Category Archives: current events

Nuance, Context and other quaint notions

There are knee jerks that are almost impossible to resist.   Those knee jerks, now amplified and encouraged by our own private on-line and mass media cheering sections,  rule our world today, certainly our politics.  Right is right and evil is evil and if you try to defend evil I will swat that shit away and wag my finger like Dikembe Motumbo under the basket, as your shot winds up in the third row.   Don’t try that shit in my house!

When I hear somebody say that  God told them to do something, and that thing is bombing a water filtration plant and hospital in a far away land (because the dictator of that land is a modern-day Hitler), causing children to die along with their elders, my knee jerks.  That kid in Florida, Trayvon Martin, when the vigilante with the gun stopped him, whatever the guy with the gun may have said to him, why didn’t the black kid just say “yes, sir.  I’m up from Miami, visiting my family, sir” and get to live another day?  Knee jerk.   When the president does what he’s on record as saying his predecessor was an idiot for considering…. boing, there goes the knee.

Flash the cards, there is no shortage of them.  Abortion: murder of a human soul or a hard choice in a situation where an unwanted child will otherwise come into the world to live a life nobody would wish on it     If you believe God said abortion is murder, that’s the end of the story, bub.  It’s murder if the fetus was put in a thirteen year old’s womb by a rapist, or by the coercion of a sleazy, criminal relative.  Murder if they held the girl down and took turns punching her and raping her.  Murder because, every soul was created by God and the soul comes into being at the moment of conception, because God loves every soul.  

True believers are hard to have a conversation with.  There are no facts you can put forth that will allow them to see things from another perspective.  I’m not singling out hypocritical Christians, doggedly defending the rights of fetuses while letting the little unwanted newborn fuckers fend for themselves.   I am just using rigid religiosity to illustrate this larger point about belief that is impervious to discussion, nuance or context.  We all believe what we believe and we justify those beliefs according to our ability to rationalize.    

I am floundering today, as I try to make this vague yet obvious point clear.  If we omit nuance and context in a discussion, we are just talking opinionated shit at each other. Nuance is the first casualty of absolute moral certainty, any sense of a larger context is killed at the same time.  Not to say there aren’t principles worth fighting for– personal integrity is one, it seems to me, but even there, choosing your battles is very important.  This black and white, red and blue, us and them world we live in is the divided, divisive hell it is for many reasons.  High on the list is a massive failure to acknowledge nuance and context, particularly on the other side of our own beliefs, when talking about particular issues. 

I was surprised to learn, as I was writing a long manuscript about my father’s life, trying to draw every lesson I could from his tragic example, that it is possible to identify with the feelings of a desperate, trapped woman who viciously takes it out on her baby.   The feelings, I say, not the actions.  It’s impossible to identify with the actions, I think.  The actions are despicable, whipping a baby in the face, there’s no defending that.   The feelings, odd to realize, are quite readily understandable.   That’s some fucking nuance right there, dear reader.  Let me try to make it as clear as I saw it that day.

A relative I never met, who was portrayed to me only as red-haired, tiny, very religious and with a terrible temper (also a great cook), turns out also to have whipped her infant son in the face, regularly.   It was part of her daily routine, breaking this toddler’s spirit.  I always assumed she was a psycho, which she most likely also was.  But one day it dawned on me, how tortured this woman was when she began taking it out on her first-born son.    It doesn’t excuse what she did in any way, but it sheds light.  Light is the only antidote to darkness.   It shows a path out of what she was trapped in, even if one didn’t exist for her in 1926 when she began her lifelong persecution of the boy she called “Sonny”.

The man she fell in love with was driven away by her brother and her sister-in-law.  It was nothing personal for them, nothing against the young man who loved her.  It was strictly practical.  Her marriage would have meant the loss of their indentured servant and they weren’t ready to give up their live in maid.   Years later she was forced into an arranged marriage with a man who seemed to be brain damaged. He’d been knocked in the head many times by his own angry step-mother and nobody will ever know if this deadpan man who died young was brain damaged or not.   He couldn’t make a living.   They lived in a filthy, teeming slum, the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in 1922.   Every day the woman woke up to this horror.   Somehow she got pregnant.  The baby girl died shortly after she was born.  

At some point the heartbroken woman got pregnant again.   This time the tiny woman gave birth to a gigantic son.   We can imagine the pain of this childbirth.   The baby looked exactly like the idiotic husband who had knocked her up.   He looked at her with that same dopey expression.   One day the woman snapped, whipped the baby in the face with the thick, heavy, burlap wrapped cord of her iron.   It apparently felt good.  Maybe the only thing in her life that did.

I’m not being a lawyer for this evil mother.   We’d like to think a mother like this today would be in the hands of an excellent psychiatrist.   That her child would be getting help recovering from his trauma.  But what I’m digging for here is Nuance.   Not that she’s in any way right to act in this vicious way, but in order to understand her pathology, on the way to hopefully making life better for all involved, we have to fully know the context of her actions.

I rattle on about this subject tediously often, I’m aware.   We live in a world where every message we get, every bit of news, is curated, structured to support one polarized point of view or another.   It is extremely rare to get the full story about anything, from anyone.  I am always looking for a way to make the point about nuance and context that is not partisan.  I do this animated by the Anne Frank-like faith that most humans, in their hearts, are not haters.   That we are all basically good.

I believe this even as I hate any U.S. president who rains death on people who have no power to do anything but agonize and die, or if they manage to survive, fear and hate.   Few problems have ever been solved by the application of massive deadly force, whether you call it “Freedom on the March” or by any other high-sounding name.  It is of course business as usual,blowing shit up is a driving force of capitalist profit making.  

I felt a surge of hatred when Bill Clinton sent missiles that blew up civilians, destroyed infrastructure they needed to survive.   That same hatred surged through me when George W. Bush ignored millions of us marching in the frigid streets and launched “Shock and Awe”, later declaring victory and lynching Saddam after shooting his two hideous sons in the street like dogs.   As for the massive civilian deaths?  Killing civilians is now blandly called “collateral damage” nothing to get excited about, certainly no war crime, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.   Barack Obama’s extrajudicial murder of the radicalized American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and his teenaged son Abdulrahim a week later– same deal, along with all the other deaths our recent president inflicted on unknown brown people on his secret kill list.

Can we have some fucking nuance, a little context so we can discuss these things intelligently instead of just using force to kill things like Terror, Evil, Haters of our Freedom?  Our previous president told us we were looking forward, not backwards at the architects of  our recent crimes under international law, you know, because we are, uh, taking the high road.   To be totally honest, we tortured some folks, what are you going to do?   Good folks doing some bad shit, with the best of intentions.  

