Category Archives: Ahimsa

Being Invisible Hurts

Making one’s life’s work a project to make the children of the invisible feel visible for a few hours a week:  sheer idiocy.  I realize this, and how developing this project flows naturally from my own childhood experiences.   I was not born invisible, did not slip off until I disappeared during high school and kept out of sight, and the workforce, for a few decades.  I had great potential and was reminded of it often by many as I slipped silently into the night.  

We live in a corporate society, just accept it.  Virtually everyone I know is employed by a corporation, paid by a corporation.   The success or failure of everyone in our society is measured by their prosperity or lack of prosperity.  To dream of an unpaid program that has no measurable path toward prosperity?   Sheer idiocy.  

I do not castigate myself, or seek to belittle what I have managed to achieve so far, even as I mock myself in the voice of the larger society.  A program that allows young public school children, working together, to make all esthetic and technical decisions as they produce group animation?   Priceless, truly.  They master a host of skills and reap huge, unquantifiable benefits from this communal play with its ingenious balance of free imagining and technical demand.   Even just the isolated element of adults witnessing and applauding kids’ creativity and achievement for its own sake is invaluable.  That I lack metrics to prove this?  A fatal flaw in the design of the program, from a corporate funder’s point of view.  

I have felt in my body the pain of being invisible.  It doesn’t come from a lack of fame, or envy of celebrity, or the want of some validation.   It comes from that fundamental human need not to be seen as a fungible widget in a school uniform, a tiny data point, but as an individual containing an entire universe of imagining and potential.  The corporation does not place any value on this fundamental human need– it has no such need itself, being a legally constructed monster, a single-minded, all-consuming predator given all the natural rights of a human being.   “I’ll believe that corporations are people when the state of Texas puts one of them to death,” said Bill Moyers, national treasure.  Me too.  

A thought experiment:  consider your feelings on a subject you care about greatly. Express them as cogently as you can to a close friend.   Hear your close friend express almost zero understanding of why you feel so deeply about the subject.   Experience the existential moment where you weigh all the other good qualities of your close friend against their inability to understand your deep engagement with this subject.  This part is a conversation, largely with yourself.  

Now, experiment part 2:  express the same thing, in written form, and send it to the friend.  Hear nothing in return.   Is a neurotic person the only type who might find this silence troubling?  

The world is just the world and there is a certain wisdom, I suppose, in lowering one’s expectations about what can be done.   The myth of the individual who, by force of intellect, will, talent and determination, changes the way people think about the world?  It is seen now and again, usually in the context of people who achieve great wealth and celebrity along with their influence.  Luck is also a factor, the accident of birth first among these fortunes.  

Then we have someone like Malcolm X, pointing to another path, following one’s beliefs without thought of personal gain like recent world-changers who spring to mind, amoral corporate geniuses like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.  Of course, Malcolm’s fame arose while speaking for a large, ignorant movement– he stood for years before a loud megaphone where his genius could be honed and displayed regularly.  He underwent moral transformations during his life, was willing to revisit his deepest beliefs, refine his moral stance.  And he was willing, although not anxious, to die for those beliefs.  The shots that ripped him apart in the Audubon Ballroom that February day fifty years ago this week were earned by telling threatening truths many had an interest in not hearing expressed.   Several parties who hated each other were united in their desire for his death, played essential parts in his murder.   Not exactly a role model for action, perhaps, unless one feels he has no choice.  I suppose I feel that way.

 

Making it Right (and the difficulty of anger)

The world is not right, though it will insist it is, bashing you in the face as many times as necessary to prove it.  History does not proceed by justice, the law does not concern itself with trifles, like the American lynching that was winked at for a century after the Civil War.  You get a flawless receipt from every ATM you will ever visit, along with the exact amount of money you ask for, plus applicable fees, yet the same company that makes the ATMs will insist it’s impossible to guarantee the same accuracy in counting electronic votes in US federal elections.  There are a billion examples, literally, more than that if you go inside families, friendships, workplaces.

In a world as insistently corrupt as our own, how does an individual make it right?   We have the serenity prayer, which at times may guide us to accept the difference between truly maddening things we must fight and things that will only madden us.   I have nothing much to offer here, except to consider for a moment the role anger plays in these proceedings.

A friend’s recent reaction to anger caught my attention.  This cheerful, agreeable woman got angry, years ago, over something she took as a slight.  Her unusual show of temper was mentioned recently (note how slyly the passive voice is used) and she became very apologetic about it, almost worked up that we recalled it.   The words angry and mad are used interchangeably, and both are emotionally fraught words.  A stigma is attached to both, and for understandable reasons.  Angry, mad people often do terrible things.  Seeing people out of control, or feeling out of control ourself, strikes terror.

