reveals a vicious side, posts that photo of you with the dick against your dumbly grinning face.   Of all the things that goad adolescent suicide, a good public humiliation is high up there.  Another person’s shame can now be uploaded, instantly, on to the internet everybody carries in their pocket.  This is a new, devastating weapon everyone is aware of.

Shoshana Zuboff discusses the wariness that must be imparted to children in this world of eternal invasive, largely commercial, surveillance.  Be paranoid, they are collecting every private insight that can be gleaned, in order to “serve you more efficiently”.  They are modifying your behavior in real time, and the reach of their prying apps, in continually more refined ways.  You are a sucker if you trust anyone.  Do not make eye contact, hit “like” and LOL.

I saw an ad for what seems to be a wonderful project.  A search engine that spends its profits planting trees, they’ve already planted millions of trees in formerly denuded, lifeless landscapes. We can read all the devilish details of what amoral motherfuckers Google’s executives are. They also built the greatest internet mousetrap in history, you have to give them credit.  The proof of Google’s value, as they say, is in the pudding, they are richer than fuck, among the most successful companies in history.   That’s really all you need to know.  Hate success?  You hate freedom!  (talk about heteronomous logic)

The alternative search engine I saw the ad for, Ecosia, has a series of wonderful ads.  They plant trees to restore destroyed rain forests, reclaim arid new deserts, provide habitat to preserve some of the thousand of species that are becoming extinct every day.   You can download their free app.   Sounds like a total win-win.  Fuck google.  Let me support a company that is doing something proactive to save our planet from the rapacious extractionists who are, to put it crudely, raping our biosphere to death.  

Then I think:  this is exactly what they want, isn’t it?  Talk about building the ultimate mousetrap.

Download the free app, along with every other idealist in the radius of Ecosia’s advertising,  and they are on your computer, on your phone, in your home, in your head.   They now have your name, and your every preference, on a worldwide list of everybody who fancies herself an idealist, everyone who wants a better world.  Who do they have to wipe out first, if they are to finally have everything just before the earth breathes its last?   Me and you, baby, the people who are determined to fight the grim, determined, heteronomous armies of death.  

Another bracing thing Shoshana Zuboff details is how this justified paranoia has decreased human to human trust among Americans.   We also have less and less trust for institutions, norms, the fairness of justice.  We are right to be paranoid, as we are screwed left and right, in the name of abstract principles that serve only the monetizers at the top of the societal food chain.   Distrust has become a kind of default setting as we learn more and more about the details of how we are being systematically fucked and lied to about the nature of this nonconsensual arrangement.

One final thought about thinking.  We tend to think in words (feelings come in many tastes, smells, sounds, colors, etc.)  and so a word like anodyne, or heteronomy, is essential in forming certain thoughts.  Without the word neatly expressing and encompassing the larger concept, we’d have nothing to chew on, at least not in a way we can express.  Something to masticate.

 

 

[1] Kant, a world-changing philosopher, is reputed never to have traveled more that a short distance from where he was born.  Forty miles is the distance I recall hearing from a chatty professor in a philosophy class at City College around 40 years ago.   I did a search for what that distance actually was, using the newfangled internet.  That he never travelled more than 16 km. (9.9 miles) from his birthplace is apparently a crock:  

A common myth is that Kant never traveled more than 16 kilometres (9.9 mi) from Königsberg his whole life.[45] In fact, between 1750 and 1754 he worked as a tutor (Hauslehrer) in Judtschen[46] (now Veselovka, Russia, approximately 20 km) and in Groß-Arnsdorf[47] (now Jarnołtowo near Morąg (German: Mohrungen), Poland, approximately 145 km).   source

Ninety miles, bitches.  Don’t believe the hype.

 [2]  Thank you, Yuval Noah Harari, for the description of this animal right to play and socialize, unsentimentally sacrificed without a second thought by the industry that brings Americans their dairy and meat.

Fiction Writing Workshop

Fortunately for Hal, who’d had a novel published to good reviews when he was fresh out of college, he came of age in an era when such things could be parlayed into a comfortable life.  Hal was a tenured professor of fiction writing by the age of thirty-two and never had to worry about making a living after that.   

