Category Archives: book of irv

I’ll See You in My Dreams

Stop me if I told you this one already, dad.  It starts with my love for soul music, which I got from you.  It’s impossible to overestimate the value, to me, of those flat Sam Goody bags you’d bring home from downtown Brooklyn with the latest Sam Cooke record inside.

“Mister Soul,” said the skeleton of my father. 

You’d put that new disc on the turntable in the living room and I’d groove to each new track, before I even had the words to describe a groove, the feel, the voice, the thrilling freedom of a guy playing with time the way Sam Cooke did.

“Yeah, and of course, he had to be shot for that, for good old American values,” said the skeleton.  

Like Patrice Lumumba.  

“Lumumba died for freedom,” said the skeleton, raising a bony fist.

We’d listen to those Sam Cooke records in the living room and they would transport us. Mom would play Johnny Mathis, and I dug that music too, and the way his voice was drenched with reverb, a thing I also couldn’t identify, but loved from the start.   Love of music is no small thing.

“Well, your mother and I both loved music.  Somebody, maybe Nietzsche, said without music life would be a mistake,” said the skeleton.  

It would certainly be as mistaken as a life without sex, something many millions don’t need to imagine.

“True enough,” said the skeleton. “But I know all about your love for Sam Cooke and how big a favor I did to your musical taste by marinating you in Sam Cooke when you were but a tadpole.  What’s the story you said you may have told me already?”

Oh, yeah.  One afternoon, as mom was getting close to her first and last trip to Hospice By The Sea, which was a lovely place but actually miles from the nearest sea, I heard her groaning from her bed and went in with my guitar.  I don’t know if she was asleep or awake.  She might have been in pain or having a bad dream about death, an eventuality she was determined not to talk about.  

I sat by the bed and played a gentle samba-like vamp with my fingertips.  It was the most soothing thing I’d come up with in my life and I thought it would calm her.  She became quiet and I figured I’d lulled her back to sleep.

She opened her eyes, lifted her head off the pillow and said irritably “what IS that?  It sounds terrible.  It always sounds like you’re tuning your guitar.”  

I never understood that.   Here was a woman who loved music, pop music, opera, show tunes, country music, every kind of music. What was this “it always sounds like you’re tuning your guitar” shit?   We finally had a conversation about it.  

It turned out, much to my surprise, that she was no fan of instrumental music, had never liked it.  When she listened to music she listened to the singers, their passion, the stories their songs told.  That’s why, once she discovered it late in life, she loved country music: the big personalities of the singers and the great stories apparently told in many of the songs.  “I never liked jazz, I love the melodies, I don’t care for improvisation.  I listen to music like I read books: for a good story told in a great voice.”

I remember thinking, damn!  I always assumed she was just being a dick, out of unhappiness with her own life, crapping on something I loved to do– play the guitar.  I never sang, I wanted to play well enough to be an instrumentalist– a thing my mother, weeks before she died, told me she had no understanding of.  In fact, she told me explicitly that she often had a hard time recognizing a song just by hearing the melody played on a guitar.

“Damn…” said the skeleton.

A year earlier mom began crying at the thought that she’d never hear my singer friend Joe sing again.  I had Joe over to my apartment, opened garageband — a program that allowed me to accompany and record Joe and overdub other instruments afterwards–  and accompanied him on a dozen or so songs from the Great American songbook.  After he left I recorded a few more instrumental parts, but left the accompaniments spare, his voice front and center, with a nice dollop of reverb.  

I brought the CD down to Florida, popped it into the computer and played it for her.  She was painfully polite about it, how sweet of us it had been to try to make some music for her, but the music had clearly not done anything for her.

About a month later I was talking to her on the phone and she reported “the most amazing thing!”   She’d been lying in bed listening to her iPod and suddenly Joe was singing and it was so beautiful she couldn’t believe it, she had no idea how the song had even got on her iPod.   It sounded like he was singing in a big hall.  It was gorgeous!  

“Which she pronounced ‘gawgiss’,” said the skeleton.  

Yeah.  I explained to her that I’d put the tunes on her iPod from the CD, and if she found a playlist called Joe DiSalle Trio she could hear all dozen or so tunes we’d recorded for her.   I coyly asked her what she thought of the trio (which was me on guitar, keyboard and bass) and she said they were good.  I explained that the big hall sound was a kind of reverb, called “big hall”,  that I’d added to Joe’s voice to give him that Johnny Mathis sound.  I told her I wasn’t surprised it sounded so much better on the iPod, as it was mixed to be heard in stereo through headphones and not over the crappy speakers of the computer in the den.

“Nice story,” said the skeleton.  

Yeah, but that’s not the story.  So a couple of days after cracking up a room full of hospice women in her bedroom in your apartment, she’s suddenly feeling like shit.  She often said “I don’t know why I feel so goddamned shitty all the time!” in the months before she finally died.  I knew not to make any linkage to her approaching death from a painful and wasting cancer that had spread to her whole body.

“Which was kind of you,” said the skeleton.

Anyway, they finally took her, on a gurney, down to an ambulance to take her to Hospice by the Sea.  One of the magpies that used to sit with Ed Pulley and his dim girlfriend on those benches in the parking lot, a woman mom always hated, a nosy ignoramus and a racist, called out “they’re taking another one to die!”  In that case she was right, but what the fuck?  

