Category Archives: book of irv

“What is it you fucking want from me?”

“Oh, boy,” said the skeleton.  

Heh, yes, I’m afraid so.    This is a fundamental question for all humans, what we fucking want from each other.  I think about this now, in the context of your life, and your challenging, pointed question which, inevitably posed when I was most vulnerable, always made me feel like a needy neurotic whiningly asking for something unreasonable.  I was actually forced to ask for something that should have been naturally given between people who love and respect each other, instead of withheld.  

“Well, love and respect do not always go together,” the skeleton said, shifting, ready to rumble.  

Don’t be like fucking insane Andy, dad.  That pusillanimous turd, when I gave him the chance to offer me any version of the apology he owed me, pugnaciously challenged me about my use of the word reconciliation.   Reminded me of your old technique.  Were we talking about whether love and respect always go together?  Does that have anything to do with what we are talking about?  

“You never showed me very much respect,” said the skeleton.  

Well, take consolation in the kind of mature man you produced, then.  Twenty years ago I could not have resisted a smiling “fuck you…” in answer to that.  We’re not talking about respect, except to the extent that we’re talking about what we need from our loved ones.  Mutual respect is inherent in a fair give and take of what each of us needs, but any arguable distinction between love and respect is far from the point here.

“Bear in mind that my loved ones growing up were incapable of anything but bare survival.  My parents were in an arranged, loveless marriage.  My mother, in fact, despised my father.  She literally loathed him.  He was, as Eli described him, two eyes, a nose and a mouth.  His entire existence was devoted to not getting smacked in the head with a heavy piece of wood.  He did not always succeed in this.  Where was I supposed to learn what people give to people they love?”  the skeleton was getting a bit worked up.

Don’t you find it a bit ironic, if not also sad, that you, now dead more than eleven years, are still blaming your parents for your own failings?

“Touché, momzer.  Look,  I’m not blaming them, I’m explaining that I had no role model for giving and taking what is needed between people…”  

And therefore you are not responsible for the fact that you never took the trouble to learn how this indispensable human thing was done?   I was kind to you as you were dying, where did I learn to do that?  

“Was I never kind to you?” asked the skeleton, almost tearful, in a dry eye socketed kind of way.  

There’s the horror of it, dad.  You were kind, and showed it often, and it made the many times you mercilessly raged, and coldly refused to give what was needed, that much worse.  You were the skillful facilitator of sensitivity sessions between warring ethnic groups.  You were a longtime advocate for what was then called intergroup relations, having people listen carefully to each other, hearing what came through beyond the idioms.  You recognized how crucial it was for peace to have your concerns heard, to hear others.  Is it an unnatural thing for a child to show his parents something he’s created?  To expect some kind of sensitive reception and helpful feedback?  

“Well, you were always the little genius, you didn’t need my input.  I told you in high school that your drawings reminded me of George Grosz.  You came to admire Grosz when you were older.  What, was I remiss in not telling you that you drew like Albrecht Durer?  I don’t know what you expected.  I wasn’t a fucking art critic.  I don’t even know why you would expect me to know what to say about any of it…”  The skeleton, I saw, was truly at a loss.  

It’s a much more fundamental question and it has nothing to do with knowledge. Mom used to ask me what she was supposed to talk about with her grandchildren.  Like it was a mystery.   Ask them about their lives, I used to tell her.  Ask them to tell you what’s new and exciting, let it remind you about things from your childhood, tell them about those.  She assumed she’d be hearing about things she could never relate to, the new Game Boy, musical groups that made sounds she found hideous, the mindless fads of an incomprehensible, materialistic generation.  I always assume that a conversation goes where it goes and that two people who like each other will generally find something mutually interesting to talk about.  The back and forth, being listened to by someone who shows an interest in what you’re saying, is where most of the action is, it seems to me.  

“Well, that’s a quaint idea,” said the skeleton.  “Look, you’ve always been that way, very verbal and interactive.  You have a genuine interest in other people, that’s one of your attributes.  Not everybody has that.  Not everybody gives a dead rat’s ass.”  The skeleton pointed to a dead rat that was waiting for a hungry scavenger.  

In answer to your exasperated question “what is it you fucking want?” I offer you this.  I want to speak, and be heard, and have a reply from the other person that’s actually responsive to what I said.   I want to hear what you’re saying, and get clarification when I need it, and understand the point you are trying to make.   I want a catch, basically, a back and forth where we each throw the ball directly to each other and don’t turn it into some kind of competition to see who can catch the high heat and who is too much of a pussy to handle the hard stuff.  

“Well, you’re an idiot doomed to a lot of disappointment then,” said the skeleton.  “That’s not what life is like.  You expect the impossible.  People don’t give a fuck.  Look at the situation of the American Negro, to take just one example.”  

With respect, I’m not going to take a look at the example of the American Negro.  

“I don’t know what you fucking want me to say,” said the skeleton, petulant as a child.  

Well, you can always tell me how sad it is that I’ve propped the bones of my dead father on my knee and am using the poor pater as a ventriloquist’s dummy.  

The skeleton looked at me with dead eyes, and a grin that clearly did not match his mood.  

I’m painting your portrait, dad.  I’m showing you from as many angles as I can, making you as three-dimensionally lifelike as possible.  This is a maddening and characteristic feature of yours, this need to fight over things that reasonable people would admit are just wrong to fight about.  

“You were a very difficult child,” said the skeleton.  

There you go, way to do it, pop.   You remind me of Dubya when you act like that.  Smart as you are you remind me of the dumbest, or at least most speech challenged and idiotic looking, president we’ve ever had.  

“History has given us equally moronic presidents.  Dubya was bad, but he wasn’t the most stupid.  Apparently he had a genius for remembering people’s names and charming them,” said the skeleton.  

This is a beautiful thing I always admired about you, you could have been the producer of Hollywood Squares:  Wally Cox to block.  

“I think you missed your calling too.  I think you could have created and syndicated a show called ‘I’m Still A Snide Little Shit.’  It would be a great hit in the Age of Trump, don’t you think?”

I do.  If only my father had left me the millions presidential candidate Trump was left when he found himself on third base thinking he’d hit a scorching triple when all he’s ever… ah, what is the fucking use?  I’m talking to a dead man, after all.

 “On the other hand, Elie, these are some of the best conversations we ever had,” said the skeleton.   “Ironic, eh?”