Make American Great Again.   Hope and Change.  Make America Great Again, again.  The slogans change, a few of the proponents of government violence change with each administration, but the song remains the same.  Fuck nuance, fuck context, it feels good when our leader bombs the shit out of some fuckers who might very well be evil.  If nothing else, they really do appear to hate our freedom.  Even pundits who usually seem to have a reasonable grasp of world affairs go momentarily gaga when the president blows some shit up with a huge show of force.   It doesn’t seem possible to me that we are a nation of such stupid motherfuckers.

The evidence is not strong that we are not, but I am always digging for it.

 

 

It’s Really About Who Gets to Write History

My father, who had a lifelong fascination with history and politics, taught me early about the importance of putting dates on things I wanted to remember.   As a boy I showed him a drawing I was proud of and he asked me if I’d written the date on it.   It struck me as an odd thing to ask, to do, it had certainly never occurred to me.  Then he asked an illuminating question.  

“Well, it may not matter to you tomorrow, or next week, when you did this particular drawing.  But what about if  you find this drawing five years from now, or twenty years from now?  Wouldn’t you like to know when you drew it?”   It turned out I would.  

He also taught me to make sure I put a date on any newspaper articles I clipped out. This brought home to me the fascinating idea that time passed, things happened, took their historical place in a long sequence of events, later creations were created based, in part, on earlier ones, more dead people died, others took life, many things happen every day.  All these things had a specific time when they happened.  Like right now, the way I can type April 11, 2018, the day it is now and the day it will never be again.

History is the procession of selected events seen through the lens of what happened before and after the event.   It is this connecting of the things, giving context, explaining the origins of and the events that flowed from the thing, that is the heartbeat of history.   We humans are geniuses of rationalizing, we invent perfectly plausible reasons to support a case we can make, if pressed.  So the history of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency can be told as an idealistic, progressive one, or a particularly racist one during which the Ku Klux Klan rose again and Americans were whipped up by a skillful propaganda campaign and marched off to die in a senseless European war.  

Of course, Wilson’s presidency was also both of those things and more.  Historians tend, like the rest of us, to take sides.   You can be in the school that defends the violence in the former Confederacy as a natural, human reaction to the savagery of former slaves, or you can be in the school that documents and excoriates the violent  racism that halted government services for former slaves in a very short time and ushered in a century of racist terrorism.  It’s hard to be in both camps. History is a moral exercise for those who write and defend their version of the story.  

The building blocks are the events, the facts, things that actually happened, though they may be in dispute or, often, covered up completely.  If we are missing an important thing that happened, a promise that was violated, an unprovoked series of attacks that called for pay back, it’s impossible to understand why two countries go to war, two people begin punching each other, how a problem finally gets worked out.  Assembling the pertinent facts is an important part of figuring out this convoluted, iridescent, free-style human conga line we call history.   

Fact:  We know that on (or around) July 4, 1776 the British colonists in North America served notice of their demand for political independence from the King of England.  The Declaration of Independence speaks of the burning need to dissolve long time political bands and bonds of kinship, language and affection and blah blah blah.   Self-evident truths we hold so, re freedom and equality, as opposed to King George III, [1] who was a merciless fucking tyrant (fact or not fact).  

Fact:  I was momentarily uncertain about what number George the English King our forefathers rebelled against was.  I remembered George III and then wavered.  I suddenly thought it possible he was George IV.   Some part of me just wanted to type IV, I realize now, because it is Roman numerals and it’s cool the way you subtract the lower number from the higher by putting it in front.  

We can all have this verifiable hard info instantly in 2018.   It took me literally five seconds to fact check the correct name of King George III, the bloke our Founding Fathers rebelled against.    We are in an electronic age where everyone who takes a few seconds to do so can instantly be as factually accurate as the greatest minds of the past.  This is now done in seconds.   It behooves every writer of nonfiction to do it frequently.

 For one thing, nothing hurts your credibility as a narrator as instantly as a factual error.   If you say you’ll never forget where you were when you heard Malcolm X was murdered on February 21, 1973, anyone who knows Malcolm was killed in 1965 will instantly know you are full of shit, at the very least about the date.   Those eight years between the event and when you say it happened were full of rich, charged, explosive days.  A billion significant things happened in those eight years of turmoil and hope.   America was one way going into the 1960s, what can be considered the old, conservative way that the MAGA hats dreamily dream of, and another way entirely coming out of the 1960s.   To many it felt like a revolution.  It certainly was a dramatic swing of the pendulum, from 1965 to 1968, to 1969 and into the early seventies.  It has swung hard the other way ever since, IMHO.

The other reason to be accurate is because you can.  Because it is good, in a discussion of any problem you are trying to solve, to have all of the available information on the table.  That’s one reason the increasing lack of transparency in our corporatized society, in our government, drives me mad.    There was a massive U.S. government surveillance program in operation for years.  The conversations and private emails of millions of us were recorded and stored in a searchable database.   Criminals and terrorists were already wary of this kind of shit and generally took measures not to communicate by unsecured means.  The rest of us were not wary, and had no reason to be, as our private communications were being intercepted and stored by the billions.  

Our presidents gave inspirational speeches about our freedoms and our high aspirations as a great democracy, even as secret prisons existed where people were secretly tortured in our names, even as drones killed countless people in several countries, quietly, discreetly.   Even as we were all being illegally spied on by our own government in a massive data mining operation directed against everybody.

A citizen named Edward Snowden made this information public, at the risk of his own life and/or freedom.   Obama said he would prosecute Snowden under the Espionage Act of 1917, amid bitter arguments over whether Snowden was a traitor or a patriot.  The Espionage Act Wilson signed into law criminalized what, to my understanding, would have otherwise been protected speech if it arguably “aided and abetted our enemies” in a war declared mostly for American ambitions on the world stage (and the recovery of billions loaned by our banks to England, France and other “good guys” in that war).  

The Espionage Act carries the death penalty (though I don’t recall anyone being convicted and executed, though a few popular outspoken opponents of the World War spent years locked up behind it).   Under his own legal rationale and precedent, if Obama could have directed a missile at Snowden he would have been within his new presidential rights to have Snowden reduced to a pile of steaming chopped meat.  Other American citizens met that fate even though they were not charged with anything, let alone a crime that carried the death sentence.

Facts are all we have to defend us against incoherence.  They are not magical tools, but they’re the only ones we have to make sense of what is otherwise incomprehensible.   When you read a well-researched, well-told history you get the feeling you understand more than when you read something you cannot help thinking is a bit stilted, written by a partisan.   Was the Klan really the modern-day equivalent of the knights who protected Christendom from infidels as Woodrow Wilson seemed to believe?   (Well, maybe so, if you think about some of the excesses of the Crusades).  I don’t have a ready example at the moment, but hopefully you can take my point.   

When you are given a story with a piece that just doesn’t make sense, you are probably being given a story with a crucial fact or two left out.   This happens quite regularly.   I will tell a story of outrageous, unaccountable customer service in my local post office; the postal supervisor will tell a story of an unappeasable customer with an angry attitude who would not give him a break, or listen to reason, and in the end told him to go fuck himself.   Both stories are true, and even accurate, but both stories leave out crucial pieces that are harmful to the storyteller’s version of events.  