At the hospice mom lingered for a few days.  I brought my ukulele and I was working on a solo version of I’ll See You in My Dreams, which I played many times while I sat in the room there.  Not long before the end, as I continued to play it, mom turned to me with a big smile and said “I’ll See You in My Dreams!”

A Note on Eli as My Father’s “Father”

Eli was the closest thing my father ever had to a father and the source of 95% of what little I know about my actual paternal grandfather.  Eli described my enigmatic grandfather as being completely deadpan, his face ‘two eyes, a nose and a mouth’.

“Well, that’s about right, Elie,” said the skeleton.  “Eli was the closest thing I had to a role model in that house full of frightened shtetl Jews, the only survivors of massacres they avoided by sheer accident.  Eli, whatever his other faults, would not hesitate to stand up to someone who wanted to knock him down.  That was an amazing thing to see, as a kid, a tough American-born Jew who lived on his own and didn’t take any shit from anybody.  Of course, it had its dark side, as any of his kids will gladly detail for you.”

I remember the faces of his three children, all in their fifties by then, sitting in the front row at his funeral as I began to read my notes.   They knew I was his good friend, and in some ways the child he’d never had.   They all smiled and nodded gratefully when I ad libbed that had Eli raised me I most certainly would not have been able to say, without hesitation, all the good things I was about to say about our departed, sometimes savage, loved one.

“Well, he was pretty much hated by his kids, and not without good reason. He was a tyrant to them all, it was always his way or the highway.   He was also pretty much shunned by his grandchildren too.  You remember when he told you ‘just what the world needs, another goy…’ when his half-Christian grandson was named Connor Steven?   He was a very black and white fellow, our cousin Eli, and he loved few things more than a good fight.” The skeleton sniffed the air and chuckled.

You know how we act as unconscious surrogates in many cases, finding and serving as the family members and needed confidants we lacked as kids?

“Yop,” said the skeleton, picturing himself and others in those roles over the course of his eighty year life.

I realize in some essential way that I served as the interactive kid Eli never had, someone who didn’t reflexively dismiss him, and that he, in some odd way, was the father I’d never had, someone who actually considered the things I said.  He and I could fight bitterly without becoming enemies.  

“Well, I’d say that’s true.  Your mother and Eli had love at first sight, and they fought constantly, bitterly, gave no quarter.  Their fights were violent slug fests, no holds barred.   Afterwards they’d laugh, and hug and kiss, and say they’d never forgive each other, and their eyes would twinkle as they looked forward to their next knock down drag out battle to the death.

“In fact, your mother was about the only person who could ever go that far with Eli.  You saw how threatening he got when anyone crossed him, even at 85, 86.  His face would turn magenta, white foam would instantly form on his lips, his grey hair would stand up like porcupine quills.  He’d become, like you said at his funeral, savage as an angry panther.  

“Like when he backed into that car in a parking lot, and the driver jumped out, and he snarled ‘you’d better get back in your fucking car, bub, before I forget that I’m 85 years-old and come out there and beat the shit out of you!’ The other driver got right back in his car, as anybody not insane would have done.  

“But your mother had absolutely no fear of Eli.  My brother and I, even as adults, had some healthy fear of him.  When we sat down to eat as kids he’d yell ‘go run and wash your goddamned dirty hands!’ and we’d run, boy.  It was run wash your hands or get a smack, and it wouldn’t be a love tap, either.” 

My cousin and I were in Peekskill a couple of months back, when you gave me the cold shoulder at the grave.  

“Surely you didn’t really expect me to talk in front of Sekhnet and your cousin.  The game would have been up if I’d started speaking from my grave,” said the skeleton.  

Of course.  Anyway, the point is that when we stopped by your house at 1123 Howard Street I recognized the place from the home movie Dave’s son had transferred on to a DVD that I watched at the Nursing Home with my uncle shortly before he shuffled off this mortal coil.  In one scene Azi, at around thirteen, is smiling on the porch, and your mother and Aren are there as you pass by, crew cut and tanned, looking healthy and fit in your yellow t-shirt.  

“Well, why wouldn’t I look healthy and fit?   I was probably 28 or 29 when that was shot,” the skeleton thought for a moment. “I have no idea who shot that home movie.  Oh, of course, it must have been David.  Nehama was on the porch at one point, she came out of the screen door with a big smile and did a turn for the camera.  Dave was the only one not in the movie, and he was also the first one to get new technology, because he was rich.  He had the first nice car, the first television set, the first home movie camera, an 8 mm, probably from Germany.”

I mention 1123 Howard Street because when we stopped by it was a two family house, with a separate door and stairway to get to the second floor.  It seems this was likely a later addition to the place, along with the siding, but it made me wonder about the living arrangements at 1123 Howard.  

The house must have belonged to your Uncle Aren, who must have lived on the first floor with his second wife, Tamarka, and their children Nehama and Dave.  Which makes it likely that you lived upstairs, with your parents and Paul, and above your living space there was some kind of attic where the Jewish transients would stay, and piss out the windows, and shit in paper bags.  

“That is a mystery I cannot give you a definitive answer to, Elie, since, as you may have realized yourself by now, I can only really tell you things that you have already discovered for yourself.  Hopefully Azi will answer that question since you emailed it to him just a couple of hours ago,” said the skeleton quietly.