 

A Grown Man Whining About How Mean His Father Was (Badlands)

It is a cliche used to describe the pathetic:  “his father was so mean to him!”  said with sideways marionette’s quake of the head and a mocking little wave of the hand.  “Her mother was a nightmare,” is sometimes said with a touch more sincerity, but, in general, hearing an adult talk about how mean a parent was brings a smirk to the cheek.  

“Well, you hit on something there, Elie.  That’s why I said the other day that I don’t hold anything against my parents,” said the skeleton cheerfully.  

“Look, there’s no doubt that I was a bastard to you and your sister, and that I did terrible harm to both of you, and put obstacles in front of you in this uphill world that made things a lot harder for both of you.  I accept all that, and like I told you right before I died, I was sorry about it.  But beyond that, as an adult, you have to find a way to move on.   You can’t keep blaming your painful childhood.”  

Well, of course, you can keep blaming your painful childhood, many people do that, consciously or unconsciously.   But I take your larger point, it’s like forgiveness.  We learn that forgiveness is not primarily for the person you forgive, though it also makes that angry, guilty asshole feel better.  Forgiveness is a gift we give mainly to ourselves.  The understanding that while you cannot change a bad thing that was done to you, you can digest it to the point where you can let it go, exhale it as some other gas.   We can learn to become like the plant that breathes in toxic gas and exhales oxygen.  We must do this for ourselves and for the larger sake of peace among those we love.  

“Uh… OK.  You’re getting a little abstract and poetic here, but I get the point,” said the skeleton.  

Plus, there are also certain things that at the time were hurtful that you can later see through more mature eyes as having been inevitable.  You remember that ass-whipping you gave my sister and me in the Badlands?  

“Heh, yes, I remember that very well.  And I have to say, you and your sister brought that on yourselves.  It was one of the few times I ever lifted a hand to either of you,” he said.  

All true.  Yes, and my sister feels the same way, so do I, in fact, even at the time we didn’t really hold it against you.  It was one of those things that, looking back on it, had been inevitable.   I don’t remember if I told the story here already.  

“I don’t think so,” said the skeleton, “and, anyway, you have to start gathering these 330 pages into themes and bunches and pruning them and adding things where more detail is called for.  Write the poor little story, what do you have to lose?”  

You were still working as a teacher back in, we’ll say, 1962, and so you had those blessed ten weeks off every summer.  Somewhere I probably still have the bit I wrote about What I Did on My Summer Vacation from the beginning of second grade.   We’d gone to the AAA on Hillside Avenue and while my sister and I gathered up tons of glossy tourist brochures, you sat with someone from Triple A and they took a green marker and made lines down a series of spiral bound map books they called Trip Tix. The long pages were bound at the top, like a meter maid’s ticket book.   The Trip Tix laid out the route exactly, mile by mile, and had notations for every historical site, or site of interest to kids, along the 3,000 mile drive.  There was also a fat book for every region we’d be passing through, with selected hotels and restaurants, each with a notation about how they felt about young children and dogs.  We were going to be traveling with Patches.  

“A brilliant dog, Patches.   She’d proven her smarts on the street as a very artful and independent little pup before she decided we were going to take her in.  You remember she used to come back from Union Turnpike munching on a chicken carcass she’d find behind the bar?”  

She was a smart dog, alright.  I remember one time she was not so smart, though, or at least, not very prudent.  

“Yosemite National Park,” said the skeleton.  

Yup.  We were stopped in a line of cars on that leafy road.  

“I remember it vividly,” said the skeleton.  

I know, this is for the reader.  Several cars were stopped in front and behind us as we came upon a small group of roadside bears, up on their hind legs, begging. There were signs all over the park about not feeding the bears, and every ranger reminded us of that warning, but some of these shameless hustlers still managed to get fed.  You and mom were obeying the law, as you most often did, and the car windows stayed rolled up.  A gigantic dark reddish brown bear was standing by mom’s window, to us it looked like a grizzly bear, it seemed to be about seven feet tall, and Patches, who was on mom’s lap, lunged toward the bear.  

“Heart in mouth moment,” said the skeleton.

The bear wasn’t about to take this shit from some little pampered pooch in a car and it swung an enormous paw at mom’s window.  The paw was almost the size of the entire window, and you could see the gigantic, sharp claws and the huge light brown pads on the underside of it as it pounded against the glass.  

“It seems like a miracle the glass didn’t shatter,” observed the skeleton.  

It does, and thinking of it now, I suppose the very size of the paw may have been a decisive factor.  The weight of the hit was apparently distributed across the glass enough that the glass didn’t shatter.  Then again, Physics was the only course I truly had no idea what was going on in.  

“Lucky for you that pinko you had in high school thought you were a cool kid and passed you anyway,” said the skeleton.  

Well, as you know, I’ve always been an extremely lucky bastard.

“As were we all that day in Yosemite.  Jesus that was a scary moment,” said the skeleton.  

Indeed.   Anyway, it was a hot summer, literally thousands of miles in the car, sweltering in places like St. Louis, and I recall that huge bag of M & Ms we had in the car turning to mush.  We started saying “melts in the bag, not in your hand” as a riff on their ad: melts in your mouth, not in your hand.  

“Well, that was before the age of air-conditioned cars.  And it was the height of summer.  We stayed out of the heart of the Old Confederacy, where it was really, really hot, in more ways than one.  We were heading across country, after all, but we stayed out of the deep South deliberately too.  That AAA guide would have also needed to tell us which hotels allowed Negroes, and Jews, along with kids and dogs.  The Klan still ran much of the south and there were no federally enforced anti-lynching laws yet,” the skeleton shook his head.  “We were already post-racial back then, see, there was no need to protect the good Negroes who did what they were told.  If some angry asshole Negro got out of hand, too uppity, well, it was a state’s right to deal with a bad apple like that as they saw fit.”

I remember passing some share croppers’ shacks on the side of the highway somewhere down south.  Raggedy little black kids moving around outside these tar-paper hovels.  That may have been on a trip to Florida, though, I think it was in South Carolina.  

“Yeah, I remember you asking about those shacks, and I think you’re right, that was probably a couple of years later when we started going to Florida,” said the skeleton.  

Reminds me of another ass-whipping my sister and I almost got in Harold’s father’s place in Miami Beach where we stayed during that first trip to Florida.  I don’t know how you didn’t beat our asses that time.  

