Category Archives: book of irv

Thwarted Transparency

The reader should keep in mind that Irv Widaen put an uncommonly high value on honesty.   It’s hard to imagine him ever telling a fib, for example, much less calculating a lie to evade having to speak of an uncomfortable true fact.   Honesty was his trademark, he was going to tell you the truth no matter what the cost, since honesty itself was a rare and precious thing.  My father always spoke his mind and could articulate multiple sides of most issues.  He liked putting every available detail on the table for discussion. He had no respect for those who deliberately distorted the facts.

He didn’t need to lie because he was adept at reframing any conversation to his needs.  This way he could remain scrupulously honest without talking about anything he didn’t want to talk about.

You will read of times when my father seems to have been dishonest.   There is no contradiction with his basic honesty in this, though it’s complicated.  

For example, when his eight year-old son came to him with tearful questions about what happened to Grandma’s six brothers and sisters, and Pop’s six brothers and sisters back in Vishnevitz, and their parents, my father did not solemnly lay out what was known of the terrible story.  Instead he angrily told his young son to stop being melodramatic, that nobody knew any of those people, that they were abstractions, that the real problem was that the pampered boy, for some insane reason, wanted to feel like a victim, a childhood victim of the Nazi extermination in the Ukraine and Belarus when in fact he was only a middle class American drama queen who never knew any of these faceless, nameless people, people who disappeared into that night and fog thirteen years before he was even born.

It’s easy to think of this evasion as an act of dishonesty, a betrayal.  I’ve come to see it also as an expression of my father’s disability, his inability to do otherwise.  You can picture a father quietly telling his child:  the parts of Europe where our family comes from had a long history of anti-Semitism;  in the winter of 1942 into the summer of 1943 followers of the mad Adolf Hitler marched into the areas where we lived and killed everybody.  That’s why we fought World War Two, to kill Hitler and his mad ideas.

My father wasn’t able to say something like that. Or perhaps he said something like it, in one clipped sentence like that, and maybe I forced him to say it again, in two sentences, and it was only when I persisted beyond reason that he chided me for being a self-pitying little pussy who just wanted to feel like a victim.  

Someone who’d been raised by tender parents would have instinctively drawn the child close, said he understood how upsetting this terrible true story was, petted and comforted the kid.  My father, raised with his mother’s lash across his face and a father who was a ghost of a man, was never given these human tools.

At eight I was a little young to be an astute historian.   The only notes I took in those days were in the form of disturbing drawings.  Some of them, I recall, scared the shit out of my mother.  The secondary source in my memory recalls only the bad reaction of the overwhelmed father pushed to his breaking point by his anxious young son.

It is easy to see this now:  my questions hurt him too much, frightened him, left him feeling powerless, desperate, angry.   I get that now, though it’s taken more than fifty years.

ii

The personal, of course, is political.   Consider the powerlessness, desperation and anger of the average American voter right now.  Those who voted for the president are disgusted about how little respect the bad people in the media are showing their guy.  Those who voted against the president are despondent that it could have come to this sorry pass in America.

Truth is the first casualty of war.  “Truth” is now seen by most Americans as synonymous with Point of View.   Coming to this opinion is simple if you live in the right Social Media echo chamber, and we all do.  The same set of facts now automatically leads to two sets of irreconcilable opposite “truths” that trolls will endlessly goad each other about.  

If the president in the blue hat orders the killing of far-away strangers based on a high-tech remote surveillance and profiling process, and you wear a blue hat, you’re unlikely to press for an investigation into possible war crimes when innocents are blown to bloody shreds.  If the president ordering the extra-judicial executions is wearing a red hat, the man in the blue hat might get up on his hind legs about these high-tech assassinations that are radicalizing more and more of the world against us.

There are, still, true things.  There are things as they exist beyond spin, beyond their commercial and political uses.  Facts: where I was born, what day, what year.   Facts: what I ate today, what I drank.  Likewise in the world: if it is raining, what Cairo’s average temperature was each of the last thirty years, whether there is a law against racial discrimination in America.  

Fact: the United States has the highest infant mortality rate of any wealthy industrialized nation.   The political is also personal. 

My father was the second child born to his tiny, red-haired, angry, religious mother.   The first was a girl who died either in childbirth or immediately afterwards.  This would have been in a tenement slum or a filthy, crowded maternity ward on the impoverished Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1922 or ’23.  

I wonder if my father ever thought about this tiny, dead sibling he never knew.  I doubt it. Speculation on such things takes you quickly beyond the realm of fact.  In these pages I have tried to stay as close as I could to the facts I knew and limited my leaps of conjecture to things that were truly unknowable, like the nature and extent of my father’s love affair with the amorous young Christian widow in Connecticut.  

The photos suggest they saw each other over the course of many years.  I never heard my father mention her, I never heard her name.   I have Eli’s quick story about breaking up that love affair and a total of three suggestive black and white photos of them together, found after Irv’s death, in a shoe box of miscellaneous photos.  In one, they are captured wrestling on a picnic blanket and I’ve never seen my father look happier (the photo is  here, at bottom of page).  Or, here:

Irv and his shiksa.JPG 

One photo appears to be from before the war, in the summer of 1941, when my father was 17.  He is skinny, in a white shirt and tan pants, sitting jauntily on the railing of the porch next to his landlady/lover.  In another he’s clearly a college student after the war.  The skinny boy in the first picture, renting a room in her Connecticut house, pumping gas to pay his bills becomes, over perhaps ten years, the happy, round-faced young college graduate in the last photo.  The woman appears to have made the long trip up to Syracuse to see him.  The graduate wears the optimistic expression of a young scholar heading to an elite graduate school and his life of ideals beyond.

iii

A couple more details about this impulse to thwart transparency and why this thwarting bugs me so much, personally and politically.  

Reframing was my father’s favorite technique — if you aggressively pursued some matter with him — ju jitsu! — shift the ground of the conversation to a pointed interrogation about why anyone would pry into such things in the first place, or whatever will make the person most uncomfortable.  Put the inquisitive fucker on the defensive, there’s no defense like a good offense. It’s kind of like a mini filibuster, just keep talking, run out the clock.  You can see virtually every politician today do this maneuver when in a tight spot, spout prepared talking points about something utterly unrelated to the question asked.  This tactic is most often coupled with an indignant attack on the character of the person asking the uncomfortable question.

The logical extension to this technique is to preemptively vilify and delegitimize the truth-seeker.  If the truth is disquieting, shameful, criminal, best to be circumspect about it, have others respect the secret.  Indiscreet persons shall be blamed and attacked immediately.  You can bet your nest egg that someone is making a lot of money on the deal if it is disquieting, shameful, criminal and ongoing, and you’d be wise to dummy up.

The personal is political.  Bradley Manning tried to report the evidence of probable war crimes by Americans that he was seeing on his computer screen night after night.  When he made the evidence public, after being silenced by his superiors, he was made to pay a steep price: prosecution as a traitor to the United States of America.   Before his court martial they kept him naked in an outdoor cage, to show he was no better than any other terrorist and just as guilty under  a statute that does not allow arguments about intent.  