Commie Bastard

“Basically, you’re a commie bastard, Elie,” said the skeleton of my father, with very little judgment.  “You know, you’re animated by that ancient, hard to extinguish Jewish spark of longing for Justice.  A CEO in Japan makes 11 times what the average Japanese worker does, in Britain and Canada it’s 20 times.  Here in the ‘USA! USA!’, as you call it, the average CEO makes 435 times more than the average worker, because, fair is fair.  You know, you’ve always had a rage against this kind of logic.”  

Well, in fairness to the CEO class, I had the same reaction when Cheney and Dubya started torturing people in my name, when Obama, years later admitted that “we tortured some folks” and, historically, when my family was lined up by that ravine in Vishnevitz, or simply disappeared without a trace two hundred miles north.  

“You don’t really expect those who live on a million dollars a week to suddenly have to make due with only a few hundred thousand, do you?” said the skeleton, his facial expression matched perfectly with his words.

“The super wealthy are not like you, Elie.  They go to bed dreaming about wealth and they wake up thinking about it.  You are a… how to put this in a way that won’t hurt your feelings?… a fucking idiot swimming against the prevailing tide of your time.  Is any of this confusing to you?  America is run by wealthy people and the lucrative interests they own.

“Much of history is interpretation, as we’ve discussed, but certain lines can be drawn between events– causes and effects shown with reasonable reliability.  A doddering, beleaguered, probably senile Ronald Reagan, oversaw the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987.  Why allow opposing views to be presented to the public when the free market can best decide what views the masses of Americans will see?  

“So you have, in short order, the rise of Rush Limbaugh, FOX TV and the rest of the well-oiled Right Wing echo chamber.  If they are laughable nuts to some, they are also the voice of America to wide swaths of our population who get all their information from these avowedly fair and balanced sources.   Whose interests does the end of the Fairness Doctrine serve in the end?  It doesn’t take a PhD in the History of the Fairness Doctrine to figure that one out.

“When Obama became the first presidential candidate in decades to opt out of public election financing he was able to outspend John McCain two to one.   He was charismatic, a great campaigner, McCain had to run on the dismal record of his party during eight terrible years, etc. but the 2:1 spending didn’t hurt either.

 “All of those twenty dollar internet contributions Obama had quickly multiplied when the big money started pouring in from the financial services, fossil fuel, health insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

“Then, you know, when crafting the Affordable Care Act, fair is fair, take the only effective solution—the public option—off the table from the start and let the private health insurance industry write the law. 

“In the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, as you’re fond of calling it, the mandate is all one-sided, the consumer is forced to pay for health insurance, in exchange for CEOs holding the line at their seven and eight digit annual compensation packets and giving the insurance companies the option to opt out at any time if their profits are adversely affected by the new law.  

“The pernicious myth of the ‘free market’ is so pervasive that the alternative to any profit-driven enterprise is unthinkable, downright un-American. That said, your critique of this rogue form of bare knuckles capitalism makes you, and let’s be honest about this, Elie, a fucking commie.”

Neuroplasticity

Neuroplasticity is a term that’s been getting a lot of play lately, it refers to the brain’s ability to heal and reformat itself.   Though the idea has been around for a long time, scientists, using MRI brain scans, can now confirm the brain’s power to heal itself — the scans show the changes in the brain’s chemistry and physical structure.  

Not to say it doesn’t take a lot of conscious work to heal the brain, but the soft, sensitive organ, easily harmed and scarred by abuse, is remarkably malleable, it turns out.   ‘Neuroplasticity’, if the term had been coined, wasn’t in wide use back when I was arguing with my father about the ability of a human to change painful aspects of his life.

 “Well, like a lot of science, Elie, all I can say is ‘dassum shit’,'” the skeleton said.  “You know, it’s an attractive idea, that we can heal ourselves, change the emotional functioning of our brains.  Have you known anyone who has ever done that?  I mean, seriously, to any great extent?  

“Have you seen dramatic transformations of that kind in anyone you’ve known, in yourself?  The MRI might see it, but how does that translate in a human life?   This research is based on the brains of meditating monks who acquire fantastic abilities, like elite athletes who push their bodies to do amazing things.  I think the jury is still out on ordinary people who ride the subway and grind their teeth at night, whatever their brain scans might show.  

“Not to mention that scientists still have only the most primitive idea of which part of the enormously convoluted and complicated human brain is responsible for which emotions.   I stick to my original position on that — people cannot fundamentally change their personalities, or their brains.”  

OK, although you realize that position reflects the rigidity you say you regretted as you were dying, and a refusal to evaluate evidence that can be shown on an MRI.  Those brains showing all the damage that were imaged after months or years of therapy, good diet, plentiful sleep, deliberate changes for the better, and showed reversal of the damage?   ‘Dassum shit’, you say?   Have you become a science denier now too, just to win a senseless argument?    

“You may have noticed that senseless arguments are the most hotly contested ones.   If you’re going to base an argument on what makes the most sense, it’s often possible to show that one side is much more sensible than the other.  Of course, the relative sense of positions is not the real question, most arguments are conducted for their own sake, they stand in for the primitive will not to be dominated.   Did Eli’s arguments make sense?”  

Sometimes they did, as ridiculous as they were at other times.  I recall the time he accused his son-in-law Herbie of fucking him when he bought Eli a hearing-assisted phone.  

“His hearing did get pretty bad at the end, when you were talking to him on the phone,” said the skeleton.  

