Category Archives: current events

Did the Nazis actually win World War Two? (part two)

The following series of frustrating interactions with corporations involved in my medical care got me thinking how thoroughly the world now seems to run on the principles laid out, for corporations, by the famous Nazi party that ran one of the most powerful modern industrialized nations in the world for twelve of their planned thousand year rule.  These principles extend beyond lying, advertising falsely, assuming no responsibility for anything, blaming the victims, into how individual customers are cared for.  Nazi methods, once shocking, are now the routine way masses of people with any kind of problem are treated. 

Sounds overwrought, I know, to compare the now standard corporate runarounds  to techniques perfected in the Third Reich, but bear with me and you may yet be persuaded I am not merely talking through my tin foil yarmulke.  The amount of stamina and self-possession needed to have a corporation fix it’s own error, no matter how minor, is incredible.  We are often exhausted and resigned before we actually get to speak to a human.  This too is part of Nazi-inspired design.  Think about it.

The burden for correcting corporate mistakes always falls to the consumer.  Fair enough, why would a corporation care about a mistake, as long as it’s getting paid?   Profit is the bottom line, not worrying about the gripes of malcontents here and there.  A series of hurdles are erected to limit the number of complaints the lowest paid workers of any corporation will be forced to listen to on any given shift.  

It is fairly standard to have to navigate 3-5 minutes of robotic prompts and advertising, along with requests to stay on the line for a survey about the “service we are about to provide” before being placed on hold to wait for human representatives who are all busy helping other customers.  They urge you to handle your problem via their website, which enables each problem to be dealt with in a fraction of the time (if at all) and at a tiny percentage of the cost of having humans talking to other humans on the phone.

I’m not naive.  I get it.  Hire enough representatives to help everyone you are providing poor service to, without the long waits, and you cut directly into the corporate bottom line.  A ten minute hold, with blaring, nerve jangling muzak, to talk to customer service weeds out a good proportion of the whiners waiting helplessly in line to express how pissed off they are about some trifle or another.  It is simply the way it is done today in our era of global corporatism.   Corporations do what is best for corporate profits and that’s that, ask the U.S. Supreme Court if you don’t believe us.  You got something to say?  Please continue to hold, we thank you for your patience, your business is very important to us.

I was hit with a nice triple or quadruple whammy the other day just trying to get renewals for prescription drugs I’ve been taking daily for the last few years.   After weeks of looking for a physical therapist to help me with my stiff, painful knees who accepts my insurance, I took a break from leaving voicemails that were never returned and walked up to a nearby address provided by my insurance company and next week I’ll be evaluated for PT.  

“Evaluated?” I said, “I just gave you the doctor’s referral, detailing exactly what PT services I need and why.”

“We have to examine you first and submit a report to your insurance company and wait for approval before we can provide any services, that’s the law,” the pleasant receptionist told me.   Then she said that this approval ordinarily takes no more than two weeks.   Which will only make a total of five weeks since I was referred for physical therapy by the doctor who examined me.  

I vented a bit about American medical care, making sure my satirical, semi-humorous presentation was coming through as nonthreatening and ironic.  I was rewarded with a sympathetic smile from the receptionist who told me kindly that it might be less than two weeks, sometimes it’s much faster.

When I got home I followed up again on the status of getting my prescriptions renewed, a blood pressure drug, a statin and megadose Vitamin D, after hours of wasted calls with the corporation who dispenses them.  I’d had a long discussion with a rep named Don, at CVS Caremark, on May 25th.  Don assured me that he’d contact my doctor and get the prescriptions sent over to CVS Caremark, that I’d have the pills long before my dwindling supplies ran out.  

He then asked me to hold one more time, this was 48 minutes or so into our call.  I asked if he needed more information from me.  He told me he didn’t and agreed he could call me back if there was any problem processing the order.

The only problem is, reasonable as this may sound, that is not their corporate procedure.  If the customer does not stay on hold until the very end, the call is recorded as “customer disconnected” which was the notation Don made on my call, after assuring me everything was cool.  It was all cool for Don, why the hell wouldn’t it be?  The man has a job he loves, living the dream.  

Maybe Don wasn’t as amused as the receptionist pretended to be by my witty send-ups of our sickeningly broken profit-driven American health care system.  Maybe he was politely seething under his MAGA hat, imagining this demanding and ruthless prick he was dealing with, someone who expected to just be let off the line after only 48 minutes, at least five of them spent whining at tedious, didactic length, about the corporatocracy we all take for granted as simply the way the world is.

I learned my order was not being processed only by following up ten days later, when I hadn’t received the promised email confirmations of my order.   After only ten minutes on hold, and repeating all of my identifying info again, I was told the notes the corporation had for my May 25th call stated that the customer had prematurely disconnected from call, with the predictable result that no action could be taken on this jerk’s behalf.

An hour into my follow up call I conferenced in the doctor’s office where all the details were laid out by CVS Caremark rep Liz (only authorized to wait on hold for up to two minutes, exactly, she told me as she instructed me what to find out from the doctor’s office).  I put her on the line with the doctor’s receptionist, after a mere 35 second hold for Liz,  in a conference call and continued taking detailed notes.  Everything seemed to be straightened out, at last, and not a moment too soon.

This, sadly, didn’t result in the prompt resolution of my quest to have my prescriptions refilled.  One reason I prefer dealing with my local pharmacy, before they told me a few weeks back that my business was no good there.   I got an email from CVS in error, as it turned out, informing me that only one of my three prescriptions were listed on the order, which was pending.  

I followed the prompts and logged into the CVS Caremark website where I was able to confirm that only one of the three medications my doctor’s receptionist and the CVS Caremark rep had discussed was on order.  

I wrote a note to CVS Caremark in an attempt to fix this, have them update my prescription order, only to find myself in a permanent error loop “you have failed to update your email address” (which I had done by then two or three times).  Twenty five minutes of this was enough to convince me there was a technical problem with the ineptly written code for their website.  In order to get tech support with the website you must be able to send a message, after logging in.  Seamless and fucking brilliant, actually.

I thought of my former friend Andy and his ilk, mad fucking programmers and coders, well-paid guys on the Asperger’s Spectrum with no clue about humans, except as to erring like one.  The “Contact us” link on the website, of course, required you to be logged in.  You can’t contact anyone unless you update your email address in your profile, or even if you do.  Only option is to go through the standard four minutes of robot prompts and hold to wait to talk to a low paid human, who probably can’t help you anyway.  (Turns out she can’t).

Called the doctor’s office two days later to follow up on the status of the prescriptions.  The receptionist told me she’d left me a message.   My phone showed no messages or missed calls, then, when I went to renew the voice mail list, informed me again that it was unable to synchronize my messages because I  was not connected to a data network (I was).  

An hour call with T-Mobile tech support allowed me to hear the voicemail from the doctor’s office, a forty second tour de force of confusion and obtuseness.  I had Sekhnet leave me a voice mail to test it out, make sure the glitch with the voicemail was actually fixed.  “Error.  Unable to synchronize because you are not connected to the data network”.  

Another call to T-Mobile, another hour.  This time I got a $20 credit from the Nazi fucks (T-Mobile is a German corporation, originally) and delivered a few concise, impassioned but not overwrought, analyses of the inhuman treatment we are forced to take for granted in our corporate world that actually got great praise from the Indian kid I was talking to, the guy who granted me the $20 credit for the hassle I was in the middle of.   He “escalated” my complaint and I had a long pleasant chat with Leo, at the next level of tech support expertise, who couldn’t fix the problem either but promised to re-escalate my situation and get back to me ASAP with the fix (a mere 24 hours ago).  Leo sent me a text to this effect, with his identifying information.

 I am still unable to get voice mail, or log-in to CVS “Caremark” to update my prescriptions, but I am assured that everybody is working hard on my case(s) and I’m sincerely promised that everything will work out, as long as I’m as patient as…

By the way, remaining on the line the other day to the bitter end of a long chat with Liz (not to repeat the nonconsensual phone sex I’d had with untruthful Don), I  learned from the CVS Caremark rep that my pharmacy, who she contacted while I held one last time,  was not being paid by my insurance because they hadn’t updated my insurance information on their computer.  They had my old insurance policy listed, with a non-working customer ID number, and their bills submitted under that number were therefore rejected.

I dread to make the follow up call to CVS Caremark, now weeks after my original request to have the prescriptions renewed and filled by them, to find out why only my statin now seems to be on order.  (A few days ago only my blood pressure medication was on file).