When Hal’s father died, Hal got drunk.   He got the news from his sister, who’d been at the hospital when their angry, hopeless father breathed his last.  The old man was pissed off that Hal couldn’t make it back to the hospital to say goodbye one last time.   Hal had been at the hospital all day, went home to make dinner for his daughter, and his father was bitter about that last bit too, according to his sister, who had no reason to lie.

Hal told his sister he’d see her the next morning and went into the kitchen where he kept the Scotch.   He drank a good deal of that fine single malt, which the label said had been aged in a sherry cask.   The warm feeling came over him.   He sat quietly at the kitchen table, in a comfortable chair that could tilt any way he leaned.  

When Hal’s daughter came in, her father was already drunk, that familiar blank look on his face.  He changed his facial expression slightly as she came into view, but the effect wasn’t exactly a smile.  She already knew that grandpa was finally gone.   She’d had the text from her aunt.   She went into her room, locked the door, and a few moments later, tweeted that she was going to kill herself.

“This is your autobiography, Al,” his friend Tova told him, walking in through the back door, gesturing toward the bottle, the daughter’s locked door.  “As you have been telling your students for decades, even back when you were still writing, ‘all good writing is autobiography’.”

“Yeah, yeah.   I was full of shit,” said Hal.  “All bad writing is also autobiography.  A meaningless cliche, like all the other ones in the vast imaginary forests of bullshit.  Vanity.  What the fuck was I thinking?”

“You made a good living,” Tova said.  

“Yes, there was that,” Hal said.  

Tova had a notification from her phone.  She read the screen.  “You’d better call David, your daughter is going to kill herself.”

David was still seven hours away, driving through the foggy night from upstate.  Even in good conditions, it was a long and tedious drive. David was the only person who could talk to Debbie in a way that made any sense to her.

Hal found himself thinking of the family roots. His father had been the last of thirteen children, from some benighted hamlet in Poland nobody had ever bothered to put on a map.  Just as well, everybody there was dead, murdered one chilly afternoon in 1943, by people smelling of vodka.   Hal’s father was in the United States twenty years by then, the only one.  Nobody had a crystal ball, or the money to consult one, otherwise they all would have tried to come to America before that madman marshaled an army of murderous zombies.  

“Look, Hal,” Tova said, as she had many times, “I’m sorry you came from such a poor, shit family and got no rachmunis from anybody when they were all slaughtered, may they rest in peace.  I, and I don’t need to remind you, I have the papers to prove my right to be fucked up, both of my parents got checks from the German government until the day they died, as you know.  They were certified Holocaust survivors, I am a certified, official child of Holocaust survivors.  You, on the other hand, are a melodramatic self-pitying drunkard masochistically fond of brooding on history that happened while you were in boot camp.”

“I could have been Charles Kushner,” Hal had taken to saying recently, “son of two Holocaust survivors who got out of Europe in time, their assholes crammed with enough diamonds to build a small real estate empire in New Jersey.”  

Charles Kushner, the billionaire son of Holocaust survivors, begat Jared Kushner, who was so righteously outraged when his father was imprisoned briefly for simply hiring a prostitute and a filmmaker to make a video blackmailing his uncle, a man who was about to turn rat.  

The blackmail video was necessary to shame Charles’s sister, who Charles believed wore the pants in her home (and, also, appeared to be susceptible to the threat of public shame).  If she said the word, the fucking rat would not take the stand against her brother. Otherwise, her husband was scheduled to rat him out at the federal fraud trial that was about to start.  Charles had been given no choice, as he explained to Jared in the weeks before he was convicted, sentenced and disbarred.  The brother-in-law was the only witness who could really hurt him, and they seemed to be on the same page going forward, but the prosecutor flipped him.  

“Fucking rat,” said Charles, when he gave the money to the scumbag who set up the whole ill-fated prostitute and surveillance thing.

“Who knew my fucking sister was also a fucking rat?” Charles later asked a pigeon sitting on the window ledge of his cell at the federal prison.  “They never revealed if she’d worn a wire that day or not, the treacherous bastards…”   The bird nodded.

