Category Archives: current events

Why My Mother Loved Jon Stewart, but Hated Stephen Colbert (Draft 1)

It’s easy to understand why my mother loved Jon Stewart, what Jewish mother could not love him?   My mother was a secular Jew from the Bronx, raised to believe in equality, human rights and social justice.   I recall her telling me when I was young that she didn’t think much of Howard Fast as a writer, but that the idealistic man who’d been blacklisted as a suspected Communist had his heart in the right place.  As an old woman she was discouraged by the many signs that our country did not always have its heart in the right place.  She would clench her teeth every time President Bush came on TV.  

“How an obvious imbecile like that got to be president… every time I see him it makes me sick.”  

She regarded him as the worst American president, definitely the worst of her lifetime.  One of the last things she said to me on her deathbed at the hospice, and she said it urgently:  “please promise me Sarah Palin will never be president of the United States!”  

I promised her, thinking to myself “certainly not in your lifetime, mom.”  

She watched Jon Stewart every night.  Whenever I was in Florida with her she’d call me in to watch when his show was about to start.  She found him adorable, as, of course, he is.  He made her laugh, with his trenchant insights, facial expressions and overall comic brilliance.  He, almost alone among the media in the years of her widowhood, gave her hope that not everyone in the world was insane.  She was doubly delighted when Bill Moyers interviewed Jon Stewart and the discussion quickly became an intelligent hour long mutual admiration society between two of her favorite media personalities.  

As much as she loved Jon Stewart, she had an almost visceral dislike of his gifted protege Stephen Colbert.  As soon as Stewart’s show ended, even before Colbert’s American eagle swept beak and talons first toward the camera, she had the remote in hand and was looking for something else to watch.  I never understood this.  She couldn’t explain it, she just couldn’t stand him.  

“You realize that the overbearing right wing blowhard persona is parody, he’s playing a character.  He’s hilarious, mom.”  

She shook her head.   “I know.  I don’t know what it is, I can’t watch him.  I know it’s a parody, I just can’t stand him.”

So it wasn’t that she was like President Bush’s team who’d hired Colbert to do the Correspondents’ Club dinner, most likely in the mistaken belief that he was a fellow traveler, a very funny, popular comedian who happened to be patriotic and believe in the unquestionable greatness of America, right or wrong.  In 2006 nobody in the media was saying too much out loud about Bush and Cheney’s muscular excesses.  It was as if they were all afraid of being shot in the face with a blunderbuss full of birdshot or something.

I showed my mother the video of Colbert fearlessly skewering the president at the Correspondents’ Club.  I recall at the time feeling great admiration for him, he was about the first person to publicly suggest the Emperor and those around him were naked.   He showed impressive sang froid by doing it, literally, in the president’s face.  My mother admitted it was a great routine.  He began:

Mark Smith, ladies and gentlemen of the press corps, Madame First Lady, Mr. President, my name is Stephen Colbert and tonight it’s my privilege to celebrate this president. We’re not so different, he and I. We get it. We’re not brainiacs on the nerd patrol. We’re not members of the factinista. We go straight from the gut, right sir? That’s where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. I know some of you are going to say “I did look it up, and that’s not true.” That’s ’cause you looked it up in a book.

Next time, look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that’s how our nervous system works. Every night on my show, the Colbert Report, I speak straight from the gut, OK? I give people the truth, unfiltered by rational argument.  (the rest is here)

Bush is still smiling gamely at this point, but his smile becomes more and more brittle until it falls off his face after a few moments.  Good sport and nice guy that I’ve often heard George W. Bush is, his politics aside, I’m pretty sure he shook Colbert’s hand at the end, told him he’d done a heck of a job.   But he clearly understood in pretty short order that he was being roasted by a merciless chef with a bullet-proof persona.  You can see that watching his reactions on the video.  My mother loved it.

I tried to get her to watch Colbert’s show a few times, but she never lasted through the opening, switching to an in progress re-run of NCIS, CSI or other murder mystery as I left, befuddled.   She loved murder mysteries, particularly NCIS.  Murder mysteries were increasingly all she read as she got older.  No less a mystery than any of these was her intense dislike of the brilliant Mr. Colbert.

One night I was going through a box of black and white family photographs.  I found a photo that made me feel like a great detective from one of her mysteries.   It was a shot of my uncle, my father’s younger brother, as a young man, dressed in a well-fitting suit.  It could have been a photograph of Stephen Colbert, in character as the rooster-like right-wing talk show host.   My mother strongly disliked my uncle.  She found him narcissistic, tyrannical, unreasonable, demanding and petty.   In  a word, Colbert’s character on the show.   She once desperately offered me a huge monetary bribe to spend a week in Florida when my uncle and aunt planned to visit her, after my father died.  She kept upping the dollar amount as I hesitated.