In a country that was not obsessed with eternal, existential “competition” to separate God’s chosen winners (ubermenschen) from all the faceless fucking loser parasites (untermenschen, lebensunwertes leben, the “useless eaters”), masses of people with no rights a winner is bound to respect, it would not be quite so difficult to resolve simple fuck ups by the companies we deal with every day.   But that is the kind of dreamy sentiment only someone not sufficiently impressed with the importance of the corporate bottom line would express.  The dreamy Koombaya hallucination of a fucking born loser (note: most of us losers are born that way, as is the case for most winners).

“Please continue to hold, the Obersturmbannführer will be on the line shortly to facilitate your unrequested relocation eastward.  Meantime, try to control your fucking blood pressure without drugs, loser.  And dig this five second loop, played over and over at sudden wildly increased volume for the next ten minutes, by our house band, the Ultrasadistic Nervejanglers.  We think you’ll dig it, and if you don’t, oops.  Have a nice day and, please, for the love of all that is holy, continue to hold.”

The case for the Nazis having won World War Two (part one)

Mr. Hitler, one of a small, select group of abused children I love to hate, eventually came to believe it was the Jews, not his violent, enraged, authoritarian father, who had fucked him up.   Hitler blamed the Jews for betraying the glorious German army in November of 1918, the army that was never defeated on the battlefield but only by the “stab in the back”, Jews wielding their fiendish powers to force a victorious, superior army to surrender to their inferiors under humiliating terms.   There are klansmen who feel the same way about the end of the Civil War– that it was the goddamned Negroes… somehow… to blame, for all the horrific shit that followed the unjust loss in the South’s heroic war for control of their homeland, their genteel way of life.   Horrific shit that irrationally angry, out of control Blacks are still trying to blame the damn Whites for, according to the Klan.   These fanatical bigots blame the Blacks for forcing the bigots to intimidate and lynch them so they don’t run amok.   Animals!  Violent revenge is the only answer, scream those who dream only of violent revenge.

One of Hitler’s more perceptive followers, it may have been the club-footed Poisonous Dwarf, master of the casting couch Dr. Josef Goebbels, commented that if the Nazis were victorious they would be seen by future generations as all-time great statesmen, while if they lost the war they started they’d be regarded as history’s greatest criminals.  A smart way to put it, I think.   The third possibility never occurred to the fanatical fuck: we can lose the war, and be regarded as history’s most despicable criminals, and win the peace by influencing the next hundred years of history in profound ways unimaginable now as I execute my children, our dog, my wife and prepare to shoot myself in the mouth following the Fuhrer’s final divinely inspired (or mad — it is not our place to question) order.

After the war, many prominent Nazis were secretly recruited by our country’s new secret intelligence agency, now heading into a long Cold War, for their expertise in dealing with Communists.   These Nazis exerted a certain influence in their adopted country, on the ruthless calculations of the organizations they worked in, but it is more the working methods pioneered by the Nazis in their own country that I am thinking of.  

I will get back to the many common daily experiences in our modern world that are proofs of how profoundly the lessons of the pioneering Nazi media machine have influenced all sorts of commercial, corporate, political and military behaviors that affect all of us every day.  I will argue, for example, that corporate customer service, where you almost never get to speak to the supervisor who can actually do something for you, owes a lot to the Nazi model.  In that model the expendable individual is an afterthought, unless he’s privileged, in which case, you know, he must be helped.  It is the corporate imperative, the needs of the leader, that must always be served.  How these common corporate policies translate into increasing rage, powerlessness, dehumanization, a hopeless willingness to blow everything up, even if it means authoritarianism, is worth having a look at.  I’ll return to this main point in part two.

I am listening to a spirited reading of Hannah Arendt’s contemporaneous account of Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, published in 1963.  The reader, Wanda McCaddon, reads it wonderfully.   It feels like I am hearing the voice of the author herself, who is also a gifted and expressive reader of her own work.  It is hard to stop listening, it is endlessly fascinating, I love it.   I am falling hard for Ms. Arendt (1906-1975), who, quite apparently, didn’t give a rat’s ass who she offended in her quest for the deeper truths of Eichmann’s show trial.  

She shot from the hip, she was hip, she was brilliant, arch and sincere by turns, deeply read in the historical matters she discussed (a native German speaker she devoured primary sources — including the 3,500 page transcript of Eichmann’s pre-trail interviews, in German, and understood every word and nuance Eichmann and the Court, three German-Jewish judges, exchanged), she wrote beautifully, saying clearly whatever was on her mind, managing to offend everybody, and clearly seemed fine with that.  

One example:  in passing she notes that the anti-Semitic Eichmann had been required to read, and been impressed by, Zionist icon Theodore Herzl’s manifesto Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”), the only book the mediocre, uncurious Eichmann had ever read, according to Arendt.  Google refers to the book as a pamphlet, which is even better.

She gives some credence to Eichmann’s claim that the “Final Solution” (kill all of them, especially the babies, the ghastly method arrived at and set forth at the top secret Wannsee Conference, once the previous solutions proved insufficient) was possibly not his preferred way of dealing with the Thousand Year Reich’s intractable Jewish problem.  Eichmann was personally very squeamish, had never killed anyone himself, couldn’t watch gassings or shootings when invited to by death camp commandants,  and hated the idea of mass murder, or so he insisted (Arendt seems to back him up on all but the last of these– he clearly had no problem with mass murder, whatever distaste to the contrary he might have expressed as his life hung in the balance).

The Nazi official initially tasked with getting all Jews to emigrate out of Germany, Eichmann spent a long time formulating various emigration plans.  His basic plan was to get all of the Jews out of Germany, out of German controlled territories, and send them to a Nazi-controlled Jewish State.  Madagascar was one place the Nazis  considered, just send 4-5 million fucking Jews there and let them fight it out with the 4 million fucking Africans already living there, all overseen by impartial Nazi overlords.  

Zionists were understandably outraged by Arendt’s tart suggestion (an ironic aside, clearly) that Eichmann had been, for all intents and purposes, a pragmatic Zionist. She had other unflattering things to say about Zionist leaders, some of whom made pragmatic deals with the Nazis during the war.  These leaders, naturally, preferred less conversation about those pragmatic deals.    Much of what people excoriated Arendt for (many of her most vocal detractors had apparently never read her book)  related to how cooly she seemed to approach the horrendous history she brilliantly outlined, how she used phrases like “grotesque silliness” to refer to some of Eichmann’s more asinine pronouncements, including the stream of cliches he spouted as the noose was placed on his neck.   Her book was not published in Israel, in Hebrew, until 35 years after it’s publication in the U.S.   

I can’t resist an Arendt-tinged thought:  Eichmann’s dream of a Nazi-controlled Jewish state… hmmm… tempting to opine about how, in an odd way, his dream may have come perversely true, at least as shown by the current state’s defense of its most controversial policies, policies that involve the indiscriminate murder of civilians and maintaining concentration camp conditions for many of the millions under their occupation.

What makes a Nazi type is blind obedience to power, a willingness to do whatever is required to show loyalty to your superiors, to advance the infallible leader’s program, and your own career. The Nazis had a word for it, fuhrerprinzip*,  the absolute duty to obey the orders of your supreme leader, orders that are always wise, just and beyond question.   If you are in the party inner circle, the SS, for example, you swear a blood oath of personal loyalty to the leader, loyalty to the death.  No national, moral or personal consideration is of higher value than serving your master with unwavering loyalty.  In fact, you’ve expressly agreed to die before putting anything above the Fuhrer’s commands.

There were, obviously, great rewards for those who climbed the Nazi hierarchy, distinguished themselves by their fanatical devotion to the Fuhrer.    There was not even a need for a highly enough placed Nazi to make any hard sacrifice of beloved things, even if those things were expressly forbidden by Nazi policy.  Hermann Goring, a bloated morphine addict, had a large collection of plundered, incredibly valuable “degenerate art,” art works explicitly banned from Germany.  Vice is fine, if you’re cool, and in a powerful enough post.  Fucking Eichmann had a Jewish mistress in Vienna, although “rassenschande” (“race disgrace”, an anti-miscegenation law like the ones here in the USA for decades) was a serious crime under Hitler.  Just because Nazi policy was at one point to execute homosexuals as degenerates doesn’t mean a high enough ranking Nazi with a taste for boys couldn’t have as many handsome, fit, willing young men as he could requisition.  It just had to be done discreetly.   The rules are always flexible at the top, in any hierarchy, particularly in a corrupt one.  The higher you go the fewer consequences you face, except, perhaps, if you lose the war and face trial for war crimes.  God, how much does that suck?

One looks in vain for a rational “ideology” in any totalitarian state.   The role of the citizen in an authoritarian regime is not to understand the changing whims of her superiors, or the ostensible reasons for them, in fact, the real reasons are rarely, if ever, revealed to citizens.  The citizen’s only duty is obedience to authority and for that reason commands are put in the simplest, most compelling terms.   The choice is obedience or severe punishment, often death. 