“Why is Debbie going to kill herself this time?” Hal asked Tova.    

“The tweet is vague on that,” Tova said.  

“I haven’t been much of an improvement on my old man,” said Hal.  “I have no clue how to help that kid.”  

“I’m going to make coffee,” said Tova.  

“To ruin a perfectly good buzz,” Hal said, pouring the last of the single malt into his glass.  

“Buzz-kill is what they called me in college,” said Tova.  

“You went to a top school full of smart bastards, didn’t you?”  

“Not like the place you teach, professor,” said Tova.  

“No, not like the place I teach,” said Hal, drinking up.  

“No matter, David will be here soon.”

“Let’s hope he can stay awake on the highway this time,” said Hal, tilting back in his chair.   There seemed to be no end to nights like this one, he thought.

 

(to be continued, or not)

 

A few words about liberation

I will practice saying this in an anodyne way, in a manner designed to avoid controversy, to provoke no political knee jerks or piss anybody off.  [1]

Tonight we Jews celebrate our people’s emergence from slavery to freedom, from bondage to liberty.  It is literally a celebration of liberation that requires each of us to imagine herself as a slave and to consider and commit ourselves to the duties of free people towards those who are oppressed.   We are commanded to identify with the slave, the oppressed, the victimized.  It is very, very hard to imagine the pain of slavery if you have never experienced it.

Frederick Douglass wrote about how agonizing it was to take leave of his loved ones forever when he escaped from a slave state to a free state and became, for the first time, a free human being like any other.   He commented that had it not been for these bonds of love, and the heart-crushing thought of never seeing, or even hearing from, any of your loved ones again in this world, thousands more slaves would have escaped.

We cannot dream of what we cannot imagine. The idea of something better comes first.  The vision, born in discontent, is what spurs us to action when we seek to change our condition, change the world.  At one time many ideas we all accept today were unthinkable: abolition of American slavery, the end of unlimited child labor, gay marriage, to name just three that spring to mind.  

Each of these common injustices were accepted by most people for centuries as just part of the legal and moral landscape, however unfair some may have privately agreed these things were.  The Constitution protected slavery, after all, there was no law that said children couldn’t be worked as virtual slaves without no limitation on hours or working conditions, homosexuals were long considered deviants to be punished for their sexual preference.  Today we see these things much differently, and laws were made to ensure these changes were enforced, only because, after a long, determined, principled struggle in each case, a more just idea took root in our society.

A vision of a better way always comes first.  What we can’t imagine, or name, is impossible to work towards.  The firm idea of how intolerable an injustice is must take root before any change can begin.  Before we can take steps to end oppression we need to name it, analyze it, understand it, form effective strategies to defeat it.  We also need to imagine and describe the end goal we have in mind.  

The slave dreaming of escaping, getting rich and buying slaves of his own is no dream at all, it is just more of the same.    

I’m not the only person thinking this way, that we need to dream actively of what we want to become.   Check out this beautiful vision of a better world, by several women I already admired greatly (and a couple of guys too, apparently).

 

[1] Tomorrow I’ll go back to business as usual, fuck this anodyne shit.  I  will thoroughly dissect pathetic porcine puppet Bill Barr’s sickeningly misleading, ass-kissing, partisan spin on Mueller’s report, the executive summary of which ends:

The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President’s corrupt exercise of the powers of office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.

CONCLUSION

Because we determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment, we did not draw ultimate conclusions about the President’s conduct. The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that would need to be resolved if we were making a traditional prosecutorial judgment. At the same time, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.

 

(from Mueller’s excellent, clear, short summary of Volume II on obstruction which I urge you to read in its entirety here)

Understanding Anti-Semitism and other irrational hatreds

If you start with a slight prejudice, and have it confirmed a few times by your own experience, you will often come away with the firm belief that you were right to dislike the suspect fucks all along.

I am Jewish, from a once-large family ruthlessly pruned by European anta-semits almost eighty years ago.  As one of the few left from a family wiped from the world, strictly on the basis of our religion and social status, I am aware of the murderous power of rage channeled into an ignorantly opinionated and violent belief system. It is the same anywhere, where one group kills another simply because they hate and feel righteous doing so.