Yeah, so Herbie bought him a phone with an amplifier in the handset.  He showed it to me like he was displaying a greasy, corn-encrusted turd someone left for him on his pillow.  “Can you believe this shit?” he demanded.  

I told him it was very nice of Herbie to get it for him and that we should plug it in.  He looked at me like I’d just squeezed out a turd next to Herbie’s.  

“Are you kidding me?” he fixed me with his famous scowl.  “He didn’t buy me this to be nice, that’s not in his repertoire.  He bought me this to say ‘here you go, you deaf old fuck, have a hearing aid phone!’  It was nice, all right, if you want to say he was being nice,  it was a nice ‘fuck you’.  Have it your way, then, he bought me the piece of shit phone as a nice “fuck you, Eli, you deaf bastard!”  Are you too goddamned dim to see that?  Come on!”  

“Were you too goddamned dim to see that?” said the skeleton.

 Look, we’re straying a little far from the point.  

“Oh, ‘we’ are, are ‘we’?” said the skeleton archly.  

“Look, you have to reconstruct, or let me be more precise, you have chosen to try to reconstruct, using memory, imagination and conjecture, what my interior life may have been like.   You believe, with impressive, even heroic, naiveté, that once you have shaped this into a narrative that anyone will give a rat’s camisole about the life of an unknown man, alternately a gentle idealist and a violent monster.”  

I’ll grant you the book proposal will lack some of the oozing sex appeal of the biography of some celebrity twat who, through tireless effort and cunning, parlayed a paltry ten or twenty million into a billion dollars, or sold ten million records, or could hit a baseball 450 feet, or who gave 10,000 blow jobs, or even someone who imprisoned and raped teenaged girls in his cellar, but life is primarily lived by anonymous people, sometimes invented out of whole cloth– as in famous literary characters– who read to find echoes of their own experience, and whatever little insights they can use, as often as they read to escape those experiences.  

“Ah, so you give them both.  Brilliant.  A little worrying of the soul, a little torment, a ridiculous Eli anecdote sprinkled in for fun.  Did you remember to tell them about Caesar Previti?  That’s a good one.”  

I was thinking about your friends and colleagues, or, I should say, the name Caesar Previti popped into my head the other day.  I jotted it down and texted it to my sister, asking if the name rang a bell.  It seemed to me that Previti was a co-worker at the Human Relations Unit.  My sister had the same feeling, that Previti was a friend and colleague you spoke of from time to time.  

“And you got excited, right?  Like this was a little vein of gold to be mined, maybe Previti was still around to be interviewed or something, right?”  said the skeleton.  

I’m afraid so.  Anyway, I put his name into google, and it spell- corrected it to Cesare Previti. After that, it was only a matter of seconds:

Cesare Previti (born October 21, 1934 in Reggio Calabria) is a former Italian politician and convicted criminal. He was, with Marcello Dell’Utri a close friend and right-hand of Silvio Berlusconi and founder of Forza Italia.

“Your sister was surprised too, right?  Another clue, if one was needed, about the dodgy, slippery nature of memory.  Perhaps your neuroplasticity research will take you to a place where your neurons are flexible enough to flawlessly separate fact from fiction, but then again, maybe you’re just kind of fucked, Elie,” said the skeleton, sniffing the breeze that was blowing down the hill from Oregon Road.

My Brother’s Keeper

I stumbled on this wonderful definition, at google translate, of the word quijote (a variant on quixote), the name of a restaurant several of us ate at last night.  It’s perfect for a number of reasons.  

quijote:  Piece of armor that covers the thigh.

Person who has high ideals and fights and defends causes that, although noble and just, do not concern him.

“Wonderful definition,” said the skeleton, “fighting for noble and just causes that do not concern him.  Hah!  I can see why you love it.  Not only does it define you to a tee, it’s summarily judgmental, you know, the slavery of those people does not concern you, noble but misguided tilter at windmills.”  

I thought you’d like it.  Goes to that old question about being our brother’s keeper.  

“Well, things didn’t always go well for my little brother when I was his keeper.  That time I stuffed his mouth with raw chopped meat stands in for a lot of equally unkind turns as my brother’s keeper.  Still, this question of ‘what does not concern him’ is an excellent one.

“You know how we always said, on Passover, that slavery anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere, that as long as tyranny is winked at by democracies the world is not safe for children, and putting yourself in the place of the weakest and most oppressed among us is a crucial duty of all citizens and so on, all things that, clearly, ‘do not concern him’. Funny, the right wing has succeeded in making this part of the American credo, to a seamless extent, really, if you think about it.  

“If the whole game now, the new American Dream, is being a free libertarian, the government allowing you the full exercise of your freedom without interference, it is truly not your concern that millions in your own country live in want while you enjoy heedless personal liberty, justly feeling no obligation to anyone but yourself.  If you are born with $100,000,000 you should keep all of it.  Who is the government to confiscate any part of what is rightfully yours, you dig?  

“You, why are you concerned about the poverty and hopelessness you saw when you taught third grade in Harlem?  You have bigger things, much closer to home, to worry about.   That staircase in the untended tenement on Manhattan Avenue, right out of a horror movie, with the broken glass on the landing, and that mother of the kid you walked home coming to the door at 3 pm in a flimsy nightgown, her breasts swinging freely underneath it, not understanding why this white detective was knocking on the door with her nine year old kid next to him.”