The roster of top Nazis, people with the arbitrary power of life and death over everybody under their authority,  is a Who’s Who of disturbingly mediocre and often disturbingly disturbed individuals.  Don’t look for consistency, or a coherent worldview in the Third Reich, outside of power and blind ambition.  Look for ambitious, morally flexible people twisted by a charismatic sociopath’s shabby revenge fantasy, thirstily chasing their dream of power and a chance to be a major player on the stage of world history.  How many followers would Mr. Hitler, the world’s most photographed man in his day, Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1938, a mega-celebrity in the pre-television age, eventually a super-villain to rival any,  have had on Twitter?   I shudder to think.  

Speaking of unwavering consistency in one’s iron-clad beliefs, we learn from Arendt that Hitler himself, history’s most virulent and prolifically mass murdering anti-Semite, had literally something like four hundred Jews (356, actually) he personally spared, for one reason or another.  I thought about this for a long time before coming to the obvious answer.   The reason Hitler exempted hundreds of Jews from his death sentence was the same reason he killed millions of other Jews– because he was insane.

Eichmann, when he was read into the “Final Solution” at the Wannsee Conference, where he acted as secretary, taking the minutes of the secret meeting (which were, of course, destroyed) became officially designated a “bearer of secrets.”  This designation meant he had to strictly abide by strict Language Regulations, use only the Nazi sanctioned euphemistic language to refer to the secret mass-murder, words like sonderbehandlung (special treatment) instead of “expedited trip to the death camp,” mild phrases like “resettlement in the east” (Auschwitz).   Lying this way was required of all “secrets bearers” and everybody else.  

The Nazis were cynical masters of euphemism, they seemed to get a kick out of it, a kind of Nazi puckishness at work.   This Nazi tic has been widely imitated by many of today’s leaders and industries, who speak reassuringly out of their asses while committing unspeakable secret evils.  Here in the USA the proposed Clear Skies Act [1], is as good an example as that famous Nazi sign over Auschwitz, Arbeit Macht Frei (work liberates).   Goldman-Sachs, major players in, and beneficiaries of, the massive systemic  financial frauds of  a decade ago, are sponsors of the great Terry Gross’s Fresh Air.  The Koch Brothers, now sponsors of the NY Yankees broadcasts, tout their commitment to a level playing field for the permanent underclass.

The Nazis were famous for the audacity of their lies.  Why tell the truth when a lie can immediately galvanize a nation, if it is told over and over and anyone who contradicts it can be given special treatment, or resettled in the east?  The “Big Lie” was a technique pioneered by Reichsminister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, lady’s man Dr. Josef Goebbels.  You repeat the most inflammatory lie you can think of, the one that will cause maximum fear and rage against the enemy, over and over.  The bigger the better, say it over and over in the mass media, hammer it every day, many times a day.  If people don’t actually believe it, the constant repetition of the lie wears down their ability to actively disbelieve it after enough repetitions.  The only thing that is needed for the Big Lie to become the practical truth is to silence all other voices when you broadcast the lie.

The Nazi state immediately Nazified one profession after another (gleichshaltung — “coordination”) and took complete control over the mass media.  Every newspaper article, magazine piece, radio broadcast and newsreel was prepared and supervised by Nazis.  Every news source told the same story.  Truthfulness and lying in the mass media become irrelevant if there is no way for a citizen to hear an opposing view or verify as fact anything claimed on the state run mass media.  Dictators appreciate the flexibility that kind of control of public opinion affords.

Tell an audacious lie, a shocking lie.  Your hated opponent is planning a vast betrayal!  Here is the fake proof, look!   Here is one of the conspirator’s full confession, with pictures of the guilty looking malefactor.   Dress some German political prisoners in Polish uniforms, shoot them at the German-Polish border et, voila, casus belli for invading Poland!   Doesn’t matter what the lie is, as long as it makes your followers’ blood boil, prepares them for the just, merciless retaliation of the State that will be done in their names.   Things like children being plucked from their mother’s arms, thrown on the ground as the wailing mother is shot…. nobody needs to know about something like that.  You know?  Cattle cars crammed full of doomed “enemies of the State” continuously running to massive death factories in the East, merely lies told by those who hate our Nazi freedom.

The first thing a dictator must do is destroy the credibility of his enemies.  Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?  Sheesh.   The mass murder of the fucking Jews?  Really?  Are you kidding me? Who would do something like that? Fucking Jew propaganda, don’t fall for it, son.  You know what they’re like, how treacherous they are.  They’ll stop at nothing to seduce or rape all our women, our daughters, our mothers, our sisters, our wives, dig up the corpses of our grandmothers, rape them, these fucking people…. obsessed with corrupting our DNA, you know what they’re like!  Why would you believe them when your Fuhrer is standing right here, telling you what you already know, that they’re fucking liars?

Can I get a nice “Heil Hitler!” mein friends?

 (to be continued)

 

[*]  The Führerprinzip [ˈfyːʀɐpʀɪnˌtsiːp]  (German for “leader principle”) prescribed the fundamental basis of political authority in the governmental structures of the Third Reich.

[1]    The beautifully named law Dubya Bush proposed would have allowed industrial polluters to spew toxins in the air if the cost of not doing so would be prohibitively expensive to the polluters:

 Environmentalists were already worried about a 2003 EPA rule that weakens the “New Source Review” provision (1977) of the Clean Air Act.  This means that when industrial facilities make upgrades to plants that increase air pollution, even by hundreds of thousands of tons, if the improvements cost less than 20% of the replacement value of the “process units,” the plant doesn’t have to install modern pollution controls. According to one study, the failure to install modern pollution controls at 51 plants (involved in enforcement cases) is responsible for 5,000 to 9,000 premature deaths and 80,000 to 120,000 asthma attacks every year.

 source

Lessons from Eichmann

My picture of this evil motherfucker has long been of a diligent bureaucrat, a clerk, a banal, unremarkable man, a fanatical assistant fanatically doing his infernal job.  I got the banality idea from Hannah Arendt who covered the 1961 trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem and wrote about the stupid ordinariness of Eichmann.  I read one of the long New Yorker essays that later was incorporated into the book, it may have been the essay that gave the book its famous subtitle: A Report on the Banality of Evil.  The real danger, she wrote, was not from “monsters” or evil outliers but from ordinary people doing horrible things in the name of some insane idea they slavishly, even moronically, believe in. [1]   Fucking happens all the time.  It was only recently that I understood that Adolf Eichmann was also this guy, with the death’s head on his fucking hat:

Eichmann_1942.jpg

Eichmann never completed high school, and wasn’t one of the major architects or engineers of the Final Solution, Mr. Hitler’s ultimate idea of what to do with people he imagined were inferior, terminally toxic and devoted to the destruction of the great Aryan “master race”.   Eichmann was simply the hardworking Nazi who kept the trains to the death camps packed, running on a tight schedule, made sure the killing machine was up and running full bore at all times.  Mr. Hitler, we note, was a famously insane monster, as ragingly mad as he was mediocre.   Just look at these two pictures, I think it’s enough said:

 

baby Hitler with adult Hitler.jpg

Israeli agents tracked and captured Eichmann, who was living incognito in Argentina. Thankfully, they didn’t find his location and drop a Hellfire missile on his fastidious Nazi ass from a Predator drone.  The technology didn’t exist in 1961, but the Israeli agents who caught him could have just as easily gagged him, hung him upside down, made a few deep cuts and let him die a long, slow, painful death.    Instead they kidnapped the mass murdering bureaucrat and brought him back to face justice in Jerusalem.

To face justice, let us think for a moment about what this means.   Setting out the crimes charged, publicly, in a way a jury can understand.  Making the case by presenting witnesses, victims, other documentary evidence.  Letting the accused defend himself against the charges.  Arriving at a just outcome after a fair and open trial.

Justice requires this careful process, making sure the State is only punishing someone who has been shown to be guilty of the specific crimes charged, beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt.  Justice isn’t taking Saddam Hussein out of his cell in the middle of the night, after a summary secret trial, and hanging him in secret, the only record a blurry cellphone video.  That’s called Texas Justice, which is another euphemism for lynching.   Texas, the state that leads the world in executions, and before that led the world in necktie parties.   Not always after a fair and impartial trial, heh, no, not always, pardner.  Not the way justice, also known as fairness, is arrived at, needless to say.