“I was always a man of great restraint,” said the skeleton, deadpan.  “Even when I was calling you a fucking cobra with a face twisted and contorted in hate I was being restrained.  Even as the spit flew out of my mouth and my face turned colors.”  

It goes without saying.

Back to the Badlands then.  We’d been in the car for weeks by then, and going a bit stir crazy, I was probably six and my sister would have been four.  We’d seen a lot of cool stuff, but there had also been hours upon hours in the back seat of the station wagon.  We were in a rangers’ station and the ranger was showing a slide show.  For whatever reason, the slides were projected in such a tiny size that, even lying on the floor right in front of the screen as my sister and I were, it was hard to see the details of things like the Tufted Ear Squirrel that the ranger was droning on about.  We started to laugh at the absurdity of these postage stamp-sized images at the front of this large, dark room and we couldn’t stop.  You hissed at us, very embarrassed, and it only made things worse.  We were delirious.  

“When you two started laughing like that, it could get bad very fast,” said the skeleton.  

Well, it did in the Badlands that day.  You’d been driving for thousands of miles by then, and it was hot, and your kids were out of control.  Even at the time, somehow, and in spite of how young we were, we seem to have recognized all that.

“If you don’t stop laughing I’m going to whip your asses,” you finally threatened, miles from the rangers’ station, when we still could not stop howling.  This, of course, only made us laugh harder.  And we couldn’t stop.  

You pulled the car on to the gravel shoulder of that desert road, yanked us out and pulled us to the back of the car.  You threw down the little panel in the back of the station wagon and shoved us toward it, seemingly yanking down our pants, and underpants, and drawing your belt out of the loops in one motion.  Our little hands were flat on the panel and our asses were extended in the proper orientation for a good ass-whipping.  I don’t recall the feeling of the strap across my naked ass at all.  What I remember, vividly, are the faces of the kids in the passing car as we were about to be whipped.  They were pressed against the glass and laughing deliriously as their car roared past.  I know my sister saw them too.  

“Well, as President Kennedy said ‘life’s unfair’.  They got a free show of two kids being whipped bare-assed for exactly the same thing they were doing– laughing their asses off.”  

I remember hoping we’d pass their car further down that desolate road, pulled over, and get to see them getting their little asses whipped, but we didn’t.  

“Life’s unfair, Elie, and then you die,” said the skeleton, lying back down to continue his long nap.

First attempted opening to the Book of Irv

My father was like Zelig, a peripheral character uncannily at the center of some of the most important events of the tumultuous twentieth century.  His life is a great illustration of many difficult things and the light it can shed on other lives is considerable.  I can’t overestimate the light it sheds on mine, even as it’s been a life’s work, so far, to fully view everything it reveals.  He imparted enduring moral values and a humanistic worldview to my sister and me, even as he placed enormous obstacles in both of our paths.  

The dramatic arc of Irv’s life story, this likable underdog’s tremendous potential, notable achievements and terminal bitterness, is a tragedy that compels me to put things into a perspective I can use as I trudge toward old age, which does not tarry in its inexorable creep.   I remember the world of my childhood and the changes in the decades since.  The changes of our lifetime are like an echo of the titantic changes that took place during my father’s eighty years.

Born in New York City in 1924, young Irv walked into a small town kindergarten unable to speak English and was promptly mocked by his tiny classmates and punched in the face by the Great Depression.  His family, already poor, became unspeakably more poor, the poorest family in that wretched little town.  He was drafted and served in World War Two, while virtually his entire family was being wiped out by Nazis.  Against all odds he went on to get a graduate degree in History from prestigious Columbia University and remained committed to helping bend the moral arc of history toward justice while he worked hard to build a respectable middle-class life.  He then raised two kids while watching his idealism turn largely to dust over the next four or five decades.  Seeing his life’s hard work slipping down the drain did nothing to enhance his serenity during his golden years.

My father was supremely sensitive, a lover of animals, of the underdog, friend of the oppressed and an eloquent fighter for the weak.  As a young public school teacher in New York City he spoke to parent-teacher groups in support of school integration after the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Ed, finally admitted the obvious, that “Separate but Equal” was a pernicious fiction that needed to die.  My young father was greeted as a “nigger-loving fucking Jew Commie” and attacked by parents and teachers alike in the cafeteria of the first NYC public school where he spoke in support of school integration in the late 1950s.  After that first scare he was accompanied by two NYC cops at the other schools where he spoke.  He later worked in a special unit at the NYC Board of Education that intervened in riot-torn high schools, and solved problems in school after school, even though the peace did not endure anywhere.

My father was scarred beyond healing by a childhood of grinding poverty, emotional and physical abuse, finished with a tart note of small town anti-Semitism.  His wounds and his great intelligence combined to make him a fierce and formidable fighter.  His most enduringly destructive battles were conducted across the dinner table in the little house he owned.  A man with a great, dark wit, a deep reservoir of compassion, able to grasp subtle nuance, he also saw the world as an eternal struggle between right and wrong and was unable to refrain from total war, especially with his children, though he’d regret this greatly, and explicitly, the last night of his life.

As my father’s most dependable adversary I was groomed from before my first memories to fight the way a pit bull puppy is trained to do battle.  The pit bull is a cute dog, trusting, loyal and friendly by nature.  It takes a great deal of calculated cruelty to transform this animal into a vicious prize-fighter.  Young pit bulls raised to fight are tortured until they become enraged enough to rip another dog’s throat out.  My father, a good man who loved the souls of animals, was horrified by such things, though he did things to his wife and children that were equally terrible.

F. Scott Fitzgerald rightly defined first-rate intelligence as the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts in mind at the same time.  My father was a good man, in some ways a great man, who frequently did terrible things to those he loved.  My father was a flawed and deeply wounded man who could not help but destroy, even as he did the best he could to protect those he loved.  He was brilliant, he was an idiot.  He was a kind and thoughtful man, he was a fucking sadist.  He was the best of husbands and fathers, he was the worst of them.  

He was an unshakably honest man, even as he denied the reality of the mass-murder of most of the family to his nine year-old son.  My father led the nation’s largest Zionist youth movement after his retirement from teaching, was a proud Jew, even as he told his young son to stop whining when the boy learned about the murder of his mother’s twelve aunts and uncles, in addition to most of his father’s family, executed and buried in mass graves only thirteen years before the kid was born.   There is no contradiction in any of this, even as it has taken me the better part of six decades to grasp this eerily simple fact.