The main thing here is punish the leaker, don’t worry so much about the crimes exposed, no need to probe into those.  The probe would likely lead to good, patriotic people being punished for well-meaning mistakes made in the fog of war.  The news cycle will focus everybody’s attention back on the real malefactor.  Make sure everyone knows the fucking illegal leaker is the traitorous enemy, not the people nonchalantly killing in the leaked videos.  Our new president, like our previous one, focuses on these fucking illegal leaker felons, understandably.

In family life, if someone considers a fact embarrassing, say a divorce nobody mentioned to the children, or quietly sitting on tens of millions of inherited dollars, or some other ticklish thing, it is a fact best left unspoken.  If you mention the taboo fact in any context, you are a betrayer of shameful secrets, whether you understand the shame or not.  

In a family conversation about bankruptcy, for example, if you mention that so and so once declared bankruptcy, and his adult children, who are there,  don’t know about it (they were kids at the time), you may have unwittingly whacked a hive of wasps in front of some fast tap-dancing in the family room.  

“Dad never declared bankruptcy!” mom will quickly, falsely, assure the children, giving the urgent eye-bugging, throat slashing sign for you to clam up.   Picture the look you should try to have on your face when the adult children look at you next. 

Transparency is an ideal that our culture of constant selling and spinning makes difficult to uphold.  You can’t have a real discussion, effectively explore options, solve problems, without free access to all the pertinent facts.   Forget about the uninformed populace of a democratic republic having anything like democracy without access to what their elected officials are doing in their name, without informed public debate.  

For reasons that should … be obvious… much as transparency is to be desired, the plain facts, set out, just like that, would be… in many cases, too destructive.   You can hear our thoughtful former president B.O. carefully dancing out that explanation.   National security. Sovereign immunity.  State secrets.  Classified.  Espionage Act, no defense against treason based on your actual motives in disclosing.

After all, some of our wealthiest, most lucrative corporations have staunchly guarded trade secrets that are worth billions.   And if it’s not technically a trade secret, it should be, particularly if certain demographics would be outraged, and we’ll continue to treat it like one.  

As I have noticed so often, opacity and misdirection are all that’s needed for every form of mischief and corruption to flourish.  The worst among us love it when no difficult questions are asked.

What good is history?

“You remember I told you about my brother and I taking Uncle Peter to the zoo?” said the skeleton of my father from his grave on the side of Cortlandt Road.

You showed him the giraffes.  

“Yeah, we said ‘look, Uncle Peter!  Those are giraffes, from Africa –aren’t they amazing?’  Uncle Peter said ‘what good are they?’.   My brother and I looked at each other, took him to see the crocodile, one of the world’s most impressive reptiles.   Do you remember what Uncle Peter said?”  

“Who needs it?”

“Well, the same goes for history.   To some people it is an empty abstraction full of ambiguity and threatening, unresolvable nightmares better forgotten.   Why think about what our forefathers did to Africans, to Native Americans including the Mexicans?    We committed some horrible genocides, wrote laws to protect the most vile occupations man has ever engaged in, protected those practices for almost a hundred years under the world’s most revolutionary blueprint for democracy, our U.S. Constitution.  

“Of course, you’d have to be a lawyer to find the discreet little phrases where the Constitution protects those hideous practices, but to a lawyer and a judge, no matter could be more cut and dried.  ‘ ‘Other such persons,’ Yaw Honuh, what could be more clear cut and precisely, perfectly dried, suh?’   

“The learned Chief Justice, a man a hundred years ahead of his time, is compelled to write: ‘Whatever the constraints of our individual conscience, the law requires a faithful interpretation of the intent of the Framers. It was clearly intended by our founding fathers that this genocidal practice be authorized under our law, at least until the year 1807.’     

“What American wants to hear that shit?  What, we are no better than the Nazis?  Who wants to hear that Americans, many times in our history, have celebrated mass murder as enthusiastically as the fervent mobs at Nazi rallies?   There was never an anti-lynching law, and those lynch mobs used to be quite enthusiastic, bring a picnic, the whole family, buy souvenirs afterwards to recall the amazing day.   There were no protests when Truman insisted we had to drop those atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  There was dancing in the street when Japan surrendered.    

“With Hitler, you had, for the first time in the history of warfare, a ruthless maniac with the modern means of killing civilians on a mass scale and no hesitation to use the new technologies.  The blitzkreig in the skies over London, for example, a continuous, nightly bombardment of civilians, was designed to terrorize the populace and demoralize support for the war effort.  So the Allies responded in kind, we killed untold hundreds of thousands of civilians during World War Two.  The historic city of Dresden was wiped out with incendiary bombs, the massive firebombings of Tokoyo killed many more Japanese women and children than both atomic bomb blasts combined.  So, of course, in a time when everyone is filled with dread and fear, it’s no surprise that many people turn away from history.”  

“Add to that the notion many people have that history is generally written by rascals, in the pay of other, sometimes pernicious, rascals.   Which is often true, you have to look at who the person was who wrote the history, who paid for the book, what the hidden agenda is, why the story is told this way, certain facts highlighted, others left out completely.  You know first-hand that it’s possible, by the way you tell a story, to convincingly describe something completely alien to those who actually lived through and survived it.”

It’s fascinating to me that you had such a keen, lifelong interest in history, and bending the moral arc of history and all that, and at the same time you always insisted that people can’t change themselves in any fundamental way.   That optimistic impulse, to read history and learn lessons in hopes of avoiding the worst stupidities of the past,  set against the pessimistic belief that people’s lives are laid out for them immutably by the age of three.

“Well, look, Elie, you can hold up history to support either proposition, or both of them.  Did America change for its black citizens?  You now have a black middle class, much larger than it was sixty years ago.  You have black millionaires, even a black billionaire or two.  Certain changes toward equal rights have been made, as a result of a titanic, organized struggle and sometimes unbearable sacrifices.  You can say a lot has changed.  The power company in Georgia has a policy of firing employees if they say the word ‘nigger’, you know, what is now universally, in mixed company, pronounced as the ‘n-word’.  

“On the other hand, you have, for the vast majority of blacks in America, the same eternal charnel house.  Brown v. Board of Ed was decided in 1954, segregation in education was unconstitutional, it imposed inferior education on black students.  States were ordered to de-segregate schools ‘with all deliberate speed.’ Now, going on 63 years later, longer than your lifetime so far, schools are as segregated as they were the day before Brown was decided.  So you tell me how much has changed for the average Negro in America.”    

I’ll tell you one thing that has changed, with a president who cunningly positioned himself with the White Supremacists, hate crimes are up.   Every other day we see a scene in a Jewish cemetery, grave stones knocked over; a mosque set on fire.  The anger of the master race is quite palpable, and we have a guy who is stoking it in a cynical attempt… well, you just have to listen to the political pronouncements of each side to get a pretty good idea what is going on.  

“History, what good is it?  I can hear my Uncle Peter, an uncurious man with only practical concerns related to life on his farm.   I guess I’m with Howard Zinn on the constructive use of history– taking courage from those rare moments when people have organized and triumphed over evil things like slavery, child labor, denial of basic rights to women.    We have to take courage from these things or we could not act.  We’d be in despair with a destructive narcissist like this one in power, appointing people who are dedicated to destroying the agencies he’s putting them in charge of.  