“Please,” she begged over the phone, “you can’t leave me alone with them!  For a week!  A week, Elie!  There will be bloodshed.”  

I rushed into her room with the photograph of my uncle.

“Is this why you hate Colbert?” I asked, handing her the photo.  

“Oh, my God,” she said, staring at the picture, “oh, my God!”  And then she began to laugh.  Another mystery satisfyingly solved.

 

Draft two is here, complete with a couple of moronic editorial improvements.

Epilogue to Childhood Memory

The ideologically driven filmmakers of “Let My People Go” (see previous post) certainly made their point to an eight year-old viewer, at least until the moment he was forced to make a dash to vomit.  In the fifty years since that visceral moment, history, like freedom, has been on the march.  

There were several wars in those years between the Jewish State and its neighbors including a decisive one, in 1967, when the virtually indefensible 1948 borders of Israel were expanded to include the buffers of the Occupied Territories of Gaza, the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Sinai.   Since that time, various Israeli governments have put permanent, strategically placed settlements in some of those territories.  There has been a shit-storm of controversy, with violent fanatics on both sides having way too much say over the outcome.  No doubt, given the choice, most people on each side would prefer peace to endless war.  The tragedy is that the voices of modest, decent people are rarely as loud and persuasive as the voices of violent haters ready to kill, everybody and anybody.  Take no chances, don’t trust their words, kill them!  Make them pay!

Intellectual understanding only goes so far.  I can understand why powerless people living in hopeless camps for generations, subjected to curfews, checkpoints, searches, rough treatment, detention, torture, would feel desperate enough to resort to and celebrate violence.  I can understand why peaceful citizens on the other side would demand curfews, checkpoints and heavy-handed tactics in order to avoid being killed by people desperate enough to blow themselves up.   Like I say, understanding with the mind only goes so far.   Certain things, in the word of one peace-loving Israeli I once knew, are un-understandable.  

In hindsight, as they say, many things snap into the old 20/20 focus.  If you think of a handful of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, determined to take some Nazis with them to hell as the Nazis were ‘liquidating’ the ghetto, you have a clue how this rear-view moral vision works.

There is no real choosing which was worse, the killing of millions during the Middle Passage over the course of three centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, or the killing of millions during a frenzied three or four year industrialized killing machine fueled by German ingenuity and efficiency.   I could not say, generations later, that either atrocity gives anyone a right to kill anyone else over it.

I’ve got no answer, propose no equivalencies, no justifications, nada.  It’s a horrible situation over there in Palestine/Israel, Israel/Palestine, as in many parts of the world, many of them in the immediate neighborhood.  Violence and brutality are always passionately justified by the practitioners.   History shows that the violent and brutal often carry the day while voices of reason usually get their brains blown out if they speak clearly enough and get enough attention.   I’d like to believe that in the long run human decency and our eternal longing for peace win out, but, looking around, I realize I may be with Anne Frank there, and Jesus, and right before he got shot, the Gandhi I was cursing just the other day.

Feeling Powerless?

Don’t worry, there are hard-working, brilliant idealists at work standing up for you.

A few years ago the commonly cited number was 45,000 Americans a year dying deaths that could have been prevented had their illnesses been detected before the fatal stage that brought them to an Emergency Room.   My father, though he retired with excellent medical insurance and was on Medicare, though he saw an endocrinologist, hematologist and cardiologist regularly the last two years of his life, as his energy and life force deteriorated, was first diagnosed with liver cancer by an ER doctor, six days before he died.  

My father’s case was, hopefully, unusual in a nation with the most advanced medical technology in the world.  Most of the 45,000 annual American deaths that could have been prevented by earlier intervention (a few seconds of diligent google research shows this recalled number is a fraction of annual preventable American deaths) were died by poor people, people without health insurance, people too frightened, by disease and the specters of unaffordable expense, bankruptcy and pre-existing conditions, to see doctors.  Many who died needlessly probably had serious warning signs they should have heeded.    

In part to address this intolerable death toll in our extremely wealthy nation, in part to rein in the runaway cost increases of the most expensive medical care in the world, President Obama passed the landmark compromise medical insurance bill that bears his name.   I haven’t seen the statistics since Obamacare went into effect, but I’ll guess that the number of annual preventable American deaths has come way down, maybe by as much as a third.  

Progress on an institutional level is at best incremental and the perfect must not become the enemy of the good the president, a man with millions of determined enemies, reminds us.   Malcolm X, in his posthumous autobiography, remarked that sticking a knife ten inches into someone and pulling it out six inches is also considered progress.  But tell that to the guy with the knife stuck into his body.    