Only a gullible school child, or a person raised to be an uncritical consumer of any toxic product that is winningly advertised,  could believe only the good about any hero.  There is no such thing, except in our longings, as a purely good hero.   Andrew Jackson, remembered as a beloved man of the people, a champion of participatory democracy, friend of the common man, was also a cunning land speculator who seized millions of acres from people he killed and used his government position to become fantastically rich while trading slaves, a vicious racist betraying allies while slaughtering Native Americans, indulging a psychotic rage whenever the mood was on him.   Gandhi, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, Mother Theresa, choose your hero, every one of them three dimensionally human.  We all have different sides to us.  The good within a person is always in a struggle to overcome the shabbier impulses.  Those we admire the most do the best job in that struggle.   Or anyway, the ones I admire the most do that.  

The biographers I admire the most, like Jane Leavy in her great book on Mickey Mantle, give us all the reasons to love and admire the protagonist while also unflinchingly providing the terrible specifics of their human flaws.  On the same page we have all the evidence that the beloved Mantle was a loyal, generous, heroic man with a great sense of humor and that he was a haunted, irredeemable asshole well-justified in his self-hatred.  A man capable of great kindness and touching gentility, he was equally adept at literally farting in the face of a young Yankee fan clutching a score card in her little hand.   “Oh, Jesus, I did that?” he said sheepishly to the little girl, now a grown-up sports writer and a supremely talented biographer.

I devoured that book greedily, thinking “fuck…” over and over as I read about one of my childhood heroes, liking him no less, understanding him much more.  I aspire to do something similar telling the story of my father’s forgotten life.  It is a life that deserves not to be forgotten.

“I Don’t Blame My Parents”

The skeleton of my father sat up in his grave in the First Hebrew Congregation of Peekskill cemetery on that tree-lined country road, Oregon Road, in Cortlandt, NY (though you won’t find it reasonably placed on any map) and summoned me.   I have to admit, these conversations with a man long dead are starting to wear me out.  On the other hand, the duty to honor our father and mother does not end at the grave.  

“Exactly,” said the skeleton, “and that’s what I want to talk to you about.  It’s human nature, as you know, to look for causes for things, particularly things that trouble us.  That impulse to find a cause for vexations without explanation animates violent mobs and great thinkers alike.  It’s tempting, when you think you’ve found a cause, to believe that it explains everything.   Nothing explains everything.  That’s one thing that begins to sink in once you are dead, Elie.”  

I knew what he was driving at, of course.   It is one thing to step forward into a life of new insight, it is another to avoid stepping back into the dimness of your previous life.  

“We had this mostly senseless debate for most of our life together,” said the skeleton, “arguing about how much a person can really change, if at all, on a fundamental level.   It is a stupid argument, really.  Of course we can change things that bother us enough, of course we can’t change other things that make us most vulnerable.  It’s not all our choice, on one level, and it’s all our choice, on another. You can talk about the role of genetic predisposition, DNA, early childhood experience, circumstance, luck — humans are complicated biological machines. But I think it’s ultimately a mistake to blame someone else for the misery in our own life.”  

Interesting pivot, dad, back to where this discussion started so many years ago.  A mistake, you say, to hold others accountable for their destructive actions and the impact those actions have on us?  

“OK, I can see the problem with that.  Fine, let’s take this away from a discussion of intangible abstractions, then.  I don’t blame my parents for what happened to me in my life.   In particular, I don’t blame my mother,” the skeleton’s neck looked suddenly stiffer, if such a thing is even possible.  “I have to imagine she suffered terrible things to make her unhappy enough to whip her own baby in the face.”  

No doubt about that, though it’s two different things to imagine the terrible things she suffered and to hold her accountable for the suffering she caused.  One can only imagine the miseries of life in that doomed little hamlet Truvovich.  In fact, one is forced to imagine them, since the place and all its inhabitants are gone without a trace.  If not for the Russo-Japanese War, and your Uncle Aren drafted for a twenty year stretch by the Czar, Aren probably never would have run away across the ocean with Fischel Bobrow and a guy named Fleischman and wound up in New York City learning to vulcanize tires at the dawn of the automobile.  If Aren hadn’t arrived, Chava, my grandmother, would have remained in Truvovich and died with everyone else in her family as the shtetl was wiped off the world map forever by anonymous murderers.  

“Well, yes, thankfully she made it to America, courtesy of her brother Aren.  What we know of the lives of Jews in that part of the world, and seeing what their eventual fate was, we do not imagine a very happy life there even for a little Jewish girl who was born happy as a clam.   I don’t imagine that my mother was born with a great talent for happiness, and she certainly found very little reason for it here in America.  As to what made her so violent toward me, it’s really impossible to say.”  

Is it, though?  How do we find it impossible to say?  She suffered enough to make her violently enraged at her infant son.   The suffering must have been tremendous to make her whip a baby in the face.  

“OK, I don’t think I’m making my point.   It doesn’t really matter what made her that way, I guess that’s what I’m saying.  Would I have preferred a mother who didn’t act like that?  Of course.   Can I blame her for everything that I suffered in my own life?  I really don’t think so.”  

Interesting perspective, for a dead man.  I will have to mull this over a bit more and get back to you.  

“You do that,” said the skeleton, then he seemed to wink.  “You’ve had a lot of practice mulling things over, haven’t you?”

The Rich Usually Prefer the Way Things Are

“Elie, I think it’s time you put that law education of yours to use here and told the concise yet detailed story of the end of blacks as ‘the special favorites of the law’ with all its gruesome irony,” said the skeleton.  “People don’t know the devilish legal details, and I think the way you can present it would give a helpful historical and legal frame to the ugly story.”

I’m glad to do that, even as I’m in the process of renegotiating repayment of that law school loan, for an eventual repayment of over $100,000, by stretching the payments out until I am 85 years old.   A new income-based option Sekhnet gives Mr. Obama’s administration credit for.  The original loan was about $40,000, mind you, but under the new terms, and agreeing to pay back much more, my monthly payment would go down by about 90%.

“I never taught you shit about money,” said the skeleton, “then again, I never knew the first thing about it myself, outside of needing to make it, working two jobs and saving as much of it as I could.  Dave eventually told me to give the money I had in the bank, at 4%interest, to an investment weasel and for many years I made 10% or more on the same money.”