Eichmann’s trial made must-see TV in 1961, it was filmed live by a camera crew, directed by an American filmmaker who’d been blacklisted during the dark days of McCarthyism, and broadcast daily.  It was broadcast worldwide (in over thirty countries)  by an American television network.   The BBC made an excellent film about the televised trial, The Eichmann Show, that incorporates Eichmann himself maintaining his grim composure in that glass cube and includes some of the horrific footage shown to the world for the first time during that trial.  You can see the movie on Netflix, I recommend it.  Eichmann sat in the specially constructed bulletproof glass  booth, two armed guards behind him.  He sits there listening, usually impassively, sometimes looking like this:

 

Eichman 1960.jpg 

The banal bureaucrat, who made sure millions were shipped out to be murdered with maximum efficiency, showed little emotion as a hundred and twelve survivors described the living hell Eichmann had done his best to make possible.   Then he was forced, along with the people packed into the gigantic courtroom in Jerusalem and the rest of the worldwide viewing audience, to watch clip after clip from movies taken by the Nazis, showing life and death in the death camps.  

These clips were shown on TV, the monstrous images broadcast everywhere to be seen by the world for the first time.  Walking skeletons, a bulldozer pushing a hundred jiggling skin-covered skeletons into a burial pit, hopeless, emaciated faces, expressionless, dragging dead comrades.   The kind of visceral, moving images that, in a much smaller dose, made me projectile vomit when I first saw them as a kid.  [2]

In 1961, for the first time, the world saw the visual proof of what the Nazis actually did to fulfill their murderous Fuhrer’s wildest dreams during their Thousand Year Reich.  What doomed Eichmann was not merely the stories told by the one hundred and twelve traumatized survivors who testified, it was also the documentary footage shot by the Nazis themselves.  The Nazis considered what they were doing God’s work, as their type always does.  God wanted them to kill all Jews, Gypsies, Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats, Homosexuals, Intellectuals, non-fascist leadership, genetic defectives and enemies of every kind.  Hitler told them so, and clearly, Hitler, chosen by God Himself as Germany’s savior, knew best what God wanted.   Eichmann appeared to have no regrets, he was only doing his job and he did it at a very high level, a level he seemed to be proud of.  Not everybody can handle overseeing the killing of several million people!   He bragged about being ready to leap laughing into his grave, so satisfied at the millions he’d killed.

 

Eichman quizzical.jpg

The young state of Israel did not have the death penalty.  When Eichmann was found guilty, apparently still convinced he’d committed no crime, the Israeli judge said that although they did not have the death penalty in Israel they’d make an exception in Mr. Eichmann’s case.

Shortly before he was executed, after his appeal failed in the Israeli Supreme Court, Eichmann wrote a request for clemency.

EICHMANN-simian fear grin and handwriting.jpg

That’s part of his clemency request, I love the photo, his great expression, and the way someone has composited it next to his meticulously neat handwriting. Here is the last paragraph of his request for clemency [3], written in a slightly more harried hand:

Eichmann request for clemency.jpg

The request was denied.

My thoughts went from Eichmann in Jerusalem to Jerusalem today, the divided, bitterly contested holy city that now is home to the new U.S. Consulate General in Israel.   A former lunatic fringe right-wing extremist member of Israeli Parliament, Avigdor Lieberman, a Jew from the Soviet Union, is now Defense Minister of Israel under Prime Minister Netanyahu.  Lieberman’s party is called “Israel is our home”, meaning, for their purposes, “not your fucking home, Arab scum”.   He has had many radical, often ugly, proposals for how to deal with Arabs in Israel and the occupied territories he believes God gave to Israel.  Under his orders Israel now shoots to kill anyone who opposes Israel or its eternal, aggressive, often brutal occupation of land captured in the 1967 war.   God, apparently, told Mr. Lieberman it was fine.  

Instead of rubber bullets or water cannons to break up demonstrations, assuming a government has a right to use those brutal, but non-lethal forms of violence against unarmed civilian demonstrators, just shoot these fucks with live ammunition.  It’s fine.  Shoot them in the thigh, in the chest, shoot them without worrying about it, because, as Lieberman says, there are no innocent people in Gaza.   Call them all terrorists and kill as many as you want, let the world’s anti-Semites criticize, they always do, they irrationally hate us, no matter what we do.  Gaza is sometimes called the world’s largest, most densely packed, open air concentration camp.  Only by anti-Semites, according to the Avigdor Liebermans of the world.

It is generally a bad idea to compare people to Nazis, it’s incendiary and tends to end rational conversation.  You wind up arguing the fairness or unfairness of comparing the person or policy to fucking Nazis instead of talking about what you were trying to address before the other N-word came into it.  The Nazis, to a Jewish person, a Gypsy, any perceived enemy of the Nazi state, those who believe in anything but Nazism, were just plain inhuman.  Sure, Eichmann played with his kids after a hard day at the office, a hard day visiting Auschwitz or Treblinka, hearing about the latest poison gas used to exterminate these vermin, but the man was also irredeemably evil, or less emotionally, a war criminal, I think most people would agree.  

Unless, I guess, you like the idea of killing Jews, and the more the merrier.  There are, I do not doubt, people like that.   Very fine people, the finest people, no doubt. Who love their kids, and tell jokes, and strive to help their neighbors, as long as they’re not Jews, Blacks, Immigrants, Muslims, terrorists, union members, intellectuals with their fucking nuance, homosexuals, insatiable parasites on the government tit, people who hate our freedom and don’t want to see our country made great again.

What lessons does the Israeli right wing government take from history, from our own Jewish history?   It is worth thinking about.  You dehumanize an enemy and then it is no problem to have snipers kill as many as necessary to make them shut the fuck up.  In fact, shoot special bullets that explode on contact, causing the most grievous possible injury.  Nothing says somebody wearing a medic’s tunic, or a press vest, is any less subject to being shot in their smug face than the people they are trying to help, the ones throwing rocks, molotov cocktails, trying to cut the wires on the border fence, the ones screaming Death To Israel, the ones demanding, most intolerably, the right to return to their former homes.  Nothing to fucking see here.  One more reason to shoot the press.  No pictures, no problem.  

Ask Eichmann how he felt about those fucking Nazi documentaries of the death camps.  He’d probably have a regret about that. After all, he was a devoted servant only following his master’s orders, trying always to do his very best in the Nazi hierarchy.  Why would his master not destroy those incriminating films? Damn. Everybody now knows, the first thing you do, you burn that shit that could make you face justice.  Shit…

I wonder if Eichmann was thinking about that as several stoic Jews led him to the gallows that long ago night in Jerusalem.  Eichmann apparently conducted himself with dignity at the end, spouting a few final idiotic cliches before he was hanged.

 

[1]   From Amos Elon’s introduction to the republished Eichmann in Jerusalem, a book that apparently met with harsh criticism in some quarters  

Screen shot 2018-06-05 at 6.13.59 PM.png(c) Penguin Books 2006

[2]  The kind of visceral moving images Holocaust Deniers claim is propaganda made by the infernally manipulative Jews themselves. (And truthfully, who among us has not faked his own atrocity films, just to viciously exploit others?)  These historical revisionists also deny any malicious motive for rewriting the historical record, you know, some of their own lawyers and accountants are fucking Jews.  At most, these dodgy history revisers insist, a couple of hundred thousand Jews may have died, maybe, and certainly not as a result of any German policy, if anything those policies were designed to protect the Jews, died not by the Nazis’ hand but of contagious diseases contracted and spread because of their filthy ways.   So much for those never-rinsed asshole ‘historians’.  Don’t even know why I mentioned the little shit stains.   

 

One more from Amos Elon’s intro, to cleanse the palette:

Screen shot 2018-06-05 at 6.44.37 PM.png

and this little gem, from the same intro:

The Israeli psychiatrist who examined Eichmann found him a “completely normal man, more normal, at any rate, than I am after examining him.”

[3]  Eichmann’s handwritten clemency request, not released to the public until almost fifty years after his execution, reads in pertinent part:

  • “[The judges] made a fundamental mistake in that they are not able to empathize with the time and situation in which I found myself during the war years.
  • There is a need to draw a line between the leaders responsible and the people like me forced to serve as mere instruments in the hands of the leaders.
  • Had I been, as the judges assume, the fanatical driving force in the persecution of the Jews, this should have been reflected in a promotion and other rewards, but I was never granted any benefit.
  • I am not able to recognize the court’s ruling as just, and I ask, Your Honor Mr. President, to exercise your right to grant pardons, and order that the death penalty not be carried out.”

source

Grey Skank, on the case!

As much as I sometimes disparage the venerable journal of record, it is one of the most important and influential sources of news in our society.   Recently, because of some shenanigan by Sekhnet who subscribes to the Times for an elderly former neighbor who lives in an institutional hell, isolated, against her will, we both get NYT news clips sent to our phones.   The other day this one arrived.  

The story had been meticulously set out in a long New Yorker profile HERE, (and I wrote about it, more briefly, HERE)  but the NY Times had several more sickening details, gathered recently.

