Category Archives: Ahimsa

MLK Day 2025

As the nation observes the national holiday of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (and racist legislators in Alabama and Mississippi also celebrate gentleman traitor Robert E. Lee), a billionaire-studded contingent will be on hand, in a warm room, the paying crowd and mass of police outside freezing, to witness the historic swearing in of a president who stole top secret government documents as he left the White House after fomenting a many tentacled criminal conspiracy culminating in a violent insurrection to prevent certification of his election loss.  Never in American history has this 1933 German scenario been played out:  a ruthless and vindictive dictator, hellbent on absolute power, found guilty of major crimes, implicated in deaths, being sworn in as the lawful head of state.   Brings to mind this expressive gif:

We have had racist presidents before.   I was taught that Woodrow Wilson was an important progressive president who started the income tax and was the moral force behind the League of Nations, forerunner of the UN.   What every Black person I’ve ever discussed Wilson with already knew, I had to learn.   Born in the South in 1856, he was a boy during the Confederacy and the Civil War.   He hated Blacks and ordered the resegregation of the federal civil service as soon as he got into office.  He also hosted DW Griffith, director of the groundbreaking 1915 cinematic epic Birth of A Nation, at the White House.  Griffith screened the first film ever shown at the White House.  I was subjected to much of this film as a  graduate student and will summarize what I saw.

After the Civil War, down in the persecuted southland, Blacks were strutting around, completely out of control.  They were rich, and gaudily flaunted their wealth, lording their newfound power over the downtrodden whites, who they bullied.  Good Christian white folks were being dominated by these overbearing Blacks and were legitimately intimidated, particularly since the Blacks were backed by a hostile army of Union soldiers with rifles and bayonets.  White women were in constant danger of rape by the out of control, savage  Black men.  It is likely that more than one struggling white woman was dragged off to be defiled off screen by the savage Blacks, as the white men watched in hopeless horror.

In reel two or three a noble group of selfless modern day knights arose, to protect female Christian purity from these sick, depraved former slaves, now domineering oppressors. They rode in on horseback, looking absolutely ridiculous in their stylized Ku Klux Klan regalia, the piano music swelled (it was a silent film) and soon these heroes were giving holy hell to the Blacks, who richly deserved it. My classmates and I were all relieved when the long class was over, though the film had another hour yet to go. The professor tried to get us to stay, I don’t think any of us did.

The racist progressive Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States and klan sympathizer, had this comment about DW Griffith’s groundbreaking masterpiece:

So the upcoming horror show with the current cast of depraved and destructive psychopaths, while sickeningly real, with their ability to write history in something much more powerful than lightning (for political purposes), also has to be kept in perspective. Extreme enough pain can jar us out of apathy and despair and mobilize us to find a cure.

When the finality of an ugly, senseless conflict with a group of my longtime friends, who refused to consider the truth before pronouncing an irreversible death sentence, became painfully clear to me, when the brutal irrationality of it hurt badly enough every single day, I had to wake up.  Waking up from a nightmare and recovering yourself can be hard, but if the nightmare is hellish enough, wake you it will.  

This upcoming shitstorm will wake enough of us up to fight it to a standstill and disable it in 2026, or indifferent fate will allow the very worst of human possibility moving forward.  For me, I don’t intend to leave any of this up to fate.

The psychopathic worldview

From the personal to the political, there are some people who cannot be wrong, no matter what they might have done. A mountain of evidence, a clear chain of cause and effect, the corroborating testimony of 250 eye witnesses, incriminating statements they themselves repeatedly make — angrily reduced to the satanic work of sick, evil haters determined to unfairly persecute them, out of pure, blind spite, malice, irrational hatred. The person who can never be wrong must remake the world into a place that always serves them without question or contradiction, in order to make themselves feel irrefutably right, no matter what.

