Category Archives: Ahimsa

Irrationality 101

For most human purposes, rationality takes a back seat.   All that is necessary for human action, most of the time, is a rationale, a slogan, an emotionally resonant excuse.   It is hard to think of a collective misfortune more horrible than war.   Yet every war is always somehow justified, even when it is inexcusable aggression, illegal under the spongey law of nations and conducted solely for the profit of a few who don’t care how many others must die so they can grow richer and more powerful.  Justified.  Read your history book, read virtually any history book.   War, unfortunate, yes, hell, of course, but necessary, you see, because… that guy over there is Hitler.  He’s fucking HITLER!   Nuff said.

My sister and I had a good laugh when she pointed out a howlingly imbecilic line I’d written in an otherwise promising first draft about our family life.   Describing our nightly fights around the dinner table as a battle field I went a step too far.   My sister read the line with beautiful archness: “the brutal battlefield of our family dinner table was as nightmarish as any war scene you can imagine.”    ANY war scene, she repeated, with deft intonation for maximum ironic emphasis.  In the beat it took me to reply she reeled off a string of famous atrocities that left no doubt of the idiocy of my claim.   Instead of a reply I burst out laughing.  We had the best laugh we’ve had together in years.   Then I caught my breath, pulled myself together and deleted the absurd line.  

There I had a rare moment of good fortune, somebody gently pointing out my foolishness, and doing it with humor and superb understatement that made me see it for myself.   The laugh made it undeniable, how laughable my claim had been.   I submit that this moment was an outlier in general human affairs, a rare moment when rational good sense triumphs over a feeling of poetic license, shoddy but justifiable thinking, emotional overstatement.    

Yes, of course, no child should ever be subjected to the mistreatment my sister and I regularly endured from our parents.   Yes, of course, I have a right to be hurt and indignant, even angry, about the abuse we were made to suffer.   But was it really as horrific as Turks on horseback driving helpless Armenians into a river to drown, worse than the Janjaweed, ISIS, the viciousness of the fanatical SS?

Eh, probably not, now that you put it that way.

But there’s the thing about irrationality, as a general rule it doesn’t stop anyone.    We have an irrational chaos-monger insisting he will make our country great again, apparently by wiping out every vestige of decency that people have fought for centuries to achieve here.   All he needs is a slogan and his base will roar, full-throated support, chant anything, no matter how idiotic.  “Drain the Swamp!” which they chanted during his historic presidential campaign, a slogan he told an interviewer he had his doubts about, but then decided was great when he saw how the crowds took to it, was actually translated from the original Italian– it was a mantra of Benito Mussolini as he rose to power [1].  Many people are saying Mussolini was a fascist, but there are many views, on many sides, on many sides.  Just sayin’.

There is no point feeling superior to a stadium full of desperate people chanting “lock her up!” or “Fake NEWS!” or “Suck my ass!!!”.   No reason to feel superior to a strutting, supremely confident-seeming cruel bully with seemingly very few actual thoughts in his head.  As a species, we are no more rational than anyone in that Make America Great Again crowd.   Which is not to say we don’t each have the ability to be more rational — all it takes is somebody stating the truth in a way we can hear it.   After my sister and I had a good laugh, there was no way to deny how laughable my claim about the atrociousness of our family war was.   Is being called a “fucking cobra” as bad as being locked in a church with everybody in your town and having it burned to the ground?   I suppose not.

And so it goes down virtually every issue we constantly debate in our battling society where unfair competition for material possessions is shrugged off as merely the law of nature.  One of the “debates” that drove me most insane during those madcap Cheney-Dubya days was the torture debate.  A fucking “debate” that will not fucking die, I might add.  We had an administration determined to use practices we’d long ago signed on, as part of the civilized world, to ban forever.   All that was necessary to overcome all those treaties was a horrific event followed by convening a small team of partisan lawyers to craft an argument — how idiotic an argument didn’t matter, just a secret memo to justify it in the odd event anyone was ever held accountable for the illegal program.  

In light of the secret torture memo a hard kick in the balls was now “enhanced interrogation” instead of “torture” because it was not as painful as the shutdown of a major organ system.  Nobody in their right mind could argue that a little kick in the balls is as bad as, say, your lungs shutting down.  Are you fucking crazy, you’re going to claim a kick in the balls, or sleep deprivation, or a freezing cell, or stress positions, or “walling” or water-boarding is as bad as your goddamn heart stopping?  Fuck off, peace bitch, we reframed this “debate” and there’s nothing you can do about it.

The other day I had a tiny moment of blessed relief, when a friend who loves to argue somehow drew me back into the fucking torture debate for a moment.   “You’re saying even if you have the person who planted the ticking time bomb that’s about to kill 5,000 children, you can’t use torture to make him talk.”   I took a breath.  

“In that one in a million scenario, where you have the actual guilty fuck strapped to a chair, and in a matter of minutes 5,000 kids will die if you don’t get him to talk– yeah, sure, put the fuck on a water-board, electrodes on his balls, the works.  I’ll fucking torture him myself, if we somehow know for sure that this is the actual psycho who planted the bomb.   The murderous fanatic probably won’t talk in any event, but it’s worth a shot, to save that stadium full of kids.    But the likelihood of that imagined scenario ever happening  is less than a lightning strike, winning the lottery,  inheriting 300 million from dad, like David and Charles Koch did.” 

In that liberating moment I felt free from the moronic “ticking time bomb scenario” hypothetical always used to justify torturing anyone who might possibly “hate our freedom”.   But it was a momentary feeling of relief.  My friend, although he backed off a bit, still seemed to believe that there are situations where, the absurdity of the highly unlikely (how about NEVER) “ticking time bomb” hypothetical notwithstanding, that you would be justified in torturing somebody.   It reminded me of our long ago torturous debate on the subject via email when I eventually asked in exasperation: what next, are you going to start actually torturing me?    To which he wrote something to the tune of: Oh, but I already am…  

So here we have a man, highly intelligent, well-read, a skilled debater, a moral person with nuanced political views, many of them progressive, for whom a “hypothetical” with a likelihood of 0.001% is good enough to justify, in some cases, an otherwise morally unjustifiable position.   Not to say I could picture him torturing anyone (not physically, anyway) but that idiotic hypothetical is all he needs to keep arguing the position of the most vicious, ruthless, cruel and lawless among us.  