“We have seen this before, seen the mistakes a divided opposition makes in opposing each other as the far worse evil takes root.  I grant you it makes little sense, looking toward society wide change for the better while denying a person can do it in his own life– but there we are, Elie.  People are not consistent, or logical, or, in most cases, very brave.”    

The skeleton looked over his shoulder to Cortlandt Road and we both pictured the line of cars, traveling slowly past after being energized by Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson, and their message of brotherhood and positive social change, at the moment the fist sized rocks began pelting down on their windshields.    

“The power of hatred, Elie, one of the big ones in human affairs,” said the skeleton.  

No shit, Shylock.

600 foot home run

“You know, Elie,” said the skeleton of my father, as weary of this long posthumous chat as I have been lately, “your trouble is that you feel like you have to hit a six hundred foot home run now.  The legend says Babe Ruth hit one almost that far, you can ask my man Jeeves about it and get time and place.  It was hit in Florida, if I recall, in some kind of Spring Training or other exhibition game.  Your boy The Mick supposedly hit that tape measure job in Washington D.C. that went 565 feet, I think that was the mythical number the Yankees’ creative PR flack immortalized in the press release after the game.

“You read the whole story of that tape measure shot that left Griffith Stadium and went over a row of houses across the street from the park in Jane Leavy’s great biography of Mantle.  It may have gone that distance, 565, it certainly was hit out of the stadium, a rare feat, it went an impressive part of that amazing distance, for sure.  It may have dented a car, and bounced, and finished rolling another 40 feet away where a kid showed the guy with the tape measure where he found it.  The details are not important (though this is a cool read, thanks, Jeeves).

“Mantle was, at the time of that home run, a young man of prodigious physical strength uniquely adapted to hitting a baseball, thrown at ninety miles an hour, a long way.  The physics of how someone his size hit a ball as hard and as far as he did is discussed in a chapter of Leavy’s book.  It’s not important now.  Nor is it in any way significant that he hit that ball, if I’m not mistaken, in the year you were born, 1956, the year he won the Triple Crown.”  

Your boy Jeeves informs us he hit it on April 17, 1953.

“Fascinating to have the world’s accumulated facts at your fingertips, isn’t it?  This is what I want you to realize, Elie.  Mantle was a twenty-three year-old superstar at his physical peak when he blasted that pitch on an atmospherically perfect day for a legendary home run to fly.  Babe Ruth was a force of nature, his like will never been seen again, he would have been a first ballot Hall of Famer as a pitcher, for fuck’s sake, and nobody has approached his lifetime slugging percentage — and even he is known to have hit only one or two that distance.  

“You’re standing at the plate, knocking dirt off your spikes, sometimes hitting the fuck out of the ball– but in an empty stadium.  You imagine, and I know you do, because I’m in your head, as you know very well, that you need to hit the ball over all the seats and out into Shitshow Avenue.  You figure if you hit the hell out of that heater up in your wheelhouse, somebody will have to take notice.  This is not a reasonable position, for a number of reasons.

“First of all– you have to hit the ball where there are people to see it, paying customers with their fannies in the seats.   Second– you don’t have to hit the fucking ball 600 feet.  You’d be better off, in some way, blowing the general manager, if you want to be brutal about it.   If you hit a single and a double every day, by July you’re still hitting .420, a very big story without any fancy tape measure home runs.

“But it isn’t about baseball at all, is it, Elie?  You’re not a baseball player.  I mean, obviously, it’s a metaphor.   You recall that hothead relief pitcher who claimed he could strike Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth on six pitches?   He got some shit, smirked and said ‘for Christsakes, man, they’d be over a hundred years old!’  Do you think even Ted Williams could have hit the ball 600 feet at your age?

“Look, I understand you never did what every professional in the world does, unless they have a famous father (and you could have, if you’d been smarter about it, of course)– that is, position yourself in an industry, make useful connections, get yourself powerful mentors, learn to use the tongue for more than witty badinage.  You never learned to make the connections successful people make.  You dropped out early, did not go to a college where the best and the brightest meet to rule the world.  You were open with your disdain for the ambitious, those young people willing to do whatever it takes to ‘make it’, to ‘do well’ and so on.  

“I take some part of the blame for that, you know, because I also always openly despised careerist opportunists.  More blame comes to me because I was such a relentless fuck and I kept the rage hissing full blast all the time.   I am not deaf to the great irony that my book, no matter how well-done you manage to make it, will never see the light of day because I disabled you from taking the needed steps to get some influential corporately adept genius to champion the book.”  

“Are you right to be distracted at the moment, filled with hate that the beloved liberal former president who left among his great legacies a health care plan that requires you to jump through several flaming hoops, in a fleeting sixty day period, to have a chance to reverse their mistake that makes your current health care ten times more expensive than the shit care you had last year?   Sure, hate away.  In the end, if all goes well, you’ll pay what the law says you should pay.  In the mean time, figure out how to get a tax transcript, the correct one, there are six or seven, you know, and make sure to upload it and perfect your administrative appeal within the next few weeks or lose the right to any appeal whatsoever.  I mean, fine, be enraged.  What has it to do with your duty to me, with your filial piety?”  

“I may be a selfish prick here, and I see I’ve reduced you to tooth sucking silence, but I want you to finish this book.  Not only for my sake, and I say this in all honesty, but for your sake as well.   If the book is not a mammoth home run, if it gets you a very low advance and sells a few hundred copies, it will be a greater reward than I deserve.  It may also position you to get paid for what you do, for what you have spent the last few decades doing, whatever else you have been doing.  As so many assholes have pointed out, and every lottery winner knows, you have to be in it to win it.”  

“So stop sucking your teeth, get your tongue out of your cheek, and find the right anus to gently probe with it.  You already know a literary agent, stop pretending you don’t.   She may not be the agent you want or need, but she’s a place to start, the best place you’ve got.  Can’t you even do that, for fuck’s sake?”

On The Road to Bethpage

It’s hard to imagine my father’s thoughts in the dark car as he headed out to Bethpage after dinner for his second job.   Bethpage is on Long Island, in Nassau county, a fairly long jog east from Queens.   The roads were not as good back then, the Long Island Expressway was narrower and did not extend as far, and I picture him tooling along bumpy, unlit roads at about 45 miles per hour, the stretches he did on the highway.    This would be after a dinner spent snarling, sometimes shouting, at his children, a pair of merciless pricks who took time out of their war against each other to gang up on their father.  

“I work two fucking jobs so these ingrates can give me shit…,” he is muttering to himself as he backs the car on to the tree lined street where he has situated his children’s cozy childhood.  Then he drives the twenty odd miles over dark roads to an office in Bethpage.     He parks his car and walks up the steep staircase to his second floor office in that little structure.  His small office, which looks somewhat like an attic, takes up the whole second floor of the house, or maybe the third.  He sits at a desk and begins making phone calls in a circle of lamplight.   At least that’s what he did the night he brought my sister and me with him to Bethpage.  

