Category Archives: Ahimsa

Writing, the last refuge of a scoundrel

It is, I suppose, the last refuge of a scoundrel, this sitting and writing out the things that vex you.   Writing on the internet gives carte blanche for every opinionated asshole to have a good purge with no editor to get in the way. [1]  

I had an editor once, I suppose he could be called that, he definitely did edit.   Since the company he worked for paid me $250 for a thousand words, he got the final say on what I really meant.   One of his improvements really fucking got to me, I can tell you for sure.   He took the line “It made no sense to me that a man with all the qualities he possessed could be such an intractable asshole” and rendered it “It made no sense to me that a man my mother absolutely adored could be such an intractable asshole.”  

It made perfect sense to me that my mother loved my father, and I understood the many reasons she did.  I shared many of them myself.   That was no mystery to me. The mystery was that someone with all the admirable qualities he had, and the humanistic ideals, could abuse his children, that was the point of the sentence, the rest of the paragraph.  It was why I had placed the line where I had in the complicated story I was trying to tell in a way too few 1,000 words.

The perfected sentence was clearly much closer to what the editor felt was true, he couldn’t believe, apparently, that his mother had loved his father, an intractable asshole he’d written about in a svelte 10,000 word essay also published on the site.   Fuck him and the knock-kneed, swaybacked turd he rode in on, the dick-fingered mediocrity.   His unsought refinement of  what I really meant made me want to slap him hard, back and forth, smartly, bip-bap!   We eventually had a series of misunderstandings [2]  and I saw that sending future work to him for his random editorial attentions  was not worth the $250 or the emails from friends congratulating me on having my tampered with prose published.  [3]  

Thus it is with the world, my invisible friends.   We constantly have to weigh what is most important to us.  To me, it is finding as much clarity as I can, wrestling things that don’t make sense, particularly maddening things, into some kind of coherence. I am, for better or worse, a life-long student.  I tend to brood and read, make notes, brood, read, stop while walking to make a note.

If you don’t know the people involved, you will probably find my piece about the terrible erosion of an old friendship an interesting read that might apply to your own life.   If you know the people, there will inevitably be a shudder of horror seeing the situation set out so starkly.  I have come to prefer seeing a thing clearly and deciding the best course of action based on my beliefs about the way to be in the world to passively waiting for the next arguably inexplicable assault and the sickening argument that sometimes follows about who was the bigger asshole.  There is nothing to compare to doing an emergency favor for someone and then, instead of thanks, having some shit thrown on you.   I can tell you this from recent personal experience.

I think of something like the president’s current policy of ripping babies out of the arms of asylum seekers, having government personnel lie to the parents that after a short interview they’ll see their kid again, while during the interview the kid is shipped to a prison for children, never to see the parents again.   The first thought that comes to mind, outside of the fact that the privatized prisons where these poor kids are warehoused have some kind of exemption under this supremely corrupt administration, where they get a huge break on the already lowered tax for corporations, is that this is exactly the kind of “feeling out public reaction” that Mr. Hitler’s people used to routinely do.  

Hitler didn’t come to power and immediately open up the now famous Death Camps.   It took years, step by step, to prepare everyone for this final, extreme, previously unthinkable step.  That final step only became necessary, you understand, once the nation was at war.  Step by step, always prepare the next step carefully.   First you gas ‘useless eaters’, people in insane asylums, the mad, the demented, the retarded.   You read the polling carefully.  Most Germans, it seems, had no problem with euthanasia, if it was pitched correctly.   Eventually you will be able to euthanize all enemies of the state, keeping it discreet and secretive and always, always justifying it as a mercy done for the greater good.

(added the next day)  Stop the presses.  The larger point about the incremental nature of the ascendence or evil practices remains, but my example is problematic. We learn from Hannah Arendt that the gassing of “mentally sick” Germans had to be stopped, due to public outcry, after a mere 50,000 souls were “granted a mercy death”.  No such protest was made a couple of years later when the “granting of mercy deaths” was liberally extended to millions of Eastern European Jews and many others who died in the gas (the Nazis preferred poison gas, Zyklon B, was originally developed as a pesticide, don’t you know?)  and by other methods.   

So the fact that Trump and his diminutive racist lapdog A.G. are forcibly, and deceptively, separating parents and children when the family comes seeking asylum, is just one of the many steps toward becoming a society where unspeakable cruelty is as common as America’s Top CEO’s bristling over-sensitivity to criticism.

Look, once something becomes routine, most people will stop questioning it.  It’s human nature, you can only be outraged for so long, particularly if there is nothing you can do about it.   A shame that thousands of children and their families will be scarred for life, fleeing violence in one country to experience cool, rationalized, perfectly legal government violence in the country you fled to.  But what is that next to the brutal scarring that men like the president and his Attorney General must have experienced to make them the vicious people they are today?

That is always the question, in this world so deftly described by the brilliant Mel Brooks in his explanation of the difference between comedy and tragedy.   “Tragedy is when I break a fingernail, comedy is when you fall down a manhole and die.”  If you are not personally the victim … well … you can understand … kind of … an abstraction like why it’s wrong to torture somebody who was turned in for a large reward … on the off chance that he is a terrorist … or wrong, OK, to take a baby from its mother’s arms and lie to the mother, as you lead her away … or wrong to lie, repeatedly, about everything … but on another level these things will never be absolutely, compellingly real to you.   

