Category Archives: Ahimsa

Thinking v. Selling

There is a big difference between critical thinking to solve problems, a largely neglected art, and selling, the most widely practiced art in the world today.    It extends far beyond politics, where the distinction could not be more clear.    To think productively, to actually solve problems, we need to be able to look squarely at facts and have as many relevant pieces as possible in front of us to consider.   Thinking well requires open-mindedness, intellectual honesty and a small measure of courage.  

In selling, certain facts need to be deemphasized, harmful facts removed entirely from the conversation.  The problem in sales is much more limited — simply to get the customer to buy — and the techniques used are infinitely more practical, with success or failure readily measurable, written in red or black.     One downside for us, as a society, is that being constantly subjected to the unabashed puffery of 24/7 sales pitches makes us question almost everything we hear as possible bullshit.

The imperative to learn, the thing that makes us wonder and think in the first place, often needs to be suppressed in the service of making the sale.   The art of persuasion, in the highest sense, requires laying out as much as can be known and allowing fairness to emerge organically from an open-ended dialogue.   The honesty needed for growth as a human is almost the opposite of the main quality needed for clinching a sale.

I don’t want to bring in our compulsive liar-in-chief, though he is perhaps the best illustration of this distinction that comes to mind, and of course, he’s ubiquitous.   Thoughtfulness, and reference to the observable world, is replaced, in every case, with the imperative to win, to clinch the sale, to “make the deal”.   You give a massive tax cut to the wealthiest people and “persons” in the world, selling it as a gift to the middle class.  It is clearly not, as almost all of the benefits go to the already fabulously well-off.  

At election time you swear you are about to pass a real middle class tax cut, in the next few days, in fact.   You swear to this even though Congress is not in session and no law can be passed when Congress is not in session.   When somebody from the press raises this obvious flag that you’re not being truthful, simply call them rude, stupid, fake, working for a failing outfit, an enemy of the people, tell them brusquely to sit down, scold them with authority, like you’d talk to a disobedient dog.   The angry base loves this kind of alpha dog behavior.  

The invading illegal caravan of smallpox, leprosy and tuberculosis infected raping child terrorists, same deal.   An immediate and terrifying existential threat to all of us, trumpeted hundreds of times in the days before the election, many millions spent to send troops to the border for a muscular photo op — nothing mentioned about this rapidly advancing murderous hoard since.  The art of the deal.

Writing, it strikes me more and more, is thinking made visible.  Blessedly, from time to time, we see wonderful, thought provoking (as we say) books and articles being published.   The art of selling is something I know almost nothing about.   Thinking as clearly as I can is something I try to practice every day as I set my thoughts down here.   My hope is that sometimes these musings can help shed light on what others are also mulling over.  The daily practice of writing/thinking has improved my life, I have to say.   I couldn’t put a price to it, though it certainly would behoove me to.  

I offer, once again, an example from my own life of the muddle of emotions that can blot out virtually all thought and possibility for insight.   By way of introduction, let us note again that emotion is almost always the deciding factor in life.   The way something makes us feel determines how we react to it.  The most intelligent argument is not often persuasive unless it is also engaging and emotionally satisfying.    Both strands, feeling and analytical thought, must be brought into play to make a persuasive case.   We humans love a sensible story that makes emotional sense to us.

So here’s a little story that may illuminate the difference between thoughtfulness and the unreasoning need to win at all costs.  I had a childhood friend who went to an Ivy League college where he made a friend, Andy, a brilliant guy with a history of periodic stints in the laughing academy.   Originally diagnosed as schizophrenic, Andy’s occasional spells of wild behavior were later classified as the manic end of Bipolar Disorder.   Psychiatry is as much an art as a science, though some scientists make arguments to the contrary.   Levels of various chemicals in the brain can be tested, neurotransmitter and other levels balanced, rebalanced, and so forth.  It can make a difference, or not.

For decades they did this to the brain of this fellow, who became one of my closest friends.  I was around for at least two dramatic episodes of Andy slipping over to the other side of madness, had to bring him to the mental ward myself the final time.    It was scary to be close to someone in the grips of full-blown mania, full of energy and far from reason, though it never caused me to question our friendship.

When, in the end, years later, he behaved with viciousness toward me, I did not attribute it to his mental illness.  I attributed it to him being an enraged asshole, pure and simple.   Our mutual friend was devastated to hear that I’d finally written Andy off and did his best to convince me, during a long phone call, that I needed to forgive and forget, that we all needed to be friends.  

I told him I appreciated the sentiment, and the peace-making impulse, but that I was too hurt and angry at the moment to consider any of it.  I explained to him that as far as him trying to be a mediator between us, he was in the worst possible position to do it.   The first requirement for a mediator is that she be disinterested in the issues and outcome, focused impartially on trying to help the parties resolve their dispute.   Here, his close involvement with both of us would make that disinterest impossible.  He said he understood.

Now we can fairly consider whether I was right or wrong to feel so hurt by my mad friend’s betrayal, or so angry.  That is certainly a reasonable question.   Put it to the side for the moment and consider, for purposes of this story, that I was deeply hurt and very angry.   All you really need to know is that when Andy and I spoke to try to work things out, my old friend attempted to bully me over the phone.   It was an impressive demonstration of the opposite of good will.

I have learned, over the years, that you can’t argue with someone’s feelings. Feelings are real.   You must address those feelings first, if you care about having a relationship, or even a conversation.   If you tell me I hurt you, and I care about you, I have to accept, first of all, that you are hurt.  The impulse may be to say you’re crazy to feel that way, I never intended, I would never, blah blah blah, but that self-justifying impulse does nothing to help assuage the hurt your friend has expressed.   Only acknowledgment of the feeling can be of any help when strong emotions are in play.  It is a necessary first step to any real dialogue and sensitivity to a person’s emotions is a prerequisite for friendship.

I saw my old friend a few days after that phone conversation.   He once again began trying to convince me that I needed to forgive my former friend Andy, who had reportedly told him “I owe him an apology, but I’m too stingy to give it”.   I gave Andy’s advocate hypothetical after hypothetical to try to make him understand how hurt I was, since he could not seem to grasp it.  He brushed each one aside.  “That would never happen to me,” “you seem to have a fixation on that”, “well, that’s because you handled that completely wrong” “that’s your problem right there,”  “I’m not prone to violent anger like you are,” “you foolishly trusted Andy” and so forth.   I grew aggravated and told him so, but he would not relent.  There was an important point he needed to make, a point he believed would make me see how rashly I was behaving, mitigating facts I needed to know that might make me actually forgive poor Andy.    

In the end, in the face of my rising aggravation and finally real anger, he put the important facts on the table, Andy’s excuses for his final “betrayal”.   Andy claimed he’d left me a missed call, apparently, that I didn’t return for days,   He hadn’t slept for days before and had bronchitis on the day he promised to help me with a vexing programming problem he told me he could solve in a few minutes.   He couldn’t keep his promise to do that simple thing because he had several excuses, he was very sick, sleepless, tried to call, had obligations to members of his Zen cult that came first.   Why was I being so rigid, so petty, so fucking angry?

“Why didn’t you get the hell out of there?” a friend asked reasonably when I told him the story of my friend’s ruthless attempt to make me forgive.   I told him he’d picked me up and driven me to his house, I had no immediate way to leave his suburban enclave.  

Incidentally, all of Andy’s excuses were known to me, my friend and I had discussed them all a few days earlier.

Eventually, after a long negotiation that tested every bit of my resolve to be nonviolent, my friend apologized for his insensitivity.   We remained friends, but a troubling trend soon emerged.   He did not seem able to resist provoking me.  In the end, when I could not get past this tic of his, he admitted that he had only apologized about the Andy business because I was so upset at the time.  He had been right, he said, to insist, to try to bring facts to my attention that might help me forgive.  He would do it again, he said.

In other words, no matter how aggravated you may have been, no matter how many times you urged me to stop, or reconsider, or slow down, no matter how disturbed your feelings, no matter how angry you became, what I had to say was more important than any of your so-called feelings.  Your anger is your own problem, not mine.

Now at this point you may be thinking this person simply may not really know what friendship is.   Maybe he needs to be left where he is, done. Goodbye friend, as little hope for you as for peace in your endlessly contentious marriage, or easily healing the many harms you’ve done to your children by your long example.

Call it a snapshot of the definition of insanity attributed to Einstein, or some kind of sentimental Anne Frank-like naivete about long-time friendship, or me just being a fool.    A couple of months after our falling out I called a couple of times, left messages, and, at his texted request, sent this email:

It depresses me that people I was friendly with and had no quarrel with, your wife, your sons, R____, have all vanished from my life as a result of our falling out.  Not to mention you.   I understand your wife and kids have to take your side, whatever it is, but still.   And you can’t even pick up the phone and return a missed call? (that was a rhetorical question)

What was my final, unforgivable act against you?

What did you tell R_____ that made him cut off communication with me?   When he left the US we were seemingly the best of friends, he was apologizing that we’d only managed to squeeze in one quick visit when he first arrived.  Then, as a prelude to complete radio silence,  I got a reference to “other developments over the last year or so” that presumably magnified the differences between us beyond the point of possible friendship.

Did you talk to your rabbi in the days before Yom Kippur and, if so, what did he tell you?    I don’t think it’s possible that a rabbi would advise someone to make no further attempt at reconciliation with his oldest friend during the Ten Days of Repentance.   I conclude you didn’t discuss it with your spiritual adviser.   I think you should consider this seven minute discussion on apology, forgiveness and atonement: 

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/metoo-men-repent

It only took him a few days to craft this measured reply:

I do want to find a way for us to be friends again, but I suspect that responding to your questions will get us into the same back and forth mess that electronic communication had got us into earlier this year.  What I suggest would be for us to cut to the chase and for you to let me know what you are looking for from me?  If you are interested in exploring what Judaism would counsel us to do, I’d be open to sitting down with a Rabbi (like Rabbi P_____ from the Chabad) and put our situation before him.

Just one more test, I see, of my ability to rein in the impulse to dash an impossible person to the ground and deliver just enough kicks to let him know how I truly feel about his idiosyncratic take on love and friendship.

 

Veterans Day Efforts in Vain

It was raining today in New York City, on and off, and grey and chilly all day.    Since Veterans Day, November 11, falls on a Sunday in 2018, retailers begin their special Veterans Day Sales on Monday, November 5, the day the holiday is celebrated by banks and other institutions in such years.  I could have that wrong, I’m now told the reason there has been no talk about Veterans Day, or the awful plight of many veterans, is that it is celebrated on November 12th this year.   

Whatever, this Monday fell on the last day of all out tribal warfare before the midterm elections which will decide whether the almost 40% who love Trump will continue to control both houses of Congress as well as the Executive and Judiciary branches of our great democracy.   The House of Representatives is in play, and if Democrats recapture a majority, by swinging about thirty seats, they will gain subpoena and investigatory powers.   These powers will help keep the president and his people honest, restore our federal republic’s checks and balances closer to what the framers of the constitution intended.