The NY Times headline: 

Origins of an Epidemic: Purdue Pharma Knew Its Opioids Were Widely Abused

the lede: 

A confidential Justice Department report found the company was aware early on that OxyContin was being crushed and snorted for its powerful narcotic, but continued to promote it as less addictive.

by Barry Meier

Purdue Pharma, the company that planted the seeds of the opioid epidemic through its aggressive marketing of OxyContin, has long claimed it was unaware of the powerful opioid painkiller’s growing abuse until years after it went on the market.

But a copy of a confidential Justice Department report shows that federal prosecutors investigating the company found that Purdue Pharma knew about “significant” abuse of OxyContin in the first years after the drug’s introduction in 1996 and concealed that information.

The rest of the article is HERE

Not to fear, a deal was made to keep those responsible out of legal jeopardy back in 2006 and Purdue Pharma’s paid lying fuck had this to say in response to the NYTimes recent fake news story, all evidence to the contrary (and there’s apparently a shitload from before the DOJ let the Sacklers and their company off the hook more than a decade ago):

A spokesman for Purdue Pharma, Robert Josephson, declined to comment on the allegations in the report but said the company was involved in efforts to address opioid abuse.

“Suggesting that activities that last occurred more than 16 years ago are responsible for today’s complex and multifaceted opioid crisis is deeply flawed,” he said in a statement.

Deeply flawed, yes, of course, good line, bitchface, no wonder they pay you the big bucks.  Like corporate cousin Exxon, first to research and find the connection between burning fossil fuel and catastrophic climate change, then funding decades of climate change skepticism.  Deeply flawed to blame a powerful, highly addictive multi-billion dollar profit center, relentlessly and falsely marketed as a safe alternative to the addictive forms of the same drug, for fueling the Opioid Crisis.  Even if, and I say IF (though there is absolutely no ‘if’, as the newly leaked evidence shows), Purdue and the Sacklers knew from the beginning that they were lying to sell a boatload of the highly addictive stuff in every possible way.  

I wonder if Josephson was the former FDA official, later hired by Purdue Pharma, who approved the false and misleading marketing/package insert for Oxycontin that launched the powerful opioid’s meteoric rise to the top of the lucrative opioid drug pyramid [1].  The marketing continued, we know now, long after Purdue and the Sacklers knew all about the widespread abuse of its miracle drug.

The Sackler family, owners of Purdue, always plead ignorance and hide behind a corporate veil, as their ilk always does.   They feel, no doubt, that they’ve already suffered more than enough, having paid an outrageous $653,000,000 in corporate profits back in 2006 in a deal to end the merciless federal witch hunt against them.   If there’s any doubt that these psychopaths are lying about what they knew and when, there’s this:

Then in 1998, as OxyContin’s marketing campaign was taking off, Purdue Pharma learned of a medical journal study that appeared to undercut its central message — that OxyContin, as a long-acting opioid, had less appeal to drug abusers.

In the study, which was published in The Journal of the Canadian Medical Association, researchers from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver interviewed local drug dealers and abusers to learn what legal drugs sold for on the black market. They found that MS Contin commanded the highest price of any prescription opioid with a 30-milligram tablet that cost $1 at a pharmacy bringing up to $40 on the street.

In an accompanying editorial, a Canadian physician, Dr. Brian Goldman, wrote that the findings turned thinking about the supposed safety of long-acting opioids like OxyContin on its head by showing that drug abusers “coveted” such drugs.

“This should ring alarm bells,” Dr. Goldman, who was then a paid speaker for Purdue Pharma, wrote in the editorial.

Purdue Pharma did not send the Canadian study to the F.D.A. or tell its sales representatives about it. Instead, one sales official testified later to a federal grand jury that the company gave him an older survey to show doctors that had concluded that drug abusers were not attracted to time-release opioids.

Mr. Josephson, the Purdue Pharma spokesman, said it was not required to tell the F.D.A. about the Canadian study or editorial. He added that the company did not consider the small study’s results significant because it was already known that morphine could be abused.

The real question, of course, is what kind of fucking traitor leaked these “classified” reports, pages that show the guilty parties had full knowledge of the bad shit their lucrative, fraudulent, abuse-prone baby was causing years before Dubya and Cheney’s DOJ let them quietly off the hook with the corporation paying all fines?

This piquant passage should not pass by un-noted:

The head of the Justice Department’s criminal division at the time, Alice S. Fisher, did not respond to emails seeking comment about the decision not to pursue indictments. That decision followed meetings with a Purdue Pharma defense team whose advisers included Rudolph W. Giuliani, a onetime United States attorney and former New York mayor. Mr. Giuliani, who was then regarded as a potential Republican presidential candidate, is now a legal adviser to Mr. Trump.

Oh, how far the mighty have fallen.  What a fucking country!   God bless these fucking all-powerful, unaccountable winners we have here and God bless these United States of Exceptional Avarice, Death and Shamelessness.  Have a brilliant day!

 

[1] There would have been a neat symmetry to that, but, no, the former FDA weasel for hire was a scumbag named Dr. Curtis Wright:

The F.D.A. approved OxyContin in 1995, for use in treating moderate to severe pain. Purdue had conducted no clinical studies on how addictive or prone to abuse the drug might be. But the F.D.A., in an unusual step, approved a package insert for OxyContin which announced that the drug was safer than rival painkillers, because the patented delayed-absorption mechanism “is believed to reduce the abuse liability.” David Kessler, who ran the F.D.A. at the time, told me that he was “not involved in the approval.” The F.D.A. examiner who oversaw the process, Dr. Curtis Wright, left the agency shortly afterward. Within two years, he had taken a job at Purdue.

source

The War on Drugs

Like the War on Terror, the War on Drugs depends on breaking down doors in the middle of the night, dragging people off and putting all the bad guys out of commission.   The war metaphor underscores the idiocy of this massive program which has locked up tens of thousands of nonviolent drug offenders in American prisons. [1]  War is a violent reaction to a thing that can most often better be addressed in other ways.   Most war is waged, let us be frank here, for the profit of certain powerful parties who have others die for them in noble battle.  When war is not profitable anymore, the lion will lie down and let the lamb snuggle against it.   In the meantime, locking Americans up in privatized prisons is lucrative for the owners of those private prisons.   We need to keep the beds full, or the entire industry could collapse.

Speaking of war as the answer to all problems, at one time we had a War on Poverty here too, until, as Ronald Reagan cracked, “poverty won.”    It did indeed.

This is a somewhat random rant, as I have opined here several times about the moronic nature of this somewhat random War on selected criminalized drugs.   As a society America is very fond of drugs, we are dependent on a host of medicines.  If you have any medical condition whatsoever, we use drugs to cure it.  Ads for various drugs are ubiquitous on television: Ask your doctor if Asseffex is right for you.   If you are depressed: antidepressants.   Anxious: anti-anxiety drugs.   Can’t sleep: sleeping pills.  Need to unwind after a stressful day: alcohol or a tranquilizer. Do you fart?  take this.  Does your leg sometimes shake?  This drug cures RLS.  The list is endless.  

Let us be fair– which would you rather do, take a pill or delve into painful things and make hard choices about your life?   Chronic sleeplessness cured by a pill or by doing the unpleasant work involved in understanding what is actually keeping you sleepless and making needed changes in your life?   Go for the pill.   I’m no-one to talk, I’ve been convinced to take a daily blood pressure lowering pill and a statin to control borderline high cholesterol.  Would I need these if I lost the twenty pounds I need to lose?   Hard to say, and something I may never know.  A doctor friend convinced me to take these medications, she and her husband do.  She made some convincing arguments and I was convinced.   It’s very easy to take the two small pills every evening.

The War on Drugs is a war against certain mood-altering substances that the law chooses to criminalize.   The prevailing attitude among national lawmakers about drugs that only serve to get a person high is that folks should talk to their doctors, or bartenders.  Liquor stores are also a legal and readily available option.   Meanwhile, countless poor bastards have been locked up for the crime of procuring or selling illegal drugs, including marijuana.  The annual price tag for this lost War on Drugs was over $15 billion as of 2009.   When you’re preventing evil, the sky’s the limit, I suppose.    

Why do people become dependent on drugs?  Despair, difficulty with feelings of hopelessness, anger, worthlessness.  People take mood-altering drugs in an attempt to make themselves feel better.   The moment when the effect of the drug is felt is a moment of relief for the drug user, the only time in their day when they momentarily feel OK.   The moment when the effect wears off it’s back feeling shitty again for the user.   It is not hard to identify these impulses.   The hard thing is to be in the middle of a war on the thing that makes you feel a little better, in addition to all your other problems.    Not to say people who get addicted to drugs don’t need help managing their pain, they certainly do, but being hunted and locked up does nothing to help nonviolent people who take something everyday because they feel shitty.