It’s disorienting, especially at first, to realize the relatively small role rationality, common sense, plays in many lives, in mass politics and in history. In the name of an abstract higher cause, masses of people will reflexively reject the facts, cause and effect, all appeals to human empathy, if it suits their larger need to belong, to feel righteous and correct. The Capitol policeman crying out in pain as an enraged mob crushed him in the doorway he was defending during the January 6 riot? Bullshit, a paid crisis actor pretending to be in pain, a cynical play by evil commies to blame perfectly peaceful tourists they want to viciously paint as trespassing rioters! That eyeball gouged out of another officer’s head? His own fault for fighting true patriots in the name of a sick, insane cheater and traitor!

An infuriating lie is effective because it is short, conclusive, easy to repeat and impossible, once repeated over and over, to disabuse people of. “They’re eating the pets!” was a laugh line for Kamala and millions of us, but it was instantly memorable and damn good for fundraising, for turning up the already boiling pot of outrage against imagined hoards of disgusting vermin who are raping young white girls and poisoning our nation’s blood [1]. 

The professional liar has a transactional, self-serving view of other people. It is a transgressive thrill for fans of the liar that reality itself must conform to the liar’s framing and the so-called truth, that a lie can instantly render what did or didn’t actually happen impotently irrelevant. The liar “owns” his hated enemies with his infinite ability to change the facts on demand. The power of a venerated liar’s reframing is that it blurs then obliterates every other narrative. Truth and lies are transactional commodities just like anything else employed in the art of the deal. To millions among us, increasingly, objective truth is whatever we most fervently believe to be true. That belief does not make things that actually happened disappear, but the belief that they disappear is good enough for most people.

The psychopathic personality, with its insatiable need to dominate and feel superior to others, can never be satisfied in the way most people are satisfied. If it has $10,000,000,000, it must have $100,000,000,000, $1,000,000,000,000, because it is intolerable that some other greedy bastard can have more billions than they do. What will they do to achieve their endlessly out of reach goal? Everything you can think of and many things you can’t imagine. No price is too high for others to pay for the realization of the powerful psychopath’s blind desire.

We have a front row seat now to watch these sick fucks in action as they take positions of power in the new government. The incoming president will have a cabinet full of them, and there are hundreds more waiting in the wings when he starts firing this first batch. For every George Soros, a wealthy man with a social conscience, there are a hundred billionaires who will embrace any Nazi, klansman or Putinist who promises them even more wealth and power. Robert Reich published this clip from the 1930s NY Times as an illustration of what we are seeing right now among our “greatest citizens” and their corporate avatars:

I recently got an email containing the perfect encapsulation of the absolutist worldview of someone who can never be wrong. I’d written in detail to a cousin about a lifelong conflict with my father, a man with many great qualities, and an uncontrollable need to never be wrong. I provided many examples of the senselessness of this long war, of my many attempts at reconciliation. I included quotes of my father’s genuine regret, right before he died, sadly acknowledging my many unrequited attempts to make peace over the years. He harshly berated himself for his inability to reciprocate, and expressed terrible self-loathing for having turned our relationship into a battle to the death instead of being an empathetic father capable of a loving, mutual relationship. He explained what I already understood, that he acted this way because he was crushed in his soul, finished for life at age two, as he put it, by a furious, violent mother who beat all hope out of him.

The response I received from this cousin struck me as a textbook illustration of the psychotic worldview. In short, clipped sentences it stated a series of irrefutable facts, the world as he understood it. Conspicuously absent was any reference to anything I’d written, any question I’d posed. Statement: the father I’d portrayed, Irv #1, was essentially my unrecognizably distorted creation, the product of my angry, conflict-prone personality, divorced from lived reality and entirely my burden. 

The person this cousin had experienced, who he dubbed Irv #2, had absolutely nothing in common with my Irv #1. Irv #1 and Irv #2 were irreconcilable entities and no matter how much information I provided him, how many quotes of Irv’s actual deathbed regrets and self-recriminations, he would never see anything but his pure, loving view of the very best of the man. I would never get any acknowledgment of anything I ever said or wrote to this person, no conversation was possible — in describing my father truthfully, and with nuance, I had crossed into the dark side. I was now a betrayer of a loving memory and entitled only to a series of icy statements of fact.