Imagine the average person, without my friend’s fine education, generally refined moral awareness, wide reading, long professional experience making and dissecting arguments,  confronted with an irrefutable bit of logical sounding rhetoric like “we got to fight ’em over there so we don’t have to fight ’em here!”   Jesus, that makes perfect sense.   We just need to go over there, kill or capture all of ’em, detain the live ones forever, torture ’em — end of problem!  Next!

You see, they hate our fucking freedom.   They’re not like us.  They don’t love their children, they use them as human shields.  They’re terrorists who hate us because we’re better than them.  You get that?   They have a massive cultural inferiority complex that makes them insane.  Somebody who would do what they do is not a human in the same sense that a middle class white American is a human.   They’d kill us all, and certainly not hesitate to torture us, in much worse ways than the many techniques in the $10,000,000 manual our legal team deemed totally legally defensible.  You see, we’re talking savage, primitive fucking fucks here.   You do understand the difference, don’t you?  

On the other hand, my dear fellow American, you can see the obvious flaws in that stinking pile of horse diarrhea.  I know you can.   You just have to look directly at it, get a real whiff, think of your friend from school, the kid from Pakistan, a self-effacing, warm, funny guy…  well, you would exempt Fahrid from any torture program, if you could…

 

 

[1] According to Madeline Albright in her recent book Fascism: A Warning.

The Process

Humans are not strictly rational beings.  Human Nature 101, people will kill, march to certain death, commit unimaginable atrocities, for seemingly insane causes, or for no rationale they can articulate.   In America millions of us routinely vote against our interests, in nakedly profit-driven elections now decided by the unlimited “speech” of legally created “persons” who exist only in the minds of unappealable activist judges.     We vote for imperfect candidates who serve these interests,  in the states where we’re still allowed to vote, our ability to vote less a given now than a few years ago, when the Supreme Court deemed the Voting Rights Act unnecessary in our colorblind, post-racist, er, post-racial democracy.   Yeah, we all know, n-words can’t take an f-wording joke, particularly about American history.  I’m not laughing either, and I’m technically a white man.

As fucked up as human beings so often are, there is a quality called integrity that many of us admire.   The dictionary defines integrity as “the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness.”   The synonyms include — honesty, probity, rectitude, honor, good character, principle(s), ethics, morals, righteousness, morality, virtue, decency, fairness, scrupulousness, sincerity, truthfulness, trustworthiness.

It’s plain to see that the definition of integrity will vary based on your beliefs about the nature of decency, fairness, morality.    There are often arguments, in democracy, about what is moral, honorable,  right.   These debates, in our smash-mouth culture, are often conducted by adamant partisans (many of dubious intellect) on a maddeningly reductionist level: abortion is always murder, a sin despised by God; abortion is a mother’s difficult decision and her absolute right to choose, at any time and for any reason, even the day before birth.  

“You got a glass of water, Elie?    Even for a blahg that virtually nobody reads, this post is a little bit dry, no?   A tad academic, might we dare suggest?  A wee bit pedantic, preacher?” says a pile of bones, interrupting.  “Seriously, Elie, don’t mind me, I’m just here wearing the coxcomb, so to speak, to break the spell.”

Fuck me.

“Let’s get down to it, man.  You’re thinking hard about something that is stuck like a jagged fiber between your molars.   Play it out, motherfucker, work the damned dental floss.  This piece is called ‘Process’, explain the process.  Show us, don’t perfessor us.”

Fair enough.  There is little enough we control in our lives.  I’ve been in two discussions recently with people who doubt there is such a thing as “free will”.  Let us suppose that free will is like the “free market”, a tiny speck of truth in the ocean of bullshit it claims is all fact, all freedom.  There is little enough we have control of here in a world of chaos often run by the most ruthless psychopaths among us.    We have our reputations, which are built on the goodwill of people who… never mind.  

On the most elemental level, in our personal lives, all we really have is how we act in the world, how we are with the people we encounter.   Each of us almost without exception have hurtful things we do, morally neutral things, and helpful things.  If we are great, we also have the healing things that we do. There is no greater work, I think, than calming a distraught kid, listening with empathy, helping someone recover from trauma.   There is plenty of trauma in our troubled world.

“Like this excruciating fucking post, for example.   What the fuck, really, Elie, can you make your goddamned point while some of them are still alive?” said the pile of bones.  

Your friend Eichmann cited Kant’s Categorical Imperative during his trial for crimes against humanity in Jerusalem.   Hannah Arendt gave the otherwise dull defendant a gold star for stating it more or less correctly: to act in such a way that your actions could be universally practiced and the world would be better for it.  Kant’s imperative is related to Hillel’s famous formulation of the Golden Rule:  what is hateful to you, do not unto another.   Now all this is quaint stuff in our modern world, our commodified, monetized world where the exact worth of an individual;s life can be reckoned down to the nickel by calculating their “net worth.”   

“Elie, I’m fucking begging you,” said the skeleton.  

No good deed goes unpunished.  The sassy devil of this cliche is in the waggish details.  Say you take the high road with an old friend, somebody who we will stipulate can be difficult, prone to tirelessly trying to prove himself right, no matter how many contortions are involved, a man in deep trouble, at any rate.   He is unaware of the effect his actions have on those around him, seems to have little insight into how provocative he can be, is locked in a constant zero-sum war for survival.   In this war he has shown that he will do whatever he has to do to survive, even things most of us would shrink from.  That is what people often do in war.

“So why take the notoriously thankless high road?  Why not just take your leave of him if he’s such a toxic person?”

I don’t have a good explanation, except that I am trying to redeem a friendship we once had, for the sake of learning a better way than just shoving these types off the back of my yacht and leaving them bobbing in my wake. 

“Nothing better than a good shove and bobbing in the wake job, it seems to me, if the person has been loudly demanding it for some time.”

Well, I wont say no to that.   But here’s the point I’ve been stumbling toward about my process.    First I have to try to understand as much about the thing as I can, try to see the thing from as many sides as I can, extend the benefit of the doubt if a friend is involved.  I do that by thinking and then writing here.   I arrange things until they make sense.   I arrive at conclusions that help shape my actions.   In writing I see clearly…

“Unless you’re as deluded as your, eh, friend…”

… for example, that this chap has rage he is unaware of, pent up, waiting for an occasion to let some of it out.   He appears to be largely unaware of this rage or its unconscious seepage.  He is nervous, so that things that might not rile a less nervous person really drive him nuts.  He reacts pungently.  I have to map all these things out, to get a handle on how to best approach the problem.