In the case of the futile, destructive, perpetual American War on Drugs, the efforts of our government to use criminal laws and punishment as the only cure for a deep psychological problem only reinforces what right wing extremists have been saying for years: shrink the government and drown it in a bath tub.

We have a fairly shitty medical system here in the U.S., almost nothing as far as our medical records is standardized.  That’s because private enterprise is in charge. Our medical records are considered by these private corporations as proprietary information.   The company that provided the service owns them, may charge you for copies of your own medical records in some cases.  Here’s a hilarious, if also somewhat sour, note in our American medical records song and dance.  

I went for a pre-colonoscopy visit to a gastroenterologist’s office.    The first thing the person interviewing me asked was if I’m still taking oxycodone.   That prescription popped up immediately on the screen when she put my name in.

I’d had the side of my nose sliced open in December, by a surgeon removing a basal cell so tiny it could not be detected by the dermatologist.  I didn’t really understand why the eyebrow length incision was necessary, but I immediately understood, once the anesthetic wore off, that I was in considerable agony.   The surgeon called in a prescription for tylenol with codeine.   I took a pill and the pain quickly subsided.  I took another one four or six hours later, whatever it said on the label, and a third before I went to sleep.  I felt no appreciable high, but the pain was gone.  I felt fine the next day and put aside the bottle with the remaining tablets in it.

“Are you still taking oxycodone?” the pretty receptionist asked.

No, I said, and explained about the intensely painful incision on the left side of my nose.   The opioid prescription was the only medical information that popped up about me when she put my name into the medical database.   I didn’t think much about it at the time, but I am thinking of it now:  good old Jared Kushner!   The president had appointed him to cure the Opioid Crisis (which killed more Americans last year than military veteran suicides [2], homicide by firearm and many other common causes of American death) and, by God, Jared is on the case!  

God bless these United States!

 

[1]  Almost half of all federal prisoners are locked up for drug offenses.  

“Among sentenced prisoners under the jurisdiction of state correctional authorities on December 31, 2015, 15% (197,200 prisoners) had been convicted of a drug offense as their most serious crime.”

source

[2]  Check out the shockingly high number of suicides among female veterans, almost 600% the rate of female civilian suicides 2000-2010

 link 

Why so Pissed, El? (final)

There are many reasons to be angry, no doubt.  Many reasons to be grateful for the miracle of life, also, though those reasons seem not to be as compelling, as demanding of action, as the reasons to be mad.  I’m thinking about the myths we are fed here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.  Not that every nationstate does not have its myths, every culture its signature values, but… fuck.

I think about the record disparity in income we have here now in the land of the American Dream.  Men with $35,000 toilet bowls and others, homeless, arrested for shitting in an alley.   What kind of disgusting person do you have to be to shit in an alley?   Can you blame a cop for roughing up a despicable fucker like that?  

America is ruled by advertising, has long been, but now the ads come directly to our pockets, targeted by algorithms that single us out by expressed preferences.  We elect our public representives  based strictly on advertising, branding and marketing.   Everything we see or hear is “brought to you” by some corporation with the money to bring it.   Sponsors pull out, the show is over.  Ten million people used to watch that shit every week, then something that couldn’t be spun quickly enough is said by the host and, bye bye.   Corporations taking principled stands.  We will not support a celebrity who makes a stink when everybody else on TV supports the next war.  Fuck that, we are Americans!

As individuals, we are powerless in the face of what is done in our names.   The champions we are sometimes allowed to vote for, and I think of recent liberal icons who have been devoted, flexible servants of the status quo, Bill Clinton (the “best Republican president of the 20th century”, our “first black president”) and Barack Obama (“the first black president”), are also men who will make every necessary compromise without flinching.  Every president has to pass the psychopath test before being put on the ballot of one of the major parties.  Some are better than others, but each of them, in crunch time, will do what needs to be done.  Usually that involves dropping some massive fucking bombs and selling billions in the latest killing technology to despots.  Few of us get excited about it anymore.   “It’s just the president being presidential,” spoken in the way disgusted but resigned Red Sox players and fans used to say “that’s just Manny being Manny”, referring to the mercurial superstar’s self-centered childishness.

So we cultivate honesty in our dealings with others.  Sometimes that is more fruitful than at other times.  Not everyone is comfortable with everything being on the table.  Honesty, really, what is that shit actually?  How fucking honest do we want to really be, anyway?

Many people I know have stopped watching the news.  You have a famously rabid bullying (though obsequious to superiors, allegedly) war hawk from the Cheney-Bush administration, elevated to sit at the president’s right hand, foaming at the mouth about Libya-style regime change in Iran.  Everyone recalls how well that went.   The Koch brother’s personal former congressman, elevated to Secretary of State recently by the world’s greatest deal-making winner, vows the most severe sanctions in history if Iran does not stop pursuing nuclear deterrence against the U.S., does not stop meddling in the Middle East.  He announces this with a straight face:  Iran must get the fuck out of fucking Yemen or we will fucking fuck you up.   Says this as we are giving massive military support to our close democratic friends in the House of Saud as they pour the explosions and famine on impoverished Yemen.   So, to avoid massive aggravation, you tune out, turn off the news.  Go on a nice vacation, come back, feel a bit better that life is still good.

Not a bad move, my friends.   Take a nice trip, recharge your batteries.  Look after your health.  If there is nothing we can do about the kind of country we live in, the kind of world we leave to the future, at least grant us the serenity to accept that and try to live as well as we can.   Our lives here are only the wink of an eye, after all, and each of us is suspended by a strand of a spider’s web during that wink.   It behooves us to look within, find peace, be grateful for every beautiful thing in our lives, do a little good wherever we can.  It does. 

There is something perverse in me that cannot look away.  I am driven to gather the available facts, try to understand, to put the jagged puzzle pieces together in this dark, stinking room.  I am fucked up.  I get that.  But it is my life, and my world, and it burns me sometimes that, no matter how clear and convincing the truth is, that mere truth doesn’t mean shit against a nicely spun pile of steaming horse shit.  Hell, in our new post-factual world, you don’t even need to spin that shit– just keep it constantly coming.  Heh, you completely dizzy yet, motherfuckers?

A theory

I was thinking idly the other day, as I so often do, when an obvious theory presented itself to me as I walked.   What makes a man a power-crazed, misogynistic, narcissist?   How does a person become a rigid, sadistic asshole?   As George Grosz famously said, to know this we have to study the humiliations the person underwent.

I had a friend who was the youngest of three boys.   He never felt he got enough attention.  His father seemed indifferent to him and his mother, a charming woman, apparently did not give him quite enough undivided attention when he was young.   I’m not a psychologist, nor do I play one on TV, but I could eventually see by the way he lived his life — intent on adoration, constantly disappointed and betrayed, rigid in any conflict, incapable of useful self-knowledge, needing to get the very best out of any and every deal– that he was a deeply damaged person.  He could not avoid conflict, no matter how gently he tried to control the situation.

In the end these traits made him insufferable.  It was his lack of insight into how extreme his personality was, as much as his quirks themselves, that finally tipped the balance.   I later learned, from his oldest brother, that he has been unable to keep any friends.   SAD!, yes, but not that big a surprise.

This poor devil had unrealizable expectations of life.  He expected to be recognized for his musical genius (he was quite talented) and it burned him that even those closest to him did not give him the props he deserved.   His father, for example, was unable to sit still for a long recital of recent piano works.  Father and adult son sat together in a cousin’s apartment where the concert was played for an audience of one.   As the composer played, his father, seated behind him, began flipping through the CDs on the rack next to him.   He reported how his blood ran cold as the cases clacked, how his spine stiffened as he bitterly forced himself to play the remainder of the new opus for a father still totally unable to focus on his youngest son.   I couldn’t help identifying a bit with the man forced to sit for as long as it took for him to finally recognize his son’s undeniable brilliance.  

We, many of us, have unrealizable expectations of life.  Others manage to realize these unrealizable things, which can serve to stoke our own unrealistic dreams.   At times, it appears, these fabulous accomplishments lead one to sourly ponder the old “be careful what you wish for.”   A terminally unhappy person, dreaming that climbing a certain mountain will make them happy, often finds empty bitterness at that peak as they stand there in what should be blissful triumph.   Certain holes in the soul cannot be filled by accomplishments, no matter how lofty.

I was thinking of the most powerful man in the world.   The first man in his job who is constantly attacking people from his phone.   “The president attacked…” is a common daily lede for current news stories.  He is an innovator, of a certain type.   He has made himself part of history.   From my point of view, my opinion only, he is not making himself a very inspiring part of history.  He is, from all appearances, a bully unconstrained by anything but his own need to dominate others.   How does a person get this way?   Walking uptown last night I had a theory.    

