Category Archives: current events

The Whole Story is often elusive

Getting the whole story about anything requires more work than most hardworking people are willing or able to do at any given time. This struck me again just now reading Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars, a tome from the library I’ve been reading, a few pages at a time, for a couple of months.  

I read today how Anwar al-Awlaki, US citizen of Yemeni descent eventually killed by US government drone for vociferously hating America, was grabbed and detained by the Yemenis and held in solitary for nine months, without charges or sunlight (his small cell was in a dark basement), pen and paper, exercise or visitor, by request of the U.S. government.  Relying on Scahill’s account, and just about every other source I’ve looked at, his eighteen month imprisonment occurred before he was seriously considered a danger to anyone, before he made a single video calling for violent jihad against Dick Cheney.   

It appears that, in the manner that the former Cat Stevens was put on the no-fly list, angering some and delighting others, Awlaki was marked as a cautionary tale.  In Awlaki’s case, as a dangerous radical worthy of lethal retribution, a symbol to be summarily executed without any sort of judicial process, and his sixteen year-old son, too, a couple of weeks later, without any explanation whatsoever for the murder of the American kid who’d gone to look for his father.

The ideologues around Dick Cheney have Awlaki, the go-to moderate cleric after 9/11, a telegenic and reasonable American Muslim, grabbed in Yemen for expressing anger that the US, from all appearances, was waging brutal, endless, worldwide war on Islam.  They stick him in a hole in the ground for nine months, keep him locked up, still without charges, for another nine, and, “whoa! look at that!  This fucking radical cleric hates our freedom!”  Cue the reasonable sounding post-racial front-man and the Predator Drone and Tomahawk missile.  Got one for his American teenage son, too, a few weeks later.  Hey, we droned some folks, ya know, this, uh, happens.

Wikipedia is somewhat conclusory, presenting an apparently convincing case for why this radicalized Muslim got what he deserved, though less than completely informative:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki

If you rely on the account on Wikipedia, you will know, based on a 2009 piece in the Santa Fe New Mexican, in turn based on an American government document created after Awlaki’s release from prison that

On August 31, 2006, al-Awlaki was arrested with four others on charges of kidnapping a Shiite teenager for ransom, and participating in an al-Qaeda plot to kidnap a US military attaché.[15][81]He was imprisoned in 2006 and 2007, reportedly under American pressure on the Yemeni authorities.[61] He was interviewed around September 2007 by two FBI agents with regard to the 9/11 attacks and other subjects, and John Negroponte, the US Director of National Intelligence, told Yemeni officials he did not object to al-Awlaki’s detention

You can read the cited May 2010 NY Times article, FN 61, Imam’s Path From Condemning Terror to Preaching Jihad, reporting that not only did America “not object” to Awlaki’s detention, but that he was rendered, imprisoned and kept in prison for many months, even after his “interrogation” by the FBI, under American pressure here.   

That article gives another, more vague, reason for his arrest by Yemeni authorities:  

In mid-2006, after he intervened in a tribal dispute, Mr. Awlaki was imprisoned for 18 months by the Yemeni authorities.

The article also states:

But by the end of 2007, American officials, some of whom were disturbed at the imprisonment without charges of a United States citizen, signaled that they no longer insisted on Mr. Awlaki’s incarceration, and he was released.

Scattered throughout the wiki are quotes from American officials, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and others asserting that prior to his imprisonment in Yemen there was no serious indication that Awlaki had any involvement with violent jihad.  However, as the Santa Fe New Mexican intrepidly reported, and Wikipedia made a matter of instantly accessible public record, he was imprisoned in Yemen for direct involvement in an al-Qeada plot.  

Let’s have a look at another strangely insufficient selection from the wiki on Awlaki (emphasis and annotation mine).

Al-Awlaki was said to have developed an animosity towards the US and became a proponent of Takfiri and Jihadi thinking, while retaining Islamism. While imprisoned in Yemen after 2004 [after being rendered in the dark of night, without charges, to solitary confinement, at the request of the US government–ed.] , al-Awlaki became influenced by the works of Sayyid Qutb, an originator of the contemporary “anti-Western Jihadist movement”.[61] He read 150–200 pages a day of Qutb’s works, and described himself as “so immersed with the author I would feel Sayyid was with me in my cell speaking to me directly”.[61]

Even this small detail of how much of Qutb’s writing he read a day is off in the Wikipedia account, according to the footnoted source Awlaki stated:

“Because of the flowing style of Sayyid I would read between 100 and 150 pages a day,” Mr. Awlaki wrote.