The unregulated inflation of the world’s most lucrative medical insurance and pharmaceutical industries, and obscene loopholes like ineligibility for insurance coverage at any price for people with “pre-existing” medical conditions, screamed for regulation.  Obama’s team, headed by medical industry insider Liz Fowler, working for industry financed former Senator Max Baucus (now Ambassador to China), struck a compromise — price increases for medical insurance would be regulated, American health care would become more outcome and prevention-based, there would be no more exclusions for ‘pre-existing conditions’, industry-wide cost saving measures would be introduced over time.  

The private insurance industry got something in return for giving up all this power and potentially some of its profit.  Americans of sufficient means would be mandated to buy private insurance or pay penalties for not buying it.  

Medicaid eligibility would be extended under Obamacare.  Although millions of Americans would remain uninsured, millions who’d been previously unable to afford health insurance could now purchase and even, in most cases, afford it, under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  

Somehow, along with the industry consenting to be regulated, forced to justify regular, generous increases in insurance premiums, paying out for sick people whose conditions pre-existed their purchase of medical insurance, the law provides that patients have no right to be informed of actual costs prior to any medical visits or treatments.  I kid you not.  

You make an appointment to see a physician’s assistant about a stomach ailment.  Nobody anywhere, not at the company you pay your premium to, not at the doctor’s office, can tell you in advance what that twenty minute visit will cost.  

“We have to wait until the doctor’s office bills us, there’s no way to tell you in advance,” the insurance company will say.  

“We have to be told by the insurance company what the price will be,” the doctor’s office will tell you, “the insurance company sets the price, then we are allowed to bill you.”  

Then, since all plans in your income range might be high deductible plans, you will have to pay the entire cost, whatever it might be, “out of pocket”.   That’s the law.  There is what’s fair and there is law, and the two are, regrettably, not always the same.  

If you went to a store where there were no prices on the items, where no sales person could tell you a price until after you signed a blank credit card statement to buy something, with no chance for return or refund, you would not shop in that store.   Picture a restaurant with no prices on the menu, smiling waiters assuring you that everything was delicious and not to worry, the prices were as low as possible for such amazing food.  

Assume the dinner was fine, or even if it wasn’t, here comes the friendly waiter with your check.  Dinner for two without wine: $507, coincidentally the same as my bill for seeing that physician’s assistant who was so clueless and unhelpful.  The manager is not able to hear an appeal or make any changes to the price.  The owner will not speak to customers under any circumstances, and he’s not in, anyway.  If you try not to pay there is a policeman at the door to inform you lawyers will be called to garnish your wages, and make the collection.   Don’t believe it?  Wait a few weeks, the lawyer’s letter will be in your mailbox informing you of your obligation to pay a legal debt.  

In fairness, and it’s always important to be fair, the $507 total for my visit with the physician’s assistant turned out to have been billed in error.  My next set of bills, which I confirmed the accuracy of with my insurance company, informed me I should have only been charged $457.   And much of that was my own fault.  I’d agreed with the nurse that it was reasonable to do a blood test, to rule out something serious our internet research hadn’t suggested.   The price of the blood test I had to pay was $327, discounted by my insurance company from the sticker price of $642.  Instead of being grateful for the almost 50% discount, here I am bitching and moaning.   Just goes to show, some people are never fucking happy. 

But, if you will excuse me, I have to figure out who else to call to find out how to avoid a similar expense to have a dermatological body scan done by a physician’s assistant I was misinformed yesterday is a doctor.  My concern is not only the cost of the visit and exam, but if anything has to be sent to the lab, that can add from $179 ( to sky’s the limit)  to my out-of-pocket expense, in a addition to $131 for the required pre-procedure office visit, as in the case of my 100% covered preventive care colonoscopy a year back.

A Small Piece of What Hobbles Me

Among the things that have me by the toe, the waning of democracy and the ever steeper upward tilt of the so-called level playing field.

“Are you fucking crazy?  You are held by the toe by a myth that was, at best, an exercise for keeping order and property, designed by the wealthy and maintained, whenever necessary, by their goon squads?”

Democracy was more than that.

“If you say so, my idealistic friend.”

Take the example of public education, a once truly democratic institution.  Not that long ago the children of immigrants, educated in New York City Public Schools, could attend the City College, for affordable tuition they could earn by working as they studied, get an excellent education, graduate debt-free with a degree that was worth as much as degrees now costing $160,000, and find work in their chosen field that allowed them to move out of the tenements where they grew up. 