His father was known as something of a tyrant.  He had inherited a small fortune, from a truly entrepreneurial father, and, from an early age (the father died when he was a young teenager) began single-mindedly building that small fortune into a huge fortune.   His methods were sometimes unscrupulous, he cultivated political favors, took advantage of government programs for grants and tax breaks, but he built a huge fortune on his real estate empire.  He had a beloved oldest son who had too much of a conscience, from what I can glean, to take the family fortune to the next level.   They had a falling out, the heir apparent quit (and eventually drank himself to death) and the father had to go to his second choice, a younger son who was a discipline problem.

Much has been made of the relationship between the overbearing mentor father and his tiny million dollar loan and the boy sent to military academy to get some discipline, to become a man.  The kid had crossed a line in his bullying when he bought a batch of switchblades, the better to rule his private school schoolyard, I suppose.   After military academy the grooming of this young mogul-to-be began in earnest.   I had a sudden thought last night– what role did the boy’s mother play in all this?    

The man’s father was born to some wealth, and soon acquired fantastic wealth of his own.   The mother had been born poor, was an immigrant.  It is reported that she went personally to the laundromats they owned in her mink coat, driven by a chauffeur, to collect, and then count, the quarters from the washing machines.  Nothing particularly unnatural about this, I think.  I then thought of the effect on her children of this kind of grasping, coin-counting desperation to feel wealthy and important.  The effect on the young son, seeing his dynamic mother trying to act like an aristocrat.  What values could she have instilled in the boy?  We can only judge these by the man’s behavior.

This very public man has made virtually no mention of his mother, outside of canned comments he repeated over the years about her being beautiful and brilliant.  “An amazing woman,” he will say, using the same adjective he used to describe his Healthcare for All plan, the Wall to keep Mexican rapists out, the record size of the adoring campaign crowds who cheer him and every other product he offers for sale.  I can only imagine, by his overt contempt for women (one only has to picture him lurking menacingly behind his hated rival Crooked Hillary during a debate) that his mother, in some fundamental way, gave him only conditional love and support.   The kind of thing that plants lifelong bitterness deep in the heart.   If love depends on being a certain way… well, what the fucking fuck?  I’ll fucking be that way in fucking spades, bitch.  I’ll show you that certain way!    Goddamn it, you want a certain fucking way?   Here you fucking go, you amazing woman.

(Amazing as my long inability to excavate this desk… find an agent, get to the top of that little mountain of dung I sometimes find myself daydreaming about.)

Why so Pissed, El? (2)

We live in a culture ruled not by a desire to meet everyone’s basic human needs, or even recognize them, but by an unreasoning competitive lust to acquire more than we can possibly use.   We all need food, shelter, clothing, exercise, love, sex, companionship.   We get tasty, cheaply produced toxic foodstuffs, overpriced shelter that is a burden, (if also a major investment), for many citizens, clothing made in countries where labor is cheapest and health and safety regulations least intrusive.  Instead of walking, most of us drive everywhere in fossil-powered cars whose pollution is destroying the planet.  

There is sadly little love in our society, for most people, in part because advertising creates impossible dreams as divorce rates soar.  Sex is often a commodity in our pay to play culture, pornography is readily available to every adolescent with a phone.   Companionship, in the sense of mutually respecting friends spending time together, having a few laughs, exchanging views, is more and more rare.    Look at me right now, I’m typing these words into a void instead of chatting with a friend.   More and more of our communication, as a society, is via what is grotesquely known as Social Media.   It isn’t hard to see why people become internet trolls in this kind of inhuman environment.   Why not take out your frustrations by shitting on your countrymen when nobody can look into your pathetic eyes?

Why so mad, El?  This sick shit is the only game in town, unless you make herculean exertions to get off the grid.   If you choose not to participate in what is euphemistically called the Rat Race, the competition for wealth, you find yourself a sucker betting against the house.   When I was young banks paid a substantial interest rate to hold your money.  If you had a sum you were saving, you could put it into a long-term, federally insured, bank account that paid 10% interest.  This way you could live on a budget and keep up with inflation without putting your savings on a crooked roulette wheel.  Today banks have merged with investment houses and insurance companies, the whole game is a casino.   Rather than FDIC insurance for your life savings in the bank, you have the federal government turning a willfully blind eye to the massive Ponzi Scheme that is our financial industry-driven economy.

In fairness to the ass-dicking architects of this system [1], I have heard there is nothing like taking a dump into a $35,000 toilet bowl.   It may be nice to own as many homes as you want, I suppose, although you have to wonder about why that might be.  In order to allow these masters of the universe to live such lavish lifestyles there are certain sacrifices the rest of us must make.   Not long ago they came up with a brilliant fraud to ensure that this sacrifice by the 95% would be perpetual.   I refer you to Matt Taibbi’s The Divide, pages 38 and 39, for a clear, concise description of the details [2].

You create a system where large sums of money are continually flowing in.  This is necessary for any Ponzi Scheme.  You need a steady flow of money coming in, to pay off people, to pique their greed, to make them invest more, to keep the shell game profitable.   Some unprincipled geniuses realized there was a huge reservoir of money in the housing market and came up with a scheme to defraud unsuspecting losers of billions, perhaps trillions, of dollars.   For all of its intricateness, it is deceptively simple.  You package and sell misleadingly labeled debt.

You allow millions of people to take mortgages they can not possibly afford to keep paying.  Give them “liar’s loans”, it’s not a problem, the point is to create mountains of debt you can package and sell, the more the better.  Make the initial mortgage payments small, it doesn’t matter, you can always add a clause for balloon payments that nobody will read, or understand.   As long as housing prices are going up, these poor suckers can always sell or borrow more money against the rising price of their homes, to keep their nostrils above water.   Meantime, you package these debts into huge bundles you can sell as rock solid investments, sliced into tranches of collateralized debt obligations, or whatever you want to call them.  

To make these bad debts attractive to investors, you get the ratings agencies to assure buyers that the derivatives they are investing in are AAA-rated, nothing safer than a triple A-rated investment product.   You make the transfers and investment opportunities for these toxic assets insanely complicated for anyone outside of the financial sector to begin to understand.   It doesn’t matter as long as you keep paying high interest rates on these toxic investments in the short term.  You make this golden investment opportunities irresistible.  Then you sit back, skim off the vast profits, and wait for more foreclosures to bundle and sell.  

Since we live in a culture where winners are rewarded with obscene wealth, and losers can go fuck off and die, all this makes perfect sense.   Obama’s justice department, along with not holding John Yoo, Mitchell and Jessen, Cheney and the other creators of our torture program accountable (come on! you will say, that would have been politically impossible– and besides, Cheney would have killed everyone), prosecuted nobody for this massive systemic financial fraud against millions of Americans, a fraud that resulted in the loss of gazillions of dollars for pension funds, senior citizens’ life savings, etc.  Suckers walk, yo.

Why so fucking angry, El?  This has always been the way of the world.  You think the serfs had it any better under feudalism?   Why blame perfect presidential candidate Barack Obama for not seriously addressing the most horrific failures of the system? He was no bomb thrower, he was a pragmatist.  He joked about making some “serious Tubmans” when he was out of office.  I have confidence in his abilities, I’m certain he will be the first ex-president to monetize his talents and status to become a billionaire.  Why not dream huge in the land of the American Dream?  

While we have Obama on the waterboard, I understand that the deep hatred he inspired in much of the country, merely by being “biracial”, may have led him to be more cautious than he would have been in a more just, less racist, society.   He faced a racist lynch mob every day of his presidency.  The most vocal leaders of that lynch mob are literally running the Executive branch today.  OK, leave my man out of it, then.

Why am I so fucking mad?  Because of how little choice there is in how to live by merciful human values in a corrupt, morally bankrupt, insatiably appetitive society like ours.  It is nothing to turn children into charred chopped meat somewhere thousands of miles from here, if you spin it as done in the cause of freedom and democracy.  Collateral Damage.  Sanctions against Iraq over the years cost many thousands of Iraqi children their lives, long before “Shock and Awe”, a perpetual war of aggression for no moral or legal reason.  Nothing to see here.   Drones replace “boots on the ground”, American lives are saved.  It’s all good!  We torture… some folks… call us pisher, as my grandfather used to say.   The bottom line is the economy, stupid.  The Stock Market hums along, practices largely the same as they were right before the big transfer of wealth in 2008 that was disastrous to many millions of people worldwide.  

“Nothing to fucking see here, commie bastard.  You want humble people to be left alone?   Where does that ever fucking happen?  I thought you wanted everyone’s basic so-called human needs taken care of?   How does that happen if you want to be left alone?  Asshole.  Grow some balls, go compete, monetize something, instead of whining to nobody about the infernal unfairness of life among the wise apes.  Nobody cares, do you understand me, you stupid loser fuck?  More than that, nobody is even fucking listening.”