This cousin is highly intelligent, has a scientific turn of mind, an engineering background, yet he couldn’t acknowledge that every person contains multiple aspects, strengths, weaknesses, conflicting desires, contradictory behaviors. We show different sides of ourselves to different people, at different times. Picture a Venn diagram showing aspects of the personalities of his two opposing, irreconcilable Irvs, there is always an overlap of desirable and undesirable traits, unless the person is that exceedingly rare outlier who is somehow purely one or the other. The response I got stated, essentially — I see black, you see white. There can be no ambiguity, no discussion, no room for compromise in this world, no nuance, nor any color. The very things Irv #1 bitterly lamented never experiencing as he voiced regrets the last night of his life. 

“I imagine how much richer my life would have been,” my father, Irv #1/Irv #2, said in a dying man’s voice, “if I had been able to see all the nuance, gradation and color in the world instead of seeing everything in harsh, childish black and white. The world’s not black and white, Elie.”

Human affairs is black and white only if you are damaged in your soul beyond the ability to perceive the human complexities and colorful, sometimes terrible, contradictions we all contain. Absurd as it sounds, this crabbed logic (A or B, never both) leads to propositions like — a philanthropist cannot also be a cold hearted criminal, even if there is ample proof that the person is, in fact, both of these things. 

The final appeal of the psychopath’s worldview is that, if you can accept it, all ambiguity and complication is removed from this complex, challengingly nuanced world. That this freedom from uncertainty comes at the cost it does is of little concern to people desperate for the righteous relief provided by knowing who to love and who to hate, without ever having to meet them.

[1]

See also:

I’m the bad guy

I keep forgetting this essential fact in a corporate society — the person with the complaint is always the problem. 

Who would you rather be, a wealthy, philanthropic, problem-solving job creator or a sniveling, powerless loser trying to lodge some niggling complaint?   Not much to choose there, really, in our either/or, winner/loser, black/white, powerful/helpless culture.   Then, among us puny earthlings, there is the personal sphere, the only thing we can sometimes control — how we act in response to stress.

If it weren’t for whiners like me who need to make a “complaint” any time they feel slighted, cheated, over-billed, underserved, physically or emotionally injured and all the other annoying signs of personal self-pity, corporations would never be troubled by the odd customer with a gripe of some kind.   Life is unfair, everybody, even the most powerful among us, has gripes.  De minimis non curat lex.  “The law does not concern itself with your trifle, asshole.”  Sounds more majestic in Latin.

Somehow, I take the fact that I am now a cripple personally.  When I use that ugly term to refer to myself (we prefer to be known as ‘person with a disability’ or something more respectful than ‘cripple’ or ‘gimp'[1]) I am describing a person who cannot walk a few steps without pain.  It is not uncommon for a medical limitation such as not being able to walk, after a knee replacement, with no available medical cure, to eventually make a person bitter.   I am now officially fucking bitter.

I obliged the wife yesterday by sending my dermatologist photos of two new skin growths.  I went on the MyChart of the corporation my doctor works for and sent a message.  My question was if either of these look suspicious enough to merit expediting my appointment, currently set for April.

After a night of interrupted, low quality sleep (ongoing pain, swelling and stiffness in my impeccably installed prosthetic left knee) that left me without REM, deep sleep, or any real rest, I woke today, Friday, to a text from the dermatologist’s office with a Monday morning appointment (90 minutes from here at that hour).

I hadn’t heard from my doctor. It generally takes a few days, and she always gets back to me. There was a notation on the portal, when I logged in, that my doctor had not yet seen my note. Somehow, somebody (a fucking bot driven by AI is my best guess) scanned my note, saw the words “expedited appointment” and put me on the calendar for Monday morning.