I think of the physician Ayman Al Zawahiri, no doubt a despicable, hate-inspired, mass-murdering psychopath, and wonder about him before his years of torture in Mubarak’s prison in Egypt.  Zawahiri, and his former close associate and fellow al-Qeada boss Osama bin Laden, also big fans of, and greatly inspired by, Sayyid Qutb.  These remaining worst of the worst in Gitmo, the place President Obama closed six years ago?  Well, even the innocent ones can’t be released now, you know, they get kind of unpredictable, these folks who get, you know, tortured and stuff.  And probably all very sympathetic to the detailed arguments Qutb made and published in the decades before he was tortured and executed in 1966 by secular authorities in Egypt for alleged involvement in a plot to assassinate Nasser. 

In the end the U.S. got what it wanted with Awlaki — a high profile, once moderate, articulate, native English speaking Muslim cleric who wound up making videos calling for jihad and giving lone wolf Muslims inspiration for attacking innocent Americans.   I wonder if there could have been any connection between these calls for revenge against America for its persecution of Muslims and his imprisonment without charges in a dark hole in the ground for months on end.  

 I wonder, about this and so much else done in our names, if we will ever know the whole story, except through the lenses of what we are told, and believe to be true.

footnote on “Enhanced Interrogation”

At least some Bush administration officials had opposed the interrogation techniques, including notably Condoleezza Rice’s most senior adviser Philip Zelikow.[55] Upon learning details of the program, Zelikow wrote a memo to Rice contesting the Justice Department’s Torture Memos, believing them wrong both legally and as a matter of policy.[55] Zelikow’s memo warned that the interrogation techniques breached US law, and could lead to prosecutions for war crimes.[26][56]The Bush Administration attempted to collect all of the copies of Zelikow’s memo and destroy them.[55][57][58] Jane Mayer, author of the Dark Side,[59] quotes Zelikow as predicting that “America’s descent into torture will in time be viewed like the Japanese internments”, in that “(f)ear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools.”[60]

 

source

“Enhanced Interrogation” and framing the debate

The recent controversy over releasing details of the torture program, or even whether the brutal practices, as redefined in a secret legal memo, technically even constituted torture, is the most recent, grotesque, example of what has happened to dialogue in our winner-take-all and the rest of you fucking losers go home culture.  

One side argues that torture violates our values, however you slice it, rename it, justify it in secret memos, and that the best disinfectant is sunlight.  The other side argues that to call coercive interrogation “torture”, and reveal the secret details about how, where and when such tough but necessary things were done, weakens our great nation’s security and makes us more vulnerable to those intent on destroying us — people who deserve to be tortured, in any case.

Instead of discussion there are twitch reflexes conveyed in our black and white mass media and reflected back by the populace.  Opponents of torture argue that ten years after the worst abuses by the CIA, with nobody in the administration that engineered and enabled the program ever held accountable (except by lifetime tenure on the Federal Court, appointment to the faculty of a major university, lucrative book deals and speaking tours, etc.), it is long past time to reveal the hideous details to ensure an episode like this is never repeated.   On the other side, former Vice President Dick Cheney, architect and proponent of the program, goes on the air and defiantly dismisses the report as a “load of crap”, 500 pages of weak drivel that misses the point entirely, written by partisan wimps who don’t have the stomach to do what must be done.

Here’s the funny thing, though.  There is no news in this report.  Virtually everything of consequence that this subcommittee took years, and presumably millions of dollars, to compile, and which was released (525 pages of the 6,000 page report, 90% still highly classified) amidst such trepidation and controversy, has already been published, in 2008, in a New York Times best seller and finalist for the National Book Award, Jane Mayer’s chilling The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals.*

Reading the book I was chilled to the bone at what was being done in my name.  I am chilled today, even as I learn, from Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars, that the CIA was replaced by the equally secretive JSOC (at the time Donald Rumsfeld’s elite secret force) as the masters of the interrogation and torture program fairly early on– meaning that this revealed CIA torture was the tip of the iceberg as far as torture goes.  