You read the book Everyone Poops?  A delightful Japanese book pointing out the obvious and showing various creatures pooping.  Here’s an illustrated post about it, keeping it classy, as the author says.  We all poop, very important.   It is clear what must be done regarding poop and we do it as often as necessary.   A very good thing it is, too.   We all get angry, and even funnier, we all have a right to be angry much of the time when we feel it.  It’s what to do with the anger that is the perplexing puzzle.    

It often gets turned inward, which goes badly almost every time.  We blame ourself for something as natural as pooping and wind up using it against ourselves– very bad, as bad as not pooping.  It gets barked at the wrong people, also bad, for at least two reasons.  The source of the anger remains untouched and a person who did not deserve blame got barked at.  Very fucked up.  It’s threatening to express anger to someone who can retaliate, so those who can’t or won’t fight back are often targets instead.  Speak truth to power?  Want to get fucked up, go right ahead.  Unless of course, that truth flatters power; power doesn’t mind that.

My old friend was determined, when he became the father of a brilliant and provocative child, to learn not to react to his child’s provocations with anger.  This sounds easy, but try it for twenty years or so, every waking moment, tired and distracted, in sickness and in health.   His mother had not done well in this department, not well at all.  Not many angry people do well in this department.  My friend did the hard work, I am always proud of the job he did in not repeating what was done to him.

We get mad when somebody hurts us in a strikingly unfair way, or in a way they know will hurt us.  This happens.  What we do after that makes all the difference.  I think of that wonderful line I saw at Buddha Bodai restaurant, under the glass on the table:  remain soft spoken and forgiving, even when reason is on your side.  Wonderful advice.   Hard advice, but consider– if you care about the person who made you angry, what better way is there to respond?  If you have reason to be mad at yourself, what better way to speak than softly and with a tender willingness to forgive?

A Gentle Story

I try to walk at least five miles a day and I have a device clipped to my shirt that encourages me to do so, recording every step and hundredth of a mile (20 steps).   Some days lately walking this distance is about all I manage to accomplish, but, I’ll take my accomplishments where I can and as my father always said of such things “it’s better than being poked in the eye with a sharp stick.”

Walking in the Bronx last night, looking for a new route around the part of my usual path that takes me under ear shattering elevated trains, I walked down a street I’d never been on.  This empty street, a block or two long, is named Adrian Avenue.  As I reached the end of it I heard cries for help coming out of a window over my shoulder.  

Two women were piteously calling from a window in an alley, their necks thrust out into the night.  “Please help us, we’re locked in!” the younger of them cried as I turned to face them.  

I took out my cell phone.  “Who can I call for you?” was my first idea.

“No,” said the desperate woman, “come into the lobby and let us out!”

It was after 10 pm, the unfamiliar street was empty and quiet.  Two helpless women lure unknown man into lobby where accomplices wait to rob and beat him, I thought, tabloid style.  “How will I get into the lobby?” I asked the women.

“We’ll buzz you in,” the younger one said.

“And how will I be able to get you out if the door is locked?” I asked.

“We’ll throw the key out,” said the woman.

“What apartment are you in?” I said.  She gave me a number on the first floor.  They buzzed me into the small apartment building.  I saw their door and noticed there was no door knob on it.  I heard them inside.  There was no sign of anyone waiting with a blackjack.

Within a moment or two the key slid out under the door.  I turned the key and the door opened.  Both women were so happy to be rescued from their predicament they were practically giggling.  The older woman, in a dressing gown, beamed a grateful smile.  The younger one also beamed gratefully, pumping my hand with a surprisingly strong grip and thanking me profusely.  I smiled too, told them they were welcome, and went back to walking.

Less than 200 steps later I was at the end of Adrian Avenue, and looking left, realized the street did not go through in the direction I needed to go.  There would never be another reason to walk down Adrian Avenue, I realized, which made the odd coincidence of being there to do a good deed a little bit cooler.

Small Bits of Advice to Myself

Avoid sitting around in your underwear judging people who inevitably disappoint.  You can do this easily by putting on pants and a shirt when you get out of bed.

Busy people with good intentions, when confronted by a good cause they have ignored, or a friend in a pickle who asked for help and who they have not helped, react with guilt.  Guilt is the single most abundant and predictable characteristic of the well-intentioned person.  It can also be corrosive to the recipient, so beware.   Its first cousin is anger.  Guilt can become anger in a second, maybe they’re more like twins.

Look down from time to time to be sure you have pants and a shirt on.

One of the easiest ways to bludgeon someone in an intellectual joust is by reframing the issue.  Doing this can quickly paint them into a corner, force concessions over things they have not even raised, disorientingly shift the battle to a more comfortable and familiar field where your victory is assured and the point they are trying to make will never see the light of day.  