“While exacerbating the problem by writing about it here where your angry, nervous, distracted friend can stumble on it and stoke his righteous anger at being once again betrayed.   A laudable process, I have to say.”   

Well, sure, he  would know the anonymous allusion to, say, a person who keeps forgetting key agreements and so on, are about him.   On the bright side, he’s too busy most of the time to read anything that’s not somehow related to his overwhelming professional life, so his stumbling on anything on my blahg is unlikely.   In any case, I always write with an eye toward preserving the anonymity of the people I mention in my “work” here.

“Your ‘work’,” said the skeleton, silently opening his jaws in a pantomimed guffaw, “I love that.  Thanks for tickling me with those quotation marks.”  

Shut up.  Here is my point.  Someone can make you mad, give a meaningless apology that is dragged out of them (“implied apology” asshole, I’m already covered, you merciless dick), and then continue aggravating you in the very manner he’s already apologized for.   That’s a person that needs to be extirpated from your world, no question.  Is it better or worse if the motherfucker has no idea of their neurotic habit of making others angry?  An irrelevant question, really.    

My point: I wrestle with the right way to approach all this and then, after a hellishly combative several hour long attempt at reconciliation during which I manfully avoided physically assaulting my decisively unrepentant old friend, I get an email congratulating me on the test showing a trend toward remission of my kidney disease (which I’d bcc’d to everyone on the list) and saying he’s looking forward to our next get together.

“Your fault, Elie, why on earth did you bcc him the health news?”

Point taken, bone breath.  I suppose in an ill-considered attempt to preserve relationships with his wife and kids.   Eichmann again: Hannah Arendt notes that the three German-Jewish judges who decided the war criminal’s fate were unfailingly humane and respectful to Eichmann.   Unaccustomed to this treatment, Eichmann took their attitude as sympathy and was cruelly disappointed when these men, who had treated him so decently, suddenly condemned him to death.  Arendt watched the face of the man in the glass booth and saw this reaction for herself.   He couldn’t believe it, they’d been so respectful, even kind, and now they were fucking hanging him?  

“Look, if you’re comparing an old friend to Eichmann, I’d say the poor devil is already off the back of your yacht and bobbing, utterly betrayed, in the wake.”  

My friend would never do what Eichmann did.  I take your point, but let me finish.   I am stuck musing over this, and because I cannot clear my mind of it, it floats up in conversation.  I made the mistake of bringing it up yesterday.   I myself don’t know a productive thing to say about this festering idiocy that remains so clearly oppressive to me.  I’ve done everything I know how to try to make this person understand the peril our long friendship is in,  I’ve been more patient [1] than I ever thought myself capable of being, in the face of mind-numbing obliviousness, denial and attack from my desperate old pal.  

“Yer a fucking saint, Elie, no question now.  Join a religion pronto, my boy, so you can be canonized.”  

Good idea.  Anyway, there is nothing anyone can say about this situation.  I’ve got nothing.

“Outside of the last few thousand words of postmortem.”  

Yeah, and I’m hoping this last bit of coughing will hack up whatever’s left of it.   The point is, this process has made me see all the issues very clearly, anyway.  If someone is unaware of their anger, and it causes them to provoke others, who then become angry, and they are bitter about the angry friend’s demand that they apologize for something they don’t even know they’ve done, no matter how clearly the facts point to it, and then they argue instead of being at all contrite… well, there you have it.  So there’s not much that can be said.  My experiment failed.  Case closed.  But still you feel compelled to rattle on about it.  What is a friend supposed to say at this point?

“You’re empowering him to bother you,” a friend says, in an attempt to be helpful.   The attempt was well-meant.   The effect of the comment is to blame you for being unable to put the hideous conundrum out of your head.  

“We’re back to free will now, Bozo.  If you have free will, your friend is right.  You’re giving this irredeemable neurotic the power to continue endlessly fucking with your mind.  Be done with the slimy little bastard.  Trust me, the clueless, enraged little fuck will look much, much better bobbing hopelessly in the wake of your yacht.”       

 

[1]  The Hebrew word for patience is more profound than our English word.   In Hebrew they say “sovlahnoot” which means the ability to endure suffering.  The Hebrew word for patience comes from the root “sevel” which means suffer.  It takes no patience to endure something that does not make us suffer, true patience involves enduring something that is difficult to endure.   

 

 

Fair and unfair

Fairness is what everyone wants, like liberty, freedom and love.  Fairness feels right.  Unfairness sticks in the old craw.    We live in the midst of vast, rising, institutionalized unfairness, a small group of extremely powerful people making unappealable decisions the rest of us suffer from.   Even here in our great democracy, small groups of special interests (e.g., those who insist that the estates of billionaires should not be taxed a penny when they die) get an unfair amount of say in the policies we all must live by.

In the personal sphere, the only place where we can exercise true autonomy (to the extent any of us do), unfairness can sometimes be avoided.   You can simply subtract toxic people from your life, it’s done all the time.   Addition by subtraction. Of course, personal things are not always so simple.   Take the example of a friend who insists on his love, who insists on the right to be your friend, no matter what, and seeks to bind you to an agreement to this effect.

A friend who consistently treats you unfairly, in the manner of my beleaguered brother-in-law telling me to keep secret that he was taking advantage of me, may sometimes make a rule for you, draw a line in the sand.   For example: you may not discuss how I treat you with other people.  There is nothing to say that we must abide by unfair, one-sided obligations imposed by others.

In the case of my brother-in-law, he told me to keep our “confidence” about his inability to keep his promise to quickly repay the loan I’d made to him, in the context of him revealing how much money he owed several other people, including my father.  He owed me my entire life savings, which I’d offered him in a loan when he was in a tight spot.  Then he couldn’t pay me back as we’d agreed, since paying my father’s loan (which I knew nothing about) had priority over mine.   I’d had no idea he’d taken money from my father and many other people, no idea he’d been untruthful when he convinced me to loan him the money.  Now I found myself in a bind and he was insisting I needed to suck it up, dummy up, shut the fuck up.    I told him I’d talk to my father, arrange to get paid back first.   This upset my brother-in-law, and he threatened me, and called me a pussy who had to run to his father.   He tried to make me promise to keep this between us.  This was unfair.  Fuck him, I was under no obligation to participate in my own fucking for somebody else’s sake.  