If an old friend is in a panic to see you, accuses you of malice, gives you the chance to say you were mistaken, or lying, then tells you that you’ve never been a true friend, are incapable of admitting wrongdoing or apologizing, and expresses deep anger for a good deed you did thinking you were sparing his feelings … well?  What is one to make of this?  I was confused as hell for a few days, then, as I digested the constituent parts of it, came to finally see it clearly.

The old friend is prone to anxiety, fears the worst, always, apparently.  This anxiety causes him to live a nervous life where he really can’t always give the feelings of others the same immediate attention he must give to his own feelings.   His friends must understand this characteristic distractedness, his true friends must see past it.   They must make an allowance for this personality trait, even if he can’t always reciprocate.  His life is, in a phrase Springsteen once sung, “one long emergency.”   He has many fine qualities, great intelligence, humor, warmth, but he also has needs that can sometimes obscure these qualities. 

I don’t have great insight into panic or anxiety.  I had to imagine and understand, as best I could, what life must be like for someone prone to that.   Depression I have lived, I get that, but what it must be like living with constant anxiety took some imagining.  I don’t understand being angry for reasons that are mysterious to myself.  It simply makes no fucking sense to have anger you don’t understand constantly simmering in the background.  I have to understand why I’m mad.   It can take time, but most of the time I can put my finger on it.  I get a certain relief when I understand what I’m mad about, I can often take some action that will help.  This old friend has no time for this exercise, and his anger comes out in odd ways.  Like lambasting someone who has just spent a couple of hours being as kind to him as he knows how to be.

This old friend’s oldest son is a mensch, a really admirable young man.  I don’t know him nearly as well as I know his father, but I know enough to hold him in high esteem.   It was the thought of him reading what I had originally posted, a more detailed, much angrier piece, that caused me to take the post down.   His father never reads anything I post here, the son periodically does.   After talking to Sekhnet, someone I’ve never known to pull a punch, telling me I might want to pull this punch, I realized how much the original version could have hurt the son.   It’s possible the revised post might too, but much less, I thought, and there was value to the post in the “larger conversation” I am always dreaming of.

Relationships, like all living creatures, have a life cycle.  It’s hard to see this when you are young and idealistic, but live long enough and you will come to see this life cycle over and over.   When a friendship is mutual everything is cool.  Over time certain patterns become ingrained, resentments can build up.   One guy crucifies the other guy’s priceless guitar.   Anger is stored up.  Distance is inserted between people to insulate themselves from further damage.   Mistrust accrues every time an untruth is uncovered, or an attack happens.  Enough of this shit happens for long enough, the warmth of friendship can cool to coldness.

I haven’t reached that point with this guy’s father, someone I’ve known for about fifty-five years, but I certainly am not confident that my old friend is capable of the kind of self-knowledge I need in those closest to me.  I have friends as neurotic as he is but they have never given me the same cause to doubt their basic good will.   I intend to give my old friend every benefit of the doubt, I’m just not optimistic about the long-term health of our long friendship.  I hate the idea of holding him at emotional arm’s length, for the sake of remaining friends, but that may be the only working compromise available to me.

Consider this, related, if seemingly unrelated, to the incremental way things die.  It would have been unthinkable a few years ago to imagine waking up in the USA every day and hearing the lede “the president attacked”.  This thin-skinned man with the massive inferiority complex attacks someone several times every day.  It’s what he does.   After a few hundred attacks we just take the words “the president attacked” for granted.  It’s tempting to fume about that for a moment, but I’ll rein in that impulse and give one last grunt here.  (You may laugh, or at least grimace, to see how well I rein in that impulse, I suppose).

Professional football players respectfully protesting police violence against unarmed blacks are “sons of bitches” fumes this man who then screeches that they should be “fired!”  His campaign fundraiser crowd goes wild, applauding their hero who basks in their adoration.    One of the bitches tweets that she’s proud of her son, proud to be the bitch who raised him to be such a man of  integrity.   The president, of course, has no answer to this, he’s looking for someone else to attack, the main thing is to keep attacking.  

His daughter, a mannequin-looking woman he’s on record as wishing he could have sex with, busily promotes her many brands while a public servant, profiting handsomely, if corruptly, from her selfless service to the nation.  A comedian points out that she’s behaved with monstrous insensitivity regarding her father’s policy of ripping young children from their asylum-seeker parents’ arms.  The comedian calls her a “feckless cunt” for not confronting her father on this heartless policy, instead of  narcissistically, obliviously, posting pictures of herself hoisting one of her loving children.   The description seems to fit pretty well, feckless meaning “lacking initiative or strength of character, irresponsible” except that “cunt” is the c-word, like “nigger” is the n-word.  It is a word that simply may not be uttered, except at one’s peril.

Now the president gets to be righteously outraged, the thing he does best.  Picture how much restraint it must have taken him not to tweet that the offending comedian, Samantha Bee, is the cunt.  “She’s a cunt, not my daughter, her, she’s the fucking cunt, with a mouth like a fucking toilet bowl full of disgusting vegan shit!”   He could have tweeted that, but he’s the president and aware of his power as a role model, so he merely ranted a bit without profanity about no talent, loser Samantha Bee and her low-rated show and called for her to be fired.   The First Amendment is overrated, he thinks, even as the sacred Second Amendment is constantly under attack by liberal c-words and n-words who fucking hate our freedom.  Lock her up, lock her up!

USA!   USA!!!!!

 

 

[1] With WordPress you can even do it for free!

[2] A nice example is outlined here, along with a 1,000 word piece he actually solicited, one he rejected as “strangely unmoving”.

