This is an addition to my previous review of Jane Mayer’s impressive 2016 Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.
The shit hit the fan in America when Barack Obama was elected president in 2008. The Democratic president had both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court still had a “swing vote” [1]. Hope and Change were in the air after two terms of bungling, warring, tiny minority-enriching right wing rule that culminated in a massive fraud-driven economic crash. It was a bleak time for the radical right, and their best and brightest got busy strategizing and putting their strategies into action.
After their victory in Citizens United, the cleverly argued case that legalized unlimited campaign-related spending as the protected speech of legal fictions now considered “persons”, Charles Koch and his network went into overdrive. The secretive billionaire group funded the “grassroots” Tea Party making it possible for Americans to see continual, locally organized anti-Obama protests on television every evening from every corner of this gigantic nation. There appeared to be a groundswell of spontaneous, united opposition to Obama, who was otherwise enjoying a 60% approval rating, but no matter. The optics are key.
After putting Scott Brown into office, with a huge infusion of cash right before the interim election in Massachusetts to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, ending the Democrats ability to overcome a filibuster, Koch’s network got busy nationwide in the lead-up to the 2010 midterms. In that election they spent over $137,000,000, gaining 63 seats in the House of Representatives and wresting control from the Democrats. The massive spending also allowed Republicans to further eat into the Democrat’s Senate majority, where a bunch of the contested seats were flipped. Crucially, Republicans also picked up massive influence in state elections across the country, taking over a majority of state governments. This last bit was crucial as electoral district lines were about to be redrawn after the 2010 Census.
Democracy was not necessarily going to be the long-term solution for the Koch network and their unpopular ideas, but this kind of unprecedented national electoral victory was intoxicating. Unlimited “dark money” changed the game. Few candidates could survive being massively outspent by an opponent who could constantly air effective attack ads right up to election day.
Not much was known about the roots of powerful advocacy groups like Americans for Prosperity and many other interlocking right wing foundations, think tanks and non-profits set up by the Kochtopus until investigative journalist Jane Mayer and her colleagues began researching the players and their connections. She wrote a long 2010 piece in the New Yorker that infuriated Charles and David Koch and their friends. Mayer had previously written about the billionaire funder of liberal causes George Soros, whose foundation, the Open Society Institute, spends up to a hundred million dollars a year on its causes. Soros, unlike the Kochs, had agreed to be interviewed for Mayer’s article. He accepted the unflattering things about about him and his influence machine in the piece without protest. David Koch went wild when he read Mayer’s article about his family business.
Koch complained in a four page letter to the New Yorker about the unfair portrayal of his “covert operations,” insisting there was nothing secret about his well-funded and extensive network of political influence, without citing any factual inaccuracies in the article. Koch then gave an interview during which he called Mayer’s New Yorker piece “hateful, ludicrous and just plain wrong”. [2] Not long after Koch made those comments, a smear campaign was underway to discredit Jane Mayer, featuring e-mailed threats and ultimatums, private investigators and an opposition research staff.
They didn’t find much they could use, but trumped up a “plagiarism” case against her that was posted briefly on-line, before it was taken off-line, probably to avoid litigation over the attempted libel. The plagiarism case was extremely thin, with four insubstantial paragraphs cited (from a long career at the New Yorker.) Two of the four citations contained attributions to the people she was allegedly plagiarizing. The Kochtopus, not directly implicated in the smear campaign because — why would they be? — didn’t succeed in destroying Jane Mayer or her reputation, but not for lack of trying. Fortunately, they also didn’t succeed in shutting her up.
In January 2016 her book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right came out. It is a hell of a book, an important story that should be widely discussed as we are locked in this vicious zero-sum fight between the facts (and truth) and endless spin (and powerful lies). Who are you going to believe, a bunch of hysterical climate scientists claiming that our escalating global climate catastrophes are somehow related to man’s heedless pollution of earth, sky and water, or two of the richest men in America who make their money dirtily extracting a highly toxic, and very lucrative, natural resource, while defending liberty?
Integral to the radical right’s position in the “post-factual” fight is sowing skepticism, doubt, outrage about things that are otherwise indisputable. We see this in the right’s pre-emptive dismissal of the mainstream media, well-researched, carefully vetted work of honest American journalists is now reduced, for the simple minded, to traitorous “fake news,” the hateful spewing of “enemies of the American people.” Bizzarro world, my friends.
Take a look at how the two sides of this debate are stacked up, and how unlimited money (“speech”) among a tiny group of super-wealthy anti-government radicals makes for slaughter sides. Tell me which side is the more deadly enemy of the American people.
[1] albeit a swing vote who voted with the right in Citizens United, actually writing the partisan majority opinion.
[2] David Koch, a world-class philanthropist, is not always so self-righteously pissed off. As Jane Mayer writes in her 2010 article, and in Dark Money, he is also capable of world-class self-deprecation:
David Koch joked about his good fortune in a 2003 speech to alumni at Deerfield, where, after pledging twenty-five million dollars, he was made the school’s sole “lifetime trustee.” He said, “You might ask: How does David Koch happen to have the wealth to be so generous? Well, let me tell you a story. It all started when I was a little boy. One day, my father gave me an apple. I soon sold it for five dollars and bought two apples and sold them for ten. Then I bought four apples and sold them for twenty. Well, this went on day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, until my father died and left me three hundred million dollars!”
I thought I had possibly dreamed this, but apparently not.
Our president, the man who can’t seem to stop bragging about his historically large 106,000 vote Electoral College mandate (take those close votes in three states and flip them and Hillary wins), was rebuked 98-0 by a viciously divided senate the other day.
It happened like this. He met with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin last week in Finland. The strongman apparently easily lifted our large president over his head several times during their secret meeting, greatly impressing our great leader. After the meeting Putin was wearing the smile of the cat with the canary in its mouth and our president seemed even more childish, confused and foolish than usual. Putin apparently asked that he be allowed, in return for granting the Mueller team access to twelve recently indicted Russians, to interrogate a similar number of American diplomats including the former American ambassador to Russia. Our president said he would consider it. The Senate, bitter partisans who can agree on nothing, immediately voted 98-0 to “shut the fuck up, you imbecilic asshole!”
I find a reason for optimism in that unanimous vote by hacks for both supremely corrupt pay-to-play parties. There is a limit, ladies and gentlemen, to what someone who has contempt for democracy, fairness and even honesty can be allowed to do, even if he’s the almost unanimously elected president of the United States. I like to think so anyway.
The radical right is consistent, most of the time, I have to say that for them. They latch on to something like “Right to Life” (no abortion under any circumstances) or “Right to Work” (the legal right of the employer to fire your ass at any time, with or without cause) and ride it to the end. Their disciplined relentlessness is impressive, even if it’s not always good for democracy, people, animals, plants, children, old people, babies, the environment, health, human dignity, human survival. The important thing is that they give their supporters a rallying cry to scream, a cry that never changes, if it works. That these phrases may not bear much scrutiny as ideas in the marketplace of ideas is not the point. Winning is the point, the only point.