If I hadn’t been frustrated with the lack of acceptable service, or even an explanation for that bad service, things might have gone differently.  Since I grew increasingly frustrated, every time the supervisor called me “sir” it was like he was jabbing me with a sharp blade.   I countered with a tart legal argument about my contract with the Post Office.  That must have enraged the supervisor, who had no answer except ‘machine error.’   Since he’d been repeatedly stabbing me with the indisputable truth and a dozen “sirs” and I was not backing away, the supervisor had to turn up the icy politeness.   An asshole dance needs to be danced by at least one complete asshole, but it usually involves two.

Which reminds me of what sent me to write this in the first place.   Who gets to tell the definitive story?  Clearly, in world events, we must piece together history as best we can, according to our knowledge and our prejudices.  What about in our personal life?  Surely that is a sphere where we can exercise some control that is impossible when understanding and assessing, say, the strange and fabulous career of Donald Trump. [2]

Much in human life is inexplicable, we don’t always proceed by logic or common sense (see, e.g., footnote 2  below).   Some things are explainable and make sense, if we have all the facts.  That affable, funny, affectionate father of yours that your mother spent years enraged at?  Did you know how he regularly put you are your siblings at risk, gambling all of his money on stupid bets that never paid off, resorting to illegal means to get the funds to place these all or nothing bets?   Ah, without that hidden fact, how can you ever understand your mother’s anger?  It was righteous anger, she was mad for a good and concrete reason– every time she was lied to and had to bail the liar out of a legal jam by working overtime to pay his debts.   That he never expressed remorse or gratitude?  The rancid cherry on top of the shit pie.  But we all smile and pretend we understand, even the things we will never know.

The facts matter, they really do.   They are all we have by way of understanding any sequence of events.   As for those who write the final history, they are free to highlight or omit any fact that advances their story.  The feeling of being written out of history?   There is nothing like it.

 

 

[1] I originally called this man King George IV, then had merely to click the first words of the sentence “King George” before “during revolutionary war” popped up and I instantly confirmed that it was indeed as my hunch had it, George III, the guy mad with Porphiria who had his physicians running through the palace halls carrying covered pots containing his stools.  

[2]  I have been wondering lately about the current president’s ill-fated actions in Atlantic City some years ago.  He opened a casino that was very successful.  He had boxes of hundred dollar bills sent to him whenever he asked.  Then, for whatever reason, he opened a second casino, a competitor to his first.  The second one did well too, there seemed to be plenty of business for both.   He then decided to build the world’s largest, most luxurious casino, his Taj Mahal, and borrowed $675,000,000 to build it, at 14% interest.  The Taj opened and it was only a matter of time before all three were bankrupt.  

One can only wonder: what the fuck?   I am at a loss to imagine the rationale, outside of hubris and boundless greed, for opening three businesses to compete against each other, particularly when the first two are making excellent money. There are facts we would need to know to understand this colossal WTF, facts it is unlikely any of us will ever learn.  The story itself tells us a lot, even without the missing WTF?

Crisis Actors and other liberal BULLSHIT

Human imagination is a powerful force in history. Imagination has led to as many great developments in human history as horrific ones, but some of the horrific ones have been doozies.

Why are there so many climate catastrophes in recent years?   Most climate scientists believe these are related to the warming of the oceans, the melting of polar ice, the many signs that our earth’s climate is undergoing an inexorable and deadly shift due to man’s pollution of our biosphere.   

Of course, those scientists, we are angrily informed by self-named Climate Change Skeptics, also hate our freedom, job creation, industry, progress itself.  Occam’s Razor: in the absence of evidence to the contrary, the simplest theory — the one that relies on the fewest assumptions– is usually the best.  Imagine this simple Birther-like truth: God has brought this destruction upon us because we tolerate abominations, like two women loving each other as though one were a man.

Nonchalantly homosexual historian Yuval Noah Harari (LOL!) in his brilliant Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, points out that one of the key things that has allowed homo sapiens to transform itself from an insignificant prey animal into the earth’s alpha predator is our collective ability to believe, organize and act, often with deadly violence, based on dramatic, imaginative stories told passionately enough. 

A young woman in Palestine, a virgin celibately married to an older man, was impregnated by God two thousand years ago.  The child, God’s son, preached a doctrine of love, tolerance, forgiveness, generosity, kindness, peacefulness.   He was then nailed to a cross where he died an agonizing death before being resurrected a few days later.   The most vocal and politically active of his organized American followers today are often intolerant, unforgiving, ungenerous, unkind, warlike.  Jesus weeps beside His father, a deity who is now insane with grief.

The horrific examples of mankind’s imagination at work in the world are too numerous to do more than feint at.   Why were more than fifty million people killed in a five or six year period seventy years ago?[1]  In large part (in Europe, anyway) because one charismatic genius of self-promotion convinced a powerful nation that Jews, Communists, Homosexuals, Gypsies, Slavs, Foreigners, Negroes, Hipsters were responsible for all the evil in the world and needed to be eliminated (or, in the case of the Slavs merely enslaved) in order to Make Germany Great Again.   Now this man, Herr Hitler, was just a lightning rod for these strong feelings, he could not have come to power if the time wasn’t absolutely right, but the time was right, and the rest, as we say, is history. 

We humans are suckers for a good story, a strong, simple story.   Countless billions have been made retelling the eternal human story of suffering and catharsis:  an individual is subjected to a violent trauma, their entire family is killed, but they defy the odds and prevail.   The second act of the story is their undeterrable search for the killer, the finale is their slaughter of the killer, which makes them, and the audience feel immediately  better.   

We collectively rejoice when a violent, evil fuck is violently put down.  If we honestly believe the mother gets relief when she finally hacks the murderer of her children to death, that she’s really all better after she gets her revenge, we are a bit simple-minded, but that’s not the point.  Catharsis through violent revenge is a compelling story, something the Hollywood dream machine runs on, it sells a million tickets, even if it doesn’t hold up well to even a soupcon of scrutiny.  The mother who has violently kicked this particular evil bastard’s ass still has her dead children.

This is all pretty self-evident stuff, like the God-given truth that we are all created equal.   Sit in the back of any criminal courtroom in the U.S. and you can see in very short order how self-evident this truth is, just watch who gets arraigned and picture the other equal citizens who will never be.  As God’s prophets have reminded us:  we reap what we sow.  Unless we are members of a historically despised minority swept up in a nationwide dragnet to keep privatized prisons profitable, or very wealthy, well-connected job creators, way too big to jail.

I just wanted to write a few words about this great leap of human imagination that we are recently hearing put forth as though it is a credible idea: “crisis actors”. 