[3] WordPress bots helpfully provided a link to an earlier piece, which has more a bit more detail and nuance.  Vous pouvez clickez ICI,  mes amis.

Quick note about friendship

Friendship is, more than anything, about mutuality.  If you find yourself making constant accommodations, eating bad food doled out in incredibly stingy portions, taking care of somebody who is incapable of returning the favor most of the time, somebody who casually shits on you as you provide that attention, (these often go together, in my experience) can we really call that friendship?

That’s a loaded, rhetorical question, of course.

Irony is often lost on the nervous

I had a rock vamp I used to play all the time, very groovy little four chord thing that fit together nicely.  One day, years ago, playing an old friend’s beautiful old semi-hollow body electric guitar (a delightfully resonant Gibson ES-335) later sadistically destroyed by a mentally ill musician in a fit of enraged mania, I improvised the following to those chords:

You heard
just what I said
when you had your gun
pointed at my head,
but instead,
you’re dead
I didn’t mean to kill you but…

You should have stayed
home in bed
with a comfy pillow
under your head
Instead
you’re dead
I didn’t want to kill you but…
dah dah dah dah dah dah dah

Then I took a heroic guitar solo as the mentally ill keyboard player beamed at  my maliciously macho little lyrical invention, my rock and roll posturing.  I don’t recall how much later it was that he took a file to the beautiful guitar, breaking the F-holes and prying out the humbucker pickups, gouging and mutilating the lovely red-lacquered body beyond recognition, leaving the martyred, irreparably destroyed vintage guitar floating in a dirty bathtub full of sudsy water, the greasy hair from his half-shaved head as the cherry on top.  He wound up back in the laughing academy after that little caper, though it took a village to get him there.

The thing is, once you hold a gun to someone’s head, trust is usually compromised.  I eventually had to take a dirty stake and hammer it through the heart of this highly intelligent, provocatively mirthful idiot.  I reapply the stake as needed, by posting things like this, periodically, prophylactically, to make sure he doesn’t stagger out of his fucking grave imagining that we can be friends again.  

So it is, and so it must be, with people who unthinkingly treat others solely as vehicles to take them where they demand to be taken.  People who fear they are weak will often take a friend’s perceived strength for granted, until that strength is exhausted.  You may not have noticed, friend, but I ain’t no horse.  While I can pick you up, if needed, I can also throw you down.  Neither of those things makes me a horse.  

“What is this about holding a gun to somebody’s head?”  a concerned voice asks, seeking clarification about this disturbing metaphor.  Hoping it’s a metaphor.

It’s a metaphor, it’s a metaphor.  Picture this: you create an emotional emergency, emergency, emergency!  It must be dealt with immediately, now, now, now!  Ah, never mind.  It wearieth me too much.   For the anxiety riddled, it is rare for them to instantly get the joke, unless it comes at the rare moment when their native anxiety recedes enough to let humor in.   Irony is generally wasted on this type. Nuff said.

Sitting with Difficult Emotions

The more difficult the emotion, the harder it is to sit with it.   We don’t want to feel the things that hurt us, quite naturally, and we have sophisticated, if often not very subtle, means of not feeling them.   One of the most striking is the method described by Dr. John Sarno [1], who died recently at an advanced age.  Sarno cured crippling back pain in countless patients by having them understand that immobilizing spinal pain, which the mind causes by making the body clench, constricting blood/oxygen flow to crucial muscles and nerves, is more palatable to the psyche than feeling the threatening primal rage that causes it.  Understanding that, and feeling a hint of the emotion behind the physical manifestation, appears to be a big step to feeling better.   Spine surgeons hated Sarno, as did other medical experts.  Bad for business was fucking John Sarno.

I’ve never tested Sarno’s theory, not having suffered from what the good doctor called TMS, Tension Myoneural Syndrome.   But I have often sat with anger, which is a motherfucker to sit with.  Much easier to do virtually anything else, I’d have to say.  Blaming others for your anger is a great alternative, I think you will agree.  No shortage of asshole provocateurs in this world.  Hah!  Done and done.  Nothing a hearty “fuck you!” won’t cure, repeat as needed.  If people weren’t often such merciless pricks, you wouldn’t have to get angry at all.   Anodyne as all get out, no?

In a quiet moment you will realize that blaming and venting didn’t quite work, you’re still angry.  There is a cure for that too!  Endure no quiet moments!   There is so much noise available, sought or not, that we can keep ourselves from moments that will… well, you get the idea.   Stay busy, my friends, and you need never feel things that will cut you too deeply.  Work hard, play hard, pass out, repeat.   It works for many people, I don’t knock it, really (though I also do knock it, clearly).  

 Some consider pondering things like your own anger a form of masochism.  That would be true if you used your anger against yourself, blamed and excoriated yourself for feeling something so ugly.   I don’t advocate self-harm in any form, though you might not know it from my lifestyle, which involves, I suppose, a certain amount of it.  To my mind, and my spine, there is a good benefit to sitting in a comfortable chair with difficult emotions, or taking them for a leisurely stroll.   For one thing, these terrible emotions lose some of their power.  When you sit next to a monster intimately tied to your life you will tend to feel more comfortable with, and less terrified by, the monster after a while.    