Reframing an issue to beat somebody up is an asshole move.  Try not to do it yourself.  If you are having your thoughts reframed to make you look like a fool, protesting the reframing itself will only make things worse for you and leave you further from the original discussion.  Change the frame by immediately conceding the point they are using to reframe things, even if just “for the sake of argument” (for the sake of avoiding an attempted bludgeoning, actually)  and refocus the conversation.  And check to make sure you have pants on.  

Reframing, of course, is also extremely useful to the person tormented by guilt.  By doing so the actual source of guilt, an acutely painful thing, can be avoided, while actively giving unsought advice or help in a way that can relieve the guilt.  Also an asshole move, but one is better off not judging it, since it is entirely rational behavior, if not helpful or desirable for the recipient.  Wear pants while dispassionately noticing this.  Changing the frame is rarely useful in these situations as it will often cause inflamed guilt to flare into anger.  Smile as much as possible and keep the following in mind:  remain mild and forgiving even when reason is on your side.

Lowering the expectation bar is often a good thing.  As a general principle one is well-served by being happy with less, rather than unhappy because so much more was reasonably expected.  

Feeling depressed that you seem to lack the mental energy to continue up the steep and demanding path you’ve chosen?  Be happy when you see an ad for a clinical trial on treating depression, which even includes treatment for the low-grade chronic form called dysthymia that has been used to describe your seeming psychological accommodation to a childhood spent in the company of monsters.   “Made my day!” you can chirp to yourself, jotting down the number, “help is just around the corner!”  If prone to procrastination, make sure you wait a few days to follow up by calling the information line.  Idly check pants pocket.

Take joy in small things.  Related to lowering the expectation bar, be happy when you are moving forward, even in almost imperceptible snail-like oozes.  Finally getting out of bed excited by a thought you had, even if that thought is a very small one– a small joy that must be embraced as the great motivation it is.  A small joy on a dour day is worth as much as a large joy on a happy day, maybe more.

I have more advice for myself, and anyone else who might take a useful example from any of it, but I have to change a small, but idiotic, mistake in a previous post, pointed out to me just now, if you will excuse me.  (He said, making a notably lame exit excuse.)

 

Concentrated Thinking

A writer interviewed recently by Terry Gross quoted Don DeLillo as calling writing “concentrated thinking.”  An excellent description of what a person does when focusing to write clearly, come to the point smartly, patiently untangle and remove what stands in the way of those things.  

Bad writing, like bad thinking, can be like a hungry anaconda.  Not to disparage large constrictors, we all need to eat, but a coiled monster that crushes you in its hungry embrace is not what most readers seek when they make their reading selections.  Making the reader’s task as easy as possible is one of the writer’s primary jobs, like making yourself easily understood is important in conversation. 

Which would you rather have in your lap on a Sunday afternoon, a relaxed cat or dog, or a ravenous constrictor weighing a few hundred pounds?

I’m thinking of this because, mistakenly believing I’d done some kind of good deed by answering a convoluted email from the toxic adult son of a recently deceased old friend, I had delivered to me an enormous pile of steaming shit, in a huge coil, by way of reply.  The inevitable punishment my misguided attempt at a good deed — done for the sake of others, not the vampire I was actually writing to–  deserved, no doubt.  The steaming mountain of shit, to my great alarm, uncoiled itself into a large constrictor and, as I pulled back in horror, got a firm hold on first one arm, then my torso.

I struggled against this determined monster for literally hours.  It was only through concentrated thinking, and metaphors like “coughing up a toxic hair ball”, and the fevered writing of many words, that I was able to finally loosen its terrible bonds.   The bad writing, and even worse thinking, put me back into aggravations long forgotten and filled me with a surprising amount of anger and violence.  

Bad enough writing, the product of bad enough thinking about painful emotions,  feels like it can kill you, if you let it enter your mind.   Like bad thinking, bad writing complicates things that are already difficult enough without adding complications.  

Concentrated thinking, and editing, and paring the thoughts to their most elemental form,  yielded this image, finally, which I sent as the last of too many words to the brother of this toxic person:

Your brother is a lost soul, flailing desperately.  He’s quicksand, only he talks you to death as he kills.

Like his bad writing.

 

We Can Only Do What We Can Do

I went to visit an old friend the other night, to let her off the hook.  She’d volunteered to help me as a hands-on business adviser to get my nonprofit off the ground a few years ago and found it impossible, partly because I sometimes resisted the strong opinions of this overbooked, talented, business woman and entrepreneur.  I went to release her from a promise it was impossible for her, or anyone in her position, to keep.  