“Today, I hear, banks are actually charging customers to keep money in their banks, if it’s under a threshold of many thousands of dollars.  To avoid that monthly fee you have to keep thousands on deposit at interest rates under 1%.  Capitalism eventually figures out how to squeeze the last drops of blood from the people it has already sucked almost dry.”

Luckily, I was able to lock in the historical low student loan repayment interest rate of 3.75% a few years back.  I’m told I was incredibly lucky to get such a low rate, though billionaires would be outraged to pay that interest rate for anything in today’s business climate.  One rich fuck recently whined that returning to the tax rate before Dubya’s tax cut for the rich was comparable to being sent to Auschwitz.

“Bloodsucking insects,” said the skeleton.

“OK, keep in mind that you need to tell that story of blacks kicked off the government tit in 1875, ten years of freedom from slavery deemed enough to get them on their feet, but first, this chat reminds me of something I need to discuss.  Otherwise, it’s impossible to understand how I changed from a young man with fire in his heart to radically change our society, with its famously lofty rhetoric and violent actual practices, a man long committed to racial equality and social justice, into an old man bitterly clinging to his modicum of acquired wealth and seeing blacks as an obstacle to keeping that wealth.”

Lead the way.  

“Well, I know you don’t recall the exact number, and your quick search did not reveal it exactly, but you recall correctly that when I started teaching public school in 1952, my starting salary was around $4,000.  For a year.  There had been student protests in favor of teachers in April 1950 when teachers asked for a cost of living increase of $600 a year, as you learned just now.  Do the math, it’s a more than ten percent increase over the top tier salary at the time.  The salary range for public school teachers in 1950 was in the low thousands, as that article you found showed. It ranged from $2,000 and change to $5,000.”

“Yet, in that unprecedented era of American prosperity and social mobility, I was able to buy a house, with a long mortgage and help from the G.I. Bill on the interest rate, for around $14,000.  Forty years later that house was worth about a quarter of a million dollars.  That piece of private property on that shady street in Queens was the bulk of my wealth.  And I am ashamed to tell the story of how I liquidated that investment and why.”

Look, it’s human nature to cling to what you have.  When you were a poor boy you had nothing but dreams of a better world for yourself and everyone else.  When you had some wealth your fitful dreams became more about protecting it.  It’s a natural progression.  

“No less shameful,” said the skeleton.  

“You were already in law school, if you’ll recall, so this happened almost twenty years ago, nine years or so before I took my last breath.  One spring day I saw a couple of black kids walking down the street in front of the house.  You remember when you were little the only blacks on the streets were maids, like Lilly and Dot, walking down to the bus stop after a day of work for Honey Siegel or John Towers.  This small group of black teenagers was casually walking down the street, talking and laughing.  I was sitting on the porch reading the paper and the kids and I watched each other as they went by.  I may have nodded, I don’t recall.”  

“Then I started seeing them in Fresh Meadows.  Suddenly, it seemed to me, the area was becoming integrated, something I would have welcomed twenty, thirty years earlier.  And the terrible truth hit at the same time.  Like the liberal middle class Jews in the neighborhood around James Madison High School where black kids walked from the buses and trains to the school in the years before the riot in 1973, I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.  It made me doubly sick, to think that I was reacting like a fucking racist and, also, that the value of my property, my hard-earned lifetime of work, would soon plummet as whites fled the area. It was the classic ‘there goes the neighborhood’ twitch that had always disgusted me beyond words.”  

“I panicked.  Your mother and I were already snowbirds, and, already past seventy it was beginning to get hard to pack up everything twice a year and make the long drive back and forth to Florida with the dog.  It was probably time to sell the house anyway, but I also panicked.  I’m ashamed to say it, but I was no different in my panic than any other petit bourgeois white racist motherfucker about to lose a lifetime of hard work.”  

Well, you were a little different, dad.  Most petit bourgeois white racist motherfuckers have not been long-time advocates for civil rights and actively working to integrate the schools and society.

 “Hmph,” said the skeleton, ” are you trying to deny me my righteous shame and guilt?  It’s the only thing most well-to-do liberals have to cling to, the reminder that we once held values that made us better than the worst in our society.  The fact is, and it’s a disgusting fact, having something to lose makes one vulnerable to the pettiest human impulses.  The more you have to lose, it seems, the more vulnerable to this kind of hypocrisy.  That I was once an idealist only makes my reaction more despicable.” 

That’s arguable.  Anyway, I pause to note that you could have made more than $100,000 more on the house if you’d waited a year or two to sell.  Prices kept going up, those Iranian Jews who bought the place got a great deal, as those types often do.  Easy to see these things in retrospect, I suppose.  

“Ironically, the difference in price could have paid back your law school loan, with about $60,000 left over to pay your bills for a couple of years,” the skeleton looked out into the distance with its characteristic grin.  

“Oh well, no sense crying over spilled mulattos, Elie.”

It has always been thus

“You seem dismayed at the despicable slowness with which the moral arc of the universe seems to bend toward justice.  I was bitter by the end of my life about that, too, how, for the most part, real change does not seem to happen perceptibly within a human lifetime.  I can tell you from experience, bitterness about the obstinate forces of human nature is not a good play.   It has always been thus.”

“Do you think, when you read about the liberal Napoleonic code spreading the ideals of the French Revolution, the Jews, for the first time in hundreds of years anywhere in Europe given full rights of citizenship, that anyone, beyond a few Jews, perhaps, welcomed Napoleon’s invading armies to their cities?   You’re listening to Howard Zinn’s son read A People’s History of the United States.  An unending series of perfect examples, no?”

Perfect, yes, although ‘perfect’ seems a funny word to use when describing an accurate portrait of hell.  

“Sure ‘A White Man’s Heaven is a Black Man’s Hell’ as the song goes.  ‘Progress’ was hell for the mass-murdered Arawaks, the many other mass-murdered Indian tribes, the mass-murdered Africans, the Chinese, the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, for most poor immigrants.   Take one example though, say the Africans.  Do you know, if you brought say a hundred live Africans for sale in New Amsterdam, or later, New York, how much fucking money you could make?   It was, like I told you at the end about our decades of senseless contention, nothing personal, truly, as far as the fungible Africans were concerned.  One African was worth much the same as the next, if they were roughly the same age, size and strength.   There was nothing personal, on one level, when they inspected the slave’s teeth, lifted the scrotum, examined the asshole.  Strictly business, Elie.  The death of millions of African prisoners during the trans-Atlantic transport blandly called ‘the Middle Passage’ was — what’s that word you love so much?  — an externality.”  