Remember that story about the maniac in Connecticut who supposedly shot his mother in the face, armed himself to the teeth and went into a nearby school to murder as many kindergarten kids as he could?  It was, we are now being told, a “false flag” operation.  A set up.  To take away our guns.   Yeah, brilliantly simple, actually.   

The rabid left wingers got actors, paid “crisis actors”, to play the supposedly crying parents, the traumatized teachers who were unable to save all their kids.  It was all bullshit, you see, there was no maniac with a semi-automatic weapon raining death on five year-olds at the Sandy Hook Elementary School.  It was typical liberal bullshit, they want you to believe these stories they make up to advance their agenda, so they pay people to pretend there is a crisis that needs addressing.   The only real crisis, of course, is these cynically lying haters who want to steal our liberties.

Look how eager the godless, left-wing corporate media is to gobble up these fake news stories.  You see how they do it?  Show the best of these paid crisis actors over and over and over, whining, crying, tearing their hair, rending their clothing in fake grief.  Who among us has a heart hard enough to resist the tears of the grieving parent of a tiny child who was shot to death?

That’s what these merciless fucking freedom haters are counting on, don’t you know?   That’s why these crisis actors are never lacking for work.  It’s like that godless Jew Saul Alinsky told his followers: exploit whatever is happening to advance your cause.  You must galvanize and organize the community around dramatic, traumatic events. 

And as every unscrupulous, Kool-aid swilling, partisan fuck knows, in a place where there is no chaos to exploit, create it.   Do you see how dangerous this is?  I’ll bet you thought those people you saw recently crying about dead high school kids on TV were real classmates, real teachers, real parents.  Hah!  You fell for it again.  Crisis actors paid by foreign born billionaire traitors like George Soros to take our guns away.

Theodore Herzl, a man with an iconic beard and a dream for a Jewish State, at a time when Jews everywhere were unsafe in the places they were allowed to live (a few generations before the slaughter of most of the Jews in Europe) famously said:  if you will it, it is no dream.  So true, provided you have the money, connections and political smarts to back up your will. 

In the contest for power, those who capture the imagination, feed the emotional needs of the audience, create a compelling story people will line up to hear told, those people will always kick ass.

Imagine a world where that principle was a bit less relentless, if you can.

 

[1]    World War II fatality statistics vary, with estimates of total deaths ranging from 50 million to more than 80 million. The higher figure of over 80 million includes deaths from war-related disease and famine. Civilians killed totaled 50 to 55 million, including 19 to 28 million from war-related disease and famine.

What is worth reading, worth writing

I was flipping through a sketch book yesterday, one I keep in the inside pocket of my winter coat, and noticed many notes I’d stopped to make while listening to podcasts as I walk.   I listen to several history podcasts, a few of which strike me as particularly good because they appear to have no political ax to grind.  As a character played by the great Dennis Hopper once told a character played by the great Christopher Walken, about reading history, “I find that shit fascinating.”

It seems to me, particularly in our current political culture where opinionated “partisans” speak loudly and with supreme confidence from their unwashed lowest sphincters, that the facts of what actually happened when have an important place in the conversation.   I know this marks me as somewhat eccentric.   Many people I know prefer to tune out, rather than talk about, the many aggravating, gigantic subjects that are rubbed in our faces daily.  After all, you know now after a few words where somebody stands on all the most important issues of the day, even the most ignorant are today reflexive “ideologues”.

It feels to me like knowledge actually is a kind of power.  Since we are all potential photojournalists now (think of cellphone videos of unarmed black men shot or choked to death  in confrontations with adrenalized cops), I snapped this photo of a page from my sketchbook on the creeping E train to Sekhnetville last night (hence its less than perfect sharpness, sorry, Sekhnet).  

20180405_204726.jpg

With another click I inexplicably wassupped it to a friend, as the train sat in the darkness near the 67th Avenue station because “there is another train ahead of us.”  A few moments later, as we crept past the next local station,  my friend tapped back words to the effect that, oy!,  I need to read a good novel, take a long walk in a beautiful place, have a vacation.   All true things, but, also, I take this page as an example of these fucking ugly facts not beating my brains in.

The unnaturally Confident Genius-in-chief, a guy with an inferiority complex a mile wide and infinitely deep, has recently called, speaking of talking out of unwashed nether sphincters, for the death penalty for “drug dealers.”   The drug dealers he is referring to are people like the illegal spirits dealers who grew rich and powerful during Prohibition.  The ignorance of the Tangerine Idi Amin (tip of the skull cap to Larry Wilmore) on this notion of solving our epidemic of drug addiction by executing drug kingpins is multi-leveled.   

Why are so many Americans addicted to drugs that make their pain seem to vanish?  The folks who get addicted, it seems to me, have no hope of anything better than making their pain and desperation disappear for a few hours.   The great pleasure of the initial drug experience for addicts, the pleasure that gets them hooked, apparently disappears rather early in addiction.  From then on the game for addicts is not really played for kicks, it’s all about the desperate compulsion to get the drug into the bloodstream to prevent feeling like complete shit.  

Drug addiction is an affliction of despair, of hopelessness.  Give those people an option for a life of connection with others, a productive life of hope and laughs, most of them will choose not to be drug addicts anymore.   This has been seen in place after place where the problem of drug addiction, a disease most addicts are genetically predisposed to,  has been addressed intelligently.  In America we prefer tough love, these criminalized fucks need to spend a few years locked up with violent sociopaths.

I jotted down an arresting stat: more American deaths by drug overdose in 2016 than total American KIA in years of the war in Vietnam.   Fuck.   We beat that record in 2017 and are on a pace in 2018 to beat last year’s record for Americans dead of drug overdose (unless Jared Kushner can find a magic wand to cure the opioid crisis while making peace in the Middle East and avoiding prosecution for what appears to be a string of financial crimes). 

It is a crisis when more people in your country die of drug overdose every year than of gunshot wound, in a country that leads the world by a hefty margin in deaths by gunshot.  The asshole solution: kill the drug dealers.   Duterte in the Philippines does it, why not our own populist president?   So unfair, how come the dictator of a third rate country gets to kill drug dealers, extrajudicially, and the American president, the most powerful man in the world, can’t?  Unfair!   SAD!  It is this two year-old’s level of sophistication that is being brought to bear on our nation’s most vexing problems by our most powerful citizen.  

If the president had a nimble, smart, loyal team of lawyers like Cheney and Bush did, guys who secretly redefined “torture” to make it, arguably, legal for Americans to practice against enemies real and theoretical, he’d soon have the tool in hand he needs to execute drug dealers without trial.  There is already a precedent, two American presidents have openly used it, of killing ‘enemy combatants’ without trial, evidence or any kind of charges against them.  