In July 2014 a man was killed on a street corner in Staten Island.  He was a big, easy-going man, well-known in the area.  He put in long hours on his feet every day selling illegal cigarettes, evading the New York State taxes and effectively putting those tax dollars in his pocket by selling contraband cigarettes he had driven up from the South where the legal price of cigarettes is apparently much lower due to a much lower “sin” tax there.  He did this black market business for years, at the same place, and the cops had arrested him numerous times.  He served at least one hitch in prison, but he was not a hard man.   He was known as a peace maker in that section of Staten Island.  Sometimes he was arrested, sat in jail overnight, was issued a summons, and went home.  

One particularly hot summer day he told the cops to please not fuck with him, that it was too hot to go to jail, to come back another time.   The police left.   A few days later, when cops came to arrest him, one got him in a chokehold and continued to choke while the man, Eric Garner, gasped “I can’t breathe” over and over until the officer choked him to death. 

The Staten Island grand jury that heard the charges brought by District Attorney Dan Donovan on behalf of the family of the dead man and the community of Staten Island was unlikely to indict the cop for murder or even manslaughter.  The dead man had a long criminal history, was an imposing man, with a prison record, much bigger than the officer, Officer Pantaleo, and so it was hard to argue that the case was murder or even manslaughter.   No white blue collar community in America is going to indict a cop for killing a lowlife of any race, especially not a black ex-con.  It doesn’t seem fair to them to try an officer for murder in a situation like that.  The coroner ruled the death a homicide, but that doesn’t mean a grand jury had to indict the killer.

There was a strong case to made that Officer Pantaleo had been reckless, or careless, or negligent, in using excessive and ultimately deadly force on an unarmed man he was arresting.  The DA of Staten Island never brought the criminal charge of reckless endangerment before the grand jury and so Officer Pantaleo was never indicted or prosecuted for anything in connection with Garner’s killing.  

The DA was a Republican party stalwart who once ran unsuccessfully for New York State Attorney General.   He was elected to Congress from New York’s Eleventh District in a special election in May 2015, after Republican congressman Michael Grimm resigned following his indictment for felony tax evasion.   He got 56.8% of the vote when he was re-elected in 2016, in a district Trump won by over 20%, the only district in New York City Trump won.   He is running for reelection after overcoming a challenge from Michael Grimm, now out of prison, in which he “out-Trumped” the former representative.[1]   He is being opposed by a thirty-one year old Afghanistan war veteran named Max Rose.  Over a million dollars has come into the Rose campaign chest from outside the district, though none of it from corporations, who are major donors to Donovan.  If I was rich, I’d probably give Rose a generous donation.  

Instead, I headed to Staten Island to canvass for him on this final day.  I wanted to speak face to face with as many registered Democrats and the over 100,000 Independents on Staten Island as I could, convince as many as possible to vote for Rose the following day.  The margin of victory is likely to be in the low thousands, or even closer, if the predictions of a tight race are right.  It will be an uphill battle for Rose and truly every last vote counts in these district elections.  

If you are dealing with brutal forces in a contest where brutality is winked at, signaled to each other, it is best to come right out and express your political views in the most direct possible way.  I wanted to talk to voters face to face, let them see this old man who’d made a long trip to talk to them about why this race, the only race where a Republican and a Democrat are vying for a Congressional seat in New York City (all the rest are solidly Democratic), is so important.

Max Rose is for gun control, Dan Donovan supports the Second Amendment, though he would also support background checks.  Max Rose will vote for legislation to curb climate change, Dan Donovan is not sure, since he’s not a scientist, how much human pollution really affects the escalating climate catastrophe we are all seeing.   “You have to ask the scientists,” he says, in a very confident, politic way.  He tends to vote with the rest of his party, and to go along with the wishes of our strongman-type president.  He fended off a primary challenge from Michael Grimm by veering further toward the extreme right, swearing his allegiance to the president.   He is a politician I would like to see out of office.

A friend was kind enough to give me a ride to South Ferry in his car, which saved me a lot of time and hassle getting down to the ferry.   After being casually sniffed by a beautiful golden retriever, a working dog with a security handler, I waited for the next ferry to Staten Island.    I was lucky enough to board one of the old ferries with the outside deck for my cruise to Staten Island.  These old ferries had been taken out of service for years after a maniac hacked a bunch of people with a machete.  It is much easier to safeguard a ferry where everyone is in one large compartment.   This is the first ferry I’ve been on since that maniac’s attack, decades ago, that had the outdoor deck.  We passed Ellis Island in the distance, the place where poor people from Europe and beyond came seeking to be admitted as immigrants or refugees.  

 

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All four of my grandparents had checked in there in the years before the immigration restrictions for poor people, strict national quotas, were put into place the year my father was born, 1924.    People crowded along the railing to get photos of the Statue of Liberty.   We all did.  There was a group of Indians or perhaps Pakistanis (the women wore head scarves, and sandals, though it was chilly and rainy) and they were delightedly taking and posing for pictures, along with everyone else who was traveling with someone.   People lined up along the railing, took turns smiling for the cellphone camera, with the dramatic statue behind them. The woman next to me on the bench and I smiled at each other as we approached the Statue of Liberty.    You have a camera and you pass that beautiful statue, a symbol so full of promise for a better life to millions over the years, millions who have contributed richly to American life and history, you do this:

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On ramps right outside the Saint George ferry terminal in Staten Island there are dozen of bus stops.   I was informed by google maps that I could take the S-46 or the S-48 buses to Max Rose headquarters at 629 Forest Avenue.   It was chilly on that bench by the water.  I put on my extra layer and turned to the other old fart on the bench at the S-46 bus stop with me.   He was wearing a baseball hat with a huge American flag on it.  I asked him if the 46 would take me to Forest Avenue.   He told me the 48 was better, because it went along Forest itself, and I could watch the numbers, it would be hard for me to get lost.  The 46 went on a street parallel to Forest, but you really had to know your way around or things would get bad fast.  I thanked him and went over to sit on the bench at the 48 stop.

(I witnessed, and was a second too slow to help out on, a surprising and poignant scene between high schools kids on that 48 bus– but that will have to wait for another post).

When I got to the office, about fifteen minutes before my required training for canvassing was to begin, the young woman at the door informed me that if I was here for canvassing, they were turfed out.  She explained that meant that all of the names and addresses they had to canvass had been covered already by volunteers.  She told me that I could join the phone bank, and motioned to a room full of young people, shoulder to shoulder, consulting lists and talking on their phones.  They were reading some kind of script, I suppose, it was noisy in there.   I used the bathroom and headed back to the front door.  

“You want to join the phone bank?” she asked me as I approached the door. It wasn’t what I’d come for, I wanted to show some Staten Island Democrats my old face, talk to them in person for a few moments, impress on them the importance of going to vote the next day.   The Democrats need to flip about 30 seats in the Congress and this race, expected to be an easy win for the Republican, appears to be running neck and neck.  Making calls from the makeshift call center did not have the same appeal to me that speaking to people face to face did.   I told her I was going to walk around the block and think about it.

I stepped out into pissing rain.   It was raining hard enough now that ten minutes out in it were enough to soak your pants.   I decided to look for something to eat, to sit inside and stay warm and dry while I decided what to do.  I saw two young women with a pile of Max Rose brochures in front of them, sitting in a coffee shop.  I thought about going in to speak with them, then felt self-conscious about approaching them.  They would probably have been happy to talk to me about Max Rose, I’m sure, maybe even convince me how important it was for us all to be making phone calls.   They never got the chance.  I bought a hot pretzel a few doors away and caught the next bus back to the St. George Ferry Station.  

Right before I went to sit down at the sheltered bus stop I snapped a photo of Max Rose’s Staten Island campaign office (the eleventh district extends into Brooklyn where Max Rose already has an 80 to 20 lead).  It was then that I noticed that his campaign headquarters was in the same small building as Mandolin Brothers.   Mandolin Brothers was a famous purveyor of excellent new and vintage stringed instruments.   You could play and buy beautiful guitars, mandolins, banjos, ukuleles there.   I was only there once, years ago, and pretty close to closing time, but it was a great place I always intended to return to.  I smiled to think they’d loaned their space to Max Rose for his campaign.  Not only great musical instruments, I thought but good political impulses.  (I later learned from my smartphone that the store is long gone).

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The ferry back was one of the now typical ferries that have no external decks along the sides for good, open air views.  The ferry was entirely closed, which was fine with me, it was shitty out, and cold, I was disappointed, and tired, and I sat on a bench hardly noticing that we were traveling over a vast stretch of ocean water.   In a little over twenty minutes we were docking at the foot of Manhattan Island.  I passed a black lab with a working dog collar on and also the golden lab, who was now barking continuously.  It must have been close to quitting time for the golden lab, and her patience was just about done.

A short walk north and west from the ferry station in lower Manhattan, you come to this museum:

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On the front door is this sign:

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We are stronger than hate, until hate actually murders us.  It happens.  It has not stopped happening for many years now, though the names of those being murdered by hate keep changing.   Genocide continues with horrific consistency, on massive scales and on more limited scales.    Four years ago, for example, a few thousand Yazidi men were slaughtered in the Sinjar Massacre, too few for a proper genocide, perhaps, but still very, very horrible.  The Rohingya were recently the subjects of persecution and genocide in Myanmar, the nation formerly known as Burma.   Everyone in Yemen is catching hell, children are being killed every day, casualties of  the brutal Saudi war there, which rages with American support.  Protesters and rock throwers are being shot to death in more than one country, threatened with being shot to death here, by the American president.   So-called strongmen appear here and there to enforce their will by organized mob violence and with their armies.   They use the military to intimidate citizens and perceived enemies, as our president is doing now, having soldiers install concertina wire along the border fence at a cost CBS news reported tonight is perhaps $200,000,000.

Many people feel the world is overdue for its next, and final, world war.  Look at the world, it’s in chaos, violent storms and other natural disasters are regularly destroying homes and killing people all over the planet, species are disappearing, violent ideologies are waging ruthless wars against unarmed civilians in many places.  Some historians claim that we are living in the most peaceful moment of human history.   I think that’s a wonderful thought, probably backed by some kind of very convincing statistical evidence.   I also don’t think it’s true.   The world is waiting to explode into the next mass murder, many people everywhere are desperate, snarling angrily, we are one big bomb away, and violence is in the air.

So I say, to myself and to people of all faiths and original nationalities who vote in American elections: vote today for the party that is less racist, less xenophobic, less nationalist, less extreme in its divisive rhetoric.  Changing one-party control of our democracy is not the answer to all of America’s problems, but it is the start.   The other way lies madness.