Jews were hand in hand with blacks catching hell down south during the Civil Rights movement.   Both of my parents were reviled as “Nigger Lovers”, which was the common phrase for their type back then.  Now, more often than not, Jews and blacks find ourselves on opposite sides of a divide that benefits only powerful haters.   The way of this imperfect world, I suppose, to randomly divide and control groups of people, and a subject for another time. [1]

Yesterday I had a graphic illustration of how this hatred of groups works.   I waited on a long line in a health food store in Queens to buy some vegetarian burgers we like.   At the cash register I was surprised when the bill was $1.20 more than I expected to pay for the two items.  

 Before you say I’m conforming to the stereotype of the cheap, penny-pinching Jew who only thinks about the price of everything and is always looking for the best deal, consider me as an aware consumer who knows how much the thing he buys regularly is supposed to cost.    The price ranges from $4.99 to $5.49, everywhere.   This store charged $6.09.

The line had been long, it was raining out, a 60 cent surcharge for each item was not hard to pay. Nonetheless, I was a little disgusted at the greed of the store owner, a store doing a brisk and lucrative business, as I went back out into the rain.

On the way home I stopped in another store to pick up something else.  The price was a little higher for this item than at other places, but I was happy to find it so I bought it.

  The cashier rang it up and charged me almost a dollar more than the price on the item.  I paid and left, then looked at the price again and thought “what the fuck?”

I went back in, the manager was called over and I was subjected to a convoluted rationale for why the store was legally required, contrary to the actual law, to charge tax for this tax-free item.  I have never paid tax for this item in any of the dozen stores I bought it in.  That’s because it is illegal in New York City to charge tax for this kind of ready-to-eat item.  I looked at the young Korean manager, who stood firm on store policy, said nothing, left the store, later ate the food.   Now, for the insight.  

Both stores were run by Koreans, no doubt future crazy rich Asians.   I called an old friend and told her I’d had a graphic insight into the workings of antisemitism.   I was disgusted by the practices of both greedy store owners, both of whom happened to belong to a certain ethnic group, and that, therefore, it felt quite natural to draw a conclusion about the group personality of these “Jews of east Asia”.  

Much to my surprise, my friend immediately jumped, with surprising vehemence, into an animated and detailed discourse on the sometimes shady practices of Korean store owners.

“Koreans are famously greedy bastards,” she said, adding a few of her direct experiences with greedy Korean store owners, reminding me how brazen they’d been at the laundry after losing articles of our clothes more than once. This happened because they combined the washes of customers, to be a little more efficiently profitable.

She gave them some credit for having invented the salad bar, though, of course, it was also a way to charge inflated prices for rotting food that they cut the bad parts off of.    

“Some of them are greedy bastards, no doubt, but we can agree that not all Koreans are like that,”  I said, but the point was made.   She was really disgusted by greedy fucking Korean store owners in New York City.   It was a pet peeve of her’s, being ripped off by the snippy, greedy, entitled fucks.

We all swim in a sea of outrage.  Our fellow swimmers are constantly kicking and clawing us.  It is good to remember, somehow, that succumbing to hatred of everyone else, while easy to do, is important to resist.   Every one of us is an individual with a soul of infinite worth.  Even greedy fucking bastards.

Oh, yeah, here’s yet another example of Korean entrepreneurship in a disappointing context.  This occurred between my trips to the two Korean-owned grocery stores and, even though completely innocent  on the part of the school operators, would have sealed the deal, if I was the sort to make that kind of deal.  

I went to pick up a couple of whole wheat everything bagels at the bagel place on Horace Harding yesterday.   The place has been there since I was a kid, open 24 hours a day, selling hot bagels (boiled and baked in the back) for easily fifty years.    I was in there about a month ago, the place smelled great, the bagels were delicious.    

Yesterday the bagel place was a storefront school where local immigrant parents send their children so they will all get into medical and law school.  

How many more examples do you need?