As Republican icon Ronald Reagan said, either being pithy or already in the first throes of dementia: “the right to life ends at birth.” “Right to Life” means that the right of a fetus to be born is absolute, more absolute than a mother’s right not to die from complications of pregnancy, far greater than the right of a fourteen year old girl not to have to go through the trauma of giving birth to her rapist’s baby. Like every right extended, except to wealth that has perpetual life (corporate folks, persons just like you and me except they never die) it terminates at a reasonable time. In the case of an unwanted baby, the right to life ends as soon as the poor bastard is born, breathing air and crying. When the unwanted child is born society says “you’re on your own now, motherfucker, we protected you for nine months, your own mother wanted to kill you, but we saved you from that murderous bitch. Now get the fuck out and get a job, asshole. And try not to stink so much… can’t you change that sagging diaper already? No self-respect, you little shitass…” Nothing to see here.
The way America’s wealthiest and least scrupulous organized themselves to make sure Obama was not able to get bipartisan support for anything, especially his hated plan to give access to healthcare to more Americans; priceless. Jane Mayer reminds us that when Ted Kennedy’s death in 2009 left a vacancy in the Senate, a flood of dark money was unloosed immediately before the special election in Massachusetts. After that election unknown Republican Scott Brown would sit in the seat occupied by a Democrat (a Kennedy, in fact, Ted took over JFK’s seat in 1962) from time immemorial. Read all about it here.
The Koch influence machine (the Kochtopus, as admirers dubbed it) had secretly pulled off a stunning, history defying upset in a blue state that hadn’t had a Republican senator in generations. Wikipedia is pretty even-handed about the invisible tentacles of the Kochtopus:
As of January 8, 2010, Martha Coakley raised over US$5.2 million in total, and had $937,383 cash on hand. Scott Brown had $367,150 cash on hand. Brown spent $450,000 on television advertisements, while Coakley spent $1.4million.[99] A week before the general election, Brown raised $1.3million from over 16,000 donors in a 24-hour fund-raising effort. Reports also indicated that Brown raised an average of $1 million per day the week prior to the election.[100]
The effect of this historic upset was that the Senate, with Brown, was now 59-41 Democratic, meaning Obama’s majority in the Senate, although impressive, was no longer filibuster-proof. The loophole now existed for the entitled vulture class to defeat the hated president’s hated, albeit mostly conservative-think-tank-created, healthcare proposal. The compromise that became known as the Affordable Care Act, when it was passed, had many, many faults, none of them ever fixed. The ACA contained a few huge improvements over America’s past ruthless health insurance regime, the biggest being the abolition of the vicious “pre-existing condition” loophole that allowed health insurance companies to only insure people who were good bets not to need massively expensive healthcare. The business of America is business, how it is fair that some fuck with cancer expects to get all those expensive treatments and drugs paid by insurance? Pre-existing condition, totally unfair to make the insurer pay!
Some socialist types, and others, believe that included among the rights of citizenship in a wealthy society is the right to decent, affordable health care, administered through a publicly supervised health care system. Americans pay by far the highest prices for our health care, far more than the citizens of other wealthy, industrialized nations, yet our health outcomes are no better than most places, except, arguably, at the very top end of American medical care. Wealthy patients can always seek out and buy that top high-end healthcare, if they want to pay for it (and why not? they deserve it).
The rest of us believe we have a right to not die of the many preventable and treatable diseases that are always stalking us. A “right to life” if you will. 50,000 or more dead Americans every year who die because their only access to health care is an emergency room where the ER doc will say to a family member “oh shit, if only we’d seen him two years ago…” These unfortunate American dead and their loved ones unwittingly make a sacrifice for all of us, a small price to pay for the freedom of eternal, legally created “persons” to live in perfect liberty, enjoying maximum profits protected by a friendly government, with the populist cover of a manipulated mob of confused, angry, powerless people chanting “USA! USA!!!”.
I get my health care through the problematic Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. I can tell you dozens of ways the law sucks, and have written about many of them here (click the category Obamacare to read ’em). Top of my list is the difficulty of actually finding care in this corrupt, lobbyist-written regime. After years of rabid Republican opposition to the law, and more than fifty attempts to repeal it in its entirety (check ’em out), some elected Democrats are organizing to fight back with the hated “public option” (something that already exists and works pretty well for millions of Americans 65 and older, as well as in most other wealthy nations). Seventy Congressional Democrats have apparently formed a caucus to discuss lowering the age of Medicare to cover even that fucking unwanted baby who selfishly insists on its right to care after the government has already zealously protected its ungrateful little ass for nine long months.
Here’s the petty detail that bugs me today, as I work on rehabbing my aching knees. It took me about a month to find and get an appointment with a sports medicine doctor for a referral to Physical Therapy (PT). A rep for my health-insurance company (think of how fucking asinine it is to give people health care via private, profit-driven insurance companies…) assured me that referrals are no longer required by their company for things like PT. Every place I contacted about PT disagreed. Obviously, they said, you have to have a doctor’s referral before we can give you PT. Made sense. I finally was able to see the sports medicine doctor who immediately referred me for PT. Then it was a few weeks of searching, not getting calls back from the “in-network” PT offices where I left messages, until I finally hobbled over to a place I could walk to that accepted my insurance and where I could have PT.
Note this: every week I searched, without finding service, every obstacle I had to crawl over to get to the next step in finding treatment, was money in the pocket of the insurance company. Multiply my search by a few thousand searches, by a million, and you begin to get the idea of how lucrative it is to make this basic of medical care, finding and seeing a doctor in your “network”, so difficult.
There was one last hoop to jump through on my ailing knees, now weeks and weeks, months, in fact, after they’d become acutely painful. I’d have do be “evaluated” for PT for my knees, by doing a half squat with my back against the wall of the PT room. I did the half squat and was told now all I had to do was go home and wait to see how many sessions my insurance company would approve. You see, the doctor is not the one who decides what’s medically necessary, nor is the physical therapist, it is someone at your insurance company who decides exactly what course of treatment, under the current law, you are entitled to. Fair is fair, they’re the ones paying, you dig.
They decided I was entitled to seven sessions of PT, twice a week. If you do the math, the approved PT would last just over three weeks. Not much time to fix a problem that had taken a year or more to get this bad, now I just had to wait until they got the go ahead from my insurance company. A week later I was able to start PT. It is slow going, physical therapy. No long-festering physical ailment can be cured in seven sessions. After session six I asked the receptionist at the PT place what I had to do to get more sessions. Another referral, she told me. I contacted the office of the sports doctor I’d seen for a second time a week or so earlier. After session seven of PT I was told that once the referral arrived I would have to be re-evaluated.
Stand against the wall in the room where you’ve completed your seven sessions of PT and squat as far down as your creaky knees will take you, then just go home, without further treatment of any kind, and wait. In about a week, if all goes well, they would get the OK from the insurance company, if your particular insurance policy authorized more physical therapy for you. Then, the following week you could continue your PT, with only, at most, a short one or two week gap. You see, it’s impossible to determine if you’ll need more than seven sessions until you’ve completed seven sessions, right? That’s just basic logic, right? No matter what your fucking know-it-all sports medicine doctor might have to say about it (the rehab could take several months of hard work, she told me sympathetically). No matter what.
Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, Jane Mayer (January 2016)
Dark money is tax deductible, it turns out. If you anonymously contribute a very large sum of money to a political cause, funneling the cash through a non-profit 501(c)4 corporation, in the worst case scenario you get a gigantic tax deduction against your income. If you advance your political agenda with a skillful bet on the right politicians, you can reap an even higher return on your tax deductible investment. Win-win, if you know what I’m sayin’.