 

[1] Wikipedia:

In 2018, Donovan faced a primary challenge from former Rep. Michael Grimm.[27] During the primary campaign, Grimm accused Donovan of having tried to entice Grimm to drop out of the race by offering to lobby Trump to pardon Grimm.[27] Grimm pleaded guilty to federal tax evasion charges in 2014 and spent several months in prison.[27] During the primary, both candidates emphasized their loyalty to Trump, seeking to “out-Trump each other,” according to the Washington Post.[28] In the 2018 general election Donovan is facing Max Rose.[29]

I’ve Waited Long

I am typing in the room where my mother’s ashes sit in a box in a beautiful paper bag.   The elegant bag is in the corner, out of my view, and I haven’t looked at it in a long time, but it is a distinctive bag.   The bag is brown paper on the outside, a pure slate gray on the inside.   My mother would like the bag.   She has no worries now, nor any wishes, either.  I decided years ago that I’d scatter her ashes in the Long Island Sound at the public beach at Wading River, but we haven’t done it so far, in eight and a half years.   I haven’t been to that beach in more than fifty years, who knows if you can even get on the beach now without a resident pass?   When I was there last there were swings, seesaws and a sliding pond on the sand, and a small parking lot with maybe eight spots painted on the once black shore road.

The idea of scattering my mother’s ashes in the water at Wading River was a sentimental one.  I  think of those months in that rented green and white bungalow a hundred yards from the lapping water as the happiest summers of her life, but who knows?   She always said she wanted to live near the water, and for a couple of summers we did.   I don’t know if she was happy there or not, hearing the waves breaking at night.  What I do know is that at the moment she truly doesn’t care.   Her concern at the end was about not being eaten by worms and bugs, the thought terrified her.  I assured her it would never happen and it will never happen.  

The scattering of her ashes is more a poetic matter, really.   Every so often it gives me a pang, that I haven’t managed to scatter her ashes into the gently lapping Long Island Sound,  that her ashes are sitting there in that elegant paper bag.  On the other hand, I am positive she doesn’t mind, even if she would chide me about my long failure to do it, if she were somehow able to.

That I can sit here, a few feet from her ashes, writing thoughtfully about it in words almost nobody will ever see, is a blessing and my form of daily meditation.   Thinking these thoughts, molding them into sections that I then comb carefully for readability, focuses my spirit, clarifies my beliefs, sharpens my sense of purpose.   That I have little clue about the only thing the world understands — attaining financial success — does not distract me while I work.  The hard work of vainly striving is not a remote consideration while I concentrate on making my words express my thoughts, my heart, as clearly as I can.

                                                                           ii 

I had a call just now from a one-time good friend of my mother’s, a woman a year older than my mother.   My mother would have been ninety last May, this woman was ninety-one last month, and still going strong.  God bless her, as we say.  Her mind is sharp, her language is crisp, she is upright and walking and driving great distances– still a force at ninety-one.   In the course of narrating a lot of horrors she asked me to keep to myself, while assuring me that she is up to the challenges, taking them one day at a time, she mentioned something that gave her a glimmer of hope in these dark times.

She attended an interfaith vigil the other day, the great throng of several faiths who had gathered was inspiring to her.   The hall was very crowded, with a big crowd outside also.   Somebody came through the mass of people outside and ushered her inside to a seat she didn’t want.  “I can stand, I’m perfectly fine,” she insisted, “give the seat to someone who needs it.”   In the end, she took the seat, though she felt bad about it.   Her ninety-two year-old friend, who had declined the seat in another part of the crowded hall, regretted it afterwards as her lower back tightened up painfully after standing on the concrete floor for a couple of hours.   Better to be seated than aching, I say more and more often now.

Small mercies take on a bigger and bigger significance as life goes on.   We see few enough of them in the world now, as so many nations stand on the brink of merciless horrors many of us believed were a barbaric relic of a bygone, insane age.  I’m talking about a small mercy like finding a vacant bench at the point of a walk when your arthritic knees are barking.   The relief you feel, taking the weight off your troubled bones, a gift you give yourself, provided by a merciful side of the universe and gratefully accepted.

There was a lot on this woman’s mind, and much of it I agreed not to share with anyone, so there’s that.   At one point, God bless her, she couldn’t resist giving me just a little shit about not calling her lately, after I’d spent hours on the phone last month advising her about some very vexing things– and sent her several more pages about my father’s life that she was too vexed to really take in.   

                                                                  iii

After the Saudis murdered a journalist in their consulate in Turkey last month there was a period of several weeks during which the vicious, smiling thirty-four year-old Crown Prince had his advisors and marketing folks make up and spin multiple lies about what happened to the disappeared critic of the regime.  Our president, also born to great wealth that made him feel truly exceptional since childhood, stalled along with the Crown fucking Prince of Saudi Arabia, a fundamentalist Islamic monarchy.   “We have to wait until  the Saudis finish investigating whether they murdered this vicious, lying journalist, which they strongly deny, look, they strongly deny it, like Justice Kavanaugh denied all those lies against him  — whatever happened to the presumption of innocence that liberals used to talk about?  Here they go, rushing to call MBS a murderer, which we don’t know, we may never know, certainly not until he’s done investigating whether he is or not, look, this kid is a gem, a great, great future king– no presumption of innocence for him?   Typical of the lying haters and hypocrites, funders and defenders of the raping, leprosy and smallpox infected terrorist hoards advancing on us …”

All we have, any of us, is the impression we leave behind on those who knew us. We are whispers, after our death, not even ghosts.   The example of how we lived is the only thing we leave to the world of people who knew us.   The power we may have wielded over others is nothing, it is how we used that power that is remembered, that lessons for the living can be drawn from.

I had an old friend who lives the frenetic, embattled life of a successful suburban citizen.   His many stresses and frustrations have few, if any, safe outlets.  It appears that I became his best option for relief.   More and more, particularly since I’ve devoted myself, from before my mother’s death, to restraining my angry reactions as much as I can, he took to provoking me.    I pointed this out to him each time he did it, but he always argued that he was not provoking me, that I just get mad unfairly, that maybe I was the one with the provocation problem, not him.    I had more than one opportunity to throw him on the ground and kick him, but I breathed and fought my way to remaining as peaceful as I could.   This restraint apparently goaded him to ever greater provocations.

In the end, he provoked me into detailing the many things I don’t respect about him.  I don’t know if I mentioned his lack of basic courage, which I think is probably encompassed in the unfortunate phrase I do recall using “moral retard”.   In the wake of this his wife called me, basically offering me an ultimatum.   You have to forgive him, she told me, because he loves you, we all love you.  

I explained why it’s impossible to forgive someone who takes no responsibility for hurtful things they repeatedly do.   Futile, really, since those hurtful things continue on and on into the future if they are not acknowledged and corrected.   The only option, to pretend everything is fine because people tell you that they love you, is not one I’m willing to take, even for the high moral cause of professed love.

Besides, I told her, love is the way you treat people, what you reflexively do when you see a loved one in pain.   Love is action, not a word.  I told her to let her husband know that I’ll be happy to hear from him once he gets some insight in the therapy he assures me he is working hard at.  “That’s not going to happen,” his wife told me, and it had the ring of truth.   He would rather lose his oldest friend than admit that the annoyingly superior fuck might have been even partially right.  Zero sum, baby, he can’t help himself.  If you don’t win, you lose.  What could be worse than that?  Ask the president.

It began to bug me more and more that because I’d taken a principled stance in regard to an old friendship I’d lost the longtime friendship of his wife and his two sons, as well as the friendship of a close mutual friend, apparently enraged at how badly I’ve hurt his troubled old friend.   I called the guy on Halloween (spooky, I know), to ask him three questions that had formed in my head.   I left a voicemail.   I heard nothing back from him, though I’d spontaneously left him the option of doing nothing, saying I’d email him the questions if I didn’t hear back.

A few hours later I rethought my offer.  What was the point of sending questions to someone who could not even reply to a voicemail?  It would only increase my aggravation if I never heard back, give him an easy, an effortless, final provocation.  I called again, left a second message, asking him to text, email or call me if he was willing to help me by answering three questions.  

Two days later, having heard nothing, I texted him, asking if he was out of town or too weak and unJewish to respond.   “Weak and unJewish”, an admittedly provocative formulation (especially to a Jew who fervently prays every morning), but, in context, restrained, I thought, particularly after two days of silence by way of reply.

I soon got the texts one would expect, explaining how he’d heard the first message and thought he’d be getting an email, and then no email came, and then, belatedly, he saw the other voicemail from me but didn’t actually hear it until after my recent text a few hours earlier and so on and so forth and so, you see, there was a rationale to all the delay, a hazard of digital communication (which is what I’d called to avoid in the first place) and, yes, please send him the three questions.

I sent this:

It depresses me that people I was friendly with and had no quarrel with, your wife, your sons, R___, have all vanished from my life as a result of our falling out.  Not to mention you.   I understand your wife and kids have to take your side, whatever it is, but still.   And you can’t even pick up the phone and return a missed call? (rhetorical question)

What was my final, unforgivable act against you?

What did you tell R____ that made him cut off communication with me?   When he left the US we were seemingly the best of friends, he was apologizing that we’d only managed to squeeze in one quick visit when he first arrived.  Then, as a prelude to complete radio silence,  I got a reference to “other developments over the last year or so” that presumably magnified the differences between us beyond the point of possible friendship.

Did you talk to your rabbi in the days before Yom Kippur and, if so, what did he tell you?    I don’t think it’s possible that a rabbi would advise someone to make no further attempt at reconciliation with his oldest friend during the Ten Days of Repentance.   I conclude you didn’t discuss it with your spiritual adviser.   I think you should consider this seven minute discussion on apology, forgiveness and atonement: 

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/metoo-men-repent

I heard back quickly by email.  He’d received my questions, but I’d have to give him a few days to answer them.

I took a breath and typed back: OK.

The Sins of the Fathers

The Holy One, Blessed Be He, in Leviticus 26, makes it clear that He will punish the children, grandchildren, yea, the great-grandchildren of sinners seven times over. OK, actually, I’m lying, He only implies it, merely hints at it in his final threat.   There will be no children or grandchildren left alive when the All Merciful is done with you, disobedient sinners.   As it is written:

27 “‘If in spite of this you still do not listen to me but continue to be hostile toward me, 28 then in my anger I will be hostile toward you, and I myself will punish you for your sins seven times over. 29 You will eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters.'”  [1]

As it is written (by me):

The father’s weakness
anger, vanity
visited as a curse
on the lives
of his children

It does not, of course, need to be written this way, though frequently it is.   Your parents are your first role models for how to act.  Sometimes they are the worst possible role models, in which case, you will have to take your lumps for having originally learned how to treat others from teachers who had a poor idea of how to do it.