I also was intent on telling her, though it’s taken me years to realize this seemingly simple thing:  people can only do what they can do and it’s ridiculous and self-defeating to be deflated or disappointed when they cannot do what they cannot do.  It’s also Einstein’s definition of insanity to continue in this loop: if someone shows repeatedly that they can’t do a particular thing, expecting them to be able to do it the next time, and getting pissed off again when they don’t, is the definition of insanity, or at least a foolproof recipe for it.

I visited to let her off the hook gently and resume our old, warm, comfortable friendship without the iceberg of my life’s biggest and best idea looming coldly in the way.  I went to tell her I recognize she had the best of intentions to help and express my appreciation for her willingness to help. Explain that I understand– seeing my plans through her framework of business success it’s hard to see my efforts to date as anything but the objective failures of someone unwilling to listen to even the best advice.  Until I can find colleagues I can inspire about my actual idea, and who become as excited as I am about the workings of the autonomous factory for creative play, I will never be able to move things forward very far or at more than a snail’s pace.

“Do you realize how hard you are to work with?”, she asked me with a smile, as determined to help, in spite of my attempts to reframe things, as I am to sell a philosophical system when all anyone can ever sell is a product the market will buy.  Her view is that my product cannot be so specific, it has to have the widest possible generic appeal so I can cold call hundreds of schools, marketing to them in familiar terms they are comfortable with, using professionally prepared targeted mailings and sample videos on enclosed thumb drives, and not putting them off with a radical approach, my sketchy, too candid, rambling, semi-depressing, too long sales rap and a maddeningly specific idea for exactly what I want to do and the specific places where I am willing to do it.

She had a legal pad out now, made two columns.  We were starting at the beginning, asset column, liability column.  Although I’d come to socialize, and protested that, she was determined to help, even after I told her I realize it’s absurd to rely on friends who don’t share the vision I am struggling to turn into a product for sale, a vision I am still struggling to pithily package.  I let her help me, sure, why not?  

She listed my assets: program and skills to run it, law degree, $8,000 donated dollars in the corporate war chest.  Then a light bulb went on over her head and she got excited.  My rent stabilized apartment!  I am sitting on a ‘cash cow’, if only I’d take the bold steps of violating the law and risking eviction, this was a tremendous resource as an illegal air B & B!  Hire a cleaning company, put everything in storage, have the landlord do all repairs, plaster and paint, have the floors done, buy furniture at Ikea.  I could then, from the proceeds of renting my illegal hotel suite, fund the salary for a professional partner, although, of course, I’d have to factor in bribing the superintendent of the building and use a fake name under which to solicit and accept the money, cash only, probably get a burner phone under a fake name, too.  

I expressed reservations, typical of my fearful, risk-averse nature, first of which was the constant presence of the shady superintendent who sees all comings and goings and would certainly notice people with suitcases walking up two flights, back down with suitcases, different people with new suitcases coming and going. 

“Do you do favors for the super?”  she asked.  A creative entrepreneur must be fearless and resourceful, her body language said to me.

“What, like help him take out the garbage?”  I said.

“No, I mean are you friendly to him, give him tips, take care of him, you know, do you have a good relationship with him?” 

“I guess so, we exchange wisecracks when we pass each other, I’ve made him laugh a couple of times, he’s sometimes funny,” I said, “but I don’t trust him.  Even if he was getting a cut of every guest’s cash payment, I wouldn’t trust him.  Especially then, I suppose.  Can you trust someone you have to bribe, someone who would take a bribe?”  We put the cash cow to the side, I told her I’d think about it.

Then, for purposes of marketing, she stressed the importance of camouflaging the radical nature of my student-run workshop.  “Nobody is going to send their kids to something advertised as run by kids.  I wouldn’t send my kids to anything that was ‘student run’,” she said emphatically.  “No parent wants their kids in a program the kids run.  We know our kids, especially at seven, can’t run a program, and they’re not really running your workshop, really.  You run it.  They want to know, before they hire you, before they send their kids to you, that the adult is in charge.  Run it however you want when you actually do it, if it works, which you tell me it does, fantastic, but if you think ‘student-run’ is a selling point, think again.”

This very point had been debated heatedly, and most annoyingly, at what I decided was the final board meeting with the people I had at that meeting.  Much easier to contribute criticism and strong opinion than to help imaginatively fine tune a vision you don’t share or understand, a vision, frankly, that hasn’t even been articulated professionally.  

I listened carefully to her point, trying to keep neutral body language and a receptive expression on my face.  I told her I understood she had a very strong opinion on this matter, and assured her I would give it more thought.