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[1]   Though it was hard to ignore the spectacle of Jews of various political orientations coming together to denounce an elected official, a black woman, a Muslim, who’d bluntly stated that Israel is immune from criticism in America, no matter how extremely it behaves, because it has a powerful, well-funded political action network here in our pay-to-play democracy.   Imagine that, a fucking Muslim woman complaining about a group of Jews using their wealth to influence American foreign policy!   How dare she?!!!  (Even if it is true).   Fucking anti-Semite!  

The case for her anti-Semitism strikes me as thin, particularly in light of what she said afterwards, the content of her apology for insensitivity, what she said in the actual remarks from which the indictment of her was drawn.   She made the point that you cannot criticize Israel’s actions without being called an anti-Semite.  The almost universal reaction to her selected remarks showed that this point was true.   She also said that we dehumanize humans who are being brutalized, in order to remove their brutalization from the discussion of right and wrong.   I agree.  

Did any Iraqi civilian child have anything to do with the tyrannical reign of Saddam Hussein?  No, but many were killed, a fact made much easier to bear if they can be made “other”…   This is an ancient technique.  You are justified in killing a terrorist, always.  If you kill freedom fighters, on the other hand, you are evil.   Now just tell me which one is which.

The clip of her uttering the offensive phrase “dual loyalty” (of American Jews to Israel) was played over and over, and referring to hundred dollar bills, called “Benjamins” by rappers, (after notorious Jew Benjamin Franklin)  to make the irrefutable case that this African Muslim bitch is out of line.  

Personally, I believe what she’s said, both in the remarks she was condemned for and her interviews and statements since the “sensational” story, which blew up big time because attacking the power of AIPAC is as politically stupid as denouncing the NRA or Big Pharma, or the Oil Industry.    

A black woman, a Muslim, criticizing the decisive role of  money coming through the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC) in determining American foreign policy– well, the only explanation is that she’s an anti-Semite, and possibly, also, a supporter of terrorism.  That or a freedom fighter, but fighting for the wrong freedom…

 

Imagining Liberation

I had an email from the thoughtful son of old friends, a young man who was already becoming a mensch when he was a boy.    He asks for contemporary liberation stories for the upcoming seder.   The seder is the Passover meal where we discuss (at the best of the seders) the concept of liberation from all forms of slavery. I’ve been thinking about contemporary liberation stories since I read his note earlier today.

My first thought was the inspiring message delivered by historian Howard Zinn toward the end of his life  when he was honored in France for his great A People’s History of the United States. [1]    Zinn viewed his project as writing a creative history to anticipate a possible future, a fairer, more desirable world, and to disclose those fleeting, often “hidden episodes of the past” when the good in us, our compassion, rose up in a wave to triumph over every one of humanity’s worst impulses.

My second thought was that what we cannot imagine we can never help bring into existence.   This works as well for great, life-saving ideas as well for awful world destroying ones.  Hateful ideas, sadly, seem to have a consistent power all their own to rouse people.   I am imagining a future better, more just, more peaceful than our present.   We have many examples of the world being one way for centuries until a big idea took shape, was afoot in the land, began to influence the beliefs of millions of people.

It was unimaginable to most Americans, in 1795, in 1820, 1850, that slavery, “the Peculiar Institution,” a powerful engine of the American economy that created vast wealth, would ever be outlawed.   Slavery was explicitly protected in the U.S. Constitution, after all.   Abolitionism took many years to rise into a commonly understood cause and later an unstoppable movement.  The pressure to crack the country in two was the result of the clash of the idea that slavery is legal, and good, and that slavery is an intolerable evil in the land of the free and the home of the brave.  An ocean of American blood was spilled to settle the question, and today even the crudest demagogue would hold himself back from publicly advocating slavery.

In 1890 it was unthinkable to Americans that 48 years later child labor would be subject to the limitations of federal law.  Prior to the 1938 law, children could be employed seven days a week, for limitless hours a day, starting as early as dawn, working well into the night, in a mill, a factory, mucking out chimney lines, bringing supplies down into mines, working on assembly lines.   The New Deal legislation that put reasonable restrictions to protect children from childhoods as slave laborers was many decades in the making, after centuries of ordinary, common brutality everybody just thought was the way the world is.  You’re born, they work you all day, every day, you die.  Before that law was written and passed the idea that children needed protection from ruthless employers had to take root, after decades of massive child suffering and millions of hobbled lives.