It makes me very sad, because, though you can learn these things over the course of many years, given the time and inclination and the luck of finding people to support you in this difficult endeavor, the odds of ever doing so are greatly stacked against you if you’re raised by senselessly enraged parents, or terrified ones.  They can’t be expected to offer meaningful support because they don’t even understand what you’re trying to do.    Your parents’ poor teaching will, as Ha Shem threatens the willfully disobedient, eat your flesh. 

 

[1] The Lord’s truly divine punchline (you really should read the entire five or six paragraphs of unimaginable horror the Holy One threatens will befall the disobedient, if you want the full effect of the punchline):

36 “‘As for those of you who are left, I will make their hearts so fearful in the lands of their enemies that the sound of a windblown leaf will put them to flight. They will run as though fleeing from the sword, and they will fall, even though no one is pursuing them. 37 They will stumble over one another as though fleeing from the sword, even though no one is pursuing them. So you will not be able to stand before your enemies. 38 You will perish among the nations; the land of your enemies will devour you. 39 Those of you who are left will waste away in the lands of their enemies because of their sins; also because of their ancestors’ sins they will waste away.'”

Schematic of the previous post

A complicated, difficult dynamic can be reduced to simple terms.   This process is sometimes referred to as reductionism, which has come far from its original scientific/philosophical meaning of breaking a complex issue into its simplest component parts to understand its workings.  

In our modern political version of reductionism a long, complex history can be summarized in an easily understandable, if simplistic, concept:  liberty, or betrayal, or treason. Traitors have long been executed in front of cheering crowds, their heads set on pikes as a warning to anyone who might be thinking of challenging power.   The individual guilt or innocence of the decapitated party is far less important than the effect on the rest when a traitor meets a grisly end.

For most purposes in the larger world, the party with the loudest megaphone will define what is going on.   For example, Americans angry about a recent national disgrace involving a controversial Supreme Court appointment can be called an angry mob.   An angry mob can be dismissed, they are clearly irrational assholes.   The underlying events that made millions so angry?   Wah, wah, wah.

My old friend who felt disrespected by my late arrival has his story about the end of our long friendship, confirmed in its harshest detail.   Widaen told me he disrespects me!    

Widaen, for his part, had another story, my old friend simply doesn’t seem able to stop provoking me.  He seems intent on making me angry.   He surely sees that he’s aggravating me, or placing me in a brutally unfair position, and when I protest, he doubles down.  Gives a meaningless apology, to end the conflict, and then continues on the same way as if we’ve never discussed things.

There are facts, actual events, underlying this dispute, but those facts are in dispute.   If they are in dispute, they’re not really facts, are they?   

This is the self-justifying idiocy of the world.   If you find any mental construct to support your position (if there is a dispute, can there actually be “facts”?), you’re golden, just keep doubling your bet.   In the case of my once good friend, he was able to justify his own actions, become the victim of my brutality and get the sympathy of those who know us both.  

I think a lot of conflict between people who are close (and tribes and nations, for that matter) can be traced to lack of insight, a lack of actually listening to what the other party needs.    

My friend’s refusal to empathize with the feelings I expressed became impossible for me to tolerate. Ultimately it’s impossible to respect someone who lives in denial about how his actions affect others.   His years of constant fights with his wife?   Nothing to do with my disrespect for him!    

The good news, as far as I can make it out, is that insight can be developed.   There are things baked into us that are hard to change, but change is the nature of the universe, us included.   If you develop just a bit of insight, we can continue to talk. You need to have just a little insight, to have a good friend like me.

“You arrogant, pretentious fuck,” I can hear the words foaming on my once good friend’s lips.   My point is no less true.

Provoking vs. Disrespecting: anatomy of a fatal falling out

I will use a personal story to flesh out a mechanism that commonly leads to violence and sometimes death.  It is a mechanism that is particularly ubiquitous in this black and white zero-sum society we are living in at the moment.  It is the reduction of a complicated story to a simple, primary concept, like betrayal, or loyalty.   One party wins all, the other loses all, or it’s mutual destruction — fine, everybody loses and everybody wins, sort of.

In this particular personal anecdote no punches, kicks or bullets were exchanged, though both sides wound up feeling hurt and completely justified in their final anger at the other.  Every person who knows my once good friend, including two who claimed recently to love me, has cut me dead, which is as bad as the underlying impasse with a guy I’ve known since fourth grade.   In some ways it’s worse, more painful, this tribal closing of ranks after an ultimatum to forgive without condition or forever be seen as the vicious loveless party persecuting a weaker man. 

This is an aggravating story Sekhnet, who tries her best to take care of me, urges me to somehow put out of my mind every time I mention anything connected to it.   I don’t know how that’s done, until I am done working through it to my satisfaction.   A gnawing, vexing story untold is just a fucking tumor in waiting, as far as I can see. There is nothing I can do about a lying sociopath president or a lockstep political party who seems to have, with alarming speed, acquired a taste for the inside of their new leader’s ass, but this situation with an old friend I can wrestle with directly.  I believe it also sheds light on our larger problem as a culture, which comes largely from partisan oversimplification and a mass failure of empathy.

The common response to a fight is to take sides, be loyal to your people.  They call this tribalism now, reminding all of us homo sapiens that when it comes to war, we jump with those closest to us.  Loyalty has been elevated to the highest value, they used to call this kind of reflexive patriotism “my country– right or wrong” — you defend whatever America does because you’re American.   Somewhere far down the list of civic virtues, after loyalty, are being analytical, and fair-minded, and trying to find the causes of friction and the best solutions for difficult problems, including interpersonal troubles like I had with an old friend recently.

My mother always expressed frustration, even anger, at her daughters’ children’s seeming ingratitude.   My sister (my mother’s daughter) always expressed frustration, even anger, that her mother could not just give with grandmotherly generosity without demanding a “thank you”.    I always thought that a skilled mediator could convince my sister to teach her kids to say “thank you, grandma” when grandma gave them something.   This simple act would have gone a long way toward reducing tensions, but they were both too angry, and too stubbornly committed to being right, to ever go to a mediator.   Each one dismissed the idea of mediation as something the other would never agree to do.

Sekhnet reminds me of all the other things I should be worrying about, instead of this intransigent former friend who is too hurt and angry to make peace.   I have worry enough to cover these other things, and have made appointments, or at least calls, about all but one of them. [1]   Seems funny, in light of these other immediate worries, that I’m returning over and over to the sad and now sickening falling out with a friend of more than fifty years, but here we go.   On the other hand, this is the only vexation I have any chance of getting closer to solving today.

Much violence among armed teenagers is over the issue of perceived disrespect.  “He dissed me,” more than one violent young man will say in complete justification of why the person he shot needed to get shot.   Disrespect is a fundamental blow that we are taught not to tolerate.   For purposes of my friend’s case against me, I explicitly told him I don’t respect him and I gave several specific reasons why I don’t.   It would seem to be case closed for our friendship.  

I disrespected my friend, first by my actions and then by explicit words, and that’s all she wrote.  If you don’t respect someone it’s impossible to be friends with them.   End of story.   There is no coming back from this.   It’s as bad as lack of trust, lack of mutuality, lack of empathy, lack of affection.   There is nothing else to tell, many would say, closing the case, though I will tell the rest, as is my way.  The details may be useful in seeing how this sort of irrefutable tribal conclusion is often reached.   

What I was seeking from my friend, by the way, was that when he saw me getting aggravated as he pressed ahead in some conversation — the reddening of my face, the clenching of my arms and hands, the gritted teeth, the labored breathing, the other universal signs of approaching anger, plus my words to that effect — that he could take his foot off the accelerator, apply the brakes a little and change direction.   He was increasingly unable to do this in recent years, as his own life got more and more stressful.

During our last discussion my friend told me, three separate times in the course of about twenty minutes, that he felt disrespected by me.  He felt this because I had been ninety minutes late to meet him for an important discussion to try to save our failing friendship.  He told me at once, and slightly sheepishly, that he knew the feeling was irrational, since we’d been loose about the time, and he’d declined to accompany me on the errands that took longer than planned so that we could meet at the original time.  This talk was important to him and he’d saved the entire day for it, from two pm on.  

He told me we could meet at any point, true, but still, I didn’t show up until almost 3:30 and ninety minutes is past the border line for disrespect.  It was even worse when you start the clock at 1 pm, which was my initial suggestion, making me a full one hundred and fifty minutes late.   It was true, he said, that I’d called as soon as I knew I was going to be late, spoke to him from the middle of a traffic jam on the Grand Central, and that each time I called he’d reassured me that he wasn’t, for once, under any particular time pressure. He’d told me not to worry, in fact.   All this was true, he said, and so it might seem irrational to me that he felt disrespected, but there it was.  Ninety minutes.  It’s hard to ignore ninety minutes.

The second time he told me how disrespectful I’d been to him, about ten minutes later, he was in the middle of denying that he had provoked me again recently, intentionally or unintentionally.  He told me that he’d only apologized to me in the most egregious previous instance because I seemed so peeved.   He had actually been in the right, he told me, to insist in the face of my rising aggravation, on the annoying thing he’d been insisting on me hearing, for a second time in a week, as it turned out.   In fact, he added, he’d do the same thing again, if it came to it.  

I was just wrong, he said, to see what he’d done as provocation.  He is not provocative, he is actually a lifelong peacemaker by nature, and besides, I was the one who’d behaved disrespectfully toward him and was now not accepting his most recent apology.  Ninety minutes, he reminded me, more than enough time for my disrespect, intended or not, to sink deep inside of him.

This line of counter-attack is familiar from my childhood.  My father liked to reframe everything away from whatever I was concerned about to a discussion of my terrible temper, how angry I always was.  When I was young, this used to piss me off pretty quickly, the abrupt pivot from what I needed to talk about with my father to the general subject of my crazy anger.  Once I got mad, I lost any chance to talk about anything.  “You see,” he’d say with a smug smile, “this is exactly what I’m talking about.  The People rest, you’re irrationally angry again.  You really have a fucking problem with your violent fucking temper.”    

My father did me a favor, in a roundabout way, since by the time I was a middle aged man this kryptonite became a weaker and weaker weapon against me.   It took years of work, but years well-spent, in my opinion.

My disrespected friend, on the other hand, had been actively taught never to show anger.   Anger is a threatening emotion, particularly to someone raised never to express it by word or conscious deed.  “I was taught to swallow it,” his mother told me recently, “avoiding conflict at all costs is how I was raised.   My mother used to tell me to use any means necessary, including creatively altering any details of what happened that could possibly make anyone mad.  The only supremely important thing, according to my mother, was avoiding confrontation.”  