I spoke to my father who told me, with characteristic directness, that it was my problem, that he insisted on continuing to get paid back first and that I shouldn’t have been so generous with my life savings.  Also unfair, sure, but no more unfair than my brother-in-law trying to force me to keep a secret for the sake of helping him to conceal his shameful practices. 

Now, decades later,  I find myself up against another game with evolving rules that are not fair.   “I know you are an open kind of person, not given to arguable untruth or subterfuge, and that you seek advice from people close to you, that you tend to write about your vexations, so it may be very hard for you, but I need you to shut up about how difficult I am making your life.  I would never betray you this way, so I’m asking you never to reveal anything personal that happens between us.”

I think of Zora Neale Hurston in this context.  She was up against the rules of a rigged game she had no hand in designing.   She was not consulted about the virulent, often violent racism of her home country, our country, an America where death by lynching was still imposed on Negroes who forgot their place.  Someone wrote of Zora that she refused to play by the rules of a game she’d never agreed to play.   Respectable position to take, I’d say, even heroic.  She got some fame, deservedly so, and fell hard, because, in the end, the game is designed that way. Agree to play or not, there it is.

I have my faults, but lying is not one of them.   To say to me “you’re lying” when you feel I’m in error about some small, easily verifiable fact, is not the same as saying “you’re wrong.”  But I’m not here to quibble, so don’t bother arguing that you never said it.  You said it, take that to the bank.

I’m here simply to state that as I’m being smothered by a toxic blanket, wielded by a drowning man, I’m not going to agree to sit quietly and keep trying to work things out nicely with the fucker who’s wrapping the stinking blanket around my face.  Fuck that.  If you are offended, here is some consolation:  you know now, full-stink, how it feels to have your feelings and wishes ignored.   Feels unfair, I know.

For someone who owes an apology he is incapable of giving to go on the offensive to try to save an old friendship… well, it’s nuts, fucked up, crazy, mad, foolish, doomed, counter-productive but also: unfair.   The big betrayal you apologized for, after we came as close as two people can to punching each other’s faces without actually exchanging blows, you still defend as right, in some twisted way.  “I saw you getting furious, OK, but I also seriously thought if I told you those two little things it would make a difference.   So, sorry you got so mad, but I was actually only trying to do the right thing.”  Insisting even now, that the thing you were forced to apologize for really was hardly blameworthy at all, oh my.  I guess winning really is the only thing, if your personality is hardwired that way.

I’m trying my best to get this whole unfair set-up out of my head.   I have other things I have to focus on, things that will take massive concentration to do properly.  That rule “no reference to how consistently antagonistic and morally tone deaf I am or how my slightly insane passive aggressive behavior toward you might irk you, I’d certainly never make such a reference to you, I’d never publicly betray you…”— nah, bunk dat, homey.   Fuck that.  Learn to do better or move the fuck on.

 

A Ticklish Personal Matter

When attacked we can fight, take flight or do any number of other things.  I have been trying in recent years to follow the principle of non-harm, Ahimsa, approaching others openly and directly, and without violence.    I don’t mean to whine, but this is sometimes a tricky road in a culture where every rugged manjack among us is expected to compete and a shove, a knee or sharp elbow is perfectly permissible in this contact sport not intended for sissies, weaklings or peaceniks.   It is a particularly hard road when, in a moment of misguided bonhomie or extreme peevishness, a friend feels free to get some blindside shots in.

In my hubris, holding my vow of peacefulness in absurdly high regard, I made a mistake, I realize to my great misery today, expecting that one kind of animal, given the chance to be heard, to listen, to reflect, could turn into another kind of animal, somehow.  I was hoping, in the face of escalating bad experiences with a troubled, reflexively defensive old friend (and we all have our troubles) that we could somehow work out the worst of our conflict and have a more honest, mutual relationship going forward.  I was actually hoping for a miracle, rare as those things are.  It was a foolish hope, no matter how laudable and high-minded the attempt to save a badly damaged old friendship might have seemed.

Writing is the only tool I’ve developed for thinking and working through this kind of painful situation — being hurt, receiving an extracted, pro forma apology  (my friend insisted there was an implied apology already given when he said, after my long explanation, that he now understood how I felt) and then having the ante immediately raised by more of the same mistreatment that was already apologized for, ad nauseam.  The hurtful behavior comes down to an uncontrollable reflex to ignore, disregard or minimize the feelings of others, seeing only your own feelings. The raw feelings in others often aroused by your own words and deeds, you truly feel have nothing to do with you or anything you might have done.

Some people seem wired to be incapable of not doubling down when they feel they’ve lost a poker hand.  Admitting fault, apologizing, being humble, really listening to another person’s point of view — all losing hands in the eyes of the winners of our culture.   Being on the other end of things, a loser, I need to finish rinsing the fecal matter out of the Hawaiian shirt I was wearing yesterday (bad accidental spraying of projectile diarrhea) and try to get on with my regularly scheduled unpaid work, progressing well, in spite of the odds.    (here)

“I apologized to you, but that apparently wasn’t enough for you” he said chidingly to begin our reconciliation talks.   He appeared sincerely irked that his apology, sincere as he could make it, did not seem to have been enough for his unreasonably demanding old friend.   All he’d really done was accuse me of malice or extreme stupidity and hold me personally responsible for a catastrophe in his life (he later allowed that he’d been wrong to do that, but I have to understand the stress he was under at the time), put me in an unfair situation no friend should ever put another person in, and vent angrily at me after I’d done my best to be a supportive friend. He seemed genuinely aggrieved that his apology had seemingly made no difference to me at all.  Not the  conversational opening, or attitude, I’d hoped for, but I’d try to make the best of it, somehow.   

I pointed out quietly that after that apology the same hurtful behavior has been repeated in each of our recent exchanges.  I told him it appeared he was unable to stop doubling down, seemed poised to keep his streak of controversy going.   I said we should refocus our chat, talk about  the changes that would be needed going forward, in light of the multiple times recently my feelings—

“You want to talk about feelings?  I feel disrespected, traffic jam or no traffic jam, after being very easygoing about our meeting time, you have to admit, I was extremely laid back about our changed meeting time, which you’ll recall was originally 2:00, and which you later agreed would be three pm, and then we didn’t get together until 3:34 pm.   That’s very disrespectful, that long a delay is simply disrespectful on its face, especially on a day when we’re supposed to be having this important conversation you requested.  Of course, things happen, none of us can control a traffic jam, but it was very disrespectful nonetheless.”