“There is somebody else you should contact,” says the skeleton of my father, “you should be in touch with Rom, the artist formerly known as Peanuts.  You know how to reach him and you know what a good guy he is.  He’ll give you another point of view, will shine some needed light on these dark musings of yours.  I didn’t just sit at that desk making phone calls, I visited each Young Judaea club in Nassau-Suffolk region.  I drove out to Smithtown and Riverhead, wherever a few Jewish kids got together, I was an ambassador  and organizer to high school aged Jews on Long Island.  I was director of Nassau-Suffolk for years, you don’t think I made a few friends?”  

I have no doubt you did.  You had Donnie Ingram and Artie Friarman, to name just two.  Rom, I’m sure, has a couple of good stories, remembers you as a great guy, a funny and straight shooting bastard, no doubt.  

“Which I also was, mind you,” said the skeleton, holding up a finger.

Which nobody can deny, which nobody can deny.  

“Look, Elie, you’ve got to stop this neurotic shit already and start taking steps.  You have to take steps, Elie,” said the skeleton of my father, from his grave outside of Peekskill.

Steps, yes.  There are steps to be taken.

20:400

My father always wore glasses, even at the end of his life when, after laser surgery, his vision was almost 20:20.  

“I couldn’t stand it, he looked so weird, we had a pair of glasses made with plain glass lenses,” my mother said.  I think she told me that after he died and I tried on his glasses, which I had never been able to see through, and I saw plainly without having to whip off the glasses in pain.

20:400, my father told us, is considered legally blind.  Being legally blind was not, apparently, an obstacle to serving in the armed forces in World War Two.  My father was drafted and inducted.  By sheer luck of his assignment, reading the manuals for aircraft when the mechanics got stuck, he didn’t find himself in Europe until after the remnants of the Nazi government surrendered.  

I picture him, the twenty one year-old Jew, arriving in the epicenter of the madness, looking around through those strong corrective lenses he wore.   I can’t imagine what was going through his mind, and he never spoke of it.

Thinking of it now, I wonder how he managed the first few years of his tortured childhood, legally blind, trying to see the world that was always blindsiding him.  It wasn’t until well after he entered school, I’m fairly sure, that he got his first pair of glasses.  His untreated legal blindness was probably another reason he believed he was the dumbest Jewish kid in Peekskill — unlike the other kids in his class, he simply couldn’t tell a vowel from a consonant.

Irv, physical description

“The reader will want to have a physical description of me,” said the skeleton, “you know, before I was this universal soldier we behold now, as you slink toward your own old age.”

I am always struck by an uncanny resemblance to James Earl Jones.  The face, the eyes, the deliberate dignity with which he carries himself, the set of the downturned mouth, the body type, with the assertive, athletic thrust of its belly-prominent torso.  Every time I see James Earl Jones it strikes me again how much, in his looks and the way he presents himself to the world, he looks like my father.  

“Wow,” said the skeleton, “that’s a weird one, I have to hand it to you.”  

No less an authority on the subject than Pablo Picasso said that art was a lie that helps us see the truth.  It’s also a matter of poetic license, as they used to call it, but if you picture James Earl Jones, you have a pretty basic idea of what my father looked like.   I think it may be his lightly colored eyes, as much as anything, and the downturned mouth, when his face is otherwise at rest.  A kind of defiance.

“We can assume those burning light colored eyes are the genetic gift of a white man who owned an ancestor of his,” said the skeleton.    

You yourself, with your six foot two frame, rangy as a young man, as we see in the army photos, filled out to the point of bursting in later years, and your thick, jet black hair, remarked self-effacingly from time to time, and out of nowhere, about how often you were mistaken for Rock Hudson.  

“I did say that,” said the skeleton.

That was like your singing, in a way.  You could pull off a few syllables of a very soulful Sam Cooke imitation, or some other singer of an earlier time.  It wasn’t so much an imitation as an homage, a fleeting demonstration of how much you loved soulful singers.  

“Your goodbyes,” you’d croon to mom, out of the blue, “leave me with eyes that cry…”  You’d sing it very tunefully, and cut it off right there, go back to cutting your steak, shoveling down your dinner.   “I got a house, a showplace, but I can’t get no place, with you…” you’d sing, as mom got that odd smile on her face. 

“I…. wish… you…. bluebirds,” you’d sing, with a perfectly digested sense of Sam Cooke’s other worldly timing.  

“Well, in spite of everything, I saw myself as a seductive, devilishly handsome man,” said the skeleton.  

I know what you mean.  It reminds me of that revelation I had as a young man, that you don’t have to smile at a girl you like.  If the girl likes you, that is.  

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said the skeleton, “but if you mean you felt handsome, or unself-conscious, or whatever, and felt no need to smile or ingratiate yourself… I know you remember me telling you that when I look in the mirror I see what I want to see and ignore what I don’t want to see.”  

I do remember that, and I do the same thing.  You know my sister, a good looking woman, has always placed a tremendous premium on what a person looks like.  She can’t stand to hear my critique of Obama, because he’s so handsome, as well as so well-spoken.  “No, please, stop talking about my boyfriend that way.  He’s too handsome,” she’ll say.  

“Well, Eli said that about his love at first sight relationship with my mother,” said the skeleton, “you know, how much they both were drawn to good-looking people.  How they could forgive anything, if the person was good-looking.”  This is one of those odd moments, since I never mentioned any of this to my father when he was alive or since.    

“Oh come on, stop being coy, Elie, you know very well how this works now,” said the skeleton.  “Besides, how many times, in trying to describe Eli, piece together the painful mystery that was my mother, have you set out that scene, the reunion of oldest brother and youngest sister in New York City, when Aren brought Eli to pick up Aren’s little sister, Tante Chava?  Eli would have been a boy of about seven years old, right, born in 1908, my mother came right before the War to End All Wars.   Eli was regarded as a very handsome young man.  Uncle Aren was a very handsome man too.”

“The D.U. was very handsome in his wedding photos,” my sister points out.  The D.U., of course, the Dreaded Unit.  

“This is what happens at this hour, when you would really much rather be asleep,” said the skeleton, not without a touch of sympathy.  “You sleep for a couple of hours and then are suddenly awake, and desperate to go back to sleep, and you get up to try to mentally tire yourself out enough to go back to sleep.  If you have a thought in mind and get up to write, this is the kind of thing you might write.”  

Right.  I got out of bed with the thought of a clip from a great Norman Lear documentary I saw the end of tonight.  Lear is 93, completing his memoir, a work that takes him eight years, years when he is also in therapy.  He looks at the filmmakers and tries to explain how difficult it is grappling with feelings about his father, who let the family down by undertaking a shady job that resulted in his being hauled off to prison when Norman was nine.  Broke up the family, since the provider was gone.   Lear is tearful as he wrestles with eighty five year old feelings about his father.  A 93 year-old tormented by his feelings about his father.   In the next scene he is watching a clip from All in The Family, a show that sheds tremendous life on our family.  

The skeleton regards me warily.