I felt very mature after saying this and we moved on to her next points, a few more about the cash cow I was sitting on and the nature of the marketing materials I’d have to produce, ones specifically not accenting my unique approach of putting the children’s playful motivation on the front end of the learning equation, whatever the hell that was supposed to mean.  

I’d find out the following day that there is at least one other worldwide movement dedicated to the same principles my program is, the same principles also expressed by Sugata Mitra.  It’s called the Reggio Emilia approach [1], and proceeds precisely as my workshop does.  It’s a child-centered educational movement that lets the interests and excitement of the students, carefully listened to by adult facilitators, drive the learning of that group of children.

“Yes,” I can hear my friend say, “but they are a 70 year-old movement, while you…. do you think you are easy to work with?”

As I’d shown earlier, when I’d tried to point out that, being a one person organization, much of my effectiveness depends on my ability to transcend my moods, alone, at each discouraging turn.  My idea, which has succeeded wildly in practice, is in danger of extinction unless I can recruit and retain at least one other creative person who shares my vision, I tell her.   

“We can either discuss your moods or discuss business.  If you want to discuss your moods, I’ll put this away,” she said, giving the legal pad a quick wave.  

“Business,” I said with a smile.   She smiled too.

 

[1]

At the heart of this system is the powerful image of the child. Reggio educators do not see children as empty vessels that require filling with facts. Rather they see children as full of potential, competent and capable of building their own theories.

Children have the right to be … active participants in the organization of their identities, abilities, and autonomy.. .  “better citizens of the world”… (this system) also credits children, and each individual child, with an extraordinary wealth of inborn abilities and potential, strength and creativity.  Irreversible suffering and impoverishment of the child is caused when this fact is not acknowledged [my emphasis– ed].

Each day and every moment, we, the teachers, follow the directions of the children and adapt ourselves, always observing, documenting, listening and interpreting their goals, theories and strategies so we can gain insight into their thinking, always ready to make changes and support the children in their discoveries.

“Tell me and I’ll forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I’ll understand.” Chinese Proverb

source

 

The Fairness Doctrine

There used to be a rule for broadcasters, all of whom use public airways built and maintained by the government, We The People, that required them to present a certain amount of controversial public interest content and give both sides equal opportunity to influence public opinion in any debate involving that public interest.  If you gave ten minutes to the spokesman for everyone having as many guns as they want and being free to take them everywhere they go and use them freely if they feel threatened, or even just a bit paranoid, well, a spokesman for people who are not insane had to be given a chance to rebut that opinion.  It was called The Fairness Doctrine, a quaint idea today.  The FCC apparently abandoned the doctrine during the Reagan Administration.

I suspect the Fairness Doctrine was devoured by ravenous Big Media when they got consolidated enough to openly advocate for the forcible drowning of the government in a bathtub and the government decided maybe it wasn’t wise to piss off the three or so major corporations who now control all of the broadcast news.  However it vanished, it simply is not the rule any more, except, seemingly, after presidential performances.  After the State of the Union the opposition gets a few moments to convince their base that the president has just unloaded a dump truck full of shit onto their kitchen tables.  

Of course, we isolated cranks who tap our thoughts onto the internet have never been bound by any kind of fairness doctrine.  Protected by the First Amendment, we rule our micro-kingdoms with absolute authority and a divine right to be as unreasonable and unfair as we like.   Still, many people have a tic that acts up when unfairness rears up on its hind legs and sprays urine in all directions while braying like a donkey.

A reader pointed out, quite fairly, that I’d been unfair recently, to myself.  He pointed out that I presented my old friends’ lack of care for me and her unkept promises to me much more gently (in the post I removed, hypothetically to protect her feelings, though there was virtually no chance she’d ever read the post) than I presented the counter position in yesterday’s post, the “compelling” reasons why she probably felt justified to act like a self-righteous, selfish, demanding, angry, materialistic jerk.  

Her theoretically compelling reasons, painted bravura style in the merciless strokes of the internal victimizer, an artist who can harshly improvise like nobody’s business, presented an unquestionably idealistic man (me) in the most damning possible light.  “He sleeps late!  He gets depressed!  He doesn’t make that fifth and sixth phone call when he gets no answer the first few times.  He’s not an undaunted salesman nor a master of marketing, graphic design OR branding!  He doesn’t burn to sell his great ideas, the loser!  He’s not out healing the lame and kissing lepers, though he claims he’d love nothing better.”  

I should go back and add a line about the stinking lack of fairness of that unfair characterization.  After all, I don’t want to give the impression that I learned nothing from battles with my unhappy, ruthless father, a man filled with terrible regrets in the last few nights of his life.  Here is what I learned:  it is easy to see imperfection, be put off by it and reduce the imperfect thing to the sum of its imperfections.  It is easy to be disappointed and hurt, life can be a parade of reasons for discouragement and anger.  