Ten minutes later, the same feeling of being disrespected about our delayed meeting time, explained and expressed again, this time half a mile from where we started our walk.  My disrespect of him was becoming a leitmotif.   Shortly after that, maybe a block and a half later, he expressed his feeling of being disrespected again.   The boy can’t help it.   The third time was the charm.    I snarled that he was perfectly right to feel disrespected, I don’t fucking respect him.  I recited the top five reasons why.  Starting with his unfathomable difficulty understanding the emotions raised in others by his need to argue every point, the smaller the better; his indefensible, dependable tone-deafness to the feelings of others.  

A very nervous fellow (he insisted his baseline nervousness is no more than a three, four at most, on a scale of one to ten), he was remarkably calm yesterday, as he pressed on, constantly turning the conversation toward minute, arguably disputable details and away from the larger point:  his reflex to provoke and then wildly defend himself, a tic that needs to be controlled if he expects us, against all odds, to remain friends.  

He was calm and collected and I was on the verge of exploding in anger as he calmly explained, for example, why he is more of an expert on depression and anxiety than I can ever be (and by the way, he definitely does not suffer from anxiety disorder, he told me that categorically)  he had been trying to spare me this.  You see, as an undergraduate forty years ago he worked in a mental hospital, for a year and a half, and had regular briefings from a famous doctor, and therefore, sorry old bean, I didn’t want to pull rank on you and rub your nose in it, but since you brought it up… 

It went on this way for almost an hour.   Note for note, tit for tat, making an equivalence at every turn, true or false as needed, distinguishing, reframing, focusing on a tiny, irrelevant detail at great length, contradicting, insisting, qualifying, comparing, rephrasing, using the passive voice, digressing slightly, sticking a few convoluted points that would have impressed a professional contortionist.  At one point he told me, point blank, when we disagreed about the timing of an unfortunately dashed off email he’d sent — “you’re lying”.   On that issue it turned out, looking at the gmail time stamps later, I was approximately as close to a true recollection as he was.    When I could bear no more of this ceaseless counterproductive cavil I snapped, pointed in the direction of his car and told him to take a walk, get in his fucking car and go home.  We were done, I told him, I was done.  Direct and nonviolent, but direct, and done.  I truly had nothing else to say.   I’d started with nothing to say and now had less than nothing to say.

My display of anger, which I’d managed to resist for almost forty minutes, seemed to give him a lift, odd to say, maybe it was the small moral victory he’d been craving — he became as conciliatory as he knows how to be.  He was relieved to see that I was finally calming down.   He assured me that he was capable of change, was going to change himself, fully intending to, and soon, he was back in therapy again.  He told me he would try to do better at recognizing the signs that he was making me angry, and promised to try to back off when he saw me getting very upset.   I told him it was a bit late to consider a friend’s feelings at that point, once he was already provoking his friend to anger.   He was undaunted, optimistic. “People can change,” he assured me, after his tour de force of immutability and well-fortified neurotic constancy.  

He implied that I was being hard-hearted to insist that an apology must contain a promise about future actions.   There I cannot yield.   It is a crucial component of a healing apology, real ownership of the hurtful thing done, acknowledgement of how that hurtful thing feels, sealed with a credible assurance that the behavior will not be repeated.   He would stand by his apology, although he couldn’t guarantee all of that, since so much of his hostility, if any (he wasn’t going to fall into the trap of stipulating to that) is apparently unconscious and therefore beyond his control, nonetheless I should believe his promise that he is sincerely working on changing himself, to become a better listener, not always provoking, being much less provocative, not that he was admitting he did provoke anyone, it was surely something he was completely unaware of about himself, if I even was right about it, which he had his doubts about, but since I seemed to believe that he was…

We spent a few senseless hours after that, talking in a more or less relaxed manner about a number of more mundane things, and then, as it was close to his bed time, he headed off  shortly after the sun went down.   As we parted, he played the love card, going for a hug.  I gave him one arm and told him that love is more than a word or a feeling, it’s the way you actually treat the people you love.

I am done being a lawyer, and trying to be patient in the face of reflexively defensive, often inept would-be amateur lawyers who insist on their right to keep arguing no matter what.  At least lawyers with the training and experience know, most of the time, when to fucking shut up.

A prayer, then:

Strive to be humble, never haughty,
Seek understanding, not strife    
Attack not, nor shall you counterattack, except to save a life.

When in the wrong, be remorseful, not aggrieved
Be not proud, but meek
Modest, not brazen
seek insight, not vindication,
Listen with your heart, become wise.

talk to your rebbe
friend
he will tell you the same thing

(please rise) 

Nuance vs. Anger

In an enraged world, where powerless people are poised, at the slightest provocation, to bite each other’s heads off, nuance disappears.   The best explanation I heard of why this happens is the neuroscience of what happens in the insula (insular cortex) when people are angry.   This important region of the brain, crucial to our emotional lives, lights up, apparently, whenever we are angry.   When the insula is glowing with anger we simply can’t process nuance, can’t make distinctions, can’t make productive comparisons, can only see our anger.   People who insist Trump is the worst president ever can quickly get mad enough to insist that fucking Trump is a better president than fucking Bernie Sanders would have been.

We attended a concert for peace at Temple Emmanuel a few months back.  A couple of musicians we like very much were performing and it was touted as a concert for peace, Palestinian musicians making music with Israeli musicians.   Outside the historic synagogue a small group of angry looking Jews were holding signs, behind a barricade, with a couple of NYC cops flanking them.   The signs said this was an anti-Semitic event held by self-hating Jews.   I crossed the street to ask what was up. Imagine my surprise to learn that I was about to be a dupe of fucking anti-Semites!   I was informed that one of the concert’s sponsors, the New Israel Fund, supported terrorism against Israel.

This claim took me by surprise.  I knew nothing about the New Israel fund, and asked how exactly these momzers [1] supported terrorism against Israel.   “BDS”, I was told, the anti-Semitic plot to squeeze Israel to death economically so that the Arabs who claim to be Palestinians can overrun it.   I felt like I was talking to Stephen Miller, the hatred coming off this one young man was palpable.   I told them I’d check out the New Israel  Fund, but that as far as I knew, from the artists in the show, I was pretty sure none of them are anti-Semites.  My friend crossed the street and took me by the arm at this point.  She led me away from the dozen or so protesters who continued to make a ruckus after we headed in to see the show.