I know, twenty-five years later that scene is still vivid in my memory.  I’d just woken her from a nap, or maybe she’d just had a hit of heroin, or who the hell knows what.  She was only partially there, swaying slightly as I tried to explain I wasn’t a cop, I was the boy’s teacher.  The boy had been putting his hand up and down the front of the skirt of the little semi-retarded girl who sat next to him in class. It had upset her, to have his unwanted finger probing for her little vagina while I was at the blackboard teaching math.    I’d spoken to him sternly about it, in no uncertain terms, he kept doing it.  I told him I would speak to his mother, and so here I am.  Ma’am, are you OK?

“No, Elie, ma’am was clearly not OK.  What’s with the rhetorical questions?  Just and noble, to do what you said you would after the kid would not heed reasonable adult correction, but also, you know, matters that did not concern you.  

“That’s the beauty of what Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher and their glorious ilk sold to their gigantic flocks, what the folks your friend Tex calls economic fascists, rightists like Paul Ryan, continue to peddle.  The message resonates.  You owe only your immediate family and their circle any kind of duty.  We owe absolutely nothing to strangers.   

“The social safety net is a crutch that fosters dependence and corruption.  We owe nothing to each other as members of  a society.  It is natural to acquire as much as you possibly can, and there is nothing at all shameful about acquiring a thousand, or a million, times what you actually need to have a perfectly fine life.”   

In fact, it’s not only natural, it’s praiseworthy to seek a thousand, or a million, times what you need.   The problems of those who don’t have enough to eat?  The problems of young kids in America who get brain damage from long-term malnutrition and other poverty-related maladies?  They do not concern you.

“A food stamp recipient who buys a steak with food stamps is gaming the system.  They’re morally obliged to eat gruel, you know, like in a Dickens orphanage.  The only people who have the right to eat steak are those who earn the money to afford it, or inherit the money, or acquire it by arguably fraudulent means, but done in the employ of a corporation that is ‘too big to fail’ in a system where people who commit massive fraud are free to pay millions in bonuses to their henchmen.

“You know in 2009, right after their falsely triple A rated toxic derivative casino marketplace almost toppled the economy– cost your mother, my widow, about 40% of what we’d managed to put aside– the industry paid themselves $20,000,000,000 in compensation and bonuses. Twenty billion.”

Twelve years dead and still so bitter.

“Elie, I will feel this way about the killers and the spoilers two hundred years from now.  Even as, at the same time, I can easily see that none of this concerns me.  For one thing, I’m dead. There’s that, of course.  For another thing, even when I wasn’t dead, when I was walking around, growing my hair over my collar and my thick mutton-chop side-burns, dismissing bullshit with a curt ‘dassum shit…’ I knew how little a person can do about any of this, the stuff that ‘does not concern him.’

“The world is a place of misery and bad behavior.  The Buddha taught that the only way out is to go inside your own mind, your own soul, and find the inner tranquility to carry you through it.  I think of that Buddhist monk in the street in Saigon setting himself on fire to protest the continued war in his country.  Didn’t go that well for him, I guess.”

Sorry, dad, not my concern.  

“Go get ’em, Elie,” said the skeleton, yawning or pantomiming a scream.

The Fairness Doctrine is Ancient History

“Well, how bout this one, Elie– we have the votes, let’s abolish the fucking Fairness Doctrine and get the old show on the road,” said the skeleton.

For the benefit of those who have no idea what the Fairness Doctrine was, a bit of, eh, history.   Starting in 1949, when television was in its infancy, the FCC came up with a requirement for broadcasters, licensees who used the limited public airways built and maintained by We The People, when presenting public interest content, to give both sides of any contentious public controversy equal opportunity to influence public opinion.  

“If you gave air time to a spokesman for everyone’s irrefutable constitutional right to as many guns as they want and the freedom to take them everywhere they go and use them freely anywhere if they feel threatened, or even just a bit paranoid, well, a spokesman for people who are not insane had to be given a chance to present their side and rebut that opinion.  It was called The Fairness Doctrine, a quaint idea today.  

“The FCC apparently abandoned the doctrine during the Reagan Administration, when the votes lined up to begin consolidating media and getting rid of anachronistic, idealistic, safeguards against the mass media becoming a propaganda machine for one side or the other.  

“Which makes sense, since the Reagan Administration can be seen as a kind of fork in the road, making the right wing cool.  And as Yogi is reputed to have said ‘when you come to a fork in the road, take it.’  

“Under the Fairness Doctrine if a licensee down south ran segregationist programming and censored all national news about the civil rights movement, the public in its broadcast area had a right to also hear a non-racist point of view and the broadcaster was obliged to air it.   They actually yanked the license of at least one broadcasting outfit who refused to give what were then quaintly called ‘nigger-lovers’ a chance to rebut the network’s view.   You can imagine how many righteous souls that decision pissed off.  

“And, of course, if you want to influence partisans and maintain your political power, the main thing you need is a powerful echo chamber.  You don’t want the other point of view considered, or even heard, it must be vilified and ridiculed so it can be dismissed reflexively.  If you chant your slogan you don’t want the other side to get even sixty seconds to state all the reasons your slogan is pure idiocy.  

“I used to get a kick out of listening to Rush Limbaugh, as you recall, the massive, cast iron balls of that whacked out right wing drug addict used to give me a kind of kick of adrenaline.  