I experienced a few untruths from this now very old woman over the more than fifty years I’ve known her, but I never held that personality quirk against her.  She’s a lovely woman, outside of that.   I spent hours on the phone with her last month advising her about a very aggravating and frightening situation I must keep secret.   That’s the other piece about her approach to anger, fear, shame — really emotionally explosive things must always be kept secret.

The son is like her in some fundamental ways.   His occasional bending of the truth was something I just accepted as a regrettable feature.   I always felt I could trust him about the big things, in spite of his tendency to be less than truthful at times about small things.   Funny that this equivocation was never a terrible issue in my friendship with him, I guess because our affection went back to childhood and since I always felt I could trust him in the larger sense, I never worried when he did that dance he sometimes does to try to make sure everybody is happy.   I suppose I never questioned his motivations when he was being less than honest, it was for the sake of avoiding what he saw as an inevitable confrontation, I could always see that.  

Now here we were in a real confrontation, and his dance was not at all endearing nor did it give me any reason for optimism.   He simply could not admit, beyond saying the words “I’m sorry”, that he’d been wrong to blame me, based on a casual remark made to his wife in passing, for willfully, or recklessly trying to destroy his long-troubled marriage.   I was his oldest friend, and I tried my best to help him get the full context to that particular, unfortunately weaponized remark.  

I was not at all angry at the pointed accusation, odd to say.  I was on the spot, I was concerned, there was a slight tightness in my gut, I felt under pressure, but I wasn’t angry.  Seeing him in such distress I did what I could to try to help him.  It took an hour or more to get things to a reasonable place that he could offer to his wife and their therapist in explanation of his oldest, closest friend’s alleged treachery.

When I was finally done with that he asked me if I harbored anger at him, conscious or unconscious, and told me I’d never once in our long relationship ever admitted I was wrong, had never apologized to him about anything.   These are faults I work on not having, when I become aware I’ve hurt a friend I do my best to make amends as soon as I can.  He brought up a thoughtless thing I’d apparently done to him years ago and I told him I was wrong and apologized, for what it was worth.

As soon as I was done telling him how sorry I was he accused me, based on something “someone in his family” had disclosed to him, of insultingly treating him like a helpless child.   The vexing information he complained of being spilled by a family member (there are only three possible candidates) was something I later realized that I myself had told him months earlier.   It was quite an emotional trifecta in his car that afternoon.  It took a few days before it began to strike me as an unfriendly, and unfair, assault on my character and my friendship.   My friend kept telling me how impossible his life was, worse than ever, the pressure on him was unbearable.  I told him we needed to talk face to face, that things between us were very bad.

Now I was in a suddenly aggravating conversation, doing what I could to try to save a friendship that was hanging by a thin, fraying thread.   The conversation was hard work, because he’s very smart and quite capable of putting up a strenuous emotional and intellectual fight.   His position was that he’d apologized to me already, about everything, including that “thing in the car”, and that it appeared to him that I was unforgiving, unreasonably demanding more than an apology.   “I apologized to you already, but my apology apparently wasn’t enough for you,” was his opening line to this conversation we needed to have to better respect each other’s feelings if our friendship was going to survive.  

In his defense, I’m pretty sure he honestly does not see himself as capable of expressing vehement hostility.   That, he likely believes, is my area of expertise.  I am the one who expresses anger, after all.    All of his efforts in interpersonal relations are intended to keep the peace, make peace, be a mediator between angry people.  In the short term, his efforts sometimes work, two angry people kiss and make up.   Long term, his record is not as good — as nobody’s can be when “peace” is based on persuading everyone to let bygones be bygones and a polite agreement that everybody loves each other.  That’s not how love, or anger, actually works.  In any event, the impasse between him and me is a special case and he really couldn’t be expected to make peace with someone as angry and unforgiving as I apparently am.   Plus, of course, the disrespect, how do you get past that?

In the end, the third time he brought up the disrespect, about five minutes after the second time, I finally lost it.  Outside of provoking me, I have no other theory for why he kept mentioning this perceived feeling of being disrespected.  I snapped.  I told him he was right to feel disrespected, that I don’t respect him, not the way he treats people, not many of the choices he’s made in his life, not his inability to empathize, to be honest about his feelings, to have any insight into his anger, to make a meaningful apology.   If you apologize for hurting somebody, I said, and you continue to do the same hurtful thing over and over, your apology is a shit apology.   A lie.   A meaningless fucking lie, dude.    

It may be worth mentioning here that we spoke for another four or five hours after that.   We talked quietly, but in circles, each trying our best to somehow rescue our deeply wounded friendship.   Oddly enough, he seemed to calm down and fight much less after making me explode at him.

 My childhood friend now spends a lot of time studying the ancient wisdom of Judaism with an orthodox rabbi, though he chose not to contact me during the Ten Days of Repentance, a time when Jews are supposed to make amends with people they know they’ve hurt.   Feeling the aggrieved party (victimhood is one of the most frequently and potently weaponized feelings in Trump’s America) I am sure he contented himself praying for his soul and the souls of his loved ones.   I thought about this falling out, blamed entirely on me for my inability not to be provoked by what I falsely claim is provocation, extensively during those ten days and beyond.  

I heard a rabbi talking about apology, atonement and forgiveness.   A fascinating seven minute segment on On The Media (click here for the excellent conversation) .  The rabbis apparently require someone seeking forgiveness to apologize at least three times before they can give up with the human and atone before God.   Element number one of an apology is empathy– I know you’re hurt, if someone had done to me what I did to you I’d be hurt too, just like you are, I’m sorry I hurt you, I’ll try my best not to ever do it again.   Remove empathy and you have only the empty form of an apology:  I see you’re hurt and waiting for an apology, so I’m sorry, can we just move on now?

Can we just move on, you merciless fucking irrationally hurt self-righteously enraged prick?

Think about any member of his family who might want to keep in touch with me– impossible.   There is a huge cost to taking sides against your own family, going against the current of your tribe’s strong feelings, even in a small way.  This conflict in the soul when a person opposes the will of the tribe has been the stuff of drama forever.  First, it is seen by those who trust you as disloyal.   Second, if you are critical of the accepted tribal story your head can be next on the chopping block, you see how upset everyone is.   Best to say nothing.  

I have a friend fond of quoting his grandfather’s aphorisms, gleaned from the teachings of the rabbis.  One of our favorites is “yaffa shteeka leh cha-chameem”   beautiful is silence to the wise.   Dig it.

 That said, the only hope we humans have, if we truly seek to change things for the better, is looking as deeply and dispassionately as we can into things that are sometimes, frankly, terrifying.  It is easy to resolve conflict in your own mind by reducing something to a simple scenario.   Few scenarios are actually as simple as we easily convince ourselves they are.

 

[1]  I have a CAT scan of my kidneys, bladder and ureters early next week, then a camera on a long stick up the penis into the urethra to look for the source of a large blood clot, gross hematuria, some emergency dental work I need to set up and a bit of fancy footwork to do playing the insurance odds, by the December 15 deadline to buy health insurance for 2019, trying to learn before then if I’ll need another $88,000 infusion of chemotherapy for my eventually life ending kidney disease.  

Fighting with the Only Weapon They Have

It’s a fairly safe assumption that someone who regularly suffers from a physical condition he reasonably believes is caused by rage is frequently angry.   He may not often know exactly why he is angry, or even that he is so angry, but then a car cuts him off on the road, his skin cracks open, his spine painfully seizes up, and he literally can’t move without agony.   So angry, he can’t even scream.

There are releases from the choking grip of anger.   Vigorous physical exercise, for example, is frequently thought of as a great outlet for stress, including rage.   You work up a sweat, breathe hard, drink in oxygen for your hard-working muscles, endorphins are released,  you experience a sense of well-being.   In movies we often see a persecuted protagonist sweatily taking out her frustrations on a punching bag,    It is better to pound a heavy bag than your own head against a wall, for sure.   Probably also better than the fake catharsis we so often see in American movies, vengeful violence as the final and best answer to unbearable pain.  I’ve found that writing clearly while thinking through something thoroughly can sometimes make a difference, help me contextualize, understand  and digest my anger.

Many people don’t see anger as a chance to work through an aggravating issue that has long plagued them, but something to repress at all costs.   If a friend you admire is secretly screwing the girl you love, a young woman who then inexplicably scorns you, well… that’s something for a novel you might dream of writing some day.   Bros before hos, yo– no reason to get angry about even a double betrayal.    A person given to repressing anger, no matter how reasonable that anger might be,  will not be tolerant of someone who sees anger as part of a process to be worked through, with important insights to be gained.  

For example,  if you feel yourself getting angry there are steps you can take to control how you express that anger.   That modicum of self-awareness and self-control is sometimes the only thing that can prevent violence.  The first essential thing is learning to recognize the initial rising of anger, that is the moment when you must become super clear in your mind and body about what you need to do differently than what the chemicals coursing through you are now urging you to do.   It is not an easy process to get better at controlling an angry reaction, but I have two friends who’ve made great progress controlling their tempers and I take courage from their examples. 

“Yeah, but he still makes that face,” a mutual friend will observe with a wry smile.   OK, but making that face is much different than following it up with a provocative insult, violently smashing things or bashing your face, isn’t it?  A much better reaction, the face, with no violence in word or deed beyond that.   I’d say that is tremendous progress, and I find it inspiring.   Plus, you can’t help the look on your face, beyond a certain point.

To someone at the mercy of  the constantly percolating violent impulses of repressed anger, there are only the tools at hand to crudely express it.   This is where the passive-aggressive playbook comes into play.   Anger is threatening and must not be expressed, but I am enraged.  I am also terrified, because if I express anger there’s no telling how cataclysmically destructive the violence will be.  The best course of action, for someone with a mortal fear of anger, is passive aggression.  In fact, it’s often the only course of action available to people afraid of conflict.

“You are a judgmental motherfucker,” the individual I have in mind here snarls, departing from his usual high civility.

We are all judges here, friend.  We judge what we can accept and what we can’t, what is proper and what is out of bounds, what is fair and what is unfair.  We judge crime and punishment.   We all do this every day, in many choices we make.   We judge this better than that, this one a friend, this one an acquaintance, this one an enemy.  

“Only vicious people like you have enemies,” says the person too angry to be angry.  

I rest my case.

“Yeah, easy for you to set up a straw man and knock it down, with nobody here to contradict your pontification,” says the nonjudgmental one.  

Nothing could be easier, buddy.  

So here’s what you do, the only power left to you.  You withhold.   I know all about the power of this, having been raised by a father with many weapons, but none more effective than this one.   You listen to the heartfelt expressions of someone close to you who is in pain, you read them laid out at length in writing, if necessary, and then reply, simply:

You’ve expressed your view of things here very clearly and I truly appreciate the mildness of your formulations.  

Period.  