Obama openly did it to two or three American citizens.  Spin it right, there’s absolutely no problem doing it, you can even joke about it at a press conference, like Obama’s spokesman did when an innocent American teenager and his friends were turned into chopped meat in a remote area in Yemen.   Cheney’s lawyers gave us the president’s absolute right to designate people ‘enemy combatants’, place them on a secret kill list, and have skilled American gamers take them out by remote controlled missiles.  Constitutional law professor and idealist Obama gave the president the right to do this to selected Americans who could be designated ‘enemy combatants’. Word up, Trump.

I pause to reflect on the words of an Iraqi-American doctor, speaking to Brooke Gladstone recently.  He said that when people are not held accountable for their crimes it gives permission for the crimes to continue indefinitely.   When Obama took the famously “high road” on American torture, looking forward and not back (while nobly and folksily admitting ‘we tortured some folks’), he gave the architects and drivers of the recent, widespread American torture program the eternal gift of ongoing silence.  

These creatures who made their bones torturing, first the meaning of the word and then actual humans, continue to live successful lives.  The two fucks who wrote the infamous “torture memo”, government lawyers who claimed it is not torture unless the pain is as severe as the failure of a major organ system, are today quite prosperous and well respected.  One is a tenured-for-life federal judge, the other a tenured professor of, I shit you not, Constitutional Law, at Berkeley.  The two psychologists who reverse engineered the torture program from the SERE manual, and were paid over $80,000,000 for their important work?   Well, they finally had to cough up a few million to private plaintiffs, but that case settled.  Hush money paid, they can get back to their fabulous lives as fabulously wealthy American psychologists.  

Nothing to see here.  Look, we have two completely different systems of law here, one system of justice for the powerful and well-connected, another for losers.  What is news about any of this?

OK, then, who are the Sacklers?   A family name I have a hard time recalling, they currently own Perdue Pharma, a name I can usually recall easily.   I have written about this fabulously wealthy American family, headed by at least three generations of doctors, at least one of whom was an award winning pharmaceutical marketing genius   You can get the bones of their story here, with a link to a thorough, and sickening article about these evil bastards.   Jewish doctors who would make their Nazi colleague Josef Mengele tip his hat to them, if I may be explosively hyperbolic for a moment (nobody here to stop me, I notice).  

What is so evil about the family that created and falsely marketed Oxycontin as a time-released, and therefore low probability of addiction alternative to the other prescription opioids on the market?  For one thing, their widely trumpeted and hugely lucrative claim, inexplicably allowed by the FDA, was total marketing hype not backed by any research at all.  Users intent on getting high have only to crush the pill, et voila, no more time release.  For another thing, the guy at the FDA who approved the false and misleading package insert went on, by sheer coincidence, to work for Perdue Pharma at many times his former salary.   For another, these high society altruists made literally billions on the sale of this overprescribed miracle drug that has been a big driver of the Opioid Crisis.

Many Americans who get addicted to opioids start with a pharmaceutical opioid they, or someone they knew, had prescribed to them by a doctor.  These pills can be quite expensive.  Hard for a drug addict to afford after a while.  Heroin is a cheaper alternative.  In a nation that has no safety regime for illegal drugs, the heroin users buy can be 25% heroin or more, or less.  Enterprising drug entrepreneurs are able to make heroin much cheaper to produce by stepping on the product again, cutting it with more powerful, and much cheaper, fentanyl.   A shot of heroin with enough fentanyl mixed in is deadly.   The addict never knows how strong the white power they are injecting is until it is too late.   Some places have drug testing sites where addicts can find out how powerful the shit they are about to shoot is.   These places are extremely rare in our country, if they exist anywhere. 

As far as executing drug dealers, or even keeping them in check, the Sackler’s corporation has been successfully sued in a couple of states, and settled these suits for many millions, on the condition of absolute secrecy: all research, testimony and evidence in the case must be sealed.  This means every state Attorney General who wants to sue the Sacklers must start at the beginning, pay for all their own medical experts, witnesses, research.   In fairness to the family, they are now worth billions and so are immune from the normal process of criminal justice.   That weasel selling Oxycontin by the pill?   Shoot him dead, a bullet through his fucking head!

The cartoon AR-15 then checks in reminding us not to be so fucking judgmental.  Guns don’t kill people, you know, people using guns do.  It’s like a highly addictive pill in brilliantly marketed form.   If you are not a damaged person, you can use this product safely.   The only wrinkle is that we are, virtually all of us, damaged persons.   Part of the human condition.  

I have been consciously pursuing mildness and non-harm for the last few years.  I was raised in a family where abuse was a common way of showing love.  I have had to deal with anger, otherwise anger will deal with me.  You don’t go from someone who will reflexively scream back at mistreatment into a calm, philosophical person without waging a constant battle, without remaining focused on quieting the reflex to rage.   Sekhnet will frequently remind me that I believe I am doing better in this than I actually am, but she did not know me thirty years ago.

So given a society based on advertising, acquisition, fairly rigid class status, competing, judging, having two sets of laws — a generous one for winners and a viciously punitive one for losers– we all are on our own to do the best we can.  I’d love to read a great novel on a lush green lawn somewhere, with a perfect sky overhead and the lapping of water over rocks in the background.   That is a beautiful part of life: relaxation.  I love to relax.  But there is also work, and this shit, which I also find fascinating, is mine.   Even if I am not currently being paid for it.

Fifty Years Ago Today

A hater with a gun, a sniper who shot from a hiding place, someone who could not possibly have been stopped by a hundred dead-eyed lovers with guns, slaughtered Martin Luther King, Jr. on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.   Decades later, after a sometimes ugly debate, King’s birthday would come to be celebrated as a national holiday.   MLK has been turned into a caricature, an unshakably non-violent man who led his people out of the darkness of a violent racist past and into the light of our present day of color-blind freedom and justice for all.

King was killed one year, to the day, after laying out his arguments about the evil of the war America was then waging in Vietnam.   The speech was called “Why I am Opposed to the War In Vietnam”, you can hear the entire address here.   He denounced the war as an “unjust, evil and futile war.”  He explained why he was no longer able to remain silent as the war raged.   He went on to describe the symbiotic relationship between racism, poverty and militarism.    He was unsparing in his analysis.  To my mind, there is no refuting what he had to say.  

The money to solve the problems of inequality in America was being wasted in a senseless, evil war waged against the poor people of Vietnam, purely for the profits of a few.   The same can be said for every American war since.  Trillions to kill poor people abroad, on dubious rationales, hardly a penny to prevent the eternal hopelessness of our own millions who are born into, and die in, poverty.   King pointed out that we spent $500,000 for each enemy soldier killed in Vietnam and $53 for each American living in poverty– much of the $53 going for the salaries of those not in poverty.

Immediately after giving the speech, which his advisors all urged him not to give, King went from beloved icon of Civil Rights to pariah.  He was immediately condemned in virtually every publication in America.  A few years earlier he would have been universally denounced as a Commie for his brutal analysis of the military-industrial-poverty-racism complex.  He was called a Commie and worse.   King met with the hostility those who style themselves patriotic always express toward those who dissent against any American military campaign.