I sit here, sucking my teeth, petulant.  I’m mad, yo.  Get me to a laughing academy, eh?  

And, smartly on cue, the spotty but expensive internet service provided by a duopoly headed by the highest paid CEO in the world, winks out.   God bless.

 

 

[1] Apologies to any loving, consensual practitioners of anal intercourse out there.  I don’t mean to disparage anyone’s sexual preference, I just get tired of using “motherfucker” to describe these ruthless motherfuckers.  “Cocksucker” is subject to the same offensive limitations as ass-dicker.  What a fucked up world… I suppose men who behave like the genteel “Planters” of old who raped their slaves for fun and profit are best described as what they are, motherfuckers.  Keep it simple.

[2] On the second of those pages, Taibbi writes:

It was a modern take on the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale.  Big banks took great masses of straw (i.e., the risky home loans of the poor, undocumented and unemployed) and spun it, factory style, into gold (i.e., AAA-rated securities).   They used a technique called securitization that allowed banks and mortgage lenders to take vast pools of home loans belonging to underemployed janitors and immigrants and magically convert them into investments that were ostensibly as safe as Microsoft corporate bonds or the sovereign debt of Luxembourg, but more lucrative than either.

Then we have this “fun fact” about the robust federal investigation into the causes of this great fraud, from page 407.  Try to read it without clenching your jaws after the punchline:

Fun fact:  When the economy crashed in 2008, the federal government formed an investigatory group to look into the causes.  The Financial Crisis Inquiry Committee was given a budget of $9.8.  Committee chairman Phil Angelides acidly noted that this was “roughly one-seventh of the budget of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.”

Meanwhile, that same year the federal drug enforcement budget leaped from $13.275 billion to $15.278 billion.  That meant that just the increase in the national drug enforcement budget for the year of the biggest financial crisis since the Depression was roughly two hundred times the size of the budget for the sole executive branch effort at formally investigating the causes of financial corruption.

The Seven Deadly Sins

Last night I was making a bookmark for a friend I promised months ago I’d send some bookmarks to.  I’d made them months back.  A few were nice, but I’ve mislaid them here in the quivering paper quicksand in this house of constantly shifting stacks of paper.   Most had gibberish writing on them, among the colors and drawings.  I decided to use my fancy Namiki Falcon to inscribe more meaningful words on the new bookmarks.  I made one with the Seven Deadly Sins on it, for handy reference. [1]    

Pride
Greed (avarice)
Lust
Envy (jealousy, covetousness)
Gluttony
Wrath (anger)
Sloth (laziness)

Reading the list I had a minor revelation.  Below the sins I wrote “7 for 7, impressive!”

I don’t have to say any more than that, I think.  Except perhaps to state the obvious, what is lacking in someone who exhibits all seven of these bad traits.

Pride keeps a person thinking they are more important than everybody else, removes empathy.

Lust turns other people into mere vessels for gratification, removes mutuality, makes the objects of lust disposable.

Greed speaks for itself, it places the desires of the self about all else.

Envy, as corrosive an emotion as there is, is an enemy of peace and driver of malice, it keeps bitterness and ill-will simmering.

Gluttony means you will covet and steal someone else’s portion to overfeed yourself.

Wrath is the same as just being mad, fucking nuts — it is the opposite of prudence, if you think about it, since an angry person literally cannot think straight.

Sloth may be the slipperiest sin.   It means you are perpetually too lazy to do the hard work that needs to be done.

Seven for seven! You’ve got to hand it to the motherfucker.   Every cardinal sin on the list and the pious Christian right loves him.  Now that is a unique species of fucking genius!

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[1]   The seven deadly sins, also known as the capital vices or cardinal sins, is a grouping and classification of vices within Christian teachings. … These sins are often thought to be abuses or excessive versions of one’s natural faculties or passions (for example, gluttony abuses one’s desire to eat).   source

A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Medicine Go Down

As we walk through this world of darkness certain things become clear if we live long enough.  It is better to be mild with upset people whenever possible.   Particularly when confronted by someone who is angry, it is best to remain calm, keep your eye on defusing rather than escalating anger.   It’s not easy, and not always possible, but is generally a better way to walk through a violent place than flipping the bird at every one of the many angry, deserving jerks you will encounter here.

Then there is the calculated use of strategically applied reasonableness to attain a desired goal.  Not exactly the same thing as described above, but it’s a smart play. Interim CIA director Gina Haspel, who repeatedly denied the incendiary charge that stripping prisoners naked, freezing or overheating their cages, slamming them against walls, depriving them of sleep for days on end, blasting deafening music, making them engage in forced mock sex (for the cameras), using electrodes, stress positions, hanging with feet barely touching the ground, other fear and terror inducing techniques, amount to torture, backed off ever so slightly in her denials of government wrongdoing.  

These things were all perfectly legal when the CIA did them, Gina Haspel insisted repeatedly, if not 100% uncontroversially, during her confirmation hearing.  “Bloody Gina,” by all reports, was pretty gung-ho about the new freedom to roughly interrogate granted by the top secret Torture Memo[1]  and the $80,000,000 manual of best arguably non-torture practices painstakingly laid out by two patriotic American psychologist/torture tutors, Jessen and Mitchell.  To my knowledge she did not deny that she destroyed evidence of torture conducted under her watch at a “black site” in Thailand.

It was going to be a tight vote for the president’s nominee for CIA director, Ms. Haspel and her allies realized.  So she wrote a heartfelt letter to the top ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner.  The magic words:

While I won’t condemn those that made these hard calls, and I have noted the valuable intelligence collected, the program ultimately did damage to our officers and our standing in the world. With the benefit of hindsight and my experience as a senior agency leader, the enhanced interrogation program is not one the C.I.A. should have undertaken.

source

It seems to have done the trick, precatory (non-legally binding — she promises nothing, , admits nada) language and all.   She should now, with Mark Warner’s vote and a couple of others, have enough votes today to become America’s Next Top Spook.   It is petty, I know, to parse such sincere words as though they were crafted with the help of a lawyer and other partisan hacks, but I can’t help but note just a couple of things.   After-the-fact snideness is about all we get to exercise, much of the time, here in our great, participatory democracy.

I won’t condemn those that made these hard calls

It’s a nitpick, but I love use use of the word “that” to refer to those who insisted torture was legal.  “That,” while acceptable as a reference to a person, is also exclusively used to refer to animals and inanimate objects; “who” is exclusively used for people.   A telltale slip.  Nothing to see here.  Yes, OK, Dick Cheney was a bit of an inanimate object, as were the steely men who made “these hard calls”.   Kind of like a corporate “person”, not something you’d want watching your back in a fox hole, or babysitting for your kids, or meeting in a dark alley.

I also love the principled refusal to condemn the architects of the recent American torture program.  You go!

and I have noted the valuable intelligence collected

So Gina Haspel is sticking to her guns, a woman of principle!  In contrast to the reasoned opinion of every intelligence expert I’ve ever heard on the subject, she is suggesting that torture works.   She will not say it’s not a damned good way to get evil fucks to give up valuable intelligence.   Nope.  The regrettable part, to Haspel and her higher morality, is that it makes us look bad to be secretly doing things that, when leaked, make us look like monsters no better than the people we are torturing, er, interrogating in an enhanced, perfectly legal, or at the very least arguably legal, manner.

Since we are good, and evil people, or people we suspect may be evil, are evil, or quite possibly evil in the case of mere suspects, well, our American secret agents hold themselves to a much higher moral standard than standard morality requires. You see, we only secretly torture us some folks to preserve our higher moral values.  

It is important to grasp this distinction.  Only then can you understand why our highly principled UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, walks out when the Palestinian delegation complains about the fog of tear gas rained from Israeli drones and the dozens of demonstrators killed and many hundreds wounded on the Gaza border with Israel. The NY Times headline today refers to “scores” of Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers in the last two days.  Typical liberal crap– “scores,” while technically accurate, suggests way more than a mere sixty or so, eh, Nikki?

US ambassador Haley defended Israel’s amazing “restraint” in killing and maiming so few of the people who publicly massed to openly hate their freedom.  No other country, she insisted, could have behaved with more restraint.  Then she got up and left as the Palestinian representative began to speak.   The perfect way to show the world how much America cares, how willing we always are to listen.  How much more moral we are than those who self-righteously, hypocritically, attack our higher morality.

“Just a spoon full of sugar
makes the medicine go down,
the medicine go dow-own,
the medicine go down,
just a spoon full of sugar
makes the medicine go down
in the most delightful way!”

 

[1]    Torture, according to that memo, “must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” Yoo also advised that for mental pain or suffering to amount to torture, “it must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years.”     source