For true believers, it suffices merely to have a rationale, a buzzword, to spit in the face of those who refuse to believe.  In the case of these protesters, BDS is a tool for modern day Nazis and should be criminalized in America, the sooner the better. Full throated support for BDS is the same, to them, as opposing the criminalization of this specific form of non-violent political coercion.   To these angry people, anyone who believes BDS should not be illegal supports BDS and intends to put a dagger through the heart of our beloved Jewish State.  Easy peasy, no need for your fucking anti-Semitic nuance you self-hating fucker!

Here is the New Israel Fund’s position on BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction), from their website:

What is NIF’s position on boycott, divestment and sanctions?

The New Israel Fund is committed to strengthening democracy in Israel, supports freedom of speech and promotes non-violent means of expression of belief and conscience. We oppose any attempt to criminalize the legitimate expression of support for any non-violent strategy or tactic, including the global BDS movement which we do not ourselves support.

The NIF does oppose the global (or general) BDS movement, views the use of these tactics as counterproductive, and is concerned that segments of this movement seek to undermine the existence of the state of Israel as a Jewish homeland.

NIF will not fund global BDS activities against Israel nor support organizations that have global BDS programs.

However, NIF opposes the occupation and settlement activities. NIF will thus not exclude support for organizations that lawfully discourage the purchase of goods or use of services from settlements.

 

[1] bastards

Simple vs. Complicated

Complicated is hard, simple is so much easier.   It’s no wonder that buzzwords and the wearing of different colored hats so often carry the day in human affairs.  

Keeping the countless gnarly complications in mind, remembering contradictions, comparing everything to your own situation and remembering that while you may be lucky, many just like you are cursed… the endless nuance and supreme challenge of trying to remain fair-minded, pursuing justice, mindful of history’s famously slippery slopes, the dependable unreliability of history, of homo sapiens —  it is exhausting just to map it out in a sprawling sentence.  

Complicated is difficult, takes too much goddamned work to work your way through, there is no end to complicated.   Simple is better, clearly.

Hence the soundbite.  The tweet.  Slogans.   If your slogan does not parse well and fit on a hat, the marketing folks will nix it.   A great ad is supremely simple.  It hits some essential truth we recognize immediately.   The best of them bring tears, so simple, so true!   We should make that long distance call to the poignantly adorable child who misses us.  Oh, God, it’s all so simple.

Except, of course, that it’s not at all simple.  “What do you think of Bernie Sanders?” someone asks simply, though it’s not likely you dislike Sanders or what he stands for based on the way you talk.    So, carefully, sensing a mine field as the first few critical comments about him fly around the table, you say:  if we remove the personality and the things you just said from the equation and put all the actual issues his campaign raised on the table, I think we’d all agree about most of them.   I got as far as the importance of addressing catastrophic climate change before the heavy guns were wheeled into place.    Sanders is a self-hating Jew, he only uses his Jewishness for his own purposes, he hates Israel, supports BDS  (Boycott, Divest and Sanction Israel) [1]  One raises his voice to say he’d vote for Trump before he’d vote for the hypocrite Jew-hater Sanders. 

Now everything is simpler, easier to understand.  My reflexes were a tad too slow, though I know the right thing to do at a moment like this.   It is time to get up from the table and start washing dishes, or at least to clam up.   Perhaps sit on a nearby chair and play the ukulele a bit, as this little storm passes.   All these options I hope to keep in mind should this kind of thing arise again any time soon.  There is no point, no nuance that can be brought up once somebody is peeved enough to say Trump is a better choice than Bernie because Trump loves Israel and Bernie is a grumpy old Jewish Nazi. 

Simple:  Anyone critical of Israel’s long, often brutal, occupation, and the ticking time bomb of millions of encamped enemies living close by, generations of haters, many raised in hellish, hopeless poverty, many living in camps, literally, with state violence the only means of keeping a lid on the anger of now literally generations of these hopeless and dispossessed people — anti-Semite.  

We can agree that Bibi Netanyahu is clearly not an exemplar of the highest Jewish values.  He’s a putz, a schmuck, a much smarter Israeli Trump.  Fine.  Perhaps we can agree that the mildly racist Avigdor Lieberman, former extremist now Israeli Minister of Defense, and his party, to the right of Netanyahu’s right wing group, is not a legitimate force for de-escalating tensions in the seemingly eternal war between former neighbors.  

But, let’s keep this simple.  BDS, Boycott, Divest and Sanction, the same economic tactics used to exert enough pressure to bring down apartheid in South Africa, is plainly anti-Semitic.  Any Jew who thinks it might be a legitimate tactic to employ is simply a Jew hater, end of story.

Sitting here calmly, reflecting dispassionately, it is beyond dispute that there are numerous issues involved in this particular issue of BDS.   It equates Israel to the racist South African regime — not entirely fairly.    This equation requires its own long, sober conversation.    It involves uncomfortable levels of candor, perhaps, or tamping down an angry reflex to dismiss anything comparing Israeli military policies and THINGS THE FUCKING NAZIs used to do.  

Breaking down doors at night, grabbing and torturing suspects, an off the books detention or killing when required, doing secret violence here and there to keep the opposition from organizing, or bulldozing an entire block of homes because a terrorist was harbored in one of those homes, or forced relocation, or whatever you want to bring up, are reminiscent of things ruthless armies of occupation routinely do.  There is a much larger discussion to be had of the particulars of all these policies.  

All this is very uncomfortable terrain to negotiate, even among people who agree about most things in American politics, you have to walk through it very, very slowly, reassuring the other party of your good will at every step.   Easier to just say Israel, eternally menaced by a world of haters, is justified no matter what or the equally emotional position that Israel is acting just like the fucking Nazis.   The tic to view everything as a dichotomy blinds you to any truths that fall along that human gradient, seamlessly from black, to dark charcoal grey, to grey, to paler, mouse grey, to ash-colored grey, to white.  

Truth is hard, true belief is easier.   That ease is the reason so many still support their president, even as his policies are already starting to fuck them hard.

There are Israeli peace groups (example) working tirelessly against the right wing forces in Israel which have controlled the government, and the narrative, since a right wing religious fanatic murdered Itzhak Rabin more than twenty years ago.   These right wing Israeli officials argue it’s perfectly fine, even restrained, to shoot protesters with live bullets if they come too close to the fence in Gaza.  This policy is controversial and complicated, many difficult discussions can be had over whether it’s the best way for Israel to proceed toward any kind of peaceful resolution to the long conflict between Palestinians and Israel..    