After the speech, King was largely alone, increasingly focused on the larger problem: social justice for every American living in poverty.  There is no cure for racism until poverty is eradicated.  Neither goal is attainable until America stops spending billions on war.  Talk about speaking truth to power.   King laid out the exact swindle those behind our Great American War Machine are constantly pulling.      The war in Vietnam, King said, was the enemy of the poor, black and white poor together, burning the huts of poor villagers in Southeast Asia, while segregation and inequality persisted at home.  

I add: You’re poor?  Join the army, get some respect.  We will send you to kill other poor people, who will hate you — and not without reason.   Don’t expect, like black vets returning from World War Two did, the respect of your fellow citizens, or even the rights of your fellow citizens.  Know your place, wait your turn, give things a century or two.

I now believe, fifty years today after his assassination, that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. must be the angriest angel in heaven.

Context — our winner-in-chief

I have been talking to Sekhnet recently about approaching Jeremy Scahill at the Intercept (check out his excellent podcast) about writing a column providing historical context for ongoing current events.   Then Jeremy did just that in a recent podcast when he detailed  the ugly history of U.S. involvement in Iraq going back to the days before Saddam was even an officer in the Iraqi military.   We have been aggressively interfering in the politics of other countries for many, many years, doing things much worse than the things we are so angry at the Russians for likely doing to our electoral process.

I thought, on the recent fifteenth anniversary of the “Shock and Awe” slaughter of Iraqis, that colossal whacking of a gigantic hornet’s nest, that we would have more of these thorough historical reviews.    I was wrong to think that, there are too many provocative tweets coming from that building the president lives in.   The president, talking to kids the other day before their Easter Egg hunt on the White House lawn said something to the effect that nobody even knows what to call this beautiful white house the president lives in.  

So once again, instead of being able to do some research and focus on some of the lessons of the recent past, we have this barely hinged genius of attention seeking and self-branding, making noise it is hard to ignore, especially since it is within his power, if his ship starts sinking, to blow up the world.

So, rather than write my pitch to Jeremy Scahill today, rather than list some names that every American should be familiar with, and the reasons why their stories are important, as we consider the unlearned lessons of the illegal war in Iraq:   Pat Tillman, Jay Bybee and John Fucking Yoo, Maher Arar, Anwar al-Awlaki,  Abdulrahim al-Awlaki, a few others, I am thinking about this amoral, divisive narcissist, the cancerous chicken who has come home to roost in that white house nobody knows what to call.  So a little context on the career of the winner-in-chief,

Our anti-government president’s family fortune is based largely on preferential treatment the family has received from the government.  The government contracts for the thousands of middle class housing units Fred Christ Trump built came with generous tax abatements.   The federal government had an interest in affordable housing back then and gave tax incentives to builders to build it.    Fred Trump took full advantage of these tax breaks, even as he also had a winking policy of keeping colored people out of his housing projects.   The Fair Housing Act, part of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, specifically outlawed discrimination in the rental or sales of housing.   The feds sued Fred Trump’s organization for ongoing and systematic violations.

Now, let me just point out that Fred Trump’s alleged policy of not renting to ‘colored people’ may or may not have been a reflection of his own racism.   Fifty years after passage of the Fair Housing Act, few American neighborhoods are racially or ethnically integrated.   Blacks, Hispanics and Whites living as neighbors is still rare in our country.  So, let’s imagine that Fred was only protecting the people he rented to by excluding those they wouldn’t want to live next door to.   Let’s assume Fred and his middle son, Donald, were on the up and up, even altruists, saints.   They were suddenly in a bad position, as witnesses came forward describing how they marked the folders of Black and Hispanic applicants for apartments “C”, and how those applications were always, sadly, turned down in the end.     

Enter Roy Cohn, to defend the Trumps against the federal suit.  Cohn was an unscrupulous and vicious man who had made his bones as rabid anti-Communist Joe McCarthy’s right hand hatchet man on the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.  Cohn took credit for the execution of Ethel Rosenberg in that famous spying case that divided a divided nation.   It was expected that Ethel’s life would be spared, she had young children, seemed to have been peripheral to her husband’s case (if he even was a spy), but Cohn made it his business to make sure she got the electric chair.  Cohn was happy to see people fried, when it suited him.

Cohn hated Communists as much as he hated homosexuals, though he himself was an active and promiscuous homosexual.   Everything you read about Roy Cohn, every picture of him you see, makes the case that this bastard was the personification of evil.   He quickly became young Donald’s mentor in how to use the courts, and the tabloids, to kick enemies as hard as possible in the balls.  In the end Cohn died of AIDS, insisting it was cancer, and was disbarred as he was dying, for a lifetime of criminality and using the law as a bludgeon on behalf of the many wealthy criminals he represented, including the dons of all five major crime families. 

In the federal suit against the Trumps Cohn countersued the U.S. Department of Justice for defamation, to the tune of $100,000,000.   The government lawyers had no idea how to fight back against something like this.  People were terrified of Cohn, who was also a master of using the press to get his narratives out to the public.   In the end the unfairly vilified Trumps were able to settle the case, allowing their housing operations to be monitored by the feds for compliance with the Fair Housing Act, even though they explicitly did not admit they had ever violated the fucking law itself.   A stunning victory for Cohn and the Trumps.

When Donald started out in business for himself, his first major project was taking over and renovating a luxury hotel, the former Commodore, that had fallen on hard times.  On behalf of himself and his business partners the Hyatts, he got a forty year tax abatement, worth more than $160,000,000, from New York City Mayor Abe Beame, as an incentive to do this work.   I had a hard time digesting this as anything but corruption, since there doesn’t appear to be $160,000,000 worth of public interest involved in renovating a luxury hotel (today’s Grand Hyatt Hotel)  for one’s personal enrichment.   The NY Times, notorious scandal sheet that it is, puts the cost to NYC of that tax avoidance figure on Trump’s Hyatt deal at $360,000,000.  source 

Ed Koch, who succeeded Beame as mayor,  was not as amenable to Donald’s powers of persuasion, and Fred’s political connections, and refused to give him a tax abatement when Trump built his eponymous super-villain fortress Trump Tower a few years later.    Koch told Trump he would not add to Trump’s expected enormous profits by giving a tax abatement for another luxury building.   Trump called Roy Cohn.  Cohn brought a lawsuit.   Trump got a $74,000,000 tax abatement from New York City, in a 7-0 decision in the Court of Appeals.  I have no idea how that argument may have worked.  The lying NY Times recently put the tax abatement number at about half that for Trump Tower, but who knows?

Here is a short piece about the $885,000,000 in tax breaks our current president profited from in his fabulous career as a fabulous brand.  (clickez)   More details from our friends at the Grey Skank, here.