In 2004, after a disastrous first term, Bush and Cheney were reelected for a second term, carried to victory by millions of “values voters”– people who hated homosexuality more than they loved their own gay kids and were fired up to go to the polls and defeat those godless liberals who advocated some kind of equality for sodomites.   Only 15 years later that wave of aging bigots has no choice but to grimly accept the unthinkable, that gay marriage, and full civil rights for homosexuals, is the law of the land.

My point is that the first step to liberation is a vision of freedom, a picture of the better alternative to the status quo we all accept, an imagining of a better society.   If we don’t have words and images for it, it may be hard to imagine, but imagine it we must, even if the words for it must be diligently sought or even coined. [2]   The driver of this imagining is discontent, it is the precondition for thinking our way out of what is unbearable to us.  What oppresses us the most is also the key to our dream of liberation.   

Not to recognize this leaves us to hide our heads from the most vexing and grotesque aspects of “business as usual.”  I have many friends who no longer watch the news, for fear that Trump’s latest projectile turd will hit them in the face and finally drive them over the deep end.    POTUS is a charlatan, a blowhard, a greedily materialistic compulsive liar whose only “belief” is in “winning” (which does not appear to make the humorless liar happy, in any case).   He is obnoxious, angry, mocking, a hypocrite, a petulant, foolish, combative child with the power to  literally destroy the world. 

I understand why my friends avoid the news.  I try not to judge them for their ostrich poses, though I don’t always succeed.   I keep thinking of that old saw “all evil needs to triumph is for good people to do nothing.”    The first condition for imagining a better world, it seems to me, is looking at this world squarely and carefully.   It is imperative to hear the rhymes of history, to know as exactly as possible what we are up against, in all its devilish detail.   The unforeseen is not unforeseeable.   Outcomes can be predicted, we can watch sad fate of our mistreated earth in the regular climate catastrophe that has now become merely part of the news cycle.  The idea that this is bullshit, that one should be a “climate change skeptic” was created in a public relations lab, funded by the fossil fuel industry, the main beneficiaries of this particular extractive mode of making billions.

We need to be vigilant, to watch, to discuss, to find the right actions to take.  It is not hard to dream of a system better than this, where we are subjected to ever more crude cartoon characters making our laws.  We are strong enough to do it, and we have to be, to dream of a better world than this one, run by the worst of us.   And to make that idea a rallying cry.

 

 

[1]    Howard Zinn (hear him deliver his short speech, cued up here):

“I wanted, in writing this book, to awaken a consciousness in my readers, of class conflict, of racial injustice, of sexual inequality and of national arrogance, and I also wanted to bring into light the hidden resistance of the People against the power of the establishment.   

“I thought that to omit these acts of resistance, to omit these victories, however limited, by the people of the United States, was to create the idea that power rests only with those who have the guns, who possess the wealth.  I wanted to point out that people who seem to have no power — working people, people of color, women– once they organize and protest and create national movements, they have a power that no government can suppress.

“I don’t want to invent victories for people’s movements, but to think that history writing must simply recapitulate the failures that dominate the past is to make historians collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat.  And if history is to be creative, if it’s to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I think, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win.

“I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in the solid centuries of warfare.”

more about context to gained from reading good history

 

[2]  The terms extractive vs. regenerative, for example, can be applied to economic systems, with illuminating results.  An extractive model requires great pollution and eventually exhausts the resource being extracted (think extracting petrol from tar sand).  A regenerative model is based on sustainability and not harming the earth (renewable power and so on).  Which model would you prefer, if you were the Decider?

Pop loved “shooting pictures”

My grandfather was a mild-mannered man.  He had big, powerful hands he used for years professionally in the delicate art of egg candling. He held an egg in front of a bright light, (a candle at one point, one supposes) and inspected it to see if the yolk had the shadow of a spot in it.  If so, this spot of blood indicated it had been fertilized and wasn’t fit to eat.  I don’t know if this was under Jewish law or American health law, but he sat with cases of eggs, in the basement of his friend Al’s  (who my grandmother once said smelled like a camel), grocery store, or Julie’s appetizing shop, picking them up in his large hands one by one, gently turning them in front of the light and looking through their shells to see if they could be sold.