It is hard to empathize with somebody you will never share an experience with. Being born into generations of vast, inherited, well-invested wealth means you have no need to ever make contact with the great unwashed, heading home in crowded subway cars with their grubby little problems. The world of the super-wealthy, the top 0.01%, is hard for the rest of us to picture. It is apparently also very, very challenging to be that rich in ways the rest of us cannot begin to imagine.
Some indomitable men in this tiny group of the very richest, very best American families, led by the secretive Charles Koch, autocratic son of a founding John Birch Society member, realized that in order to eventually own literally everything in America, without interference from parasites of every stripe, they would need to control the government that was trying to put tyrannical limits on their freedom. Charles Koch’s wealth, now highly diversified, was originally, and mainly, from oil refining. His father had developed a process for refining the cheapest, dirtiest, source, the most energy intensive to extract, and selling the finished product for much higher profit than their competitors could. The EPA, in particular, was a bone in the reclusive billionaire’s throat. Government regulation was the only thing standing in the way of virtually unlimited profits for Koch Industries.
It would take thirty or more years for Charles Koch’s radical agenda to yield a bumper crop (The Year of Trump), but the beneficiaries would be very happy with the results and well-reimbursed for their tax deductible political spending over the decades. Look at what they’ve already achieved: abolishing profit-killing “environmental” and “safety” regulations, limiting the size of, and trust in, a government of severely limited powers, decimating labor unions, “primarying” all moderates out of office and out of politics, ending ‘class warfare’ with a decided flourish, redistributing wealth steeply upward to themselves. Along the way they crafted and sold a larger, widely accepted public narrative that justifies all this as right and proper, even highly moral and exceptionally American. It isn’t that all this pollution is doing anything bad to the environment, you understand, fellow sophisticated climate change skeptics, it’s a conspiracy by rich liberal eco-hypocrites to kill jobs using fake science to do so.
Dark Money, by the great Jane Mayer, pulls together a million details of how and what this tiny, infinitely wealthy group did to ensure that their privilege is preserved in perpetuity. Mayer details the more than thirty year strategic campaign, mucho, mucho dinero very productively spent in a brilliant, deliberate, coordinated, disciplined long game of lobbying, swaying public perceptions and spending fortunes to put people in power who would advance their cause. This largely successful campaign to bypass electoral democracy and take control of the government directly, by other means, is finally paying off big time. All perfectly legal, these extraordinary means, the Supreme Court said so in a series of indisputable 5-4 decisions. Extra-democratically grabbing power makes it sound so harsh, so dirty, almost fascistic, like a tiny, secretive clique imposing their will on the other 99.9%. Let us simply say, these intrepid protectors of the 0.01% deployed their oceans of money very wisely.
A lot of the world Jane Mayer lays out is sickening stuff, but, damn does she lay it all out. It is one skill to be a good researcher, to dig up and read everything and to find and master a lot of interesting, complicated material, selecting and organizing the most crucial of it. Being able to weave the raw materials into a flowing, compelling narrative is another skill entirely. Reading a book like Dark Money it hits me over and over — this writer is really fucking smart. I think it’s the sense that, in addition to the book being beautifully written, everything you are reading has been set so perfectly in context by everything you’ve learned to that point in the story. It is an immensely complicated, yet, on another level, elementally simple, story. Jane Mayer tells it clearly, smoothly and with virtually no editorializing. I offer this example, as a placeholder for a more detailed review I will complete at a future time.
Mayer describes the great revelation Charles Koch and his friends had, along with a major change of strategy, after David Koch badly lost his vice-presidential bid in 1980. Since Koch ran for vice president, rather than president, he could use a loophole in the law to legally finance his campaign with as much of his own unlimited cash as he chose to spend. One of the planks of his vice presidential platform was abolishing all limits on campaign spending, (which is now the law of the land via the partisan 5-4 Citizens United ruling). When the Koch platform, skewed toward the freedom of the wealthiest to acquire more while shrinking oppressive government and its socialistic programs to insignificance, got less than 1% of the vote (ironic– he probably drew 100% of the top 1% vote) the Koch brothers [1] (along with their allies from the best of the top 0.01%) understood that their ideas were too unpopular to ever prevail by electoral means.
They began to set about influencing public discourse by different means. They drew up a long-term battle plan, with the help of a cunning graduate student named Fink. They created a network of influence and public relations operations. They funded prestigious think tanks, numerous non-profits, endowed academic chairs, sponsored courses and student societies in the colleges across America, eventually found their way onto Ivy League campuses (to correct the distressing left-leaning tendency of these influential institutions), unleashed an army of lobbyists, paid advocates, psychological warfare experts like wordsmith-for-hire Frank Luntz (attack Global Warming “myth” by attacking the non-unanimous scientific consensus [2] — Luntz later recanted this bullshit). They advised political candidates, funded their campaigns, took over state houses, got odious laws and regulations overturned, drafted model laws in corporate/legislative partnerships that advanced their cause, vetted Supreme Court picks, created and funded non-profits for specific political attacks, like the Swift Boat Attackers, funded the ‘grassroots’ radically anti-Obama Tea Party, and so on. 36 years of hard, dedicated, singleminded work later, et, voila!
Fred Koch, father of all of four battling Koch brothers, like Fred Trump, father of our current president, was a brutal, demanding, loveless autocrat and an admirer of Mr. Hitler who shared many of Hitler’s views on how things should run and who deserved to rule. Fred Koch performed a heroic, well-paid service for the Fuhrer before the war, building a high tech oil refinery in Germany that ensured the luftwaffe would have a ready supply of high octane petrol for years to come. Fred Koch hired a German Nazi nanny (literally, she adored the Fuhrer) to strictly discipline the young Koch boys. She was apparently very severe in her methods while she was the primary caretaker of the boys for the long stretches when the parents were away. The nanny proudly returned to the Fatherland after the fall of France. Talk about Nazi bastards, these boys come by it honestly.
I will amend this review a bit when I am done listening to the book. It is hard to stop listening to the well-read audio version I have on my listening device. I’ve already made dozens of notes.
If we have any hope of fighting back against the monsters now in seemingly locked-down control, a book like this provides essential knowledge we need for understanding the fight ahead.
I highly recommend Dark Money. Good reading on a subject even more vital to know about now than when she released it in early 2016. Goddamned good work, Jane, and another very important book (The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals, about Cheney’s torture program, is another, also highly recommended) that deserves to be widely read and talked about.
[1] A Note on the “Koch Brothers”
The until recently secretive right-wing billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch are known as The Koch Brothers. Their oldest brother, Freddie, was cut out of the picture years ago after an ugly family power play, featuring an attempt at blackmail by his other three brothers. David Koch’s twin brother, Bill Koch, after decades of savage litigation against his brothers Charles and David, and some chicanery written into their demented mother’s will, finally signed a non-disparagement agreement with Charles and David, formally ending their long, bitter legal wars. A family of goddamned princes, really. Of these four brothers, only two have become “The Koch Brothers.” You could argue that no two brothers have ever had a larger say in the public life of their country.