In your unhappiness it is very easy to give way to a kind of righteous disappointment, reduce the complex, multidimensional thing that all creatures are to one flat surface.  That flat surface will be covered with the disgusting stuff of disappointment.  Studying the aggravating flattened details will take away your appetite, make you angry, make you want to tick that person off the list of people in your life.  

“That fucking fuck,” you will think to yourself, possibly say out loud.  Possibly even say it out loud to the actual fucking fuck while slapping its face back and forth a few times, getting in a kick too, metaphorically if not here in the physical world.

“That’s not life, Elie,” my father, so well-practiced in that procedure, would say now, as he wheezed on the last night of his life.  We are not the sum of our failings, we are complex, iridescent beings, sometimes luminous, sometimes murky, like our motives.   Humans and animals are the best games in town, nothing against plants, soil, the sky, all the rest of God’s green earth.  

Of course, we humans are, at the same time, also the worst game in town.  The best villains in drama have good reasons for why they act so badly, compelling ones the audience can relate to.  Same for the heroes, not all good, my friends.  Same for all of us, born good and bad, like a phrase under Isaac Babel’s pen, ready to be turned brilliantly toward the light or cast confusedly into unreadable gloom.  

So my apologies to myself for being so harsh on myself yesterday, and I will add a line to the post and forgive myself for yesterday’s treachery, for being kinder to a sometimes jerk I love than to myself, another occasional jerk, who I also love.

Public vs. Private — a consideration about not being an asshole

The public-private line has blurred with an explosion in technology that allows everyone so inclined to be the protagonist or antihero of their own self-created  drama.   It is wonderful and horrible, our new ability to make an electronic version of ourselves available worldwide at any time.   Science fiction.  

And like the best science fiction, it raises moral and ethical questions.   Like exploring the decent boundaries of on-line candor and respect for the privacy of others.

Many of these billions of daily posts are ethically neutral, avatars showing photographs of their lunch, or today’s design in their latte, or pictures taken from the end of their own arms, lips pursed, eyebrow raised, shirt undone.   Timeless rules still apply, provocative photos of beautiful people will always be viewed many more times than the same photos of ordinary looking people.  Things become more complicated with the on-line writings of strangers and people that we know.

From time to time you come across something that really moves or entertains you and think “fuck, this person ought to…”.   What ought this person do?   Have 100,000 followers giving a penny for the blogger’s thoughts every day?  More acclaim from fellow bloggers?  There was not even a word the equivalent of “blogger” until very recently, but like all ubiquitous things, it’s hard to imagine a time without what exists now.  It’s not even an exercise worth much effort.

The unmediated creation of public utterances can lead to hurt feelings.  A celebrity tweets an honest reaction their publicists will earn their money walking back.  A joke comes off as hate speech.  I didn’t mean… I’m sorry if… I try to be a role model… I…  The essence of wit is quickness, a blessing or curse when such things can be sent around the world with a click, without the timing or the wink to insure its proper effect.  

A writer putting out a book, or pounding out a column, would have an editor or publisher who might say “uh, Dave, are you sure you really want to say that about angry people on hair triggers who love guns?”  On-line, on his own weblog, amused at how well he’s made his point, Dave just hits “publish” while still chuckling.  The angry gun lover on a hair-trigger might turn out to be the neighbor in the next apartment who hates the sound of Dave laughing loudly to himself early every morning while writing the posts Dave himself finds so hilarious.  Googling his annoying neighbor he finds Dave’s blog and hurries over, not to congratulate him.  Not so funny, Dave, is it, coming loudly through the bedroom wall when I’m trying to sleep, grinding my teeth with this glock under my pillow, asshole… not quite so adorably witty now, are we?

I am thinking about this privacy business (having refrained from using the word “I” for as long as he could) in connection with something I posted here the other day that is easily seen as an extended self-righteous exercise in publicly airing very soiled laundry.  I thought of it at the time (and much of it still is) as an exercise in laying out several complicated and important lessons I’ve learned recently (and I will pluck those out and distill them for a future post).  Using a hypothetical example from my life, clearly identifiable as a real person, and close friend, however, has the potential to cause hurt and trouble.  Why would anyone but a person not clearly thinking things through risk causing such harm?   A hasty word, like an arrow let loose from the bow, can never be taken back.