At the time this “enhanced interrogation” was going on, and the first public revelations of it were rippling across the media, I was at a concert in Town Hall enjoying David Bromberg’s music.  Toward the end of his show he usually does a meditative tune based on  the Rip Van Winkle story. The narrator wakes up after a 20 year sleep and doesn’t recognize his home, his town, his country.   Bromberg, a humanistic and probably progressive secular Jew from Tarrytown, NY, (where Rip Van Winkle author Washington Irving spent the last third of his celebrated life), improvises a commentary about disturbing current events, his guitar vamping behind him.  

As he began musing about the arguably unAmerican things the Bush Administration had been up to, a man in the audience angrily cut him off, shouting that he was there for music, not politics.  The disgruntled man, a couple of rows behind me, wore a military jacket.   Bromberg looked at him, nodded and shrugged.  

He said “we torture people?  Now it’s OK to torture people?” and began singing again.

 

 

*   The book became a best-seller in non-fiction hardcover in the United States, with its author Jane Mayer booked on various news programs for interviews. It later made the New York Times Book Review editors’ list of “10 Best Books of 2008”[2] and was nominated for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction.[3] The book was a finalist for the National Book Awards.[4]

It also received the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights 29th annual book award in 2009, given to a novelist who “most faithfully and forcefully reflects Robert Kennedy’s purposes – his concern for the poor and the powerless, his struggle for honest and even-handed justice, his conviction that a decent society must assure all young people a fair chance, and his faith that a free democracy can act to remedy disparities of power and opportunity.”[5]

I Mash Yer Fez– rewrite

There is irony that flies and irony too heavy to leave the ground.  Sometimes you can tweak the flightless variety a bit, sometimes not.  I tried and failed in my first attempt at this one a couple of days back, to the horror of more than one reader.  I will give it a more straightforward shake, lose some of the italics, try to say directly what I meant to say the first time.

I endorse gentleness and mildness, and strive to maintain these qualities above all, although it is not easy work.   Our society is violent, competitive and challenging, for one thing.   Most humans are prone to anger when mistreated or frustrated.   It is an almost irresistibly good feeling to be right, to feel justified, to prevail.  This reflex to prevail is a common cause of friction and leads to righteous anger when we feel wronged or victimized in our zero sum society.   Wars are fought, faces punched, prisons filled, lives destroyed, out of righteous anger.    

Our society’s laws, not always designed to ensure fairness, can be seen as the organized expression of this rage to be right.   Follow me here: laws are made by those with the power to institutionalize their unfair advantage, no matter how grotesque, and to enforce it by deadly state action, if necessary.  The penalty for looting after a natural disaster and making off with a bag of groceries — prison, if you’re not shot first.  The penalty for participating in, and profiting handsomely from, billion dollar financial fraud — it’s complicated.

Our land of the free and the home of the brave, the worlds’ first modern republican democracy, was for a century a land of slavery.  This history is considered ancient and is rarely discussed at any depth.   The arguments against slavery are many, well-known, have in recent times won the day. It seems beyond dispute now that slavery is evil, morally repugnant and illegal.  The single compelling argument for a century of American slavery was this:  we need them to make ourselves wealthier by having a slave economy, fuck you, stay out of our way of life.  

The bitter, bloody struggle that resulted in the abolition of American slavery was over for less than a decade before a legally sanctioned new version of The Peculiar Institution was set in place for a century by Supreme Court skullduggery and racist codes of strict segregation violently maintained by terrorism winked at under the laws of the former slave states.   The struggle for freedom for the descendants of slaves during that century cost many brave lives.  

Today many Americans feel satisfied that slavery is deep in our past, some consider us a “post racial society”, since we now have a half-black man in the White House.  Can anyone really say with a straight face that our ongoing history of racism at law and in practice has ever been seriously addressed in this country?

Slavery and racism are considered by many as elements of ancient history, and they are hot subjects that raise hackles on both sides.  Fine, then, let’s grant that American racism is all in the past, for the sake of moving on and take a look at more recent outrages at law.  

We have been, since the devastating, coordinated terrorist attacks of 9/11/01, engaged in a permanent war against terrorism, The War on Terror, a war that is used to justify many excesses including the murder of many blameless civilians in a number of countries, right now.  

Soon after the 9/11 attacks Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld  fired chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Hugh Shelton, a commander reluctant to abandon legal safeguards designed to minimize the deaths of innocent people and ensure a solid intelligence foundation before employing elite, secret black ops squads to kill suspected terrorists.   Rumsfeld replaced him with a new general who agreed with the sleek, muscular, infinitely flexible new black ops policy the Bush administration had in mind to go after al Qaeda and similar groups.