The year I was born, Pop, at one time a prodigious cigarette smoker (Camels, if memory serves), underwent late stage lung cancer surgery.   They removed one of his lungs.  I was a few months old at the time and remember only what I was later told about it.   We have the snake plant that was delivered to Pop in the hospital as he recuperated from the surgery.  The plant is almost 63 years old and doing well.   Pop had an excellent recovery from the surgery and lived twenty-two years with only one lung in his powerful body.  

One of his doctors recommended that he add bacon to his diet, for health reasons.  There was some kind of bullshit rationale involved, which my grandfather explained to me at one point.   So in addition to his usual kasha, boiled flanken, boiled chicken, soup and several slices of whole wheat, pumpernickel or rye bread Pop ate a few strips of bacon from time to time, at his doctor’s recommendation.

Pop was a well-built, trim man who weighed 168 pounds for his entire adult life.  One year at his physical he weighed in at 169 or 170.   He and the doctor were both surprised.   The doctor asked pop how many slices of bread he ate a day.   My grandfather counted and told the doctor seven.   The doctor said, “eat six”.   Pop did.  At his next physical he was 168 pounds.  

The lived philosophy of that, food merely fuel for the optimum running of your body, still fills me with wonder and admiration.  Pop would eat a Danish from a bakery from time to time with his coffee, but couldn’t care less if he did or he didn’t.  He always handed my sister and me each a candy bar (it was Chunkies for a long time, a chocolate chunk filled with peanuts and raisins, then mainly Nestle’s Crunch Bars with the occasional Mr. Goodbar thrown in) as soon as he saw us.  For himself, he never ate anything just for the taste of it.

Pop was retired for most of the time I knew him. His favorite pastime in those years was watching a good shooting picture on TV.   He’d scan the TV Guide, a small booklet that came out every week and told you what was coming up on each of the seven or eight stations available in the media mega-market of New York City and later Miami Beach. When he spotted a good shooting picture, also known as a Western, he’d tune in and watch the good guys triumph over the bad guys.

“Sit down,” he’d say, if I asked him who was who on the screen, “watch and you’ll know.”  In most of the shooting pictures Pop watched, Hollywood movies of the 1940s, 50s and early 60s, it didn’t take long to figure out who was wearing the white hat and who was the evil, sadistic, murdering bastard who needed killing, the one glaring provocatively from under the black hat.   Simpler times.

Pop loved Bonanza, and Gun smoke, two shows he caught every week, my parents and I loved those shows too, my sister would also watch them.  Outside of those, he’d catch every western on Million Dollar Movie, a show where they played the same black and white movie several times in a given week.  Pop would watch pretty much any movie where good guys and bad guys dressed like cowboys, (or Indians, for that matter), chased each other around in the dust of their horses and shot it out at the end.

Pop’s hammer

This is the “European hammer” that belonged to my grandfather.   I will have more to say about the old fellow and his life in the coming days, but, for the moment, here is the hammer itself:

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You can see how ready it is to get to work, banging in a thin nail or doing some serious peening (whatever the hell that is).   Here is another view of the business end of my grandfather’s ball-peen hammer:

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I never saw my grandfather use this hammer, that I can recall.   The hammer, I must say, reflects his style.  My grandfather had a certain graceful delicacy about him.  He was surprisingly light on his feet.   My sister once witnessed him, at close to eighty, doing a mocking dance move behind his overbearing wife’s back.   It was during a dispute over the fate of some cash my grandfather was planning to deposit in the bank.

“Don’t put that money in the bank! I’m taking Abby out for lunch and then we’re going shopping, I need the money,” my grandmother said, in the tone of one used to being the boss.  

My sister then had the miraculous luck to witness a little dance that my grandfather must have done countless times over his long life with Yetta.   As his wife went into the other room, he did a kind of shrug and with fluid grace lifted one leg, bent the other knee and threw his arms to the side in a comically ironic manner.  

“She don’t want to put the money in the bank,” he said quietly, moving his head from side to side as he danced his mocking dance.   “She don’t want to put the money in the bank!”