Annoying, but easily remedied by calling to cancel the appointment.  In hindsight I should have just texted “N” to “not confirm” and been done with it.  I was already cranky from another shit night’s sleep, the inability of the medical profession to fix the new problem they had caused for me, and everything related to the pain, physical and emotional, of being unable to walk.  I made the mistake of not texting “N”, instead calling to find out if there was some reason for this sudden emergency appointment.

As is the case whenever trying to talk to anyone in a corporate medical office, it was a gauntlet of ads, unsolicited advice about their convenient website and hold music.  I hung up angrily after a few minutes of a five second loop of hold muzak played over and over and over.  The wife, seeing me upset, moved in to help me out.  At one point, when she had someone on the line, she began to cry in frustration and overflowing sympathy for my aggravation.  I took the phone, explained the situation, canceled the appointment, handed the phone back to the wife.  Ten minutes later she was still making nice with the very nice clerk at the appointment desk.  The doctor was seeing other patients, but would personally call me at her earliest opportunity, she let me know.

I didn’t need a call from the doctor.  I’d make an earlier appointment if needed to after I got her response on the portal.  There was no need to trouble the doctor, there was no need to trouble myself, and yet, the call went on and on until I finally lost my shit and began screaming, as I do in the shower sometimes when I’m alone in the house and my knee is screaming along with me. 

The wife is now hurt, and I am a brutal fucking bitter asshole, in addition to an ungrateful one who snarls and yells at someone who is only trying to help me. 

Have a blessed day, y’all.  May this cautionary tale remind you to be the best person you can be, and remember to make nice after you lose control of your frustrations.

[1] Across the board, people with disabilities generally agree that words implying the person is a victim of their disability should be avoided. For example, it is recommended that people choose phrases like “they had a stroke” instead of “they are a stroke victim” or “they suffered a stroke.” These negative phrases can imply that the person is passive to their condition.         

source

Personal Archaeology

Not everyone is wired this way, but for me, I need to unearth clues that help me understand the tangled progress of my life.  I learn many things way too late, and I wonder about these things, once the truth of them hits me like a wall.   Some may find this process painful and do everything to avoid it. 

I am not one of these people, I have left myself countless clues over the decades.  The challenge is to assemble them to  understand what they’re telling me about the progression of my experience.

There is a type

I’m aware now, to an extent it was impossible to know before, for reasons I could explain at length, of a type that is truly incapable of emotional growth.   They are also unable to be honest, which is a big factor in their inability to grow, mature, to evolve into better, wiser people as they go through life.  They were brutally crushed at a young age and their entire personality is an exercise in never being hurt again.   They can be charming, generous, funny, gracious, hospitable, helpful, sympathetic — until they can’t be any of these things.

The crux of their situation is that they were humiliated, early and often, their noses rubbed in their powerless to do anything about it but suffer.  They grew up in frightening circumstances with no loving adult to look to for protection.  They remain hypervigilant against anything that can embarrass them, make them look bad.   If they are confronted with something hurtful they did, no matter how gently the point is raised, they react with fury.  They are always one twitch away from a disorientingly familiar, bloody war to the death that they are bound to lose badly.  They fight with childish desperation. 

I’ve known a variety of this type over the 68 years of my life.  They come in several variations.   A common trait is an inability to see things from someone else’s point of view.    They tend to be judgmental, too.  They often have a reflex to piss on other people’s parades.

The adult daughter of one of these tragically deformed souls wrote recently online of always being amazed, as a little girl who grew up in the suburbs, by the thought that every giant apartment building in New York City had a thousand windows, with a unique life and universe behind every one. She eventually, around six, managed to express this to the adult driving the car. She referred to this person as “the adult” and later used the person’s pronoun, “she”. The response of the adult, a woman I know very well, is a perfect illustration of this kind of crabbed, damaged, damaging personality.

She told her six year-old, marveling at the variation of human experience, “that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.”   Crushing the little girl in the back seat, as this type does in order to feel superior, and therefore not subject to the agony of their own emotional limitation.