“What are you, a fucking detached philosopher living in an extended thought experiment in your own universe of perfect forms?” a friend might ask, “how did you expect her to react, you pathetic, self-absorbed, fucking wannabe wise man?   How wise is someone who embarrasses someone like that in a public forum, even if that public is only a handful of people?  Anyone in the world can read that shit, forward it to anyone else.  I could send her the link while we’re talking right now, from my phone.  And how, reading it, could she not be mortified?  Don’t you think she’s already feeling a little guilty about having promised and failed to help several times running?  You alluded to her pang yourself. You may be irrefutably right in every particular, and wording everything very gently, but you’re wrong to post it publicly.”  

“She has her own compelling version of this story too, don’t forget, and she can justify everything  — you don’t sleep normal hours, don’t knock on doors every day, do nothing to help yourself, don’t follow through on anything, live mainly in your own head, expect others to do heroic work in service of your saintly mission when you yourself mostly dream of the blessed work you’d be honored to do someday when the time is right.  Do you think someone like you is easy to work with?”  

“Yes, you see yourself as a selfless servant with a noble vision, but what do you actually do in the world, besides sit in judgment of people busy accomplishing things?  Sit in judgment in your underwear, mind you, in the middle of the afternoon or the godforsaken hours of the early morning, when it’s dark outside.  At least put on a pair of goddamn pants when you sit in judgment of us, man.” 

Fair points all, if a tad brutal in their one-sidedness.  If you would live by “first, do no harm”, the next thing would be to delete that post.  Outside of the unintended irony of making a long and detailed case against someone who loves you in order to demonstrate that it is better to be soft-spoken and forgiving, even to an asshole, what good purpose could it possibly serve?  You may whisper your irrefutable indictment of an old friend softly, but it’s no less damning for the gentle delivery, and perhaps much more damning.  

 

I Mash Yer Fez– rewrite

There is irony that flies and irony too heavy to leave the ground.  Sometimes you can tweak the flightless variety a bit, sometimes not.  I tried and failed in my first attempt at this one a couple of days back, to the horror of more than one reader.  I will give it a more straightforward shake, lose some of the italics, try to say directly what I meant to say the first time.

I endorse gentleness and mildness, and strive to maintain these qualities above all, although it is not easy work.   Our society is violent, competitive and challenging, for one thing.   Most humans are prone to anger when mistreated or frustrated.   It is an almost irresistibly good feeling to be right, to feel justified, to prevail.  This reflex to prevail is a common cause of friction and leads to righteous anger when we feel wronged or victimized in our zero sum society.   Wars are fought, faces punched, prisons filled, lives destroyed, out of righteous anger.    

Our society’s laws, not always designed to ensure fairness, can be seen as the organized expression of this rage to be right.   Follow me here: laws are made by those with the power to institutionalize their unfair advantage, no matter how grotesque, and to enforce it by deadly state action, if necessary.  The penalty for looting after a natural disaster and making off with a bag of groceries — prison, if you’re not shot first.  The penalty for participating in, and profiting handsomely from, billion dollar financial fraud — it’s complicated.

Our land of the free and the home of the brave, the worlds’ first modern republican democracy, was for a century a land of slavery.  This history is considered ancient and is rarely discussed at any depth.   The arguments against slavery are many, well-known, have in recent times won the day. It seems beyond dispute now that slavery is evil, morally repugnant and illegal.  The single compelling argument for a century of American slavery was this:  we need them to make ourselves wealthier by having a slave economy, fuck you, stay out of our way of life.  

The bitter, bloody struggle that resulted in the abolition of American slavery was over for less than a decade before a legally sanctioned new version of The Peculiar Institution was set in place for a century by Supreme Court skullduggery and racist codes of strict segregation violently maintained by terrorism winked at under the laws of the former slave states.   The struggle for freedom for the descendants of slaves during that century cost many brave lives.  

Today many Americans feel satisfied that slavery is deep in our past, some consider us a “post racial society”, since we now have a half-black man in the White House.  Can anyone really say with a straight face that our ongoing history of racism at law and in practice has ever been seriously addressed in this country?

Slavery and racism are considered by many as elements of ancient history, and they are hot subjects that raise hackles on both sides.  Fine, then, let’s grant that American racism is all in the past, for the sake of moving on and take a look at more recent outrages at law.  

We have been, since the devastating, coordinated terrorist attacks of 9/11/01, engaged in a permanent war against terrorism, The War on Terror, a war that is used to justify many excesses including the murder of many blameless civilians in a number of countries, right now.  

Soon after the 9/11 attacks Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld  fired chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Hugh Shelton, a commander reluctant to abandon legal safeguards designed to minimize the deaths of innocent people and ensure a solid intelligence foundation before employing elite, secret black ops squads to kill suspected terrorists.   Rumsfeld replaced him with a new general who agreed with the sleek, muscular, infinitely flexible new black ops policy the Bush administration had in mind to go after al Qaeda and similar groups.