Then we have the tale of a middle aged mogul, sitting on top of the world, who wanted a higher seat.   He didn’t know why he needed it, he didn’t care, he simply wanted it.   Born wealthy, aided by his bullying millionaire father’s money and political connections, he had the confidence of a warrior.   Or a psychopath.    He’d been sent to military academy at thirteen in an attempt, we are told, to rein in his escalating bullying.   He is said to have purchased a cache of knives and that was the last straw.   You can be the judge of how well that parental plan to wean him off bullying worked.

In the next act, as Donald began building his fabulous brand, he took a page out of Greek mythology.    Hubris would lead the young mogul to attempt something that had never been done — he’d have the three most fabulous casinos in Atlantic City.   Why anyone would build three competing businesses in one gambling town is anybody’s guess.   To build the Taj Mahal, the mother of all casinos, he was forced to borrow $675,000,000 at 14% interest.  It was not long before he was unable to pay thousands of people he owed money to.  Many small businesses in and around Atlantic City went under as a result of being stiffed on huge bills by Trump.  

He adroitly used bankruptcy to keep himself rich.   Phoenix-like he rose from the ashes of his many failed businesses (in addition to the three failed casinos, his airline was sold at a loss, as were several of his luxury buildings)  to continue building his fabulous brand.   His long rein as the omnipotent CEO character in his reality TV show cemented his image in the public mind as a powerful asshole nobody could fuck with.   He was only too happy to deliver his trademarked “you’re fired.”  It was his pleasure, on TV, anyway.  (As president he seems to prefer to fire unwanted lackeys by tweet).

The fact that this character he played on TV, the guy who excited so many viewers with his brashness, his street smarts, his incredible wealth, was in real life negotiating multiple bankruptcies on his failed businesses at the time did not detract from the vicarious enjoyment his fans took from his fabulous King Midas persona.    Whatever else you could say about the character he played on TV, the guy was a winner, and fearless, and called it like he saw it, and took no shit from anybody.   His four thousand lawsuits speak for themselves, every one of them turned to gold.

When I refer to the cancerous chickens coming home to roost, I am talking about a nation saturated in advertising, marketing, branding, dreaming of the mindless — and often unprincipled–  pursuit of more wealth than anyone could ever spend, buying the destructive fantasy that incredible wealth is the only human goal worth pursuing.   You can buy luxury cars, a helicopter, a jet, a yacht, ten mansions, villas with spectacular ocean views.   It’s fucking fantastic!   If you are born into the right social class, have the connections to get your first $160,000,000 tax abatement, you are on your way.   A measly $1,000,000 loan from dad, and a few introductions to power broker friends of dad’s, can make all the difference between becoming a big winner or remaining a fucking self-hating loser who will do all kinds of stupid things because you will never be a winner.

 

 

Reminder: Your feedback is vital to serving you better

Capitalism, which will not sleep until the entire world is consumed, every salable resource wrested from the earth, every animal that can be monetized slaughtered and sold, all air, water and land made toxic, has imperatives.   One is never to let a customer you have thoroughly screwed off the hook for not giving feedback.   

The U.S. Postal Service, in a public/private partnership with some top notch marketing firm, sent me a robotic reminder, another “invitation”, today:  your fucking feedback, asshole, we’re fucking waiting for it, to fucking serve you better, you fucking ungrateful fucking fuck. [1]

 

I won’t take their survey, for obvious reasons, but perhaps I’ll email the private marketing firm something like this:

Please take me off your email list.   I received unacceptable service from the Post Office, was forced to pay for it twice and received no follow-up outside of  your feedback survey emails.  

The properly stamped business mailer I sent my rent check to my landlord in was returned to me postmarked, with no other marking on it.   The Post Office deemed this nondelivery my problem, not their’s.

I’d paid for the stamp, put the check in the business mailer, and, without explanation, it was returned to me instead of being delivered.    I think most people would agree that this constitutes the opposite of service.   The “customer service” I was subjected to afterwards can only be described as “Postal”.

At the Post Office there was a wait to speak to the supervisor, since the clerk had no authority to do anything.   Rather than admit that this kind of thing shouldn’t have happened, or even hint at an apology,  I was pointedly asked by the Post Office supervisor if I had never made a mistake.   This brusque individual, rather than assuring me that the Post Office would fix its error immediately, upped his customer service game by telling me it was my option to pay for overnight delivery, if that was what I wanted, but that the Post Office had no responsibility for the mistake of a postal machine.   In fact, he said, the Post Office had no obligation to do anything but put the envelope through the same faulty sorting machine again and hope for the best this time.

When I was not satisfied with these options the supervisor gave me PS Form 3849 and told me if I had a complaint, there was a number to call on the card.   He gave me his last name, smiled and invited me to make a complaint.  The “complaint number” turned out to be what used to be called a lie.   Perhaps you will consider it merely an ‘alternative fact’.  Call the number for yourself:  800-ASK-USPS (275-8777).

I found a number on-line where I could make a complaint.  I was apologized to by Postal Employees and promised a full, confidential inquiry and an emailed report back in 2-4 business days.   I never heard back from anyone but the Post Office’s marketing partner, weeks later, offering me a survey to fill out.  My “confidential” complaint, I learned when I called to follow up, had been routed back to the snippy supervisor of my local post office, the jerk who had given me the fake complaint number after telling me with icy politeness what I could do if I had a damn problem.  So much for confidentiality.

The rent envelope, with arrows drawn by the supervisor pointing to the address it was supposed to go to, was returned to me a second time several days later.    I went to another Post Office, where again I was told there was nothing they could do but put it through the machine again and hope for the best.  I was told that apparently the supervisor hadn’t known to cover the erroneous barcode that had routed the rent check back to me a second time.  In the end I was forced to purchase another stamped envelope and send the check to my landlord a third time.  The landlord’s office informed me that the rent check had been delivered,  a few miles away, about five days later.

A week later I had a call from someone at that local post office.  The woman who called from the local post office in regard to my complaint (which her message said she was about to “close out”) left a message at 3:10 pm informing me that she left work at 3:00 and invited me to call a number the next day that was never answered.

So, with all respect, MaritzCX, independent customer experience firm, hired with taxpayer dollars to conduct the survey and analyze the results, fuck you and fuck your fucking survey.  And have a blessed day.

 

[1]  “We come in peace”

Thank you for being a valued United States Postal Service® customer. In our continuing effort to serve you better we would like your feedback about the service you received as follow up to your recent inquiry. Please let us know how we are doing and any improvements you would like to see by taking a few minutes to complete the survey.

Please click on the following link to access the survey. Your answers will be kept strictly confidential.

Begin Survey

Thank you in advance for your valuable time and input. As always, the United States Postal Service® looks forward to serving you. If you need assistance with this survey, please send an email to postalexperience@maritzcx.com.

Please do not reply directly to this invitation.