“OK, nice example of democracy in action, and meritocracy, but times change.  Systems evolve.”

Ya, mon.  This is what has me by the toe, in the New Gilded Age, working with an outmoded belief in something good that is now under constant, coordinated attack by a well-funded army of profiteers.   I designed a program for public elementary school students, to work as a group, guided by their own ideas, supported by adult facilitators.  My idea was to show public school kids, in poor neighborhoods, at their best– give them a showcase to demonstrate what they could do if they weren’t being actively trained to be factory workers in factories that no longer operate in the US, or, failing that, failing, dropping out and becoming prisoners in a privatized for-profit prison system.

“You are pissing into the wind and ignoring the fact that, sad as it may seem to you, you are one of the few people you know who is even passingly following this sickening debate about public education.   Only people with bleeding hearts give more than a passing thought to the fate of the kids you want to work with.  The children of the disenfranchised are an abstraction.   ‘Disenfranchised’ — without the right to meaningfully participate in decisions about their own governance.    But let’s not get lost in emotionality.”

“Look at the numbers, it makes everything easier to understand when you view it with a calculator in hand.   Simply multiply the number of students entitled to a free public education in the U.S. by the sum each state and school district allocates per student.  That number is hundreds of billions of dollars a year, left on the table for substandard education.”

Hundreds of billions of dollars a year. No need to pull a number out of our asses, when we can pluck one from the internets:  $621 billion a year, as of a couple of years ago.

“No small sum, my friend.   Private entrepreneurs who have already shown they know how to make billions are the best stewards of that kind of dough, not people with interesting theories about how children learn, or a quaint belief that cooperation yields more social benefit than competition.   You can’t expect public school administrators, teachers, educational theorists and the like to know as well as Bill Gates, Michael Milken, Michael Bloomberg, giants in making mountains of profit, some of the richest and most enterprising men in the world, how to maximize the profit of that enormous investment in such an important human resource.”  

You make my case for me, friend.   Milken served his time in prison, ten year sentence generously discounted by 80%, seemingly got to keep most of his ill-gotten money and is now called a philanthropist on his Wikipedia page.  We learn at a glance:  

Michael Robert Milken (born July 4, 1946) is an American former financier and philanthropist. He is noted for his role in the development of the market for high-yield bonds (“junk bonds”),[1] for his conviction following a guilty plea on felony charges for violating U.S. securities laws, and for his charitable giving.  

Forbes currently lists his net worth at $2.5 billion.   

Read on and learn how you do it.  This is how you do it:

Milken and his brother Lowell founded Knowledge Universe in 1996, as well as Knowledge Learning Corporation (KLC), the parent company of KinderCare Learning Centers, the largest for-profit child care provider in the country. He is currently chairman of the company.[18] Milken also established K12 Inc., a publicly traded education management organization (EMO) that provides online schooling, including to charter school students for whom services are paid by tax dollars,[19] which is the largest EMO in terms of enrollment.[20]

“This is really the best use of your time right now?  Showing how a convicted billionaire felon/philanthropist is profiting by redirecting public school dollars to his own for-profit enterprises?   This is really the best use of the time that is slipping like sands through the hourglass?”

Not at all, friend, not at all.  Just a small piece of what hobbles me.

The Unfairness of justice-biasing profit vectors

Corporations are people, you know, our highest court has affirmed this truth, as self-evident as the proposition that all men are created equal.   Corporations are just like you and me, endowed by their creators with certain unalienable rights, although skeptical Bill Moyers says he’ll believe corporations are people when the state of Texas puts one to death.  

I heard an excellent talk by a man named Yuval Noah Harari describing the ascent of one hominid species, homo sapiens, to dominate the planet.  Homo sapiens were not the top predators, far from it.  There were many animals who could easily kill and eat homo sapiens, there still are a few.  Homo sapiens were bound together by common terrors, and driven by fear and a large brain, came to dominate all the other species on earth, and wipe out many of them on our way to planetary domination.  

He compared us to sheep with a nuclear bomb.  A truly terrifying and profound comparison.  He pointed out that you don’t fear a lion with a nuclear bomb, not that he would ever try to create one, because a lion is not afraid, knows its power, can defend itself without a bomb, but a sheep with a bomb?   The top animal in a group of sheep will press the button in a heartbeat when a lion comes too close, the second he runs out of weaker sheep to shove into that lion’s jaws.   