{2] Mayer writes:
In a 2002 memo, the Republican political consultant Frank Luntz wrote that so long as “voters believe there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community” the status quo would prevail. The key for opponents of environmental reform, he said, was to question the science—a public-relations strategy that the tobacco industry used effectively for years to forestall regulation. The Kochs have funded many sources of environmental skepticism, such as the Heritage Foundation, which has argued that “scientific facts gathered in the past 10 years do not support the notion of catastrophic human-made warming.”
I spent the weekend, with ambitious plans, too distracted to do much, though I did do a mean version of Yer Blues for a while there downstairs. My fault, really, being distracted, still letting petty, personal vexations twist and constrict me that way. I am 62, it is past time to get much better at not being squeezed by extraneous emotions. I’m not responsible for the misery of enraged, terrified, provocative people, I’m responsible for my own thoughts and actions, keeping my focus on what I need to do, in spite of all the noise all around.
After all, the world is as the fox told Pearl in The Amazing Bone by the immortal William Steig (may he rest in peace).
Pearl, the pretty little pig, taken home by the smiling, courtly fox, is trussed and ready for the oven, flames already leaping inside the wood burning stove. She pleads with the fox who is cutting up vegetables with gusto and whistling happily thinking of the tender, succulent pig he is about to enjoy. Pearl pleads to the fox to spare her life.
“Why must you eat me, Mr. Fox? I am young, I want to live. Please!” The fox looks over at Pearl sympathetically.
“Why are you asking me?” says the fox, “how should I know? I didn’t make the world.” (This isn’t the actual Steig line, the correct quote is below [1]) The fox finishes preparing his salad. As he leads her to the door of the oven he offers further words of solace:
‘I regret having to do this to you’, said the fox. ‘It’s nothing personal’.
It is the bone, it turns out, who says to the fox:
“You must let this beautiful young creature go on living. Have you no shame, sir!”
The fox laughed. “Why should I be ashamed? I can’t help being the way I am. I didn’t make the world.”[2]
The wisdom of that “I didn’t make the world,” however cruel its particular use might be, has always stayed with me.
It’s an answer as illuminating as “because he can” to the question of why a dog licks his genitals or how a Supreme Court justice with a glaring appearance of impropriety can insist he has no legal or moral obligation to recuse himself from sitting to hear the case.
“I didn’t make the world.”
Truly. I had no hand whatsoever in the making of this world.
My only work here these days is coherently setting down what I’ve seen, heard, learned, discovered, read, in an effort to understand as much as I can. I don’t know what compels me, exactly, or why it seems so necessary to me to write down clearly as much as I can write down in whatever time remains.
I know it has something to do with this cosmic less than wink of an eye we each have to be alive in, this flickering miracle of consciousness we so briefly share. How intolerable is it, therefore, to be forced to march in a column, for an insane reason, life and death decided by the worst and most violent humans on earth at any given time? To wait a century or more for rights our Constitution provided for almost two hundred and thirty years ago? Is it just me? I don’t think so, my friend.
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ii
A great book is like a fascinating conversation. When you hear the voice of someone who reads a book with feeling, the author’s ideas coming out clearly in the spoken words, you’re having a conversation with those people. The conversation of reading is as real as, and often much more substantial than, many actual conversations you may have with other living people. Particularly conversations in these contentious, violent times, which can burst into flames quicker than you can say “wait…”.
I have been listening to two fantastic audio books that I cannot recommend highly enough. Eichmann in Jerusalem (Hannah Arendt) and Dark Money (Jane Mayer). I intend to post full reviews of both here at some future time, hopefully some time this summer. In fact, the NY Public Library is into me for two weeks of overdue fines already for the paper copy of Eichmann I have been making notes from. I have to buy a copy ASAP.
I offer the following as an example of the kind of thing that, designed to eliminate stress, actually causes more stress, a kind of forgetful oversimplification that can lead to a fist fight. It is the lazy mind’s approach to thinking. Take a snapshot of the idea, and that’s the idea. The snapshot is the idea, get it? If you hold the snapshot, the still frame from the movie, you’re holding the actual idea. Nuance is for fucking eggheads, and, anyway, who can keep all that contradictory shit in their heads, you know what I’m sayin’? The snapshot, on the other hand, is clear as the nose on your face. Often the only possible response to a brilliant presentation of great nuance is “Fu-uh-uck YOU!” That response often carries the day in the debate between a snapshot and the actual person in the photograph.
That’s just the way it is right now, when so many are angry, fearful, desperate, riled up, not going to take it anymore. We didn’t make the world. Consider, though, how limited the essential truth, if any, is contained in a single snapshot of anything.
There is a book called Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl. I found it in the public library in Fresh Meadows back when I was in high school. I read it and recall being very impressed by it. An editor at Wikipedia did a wonderful job describing it:
Man’s Search for Meaning is a 1946 book by Viktor Frankl chronicling his experiences as an Auschwitz concentration camp inmate during World War II, and describing his psychotherapeutic method, which involved identifying a purpose in life to feel positively about, and then immersively imagining that outcome.
Toward the end of the book (a longtime international best-seller) Frankl writes, as I recall, that the highest form of personal purpose is one you’d be willing to die to defend. I remember thinking as a sixteen year-old what a beautiful thing it must be to love someone or some value so much you’d die to protect her. I also recall being a little troubled by the statement, even as a teenager.
Over the next few decades I’d come to see the danger of this statement, removed from the humanistic context of Frankl’s book. Frankl was talking about defending decency against indecency, not endorsing some crackpot’s idea of hate and violent revenge that other enraged imbeciles would willingly die for. But take that one statement by itself, present it as a snapshot of the book and you have the humanitarian Frankl advocating suicide bombing, killing abortion doctors, performing any of the many atrocities, undertaken for the sincerest of murderous beliefs, for which certain humans are rightfully abhorred. These atrocities reflect badly on all of us humans, when you think about it. Although we, none of us, made the world.
But dig how that works. Out with the filthy bathwater, fuck the baby! You read an entire book, enjoy and get engaging ideas from the author’s conversation, agree with virtually everything you read. Then you find a paragraph toward the end that causes your brow to furrow. You underline the sentence about being willing to die for your beliefs and put it next to a picture of fucking Mohammed Atta [3]. Then you take your snapshot: Frankl says Mohammed Atta is an example of the highest form of purpose and meaning in human life. Based on that, the rest of the book can be dismissed as an intolerable incitement to fanaticism and murder. You cast it on to the bonfire, along with Mein Kampf, The Art of the Deal, Atlas Shrugged and the rest of the worst of best-selling twentieth century dreck.
A stray thought: could this hateful principle, seemingly applauding fanaticism, have possibly come from the same book by the same Victor Frankl portrayed here?Remove nuance from any conversation and all that’s left is simplistic folly, or worse.
iv
When my weekend of agitated distraction was about to begin I had an ambitious, perfectly achievable, though challenging, plan. I was optimistic about making a good start on it, with two days to myself, before my concentration was shattered by an intolerably annoying personal sideshow I was unable to put out of my mind for long. My goal is a 3,000 word publishable abstract of my 1,200 page manuscript about my father’s life and times. This would be published somewhere and I would send the enticing published clip out to literary agents to try to hook one to sell the book proposal, to get me some money, an advance from a publisher. I will take the first step now:
[1] I went searching for the exact quote, as I am bad at exact quotes in spite of having a better than average overall memory and spending hours daily carefully weighing words. You’d think I’d be better at quotations, but I really am quite lousy at getting them perfectly correct. I get the sense, almost never remember the exact words.