Archie Bunker always reminded me of you also, his hectoring certainty and the aggressive thrust of his face, his belly.  In this clip young Rob Reiner, The Meathead, is trying to convince Archie that Archie’s father was wrong to be brutal to Archie.  The Meathead is hammering at a single very key emotional truth– that Archie’s father had been wrong to so badly mistreat his child.   The subtext is that Archie is in a rage against a world he mistrusts because of his father’s cruelty, but the Meathead is all sympathy, genuinely horrified to hear that Archie was beaten and harshly punished as a child– and takes his father’s side. They are both, momentarily, completely out of character.

Archie wavers thoughtfully for a second, seeming to consider this, and then, remarkable actor that Caroll O’Connor was, his face becomes ineffably tender as he tries describes his father.   A generic father, the first person to throw you a baseball, and take you by the hand for a walk.  With that faraway look he describes his father’s hand, and how his father broke that hand beating Archie, for Archie’s own good.   The camera pans to the ninety-three year old Norman Lear, tears running down his face.  “Oh, God, is that good,” he says, wiping at his eyes with a handkerchief.

Earlier in the documentary Dick Cavett introduces Caroll O’Connor on his show with a phrase about the lovable bigot O’Connor plays.  O’Connor comes out, in a suit, smoking a cigarette, and immediately speaks in a way that makes it very clear he is not Archie Bunker.  He tells Cavett and the audience that Archie is not lovable, though he may make them laugh.  He talks about how much pain Archie is in, and how imprisoned he is by that pain, how limited his world is.  How much more fun he could be having, if he wasn’t so damaged. [1] Cavett does not try to make a joke.

I look over and the skeleton of my father is quietly weeping.   I’m heading back to sleep, with Sekhnet and the cat.

[1] O’Connor nails it succinctly and insightfully for Cavett and his audience: 

Well, you said ‘lovable bigot’, I don’t know about the lovable part of it.  We’re presenting the story about a man who is basically a pretty unhappy guy.  People may laugh at him and enjoy him but we must look at Archie as a man who could be getting a lot more out of his life, if he didn’t have these burdens on him and these things that have poisoned his life.  

“Jesus,” said the skeleton of my  father, parenthetically and in a footnote, “those words could be carved on my gravestone…”

 

 

 

 

Questions Raised

“While you’re on this legal tangent, why not refine what you’re doing here in the first place, Elie?” suggests the skeleton of my father helpfully, peeking out of the snow that today blankets his grave after yesterday’s heavy snowfall.   “You know, the old ‘questions raised’ from your legal writing days.”  

The question raised section of a legal argument frames the question you want the judge to answer the same way your persuasive argument, with its apt citations to precedent, will guide her to.  Raising the right question, and then providing all the reasons the judge should agree with your answer, is a large part of the litigator’s art.  Separates the winners from the losers, yo.  Worth a shot here, I suppose.

Question raised: what is the best use of your time?  

“Vague, but I like it.  Ideally, if you did not have to work for a living, were content to live as a monk, did not buy into society’s notions of status and achievement, how would you spend your precious, limited time?”

I start to think of that old commie saw ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’  The most satisfying and productive-feeling way to spend my time nowadays, seeing that without a wealthy backer one can’t launch even an ingeniously designed and cost-effective program to help the children of poor people, is writing.  I love to play the guitar, and I love to draw, but writing is something most people can understand and something potentially useful.  Let me put it this way– no matter how well you play music or draw, many people do not get it.  Simply makes no sense to them.  Words– there you go.  We all basically agree on what they mean, everyone can follow them if they are set out in an order that makes sense.

“No offense, Elie, but who gives a shit?” said the skeleton.

Fair enough.  If you have a strong point of view about how viciously the status quo is proceeding, as I certainly do, as you did, and you have the means to express it, to persuade– maybe that is a kind of moral imperative.  

“Means relatively little if you express it to a handful of likeminded people who click on your blahg to read your latest expressions of the moral imperative,” said the skeleton.

No argument here, dad.  I’ve noticed that the more devotedly vicious weasels among us, guys like Grover Norquist and his buddy Jack Abramoff and people of that ilk, are tireless in the mass promotion of their beliefs, or what they say are their beliefs.  

“Well, you have to be careful about beliefs, people actually believe them.  Like the beliefs of the millions who cast their votes for an angry, spoiled brat who can’t get enough attention or power.  You can argue, present the facts, but you won’t get very far with reason.  As you yourself have noted many times, as borne out by the sad story of my life, only direct experience that smashes your belief hard enough in the face can have any impact on what we believe.  We are largely irrational creatures, much as it may pain us to admit this.”  

Yah, mon.  The beauty part is, we are geniuses at setting up rational looking structures to support otherwise idiotic beliefs.  Think of libertarians– they believe in liberty for everybody to decide everything for themselves and that therefore the government should not intervene.  They call the fire department when their house is on fire, call the police when they’re robbed, they drive on roads built by the government, and so forth, but the government has no right to charge them any kind of tax to maintain these things.  The theory sounds reasonable if put abstractly enough: personal liberty is so important that we put it at the top of the list of what a human needs.  

“Anatole France’s great line comes to mind, the one your friend the mad judge was fond of quoting: ‘the law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike from begging in the streets, sleeping under bridges and stealing bread.'”  

Just so.  Think of the liberty of somebody born in a tenth generation of inherited poverty, at the mercy of everyone else’s more fortunate liberty.   There’s your living refutation of Libertarianism.  

“No Libertarian will ever see one of those living refutations, except maybe on giant screen TV, being led away in handcuffs by a militarized police unit,” said the skeleton.  

Question raised:  how to get these writings presented to a larger audience?

“Next question, please.”    

Question raised: how to present the story of my father’s largely tragic life as an uplifting tale publishers and readers will clamor to pay for?  

“Now you’re starting to make a little sense.  You know, if you type for hours every day, and make a certain amount of sense — even if you pretend you’re talking to a skeleton who can talk back to you —  but you have no plan to market and sell what you write– what do you call that?”  

Libertarianism?  

“I’m glad you find this funny.  Blessed is the man who amuseth himself, Elie.”  

Amen to that, padre.

Standing on a Phantom Leg — and Ag Gag Laws

The law gives and the law takes away.  Thank God for the laws we have that protect the vulnerable.  These laws are not the rule, but they are something to be very thankful for, to fight to protect.  Between the rule of law and the rule of violence, there is nothing to choose.

One of the most difficult things, as an idealistic young lawyer trying to make a living, was hearing a prospective client’s long, painful recitation of a brutal screwing that raised no legal issue a court could address.   One of the most useful, and terrible, parts of law school is the “issue spotting”  exercise.  You listen to a long detailed complaint looking for issues that may be legally remediable among the many equally, sometimes more horrific, parts of the story that is regarded, in its entirety, as a trifle with which the law does not concern itself.  

“You got royally screwed, no question, and I sympathize 100% with your anger at the sickening ordeal you were put through, I would feel exactly as you do,” I would begin, seeking the words to let the poor sodomized fucker down gently on his tender sphincter.  

“What they did to you was unconscionable, sickening and offensively typical.”  The words do not come easily, you have to give your professional opinion of the person’s odds of getting a case into court, having a meaningful hearing, achieving some victory with the law.   Those odds are zero. 