The consistency of these motherfuckers is impressive, if also sickening

There was a 911 call in Sacramento the night of March 18th, about a guy running through the neighborhood breaking car windows.   A police helicopter tracked a suspect to a backyard, where police on foot patrol converged on him.   Two officers shouted at the young black suspect to “show us your hands!”.  The man, Stephon Clark, after circling to the back of what turned out to be the house he lived in, took a step toward them, still a fair distance away.  The police then fired, twenty shots, killing him, as the audio on the police body cameras both suddenly went mute.   This can all be seen (and heard) in the video footage the policemen’s body cameras recorded. 

The audio on their body cams goes silent for a couple of minutes, and then, five minutes after their hail of twenty bullets, they are back on line, still calling for the prone, unmoving Stephon Clark to show them his hands.   They continue to demand compliance from his dead body before they will send in medical backup.  Clark was pronounced dead at the scene, his grandmother’s back yard, when medics eventually attended to him.

This kind of sudden, senseless, violent death happens with hideous regularity in our great, violent, gun-toting nation, in virtually every region of our country.  These police killings happen disproportionately to unarmed black men of a certain age.  It is not an isolated atrocious mistake that happens a few times a year, it happens way too frequently in America.   This legally sanctioned murder is not a problem isolated in racist enclaves, it is a nationwide horror, like mass shootings, thousands of annual military veteran suicides (thank you for your service), 67,000 dead from opioids in the last annual count.  

Unarmed young black men are killed by law enforcement in every corner of our exceptional nation.   It is virtually always, somehow, ruled justifiable homicide, terrible, regrettable, but understandable shit that just happens in a dangerous profession where police are justified to be scared shitless in a backyard during a helicopter manhunt for a guy smashing car windows.  

Some smart-ass reporter raised the question of this shooting of an unarmed man (the police video shows only a cell phone next to his dead body) to the President’s press secretary, daughter of a religious, right-wing former presidential candidate.   She answered the reporter with a hint of the smugness of her kind.  In fairness to her, she has an unenviable job, a job it is almost impossible to do with grace, a job affording a hundred opportunities a day to be quoted like this:  

Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders: “Certainly a terrible incident, this is something that is a local matter, and it’s something that we feel should be left up to the local authorities at this point.”

“States’ rights”, of course, the sovereignty of the local community, is always invoked by status quo types whenever the question of who should deal with the sticky problem of unruly local blacks comes up, or even ruly ones who are sometimes caught in an admittedly unfortunate situation that results in their violent deaths.   Back in the day, when the state and local governments of the former Confederacy were run by KKK members and sympathizers, (many of them very fine people, very fine people… our current president reminds us) it was frequently stated that, but for outside agitators, paid rabble rousers, professional trouble makers, Commies, Jews, and other unsavory, miscegenating social activist types, there had never been any damned trouble in the local communities between whites and blacks, we all got along great, as long as the niggers knew their place.

I know, of course, that as a reasonable white person I’m supposed to put “niggers” in quotation marks.   It is worse today to write the word, just as it is pronounced, than to tell a national audience that the killing of a person we will now all give the respect of calling an “n-word”, is a local matter.   Nothing to see here.  People like this young man Stephon Clark, who disobeyed cops after quite possibly smashing car windows, would at one time have been taken down a dark road, mutilated and hung from a tree.  Until very recently there was no law against local law enforcement keeping the peace any way it saw fit.   If it came to it, and the matter came to a court of law, it was up to a jury of peers in the local community to decide if the dead black person had been way out of fucking line.   In 2018, just like in the good old mythical days when this country was great for proud racists of all stripes, we leave it up to local authorities to decide what process is due, what justice is and where the lines are that separate ordinary police practices from murder.  

A local matter, nothing to see here, certainly no bigger picture, no pattern, no practice.   And it irks me out of proportion to the remark, because Sarah just said, what sounded to me like ‘uh, you know, Manifest Destiny,’  or “I know you are, but what am I?’ even if what she may have actually meant was no more than that at the present time this terrible tragedy is a local Sacramento investigation.   Thank God no policeman got hurt in the altercation between a man suspected of raging vandalism and those trained to protect and serve.  

Here’s where it chafes a bit more.   We leave this piece of a gigantic national horror story to the local authorities, even as those local authorities are tasked by this administration with assisting the feds in a nationwide hunt for deportable Mexican “rapists” and killers and those undocumented residents who are not allowed to apply for a driver’s license in many states, who we can then, in many states, stop at traffic checkpoints, detain and legally deport, for the serious crime of not having a valid driver’s license.  Same goes for purveyors and users of the evil weed, no quarter for you nationwide, and to hell with your “state’s rights” for those immoral malefactors who live in immoral states who vote that it’s just fine for people to smoke that awful drug.

In more enlightened times the Department of Justice might take on these police shooting cases as a kind of nationwide class action, attempt to craft a national solution to this hideous practice once and for all.   Of course, presently, the DOJ is headed by a man who was deemed too racist to be confirmed as a federal judge (imagine how racist you have to be not to slide under that bar…), a man who works for a beleaguered administration that has many more serious problems than probing why the occasional young black man, usually unarmed, continues to be shot to death by cops across every part of our once great nation, often for very minor infractions, or no infractions.  

A more pressing problem, to our nation’s top law enforcement official, is to root out those damn trouble-making illegal foreigners who are the cause of every ill that afflicts this great nation and to finally stamp out the Devil’s weed that so many states now flout federal law by allowing their citizens to use, some even allowing its use “recreationally”.    If you read a history of this country, you might swear you stepped through a warp in the fabric of time, are right at the end of Prohibition, when Herbert Hoover doubled down on deportations, protective tariffs and fighting a lost war of dubious morality, a war against intoxicating spirits, in the name of morality.

Makes me wanna holler.   I salute the young people who are not taking this shit lying down.  You have every goddamned right not to be shot to death when you are going about your business, even if you’re out of control and your business is trouble.  Even if you shoved a store owner and stole a box of cigars, smashed a car window, called the armed vigilante who stopped you on the street a provocative name, sold illegal cigarettes, informed the cop who pulled you over that you had a legally registered gun in the car, the death penalty, without a trial of any kind, except a two second one conducted by an adrenalized man with a gun, is a bit severe for most suspected crimes.   I think even self-righteous Sarah Huckabee Sanders might agree to that, privately, of course.

 

Sassy and thorough takedown of Facebook CEO Asshole Mark Zuckerberg

Stumbled on this witty article with details of the treacherous nature of the next billionaire weasel presidential contender (no insult intended to actual weasels, tiny, oft-maligned carnivores just doing their thing).   Confirmation bias, OK, because I do hate the shallow, greedy fuck and his data-driven social media money machine that exploits the loneliness and hunger for connection of hundreds of millions, but still — an excellent article, IMHO.  Click here for an interesting read.

A tasty bite from The Smallness of Mark Zuckerberg:  

(I’m not saying that small people are evil.  I am small myself…okay, we are totally evil.) 

View this collection on Medium.com

View this collection on Medium.com