Many people would find this reply to a long, thoughtful letter inadequate, annoying, perhaps even provocative, but no matter.   As all decent writers learn at some point, no iron can stab the heart like a period placed just right. [1]  

 

[1] this truth was expressed by the great Isaac Babel in his wonderful story about writing and editing “Guy De Maupassant”.

 

Weaponizing civility

I had a falling out with a friend from my childhood over his tendency to ignore my feelings, something that seemingly got harder and harder for him to control as time went on.   It was irrelevant to him that he was making me angry about his insistence on one thing or another, my anger was my own problem, the painful truth he was driving at was too important to turn into a referendum on the propriety of putting an old friend in an aggravating position, attacking him or ignoring his clear discomfort.

My childhood friend has a troubled relation with anger, something he was taught to swallow by parents who were also taught to swallow anger, whether they had a right to feel angry or not.   His mother recently described to me how she was taught by her mother, who I knew and could believe it of, to concoct a story rather than ever confront anybody in a way that might result in anger.   Following this practice, she learned late in life, did not always have the intended result.

Every one of us has to deal with anger, a difficult, sometimes scary emotion that is often quite appropriate in an unjust world.   Most things that provoke people  are things most people would be angry about if subjected to.   The key to how you view these provocations is often whether you personally are provoked or not– it is a matter of whether or not you identify with the anger personally.  

Not everyone is taught that swallowing anger, and coming up with an anodyne story to bring a close to the underlying conflict, is the best way to deal with that harsh emotion.  It may be a widely practiced method, but that just puts it in the same category as racism, misogyny, advocating mass killing for a patriotic reason or for no reason and a lot of other widely practiced human emotional excesses.  Compared to raging outright whenever one feels aggrieved, swallowing anger is probably a better alternative, though neither approach leads to a good outcome.

Swallowing anger is a demonstrably bad long term strategy.   Anger is corrosive, comes out one way or the other and it leads to many terrible things including a tendency to irrationally fly off the handle, to lash out at people it’s safe to attack who may have nothing to do with the source of one’s anger, to be stricken by bodily pains so severe that the sufferer cannot even move.  

Maybe the worst thing about swallowing anger is that it makes any anger shown by anyone else, no matter how reasonable it might be, infuriating.  Denying another person’s right to their feelings is a common cause of anger, which must then be swallowed.   It also, sadly, makes friendship ultimately impossible with anyone not committed to pretending about fundamental things that might be absent:  like the right not to have their feelings repeatedly hurt by their closest friends, the right to swallow or not swallow anger, the right to try to make things right when a relationship is about to be lost.

The reasons this old friend was so angry at me are hard to know exactly.   I don’t seem as jittery in my own skin as he is, I’m a little more affable, more comfortable in social settings.   I play guitar better than him, I seem to stand up for myself and my beliefs in a way he can’t and I can express anger when I need to.  

I don’t know what exactly it was that made him provoke me so frequently, beyond the fact that he knew he could lash out at me without much consequence for him.   As mad as he sometimes made me, as furious as some of his attacks were, I never hit him back very hard.   There was probably nobody else in his lifetime of swallowing rage that he felt safe enough to do this with.  

Just because a person can take punches and kicks without responding in kind doesn’t mean he likes being punched and kicked.  There comes a time when even the fondest sentimental attachment frays and finally tears apart under this kind of regime.   My competitive friend’s anger, in the end, was as much about this as anything:  even though my life is manifestly a failure in every way our society uses to measure a life (beautiful home, nice car, good income, social status, quantifiable financial success), he somehow felt I have the upper hand, have the more enviable life.  My squalid rented apartment in a marginal neighborhood somehow provides me the same sense of security as his beautiful home in a wealthy suburb, which is objectively unfair.

His anger at the unfairness of this, it appears, became like a snowball rolling down an immense hill in heavy snow.  As his troubled  marriage reached a new crisis, I became the go-to guy to lash out at.   Finally, when he petulantly told me his extracted apology was apparently not good enough for a prig like me, that my stubborn demand that he actually change the way he behaved toward me was very unfair, especially considering that he was actually the victim, now and forever, we were finally done. 54 years and … poof!

Now we come to the killing power of civility.   You can rage in a polite way, as our newest Junior Associate Supreme Court justice did at his recent hearings.   Nothing he said while raging is unprintable, he never lost control to the point that he uttered a line that could cost him his position on the nation’s highest court (like when I recently referred to him as a “piece of shit” and a “motherfucker” — the end of my Supreme Court dream).   He never cursed, never even came close to using an off-color term.   He never crossed the line into easily dismissible rage, everything he said while raging, however childish and regrettable it may also have been — every word was printable, “good enough”, anyway.  

Reading a transcript of his remarks you may not feel he acquitted himself as the brilliant, impartial jurist he presented himself as, his responses make him look like an hysterical zealot to some, and less than 100% candid and truthful, beyond question, but he clearly adhered to the rule of civility, firmly, if crudely.   It is that angrily clenched sphincter of a mouth, whenever confronted with a question he was in any way threatened by, that speaks louder than anything he actually said.

So it is with civility, being civil means never really having to say you’re sorry.

I recently saw the end of a long email correspondence with a friend who is a master of civility.    He was a mutual friend of the old friend mentioned above, the guy with the unexpressible, irrepressible anger problems.   He suffers periodically from disabling physical conditions he sees as directly related to the ongoing, inchoate rage he has to swallow daily.   He subscribes to Dr. John Sarno’s theory of Tension Myoneural Syndrome (TMS), the mind/body’s creation of crippling physical pain to mask even more terrifying psychic pain.   We’ve had many discussions over the years about this, and I’ve learned things from the exchange.  He is an excellent writer, a smart man and over the years we’ve regularly exchanged countless facts, observations and opinions that have enriched both of us.    

Recently he informed me that he’s unwilling to hear any story even tangentially related to our once mutual friend, or to be part of any conversation in any way related to any of the issues raised by that long friendship, the impasse we came to and our current estrangement.  I made a last attempt to get back on the same page with him.  

I laid out the harm of preemptively forbidding whole areas of conversation,  This ban, I pointed out, ruled out some of the most fundamental things friends should do for each other, starting with hearing what’s on your friend’s mind.   To him, his stance was simple loyalty to an old friend and a refusal to take sides.   Reasonable enough, on one level, and one might ask why I could not abide by his request to talk about anything else.   I couldn’t help but think of Switzerland during the Second World War, neutral, not taking sides, right and wrong — not our business… and my correspondent’s longtime aversion to difficult topics of conversation.  

I imagined the conversations available after the ban on any talk related in any arguable way to my falling out with my childhood friend.   Out of bounds: the corrosive nature of unacknowledged rage, the sharp brutality of denial and the nimble, desperate inventions of shameful secrecy.  The blackout would render our once frank correspondence untenable from my end since it closes the door to the things I am wrestling with daily.   I wasn’t looking for a taking of sides, though my correspondent felt that taking sides was inevitable, once the door opened, and that he would not allow himself to be placed in that position.  I took considerable pains not to offend my sometimes fussy correspondent, rewriting my email a number of times before sending it to make sure not to bruise his feelings.  I raised a handful of separate points, as tactfully as I was able.   Perhaps the most important section was:

We’re touching on a core belief about life: you explore freely and openly with those closest to you to try to get to larger truths, learn something from our own experiences and the lives and choices of those we know, trusting a good friend, in the course of a larger conversation, not to deliberately fuck you or thoughtlessly put you in an untenable position — or, out of deep loyalty or some other principle, you put up a wall, set parameters on what can be discussed against the possibility that such fucking and untenable torment is as inevitable as the next attack of TMS whenever anger is some part of the equation.

It points to the very different expectations we have of our closest friends, of our inner lives.  Also to our different relationships with anger.   I’m drawn to this kind of troubling but sometimes illuminating inquiry and the related stories, the more insight I can get the better; you appear to be drawn away from it.  Conflict, like pain, instructs us about which way to go sometimes.   Conflict is supremely uncomfortable, I know, but it’s also occasionally unavoidable if people are to grow, change, become wiser.   

It’s possible to work through conflicts if you can clearly see the part you’re playing, and there is openness to honest discussion on both sides.  There is a way of viewing conflict that is not starkly black and white, right or wrong, zero sum, winner/loser.  It is rare, and hard, but conflicts can be resolved without war (and can never be with war).  You can look squarely at what needs to be changed to resolve a conflict and, for the sake of a valued relationship, change it, sometimes.  There are general principles and a lifetime of beliefs involved in every choice a person makes, things that should be fair game for discussion, or… apparently not.

I didn’t have to wait long for his short, quick reply.  I read it to my sister.  She chuckled and said he was really smart, and agreed that he had channeled the DU (our relentless father) beautifully, it was the model wonderfully civil fuck you.   It reads, in its entirety (outside of a closing sentence wishing me luck, good health and good times in the coming weeks):

You’ve expressed your view of things here very clearly, and I truly appreciate both the re-send (with a more navigable font) and the mildness of your formulations.

We’ve had a great run with this correspondence for ten years now.  But in light of what you’ve written, and other developments over the past year or so, I think we may well have reached the point where our differences outweigh our many affinities, and that it is indeed time for a break.

Heh, can’t argue with that.   I particularly loved the lawyerly genius of  “and other developments over the past year or so”.  The DU himself could not have topped that one.   Reminiscent of the immortal line, uttered by my defeated father at the end of a desperate fight not to have an honest discussion with his adult son:  “if I ever honestly told you what I really think of you it would do such irreparable damage we’d never have any chance of ever having any kind of relationship between us.”  

Set and match.  

Nicely done, dad, we’ll revisit this on your death bed a few years from now, when I’ll have one last chance to be mild about how wrong you were, you poor bastard.  

Have a blessed day.

How Do We Learn About Life?

I will grant you at the start, learning real lessons in this difficult life is hard work and many people do it only haphazardly, when some crippling tragedy knocks them back and forces them to take stock.   In fact, if you’re like most people, you might want to skip this entry entirely, because I am pretty much talking to myself, and for myself.

I find I learn some of the most valuable things I know by studying the lives of people I know well who do not learn the lessons of their own lives.   My father was one I knew very well, watched very closely for decades, and there are many others.   This makes me sound judgmental, I know, but I don’t stand by, like a scientist with a gigantic pair of tweezers, observing my lab rat friends.   I was once accused of that, actually, by one of the cheekier lab rats, he actually said to me “I get it now– you’re the scientist and we’re all your lab rats!”   I smiled, because he was right, in a way, but I said nothing, because, you know, I don’t talk to lab rats, as a rule.  I try to help the people I know as I hope they will help me if the need arises.   It is sometimes subtle, but I like to think my good will is always apparent.  I am willing to listen and keep talking until the story breaks apart into incoherence.