My own copy of Steig’s masterpiece is buried somewhere in my apartment. I found nothing on-line to enable me to give you the exact, perfect Steig quote (he was a master of language in addition to being a great artist). I provide a link to a short animated clip, an advertisement of the copyright holders for the very best of perhaps six hideous video versions of this marvelous book read aloud on the internet. I am seriously considering plunking down my $1.99, this is a beautifully done animation and aloud reading of one of the great books of all time.
[2] Excellent description and review of the Steig masterpiece, complete with quotes (yay!) and selected illustrations: HERE.
[3] Mohammed Atta was one of the 9/11 suicide terrorists who flew two 747s into the World Trade Center. His face, in the single snapshot of him most people have seen, is a mask of hatred. The nervous Sekhnet and I were at JFK airport for a flight to Spain, around 2005. She had some anxiety about the flight, and time pressure (due to my habit of arriving at the last moment), and asked me to arrive with her three or four hours prior to our flight time, to avoid stress, and I had agreed. While she slept contentedly on a bench in the terminal I walked around aimlessly with our valuables, sullenly counting the wasted minutes. Over the PA there was an announcement asking Mohammed Atta to please come to such and such a desk. The announcement was repeated several times. I was glad Sekhnet was asleep, and figured the name they were calling over and over must be a common one in some parts of the world.
People are unfair to the President of the United States of America, as they so often are to the true, unapologetic geniuses walking among us. It is reported the U.S. president “attacked” our NATO allies, calling them cheap, demanding that they pay more into NATO’s military budget, claiming afterwards that they had agreed to his new terms. Immediately after those remarks the French leader said there had been no such agreement. The leader of Germany has never shown much respect for our president — he offered her some advice, told her what she needs to do for political survival, as he smoothly told one of Rupert Murdoch’s TV hosts in Britain the other day, but she, sadly, appears to be doing exactly the opposite. He took some modest credit for the great feeling of collegiality at the recent NATO meeting, something he said never existed until recently, when, presumably, someone of his caliber finally came into the room.
His meeting with Vladimir Putin on Monday, we learn, no surprise, will be secret, mano a mano; apparently no other witnesses, no recordings, no official record of any kind. Just the account that will be given of the meeting by two world leaders who have never lied about anything, nor have they ever agreed to lie about anything, nor would either ever have the slightest motive to lie about anything, clearly. No point to unfairly mention Cheney and Dubya’s controversial top secret, tandem testimony, not under oath, to the 9/11 Commission they reluctantly agreed to allow to proceed. I’m not going to knock our current president, he’s had a very challenging life, is constantly treated very unfairly by many, many, many corrupt liars and gets so little credit for his many towering and historic achievements from our communistic mass media.
One of the people who attacked the current president, while our leader was still a candidate, texted terrible things about him, this FBI man and one-time member of Robert Mueller’s team on the witch-hunt to find some kind of corruption to link to the highly principled POTUS. This Peter Strzok as much as called him a “fucking asshole”. When the defamation laws are tightened up (and truth is no longer an absolute defense to the charge of speaking words that harm another’s reputation) people like him will face justice. For now, he was dragged into a Congressional Hearing to explain to hostile interrogators what the fuck he was fucking doing texting these vicious, personal opinions to another FBI employee he was having an extra-marital affair with. Instead of apologizing, the adulterer Strzok was defiant. He said this, among other inflammatory things:
Peter Strzok: “That was written late at night, off the cuff, and it was in response to a series of events that included then-candidate Trump insulting the immigrant family of a fallen war hero. And my presumption, based on that horrible, disgusting behavior, that the American population would not elect somebody demonstrating that behavior to be president of the United States. It was, in no way, unequivocally, any suggestion that me, the FBI would take any action whatsoever to improperly impact the electoral process.”
That dickhead’s words speak for themselves. Traitor.
I thought the NY Times was too respectable a paper to publish outright mockery of America’s president. Apparently I was sadly mistaken. Not only did the fuckers splash headlines about 12 Russians indicted today for hacking the Democratic National Committee’s emails and other records, the president “trying to repair damage after criticizing British leader,” another headline reading, with leering suggestiveness, that he “Invited the Russians to Hack Clinton. Were They Listening?” but they also published a disrespectful, even humiliating little video of disgusting Brits ‘taking the piss’ on the NY Times website. The disrespect for our commander-in-chief that these fucking out of control goddamned Brits mirthfully displayed when our president came to tell their head of state she’s wrong and misguided, and that her extreme right-wing political rivals are smart and with the times? Fuck those fucking so-called “protesters”, you know what I’m saying? Totally unfair.
If you have a morbid curiosity about the depths the failing NY Times will now sink to in their hysterical hatred of our blameless leader, click here.
No idea where the president got this particular spokesreptile, Alex Azar (no offense to snakes and lizards) but check out this beautiful attempt at auto-fellatio yesterday in response to the nettlesome question of why the administration has been unable to comply with a federal judge’s order to reunite families: to wit, 3,000 children forcibly taken from their parents at the southern border:
Health and Human Service Secretary Alex Azar: “It is one of the great acts of American generosity and charity, what we are doing for these unaccompanied kids who are smuggled into our country or come across illegally.”
source(hear the quote for yourself, spoken yesterday to Wolf Blitzer, on TV)
Here is CNN’s own account of the conversation (you can see that, in context, it’s not quite as simple as I made it sound above, but that’s just nuance).
Azar is the administration official who told the Senate Finance Committee recently that it would be easy to reunite children forcibly separated from their parents. It was a matter of a couple of keystrokes, he said on June 26, to find any detained child on the government database. He claimed “hundreds” of children had already been reunited with parents and gave the numbers to back it up: 2,047 currently in HHS custody, down from about 2,300. These claims were soon belied by many other reports, even by HHS’s updated numbers of detained children separated from parents (up now by about 1,000 from the 2,047 figure). This is often the case with claims made by those speaking for our compulsively untruthful commander-in-chief. Here you go.
I am sure Mr. Azar is as highly qualified for his position as Betsey DeVos is for her position as Czar of Public Education, or Ben Carson is for his stewardship of all federally subsidized public housing in the the United States, or Jared Kushner is for solving the Opioid Epidemic and making peace between Israel and the Palestinians, or as the environment-hostile Scott Pruitt was to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Mr. Azar is possibly even as highly qualified as the president himself, even as the cruel president doubles down to escalate a bullying, counterproductive, unwinnable trade war with America’s enemies and allies alike. But let us parse this “great act of American generosity and charity”.
The hateful program designed to terrorize those thinking of fleeing terror and seeking refuge in the United States is blandly called Family Separation. Reads much better than Forcible, Possibly Permanent, Removal of Children from Asylum Seeking Parents, (and you get no receipt for your fucking kid, who we will send hundreds of miles away with no records kept, s-word asshole) in Order to Deliberately Terrorize Asylum Seekers, no?
The president and his spokespeople freely admitted that the program was designed to scare would-be asylum seekers from coming to our borders. It was designed to inspire the greatest terror someone fleeing persecution could ever face: the loss of the little brown children whose lives they are fleeing to protect. Make no mistake about the class and race-based animus at work here: the despicable program is directed against impoverished brown people, not Aryans, the kind of genetic material, the best people, the very best of the best, that the president wishes were clamoring to enter the United States instead of these brown, raping hordes.