But, for the moment, let’s keep it simple, folks.  Israel is a democracy and our greatest ally in the Middle East (along with Saudi Arabia, but why mention those publicly beheading motherfuckers?)   Our U.N. ambassador applauded Israel’s restraint in killing and wounding so relatively few Palestinians in the recent outburst of mass ugliness between these enemy neighbors.   Soon after her comments we [3]  left the U.N. Human Rights Council who wouldn’t stop bitching about Israel’s use of deadly force against unarmed civilian protesters, even suggesting the shootings by sniper might constitute a war crime.  

To cite but one example of the complexities involved.   One Israeli peace group, The New Israel Fund, supports the right of people to use protest methods like BDS, or, more precisely, it opposes the proposed U.S. criminalization of BDS  (their position is much more nuanced, New Israeli Fund actually explicitly OPPOSES BDS).  

Yet to those Jews who seek to keep it simple at all costs, the New Israel Fund supports terrorism by opposing “pro-Israeli” laws to criminalize BDS, thereby supporting BDS and hatred of Israel.  The New Israel Fund is a target of angry American Jews who believe Israelis who oppose their government’s extreme right wing tactics are traitors and anti-Semites, no better than Nazis, really.   I actually heard this view expressed by a tiny gaggle of disgruntled protesters outside a Palestinian-Israeli peace concert we attended.  

Keeping it simple: the New Israel Fund supports terrorism.   Boom.  End of story, synagogue hosting event is giving a forum to anti-Semites! The great David Broza, anti-Semite.  Anyone looking for peace with the enemy– traitor!

The Israeli government’s moral position on the mass shootings at the Gaza-Israel fence is that it gave the Hamas-inspired protesters fair warning: come within this distance of the 37 mile long reinforced fence [2] and we will use deadly force.  The warnings were dropped in the form of leaflets, plainly written in Arabic for anyone to read.  Fair warning.  Come near my fence and I will shoot you, even kill you.   Still they came, protesting by the thousands, surging toward the hated fence, threatening to breach it and cause a bloodbath in Israel, whose right to exist they angrily deny.  

The failing NY Times reported on the many Palestinian deaths, at least sixty, in the days around Ivanka and Jared’s photo op with Bibi Netanyahu as they cut the ribbon on the controversial U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem.  Palestinian and international sources give much higher numbers of dead and wounded at the Gaza fence.   Easy enough to dismiss these numbers as fake news, anti-Israel propaganda, since it comes from people who have historically had a bloody ax to grind against Israel.   Is there a number of medics shot that is justifiable?   Is it legitimate to fire on medical personnel because they are aiding and abetting, by trying to save the lives of, those who surge toward the guns of their hated enemies?

It is so much easier to pick a side and just be on it than to try to consider all sides in an extremely complicated and intractable situation and take nuanced positions on a case by case basis.  We can raise arguments about the Palestinian definition of refugees, as the Jerusalem Post apparently did recently.  Simple, these fucks are not actual refugees, they just pretend to be victims under a definition they came up with.   They can’t leave Gaza?   Good for them!   The simple view sees good guys and bad guys and good people stick with the good guys.  Simple.

I was reminded, even sitting around a table with good friends, warm friends, people I love, all old friends who speak Hebrew and love Israel as much as I do, that some innocent questions are, to be simple about it, not innocent.   Say the wrong thing and the conversation is over.   Forget the fact that we all likely agree, to one extent or another, about the school to prison pipeline, intergenerational poverty going back directly to slavery,  the fossil fuel industry-created denial of plainly observable climate catastrophes as part of a of pattern related to centuries of escalating human pollution, vast, escalating income inequality, the anti-democratic curse of concealing information of great public concern from the voting public, the recent gift of billions in tax breaks to the wealthiest, at the cost of cutting the social safety nets for the most vulnerable, our unforgivable and unaddressed national racism (we can pat ourselves on the back for banning the hateful word “nigger” and replacing it with the great neologism “n-word”, much less offensive!), the imminent dismantling of a woman’s federal right to choose to terminate an unwanted, or dangerous, pregnancy, the inevitable corruption of a democratic system where unlimited campaign money is “free speech” and dark money — if donated in a large enough pile — needn’t ever have its source exposed, as the recently rewritten law provides.  

We did not get to this cruel president and his blundering administration by chance. The extremest, greediest billionaires found their donkey to ride to the promised land they’ve been dreaming of since the days of the John Birch Society.   The Koch brothers’ wealthy, distant father was a founder of that society.  The John Birchers were rich, paranoid men who suspected Dwight D. Eisenhower might be a secret Commie, or at least an unwitting dupe of the goddamned Commies.  These canny billionaires built a national infrastructure over the last thirty years or more, methodically, think tank by think tank, state house by state house, created legislative/corporate partnerships, and finally, as the Kochs head toward their reward in heaven (both are old men now) their long-cherished dream has become reality for all of us.  The cancerous chickens of our materialistic, profit-worshipping “libertarian” democracy have come home to roost.

It is a certain kind of torment to live in a world as inured to violence as our world is.  Millions die violent, hopeless deaths, it’s just the way it is.   Cherished principles are so easily tossed aside when policies are addressed directly to our terrors.   THEY ARE GOING TO KILL US!!!!   So we are morally justified in killing them first.   THEY HATE US.   Therefore, we can torture them, because if they hate us, fuck them, you know?   They already hate us, so torture them, what are you being so squeamish about?   They’d do the same to us, probably much worse.  

At the same time, when we are calm, we can recognize that hate never conquers hate, that an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind, that we need our most creative, empathetic, ingenious solutions for intractable, historically violent problems, but those are just abstractions.  All very exhausting abstractions!

BUILD THE WALL!   BUILD THE WALL!!!!   BUILD THE WALL!!!!    Feels pretty good, actually.

 

 

 [1]   Not only is this a sticky factual issue, with many sources stating that Sanders actually opposes BDS, but there is a related and completely separate issue that is easily elided into “support for BDS”.   Do you oppose a law criminalizing BDS?   I do, vigorously.   Do I support BDS?  I don’t.  What is Bernie’s position?   Truly, I have no fucking idea, though it appears he doesn’t.   I’m pretty sure he agrees that criminalizing selected nonviolent political expression is anti-democratic.  Which in my book, makes Bernie Sanders no more an anti-Semite than I am– trying my best to live by my Jewish values, including dedication to protecting the weakest among us and not doing what is hateful to us to others.