I am not a man given to hatred or motivated by revenge.   Revenge is in my heart lately, directed toward a small intimate lynch mob of my once good friends.  I understand and forgive myself for the impulse, though revenge is not something I’m enthusiastic about in general.  I’ve never been a hater.  But, in a real sense, I hate this little girl’s soul crushing Nazi of a mother, eternally reserving her right to hurt anyone she feels like hurting, because she’s entitled to.   And because she’s terrified in her stunted soul, as all such empty human shells are.

Merry Christmas everybody

Thank the Lord we are all once again free to utter those beautiful words in the United States of America. There’s nothing woke, unwoke or deep asleep about uttering a traditional holiday greeting to our Christian neighbors. Feliz Navidad, y’all.

That said, Jesus, of course, is probably quite unhappy (and rightfully so) about what his most public megaphones are representing as his principles: fuck the poor, screw the meek, child poverty is God’s will, as is pediatric cancer, competition beats cooperation every time, obscene wealth and unslakable greed are the Divine’s way of rewarding the righteous, guns don’t kill people, burning toxic things doesn’t cause pollution, spit on and beat homosexuals, make raped girls give birth, as God intended, etc.

But let me not tar American Christians with the ugly sins of perhaps only a hundred million or so of them. One of the finest people I ever knew, smart, funny, irreverent, mischievous, died a few weeks ago at ninety. Rose was a religious Catholic and went to mass every Sunday, until she was unable to and began attending by video link. When I was overwhelmed, and she was out of ideas, she’d tell me to put my faith in God and let God take care of things that caused me anguish. I would gently remind her that prayer and faith had been ruined for me early on by the staggeringly idiotic hypocrisy of the Hebrew school/Jewish center I attended. She understood, but urged me to try it anyway. I’d deflect with a joke and she’d respond with one of her trademark wisecracks.

To be loved by someone who is religious can put the whole exercise of religion in a much more sympathetic light. Sure religion is an engine of control, enforced conformity and, sometimes, murderous intolerance of other faiths. Of course people who become very wealthy, influential and powerful promoting religion quickly become corrupt hypocrites, if they don’t start out that way. An old Jew I once knew used to say “the longer the beard, the bigger the thief”. No religion has a monopoly on evil in the name of God. It is good, in the face of such common ugliness in the name of religion, to remember the blessing of true belief in a moral system ruled by a just Creator.

It is encouraging for me to think of examples like Rose Cuccaro, people who lose nothing of their great and unique personalities while being imbued with faith in a divine spirit, and committed to loving and serving those around them. Religion, at its best, does that. It also brings great comfort to the dying.

At Rose’s wake, her daughter told us that her mother dreamed (two nights before she died) that she was at a great dinner party with her nephew Frankie (great guy, he died a few years back) and so many other cherished loved ones, and she named them.  “All dead,” said Adrienne.  The next day she told her “Frankie’s here to take me home” and she went with her favorite nephew (anybody else at the party would have been just as happy to escort her) for the joyous reunion with the rest of them.  

We all agreed that Frankie was the most likely guide to come down to bring her home. Whether they sent him because he was the most recent arrival (“you go for her, rookie, you’ll get a kick out of it”) or just out of Frank’s basic nature, which would’ve been “let me do this, it’s Aunt Rose, I got this one.”   Not a bad way to end this dream, if you ask me, if you can believe it.

And with that, a merry Christmas to all. May the blessings of this holiday season, centered around the shortest day of the year, and faith in the coming of Spring, be upon you.

Contempt is always the same

Contempt is the same thing every time anyone experiences it.  Talk to as many people as you like about what it feels like, it always feels the same.  Details leading up to it will vary, but contempt is unmistakable. 

The only people who will fight you to the death about your right to be hurt by having your feelings disregarded, and insist on blaming you for deserving to be treated as they see fit, are the contemptuous.  

As for those deeply damaged folks, seriously, fuck those putos.   Contempt is their problem, you can’t fix ’em, help ’em, save ’em, make them feel any different.  They are fucked, and rightfully so.