They sincerely believed that preventing the killing of innocent civilians was a meaningless consideration in an all out existential world-wide War On Terror.  Collateral damage, Rumsfeld and the Bush administration believed, is inevitable and, if kept secret, not something many Americans would get excited about.  They were correct in that calculation.  What you don’t know, you don’t want to know, even if you thought you might have needed to know it, if you know what I’m saying.

Before circumventing the letter, spirit and intent of national security and anti-torture laws and treaties, the administration hired a team of lawyers to write preemptive justifications detailing why they are legally allowed, even obliged, to not follow the laws they were willfully violating.

What makes all this intolerable for an idealist who believes, Anne Frank-like, in spite of it all, in democracy, is that these legal justifications are classified, state secrets kept from the citizens of the world’s greatest democracy.   And once these secret policies are given a fig leaf of legality and put into motion, it is almost impossible to stop them.  Our current president has stepped up the secret killings and prosecuted journalists under a 1917 anti-espionage statute carrying the death penalty to prevent the release of truths about our policies that might embolden our many enemies.

Righteous rage can be intoxicating to a maniac.  While intoxicated with what feels to him like righteous rage, spraying machine gun fire at inhuman enemies seems like a reasonable thing to do.  After that, though, the let down often comes quickly.  After a moment’s reflection the maniac is as likely to turn the gun on himself as to do anything else.  

Personally, no matter how provoked or worked up, I would err on the side of pausing to take a few breaths before capitulating to rage and smashing someone’s fez.  

Unless under direct physical threat, being gentle, calm and soft-spoken is usually much more productive than being righteously enraged, agitated, loud, and ready for justifiable violence.  

Of course, I know where I live and I fully realize how idiotic what I’m saying sounds.  Even if I’m totally right.

 

Connect the Dots (law school digression notwithstanding)

I went to law school thinking I would learn how society is actually organized.  They would teach me the syntax of making a coherent case, analyzing and litigating an issue.  I’d learn to use language the way the masters have always done to maintain their many advantages.  My discursive instincts would be tamed, I thought dreamily, by the sleek logic of the law and I would learn to package and sell my ideas in the lingua franca of our world.  

The imaginative impulse I have always been prone to in telling a story might succumb, I believed, to the structured logic of the law.  This turned out to be mostly fantasy, as was the idea that the law’s sometimes merciless logic is not, in many cases, close to madness.  Much evil is, and has always been, justified and maintained by the law, after all.  

I imagined, for some reason, that the study of the law would help me dispense with frills and make a clear and convincing case for things I believe in.  It turns out, unsurprisingly, that the law, a man-made institution negotiated by men paid to make sure the law is malleable enough for their patron’s purposes, larded with obfuscating frills and no solution to many human woes.  The law famously regards many essential things as trifles, but this, apparently, should not unduly trouble a calm mind.  

It must be noted that most people study the law to obtain a license to practice a well-paying, or idealistic and less well-paying, career fighting either for or against justice, or for the highest bidder.  Few, if any, sensible law students dream of learning some mystery the law never promised to reveal in the first place.   I did learn some of the things I studied law for, in spite of myself.

In the law, if you have a cognizable injury the law has a remedy for, you state clearly what you want.   You pay your filing fee and ask the court to set a date and time when the court may hear the parties, to state your case, let your adversary show why an order should not be signed granting your party the relief it seeks.     

The exact nature of the evil complained of is set out in its most pertinent details and the relief sought is laid out precisely, supported by the appropriate laws.  The argument then proceeds to show the truth of every detail of the complaint, or of the defense.  It is an exercise in skillfully marshaling the facts, pertinent law, and court decisions; persuasively presenting them in the best possible light for your position.  The presentation ends by reminding the court of the justness, fairness and, respectfully submitted, Your Honor, necessity of granting the remedies sought.  

In the strongest legal argument every detail is clearly supported by the law, the facts line up obediently to carry the burden of proof.   Specific details of the law, the intent of the legislators, pertinent legal tradition and favorable Supreme Court cases are cited to make the case air-tight.  The easiest case to win is the proverbial slam dunk, every factor the court will use to decide the matter solidly on the side of your argument.