“Over time you have not one Rush Limbaugh, who reminded me of Father Coughlin, the old populist anti-Semite who ranted on the radio about ousting that cunning old Jew Franklin Delano Roosevelt from office, but dozens, hundreds of Rush Limbaughs.  Scroll through the radio dial, and between legal disclaimers about the views expressed, you will hear the passionate partisan stylings of countless rabid dogs.  Most of them right wing, many of them very well-paid.  Advertisers love them.  And why not, hatred has always been a winning business model.  

“Since the demise of the Fairness Doctrine, with the government no longer having any requirement over broadcasters to present any nuance at all, you get calm acceptance of things like the government proscription of showing the caskets of dead Americans returning from wars that are only explained in the most idiotically partisan terms.  ‘Freedom is on the March’ and ‘Support our Troops’ is all you need to say over and over to get people waving American flags and wearing them on their lapels.  American flags made in China, of course.  

“There need be no actual discussion of any of this, mercifully, unless you happen to listen to some fringe pirate station not owned and controlled by a giant profit-seeking corporation.  And everyone knows those people are just crackpots.  Why would you want to show a parade of American coffins coming back from anywhere anyway, you sick bastard?  

“We don’t have much conversation in the mass media, not that there ever was a long supply of that, but people talking past each other and partisan false equivalencies are the rule now, everything reduced to an over-simplified either/or.   As you say, people who wear blue hats support the charismatic guy or lady with the blue hat on, same for red hats.  It’s not about the actual issues, it’s if the person is on our team or not.  A sad day for America, but, if you look back to the beginning, it’s always been a sad day for Americans with little power over their lives.   Two sets of laws has always been the case here.  

“You heard that guy, Mike Lofgren, interviewed by Bill Moyers about the Deep State.  The permanent shadow government is not a new thing, the interests it represents go back to the Founding Fathers, but it’s entrenched and protected in ways we couldn’t have imagined generations ago.  He described it as ‘a hybrid association of key elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States with only limited reference to the consent of the governed as normally expressed through elections.’  

“He set out the workings of our current deep state, now organized largely around, and justified by, the so-called War on Terror, that bold war against fear itself: deregulation, privatization, deindustrialization, financialization of the economy, Wall Street as the only casino in town, widening wealth disparity,  permanent war, surveillance state, etc.  It all takes on the air of the inevitable, but… well, you know, it’s by deliberate design, to maximize profits. 

“When Henry Wallace was the popular people’s choice to succeed the ailing FDR, and he had massive support at the 1944 Democratic convention, right wing business and political leaders got busy talking to the DNC.  Wallace was an anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, non-racist, egalitarian who had been FDR’s Vice President through the war, and before that a very capable and savvy Secretary of Agriculture, to the left of FDR, throughout the New Deal.  

“When Henry Wallace gave a speech about the post-World War Two era being the Century of the Common Man, it excited millions of common men and women in America and gave hope to enslaved people worldwide.  He advocated federal regulations to guarantee equal pay for equal work, for men, women, people of all races.   He supported the right to collective bargaining and a right to arbitration for all workers in disputes with their employers. The status quo could not tolerate this sort of shit, it stood to lose trillions of dollars.   The Commies hated our freedom and, literally, wanted to take everything the rich and their grandparents had worked for generations to acquire.

“Harry Truman was a senator of limited experience and influence, perfect for the uses of the Democratic party machine and the powerful forces they represented.  Within 24 hours they’d brought support for Truman as FDR’s V.P. from around 2% up to a robust 90% or so on the third vote, and all it took was an overnight adjournment of the convention vote and the granting of a few hundred political appointments.  

“After that third ballot Truman would be the next president, Wallace was done, the Cold War started, Civil Rights legislation and Equal Pay legislation, and the rights of labor, put off for a generation.  Then, after a few fitful years of modest progress on each of these things, shoved off for another couple of generations.

 “The Fairness Doctrine would not apply to cable TV stations, or the internet, but the abolition of it, in hindsight, was just another sign of which way the wind was blowing.   Who needs Fairness when it’s Morning in America, Elie, or when we’re Making America Great Again?  You dig?”  The skeleton beamed, a slightly mad glint shining in the eye sockets.  

“Consider this, though, Elie, which one of us is the madder, the guy who is dead and buried or the one putting words in his mouth almost twelve years later?  Hmmmmmm?”

Death of A Thousand Cuts

“Well, that’s the nature of the beast, isn’t it, Elie?  It’s rarely one thing that kills you, it’s that gang of relentless demons that finally takes you down, one pulling sneakily from the direction you least expect, as another one gleefully kicks you in the throat, two others clog dancing on your lungs, a tiny one knifing you in the kidneys,” said the skeleton of my father cheerfully.  

You remember I went to see our cousin Eli toward the end, a week or so before he died, actually.  On the phone he’d told me not to bother coming up, that he wouldn’t be very good company.   I told him I was on my way anyway and when I arrived he scowled and handed me the insert from the fentanyl patch he was wearing.  The insert was a long scroll of tightly printed mouse type, a learned collaboration between medical and legal professionals, in a life-saving effort to shield the manufacturer of the drug from liability.

He had some damned, very intense pain nothing could touch (turned out to be from inoperable cancer his children decided he didn’t need to know about) and they’d given him these damn pain patches, which did a little bit to ease the pain, which had been getting worse and worse while nobody could tell him what the hell it was caused by… but he had every damned side effect on the list.  