Go down the list of the seven deadly sins [2] as an exercise.   Take a fearless moral inventory, if you like.   Note how the seven deadlies overlap.   Do you regularly experience, say, jealousy?   Deal with your feelings of envy by understanding where they come from.  Your fucking older brother got all the credit while you got none, never, not once.  Mom and dad beat the shit out of me, while my siblings got away with murder.  My brother and sister literally murdered and dismembered people, in front of mom and dad, and my parents just laughed and gave them lavish gifts.  If I set the table wrong, the salad fork on the wrong side of the entree fork, I’d catch a beating.  A beating and not so much as a stick of gum, ever.  You wonder why I’m fucking envious of the spoiled bastards all around me everywhere?

I’m not actually recommending anything.  There is nothing to recommend.   We all do what we need to do, constantly.   Me, I need to draw, write, play music.  Can’t help it, don’t sell any of it, even as all three things are done at an increasingly high level, a professional level, one might say.   My problem, when phrased that way, is my stubborn lifelong refusal to even try to monetize any of several highly honed skills.   On another note (accompanied by a lovely, old-timey minor 6th chord), I don’t give a fuck about this world of noise and strife when I am doing what I love.

Not to say that I love sitting with difficult emotions, but the obligation to sit with the stinking bastards comes with being sentient, as far as I can see.   I’d have it no other way.

 

[1] I have written a bit about Sarno, you can read it here and follow the links for more information about Sarno’s radical, medically disparaged but true sounding, theories.

[2] Anger, jealousy, pride, lust, greed, gluttony, sloth.

A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Medicine Go Down

As we walk through this world of darkness certain things become clear if we live long enough.  It is better to be mild with upset people whenever possible.   Particularly when confronted by someone who is angry, it is best to remain calm, keep your eye on defusing rather than escalating anger.   It’s not easy, and not always possible, but is generally a better way to walk through a violent place than flipping the bird at every one of the many angry, deserving jerks you will encounter here.

Then there is the calculated use of strategically applied reasonableness to attain a desired goal.  Not exactly the same thing as described above, but it’s a smart play. Interim CIA director Gina Haspel, who repeatedly denied the incendiary charge that stripping prisoners naked, freezing or overheating their cages, slamming them against walls, depriving them of sleep for days on end, blasting deafening music, making them engage in forced mock sex (for the cameras), using electrodes, stress positions, hanging with feet barely touching the ground, other fear and terror inducing techniques, amount to torture, backed off ever so slightly in her denials of government wrongdoing.  

These things were all perfectly legal when the CIA did them, Gina Haspel insisted repeatedly, if not 100% uncontroversially, during her confirmation hearing.  “Bloody Gina,” by all reports, was pretty gung-ho about the new freedom to roughly interrogate granted by the top secret Torture Memo[1]  and the $80,000,000 manual of best arguably non-torture practices painstakingly laid out by two patriotic American psychologist/torture tutors, Jessen and Mitchell.  To my knowledge she did not deny that she destroyed evidence of torture conducted under her watch at a “black site” in Thailand.

It was going to be a tight vote for the president’s nominee for CIA director, Ms. Haspel and her allies realized.  So she wrote a heartfelt letter to the top ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner.  The magic words:

While I won’t condemn those that made these hard calls, and I have noted the valuable intelligence collected, the program ultimately did damage to our officers and our standing in the world. With the benefit of hindsight and my experience as a senior agency leader, the enhanced interrogation program is not one the C.I.A. should have undertaken.

source

It seems to have done the trick, precatory (non-legally binding — she promises nothing, , admits nada) language and all.   She should now, with Mark Warner’s vote and a couple of others, have enough votes today to become America’s Next Top Spook.   It is petty, I know, to parse such sincere words as though they were crafted with the help of a lawyer and other partisan hacks, but I can’t help but note just a couple of things.   After-the-fact snideness is about all we get to exercise, much of the time, here in our great, participatory democracy.

I won’t condemn those that made these hard calls

It’s a nitpick, but I love use use of the word “that” to refer to those who insisted torture was legal.  “That,” while acceptable as a reference to a person, is also exclusively used to refer to animals and inanimate objects; “who” is exclusively used for people.   A telltale slip.  Nothing to see here.  Yes, OK, Dick Cheney was a bit of an inanimate object, as were the steely men who made “these hard calls”.   Kind of like a corporate “person”, not something you’d want watching your back in a fox hole, or babysitting for your kids, or meeting in a dark alley.

I also love the principled refusal to condemn the architects of the recent American torture program.  You go!

and I have noted the valuable intelligence collected

So Gina Haspel is sticking to her guns, a woman of principle!  In contrast to the reasoned opinion of every intelligence expert I’ve ever heard on the subject, she is suggesting that torture works.   She will not say it’s not a damned good way to get evil fucks to give up valuable intelligence.   Nope.  The regrettable part, to Haspel and her higher morality, is that it makes us look bad to be secretly doing things that, when leaked, make us look like monsters no better than the people we are torturing, er, interrogating in an enhanced, perfectly legal, or at the very least arguably legal, manner.

Since we are good, and evil people, or people we suspect may be evil, are evil, or quite possibly evil in the case of mere suspects, well, our American secret agents hold themselves to a much higher moral standard than standard morality requires. You see, we only secretly torture us some folks to preserve our higher moral values.  

It is important to grasp this distinction.  Only then can you understand why our highly principled UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, walks out when the Palestinian delegation complains about the fog of tear gas rained from Israeli drones and the dozens of demonstrators killed and many hundreds wounded on the Gaza border with Israel. The NY Times headline today refers to “scores” of Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers in the last two days.  Typical liberal crap– “scores,” while technically accurate, suggests way more than a mere sixty or so, eh, Nikki?