The diminutive, racist Attorney General sharpens this to a finer legal point. We are no longer allowing asylum applications based on reasonable fear of deadly violence to those fleeing domestic violence or gang violence.
He points out, as defenders of the Ku Klux Klan did successfully for generations, that gang violence is not “state-sponsored”. See, this is a supremely important legal distinction. When the Klan tortured and hung a Negro who didn’t know his place it was never “state action”, the kind of thing that would have triggered the federal laws made to enforce the long-slumbering Fourteenth Amendment. Since it was not “state action”, you understand, it was solely within the province of the individual state to convene a jury to decide, if a trial was even necessary, whether the allegedly murdered black person had crossed a goddamned line that would have made any white person justifiably enraged enough to kill him. Nothing to see here, says Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, as so many of his ilk pompously intoned since before he was even a glint in his racist pappy’s eye.
Peter Fonda, an actor currently promoting some project, angrily tweeted that Barron Trump, son of the president and his third wife, Melania, should be ripped from Melania’s arms, that she might wail in agony to her supremely cruel husband (I think Fonda used the less precise adjective “asshole”) as the mothers of the forcibly seized young children wail to their husbands, if their husbands have not already been killed by the forces the US now claims no longer constitute “reasonable fear of persecution” for purposes of political asylum. Fonda was forced to retract the tweet and apologize, since he was promoting a movie that is probably already being boycotted, based on his outrageously offensive, if morally justified, tweet.
There is only one person in the country who is immune from apologizing for anything: the birdbrain-in-chief whose tweets, while largely incoherent brain farts emanating from his constantly enraged insular cortex, are often clearer than his oral pronouncements, his oral pronouncements, his very fine pronouncements, the repeated, idiotic sounding cadence, the idiotic sounding cadence, repeated, familiar, familiar from reality TV, which is real TV, let there be no doubt, and I repeat, I repeat, because he has, like, you know, the finest words, the best words, the very best words money can buy, and when I say money, I’m talking about money, MONEY, heaven-reaching towers of golden money piled on top of more money than you can ever imagine. I have the greatest words. Your words suck, but my words are the greatest, the best, the finest words. I have the finest words, the best words, and I always get the last word, the last word, the greatest word, the greatest last word. I always get the last word! Which is the greatest word, the greatest word.
In an enraged world, where powerless people are poised, at the slightest provocation, to bite each other’s heads off, nuance disappears. The best explanation I heard of why this happens is the neuroscience of what happens in the insula (insular cortex) when people are angry. This important region of the brain, crucial to our emotional lives, lights up, apparently, whenever we are angry. When the insula is glowing with anger we simply can’t process nuance, can’t make distinctions, can’t make productive comparisons, can only see our anger. People who insist Trump is the worst president ever can quickly get mad enough to insist that fucking Trump is a better president than fucking Bernie Sanders would have been.
We attended a concert for peace at Temple Emmanuel a few months back. A couple of musicians we like very much were performing and it was touted as a concert for peace, Palestinian musicians making music with Israeli musicians. Outside the historic synagogue a small group of angry looking Jews were holding signs, behind a barricade, with a couple of NYC cops flanking them. The signs said this was an anti-Semitic event held by self-hating Jews. I crossed the street to ask what was up. Imagine my surprise to learn that I was about to be a dupe of fucking anti-Semites! I was informed that one of the concert’s sponsors, the New Israel Fund, supported terrorism against Israel.
This claim took me by surprise. I knew nothing about the New Israel fund, and asked how exactly these momzers [1] supported terrorism against Israel. “BDS”, I was told, the anti-Semitic plot to squeeze Israel to death economically so that the Arabs who claim to be Palestinians can overrun it. I felt like I was talking to Stephen Miller, the hatred coming off this one young man was palpable. I told them I’d check out the New Israel Fund, but that as far as I knew, from the artists in the show, I was pretty sure none of them are anti-Semites. My friend crossed the street and took me by the arm at this point. She led me away from the dozen or so protesters who continued to make a ruckus after we headed in to see the show.
For true believers, it suffices merely to have a rationale, a buzzword, to spit in the face of those who refuse to believe. In the case of these protesters, BDS is a tool for modern day Nazis and should be criminalized in America, the sooner the better. Full throated support for BDS is the same, to them, as opposing the criminalization of this specific form of non-violent political coercion. To these angry people, anyone who believes BDS should not be illegal supports BDS and intends to put a dagger through the heart of our beloved Jewish State. Easy peasy, no need for your fucking anti-Semitic nuance you self-hating fucker!
Here is the New Israel Fund’s position on BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction), from their website:
What is NIF’s position on boycott, divestment and sanctions?
The New Israel Fund is committed to strengthening democracy in Israel, supports freedom of speech and promotes non-violent means of expression of belief and conscience. We oppose any attempt to criminalize the legitimate expression of support for any non-violent strategy or tactic, including the global BDS movement which we do not ourselves support.
The NIF does oppose the global (or general) BDS movement, views the use of these tactics as counterproductive, and is concerned that segments of this movement seek to undermine the existence of the state of Israel as a Jewish homeland.
NIF will not fund global BDS activities against Israel nor support organizations that have global BDS programs.
However, NIF opposes the occupation and settlement activities. NIF will thus not exclude support for organizations that lawfully discourage the purchase of goods or use of services from settlements.
Complicated is hard, simple is so much easier. It’s no wonder that buzzwords and the wearing of different colored hats so often carry the day in human affairs.
Keeping the countless gnarly complications in mind, remembering contradictions, comparing everything to your own situation and remembering that while you may be lucky, many just like you are cursed… the endless nuance and supreme challenge of trying to remain fair-minded, pursuing justice, mindful of history’s famously slippery slopes, the dependable unreliability of history, of homo sapiens — it is exhausting just to map it out in a sprawling sentence.
Complicated is difficult, takes too much goddamned work to work your way through, there is no end to complicated. Simple is better, clearly.
Hence the soundbite. The tweet. Slogans. If your slogan does not parse well and fit on a hat, the marketing folks will nix it. A great ad is supremely simple. It hits some essential truth we recognize immediately. The best of them bring tears, so simple, so true! We should make that long distance call to the poignantly adorable child who misses us. Oh, God, it’s all so simple.
Except, of course, that it’s not at all simple. “What do you think of Bernie Sanders?” someone asks simply, though it’s not likely you dislike Sanders or what he stands for based on the way you talk. So, carefully, sensing a mine field as the first few critical comments about him fly around the table, you say: if we remove the personality and the things you just said from the equation and put all the actual issues his campaign raised on the table, I think we’d all agree about most of them. I got as far as the importance of addressing catastrophic climate change before the heavy guns were wheeled into place. Sanders is a self-hating Jew, he only uses his Jewishness for his own purposes, he hates Israel, supports BDS (Boycott, Divest and Sanction Israel) [1] One raises his voice to say he’d vote for Trump before he’d vote for the hypocrite Jew-hater Sanders.
Now everything is simpler, easier to understand. My reflexes were a tad too slow, though I know the right thing to do at a moment like this. It is time to get up from the table and start washing dishes, or at least to clam up. Perhaps sit on a nearby chair and play the ukulele a bit, as this little storm passes. All these options I hope to keep in mind should this kind of thing arise again any time soon. There is no point, no nuance that can be brought up once somebody is peeved enough to say Trump is a better choice than Bernie because Trump loves Israel and Bernie is a grumpy old Jewish Nazi.