“Black, tarry stools?” I read from the scroll.  Yop.  The answer was the same curt “yop” to literally every symptom on the list.  Blurred vision, yop, chest pain, yop, difficulty breathing, yop.  Dry mouth, yop, increased thirst, loss of appetite, yop, yop. Muscle pain, numbness and tingling, difficulty urinating.  Yop, yop, yop.   Back pain, diarrhea, yop, yop, loss of strength, yop.  Irritability.  

“What the fuck do you think?” he roared irritably.  

“Yop,” I said and we went down the rest of the list.  We fell into a cadence of symptom, yop, symptom, yop.  

When I left Eli hours later we hugged and I told him I was sorry for not giving him a good fight.   It was very rare to have a visit with him for any amount of time when he wasn’t purple faced with rage at some point.  Fighting was the favorite sport of Eli and my mother, and they never missed a chance for a good brawl.  

“That’s OK,” said Eli patting me as we let each other go.  “We’ll fight next time.”

The next time I saw him, just a few days later, he was in a  hospital bed.   He didn’t know I was there, though the nurse told me to speak to him, that he might be able to hear me.   His wrists and ankles were bound to the bed frame and he was fighting with all his might.

A day or two later he was gone and my father and I were speaking at his funeral, me reading my careful, heartfelt notes, my father improvising like John Coltrane playing over changes for a tune he loved.

                                                               ii 

I was thinking of Eli’s fentanyl side-effects because I’d wound up in the Emergency Room last week with troubling symptoms, which seemed to be getting worse, even though it had been a few days since I’d stopped taking the statin I’d been prescribed a couple of weeks earlier.  My doctor told me to go to the E.R., just to rule out a heart attack.  

I had weakness, numbness, fatigue, muscle spasms in both arms and legs, tingling in both hands, tightness in the chest, pain over the heart, pain radiating down the left arm, odd urinary symptoms and, finally, unreasoning fear at 4 a.m. as all the most ominous symptoms continued to worsen.

As I wait for my $20,000 hospital bill for the sleepless overnight stay I decided to look up the side effects for Crestor.  They include:  weakness, numbness, fatigue, muscle spasms in arms and legs, tingling in hands, tightness in the chest, pain over the heart, pain radiating down the left arm, odd urinary symptoms and unreasoning fear.  

Reading the list I recalled my surprise, in the bathroom of what was, for about eight hours, my hospital room, while urinating into a plastic jug they never collected the urine from to study, to suddenly see blood and cloudiness– two other uncommon but known side effects I hadn’t seen before.    

The thought quickly went through my mind:  Jesus Christ, doc, you might have saved me a lot of worry and thousands of dollars I don’t have if you’d told me to go upstairs, do a quick google search and check how many of these symptoms were known side effects I was advised to contact my doctor if I was experiencing.

Creativity as a solution to problems

Creativity is only a solution to a real-world problem, like poverty, if it generates capital.  That’s an iron law of capitalism.  Even an excellent idea that could help millions, unless it can be monetized, is worth the weight of the abstract brain cells that spawned it.

“You are one bitter motherfucker, son,” said the skeleton of my father respectfully.

The Framers’ Intent and the Electoral College

“There’s been a lot of whining about the Electoral College since, for the second time in the last five presidential elections, the winner of the popular vote, a Democrat, lost in the Electoral College to the Republican, who went on to become president according to the Constitution,” said the skeleton breezily, sitting up alertly in his grave.  

“That’s arguably by the intent of the Framers’, Elie.  American democracy was based on a series of compromises between wealthy white men whose wealth was not based on slave labor, and those whose wealth was.  Fair is fair, Elie.  In the Northern states manufacture and, to some extent, in places like New York, the slave trade (but not slavery itself, God forbid) were sources of wealth.  In the South it was labor intensive monocultures, cotton and tobacco.  To make those crops really lucrative, it was best to have a slave labor force to pick it.   So keep your cotton pickin’ hands off our slaves, son of a bitch. 

“To ensure the deal, and make sure popular opinion, that might be eventually be revolted by something as inherently repulsive as chattel slavery, did not get the final say, safeguards were put into place to make sure the wealthiest Americans did not have to resort to dirty tricks or violence to keep the populace in line.  One of these ‘compromises’ was the Three-Fifth’s Compromise that is so famous today, and rightfully so.  

“For purposes of apportionment to Congress, and to give more power to the more sparsely populated southern states, each slave counted as 3/5 of a man.   So if you owned 500 slaves, your district got a boost of 300 ‘citizens’ for purposes of apportionment and say so in the Electoral College.   In effect this manipulation of the electorate– using slaves, who were neither citizens nor voters, to increase the voting power of their masters  — equalized the playing field for the rich of the North and the genteel, slave holding Planters of the South.  

“All this to say that it’s no surprise a media-star billionaire who lost the popular vote by more than ten times the margin JFK beat Nixon by is the president-elect of the United States today.  It is as the Framers intended it, you might say, if you were the smug skeleton of, say, Antonin Scalia.  

“You want the punchline?  Alexander Hamilton was very proud of the Elector College, he thought it the most ingenious part of the Constitutional scheme, because… wait for it…. it would protect the new republic from ever being taken over by a demagogue.   You can’t make this shit up, seriously,”  the skeleton nodded, jaws clacking.

“Have a nice day, Elie,” said the skeleton, “I’ve got to sleep this one off.”