Humans need a story to grasp anything.  I’ll tell you an old one, featuring the brilliant, troubled lab rat above.   He was the youngest of three brothers, always felt he got the short end of everything, that life was a zero sum game he was always losing.   He learned to negotiate, wheedle, demand, pout, glower.   These things served him well in business, I suppose, I believe he eventually made a shitload of money by nickel and diming everyone involved.  It did not make him successful in friendship or love, sad to say.   But here’s the thing:  over the years I watched him stage and brilliantly perform an identical three act play maybe a hundred times.    There is a lesson in this.

Act one: meet a new person and view this new person in glowingly idealized terms.  If the person is funny, he’s the funniest person ever.  This goes for coolness and every other perceived quality.  Act one is animated by playfulness, infinite promise and  the protagonist’s belief that he has finally found a great person, not just another neurotic asshole like all the ones who have previously let him down.    You will always be compared, unfavorably, to the new person, just so you have a personal stake in the rest of the play.  Audience participation, you dig.

In Act Two: complications arise, as in any good drama, or any good comedy, for that matter.  The person is still very funny, sure, but there’s a snide edge creeping in sometimes.   Yes, the person is very charismatic, but also, careless, not very thoughtful, kind of dumb, in a weird way.   The promises made in the first act are being strangely revisited in act two and everything is suddenly coming into question.  Reality itself is starting to come into doubt.  Drastic corrective action is called for and eventually taken by the protagonist.

Act Three reveals that this is no tragicomedy we are watching, it’s a rather stark tragedy.   In Act Three the inevitable betrayal comes, sometimes in a terrible form.  One time it’s an anti-Semitic outburst and threatened punch in the fucking face.  Another time it’s the trashing of your commercial kitchen.   People break into your house, almost certainly people you know, steal a bunch of your things, including every valuable in the house, take a shit on the piano bench, for good measure.    Or you’re invited to the wedding of illegal immigrant, underpaid workers of yours and are then served food stolen from your own kitchen.  Or the new best friend is fucking your now ex and the two of them are laughing about it when you confront them.  Or, paint your own betrayal picture here, the possibilities are truly endless.

Classic repetition compulsion, one of the defining neurotic behaviors of our time, maybe of any time.  I could not have learned about it more thoroughly from even the best psychology course as I did from watching a close friend tirelessly at work for many years.   It’s a simple process, keep repeating the same painful thing the same way until, well, just keep repeating it.  

If at first the play seems a tragedy rather than an enlightened comedy, recast the play and play it again.  You dig how this works, right?  You get a new star to play opposite you, you stage the thing with a genius director, or better, direct it yourself, who knows your vision better than you yourself?   No need to change the script, because this time– THIS TIME– everything is perfect for the desired result.   The play cannot fail to entertain and enlighten because– look at the incandescence of the new star I have cast!

But back in the dressing room, it’s always the same.  Opening night and the incandescent new star is loudly having sex with your mother, who is loving the sex and shockingly uninhibited about expressing it, not even looking away when you walk into the dressing room shocked.   Another fucking putz!   Un fucking believable… Another shocking betrayal, is it not?  IS IT FUCKING NOT?!!!

You look at this lab rat, after he tells you story number one hundred identical in every detail to the ninety-nine that came before: idealized new person, disillusionment, betrayal.    Every story exactly the same dramatic arc, exhausting.   You think to yourself: how can you not see this, my dear lab rat?   Hard for the scientist in me to truly understand.   When they hook me up to the machines that deliver that awful shock, I try to figure out how not to get the electricity full blast, there is always some way to get less pain from the sadists who designed the experiment.  That’s just me, OK, I get that, and maybe I haven’t come up against a sadistic enough experimenter, but still.   I’m left holding my clipboard and scratching my head when I see a rat rushing constantly, inexorably toward the button that delivers electrocution.

Now I have told you a simple story, about a rather extreme case, yes, but true in every detail, I assure you (except for mom and the star in the dressing room).  Most people conduct their repetition compulsion business on a much more subtle level.   We are, virtually all of us, geniuses of justification.    We can give a rationale that makes insane behavior seem more or less rational.   Why did you march all those indigenous people to their deaths when you could have made an arrangement that would have served everybody, preserved peace, honored wisdom and honor itself?   Manifest Destiny.  Social Darwinism.   Freedom on the march.   Done.  What is your fucking point, asshole?  Get off my land.

I am trying, as I believe I sometimes demonstrate in these pages, to understand the sources of pain in my life, in the lives of my friends and loved ones, and behave in ways that seem productive, healing rather than harming.    It is better to be gentle than to be harsh, better to help than to hurt.  I may not always be up to that challenge, but it seems better to struggle with remaining gentle than not to.  For me.

Not everyone welcomes this kind of struggle, it’s a matter of temperament.  I understand that, even as it sometimes makes me sad.  It is, to my way of thinking, cheating yourself out of the full richness of this life, not being open to looking deeply into these highly educational situations that shed what little light there is to be had here in a world of darkness.  

If I manage to reel myself in from anger over and over, while provoked without mercy by someone who believes I am stronger than them and therefor able to take multiple punches and kicks, it is a good day for me– not giving in to rage, remaining calm enough to remain open and almost cordial.   It is not as good a day, of course, as a day when I don’t have to prove my ability to take multiple punches and kicks, but there is something worthwhile in it for me– proving to myself again that constantly giving in to righteous rage is not my fate.   If the person I finally have to walk away from is sobbing piteously, or cursing me angrily, convinced that I am a heartless bastard, it is something I just have to live with.   

All this is well worth thinking about, I think.  And if not– well, there’s always the weather, good books, politics, culture (and lack of same), our well-stocked catalogues of frustrations and the relative fascism of various nations to discuss. The vexing smugness of powerful lying fucking hypocrites who make decisions the rest of us must live by is always easy enough to bat around (see previous several posts, and the next few, no doubt).

There is also philosophy, of course, observations about life made in a general sort of way that don’t need to  touch on tangible details that are personal or difficult, don’t force us to take sides in moral pissing contests.   No need, in a philosophical chat, to go into the well-known intimate examples of the thing we are talking about– why go there?   There’s always all that to kick around.   But that shit is really not the beating heart of a human life, or why it sometimes grabs us by the throat, this flickering miracle of being alive.

Death Threats

“Work hard, play hard, pray hard, but most of all, be a good guy!” is the motto of Mater Dei, the independent Catholic school Brett Kavanaugh attended as a boy before moving on to Georgetown Prep in ninth grade.   It is a good motto.  If you do all those things, especially the last one, you will be a credit to your loved ones and a gift to your community.     

Georgetown Prep is a Jesuit school (founded in 1789) and if you spend some time on their website you will learn a little bit about the guiding philosophy of the Jesuits. The principles of Ignatian spirituality seem simple and straightforward.  If you believe that God is in every person you meet, you will treat every precious soul you encounter in the gentlest possible way.  Every interaction is a chance to reaffirm your connection with your creator.   I wish, based solely on the beautiful ideas I read under Georgetown Prep’s Spiritual Life tab, that the world operated that way, by the admirably high principles of Ignatius of Loyola. [1]  

I write this on the holiest day of the Jewish year, Yom Kippur.  God is up there with his unfathomably gigantic Book of Life, pondering the fate each of us deserve for the coming year, according to the tradition.   On this day Jews all over the world fast, many also gather in temples, trembling and praying.    I don’t have much use for many parts of the tradition, or prayer, and most of the 613 commandments supposedly ordered by God leave me cold, as do the jealousy and the over-the-top rages of our All-Merciful God expressed in the problematic Good Book.   There is an essence of my spiritual heritage that I take very seriously:  trying to make amends when I know I have caused harm and identifying with the weak, the poor, the powerless, the persecuted.  

The larger point, of course, is that it is very easy for us humans to speak words, to write them, to array them beautifully, powerfully, to argue our most cherished beliefs using them.   The much harder thing is how you actually put those beliefs into action.   No society, no intimate club or family, for that matter, ever boasts of being founded on principles of love, generosity, hypocrisy, secrecy and duplicity.   Everyone loves love, and generosity is a beautiful thing.   The devil, however, lives in the details, the devil loves him some details.  Those sticky details we generally do not discuss, as we extoll the things we love and believe in, steer away from things that stir us unpleasantly.  

Does anything about the beauty of Ignatian principles change if we learn that Ignatius meant that only people who have accepted the divinity of Jesus Christ are imbued with the divine spirit?    What was the role of the early Jesuits, if any, in the infamous Spanish Inquisition?   

On the other hand, Jesuits are known for their intellectual rigor and a commitment to justice.  How can you not want to do justice if you see the spark of God in every person you meet?  

I don’t hold Brett Kavanaugh to the standards of St. Ignatius of Loyola, whatever those impossibly high standards for canonization may have been.   We are all people, with needs, wants, flaws.  I don’t even want to bring the entitled Mr. Kavanaugh into the conversation at all today, or any day.   I dislike his rigid, right-wing partisanship.  I despise his smug evasiveness, the way he appears to think he’s the smartest man in the room.  I think he is pretty clearly, in the vernacular, a piece of shit as a spiritual person, at the very least a hypocrite (based on his rulings and the tiny fraction of his writings we’ve seen).   It appears to me he learned nothing from the Jesuits but making arguments.  But that is between him and Jesus, and not my place to even opine about.

But you are a federal judge, after attending all the finest schools money can buy, after membership in the right wing Federalist Society, after being an extreme partisan lawyer working to impeach and convict a so-called liberal president for lying about a blow job, then a partisan lawyer advising the Bush/Cheney White House during some troubling years of torture, kidnapping, illegal wiretapping, extrajudicial murder, transfer of wealth to the wealthiest,  attempts to shred the social safety net, initiation of an endless, borderless war against those, everywhere, who hate our freedom, and as a federal judge. appointed by the extremists you worked for, you rule, in virtually every case, for the rights of the powerful and against the rights of the weak.  Not very goddamned Christian of you, I’d say.

Donald Trump’s people figured out exactly which districts they needed to win to prevail in the Electoral College.  They got those crucial districts, every one of them.   The number of votes, maybe 100,000 (he won the 16 electors of Michigan by a whopping 10,740 perfectly placed votes, a 0.23% margin), don’t matter, he won, even if he also lost nationally by nearly 3,000,000 votes.  Fair and square, he won fair and square under our current federal election rules, let’s even stipulate to that.   In office Trump has appeared to be mostly a jackass, OK, always a jackass.  Not only tone deaf and morally retarded, but a compulsive liar who only seems comfortable when bragging outrageously to adoring campaign rally crowds.  He can’t help himself.

As long as Trump is in office doing their bidding the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, the true believers, will ride that donkey as far as he will take them.  He has already delivered uber-conservative Justice for Life Neil Gorsuch (Georgetown Prep, class of ’85 — Kavanaugh, class of ’83), appointed a record number of other Federalist Society endorsed federal judges, rammed through a generous tax break for our nation’s wealthiest.  The rest of the Republicans will ride him hard, as far as he goes before hubris blows him up.   Our politicians are not known for showing great integrity, or any devotion to principles higher than staying in office, sad to say. 