“Why would anyone bother to oppose you if you had a slam dunk case, supported by law, tradition and precedent?” I asked, early on in my career at law school.   Such was my idiotic innocence at the time.    The question was greeted as a deadpan joke on my part, as I was one of very few in law school given to any kind of overt irreverence in class.  Every first year in the lecture hall was smiling after my question.    

“Excellent question, Mr. So and So.  Does anyone have an answer to this?” asked the professor with a wry crocodilian expression.     

Mr. Flores answered brightly, “The only reason anyone would possibly oppose a slam dunk case is if there was a lot of money at stake.  Other than that, professor, it never happens.”   More smiles all around, the obvious point driven home.

An old friend of mine is a lawyer for the earth.   He has been burned in effigy by angry mobs, a straw man of him has been lynched by fishermen, the swinging scarecrow wearing a placard with his name on it has appeared in newspapers and on TV.   He argues in federal court for why the law requires a federal judge to force federal agencies to enforce environmental laws against powerful corporations to stop chemical poisoners and species murdering mercenaries.   These top businessmen and their legal counsel are paid lavishly so that poisoning, killing, plundering and pillaging can continue and spread nationally and worldwide as lucratively as possible.  For some odd reason, these characters rarely seem to be burned in effigy while they put the torch to my friend’s stand-in as often as they can.

“Dick Cheney’s son-in-law is actually a polite and superficially sociable guy,” my friend told me once, after litigating a case against him and his team of corporate mouthpieces.  Though he’s not the sort of person my friend would have lunch with, he has a modestly winning social persona and does not immediately come across as the kind of monster he represents.  One of Antonin Scalia’s sons makes an excellent living slashing at laws like McCain-Feingold, the old campaign finance law, and driving a fleet of Mac Trucks through the complicated, lobbyist vetted Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.  Another fabulously wealthy lawyer, probably much smarter than Cheney’s  son-in-law and no doubt wittier, although you might not necessarily like to have lunch with Counselor Scalia either.

In general, though there are exceptions that we get to applaud, the party with the most money, power and purchased free speech wins the day in American courtrooms.

                                                                  ii

But, I digress.   Here are some dots to connect, then.

We had a popular two-term president who, soon after taking the Oath of Office, broke the one union (PATCO) who supported him when he was running for president.  The Air Traffic Controllers  were not striking for better wages, they were striking for safer working conditions, less consecutive hours guzzling coffee to stay awake trying to prevent planes from crashing into each other.   The private sector is the solution for this sort of thing, announced the president, and unions are, well… unions make it inconvenient to do business for the job creators, they’re bad for competition, bad for America.   The private sector can do things better, goes this form of logic, while we cut the funds used to run public programs and shrink government to a size where it can be drowned in a bathtub.  

Forget about the many important things government does for people, has done over the years, things that only a government can do.  Forget that democratic government is supposed to be of the people, by the people, for the people:  drown it.   Crowds turn up to hail the Chief, support our troops wherever they’re sent, for any reason or for no reason, chant “USA, USA!” and vote for people determined to drown democratic government in a bathtub.  The private sector, companies like Enron, Halliburton, Monsanto, Walmart, Goldman-Sachs and Exxon, are held out by these bold new patriots as the best guarantors of our freedom now.

When the Twin Towers crumbled we saw footage of jubilant crowds in Gaza and the West Bank cheering that the Great Satan had been so grievously wounded.  At least we were told that these mobs were doing that as they yipped and threw their arms up in the air with huge smiles on their faces, carried coffins with American flags on them, waved bloody American flags.  It was unthinkable that crowds could be cheering the murder of thousands of innocent Americans from all over the world, the blood-thirsty bastards.  The images of their celebration of murdered Americans fueled our anger and thirst for vengeance.

Fast forward a decade or so, crowds of Americans all over this land, celebrating like their team had won the Super Bowl, honking horns, screaming, delirious, pumping fists, chanting “USA! USA!” after Obama announced that he’d killed Osama.   Newscasters stumbled over the announcement, more than one said President Osama had killed Obama, but everyone, almost without exception, celebrated the execution of the charismatic millionaire terrorist, at least with a private fist pump.  This televised display of bloodlust was not supposed to have any effect among the populations who already hate our freedom.

“Totally different story,” you will say, “when the Palestinians celebrated the killings on 9/11 it was the deaths of innocents killed by terrorists that they were cheering.  Americans cheered the death of a monster who had orchestrated the killing of thousands.  Totally different, dude.”