Harari also pointed out how homo sapiens are driven by our abstract world view, march forward as societies united by belief in a common myth.   He underscored the fluidity of the self-created myths that humans live by.  We can turn on a dime, when it comes to the beliefs that drive us. Torture, for example, (although I don’t think he mentioned it), a practice universally reviled as barbaric, quickly becomes acceptable to many once it’s rebranded as something that moral freedom-lovers necessarily use against evil fredom-hating monsters.   Harari gave the humorous and horrible example of members of a divinely inspired religion based on peace and brotherhood who obey God by setting on fire those who deny the divinity of the awesome god who has commanded them to be merciful, to love their enemies.   We eventually get to an idea like the “Free Market”, another good one.

An empathetic person can see things from another person’s point of view.  So let me not be so judgmental about a freedom loving and prosperous people who consider the inadvertent downstream poisoning of impoverished babies in some faraway hellhole, or the wholesale destruction of life-sustaining jungles, “externalities”, the unfortunate but acceptable price of doing business in a “Free Market”. That millions were displaced by a war we started, hundreds of thousands maimed, killed and orphaned on orders from our leaders, who may have honestly believed they were doing the right thing?   Regrettable, of course.  

Jesus was very judgmental about the injustices of the status quo of his time, and the status quo wasn’t having it,  nailed him to a cross, made an example out of him.  Few are willing to be made such examples of.  I am certainly not hoping to be made such an example of, as I preach quietly to my distracted flock of three or four.  Let me, therefore, try to be more empathetic toward the powerful.

Seeing things from a corporate point of view, as our lawmakers are obliged to, things are not so black and white, Mr. Moyers.  Really the only thing corporations want is unlimited immunity from the justice-biasing of their profit vectors.  If fairness were the only yardstick by which we measured our actions in the world, few great things would ever be done.  How many great fortunes were made by people who passionately believed in across the board fairness?   Grow up, would you.  Life is unfair, get used to it, stop bellyaching about it, move on.

Allowing a justice-bias into the conversation about the Free Market just gums up the works, kills job creation, makes us all less wealthy.  Think about it.  You can’t spend time (which we all know is money, and therefore, also, free speech) considering every abstraction, after all.  And bias of any kind is wrong, as we are reminded constantly.  If a very profitable process for extracting a valuable commodity from the earth causes earthquakes, well, a lot of bad shit happens every day.  You cannot blame people for wanting a good life.   It’s certainly not smart to blame those people too shrilly if they have their finger on the trigger of a nuclear bomb.  

Corporations, like people, can be oversensitive too.   We all have a limit to what we can take.  For the sake of us all, and our prosperity and our freedom, and for the love of God, take a stand against the unfairness of those who would call for the justice-biasing of our profit vectors.  The Free Market cannot tolerate such meddling!

On the Pope’s upcoming visit

This Pope seems to be a very good man.  Not all of the Popes have taken the teachings of Jesus so much to heart, it seems to me.  

It’s hard for me to think of the Pope, any Pope, without recalling the answer Riddick Bowe, former world heavy weight champion and Boxing Hall of Famer, gave to a reporter as he was leaving to visit the Pope in the days leading up to a fight to defend his title.  Wikipedia seems to be silent on this important matter, (though the NY Times of Feb. 1, 1993 mentions the private audience with the Pope)  but my memory is not.  

The reporter asked Bowe, who grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, what he was going to say to the Pope during the meeting.   Bowe’s unforgettable reply:  “yo, Pope, you gotta bless me, man.”

NOTES:  (from Wikipedia)

They saw fit to include this, however:

Though ahead on points, Golota was penalized several times for low blows, and was finally disqualified in the seventh round after a volley of punches to Bowe’s testicles.

(and during the rematch)  Golota, after dropping Bowe in the second round, and being dropped himself later, was leading on the scorecards, only to be disqualified in the ninth round, once again for repeated shots to the testicles.[15]

Heard a great TED Talk about addiction

It turns out that, sure every rat in a cage with a button to administer an instant orgasm will die with his or her paw on the button, and that same rat, alone, will prefer drugged water to plain, until death, but this may not prove much about addiction.  These are rats in solitary, they behave differently than rats in a Rat Park where they have good food, a social life, best friends, sex, exercise, rat toys, treats, things that rats really dig.   The rats in the Rat Park drink the regular water because they’re thirsty from having fun, they are not looking for the drug water to take them out of their dreary, isolated existence in solitary confinement.  

Turns out, as TED speaker Johann Hari makes a good case, that drug addiction is a response to misery and isolation more than a genetically hard-wired disease, chemical problem or moral weakness.   I always love those who can hold their liquor pontificating about sobriety and the need to punish people addicted to arbitrarily illegalized drugs.  We live in a binge and gorge and hoard-more-than-we-can-use society where we are marketed to all day long to stoke our longing for newer and better things to buy and have — hard for me to see the kid getting high as a criminal.  The TED talk on this was very well-done.