Union Carbide puts a plant in an area in India where they can hire workers for next to nothing.   Tons of additional profit for the corporation.  Some toxic run-off runs off and causes suffering and death to the children of the locals.  An externality; you have your lawyers pay off the families of the dead kids, get your P.R. department to write something nice and write the whole thing off as a business loss.  Net gain for everybody, those Indian children who died would have been fucked in any case.

“Exactly, the cost of doing business.  That’s the genius of capitalism, if you want to call it that.  It has always been thus, those with the most power are never obliged to take seriously the troubles of those with the least.  And the real beauty part, for the rich, every injury can be reduced to a monetary sum, and the poor can always be bought off with pocket change.  In colonial times the wealth gap was probably roughly the same as it is now.  Barons were granted millions of acres of previously unclaimed land in the ‘New World’, the Indians had no concept of ownership of land, and poorly paid armies fought Indians to the death over this right of vast tracts of private property for the obscenely rich.   Poor whites and slaves worked for the baron and it was a new kind of feudalism for the new world.  It has walked a pretty straight line since then.  Take any period you like.  Some, like the present Gilded Age, stand out as worse than others, but for the people who have no power, every period is roughly the same.”  

Except for those brief periods of hope for real social change, like when I was growing up.  

“Yes, there are little windows when a Gandhi or a King can inspire millions to unite in hope and the moral wind is blowing the right way and you can see small changes that at the time look gigantic.  Gandhi, as a Jew in Poland, would not have had such a glorious biography as he did making his name during the active decline of the British Empire when the colonial ruler of India was collapsing anyway.  Timing, as they say, is everything.”

True dat.  

“We are brought up with this myth of the ‘individual’– that’s the basis of our culture here in the West.  Any individual, we are told, can rise, by his or her own efforts, to demonstrate their unique talents and become great.   This is what we are fed, even as millions upon millions have always been born into these societies without any real chance to become ‘individuals’ in the sense that Andrew Carnegie and Bill Gates, or your buddies George Steinbrenner and Donald Trump, are.”  

Yah, mon.  You yourself, without World War Two, what would have become of your chance to grow into an actual individual?

 “I would have been sent to sheet metal school, to learn a trade.  Fortunately it would have been a good time to be an American tradesman– although it’s hard to say if the prosperity that followed WW II would have been as great without the war — and I would probably have still been able to afford to buy a home, and I would have had a car.  Economically, I probably would have done about as well, during that historically rare period of widespread economic prosperity, as I did working as an underpaid teacher.  In fact, as a teacher, you’ll recall, I had to work a second job to have the middle class life I aspired to.   American factory workers were well-paid back then, I would possibly have made more as a sheet metal worker than molding the characters of teen-aged social studies students,” the skeleton seemed to be mulling something over.  

“I never would have met and wooed your mother, though,” he said sadly.  

I loved what your brother said at the memorial for mom.  

“Yeah, that was good, a great moment for him.  ‘I was the other one of those two country bumpkins who visited our cousins in Evelyn’s apartment building in the Bronx.’  You know, if not for your grandma’s pushing, your mother would never have given me the time of day.  A beautiful big city girl, living half a block from the glorious Grand Concourse, the Champs Elysees of the Bronx… she regarded me as, how did Brando put it?  ‘She looked at me like a bug.’  You should have seen her disdain the first few times I passed under her first floor window there in the courtyard on Eastburn Avenue.  As a student at FuckMe Sheet Metal Academy I wouldn’t have been able to pry a ‘hi’ out of her.   Once I got the chance, I impressed her with my collegiate brain, and my wit, things I hardly realized I even had growing up the poorest kid in Peekskill. When I became a doctoral candidate at Columbia my stock really went up.”  

What are the odds of a kid from the projects having that kind of chance?  

“Oh, maybe one in five hundred, I’d say.  I was born into historical bad luck and then had a stroke of historical good luck.  There’s no reckoning these things, there’s only working hard to take advantage of the rare moments of good luck that come your way.  I suppose you can think of yourself doing the same thing now.  You had a good idea, an excellent idea, really, for that non-profit art and technology workshop for the children of the doomed.  You had the good luck to be able to focus on it full-time, because of the money we left you.  The bad luck?  We didn’t leave you a fortune so you could have hired a capitalist to run turn it into an actual business.  You are not a born capitalist, Elie, you’re a fucking idealist.   Worse, for you, you live in a supremely materialistic society where branding, spin, marketing, sales, relentless chirping optimism, return on investment, sexiness, etc. rule the world.   Can you sell a program to help the children of the doomed?  You personally?  No.  Some people can, particularly if it works as well as what you designed, but I would say they have to have access to huge sources of funding — and never, ever, use the word ‘doomed’ in any connection to anything they ever imagine doing.”  

You grew up doomed, did you not?  

“I grew up doomed.  We were poor, hopelessly so, my father had no skills, could not earn a living, except briefly doing physical labor for the WPA.   I was like that Babel character Matthew Pavlichenko, the abused serf who comes back to his former master’s estate as a general in the Red Army, and he’s singing to that magical year when the revolution started, that changed him, unimaginably, from one form to the next.  That day that lives in infamy, December 7, 1941, turned out to be my lucky day, the start of my new life.  If not for the war, and the G.I. Bill, there would be no you, your sister would have never been born.”

Well, viva Hirohito, then, dad.  

“Yeah, every villain in history has people who salute him.  I just wanted to finish, I think that what you’re doing now, trying to set down this portrait of me, in the context of the times I lived in, with as much three-dimensionality as you can muster, is trying to put your good luck– inheriting enough to live on for a few years, having the ability to set things out clearly — to the best possible use.  You feel better getting up every day to pound at the heavy bag of this story than if you weren’t telling it, don’t you?”  

Without a doubt.  

“And are you explaining your life to yourself?”  

Yes, in some deep way I feel like I am.  It’s uncanny how I’m discovering things I didn’t realize before, through the process of combing through everything I can remember about growing up the son of a brilliant and adversarial father.