The Koch Brothers understand the nature of our democratic system and have been playing a long game, with no expense spared to tilt the playing field the way it advantages them most to tilt it.  If you control all state governments and the Supreme Court, the small group that decides what is legal and what is illegal as far as the law of the land, that’s pretty much checkmate.

If you don’t believe that, look at the aftermath of the Civil War.   Amendments were added to change our constitution from one that legally protected the rights of slaveholders to one much closer to the inspiring words of the Author of Liberty (and father of several mulatto slaves) that this nation was “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”  Endowed by our creator, of course, with unalienable rights and so on.   The most important of the three wartime amendments, the Fourteenth, was intended to extend the protections of the federal government to the citizens of every state, particularly in the former slave states that had recently taken up arms against the United States.  In other words, the 14th amendment was enacted to make sure no state could infringe anyone’s rights as an American citizen.   The federal government would intervene to protect those rights, under laws made pursuant to the 14th Amendment.

Enter the Supreme Court, six years after the 14th Amendment was ratified.  They made the “intent of the framers” of the Fourteenth Amendment clear in a way those framers, less than a decade earlier, could never have imagined.   For almost a century after the Supreme Court was done ruling on it, the Fourteenth Amendment was rendered useless to citizens subjected to every kind of indignity and brutality under cover of state law.  During the century the 14th amendment was in a judicially induced coma for individuals, it was used, exclusively, by corporations, to establish their rights as persons, just as important in our democracy (to the Robber Barons and their impeccable ilk) as those unvindicatable rights of the many anonymous persons who were being lynched, terrorized, paid unfair wages, re-enslaved under state law, etc.  

The Supreme Court gets the last word, and that word can last for a hundred years before it is corrected, generations later, by activists backed by brilliant and dogged lawyers who successfully fight to overturn precedent.

The Supreme Court gets the unappealable last word in our democratic scheme. An openly anti-democratic president is attempting to pack the court with his extreme choices before the curtain comes down on his corrupt administration.   Trump got into office with glib promises to make everybody’s head spin about how much we are all winning.   Things are not looking great for the persecuted billionaire populist at the moment, people close to him have been disloyally turning on him during a long witch hunt by a disloyal Republican named Mueller.  There is no time to waste, not a penny of political capital to be squandered.  He needs to get this second Supreme Court appointment done in record time, before the midterms that his party could lose bigly.  Getting a second extreme right wing judge on to the Supreme Court would do wonders for energizing his base, making their heads spin.

The confirmation hearing for Kavanaugh was arranged with extreme haste, scheduled for the first available slot.  A ridiculous and unprecedented 90% of Kavanaugh’s documents were not given to the Judiciary Committee for inspection. There were probably things in there better for the Committee not to see before questioning him, before voting to confirm him.   42,000 pages of his documents were made available to the Committee three hours before the hurried hearings began (technically delivered the evening before, they took many hours to download on government servers).  The main thing was to confirm him fast.

Now a woman steps forward, reluctantly but bravely it seems, to testify that the prep school aged Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her.  Her claim appears to be credible, it did not come up only recently, she has been suffering with the traumatic memory for some time, spoke to a marriage counselor about it in 2012.  Immediately after the woman came forward a letter signed by 65 women who encountered Kavanaugh when he was at the all boys prep school appeared on the judicial committee’s website, praising his sterling character, his great respect for women, how unthinkable it is that he might ever have tried to rape anyone.  You can read that letter now, the link is at the bottom of this list of public documents on Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination  (go to September 7 for the Kavanaugh list, Letters Received, the last one is this letter).

There is nothing in it for Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, except to prevent a man of questionable character, and perfect extreme right wing bona fides from being appointed to the highest court for life.   A Supreme Court Justice who will, among other things, provide the deciding vote to overturn the federal right of a woman to choose what to do about her pregnancy, from making unappealable right wing decisions on the Supreme Court for the rest of her lifetime.   Think of the 14th Amendment.  Every civil rights case in the country since 1963 has been brought under a law enacted to enforce the 14th Amendment, but for the previous ninety years– y’all shit out of luck, losers.

Not every young man has tried to rape someone, it takes a certain type, even if he is stumbling drunk.   The percentage of such types may be slightly higher in elite private schools, perhaps, where such youthful indiscretions are dealt with discreetly in-house, if they ever come up at all, to preserve the young man’s options later in life, but I don’t believe even among students of our finest schools most young men at some point attempt rape.  It takes a special kind of boy, who grows into a certain kind of man.  A dick.

The Republicans on the Judiciary Committee insist they are being incredibly fair to the woman who claims she was victimized so many years ago by a young would-be rapist of sterling character.   They’ve set up an immediate session for her to give her sworn testimony against the sworn rebuttal of the next Justice of the Supreme Court.   They are being very generous, they claim, letting her immediately confront her alleged victimizer, and doing it in a way that won’t unfairly hurt the man’s chances of being immediately confirmed before the midterms.  They are certainly being generous, the 85 year old asshole chairman, Chuck Chuck Bobuck Grassley and the equally hoary 84 year-old Orin Hatch, with their intimidation, bullying and ultimatum making.

Recall, the other day these same Republican toadies were refusing to make Kavanaugh answer questions about the alleged sexual assault under oath.  Then, in the interest of every appearance of fairness they said both the alleged victim and the alleged assaulter would both be under oath, on the earliest possible date, Monday, September 24, as long as she responds in full, with her complete written testimony, by 10 a.m September 21.  Fair is fair.  Need to keep this fine Christian’s confirmation on schedule, we’re on a tight schedule as the president may need another ally on the high court, an undefeatable block of right wingers not subject to appeal or being voted out, very soon, to rule in his favor on his potential troubles..

Meantime Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s lawyers have made the next move in the chess game.   They are demanding an FBI investigation to have an independent opinion on the credibility of Dr. Ford’s accusation.  This is exactly what Hatch and Grassley publicly endorsed in the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas situation– a required FBI investigation, something that apparently would take only a few days.   Trump announced blandly that the FBI doesn’t do these kinds of investigations, “they don’t do that, that’s not what they do”.  Turns out he was talking out of his ass.  The FBI regularly does these kinds of background investigations, they generally take only a few days.   The current chairman of the committee said loudly in 1991 that this was the only proper way to conduct a hearing of this sort, after an FBI investigation.  But things have changed for the doddering old fuck, now there is tremendous urgency to get the finest man ever nominated for the Supreme Court immediately into his new robes.

SO UNFAIR!   If Trump doesn’t get Kavanaugh in there by the midterms, he will lose face, a lot of political capital, his base will be deflated instead of energized right before this crucial election that could decide his fate, the fate of what he was sent to Washington to do.  So fucking unfair!  Fake news, fake accusers, fake outrage, fake hypocrisy, fake fakeness!!   Amonynous, really, an ominous cowardice.

Of course, living in the violent charnel house that is now the USA, Dr. Ford has predictably  received credible death threats from violent partisan morons.  Her family had to move out of their house, is now in hiding.  But fair is fair, you come to the Senate first thing Monday morning, Dr. Ford, and we’ll see who the country believes in a high-pressure, nationally televised swearing contest, you, the so-called victim of long ago attempted drunken sexual violence or the wonderful family man, girl’s basketball couch and believer in Christian and American values, the defender of all that is holy and good, the impeccably pedigreed Brett Kavanaugh.

They have to get this confirmation done before anything else bad happens in the days leading up to the fast approaching midterms.   Their slim majority in Congress could be washed away in this shit storm midterm and who can say how much mortal peril America’s fetuses would be in then, if Democrats controlled the Senate, without another true believer on the Court?!   What kind of accuser is this, who needs some kind of external assurance of a fair chance to be heard before she will rush across the country to Washington D.C. go toe to toe, on live national television, with someone poised to be one of the most powerful men in America?!!   HOW DARE SHE.

When Anita Hill took the stand to accuse Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, Thomas was expected to receive ninety confirmation votes in the Senate.  The men on the Senate Judiciary Committee (all men) treated Anita Hill very badly, accused her of erotomania, treated her as a hostile witness.  In the end, even after the shitshow of dickish behavior by the Committee toward Anita Hill, Thomas was confirmed 52-48, the smallest margin for a Supreme Court nominee in a century.  

Today there are several women on the Judiciary Committee (all Democrats) and the questioning of Christine Blasey Ford, should it take place under these artificially pressurized terms, will have a much different tone than the hostility Anita Hill faced.  Donald Trump can get away with his in-your-face misogyny, people expect it from him, it’s his brand, he’s a pig (and a very useful idiot, in the short run, to the billionaires who made sure he won the Electoral College).   Chuck Grassley, Orin Snatch and John Cornyn will get no such pass if they try to act like dicks, it won’t play well, except to the 38% who think Trump is doing a heck of a job.  

There are six Republican Senators in the Senate today (though we only hear of two, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, the rest are from the former Confederacy, Nebraska and Iowa, and so impervious to moral suasion it would appear).  If only two or three of them are moved by the testimony of a woman almost raped by an entitled preppie now about to assume the nation’s most powerful lifetime post, deciding what rights women will have… well, you can do the math.  

I am looking forward to the next scene in this soap opera.  I think these pious men of the right, and the women who support them, may be overstepping here in this #metoo moment.  I am hoping Christine Blasey Ford and her lawyers make the right chess moves and keep this partisan hack off the Supreme Court.  If she does, Dr. Blasey Ford will be remembered as a national hero.   A live national confrontation about character and decency is our only hope, at this perilous moment for our democracy.

 

 

[1]  What little I just learned about this sainted 16th century leader of a Catholic society created to defend the Pope’s infallibility contained not a shred of the spiritual legacy discussed on the Georgetown Prep website, but that’s a secular version for you.   What to make of this picture?   The man was a soldier for Christ, clearly, or… maybe not.

Ignatius_of_Loyola_(militant).jpg

Should any of the following disqualify him for sainthood, after the devoted work he later did for his Lord?

As a young man Íñigo had a great love for military exercises as well as a tremendous desire for fame. He framed his life around the stories of El Cid, the knights of Camelot, and the Song of Roland.[12] He joined the army at seventeen, and according to one biographer, he strutted about “with his cape slinging open to reveal his tight-fitting hose and boots; a sword and dagger at his waist”.[13] According to another he was “a fancy dresser, an expert dancer, a womanizer, sensitive to insult, and a rough punkish swordsman who used his privileged status to escape prosecution for violent crimes committed with his priest brother at carnival time.”[14] Upon encountering a Moor who denied the divinity of Jesus, he challenged him to a duel to the death, and ran him through with his sword.[13] He dueled many other men as well.[13]