When you see contempt, remain calm, leave

Contempt is the ugliest thing you can see in another person. It is a childish expression of vicious, outer-directed egotism: I am ultra important, you are a piece of shit, I can treat you however I want to and there’s nothing you can do about it. Once someone shows you contempt, there is no saving things, talking things out, reasoning, making peace. Contempt is the last corrosive word these assholes have to protect themselves against their own disabling insecurity.

It is always infuriating to be treated with contempt (also hurtful, unfair, despicable, indecent, etc.), but the best thing you can do, especially if one of these folks has any kind of power over you, is regard them calmly and get away from them as quickly as you can.  Even a stranger showing contempt is worth not reacting to, there is never anything to be gained, even if you like fighting and enjoy bashing bullies in the face.  There’s really nothing in it for you better than getting away from them for good.

Here’s a recent personal tale of facing contempt that I am actually grateful for.  This asshole’s show of contempt kept me out of the hands of a lying, negligent maniac doctor who sent an entirely false report of tests he never performed to my other doctors.  He works for Optum, by the way, which is part of United Healthcare — go figure!   I guess the entirely fabricated report is one reason Optum never sent me a bill for the three hour session Medicare paid 80% for.

The doctor was friendly and reassuring the first time I met him. He scheduled tests and when I asked about anesthesia he assured me I’d be given conscious sedation before the tests, which was a great relief to me. Having things shoved into your penis, scopes, tubes, etc., while not as horrible as it sounds, is bad enough. I was glad I’d be conscious but sedated for the procedure, which involved putting a thin tube into my bladder by way of my urethra and then filling my bladder with water.

When I arrived for the test, the nurse who was going to put the tube in asked if I was ready.  I said I would be, as soon as the conscious sedation was on board.  She reacted with frustration toward the doctor “I don’t know why he tells patients they’re getting conscious sedation, we don’t give that for this test, we never give conscious sedation, we don’t even have it in the office.  You have to be alert and answering questions.  I guess he thinks it calms patients down when he says that, but I always tell him it doesn’t.”

I confirmed that it doesn’t.  If I’d known, I told her, I would have taken a tranquilizer before I came for the test.  She said that would have been her advice, if I’d been told to call her prior to the procedure and that she was sorry nobody had told me to call her.  She had nothing she could give me.   The catheter went into my penis and into the urethra before stopping at an obstacle somewhere on the way to my bladder.  She retracted it.   For the next ninety minutes this angelic woman held my penis, keeping it warm in the cold room, as various applications of lidocaine did their best to numb my urethra, and tried at least three more times to insert various catheters into my bladder.  Finally she said the doctor would have to try it himself.

The doctor came in, sweaty and harried looking, by now it was getting toward closing time.  He asked how I was doing.  I told him I was wondering what happened to the conscious sedation.  He lost his shit, raising his voice and snarling that it was impossible that he’d ever said that, essentially calling me, and his nurse, a couple of fucking liars.  In that moment I knew this guy was not going to be my doctor.  I managed him as one does an out of control five year-old flinging shit around the room.  I made only one call to his office afterwards, to his nurse.  She told me how to get the medical records for my new urologist.

Highlights of the report:  results of the cystoscopy (a camera at the end of a wand inserted into the opening of the penis) he never performed.  He found no tumors, normal this, slightly abnormal that, the report said.  No mention of the unsuccessful attempts to insert the catheter to test the bladder, the test went fine, the bladder was normal.  He discussed all this with the patient, also getting claimed legal waivers from the patient on about twenty different fronts, covering his ass front and back, and the ass of Optum, and insulated the $560B corporation from the aggressions of any plaintiff’s lawyer who might want to make a fuss about a fictional narrative detailing the results of tests the doctor and his nurse never did.

Think of this, though. If the guy hadn’t had a temper tantrum and started throwing his poop around the room, I’d have gone back to him. I’d have never read his scandalous report, never known he was a compulsive liar. I’d have been in the hands of a maniac working for psychopaths. So the fact that I no longer tolerate contempt saved me from a world of trouble.