Thoughts while falling asleep

I think of my father’s dire childhood, it actually is unthinkable.  How often was he hungry growing up?   Phrases to describe the poor kid’s misery pop into my head in the middle of the night, too perfect not to get up and write down, though last night I didn’t, needing sleep more than phrases.   Now I’m left with shards, like the ones on my father’s eyes and over his lips when they opened the coffin for me to do a positive I.D. at the cemetery.

Here is a thing that was impossible for my father:  turning off the brooding anger.  My sister said it right: the loss of a dime from the change he had received and put on the counter was the same to him as the loss of his entire family in Truvovich.   Every indignity equalled every other indignity, every tragedy, no matter how small, carried equal weight. Every disappointment enraged him.  Then we have the next logical step.  

“Nothing you ever tell your sister, no amount of praise you can give her, ever sinks in,” said the ‘dumbest Jewish kid in Peekskill’ on his deathbed, almost 81 years old, after a distinguished life as an intellectual who was half a dissertation away from a PhD from Columbia.  

“You had a temper tantrum at the rain,” observed my father when I was a boy.  He shook his head with one cheek creased in a smirk to underscore the idiocy of this tantrum.  Something I’d been looking forward to, possibly a day at the ballpark, had been washed away by a deluge.  I apparently ranted at the rain.   “You stood there hollering at the rain, you were inconsolable,” my father said sadly.

I’d like to think the skeleton of my father has the insight to reframe these two remarks.  

“I know what you want me to say,” said the skeleton, “‘Your sister, I’m ashamed to say… your mother and I never gave her the emotional support we should have, all we did was undermine her confidence.  Every kid needs to hear that she’s bright, and capable, and cute.  Your sister was all of those things, at the top of the scale for each.  We never gave her any credit, filled her with self-doubt at every step.  It’s a testament to her will, independence and intelligence — her character, really– that she has done all she’s done in her life.  It’s not something we like to dwell on– we were simply wrong and we fought like devils to convince you two we were never wrong.'”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.  

“Well, but that’s not how it works, Elie.  You can’t just rewrite all my lines and pretend I was ever capable of the insights you ascribe to me posthumously.”

Actually, as the living party of this partnership, I get the final say on how it works, though I take your point.  I don’t know that you’d be capable, even now, of saying the words I just put between your jaws.  Still, they are the right words for you to say.  Just like you could have said this about my bitter disappointment as a young boy, when I was, as you say, inconsolable and you just shook your head about it. 

“Look, Elie, I know how much you were looking forward to this and how disappointed you are that it got rained out.  Any kid would feel the same way.  I know it hurts.  We’ll do it next week.  Life is full of disappointments and one of the biggest challenges anyone faces is remembering that they are only momentary set-backs.  Everything will be fine later, you’ll see.  Come on, let’s do something now to take your mind off it, you want to go see ‘Son of Flubber’ today?” said the skeleton, grimacing to pronounce the fifty-two year belated words of consolation.  

“But, of course, much as you’d like to hear it, I would never fucking say any of that.  You really expect anyone to believe that just because I felt guilt and remorse as I was dying that I would have held on to the insights I had then throughout eternity?”  

I prefer to think that, yes.  

“Jesus fucking Christ, that’s not how the world works,” the skeleton squinted like Clint Eastwood, if you can picture it. “Prefer away, then, but it changes nothing, your preference.  You want to believe in a world where people are not self-interested pricks out for their own advantage over everything else?  

“Go ahead.  Believe that 75% of your fellow Americans did not vote for this American Mussolini you got in the last election.  Statistics may show you’re right, numerically, but there’s a lot of hate out there.  You think Germany in the twenties was some kind of historical anomaly?  The height of western civilization plunged to the depths of barbarism over the course of a few years.  Your boy Frank Zappa had that track in the late sixties, ‘It Can’t Happen Here’ with the guy asking pointed questions, rat-tat-tat, in a German accent.  Hey, even the Germans are alarmed by this guy you have now.  

“Any nation that could enslave millions for centuries and then persecute the ancestors of those slaves for over a hundred years after a bloody civil war led to the abolition of said ‘Peculiar Institution’… well, all bets are off for the grandchildren of the little kids who ate cotton candy and cheered as black men were jerking at the end of a rope.  I know you don’t need me to draw this picture for you, Elie.  It doesn’t matter what you believe, what you need to believe– it matters how you live, how you use your limited influence, the example of your life.  And even those things hardly matter.”  

You’re a warm fire of inspiration on a chilly grey day, dad.  

“Homo sapiens is distinguished by one thing, domination over others, over nature.  If dolphins ran the world, maybe there’d be a chance to save the planet.  But killer apes in charge?  Good luck, Elie.”  The skeleton looked around, that eerie smile/yawn on its face.  

“You want a happy ending here, a nice bow to tie this into today?  Sorry, Charlie.  No can do.  That’s not how this shits how works, you dig?  Get on with your life, make those six medical appointments you listed yesterday, meet the new doctors, do what you can to protect your life going forward.  

“God knows this motherfucker you have now is not going to do anything to protect anyone, except perhaps his reptile children, the heirs of his hideous DNA.  Didn’t you love his son, speaking to his bloody mouthed followers, describing how his father came from ‘nothing.’  I guess to a billionaire’s son a few measly millions, even forty or a hundred of ’em,  really are nothing.  A plague on them all, Elie.  Take care of yourself today.”  

You have a nice day too, dad.  We’ll talk again soon.