[2]      The fence is actually two parallel barriers built by the Israelis: a formidable one of barbed-wire within Gaza and a 10-foot-high metal “smart fence” packed with surveillance sensors along the Israel demarcation line. A restricted buffer zone as wide as 300 yards is between them. Israel has warned that people in the zone without authorization risk being subjected to deadly force.    

source   (Lying NY Times) 

[3]  We, the People.

Fantasy Island in my mind

Outside, the world is raging.  People are actually arguing about what to call the cages they are throwing confiscated children into.   One wealthy country’s criminally misguided drug laws put neighboring countries’ drug cartels into overdrive, people are killed, tortured, threatened.  Citizens flee the violence of their impoverished home countries.  They are caught at a border, have their kids grabbed, or are told that their children will wait for them while they’re being processed as potential illegal terrorist types [1].  Then, as the adults go with authorities, their kids are secretly whisked hundreds of miles away, no receipt given, the kids can be anywhere.   Whose fault is that?  

Outside, on the Fourth of July, freedom is no doubt loudly, ponderously on the march.   Is it still freedom if it wears jackboots?   Back in Germany, between the world wars, as the violent revenge fantasies were gestating in vats of nationalist, racist steroids, militant German youth marched chanting “wir sheissen auf die freiheit!“. The NY Times translated this as “we spit on freedom!’ though, of course, the active verb in that sentence means “shit”.   WE SHIT ON FREEDOM!  

In my mind, it is much more quiet.  Nobody shitting on freedom, no bureaucrats sending children hundreds of miles from their parents with no records kept, no world leader threatening to detonate nuclear bombs and annihilate millions if he doesn’t get universal adulation — and a Nobel Peace Prize.

“You pretentious asshole,” says an old friend.

“Yes?” I say.

“You seriously believe you can write your way out of a world of festering horrors?”

Mmmm, result is unclear.

“Did you read that off the little screen of your magic 8 ball?”

It is likely.  

“Look, you seem to feel you can just write out your thoughts and feelings and put them up for your dozens of mindless followers to salute.” 

Here is my bottom line.  If you are my friend, I give you the benefit of the doubt.  I exert myself not to judge the things you do to survive, even if they are things I myself am unable to do.

“Fuck you!” says my old friend.

Didn’t mean to sound judgmental, old bean.   I only mean to point out that my first duty, as your friend, is to give you every benefit of every doubt.   I was directed to an interesting opinion piece in the Grey Skank the other day about the corrosive shame so many men feel, and how it leads to the disrespect of women, which fuels more shame.  This cycle culminates, of course, in toxic masculinity.   That is the kind of macho bluster that puts violence at the top of the list of ways to get people who say uncomfortable things to shut the fuck up.

“Jesus, the torture never stops!   Will you get to the fucking point?” says my old friend.

Of course.  Giving the benefit of the doubt starts with recognizing the feelings of another person.   He did this because he felt he was about to be killed.   Fair enough.  In his shoes I might well have done the same thing.  I certainly would have felt the same way he did. 

“You are maddening!” he says.  

Yes.  Anyway, I’ve learned that you cannot argue, or it is pointless to argue, aggravating and counterproductive to argue (unless your goal is a good argument), that you should not feel what you are feeling.  The feeling must be acknowledged, its reality accepted.  The feeling is what it is, the reasons for it cannot be understood or addressed without first acknowledging the feeling.  No productive conversation into overcoming the bad feelings can be had if the other person’s strong feelings are denied.

“Feel this, motherfucker,” says my old friend clenching his fist and brandishing it uselessly.

“Oh, uselessly, eh?” says my old friend, swinging his fist an inch from my nose.

I smile without showing my teeth.  “Doan wase yourself…” I say through my smile/smirk, like Bruce Lee on the deck of that boat in Enter the Dragon, not even turning my head to the bully, watching the waves lapping in the distance.    

My friend punches me full force in the mouth.  

Feel better, do we?

“You self-righteous fucking asshole,” says my friend.

Yes?

Look, I get that your feelings are hurt.   I seem to be blaming you for acting badly, even though it wasn’t your fault.  You were in a total panic, afraid I was secretly angry at you, maliciously sabotaging your shaky marriage.  I get all that.  It was important for you to point out, at that time, that I always feel I’m right, never admit the possibility I could be wrong, never apologize about anything.  I apologized to you, for what it was worth.  Then you told me how hurt and angry you are that I see you as an anxious person who needs to be protected.  I get it, I get all that, truly.

Thing is, though, strong feelings, stirred and unacknowledged by the people who are supposed to be your closest friends, lead to other strong feelings.  This happens almost in direct proportion to the strength of the feeling that is left unacknowledged.  If you deny my right to be angry, what am I to do with the feeling?   You come to me in rage, I don’t acknowledge your right to be angry.  Tell you you’re a fucking baby, advise you to “grow a pair”, man up, stop being a pussy(cat).   What happens to the rage I tell you to fucking shut up about?

“One punch in the face wasn’t enough for you?” asks my friend.

Once is never enough, from a man like you.  You remember that Captain and Tennille line, the pretty Tenille singing to the Captain:  do that to me one more time, once is never enough, with a man like you.  What the hell?    

“I’m going to kill you,” says my friend.  

No, you are not going to kill anyone.  One thing I can assure you, I am not going to be killed by you today.   You may feel like killing me, and we can talk about that, you toxic male you, but you ain’t going to kill me any more than I’m going to kill you.

Feel free, in the meantime, to punch me in the face as hard, and as many times, as you like.   I’ve got to get back to my daydreaming on Independence Day, so forgive me if I don’t cry out.   Rest assured, your punches are mighty, and terrible indeed.

 

 

[1]  Not to make a gratuitous comparison between government lies told to helpless people, but when the Nazis forced the Jews at the killing centers to strip naked and line up, the Jews were told it was for a shower, not a gas chamber.   Which would you rather step into?  A nice hot shower, or a sealed room about to be pumped full of poison gas?  Come on, is there even a choice?

Writing, the last refuge of a scoundrel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

USA!   USA!!!!!

 

 

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

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

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

Quick note about friendship

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

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

Irony is often lost on the nervous

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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