US ambassador Haley defended Israel’s amazing “restraint” in killing and maiming so few of the people who publicly massed to openly hate their freedom.  No other country, she insisted, could have behaved with more restraint.  Then she got up and left as the Palestinian representative began to speak.   The perfect way to show the world how much America cares, how willing we always are to listen.  How much more moral we are than those who self-righteously, hypocritically, attack our higher morality.

“Just a spoon full of sugar
makes the medicine go down,
the medicine go dow-own,
the medicine go down,
just a spoon full of sugar
makes the medicine go down
in the most delightful way!”

 

[1]    Torture, according to that memo, “must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” Yoo also advised that for mental pain or suffering to amount to torture, “it must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years.”     source

Reminder: Thou Shall Not Kill

I hurt my knee.  It hurts like hell in certain positions, like a scalpel being inserted point-first into the patella.   If I sit too long and try to stand, or even just straighten my leg, scalpel into patella time.   I am trying a knee brace, not bending the leg when I sit, but it’s not always possible to avoid the searing pain of trying to straighten my once sturdy leg. 

Finally went to the doctor, who sat on my foot and pushed and pulled my knee from different angles.  The only thing that hurt was the direct pressure on the patella when I tried to straighten the leg.  The doctor told me to go have an x-ray, which would then allow my insurance to pay for an MRI if the sports medicine practitioner needed to do an MRI.   

I called my current insurance company, Healthfirst.  I declined the robot’s kind offer to take their customer satisfaction survey for the “service you are about to receive” by pressing two.  It was only a few moments before Jackie was on the line, very pleasant, bright, sympathetic.    She tried to walk me through the website, which was buggy today on my end.  It displayed completely differently for her than it did for me.  The search function did not seem to be working correctly on my end.

She found me a nearby x-ray place, then a sports medicine doctor, both of whom took my specific Healthfirst insurance plan.   Then an opthamologist, so I can get a prescription for new glasses, then a gastroenterologist for my overdue colonoscopy.  We truly had a great chat while all this was going on.   At the end of ninety minutes of customer service I thanked her, we had a last laugh and parted as great friends. I began to make the calls.

The nearby x-ray place does not have an x-ray machine, it turns out.  They do several other forms of diagnostics, have a lot of sophisticated equipment, but no x-ray.   The receptionist there gave me the name of another nearby x-ray place, and the phone number.   It was a fax line, I learned when that eerie squawking began.  

I called the sports medicine doctor, figuring they might have an x-ray machine on site, save me a few steps.   The doctor, it turns out, does not accept my particular Healthfirst plan.  A first time visit would cost between $320 and $640, if insurance paid nothing.   I asked the receptionist what determined whether the visit was $320, $435, $508 or $639.99.   She had no idea.

You walk into a restaurant.  There are no prices on the menu.  When you ask the waiter how much the BLT is he tells you not to worry about it, the sandwich is delicious.  In three months you’ll get the bill in the mail.   The EOB from the third party that deals with the restaurant informs you that the BLT is billed at $640, but since you have insurance the negotiated price is only $120.  Your copay is $50.  You made out like a fucking bandit.  

We can’t tell you what it will cost until the provider sends us the bill and the billing codes.    That is the standard line and it is perfectly legal under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  You see, until the provider tells us the exact price, nobody can predict anything.   That’s clear, easy to understand.  How is anybody to possibly know that this hospital charges $44,000 for a bag of chemicals they will infuse into your body?   No possible way anybody could possibly know that, prior to the procedure, the submission of the billing codes, and the calculation of the EOB.  Jackie confirmed as much when I asked if the $44,000 bag of Rituxan that may be in my immediate future is covered under my current plan.  There is simply no way to know in advance.  

The first appointment with this sports medicine doctor who will charge between $320 and $640 is a month from now.    Your aching knee is nobody’s fucking problem but your own.  You should have made this appointment weeks ago, you’d be almost in line to see the doctor by now.

I struck out with the other doctors’ answering machines.  Call during business hours, the first one advised me, between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.   I noted to myself, with familiar bitterness, that it was 4:30.  Same deal with the next doctor’s machine, only by then it was 4:35.   Well, it was 75 degrees out, Sekhnet reminded me.

Soon she was done trying to cheer me up.  As I laid the merciless details on she was finally struck dumb, began crying because this shit is so frustrating when it happens to somebody you love.   It is worth noting, of course, that if the law allows an insurance company to list a thousand doctors as participating, and only a handful actually are, there is no harm and no foul.  The piece of shit, er, customer, merely has to keep making calls to different offices further and further from their home.  Eventually they will find a doctor somewhere who accepts their insurance.  No fraud where the law says there’s no fraud.  Patient Protection Act and shit.  Hey Barack, Arbeit Macht Frei.

I asked Jackie about getting evidence from Healthfirst that my recent invoice had been returned to Healthfirst by my local post office as undeliverable.  I told her the story, another short chapter in the million chapter book they are constantly updating.  That book is called How We Fuck You To Death You Fucking Piece of Shit.  The main device is never allowing the true facts to interrupt the dominant narrative.  If you can’t produce irrefutable proof, and you are not incredibly dogged, we can fuck you with impunity, fuckface.

Jackie wished she could help, by giving me the evidence that the local post office is now returning rent checks to me and insurance invoices to my health insurance company.   That could only be done by Finance.  There was no way for her to directly contact Finance.  Nobody was allowed to know who Finance is or what they do, but she dutifully made a complaint to them, asked them to send me some proof that they had received the last bill sent to me back marked “undeliverable”.   She gave me the complaint number, said I can follow up in a few days if Finance doesn’t contact me.  Finance unfortunately has no direct extension, so I’d have to get lucky when I try to follow up.