“Then it’s all good.  If you manage to whip the final product into shape as a final product you can sell–  your success will be the sweeter for being so long overdue.  And, as far as the brilliant and adversarial father, you do, of course, dig the contradiction there.  A truly brilliant father cannot be an adversary to his child, except for some perverseness in his nature.  An adversarial father cannot be a brilliant father, otherwise he would support his children, not undermine them by fighting them every step of their way.  Wait, wait, I know what you’ll say– another example of my black and white thinking.  But, hang on a second.  Brilliance includes intelligence and insight both.  And I know you know what I’m talking about,” said the skeleton.  

Obviously, dad.

 

Paging Through History

“You know, I realize this is a creative re-imagining of my life, that there are many things that must be left to conjecture and inventive reconstruction on your part, but it may be time to remind readers of the trickiness of imagining history, trying to construct a realistic frame to see it through,” suggested the skeleton.  

Sure, we see it through a lens of inevitability, hindsight imparting the illusion of knowledge we can never have in real time.   It’s hard to imagine things as they were at the time, before the chickens begin coming home to roost.  When you were a fourteen year-old rooting for Hank Greeneberg as he hit fifty-eight home runs, you had no way of imagining that after driving in 262 runs in the next two seasons he’d have just 67 at bats in 1941 before missing the next three seasons defending his country.

“He’d been drafted in the pre-war draft and deferred a couple of times for flat feet, then he was re-classifed and inducted into the armed forces at the beginning of the 1941 baseball season.   On December 5, 1941 Sergeant Greenberg was honorably discharged pursuant to an act of Congress, along with any man over 28 who didn’t want to stay in the Army.   He was out and looking forward to hitting home runs in 1942.  Then, two days later, as your kids in Harlem used to say when someone got hit from the blindside, we got ‘japped’.  Greenberg re-enlisted, we actually served together, amazing as it seems now, in what was then called the Army Air Corps.  It was a little like Sekhnet’s father, at the end of his two-year hitch with a month to go when Pearl Harbor was hit, his tour extended by three or four years.”

Also, the world at the end of World War Two was at the dawn of the age of 24/7 multi-platform mass media we have been living in for decades now.   It’s hard to overestimate the power of wall-to-wall womb-to-tomb advertising noise we are subjected to now.   We elect our candidates based on the best ad campaigns, based on who presents as the best “product”.  

“Trump is a brand, has been branding himself for years.  George W. Bush was a brand.  It doesn’t matter what the brand is, mind you, Americans are trained to buy the brand name.  You want Brand X or Chef Boyardee?” the skeleton winked.   

We always had cans of that in the basement, the ravioli and, at one point, beef-a-roni.  Wow, I haven’t thought of that stuff in years.   The source of my bad eating habits, in a can, can to stovetop to bowl in just a couple of minutes.

“Advertising is really the genius of America, if you use genius in the sense of exerting an effect in the world through creative energy.  Harold Lasswell, who I know you encountered when you did research on the Nazi rise to power, said as much.  In those days, at the dawn of radio in the 1930s,  we still had an expectation, somehow, that we weren’t being constantly lied to.  Lasswell put his finger on how governments, and political factions, were increasingly unscrupulous in how they manipulated public opinion.   I remember being surprised at how enthusiastically you reacted to Lasswell, who was not without some very smart critics, then it occurred to me that, influential as he was when I was in college, he was largely forgotten by the time you encountered him a few decades later.  The things he laid out about the manipulation of public opinion, which sound prophetic when you place them in their historical context, are just taken for granted now.”

Lasswell:  Propaganda is the expression of opinions or actions carried out deliberately by individuals or groups with a view to influence the opinions or actions of other individuals or groups for predetermined ends through psychological manipulations.

“Duh. Politics 101, Elie.  Well, you always talk about that one section of Mein Kampf that Laswell mentions, where the slavering future dictator wipes the rabies foam off his mouth and gives a tight, coherent lecture on the need to say whatever is necessary to manipulate the populace, to terrify them and make them hate, and obey,” said the skeleton.  

“There it is in a nutshell, really.  Think of how many national elections are decided by discrete moments, innocuous enough in themselves, exploited with ruthless skill by the best advertising minds money can buy, going viral in the mass media — Dukakis on that tank, Howard Dean’s so-called scream.  Think of how many elections are decided by well-crafted, sensational appeals to terror— Willie Horton, Goldwater blowing up the world with nukes, Bin Laden”

“LBJ had that early success in Texas leaking the story that his opponent was a goat fucker.  Timed for a day or so before the election, to create maximum buzz and minimum time for rebuttal.  It was all they talked about in that part of Texas, why the guy was denying fucking a goat, or being suspiciously silent about it, or why he didn’t seem very convincing when he denied it.  You remember that 2004 election, after four disastrous years with Bush and Cheney?  Decided by millions of ‘values voters’ driven to the polls by their hatred of homosexuals.  Karl Rove brought out truckloads of anti-fag voters, ignorant haters just smart enough to find the Republican line on the ballot and cast their votes.   Wedge politics.  Throwing raw meat to your base.  An earnest search for solutions?  Nigger, please.”

Indeed.   I’ve heard that the Howard Dean ‘scream’ was the result of the kind of mic he was holding when he reacted with glee at that moment.  When played in the room where he whooped, with all the noise in there, it was hardly noticed by anyone, or even heard by most of the audience.  Fed directly into the board, from that unidirectional mic, with the crowd noise dialed way back by the design of the mic, it became the clear, insane squawk of a madman.  That was the clip everyone played.  He was the front-runner at the time, then, toast.  

“That’s how you do it,” said the skeleton.

“By the way, Elie, there’s one things that’s bothering me that I need to mention.   You have me saying ‘nigger’ an awful lot.  It’s not a word I ever used except quoting, and I taught you and your sister, if you recall, years before it became taboo and the most offensive word in the language, next to ‘cunt’ (and many cunts will argue to the fucking death about which is worse), not to use that hateful word.  I have no problem with the rest of the frank language, and frankly I have no problem with the fucking f-word or any other word, but ‘nigger’ is kind of in a special class.  It’s like kyke, I want only another Jew to call me a kyke, if somebody must call me a kyke.  I don’t care that blacks call each other ‘my nigga’ and shit like that, it’s their word now, not ours.  And it was never mine.”

Point taken.  I ask the reader to ignore any time the protagonist of this book seems to nonchalantly use the word ‘nigger’.