Simple: Anyone critical of Israel’s long, often brutal, occupation, and the ticking time bomb of millions of encamped enemies living close by, generations of haters, many raised in hellish, hopeless poverty, many living in camps, literally, with state violence the only means of keeping a lid on the anger of now literally generations of these hopeless and dispossessed people — anti-Semite.
We can agree that Bibi Netanyahu is clearly not an exemplar of the highest Jewish values. He’s a putz, a schmuck, a much smarter Israeli Trump. Fine. Perhaps we can agree that the mildly racist Avigdor Lieberman, former extremist now Israeli Minister of Defense, and his party, to the right of Netanyahu’s right wing group, is not a legitimate force for de-escalating tensions in the seemingly eternal war between former neighbors.
But, let’s keep this simple. BDS, Boycott, Divest and Sanction, the same economic tactics used to exert enough pressure to bring down apartheid in South Africa, is plainly anti-Semitic. Any Jew who thinks it might be a legitimate tactic to employ is simply a Jew hater, end of story.
Sitting here calmly, reflecting dispassionately, it is beyond dispute that there are numerous issues involved in this particular issue of BDS. It equates Israel to the racist South African regime — not entirely fairly. This equation requires its own long, sober conversation. It involves uncomfortable levels of candor, perhaps, or tamping down an angry reflex to dismiss anything comparing Israeli military policies and THINGS THE FUCKING NAZIs used to do.
Breaking down doors at night, grabbing and torturing suspects, an off the books detention or killing when required, doing secret violence here and there to keep the opposition from organizing, or bulldozing an entire block of homes because a terrorist was harbored in one of those homes, or forced relocation, or whatever you want to bring up, are reminiscent of things ruthless armies of occupation routinely do. There is a much larger discussion to be had of the particulars of all these policies.
All this is very uncomfortable terrain to negotiate, even among people who agree about most things in American politics, you have to walk through it very, very slowly, reassuring the other party of your good will at every step. Easier to just say Israel, eternally menaced by a world of haters, is justified no matter what or the equally emotional position that Israel is acting just like the fucking Nazis. The tic to view everything as a dichotomy blinds you to any truths that fall along that human gradient, seamlessly from black, to dark charcoal grey, to grey, to paler, mouse grey, to ash-colored grey, to white.
Truth is hard, true belief is easier. That ease is the reason so many still support their president, even as his policies are already starting to fuck them hard.
There are Israeli peace groups (example) working tirelessly against the right wing forces in Israel which have controlled the government, and the narrative, since a right wing religious fanatic murdered Itzhak Rabin more than twenty years ago. These right wing Israeli officials argue it’s perfectly fine, even restrained, to shoot protesters with live bullets if they come too close to the fence in Gaza. This policy is controversial and complicated, many difficult discussions can be had over whether it’s the best way for Israel to proceed toward any kind of peaceful resolution to the long conflict between Palestinians and Israel..
But, for the moment, let’s keep it simple, folks. Israel is a democracy and our greatest ally in the Middle East (along with Saudi Arabia, but why mention those publicly beheading motherfuckers?) Our U.N. ambassador applauded Israel’s restraint in killing and wounding so relatively few Palestinians in the recent outburst of mass ugliness between these enemy neighbors. Soon after her comments we [3] left the U.N. Human Rights Council who wouldn’t stop bitching about Israel’s use of deadly force against unarmed civilian protesters, even suggesting the shootings by sniper might constitute a war crime.
To cite but one example of the complexities involved. One Israeli peace group, The New Israel Fund, supports the right of people to use protest methods like BDS, or, more precisely, it opposes the proposed U.S. criminalization of BDS (their position is much more nuanced, New Israeli Fund actually explicitly OPPOSES BDS).
Yet to those Jews who seek to keep it simple at all costs, the New Israel Fund supports terrorism by opposing “pro-Israeli” laws to criminalize BDS, thereby supporting BDS and hatred of Israel. The New Israel Fund is a target of angry American Jews who believe Israelis who oppose their government’s extreme right wing tactics are traitors and anti-Semites, no better than Nazis, really. I actually heard this view expressed by a tiny gaggle of disgruntled protesters outside a Palestinian-Israeli peace concert we attended.
Keeping it simple: the New Israel Fund supports terrorism. Boom. End of story, synagogue hosting event is giving a forum to anti-Semites! The great David Broza, anti-Semite. Anyone looking for peace with the enemy– traitor!
The Israeli government’s moral position on the mass shootings at the Gaza-Israel fence is that it gave the Hamas-inspired protesters fair warning: come within this distance of the 37 mile long reinforced fence [2] and we will use deadly force. The warnings were dropped in the form of leaflets, plainly written in Arabic for anyone to read. Fair warning. Come near my fence and I will shoot you, even kill you. Still they came, protesting by the thousands, surging toward the hated fence, threatening to breach it and cause a bloodbath in Israel, whose right to exist they angrily deny.
The failing NY Times reported on the many Palestinian deaths, at least sixty, in the days around Ivanka and Jared’s photo op with Bibi Netanyahu as they cut the ribbon on the controversial U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem. Palestinian and international sources give much higher numbers of dead and wounded at the Gaza fence. Easy enough to dismiss these numbers as fake news, anti-Israel propaganda, since it comes from people who have historically had a bloody ax to grind against Israel. Is there a number of medics shot that is justifiable? Is it legitimate to fire on medical personnel because they are aiding and abetting, by trying to save the lives of, those who surge toward the guns of their hated enemies?
It is so much easier to pick a side and just be on it than to try to consider all sides in an extremely complicated and intractable situation and take nuanced positions on a case by case basis. We can raise arguments about the Palestinian definition of refugees, as the Jerusalem Post apparently did recently. Simple, these fucks are not actual refugees, they just pretend to be victims under a definition they came up with. They can’t leave Gaza? Good for them! The simple view sees good guys and bad guys and good people stick with the good guys. Simple.
I was reminded, even sitting around a table with good friends, warm friends, people I love, all old friends who speak Hebrew and love Israel as much as I do, that some innocent questions are, to be simple about it, not innocent. Say the wrong thing and the conversation is over. Forget the fact that we all likely agree, to one extent or another, about the school to prison pipeline, intergenerational poverty going back directly to slavery, the fossil fuel industry-created denial of plainly observable climate catastrophes as part of a of pattern related to centuries of escalating human pollution, vast, escalating income inequality, the anti-democratic curse of concealing information of great public concern from the voting public, the recent gift of billions in tax breaks to the wealthiest, at the cost of cutting the social safety nets for the most vulnerable, our unforgivable and unaddressed national racism (we can pat ourselves on the back for banning the hateful word “nigger” and replacing it with the great neologism “n-word”, much less offensive!), the imminent dismantling of a woman’s federal right to choose to terminate an unwanted, or dangerous, pregnancy, the inevitable corruption of a democratic system where unlimited campaign money is “free speech” and dark money — if donated in a large enough pile — needn’t ever have its source exposed, as the recently rewritten law provides.