Point taken.  But here are some dots to connect:  

Right after the 9/11 attacks Congress authorized the use of force to strike back at the terrorists.  The invasion of Afghanistan had hazy goals from the beginning, outside of killing or capturing bin Laden and other al Qu’eda leaders, who were allowed to escape at Tora Bora.  Once they were gone there was no clear reason to continue warring there and no chance of installing a stable western style democracy, yet war on we did, for little discernible purpose.   Many of the billions for that war were spent on private contractors hired to do things army grunts, working for a fraction of the contractors’ pay, usually did.  The contractors were paid many times what American military personnel were paid, for doing the same work, and the politically connected corporations employing the contractors made a killing, as the saying goes.

The war in Iraq, a preemptive strike advertised as a war to free a random tyrannized population from the clutches of a random Hitler-like dictator, was even more unreasonable.  Here too, a tremendous force of private ‘contractors’ earned many billions of dollars for the corporations who hired them.   Already wealthy people with the right political affiliation got immensely more wealthy servicing these long wars.  Part of the beauty of the set-up was that since these private contractors didn’t work directly for the government, their employees were not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice and could do questionable, sometimes unspeakable, things without the usual questions being asked, with little or no accountability up the chain of command, if accountability could travel upward in a corporate hierarchy.  

Both wars, seen by many, not unreasonably, as wars of aggression and wars of choice, ruthlessly conducted, made America more hated worldwide, drove the recruitment of jihadists, insurgents, foreign fighters, suicide bombers.   Both wars continued far longer than any others in U.S. history, far longer than World War II and the Civil War combined.  The actual conduct of both wars kept from the public more than any previous wars.  Fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight ’em here, freedom on the march, the war on terror, killing those who ‘hate our freedom’, making the world safe for democracy, the war to end war.   Whatever.

The point is: we are a declining nation at permanent war against a shifting, constantly replenished world-wide enemy.  This entails some sacrifices in things like privacy and civil liberties, more government secrecy, less latitude for journalists who are not with the program, trials for espionage against journalists who try to push the boundaries of the muscular new government secrecy doctrine.   The attitude seems to be:  God bless America and God bless our men and women fighting for our flag, including those secret forces and private contractors working behind the scenes to hunt down and kill our enemies.    Damn those myopics who bitch about the curtailment of abstractions like privacy, complete freedom of the press, truth, justice and the so-called American way.

When they first started doing extrajudicial targeted assassinations of its enemies, Israel was widely castigated for it.  A car would be blown up in some middle eastern country, killing an infamous and elusive freedom fighter/terrorist, and the world would scream in protest of this murderous illegality.   Executions by governments, it has long been traditional, must be preceded, in virtually all cases, by a public trial in which proof of guilt for a capital crime is shown beyond a reasonable doubt.  Fast forward a decade or two and consider for a moment the massive and widespread American program of killing by drone strike whoever the president at the time deems worthy of death, with or without an accusation of a specific crime punishable by death.  Drone strikes are now the preferred method of American warfare and there is little discussion of its legality or propriety anywhere but among malcontents and nitpickers with nothing more important to do.

There has been, since the days of President Bush the First, a media ban on showing dead U.S. service men killed in combat.  There is no draft, we’ve had an all volunteer armed force for more than a generation now.  Nobody back home is asked to make any of the traditional civilian sacrifices for the ongoing wars, even taxes cannot be raised to pay for these amazingly expensive wars, we put them on the credit card.  The killing goes on largely by remote control, and since there are no American “boots on the ground” (very unpopular for our brave troops, and their much better paid mercenary comrades, to be killed or captured by freedom haters) nobody pays much attention to the actions of secretive groups like the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the elite units that carry out most of the killing of bad guys and innocents alike.  We justify or explain away torture now.  The president recently admitted that, after 9/11, unfortunately, and with the best of intentions, “we tortured some folks”, as well as conducting wars that are not defensive and killing by remote control in nations we are at peace with that may have enemies, even American citizen enemies, afoot in them.  

JSOC conducts secret killing operations in dozens of countries today.   The news does not report this, and the rare journalists who research and report on stories like this, like Jeremy Scahill (Blackwater, JSOC targeted kill list expanded to thousands of names) and Jane Mayer (Extraordinary Rendition and Enhanced Interrogation torture programs) … well, the most painstakingly researched articles, books, exposes, documentaries only have any effect on a tiny fringe of the population.  These hideous and troubling revelations are not mainstream in any significant way, don’t get much airplay, few get very upset about it, and even if they do, you know?   