I like TED talks, many of them are great, few of them are not at least interesting and well-done.  But there is a sinister side to the silently corporate sponsored TED events that makes me want to say, and I hope you will forgive this outburst, “suck my ass, TED!”  Check out the price of admission, once you apply for your ticket:

Picture 2

Picture 4

Yes, that’s $8,500.  Put up or shut up, yo.  Nobody’s holding a gun to your head.

But… besides that, Mrs. Lincoln, this is still the greatest country in the world

Those in our great and wealthy nation who are cruelly fucked need to understand it is usually nothing personal.  Truly.  Nobody gives a shit about you as an individual, that is what the cruel part of cruel fucking is all about.  You as a person are erased, but it’s nothing personal.   The mistreatment was not meted out to you as an individual, so don’t get so individually indignant, man.   Let us look at the case of American blacks, for example.  Let’s take a short historical look at this cruel fucking, see if we can put it in perspective.

We should all be able to agree that the deliberate murder of perhaps ten million African ancestors during the mass kidnapping of slave laborers to the New World was an inhuman atrocity.   As bad as the Holocaust with a capital H was, and as many millions murdered, the sickening carnage of the “Middle Passage” makes any decent person want to vomit as much as the black and white film of rubbery skeletal cadavers being dumped down chutes in the death camps does, or Henry Morgenthau’s contemporary accounts of the nauseating brutality of the genocide Turks inflicted on the Armenians during WW I, or any modern-day version, for that matter.   There is no comparing mass murders, they are all the same.   Done with that argument, OK?

We can agree, one would hope, that slavery was an unmitigated evil that caused irreparable harm, while creating and concentrating vast wealth, and led eventually to a cataclysmic outburst of mass psychosis in which three quarters of a million, mostly poor, Americans lost their lives in combat, (more than the total of American dead in all other wars combined)  another quarter million dead civilians, not to mention the countless maimed, amputated, brain damaged.  The war was fought, as most are, to preserve the privilege of the wealthy who stood to lose a fortune, and their genteel way of life, if slavery was abolished.  There was talk, for a time, about 40 acres and a mule for every freed slave, to minimally compensate them for their centuries of unpaid labors and to put them on their feet as free families.   Nothing was ever done about that, there were soon much more pressing problems for America to deal with.   After the war the nation went into the worst economic depression in its hundred year history, at the end of which the robber barons made untold monopoly fortunes.  For the masses of all colors — mostly misery.  

The only good thing about the Civil War– the end of slavery.  The 13th Amendment made slavery illegal under the U.S. Constitution, except that the Supreme Court quickly put the 14th Amendment, enacted to protect the rights of freed slaves, into a judicially crafted ninety year deep sleep.  While the 14th Amendment slumbered the Ku Klux Klan put on the kind of horror show that hate-filled sore losers with weapons are apt to put on, if not restrained by the law.   A century of terrorism, protected by state laws upheld by the Supreme Court’s perverse 1873 14th Amendment ruling (the resurrected 14th has been in place now for fifty years and tens of thousands of cases brought under it), which gave the former rebel states, who had taken up arms against the nation they seceded from, the last word on the treatment of its citizens, including former slaves.

It is not surprising that the lot of former slaves was hard in the former Confederacy.  

A mass migration northward towards decent paying industrial jobs resulted in a large gathering of the descendants of slaves in the ghettos of major cities.  The decent paying industrial jobs eventually were sent places where the corporations could pay the workers less and therefore keep more of the profits.  Ghettos traditionally have the worst city services, worst schools, highest crime, highest unemployment rates, most repressive policing, and currently– a school to prison pipeline.  And as prisons are increasingly privatized, finally a profitable use for the bulk of these disaffected, often angry, sometimes violent, sons and daughters of the ghettos.  

So while some of us felt proud recently that America had its great post-racial photo-op, a very accomplished and unique half-black man is currently president, it is good to keep things in perspective.   It’s not post-racial in ghettos and housing projects, or in prisons, or on Ivy League campuses or in corporate board rooms.  This country is as divided in many ways, including matters of basic civil rights and race, as it was immediately prior to the Civil War.  Millions of Americans, of all races and every national origin, are simply, how to put this tastefully?… fucked.  

People who are the recipients of sex they did not consent to are often deeply disturbed by the experience.   That said, if it is done on an institutional level, and you live in a democracy where, unless your point of view has billions to spend selling itself via free speech, you have almost no voice as an individual and you must not take it personally.  You really must not take it personally, man.

Really, I mean… you know what I’m saying? 