We did not get to this cruel president and his blundering administration by chance. The extremest, greediest billionaires found their donkey to ride to the promised land they’ve been dreaming of since the days of the John Birch Society. The Koch brothers’ wealthy, distant father was a founder of that society. The John Birchers were rich, paranoid men who suspected Dwight D. Eisenhower might be a secret Commie, or at least an unwitting dupe of the goddamned Commies. These canny billionaires built a national infrastructure over the last thirty years or more, methodically, think tank by think tank, state house by state house, created legislative/corporate partnerships, and finally, as the Kochs head toward their reward in heaven (both are old men now) their long-cherished dream has become reality for all of us. The cancerous chickens of our materialistic, profit-worshipping “libertarian” democracy have come home to roost.
It is a certain kind of torment to live in a world as inured to violence as our world is. Millions die violent, hopeless deaths, it’s just the way it is. Cherished principles are so easily tossed aside when policies are addressed directly to our terrors. THEY ARE GOING TO KILL US!!!! So we are morally justified in killing them first. THEY HATE US. Therefore, we can torture them, because if they hate us, fuck them, you know? They already hate us, so torture them, what are you being so squeamish about? They’d do the same to us, probably much worse.
At the same time, when we are calm, we can recognize that hate never conquers hate, that an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind, that we need our most creative, empathetic, ingenious solutions for intractable, historically violent problems, but those are just abstractions. All very exhausting abstractions!
BUILD THE WALL! BUILD THE WALL!!!! BUILD THE WALL!!!! Feels pretty good, actually.
[1] Not only is this a sticky factual issue, with many sources stating that Sanders actually opposes BDS, but there is a related and completely separate issue that is easily elided into “support for BDS”. Do you oppose a law criminalizing BDS? I do, vigorously. Do I support BDS? I don’t. What is Bernie’s position? Truly, I have no fucking idea, though it appears he doesn’t. I’m pretty sure he agrees that criminalizing selected nonviolent political expression is anti-democratic. Which in my book, makes Bernie Sanders no more an anti-Semite than I am– trying my best to live by my Jewish values, including dedication to protecting the weakest among us and not doing what is hateful to us to others.
[2] The fence is actually two parallel barriers built by the Israelis: a formidable one of barbed-wire within Gaza and a 10-foot-high metal “smart fence” packed with surveillance sensors along the Israel demarcation line. A restricted buffer zone as wide as 300 yards is between them. Israel has warned that people in the zone without authorization risk being subjected to deadly force.
The organized Right has had a longtime campaign against the public sphere, continually selling the idea that dynamic private enterprise is always preferable to public program solutions. This is undoubtedly true from the point of view of maximizing profits for private businesses, although it is a dubious claim in many areas, like education, fairness, access to opportunity, good public policy, etc. You’d think the failure of the charter schools and the explosion of privatized for-profit prisons (along with mandatory sentences and vast increases in the number of incarcerated Americans — including, today, the confiscated children of asylum seekers) would put this zombie theory to rest. You’d be wrong. Private freedom trumps improving the public sphere every time. Winners vs. Losers, it doesn’t get any simpler than that, chumps.
I was talking to a friend last night who told me that the only reason he got a decent public education in NYC in the 1960s was because he went to schools with a lot of white kids. He was not a white kid, nor is he a white man today. The elementary school he’d attended in the Bronx was like the one I attended in Queens, outwardly integrated (in the case of the school I went to only after an ugly battle among the parents and teachers) but internally segregated. Each grade had classes ranked from one on down, the one class being the top students, down to two, three, and, in the case of most larger public schools, four, five, six, etc. As my friend reminded me, the further down you went, the more predominantly non-white the classes became.
In my friend’s case, he was in a class closer to the one class every year and as a result had mostly white kids as classmates. Because of that, he got the same education as the local white kids. Expectations were higher for them, and the level of teaching was higher and more challenging. He had the same experience in Junior High School and High School, both schools having populations approximately evenly distributed between “whites”, “blacks” and “Hispanics”. He said the schools he went to are no longer integrated, neighborhood patterns having changed, and we agreed that the schools had probably all declined along with the exodus of “white” kids and the general lowering of educational expectations.
At one point I mentioned that I ‘d grown up about a mile from the birthplace and childhood homes of our current president. I recall my mother telling me that small, intimate P.S. 178, my alma mater, was the top rated public school in New York City. That was one reason some of the parents and teachers were so adamant about not admitting black students from nearby Jamaica. Jamaica was a predominantly black area and the schools there were much lower rated than P.S. 178, obviously.
The neighborhood around the school was called Jamaica Estates, and its tree-lined streets contained mansions and the children of some very rich people. (I grew up in the adjacent, more modest neighborhood called “Flushing”). Many of the kids from Jamaica Estates attended 178. I figured our current president might well have attended the highest rated public school in the city ten years before I did. I’d figured wrong, as Jeeves informed me when I asked what elementary school The Man had attended:
Trump grew up in Jamaica, Queens, and attended the Kew-Forest School from kindergarten through seventh grade. At age 13, he was enrolled in the New York Military Academy, a private boarding school, after his parents discovered that he had made frequent trips into Manhattan without their permission.
Imagine my surprise to find out he’d grown up in Jamaica, among the blacks! Puts the man and his alleged racism in a whole new light, as they say. Then again, not surprising that his parents would raise him to be truly elite — a man of the right people. Good breeding and all that. No need for the best public school in the city, a ten minute walk from his home, when he could meet the children of the truly elite at a private school where his childish bullying could blossom unrestrained by the laws of the schoolyard.
If you go to public school, you never know what kind of ruffian you might encounter as you begin to intimidate your little classmates. In a private school, where the student is also the child of a customer (and the customer, if wealthy, is always right) a lot more leeway can be given for this kind of behavior. In the interest of curbing their son’s impulse to bully, to ignore rules, to put himself always first, the parents sent the young man to military academy. The results speak for themselves.
If you have a limousine waiting to take you wherever you want to go, and a helicopter, and a private jet for longer trips, you are much better off than the sad sack who has to wait for a public subway train at eleven pm and squeeze into a crowded car where he will stand for the long ride home. There is no question about this.
As a matter of public policy, even if only for purposes of reducing traffic and air pollution from millions of cars, it would be best to have a first rate public transportation system in New York City. This, sadly, is not a priority of the wealthy people who make these decisions. As for the people who ride the subways at night, standing room only, fuck ’em. Seriously. What are they going to do about it, no matter how intolerably bad the service gets? Spend $50 for an uber? A rich person need never even know about this situation, and it is certainly not remotely among their problems if a bunch of low-income losers have to stand on a late-night subway train.
Those people who stayed in New Orleans during that hundred year hurricane and flood a few years ago. The question was asked: what, are those motherfuckers stupid? Didn’t they hear the warnings? Couldn’t they have gotten out, moved temporarily to one of their summer homes until the shit blew over in New Orleans? What were they doing on the roofs of their houses, crying for help as alligators, snakes and dead cows floated by? They fully expected the rest of us to save them from their own bad life choices. What can you do with those kind of people?
That’s why many of the most wealthy are so devoted to reducing the size of government so that it can be drowned in a bathtub. The public is dirty, overused, crowded, smelly. The private is clean, comfortable, plenty of space for everyone, smells nice. Why do poor motherfuckers keep acting like there is supposed to be a better choice? Who gets to choose? You, loser?