“This is exactly how they kill us, Jackie, those powerfully legally created psychopaths who make all the rules to best serve themselves. You have to admire the seamless perfection of it.”  I then described my request to see a mental health professional, as I imagined it would go.   It did not go well.  Jackie found it hilarious. When I hung up the phone I noticed I was foaming at the mouth.

I was seated on my aching hind legs, head thrown back, howling as loud and plaintively as I can.  I am doing that right now, as I type.   Easier than you’d imagine, really. 

Loneliness (for fun and profit)

The loneliest woman in the world married the most gregarious man in the world.  She told me, during the last conversation we had face to face, that at the time they met and got married he was very lonely and isolated too.   The man was a good friend of mine, and over the years I got to be good friends with his wife as well.   He was a kind, generous person, full of good cheer, an excellent host who really enjoyed company.  The time we spent together over the years was always full of laughter and meaningful conversation.    Sekhnet only got to spend a few fleeting times with him, but she immediately felt like she’d known him always.

In a vindictive turn on the phrase my father used only to make my mother tearful, “don’t worry, Evvy, only the good die young”, my friend died young.   Suddenly, stopped at a red light just off the freeway in Berkeley.   When the light turned green his passenger said “Howie…” but Howie was already gone.  His life had winked out like a candle flame in a soft breeze.

There was a lot of crying over Howie’s sudden absence, which came about a month before my long-suffering mother breathed her last breath.  I spent many an hour on the phone with Howie’s widow.  She felt abandoned by their large circle of friends, things were getting worse at work, her old enemy had been steadily climbing the corporate ladder and was now sabotaging her at every turn.   I noted at one point that I’d never heard Howie speak badly about anyone, a remarkable thing, we agreed.   We both marveled for a moment about this saintly habit of the departed and then wondered what we’d talk about, if not for badmouthing people.  

Then her complaints would continue, the treachery of those who’d always pretended to be her friends, how everyone had turned their backs on her, while feigning great love and concern.  The details were endless, the proofs she advanced very damning.  I was as sympathetic as I could manage.    

I remembered well my own mother’s loneliness after my father died.  My mother was bright, interesting, a sociable person with a great sense of humor, but my father, it emerged as soon as he was gone, had been the social glue that bound people to my mother and father.  Funny, in a way, because he always professed to be a curmudgeon who’d rather spend his time reading and my mother was the social director who arranged all the dinners and visits.  Until my father died, and the calls and visits abruptly stopped.   So I was in touch with Howie’s widow regularly, recalling how painful the isolation had been for my mother after her mate was gone.

Howie’s widow could be demanding, as I learned, shopping for and preparing the buffet for Howie’s unveiling, for example.   She didn’t always show gratitude, I began to notice, while doing nice things for her.  Over time our friendship began to feel more and more like a one way street.   Her mother, someone who’d given her a lot of grief, died after a period of dementia.   I loaned her a great book on seeing the larger picture after the death of a parent, even a difficult parent.  I wrote her a letter to go with the book.  She took the book and letter without comment.   On three separate occasions in the years afterwards she told me she’d look for the book, which she hadn’t read, and send it back to me.  I never saw my original, annotated copy of Death Benefits again.

Here is the kicker, and I notice, as it is not the first time, that a missed call is later cited as the fatal proof I didn’t give a fuck about somebody.   The first time that happened was when a former good friend, a mentally ill guy with vexing emotional problems and an unbearable amount of self-hatred, broke a promise at a very trying time for me and then left me a missed call afterwards, instead of an explanation or any kind of apology.  He claimed he’d left me a “missed call”, at any rate, my phone had no record of the call.   I was hurt at the betrayal, and angry, and didn’t return the “missed call” I hadn’t known about for several days, something that was then thrown in my face by this pant-load while shabbily blaming the emotional standoff on me, you dig, for being too petty to return a “missed call”.  That my phone recorded no such missed call was but a trifle for someone determined to defend himself at all costs.    

Howie’s widow used a similar ploy in the end to make me the asshole who’d viciously rejected her.   I had a missed call from her.  She had been calling, I learned a few days later, to tell me she was coming to New York, but she left no message, sent no email or text.  Once in New York, a day or two before she was leaving, she called to chide me for not caring enough to call her back in time.   I arranged to be available the following day, but she never called back.  I left her a message and I assume she flew off to California pissed at my betrayal.

I heard how hurtful my betrayal had been to her months later, when mutual friends were in New York.  They’d been asked to find out why I had so coldly rejected our old friend.  I told them the story and have heard nothing since from, or about, our rejected friend.

Loneliness, my friends, is a curse and often its own reward.  This woman is very active on Facebook.  I am not, in fact, I hate that shit, for too many reasons to list here.    Another mutual friend called to give me shit a few months ago for missing his mother’s funeral.   I told him how sorry I was, that I hadn’t known his mother died.   He told me it had been on Facebook.   He then gave me some grief for not being a good friend to Howie’s widow, now almost ten years after Howie’s death.   I explained, but it was no use, he wasn’t buying it.   Most likely she’d announced on Facebook that she was coming to New York, but I was too much of a self-absorbed asshole to even check her Facebook page from time to time.   He told me he’d call me back the next day, and that was the last I heard of him.