Normal

A year or two ago I saw a plainspoken philosopher speaking to Bill Moyers about our culture of cruelty.  I forget the insightful man’ s name, but I will never forget his comment after playing a clip of a campus cop nonchalantly walking along a row of seated peaceful college protesters and spraying them in their faces with orange mace from a huge, seemingly inexhaustible, canister.  The campus cop did this with the body language of somebody watering a garden with a hose.

“He’s doing this like it’s a normal thing to do,” said the philosopher calmly, but with appropriate horror.  He then showed a campus police force with a tank, surplus from our many recent and ongoing wars.  He detailed the widespread militarization of police forces all over the country, essentially an army of occupation in the many slum areas of our great nation.  Heavily armed SWAT teams in flak jackets and combat helmets, wielding automatic weapons, breaking down doors and storming in to break up illegal card games, apprehend dangerous people who are bagging marijuana.

Normal.   A frightening word in many ways, when you think of what is normal today.  It is normal for very wealthy people to want and be able to own everything, there is no shame attached to this normal desire, no matter the consequences.   It is normal for an angry or frightened person to defend himself with a gun — he now has a right to “stand his ground” in many states, even if he went looking for trouble and the ground he is standing on is far from his home and castle, the traditional boundaries of where he has long been free to defend himself with deadly force, if he could not flee to safety.  It is normal, depending on where you’re from, to kill your unmarried daughter or sister if she exchanges flirtatious glances with a man.  Honor killing, it’s normally called.

It was normal, in 1776 when Thomas Jefferson, with his gift for a felicitous phrase, was putting together The Declaration of Independence, the charter of American democracy that lit the torch of human freedom, for people of means to own other people as property.  We hold these truths, being wise men capable of holding more than one truth at a time, to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and so forth, and that, at the same time, we may hold great, easily liquidated, wealth in the form of human chattel.  I myself, he might have added, presently own a few hundred of them and I love ’em.

Of course, when I write this way it is easy to nitpick: nobody likes Honor Killing, or the grotesque inequalities between the 1% and the rest of society (except, perhaps, most of the 1%), or the American plague of carnage by gun masquerading as Constitutionally protected freedom (except for millions of American gun owners, the NRA and the politicians they purchase or rent), or slavery, for that matter.  But there is another side to these things, normal though they may also be, that makes discussing them a bit more complicated.  To denounce terrible things on the internet is about the easiest exercise there is.  Why not challenge myself, you ask?

OK.  Thomas Jefferson, it is safe to presume by his writings, had much better intentions than he was able to live out, though his life was, in most outward respects, normal and respectable for a wealthy Virginian of his time.   He probably truly loved the beautiful, light-skinned mother of his four children born over the course of their long affair.  Although each of these children was born nine months after a Jefferson stay on Monticello, each looked white and at least one had a striking resemblance to Thomas Jefferson, even though Sally was his chambermaid, even though each of the children was given preferred work in the manor house, and all were eventually freed (virtually the only of Jefferson’s slaves to have been released from bondage) the master’s patrimony of Beverly, Madison, Eston and Harriet Hemings was indignantly denied for 150 years after Jefferson’s death — and to this day, by some, almost 200 years later, in spite of the DNA match and other strong evidence.  

In a better world he would have married his devoted servant, a delicate and cultured woman fluent in French, as Jefferson was, loved her openly, embraced and educated his children and grandchildren by her.   In this world he quietly freed the slave children by letting the first couple escape when they came of age to do so — they looked white and were easily able to “pass” and assimilate into the racist society of the time– and freed the others in his will.  He had promised the slave mother, Sally, in exchange for the pregnant teenager’s agreement to leave freedom in Paris and return to Monticello as his slave, that he would free their children at 21 and he kept his word.  Sally too was discreetly freed not long after Jefferson’s death.  I have always held these deplorable things (excluding, of course, the promises he kept) against the Author of Liberty.

Here are a few little known but devilish details that help explain Jefferson’s dilemma.  Under Virginia law at the time, had Jefferson freed Sally she could not have remained in Virginia beyond a year and a day.  It would have meant parting with his long-time lover or seeking a court-order allowing her to stay, and giving good reasons in the court filing for this dispensation from the law.   The publicity would have destroyed Jefferson’s career.  

Here’s an even more devilish detail:  Jefferson’s mentor and lifelong friend George Wythe had, after his wife’s death, a love affair with a one-time slave of his, Lydia Broadnax.  Wythe freed her, got the legal paperwork in order so that she could stay in Virginia, and may have had a son by her (this is Fawn Brodie’s conclusion, disputed by others based on Broadnax’s age when the child was born).   What is undisputed is that the free-born mulatto Michael Brown was tutored by Wythe, that the teenager was  very devoted to Wythe and that the aged Wythe provided well for him and Lydia Broadnax in his will.  