“This is the worst part of my job, explaining to someone who’s been brutally, deliberately screwed, against his will, that the law regards his screwing as a trifle with which the law does not concern itself.  De minimis non curat lex, as the judges say.   It’s Latin for ‘your client is shit out of luck, asshole.  Next!'” 

The issue spotting exercise is the law student’s training for hearing a layman’s complaint and finding a viable legal theory for bringing the complaint to court.  Often there is no remedy at law.   People who are severely screwed often have a hard time understanding this.

 “You agree that they fucked me up the ass sideways,” the prospective client will protest.  

“I do,” the empathetic young lawyer will say.  

“You agree that it was unconscionable, your own word,” says the prospective client.  

“I do, absolutely,” the lawyer will say.  And so on.  The lawyer knows what the prospective client cannot understand in his particular case yet–  the laws are made by powerful forces that like the idea of non-consensual sex, they like it very, very much.   Unless there is a provision in the law to enforce the rights of those who do not give consent to those powerful people, and other non-human entities, who love a little spontaneous dalliance, consensual or not, well, you have a trifle that the law does not need to concern itself with.

It is very troubling to see a rightfully aggrieved person standing on a phantom leg. There ought to be a law…  well, I agree very much.  Unfortunately the billionaire class, in conjunction with those psychopathic legal fictions called ‘persons’, with their army of well-paid  lobbyists representing the tiny, powerful group whose interests they tirelessly protect, have the most persuasive voice for lawmakers.  

Still, there is the human reflex, felt by many, to stand on a right they strongly believe they SHOULD have.  Brings us, in an odd way, to the narrow electoral college election of this unreasonable fellow we have in office now.  Millions voted for his unconvincing promise to help the little man and cut through law and everything else to get him what he SHOULD have.   A promise ridiculous on its face, as we used to say at law,  but there you have it.  His type essentially says, pretty much irrefutably:

You have no legal right unless you can enforce it in court, asshole.   Even if you have a legal right that a court will enforce, find a lawyer who will work for free or we will bankrupt you.  We will bury you in legal bills!  You really want to fight the power, motherfucker?  We will destroy you!

In this context there is a controversy, sadly non-controversial to most Americans, that is like a fiber of celery caught uncomfortably between my molars.  No floss can remove it, my tongue is constantly playing with the irritating strand every time I’m reminded of it.   I don’t know if Anwar al-Awlaki went all the way over to becoming an active al Q’aeda recruiter, as his accusers claimed when they put him on the secret presidential kill list, and after they turned him into chopped meat with a missile launched by a Predator drone.  I doubt it, but I don’t absolutely know for sure.  Neither did Jeremy Scahill, who researched the issue in depth, but he also strongly doubted that Awlaki was affiliated with terrorists and presented a good case that no evidence whatsoever of terrorist ties was produced before his extrajudicial execution.

I know, at least in the first part of his railing against the American worldwide war against Islam, that Awlaki probably felt he had a right to free speech under the First Amendment.   It’s an argument his lawyer could have made in court, Awlaki’s right to dissent, if he’d been tried, even in absentia.   As an American, Awlaki believed he had an absolute right to express his opinions, to argue against the murderous policies of his government, to appeal in the strongest possible terms to the sense of justice in those he addressed.  

The American president had a different idea and, being a brilliant Constitutional law professor brushed aside all the legal issues raised by the targeted murder of an American citizen for giving speeches the president deemed the dangerous incitement of a deadly enemy combatant.  Brushed aside all legal arguments and zapped the American citizen with a drone-launched missile.  The story forever after would be that Obama wisely and decisively took out a dangerous terrorist leader, the number two man in al Q’aeda and heir apparent to Osama Bin Laden himself, if you believe Obama’s representations about  Awlaki.

I don’t begrudge Obama his accomplishments.  The elimination of the obscene ‘pre-existing condition’ loophole in health insurance was long overdue and something every American should applaud.  At the same time, Obama handed expanded executive prerogatives to the volatile, angry man who succeeded him as president.  

Included in these prerogatives was the absolute right to say who is an enemy combatant and, based on that unappealable status determination, to take any steps necessary to make sure the dangerous terrorist is neutralized.

“Your classic slippery slope, Elie,” said the skeleton of my father.  “You heard about those ALEC introduced Ag Gag laws which call for complete opacity when it it comes to the systematic industry-wide torture of animals raised for slaughter.  In the states where these laws have been passed it is illegal to take unauthorized videotape of violence against farm animals.  

“Violence seems like a ridiculous thing to talk about in connection with animals raised to be meat.  And it is.  The standard for what is acceptable in the animals-for-food-industry, of course, is determined by industry standards.  If ten chickens per square yard of cage means you have to cut the beaks off them to keep them from pecking each other to death, so be it and there’s nothing cruel or unusual about it.  Cruel it might arguably be, but unusual?  I’m afraid not, we all do it, sir.  Industry standard.  Nothing to see here.

“Animals being raised for slaughter and sale as meat certainly have no rights a white man is bound to respect.  But here’s the kicker, Elie.  As you know, these laws allow the State to prosecute vegan activists as ‘terrorists’.  Try that ass hat on for size.   If you’re a PETA activist and you take a video of factory workers beating a cow or pig to death, you are a terrorist under these Ag Gag laws.  What can you do to a terrorist?  Some believe torture is too good for those motherfuckers, you dig?”

“But see, Elie, torture is nothing to worry about either.  That’s because our Constitution protects us against a psychopathic element of the government deciding that, in spite of treaties we’ve signed and prosecutions we’ve successfully waged against torturers from other nations, Americans can legally torture people — if we secretly redefine it and call it something else.  

“We all know Americans don’t torture unless the country’s most powerful skillfully play to the terror of the populace, which will allow such formerly hideous practices to become ‘normalized’.  You know, like if we’re facing an enemy so terrible that all measures must be employed to destroy that enemy.  You know, an enemy that has no hesitation to slaughter as many children as it takes to rid the world of what they perceive as evil.”

OK, dad.  Calm down now.  Life goes on.  

“Not for me it doesn’t,” said the skeleton.  

Not for me either, really, not all the time.

They will kill you, Elie

“You may see this new era, with its sudden desperation, the army of full-throated angry Americans whipped up by a cynical and clever Minister of Public Enlightenment advising an impulsive, emotionally unbalanced Chief Executive, as an opportunity for you, Elie, but you should also beware,” said the skeleton of my father.  “They will have not a second’s hesitation to take any and all steps, including launching a Hellfire missile, to take your smart ass out of the game if you ever pose the slightest threat to anybody.”  

You know, this is something I’ve not been able to convey to anyone during the long, mostly fruitless eight year rule by the well-liked and well-hated Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mr. Obama.  They used to warn Cheney that the powers he was grabbing for the Unitary Executive might feel good when you had Bush in office, but that President Hillary Clinton with all that power might not feel so good to Cheney.  Cheney, Mr. Darkside, the personification of evil, told those people to go fuck themselves.  The rest, as they say, is history.  