Loneliness has been monetized, friends, if you want to verify how much, just look up Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth.   I was recently at a free dinner Sekhnet had RSVP’d to attend, hosted by some financial company.   One of the speakers flashed a slide and mentioned the FANG stocks, very valuable positions in any respectable portfolio. I glanced over at Sekhnet who gave me a sly smile at the term FANG, which encompassed some of my most hated mega-corporations.    The slide showed the logos of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google.  

Every FANG stock is part of the increasingly monetized loneliness of our digital world.   Don’t go to a store, or even talk to anyone on the phone, order shit from your computer, have a slave deliver it to your door for free.  Use a device that marks you as a cool person with money to burn — sure, you can buy cheaper versions of the products Apple sells, but you can’t be COOL if you do.  Don’t interact after work, go into a cocoon, chill and binge watch shows without commercials on Netflix.  Down the fucking list of FANGS.

One of the many reminders, this apt acronym, of the vicious power of loneliness to drive commerce and finance a comfortable retirement, if you are properly positioned with FANG to do so.  God bless these United Global States of corporate personhood.  

 

Nuance, Context and other quaint notions

There are knee jerks that are almost impossible to resist.   Those knee jerks, now amplified and encouraged by our own private on-line and mass media cheering sections,  rule our world today, certainly our politics.  Right is right and evil is evil and if you try to defend evil I will swat that shit away and wag my finger like Dikembe Motumbo under the basket, as your shot winds up in the third row.   Don’t try that shit in my house!

When I hear somebody say that  God told them to do something, and that thing is bombing a water filtration plant and hospital in a far away land (because the dictator of that land is a modern-day Hitler), causing children to die along with their elders, my knee jerks.  That kid in Florida, Trayvon Martin, when the vigilante with the gun stopped him, whatever the guy with the gun may have said to him, why didn’t the black kid just say “yes, sir.  I’m up from Miami, visiting my family, sir” and get to live another day?  Knee jerk.   When the president does what he’s on record as saying his predecessor was an idiot for considering…. boing, there goes the knee.

Flash the cards, there is no shortage of them.  Abortion: murder of a human soul or a hard choice in a situation where an unwanted child will otherwise come into the world to live a life nobody would wish on it     If you believe God said abortion is murder, that’s the end of the story, bub.  It’s murder if the fetus was put in a thirteen year old’s womb by a rapist, or by the coercion of a sleazy, criminal relative.  Murder if they held the girl down and took turns punching her and raping her.  Murder because, every soul was created by God and the soul comes into being at the moment of conception, because God loves every soul.  

True believers are hard to have a conversation with.  There are no facts you can put forth that will allow them to see things from another perspective.  I’m not singling out hypocritical Christians, doggedly defending the rights of fetuses while letting the little unwanted newborn fuckers fend for themselves.   I am just using rigid religiosity to illustrate this larger point about belief that is impervious to discussion, nuance or context.  We all believe what we believe and we justify those beliefs according to our ability to rationalize.    

I am floundering today, as I try to make this vague yet obvious point clear.  If we omit nuance and context in a discussion, we are just talking opinionated shit at each other. Nuance is the first casualty of absolute moral certainty, any sense of a larger context is killed at the same time.  Not to say there aren’t principles worth fighting for– personal integrity is one, it seems to me, but even there, choosing your battles is very important.  This black and white, red and blue, us and them world we live in is the divided, divisive hell it is for many reasons.  High on the list is a massive failure to acknowledge nuance and context, particularly on the other side of our own beliefs, when talking about particular issues. 

I was surprised to learn, as I was writing a long manuscript about my father’s life, trying to draw every lesson I could from his tragic example, that it is possible to identify with the feelings of a desperate, trapped woman who viciously takes it out on her baby.   The feelings, I say, not the actions.  It’s impossible to identify with the actions, I think.  The actions are despicable, whipping a baby in the face, there’s no defending that.   The feelings, odd to realize, are quite readily understandable.   That’s some fucking nuance right there, dear reader.  Let me try to make it as clear as I saw it that day.

A relative I never met, who was portrayed to me only as red-haired, tiny, very religious and with a terrible temper (also a great cook), turns out also to have whipped her infant son in the face, regularly.   It was part of her daily routine, breaking this toddler’s spirit.  I always assumed she was a psycho, which she most likely also was.  But one day it dawned on me, how tortured this woman was when she began taking it out on her first-born son.    It doesn’t excuse what she did in any way, but it sheds light.  Light is the only antidote to darkness.   It shows a path out of what she was trapped in, even if one didn’t exist for her in 1926 when she began her lifelong persecution of the boy she called “Sonny”.

The man she fell in love with was driven away by her brother and her sister-in-law.  It was nothing personal for them, nothing against the young man who loved her.  It was strictly practical.  Her marriage would have meant the loss of their indentured servant and they weren’t ready to give up their live in maid.   Years later she was forced into an arranged marriage with a man who seemed to be brain damaged. He’d been knocked in the head many times by his own angry step-mother and nobody will ever know if this deadpan man who died young was brain damaged or not.   He couldn’t make a living.   They lived in a filthy, teeming slum, the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in 1922.   Every day the woman woke up to this horror.   Somehow she got pregnant.  The baby girl died shortly after she was born.  

At some point the heartbroken woman got pregnant again.   This time the tiny woman gave birth to a gigantic son.   We can imagine the pain of this childbirth.   The baby looked exactly like the idiotic husband who had knocked her up.   He looked at her with that same dopey expression.   One day the woman snapped, whipped the baby in the face with the thick, heavy, burlap wrapped cord of her iron.   It apparently felt good.  Maybe the only thing in her life that did.