They sincerely believed that preventing the killing of innocent civilians was a meaningless consideration in an all out existential world-wide War On Terror.  Collateral damage, Rumsfeld and the Bush administration believed, is inevitable and, if kept secret, not something many Americans would get excited about.  They were correct in that calculation.  What you don’t know, you don’t want to know, even if you thought you might have needed to know it, if you know what I’m saying.

Before circumventing the letter, spirit and intent of national security and anti-torture laws and treaties, the administration hired a team of lawyers to write preemptive justifications detailing why they are legally allowed, even obliged, to not follow the laws they were willfully violating.

What makes all this intolerable for an idealist who believes, Anne Frank-like, in spite of it all, in democracy, is that these legal justifications are classified, state secrets kept from the citizens of the world’s greatest democracy.   And once these secret policies are given a fig leaf of legality and put into motion, it is almost impossible to stop them.  Our current president has stepped up the secret killings and prosecuted journalists under a 1917 anti-espionage statute carrying the death penalty to prevent the release of truths about our policies that might embolden our many enemies.

Righteous rage can be intoxicating to a maniac.  While intoxicated with what feels to him like righteous rage, spraying machine gun fire at inhuman enemies seems like a reasonable thing to do.  After that, though, the let down often comes quickly.  After a moment’s reflection the maniac is as likely to turn the gun on himself as to do anything else.  

Personally, no matter how provoked or worked up, I would err on the side of pausing to take a few breaths before capitulating to rage and smashing someone’s fez.  

Unless under direct physical threat, being gentle, calm and soft-spoken is usually much more productive than being righteously enraged, agitated, loud, and ready for justifiable violence.  

Of course, I know where I live and I fully realize how idiotic what I’m saying sounds.  Even if I’m totally right.

 

On the other hand — I smash yer fez

[warning:  this post contains violent, heavy handed irony which does not always work in written form.  In fact, it didn’t fare much better in an out loud reading, where it caused a tearful plea to please stop reading it (right before the too late redeeming ending, too).  Abhorring slavery, assassination, lynching, maniacal use of firearms, it uses violent language to try to show the amount of righteous rage violence unleashes, but it is a dangerous game not to be played lightly, as I have attempted to play it here.   I regret any upset this post may cause, even as I leave it here, for whatever redeeming social value it might have.  A less visceral, more humane version is here if you prefer your points made less brutally.]

 

And, with accursed French nuance, I confusingly add that, naturally, it also feels almost irresistibly good to be righteously outraged, you fucking fuck!  

What are the laws, after all, but the organized expression of this rage to be right?   They are made by those with the power to institutionalize their unfair advantage, no matter how grotesque, and to enforce it by deadly state action, if necessary.  Slaves?  We need them to make ourselves wealthier, fuck you.  Free the slaves?  Fuck you, get a rope, we’ll show you how we deal with fucks like you.  Oh, go ahead and call the damn sheriff, he can hold the end of the damn rope we hang you from, Mr. All Men Are Created Equal Pantload, sir. 

Or even better, and a more recent example– Rumsfeld, after 9/11, facing a reluctant chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Shelton so concerned with legal safeguards for protecting the innocent and due process when using elite, secret black ops squads to kill foreign nationals suspected of involvement in terrorism.  “You’re fired, general,” said the jaunty Secretary of Defense, hiring a new guy who agreed that all terrorists and potential terrorists, everywhere on earth, must be hunted down and killed and the more secretively, the better. Any collateral damage?  Also secret.  State secret.  Classified.  Need to know. Don’t ask, we kill you.

The funny thing, if it is funny, is that even those circumventing the letter, spirit and intent of even the most high minded laws, or especially those, will hire the best lawyers in the world to write a preemptive justification for why they are legally allowed, even obliged, to not follow the law that they are willfully violating.

Where can we find these legal justifications, we citizen members of the general public of the world’s greatest democracy?  Top secret, bitches.  We have a 1917 anti-espionage statute carrying the death penalty, you want to be charged and prosecuted under that deadly law, journalist bitches?   I don’t think so!  You want to act like the truth doesn’t embolden our enemies?  Get the rope!

Righteous rage feels good for a second, while you are spraying machine gun fire and screaming at the top of your lungs at inhuman enemies, real or imagined.  After that, though, if you reflect for a moment, you’re as likely to turn the gun on yourself as to do anything else.  I would err on the side of pausing to take a few breaths before capitulating to rage and smashing your fucking fez.  

I would argue, if I was an arguing fellow, that, when not under direct physical threat, being gentle, calm and soft-spoken is usually much more productive than being righteously enraged, agitated, loud, and ready for justifiable violence.

Of course, that’s just me, fucking Ahimsa-Boy.  What the hell do I know?