“The American president, thanks to Obama’s courageous innovation, no longer need concern himself with the quaint and antiquated notion of ‘due process’ when your on target nerve-probing comes to his attention.   Say you achieve a modest degree of success in creating a voracious twelve mouthed funnel bringing masses of people to your platform, your, until now, little read work product here on this blahg.  The NSA can easily access everything you’ve ever written now, like a time machine, they’ve already gathered all your emails, phone records, the works, they just have to pull it up.  Reading it over they will easily see a long pattern of griping and many direct insults to powerful people who now have the absolute right to put you on a secret kill list and, literally, blow you into a thousand bloody shards.”  

I doubt very much I’ll be targeted for anything until after people like Jeremy Scahill, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and many, many thousands of others, perhaps millions, get whacked.  Obviously, I take your point, though, especially since, once again, it is, coincidentally, exactly my point.  

Look up Anwar al-Awlaki now and every mention of him connects him to Al Q’eada, intimating that his extra-judicial execution was well-deserved as the dangerous number two or three man to Osama bin Laden himself.  The New York Times, of course, identifies Awlaki this way.  Wikipedia remains uncorrected in this too.  I’m no friend of murderous fanatics, but, for fuck’s sake, when you look at the fucking facts of this case you will not applaud, as Bill Maher gloatingly did, the execution of this fellow American and, quite a few days later, his 16 year-old American born son, and today, we learn, his eight year-0ld daughter, shot to death by SEALs yesterday.    

Awlaki was one of America’s go-to imams after the 9/11 attacks. American born, telegenic, well-spoken, reasonable, he was on TV many times, sought for interviews by many major media sources.   The FBI found out a couple of the Washington DC based 9/11 killers had attended services at the large Virginia mosque where Awlaki conducted services.  They probed for connections, found nothing very promising but began surveillance and— whoa! Awlaki was having regular sessions with prostitutes!   The fucking hypocrite!

The whores interviewed liked him, he was apparently a decent guy who just wanted sex.  The FBI grabbed him, warned him that if he kept up his increasingly critical comments about the Bush administration’s wars against multiple Muslim countries, his wife and family might not be so happy to watch the videos of what he did in his spare time, if you take my fucking meaning, my friend.  

He eventually left the U.S. with his family and went back to live in his father’s country, Yemen.  He was increasingly vocal in his criticism of America’s worldwide jihad against Muslims.   The Yemenis grabbed him at one point, and, at the request of the Americans, kept him locked up, without charges or trial, for about a year and a half.  Much of this time he was in solitary confinement.

 “Well, let’s be accurate here, he wasn’t locked up without charges.  He was locked up for some kind of alleged conspiracy with Al Q’eada supporters, he was accused of planning to kidnap somebody, or something, but they never followed up on the charges, outside of tossing him into a hole for more than a year to meditate on American justice,” said the skeleton.  

When he comes out of prison he’s not convinced, oddly enough, that America is conducting a righteous search for a discrete group of murderous fanatics.  The Muslim still seems to believe that America has declared worldwide war on Islam.

“You get this detailed story from Jeremy Scahill’s 2013 NY Times best seller Dirty Wars and his documentary of the same name.  The book was read by a lot of people, not all of whom buy his premise about Awlaki and how he was killed, not only without trial, but without being charged with any specific crime.  ‘Enemy combatant’ suffices to land one on the kill list, and that designating is done at the sole discretion of the sitting president.  NPR, to take but one prominent example,  voiced some skepticism, they tell their large audience:

But Scahill goes on to argue, far more controversially, that the late cleric’s militancy was a direct result of American overkill and hostility toward Islam. Indeed, as we watch footage of Scahill and surviving relatives gazing sadly at home movies of the family, Awlaki comes close to being portrayed as an innocent victim.

“It is, without question, very controversial to try to increase public knowledge of secret wars, and secret kill lists, and secret programs that violate civil liberties up to and including depriving American citizens of their fundamental, but apparently not inalienable, right not to be deprived of life without due process of law,” said the skeleton.  “If you think the current president’s Muslim ban is bad, what do you think about the secret killing of many Muslim children by drones that first drive them insane, and then reduce them to bloody streaks on the rocks?”

You’re still a fucking commie, dad, even there in your eternal rest.  

“There’s not a shred of proof linking me to the Communists,” said the skeleton.  

The thing that chills me to the bone, and it apparently chills Jimmy Dore, who identifies himself as a night club comedian who tells dick jokes to drunks,  as much as it does me, is that no critical conversation of certain things is allowed in public discourse today.    Obama good, Bush bad.  Bush secret kill list bad, Obama secret kill list good.  As Dore points out, Obama is NICE.  He’s nice!  If he kills a 16 year-old American with a missile launched from a drone, turns the American kid into chopped meat, the little asshole must have done something to deserve it, no?  You don’t want to come close to portraying someone a good man, a thoughtful man, ordered a hit on as an innocent victim.

“The U.S. didn’t even try to refute the fact that Awlaki’s kid had nothing to do with anything.  The smug press secretary just said the little asshole should have been more careful about who he ‘chose’ for his father.  Which echoes the famous good advice to slum dwellers, pick your parents better, assholes, and don’t complain about your own poor choices,” said the skeleton.  

You’re a godless goddamned commie, dad.  

“Takes one to know one,” said the skeleton, “drone you later, asshole.”

I leave you with this, from today’s fucking news, discovered when I went to verify the proper spelling of al-Awlaki’s name:

The (dead) child’s mother, Anwar al-Awlaki’s widow, survived the raid with a minor wound, according to Nasser al-Awlaki. However, Anwar al-Awlaki’s brother-in-law was killed in the raid. The death toll varies according to the sourcing, with the Pentagon saying 14 militants died, along with “numerous” civilians. Nasser al-Awlaki said Yemenis were circulating a body count of combatants and civilians as high as 59.     source

fair and balanced coverage of the same story

 

Finding Inspiration in the Sickening Tragedy of History

I must take a moment off from trying to put all of my hard-earned insights about life into the mouth of the skeleton of my difficult, at times impossible, father.

To be more accurate:  I need to take a break from trying to put these insights into our ‘conversations’ by way of giving you, gentle reader, these hopefully tantalizing crusts to chew on.   I generously give the fucking skeleton most of the good lines because I am that kind of son.  But I’m afraid my dear old father can add nothing at the moment to what I need to say.  

“Well, it wouldn’t be the first time you completely underestimated me, would it, Elie?” said the familiar pain in the ass from his bed inside the earth.  

Most people I know are very upset at the recent political turns of fortune here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.    They have little faith that a vain, thin-skinned, attention and adulation-seeking man, born filthy rich, to a self-made millionaire father, Frederick Christ “Fred” Trump (I shit thee not), who sent the troubled boy to a military academy to make him less of a vain, thin-skinned, attention-seeker, and later battled government charges of systematic racism with this same son, aided by the evil Roy Cohn, the son by then the young president of his imperious, embattled father’s real estate empire, can lead our troubled and divided nation to better times.  They look at his Harvard-trained, Goldman Sachs exec turned successful profiteer of hate and innuendo, his Chief Strategist, and see Dr. Goebbels, Minister of Public Enlightenment, the man with the intellectual fire power to sell his passionate master’s vision of National Greatness to the persuadable, and they shudder with horror.    