I’m not being a lawyer for this evil mother.   We’d like to think a mother like this today would be in the hands of an excellent psychiatrist.   That her child would be getting help recovering from his trauma.  But what I’m digging for here is Nuance.   Not that she’s in any way right to act in this vicious way, but in order to understand her pathology, on the way to hopefully making life better for all involved, we have to fully know the context of her actions.

I rattle on about this subject tediously often, I’m aware.   We live in a world where every message we get, every bit of news, is curated, structured to support one polarized point of view or another.   It is extremely rare to get the full story about anything, from anyone.  I am always looking for a way to make the point about nuance and context that is not partisan.  I do this animated by the Anne Frank-like faith that most humans, in their hearts, are not haters.   That we are all basically good.

I believe this even as I hate any U.S. president who rains death on people who have no power to do anything but agonize and die, or if they manage to survive, fear and hate.   Few problems have ever been solved by the application of massive deadly force, whether you call it “Freedom on the March” or by any other high-sounding name.  It is of course business as usual,blowing shit up is a driving force of capitalist profit making.  

I felt a surge of hatred when Bill Clinton sent missiles that blew up civilians, destroyed infrastructure they needed to survive.   That same hatred surged through me when George W. Bush ignored millions of us marching in the frigid streets and launched “Shock and Awe”, later declaring victory and lynching Saddam after shooting his two hideous sons in the street like dogs.   As for the massive civilian deaths?  Killing civilians is now blandly called “collateral damage” nothing to get excited about, certainly no war crime, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.   Barack Obama’s extrajudicial murder of the radicalized American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and his teenaged son Abdulrahim a week later– same deal, along with all the other deaths our recent president inflicted on unknown brown people on his secret kill list.

Can we have some fucking nuance, a little context so we can discuss these things intelligently instead of just using force to kill things like Terror, Evil, Haters of our Freedom?  Our previous president told us we were looking forward, not backwards at the architects of  our recent crimes under international law, you know, because we are, uh, taking the high road.   To be totally honest, we tortured some folks, what are you going to do?   Good folks doing some bad shit, with the best of intentions.  

Make American Great Again.   Hope and Change.  Make America Great Again, again.  The slogans change, a few of the proponents of government violence change with each administration, but the song remains the same.  Fuck nuance, fuck context, it feels good when our leader bombs the shit out of some fuckers who might very well be evil.  If nothing else, they really do appear to hate our freedom.  Even pundits who usually seem to have a reasonable grasp of world affairs go momentarily gaga when the president blows some shit up with a huge show of force.   It doesn’t seem possible to me that we are a nation of such stupid motherfuckers.

The evidence is not strong that we are not, but I am always digging for it.

 

 

Fifty Years Ago Today

A hater with a gun, a sniper who shot from a hiding place, someone who could not possibly have been stopped by a hundred dead-eyed lovers with guns, slaughtered Martin Luther King, Jr. on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.   Decades later, after a sometimes ugly debate, King’s birthday would come to be celebrated as a national holiday.   MLK has been turned into a caricature, an unshakably non-violent man who led his people out of the darkness of a violent racist past and into the light of our present day of color-blind freedom and justice for all.

King was killed one year, to the day, after laying out his arguments about the evil of the war America was then waging in Vietnam.   The speech was called “Why I am Opposed to the War In Vietnam”, you can hear the entire address here.   He denounced the war as an “unjust, evil and futile war.”  He explained why he was no longer able to remain silent as the war raged.   He went on to describe the symbiotic relationship between racism, poverty and militarism.    He was unsparing in his analysis.  To my mind, there is no refuting what he had to say.  

The money to solve the problems of inequality in America was being wasted in a senseless, evil war waged against the poor people of Vietnam, purely for the profits of a few.   The same can be said for every American war since.  Trillions to kill poor people abroad, on dubious rationales, hardly a penny to prevent the eternal hopelessness of our own millions who are born into, and die in, poverty.   King pointed out that we spent $500,000 for each enemy soldier killed in Vietnam and $53 for each American living in poverty– much of the $53 going for the salaries of those not in poverty.

Immediately after giving the speech, which his advisors all urged him not to give, King went from beloved icon of Civil Rights to pariah.  He was immediately condemned in virtually every publication in America.  A few years earlier he would have been universally denounced as a Commie for his brutal analysis of the military-industrial-poverty-racism complex.  He was called a Commie and worse.   King met with the hostility those who style themselves patriotic always express toward those who dissent against any American military campaign.

After the speech, King was largely alone, increasingly focused on the larger problem: social justice for every American living in poverty.  There is no cure for racism until poverty is eradicated.  Neither goal is attainable until America stops spending billions on war.  Talk about speaking truth to power.   King laid out the exact swindle those behind our Great American War Machine are constantly pulling.      The war in Vietnam, King said, was the enemy of the poor, black and white poor together, burning the huts of poor villagers in Southeast Asia, while segregation and inequality persisted at home.  

I add: You’re poor?  Join the army, get some respect.  We will send you to kill other poor people, who will hate you — and not without reason.   Don’t expect, like black vets returning from World War Two did, the respect of your fellow citizens, or even the rights of your fellow citizens.  Know your place, wait your turn, give things a century or two.

I now believe, fifty years today after his assassination, that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. must be the angriest angel in heaven.