“That reminds me of that absurd movie you and your mother watched on TV one night, starring Sammy Davis, Jr.  He was the driver for an American officer in World War Two who was actually a German spy.  The officer spoke colloquial English without any accent, and had gone to spy school to learn everything about American culture.  Apparently he didn’t learn everything. When Sammy Davis, Jr. gets wise to him and accuses him of being a spy he flies into a rage and calls Davis a ‘dirty ny-jer’.  ‘It’s nigger, sir,’ says Davis, pulling his gun and placing the Nazi under arrest.  You remember how you and your mother hooted at that?”

That schvartze was one talented little Jew we were all proud of.

The 1974 NYC Human Rights Commission Report

I was struck, reading that fascinating 1974 report, how dramatically attitudes have changed, and how little facts on the ground have changed for the permanent underclass of this wealthy nation, particularly for the descendants of those kept as chattels by the supremely entitled one percent of their day.  

I need to put more of that shock into the narrative, since it tracks exactly Irv’s exasperation with the whole ongoing betrayal of decent principle that has shaped the world in the last forty years or so.  The report lays out everything in a principled way that seems quaint now in our age of Fuck You In Your Fucking Face you Fucking Piece of Fucking Shit! politics.  The intelligently written, analytic report is a vivid snapshot of what once was the cherished hope, and, in showing the brief struggle to make things better, how that hope turned to dust in the mouths of those who once worked so hard to make it more than a hope.  

“Do you know where that bending the moral arc of history quote often attributed to Martin Luther King comes from?” asked the skeleton wryly, knowing his biographer had just looked it up on the internet.  

That would be abolitionist theologian Theodore Parker, father, who defended the right of slaves to kill their masters and died on the eve of the Civil War:  

“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”  

King, of course, put it more directly:  “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

In 1974 government agencies and people of good will were actually looking for remedies for deeply entrenched historic problems of injustice, within a few years they were privatizing prisons, unleashing the so-called Free Market, and ruthlessly enforcing punitive drug laws, based on the federal Controlled Substance Act of 1970, that hard-drinking, paranoid Nixon had signed into law to criminalize the hobbies of his enemies.  

“Well, I have to be honest, I was Nixon’s enemy, whether I made the list or not.  I was always a teetotaler and I never really understood why people took drugs, but even I could see, although I always gave you tremendous shit about it, that marijuana was not nearly as dangerous as the alcohol that Nixon was sucking down every night.  It certainly does not belong on Schedule One with the most dangerous and addictive drugs known to man, drugs with no redeeming medical use.”  

“You have the transcript of that bit of the secretly recorded tape where Nixon is telling Haldeman how important it is to put crushing sanctions on pot smokers.   He says ‘you know, Bob, they are mostly Jews, and most Jews are psychiatrists and deviants, aren’t they?  You know, homosexuality, pederasty, Communist tendencies and all the rest, good Christ, we need a law that lets us throw away the key, am I right, Bob?'” the skeleton chuckled after channeling the mad former president.  

“That motherfucker really drew a line in the sand, didn’t he?  Then Reagan came in, his revolution being to smilingly turn the hands of the social clock back to the good old days when local whites knew best how to handle their niggras, yes suh.”

OK, dad, calm down, man, calm down.  

“Nothing for me to worry about now, Elie, I’m not going to bust a blood vessel.  Look at me.  Do you see any blood vessels?  On the other hand, and I know you’re a little hopped up today, but you do realize that there’s hardly a whiff here of the 1974 report on the riots at James Madison HS, don’t know?”

Yes, I do, dad.  But as you astutely noted, I am a little bit hopped up today, and I have to start getting ready to get out of here.  I’ll pull out some of that heartbreakingly clear language from the report tomorrow or the next day.  Dinner plans have been made for me and I must not be late.  

“OK.  Bone appetit, then,” said the skeleton, inflecting the French to make sure the ‘e’ was at the end of the word “bone”.

 

What Irv actually did in Germany after the Nazi surrender

He and his comrades adopted a mongrel dog and named him Schickelgruber.  That unwieldy name had been Hitler’s mother’s family name.  Lenny Bruce had a character ask another if Schickelgruber was a hoof and mouth disease.   The GIs (“government issue”) no doubt got a kick out of calling this mutt Schickelgruber, until one sad day when the little dog was run over by an airplane.  I believe I once saw a black and white photo of this little black Spaniel-looking dog.  

That detail is really all I know for certain about my father’s time in Germany after the war.  I don’t know what dates he was there or exactly where he was stationed, although it was after the war ended in Germany.  

There are records somewhere in Washington, and there is probably a way to get his service record, though his service seems to have involved nothing more dramatic than reading manuals to the mechanics in his crew when they needed him to look up some detail or part number while working on a plane or truck.  

I can also do the math, he turned 18 in June, 1942.  He would have been drafted shortly after that, and served 36 months, a number he cited often enough for me to easily know by heart.  36 months from September 1942, say, puts his arrival in Germany in the late spring/early summer of 1945, since he would have been discharged in September 1945.  In April 1945 Hitler married Eva Braun in the bunker and shot her and his beloved dog the next day, before doing what he should have done decades earlier and blowing his tortured brains out.  Irv was there, we can deduce, sometime between May and September of 1945, a lovely time of year in post-Nazi Germany, I’ve heard.

Corporal Israel, as his fellow GIs often called him, I suspect, somehow continued to enjoy his freedom from the hell he grew up in.  He was surrounded by other young guys, many of whom he considered friends (though he kept in touch with none of them afterwards, Darius White– from Eagle Crotch, Arkansas, in Irv’s farcical telling–  is the only name even known to me ) and they were engaged in an important, world historic mission.  They had, in fact, just helped kick Hitler’s fucking ass.  Fascism had been defeated (or so they all believed in that heady summer).  Nazi Germany after the surrender was likely no worse for the young corporal (he may have been a sergeant by then)  than sitting in a slum with his enraged mother, being called Sonny.

 

Whipsawed

A law professor introduced this great phrase to us in contracts class.  It means being on the hook to perform two conflicting contractual obligations at the same time, the doing of one interfering with the doing of the other.

I’m whipsawed today: the 1974 NYC Human Rights Commission Report cries out for more description, what Irv did in Germany after the war also does.  

It’s a minor dilemma — there’s no contract here.  Write one and the other, separate them later.  

Thus you, gentle reader, will have no idea, but these paragraphs, that I was was ever whipsawed at all.