Sekhnet is more upset than most.   She suffers from PTSD, is more susceptible than many to loud rumblings of the worst case scenario.   She can’t hear much on any subject related to any of this without becoming tearful.   She told me tonight that I’m incapable of talking about anything else (though, in fairness to me, I spend plenty of time doling out Obama’s share of blame for the current state of affairs).  I must therefore take a few moments from trying to craft a salable manuscript about my father and history, written with a slavish devotion to the tastes of the razor-toothed corporate cocksuckers I hope will embrace it, promote it, and pay me for it, to speak bluntly and honestly about something that quickly reduces Sekhnet to tears.   History.  

She had terrible history teachers in school who made studying the subject a boring, meaningless chore.  As a consequence she never read history once she graduated.   She much preferred the intellectual rigors of philosophy and science, though she no longer reads much of the former and doesn’t have as much time as she’d like to keep up with most aspects of the latter.   History, she says, is like the politics and ‘alternative facts’ that divide us now, a data dump of unquantifiable sludge, or propaganda, dull and/or dangerous, the stuff of which the horror we live in today is actually crafted.    

“She’s not entirely wrong about that,” said the skeleton wryly.  

I tried to explain to her that uncovering the pertinent facts and learning useful lessons from history is, indeed, an ongoing battle.  It’s like the battle I must constantly wage against anger.  There are plenty of reasons to rage, always, no shit.   The struggle not to become angry must be ongoing if it is to have any hope of success.  You might learn to eliminate the reflexive tensing of your arms, the clenching of your fists, even the snarl that might feel irresistible — but the look on your face will still betray your feelings most of the time.  

The best history is a nuanced telling of what happened in the past in the context of how this past affects things going forward.  No professional historian can actually present this story in all its nuance, though some come much closer than others.  History, at its best, is an earnest search for deeper truth about our world that inspires us to make the best choices for the future.  

It’s true that most historians write for their masters, serve a powerful force of one kind or another.  It is said that history is written by the victors, often in the blood of those they defeat and vilify.  Much of what we call history is written to justify one set of beliefs or another.   The historian, we’re told, must start with a thesis, in the manner of a scientist, and demonstrate the truth of the theory by presenting and interpreting the known and uncovered facts.  

“Sounds a lot like a data dump of unquantifiable sludge, when you put it like that,” said the skeleton.  

Yeah, maybe so.   History is slippery, I’ll give it that.  Certain things, however, happened, they objectively happened and they cannot unhappen.  There were a few hundred years of chattel slavery here, for example, from the earliest colonial days through almost the entire first century of our great democracy.   That part is beyond dispute, even if you refer to it as The Peculiar Institution and the rich people who owned slaves, raped the ones they liked, had the ones whipped that they didn’t like, as Planters.  Then the Civil War.  Then things get slippery.  

Woodrow Wilson was a great fan of D.W. Griffith’s epic masterpiece of early cinema, the innovative ‘The Birth of A Nation.’  He had the movie screened at the White House, the first movie ever screened there.  

“The aptly named White House, in that instance,” said the skeleton.  

Some feminist professor at CCNY made us watch most of the infernal movie with her, in a darkened room on the City College campus in Harlem.  I watched the thing and said to myself “I’ll be damned.”   I had no idea the freed slaves had created such a massive and intolerable wave of terror, preying on white women, raping them, and that the Ku Klux Klan, far from being the brutal, hate-filled lynching, terrorist murderers I’d always supposed, were actually modern day knights, living out a code of chivalry as impressively heroic as any from storied antiquity.  

“Sekhnet will tell you to tone down the irony,” said the skeleton.  

Fine, but I give it as an example.  The version of history that was in ascendance in 1915, when the hateful “Birth of A Nation” was made, and Klan membership was soaring, was that American blacks were out of control and needed the harsh penal laws of the southern states and brutal methods, including occasionally teaching them a collective lesson by torturing and killing the most uppity of them, to keep them in line.  It was better for everybody, these historians argued, to leave the treatment of blacks to the localities that knew them best.   Any black people who could get out of those localities migrated, en masse, to urban centers far from the former Confederacy.  Life wasn’t no crystal stair for them where they went, but it was arguably better than casting your eyes down wherever you went to avoid being strung up. [1]

The history of these things is fascinating to me, even if also maddening and grotesque.  I read historians like W.E.B. Du Bois, Eric Foner and Howard Zinn and nod my head.  These historians are speaking my language, presenting the past in a way that makes perfect sense to me, in light of the present.  Other people may not be moved by these histories at all, some might hate them, still others might never open any of these books in the first place.   I don’t say one way is necessarily better than another, but for me, as it was for my father, this shit is endlessly fascinating.  

“Well, not everybody is cut out for it, Elie.  You can see the long recitation of the horrors of history as an unbearable ordeal to put yourself through.  History is also alive.  You remember when you and your sister were little and I told you not to buy Sugar Babies and Sugar Daddies?  They were Welch candies, made by a company owned by Robert Welch, the man who started the John Birch Society– in the year your sister was born, as a matter of fact.  

“The John Birch Society were rabid right wing fanatics who believed Dwight D. Eisenhower was a Soviet agent.  The infamous billionaire Koch brothers, who have done so much to bring about a more just world — for themselves– , sprung from the syphlitic gonads of one of the founders of the John Birch Society.   Here’s what Welch published about Eisenhower, courtesy of your friend Jeeves:

  • On page 278 of The Politician, Welch summarized, from his perspective, the only two possible interpretations of President Eisenhower’s motives: “The role he has played, as described in all the pages above, would fit just as well into one theory as the other; that he is a mere stooge or that he is a Communist assigned the specific job of being a political front man.”

“Anyway, true enough, any jackass can write history.  You recall Henry Ford’s masterwork about the worldwide Jewish conspiracy, meticulously researched and based largely on the infamous Czarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”  

Yeah, look, you and I don’t have much squeamishness about history, but I recognize that many people do.   I will end with Howard Zinn’s inspiring message, delivered as an older man, talking about why he studied and taught history, why he wrote A People’s History of the United States:

“I wanted, in writing this book, to awaken a consciousness in my readers, of class conflict, of racial injustice, of sexual inequality and of national arrogance, and I also wanted to bring into light the hidden resistance of the People against the power of the establishment.   

“I thought that to omit these acts of resistance, to omit these victories, however limited, by the people of the United States, was to create the idea that power rests only with those who have the guns, who possess the wealth.  I wanted to point out that people who seem to have no power — working people, people of color, women– once they organize and protest and create national movements, they have a power that no government can suppress.

“I don’t want to invent victories for people’s movements, but to think that history writing must simply recapitulate the failures that dominate the past is to make historians collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat.  And if history is to be creative, if it’s to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I think, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win.

“I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in the solid centuries of warfare.”

 

[1] I have a vivid memory of my mother reading me this wonderful poem by Langston Hughes  (read the poem, but whatever you do, don’t click on the play video button above it)