The fact seems to be, killing by drone strike, “Signature strikes”(killing people who fit the profile of the ones we’re trying to kill, even though we can’t confirm their identities), works, is politically harmless (in U.S. politics, anyway) is good for business, and, therefore, good for America–even if an argument can be made that it’s not much different, when you shoot the wrong people and call in a Hellfire Missile strike on their house, killing groups of children and old people (collateral damage) than what guys like Hitler and Stalin used to do, and were rightly hated for.

The Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was the “go to” cleric after 9/11.  American born, reasonable, telegenic, abhorring the murder of civilians, calling for an end to violence, he appeared on the media many times in the years after that hellacious attack, until he began to recoil at America’s endless war against Muslims across the Middle East.  Openly critical of America’s war policies he left the country and returned to his family’s ancestral home in Yemen.  He began saying things on the internet inimical to America’s interests.  Yemen imprisoned him, he spent 17 months in solitary confinement and emerged as the most dangerous man since Osama bin Laden.  Radicalized, he called for jihad and death to American infidels.  His name was added to the kill list, targeted for assassination by Predator drone and he was duly executed by an air strike conducted by remote control.

Two weeks later al-Awlaki’s 16 year old American son, Abdulrahman, was eating lunch outdoors with friends when a Hellfire missile ended that meal in a splatter of meat.  No explanation necessary.

Connect the dots.  What have we become?

Living in an Immature Nation

Each time I find my blood boiling these days I’m surprised.   I feel that my blood should have learned how not to boil by now.  It has been several years now,  trying to make myself a mild man, with modest success.   The surge of anger some things stir, often things on the radio news, still takes me by surprise.   Like doomed children in NYC I’ve never met, and am trying in vain to work with, the anger often flares over a seeming abstraction– like the senseless death of another doomed kid. My abstraction-inspired anger seems weak compared to the concrete things most citizens of an immature nation become enraged about.

A fanatic takes a large sharp knife, forces one of ours to make a speech to a video camera, then brutally cuts the man’s head off.  Unspeakable savagery abhorrent to any decent person.   We can be dismayed that our Saudi Arabian allies publicly behead people for a variety of crimes, but at least that is a sovereign government rather than some random vicious asshole with a sharp knife and an internet hook-up.

Murderous fanatics launched an ingenious and horrific attack on America thirteen years ago that succeeded in changing many things in the nation they hated.  They killed thousands of random citizens.  They caused unimaginable emotional and economic devastation– the immediate economic costs of the attack alone were literally billions of dollars (some sickening graphs are here).  

America changed overnight from a nation coming to terms with the necessity for international law to one that justified torture and any practice that could inflict damage on this inhuman international enemy.   The 9/11 attacks provoked two decade long wars, one a “pre-emptive” war entirely unprovoked, shoddily planned and disastrous, that cost over a trillion dollars, stalemated America, left the Middle East shattered, angry and violent and thousands more Americans dead, maimed, disabled for life.  Not to mention Iraqis, Afghanis, Syrians, Lybians, Egyptians, Yemenis, Pakistanis– countless millions displaced, orphaned, torn apart.

Recent polls showed that Americans are finally sick of endless war, even if it is far away and fought only by those who sign up and an army of highly paid mercenaries.   Even if American military dead can no longer by shown on TV, Americans are sick of the wars.  They accomplish nothing, cost zillions, make the opposite of friends for the U.S.A., are pointless, less than pointless.  Some argue they play directly into the hands of terrorists bent on destroying the West.

Even if there are no American “boots on the ground”, most Americans seemingly have come to realize that bombing raids over impossibly complicated conflict zones seem like a stupid idea for solving knotty, centuries-old problems. Particularly when this American murder from the air often makes things worse in unforeseen ways. Particularly when those knotty, centuries-old conflicts are being played out thousands of miles away, across an ocean and another continent.

While Americans were telling pollsters they are not anxious for the next war, the president was lambasted by his many enemies as a weak, vacillating, nuance-pondering  sissy for hesitating to authorize a “muscular response” to the latest provocation, for not immediately ordering the slaughter of guilty and innocent alike each time a new horror happens somewhere in that oil rich region.  Recent polls showed that most Americans have come to support this hesitation to use state violence as the first option.  It’s almost as if we have finally tallied up the results of our bold, muscular war policy of recent years and realize perhaps a bit more reflection, and less reflexive muscular activity, might have led to a better result than rushing in boldly to blow things up and declaring ourselves victors before the battle was won.