Learning of this, Wythe’s grandnephew, who had stolen valuable books from Wythe’s library and forged Wythe’s name on checks, outraged on being written out of the will, his inheritance going to people then normally known as niggers, promptly poisoned Brown, Wythe and Lydia Broadnax, killing both men.   They died agonizing deaths over the course of almost two weeks.  The woman survived, but was prevented by Virginia law from testifying in court to seeing what she understood too late: the young man putting arsenic in the coffee.  Other blacks had seen the grandnephew dispose of arsenic before his arrest and from his prison cell (he apparently had a lot of it) but they also were prevented by Virginia law from testifying in court. 

The murder trial in Virginia was attended by great publicity, and Wythe’s grandnephew, skillfully defended by zealous attorneys, glad for the exclusion of black eyewitness accounts and using inside knowledge of the perfunctory autopsies to create reasonable doubt, was acquitted of all charges.   You can imagine the outrage in Virginia had a white man been sentenced to death for killing the sort of people Wythe’s grandnephew had killed.   George Wythe, although a famous and respected legal mind, one of the greatest Virginians of his day, signer of the Declaration of Independence, beloved of Thomas Jefferson, recipient of the largest funeral in Virginia up to that time, was also someone who taught Greek and law to a free black boy, and treated the kid like a son, after all.

If Jefferson had a sudden, crazy, fleeting thought about marrying Sally and legitimizing their children, the last chapter in George Wythe’s distinguished life story would have put an end to that.

And so it goes with each of these “normal” things.   There are reasons, always.  Even if the reasons are later seen to be immoral, insane, vicious– they are the underpinnings of law at the time, they form the moral norms of the era.  

Fifteen or twenty years ago, when Israel used a drone to blow up a car and execute some people Israel claimed were terrorist masterminds, there was a lot of controversy over this extrajudicial killing.  For one thing, it was illegal under international law at the time.   It is one thing for a team of daring secret agents to get up close to cunning, uncapturable terrorist masterminds (or, depending on your view, freedom fighters), through skill, guts and determination, and quietly inject them with something to induce a heart attack.  Or slit their throats.  Or sabotage the brakes on their car before engaging them in a high speed car chase over dangerous terrain.   It is a different thing altogether to have a robotic plane flying by remote control to distant places to kill people who are blips on a computer screen.

Again, when Israel first practiced these extrajudicial executions by drone, it was extremely controversial. Today it is perfectly normal, as plain and unobjectionable as a glass of cool, pasteurized milk. The president of the United States today looks at a list of names of people to be killed extrajudicially and says “go ahead.”  One day one of the names on the kill list is of an American citizen whose father has brought a lawsuit in US federal court to stop the expected killing by drone.  The president, in this case, consults with legal experts, decides there is a perfectly valid exception under American law, the killing is legally justifiable, and, anyway, no court will ever hear the case.  Done— kill him.   A week or two later the guy’s teenage son, also an American citizen, shows up on the list — or maybe not.  “What the fuck?” reasons the president, if he hesitates at all,  and on his order the strike is carried out and the American kid is also killed.  We’ll never know how it went, since everything to do with the kill lists is highly classified.

“He should have been more careful when choosing his fucking father, the little bitch!” was the administration’s entire public response to the question of how do you kill an American boy with absolutely no ties to terrorism?   The president’s press secretary said it smirkingly when asked about the execution of the boy and three friends who were eating at an outdoor cafe in some remote region of Yemen.  A total of eight were killed by that missile, we’ll never know who the others were, except that, apparently none were the target, an Egyptian al-Queda member.

In a perfect world, I walk up to the press secretary, clench my right hand and break his nose.  “You can give a better answer than that,” I would tell him encouragingly, helping him up off the floor like the nonviolent devotee of Ahimsa that I am.  Then the White House press corps and the international TV audience would get the real answer.

“We killed him by mistake, we had no good reason for killing him… his name was never on the kill list, he was collateral dam…. uh, he was another innocent civilian killed in our endless, borderless war against Terror, I mean… one of perhaps thousands of nameless, faceless people killed for the crime of living somewhere our intelligence determines is also home to those who hate our freedom enough to plot to murder us.  It just happens we later learned his name, and that he was a 16 year-old American, that he’d done nothing wrong, and that he was killed with other boys who probably had nothing to do with terrorism, along with four others who it is not worth talking about.  Look, mistakes are made… the passive voice used…. oh, goddamn it, leave me alone!!!”

That would have been a perfectly normal reaction.  Much more normal, at any rate, than what I have been doing so far today.