Decades later I found a great clip somebody put together of Paolo Conte’s [1] wonderful “It’s Wonderful” with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing.   A beautiful job.  Take a moment to enjoy it, and enjoy it you certainly will.   I sent it to my sister with the caption “Pop” and she instantly agreed.

 

[1]  dig  what Conte plays behind the sax solo, (I’ve cued it up for you), great stuff!

Empathy is the first casualty of stress

Flipping through some channels yesterday I heard an observation from a scientist Sanjay Gupta was interviewing about the crisis facing humanity these days. Constant stress, the guy pointed out, robs us of our ability to empathize.

One of the first casualties of being constantly stressed out is the loss of humane feeling for the suffering of our fellow human beings. It makes intuitive sense, if your ass is literally on fire your brother’s heartburn, no matter how severe, will not register. Perspective 101.

I thought back to my old friends’ marriage from hell. They are in a constant war, locked in a mutual inchoate rage almost impossible to comprehend. Each one is a basically kind person, has a good sense of humor, is very smart, and so on. Together they are highly toxic, as they have long been to each other.

In recent years my friend could not seem to resist provoking me every time we met. When he provoked me, and my temper began to rise, I told him his line of conversation was irritating me, asked him to back off, talk about something else. His response was always to double down, tell me it was my problem, that I have a problem with anger. I do. Anger is a problem. I don’t seek it, want it or need it. But there it is, waiting, in any situation where we are treated badly, unfairly.

Why couldn’t he stop provoking me? On one level he probably wants someone to kick his ass, make the screaming in his head stop, if only for a minute. That’s my best guess. This seems to be the case in the endless neurotic cycle of violent fights with his wife.

What I realize now is that the stress he is constantly flailing against in his painful marriage is a huge factor in his inability to stop when he is provoking his oldest friend. Compared to the hell he lives in every moment of every day, what problem could a lucky fellow like me possibly have? How dare I pretend that he’s provoking me?!!

All I’ve got is “addition by subtraction.” You need to stay away from people who are incapable of empathy, you really do.

Our current president’s lack of empathy is perhaps the most destructive thing about him. Everything is a transaction he is attempting to win, so that he feels like a “winner”. He has no friends, only people who are useful to him, until they are not. He constantly provokes and attacks, ratcheting up the anger and stress, disabling anyone from discussing anything empathetically, intelligently, with nuance.

If I could speak to his followers I’d tell them that I completely understand how screwed they feel, how desperate they are for fundamental change, more fairness, being able to meaningfully participate in our democracy, how right they are to feel this way. Fellow citizens, we have been fucked for a long time here in the land of the free and the home of the brave. We’ve been fed many kinds of poison, very lucrative for the sellers, very bad for us.

If I could convince them that we are in the same leaky boat, I’d ask them, quietly, how many of the alternative fact president’s promises for their lives has he actually kept.

They may point to an army of lifetime federal judges who will ban abortion and favor corporations over humans. They may mention the huge huge tax breaks he gave to the wealthiest Americans, or his no-nonsense get tough policy on children fleeing horrible conditions south of our border. He took us out of the Paris Climate Accord, the Iran Deal, increased the military budget, just as he promised he would. There are many campaign promises he made that he has kept, like nullifying virtually everything his Kenyan Muslim predecessor did by Executive Order.

One important question: how do any of these things actually benefit you or the people you love?

Do you have health care that is cheaper and better than Obamacare? He promised us that. Do you have a great job in a coal mine? Do you feel optimistic that the people of the earth, working together, can solve the most pressing problems we face or are you still constantly angry at how cruelly you’ve been fucked?

If it’s anger, and you’re looking for someone to blame, I’m your man, the eternal Jew, friend of the enslaved, who created this mess. It’s good to have someone to blame for your rage. A glance at any history book will illuminate the fine uses of this principle for you.

Addition by subtraction, it’s really the best I’ve come up with for mercilessly self-absorbed people in my life. Better to have a couple of comfortable friends you don’t have to keep your guard up with than many friends you have to dance a careful dance with to avoid serious problems. My take, anyway.