What had my blood boiling the other day?  The newest polls found that a majority of Americans are now behind the president who finally stopped wringing his hands and did what good red-blooded patriots have wanted him to do since those horrible videos of the beheadings came out.   Recent polls show Americans love the bombing of these monsters, these ISIS savages.  ISIS, crucifiers, beheaders, rapists of children, using an explosive public relations campaign, did what American advertisers strive to do all the time — dramatically sold a brand and inflamed imaginations to change hearts and minds.  The president’s friends and enemies alike applauded when he finally announced that America would kick ISIS’s fucking asses.

I think of this endless cycle of blood-crazed lynch mobs, the vicious haters proving their point over and over.  I can provoke you and make you kill, make you step over your mother and even kick her in the face, to rush out to murder and, in turn, justify my revenge killings.  Nyah, nyah, nyah nyaaaaaa-yah!   I put my smirking picture on the internet cutting one of your people’s heads off and you’ll kill more civilians than I ever slaughtered (and I crucified, disemboweled, burned to death, shot, stabbed, hacked more faceless chumps than you can count).  “YOU SUCK, AMERICA!!!!” I taunt on viral video.    Then I sit back and wait for American bombers to help me do my important work.   You fools are my greatest recruiters!

Here’s the wild part about living in an immature nation– we have little sense of anything outside of our own immediate concerns.   We’ve been raised and trained this way.  We think of ourselves as exceptional, different and better than those born in slums without sewer systems or even outhouses.  It is truly not in our nature to equate every other human life with our own.  We will, of course, knit our brows in true sorrow when we see footage of a dozen little children’s bodies, blown up in some remote village where we also blew up many adult men we had good reason to believe were mostly terrorists.  Sure collateral damage happens, but way over there, you know, it happens to “f-ing sand n-words”, if we picture them at all, badly drawn faceless creatures randomly scurrying on a computer screen.  You can blow them up for extra points while fighting the haters of our freedom.   Just don’t accidentally kill one of our own!  LOL!

Ixnay on Ein-May Ampf-Kay

The other day I was reminded that I’m no Vonnegut, nothing like the writer who started writing as a corporate PR man, who worked long and diligently, and faced years of rejection and lack of appreciation, to make himself into a marketable commodity, both his writing and his folksy wit on the speaking circuit.  After many years of hard work he wound up well paid and beloved for both.  Today I was urged not to use the word “struggle” in the title of the book I might work on, if all else fails, as appears may well be the case, my imaginary city burning as I fiddle here.  

“Not ‘Struggle'” my friend said, to remind me of what I myself noted a few weeks ago here– people don’t want to read about a losing, against the odds struggle, unless the protagonist miraculously prevails, in which case he becomes an inspiring winner and the story an uplifting fable about the power of individual imagination, resourcefulness and perseverance. 

I assured him I’d call it something else, tempting as it is, as I indisputably struggle, to puckishly riff on Mein Kampf, after the shortened German title editors insisted on as an improvement of the original “My Struggle Against Seven Years of Lies and Hypocrisy and the Fucking Jews and Other Filthy Maggots Who Want to Bugger Me Even Though I Have Never Enjoyed Buggery of Any Kind and I’ll Kill Anyone Who Says I Like To Take It Up The Ass!“.  The future Fuhrer was persuaded that the book would sell better with a strong, forceful, more succinct title.  “Those first two words, so powerful and perfect!” he was assured obsequiously, “the rest of the title, excellent though it also is, would be a distraction, and hard to fit on the spine.”

“You lay it all out so beautifully in the book, Adolf, no point giving away all that for free in the title. Build the suspense a little.  Make them buy the book if they want all that,” another cajoled, fawningly.  The author of that book, a strong-willed mentally deranged autodidact who had dictated it to a functional illiterate, was not a man to be trifled with.  He was a writer who needed flattery more than most.  In later years he’d have men hung by piano wire for offenses far less grave than second guessing the best title for his own book about his unspeakable struggle against forces hell bent on making the world a nightmare.  In that department, he was an expert.

“Did something bad happen to you today?” she asked, eyes looking sad.

“Shut up,” I said.

“You’re no Hitler,” she snapped, turning back to her computer game.

I understand.  Anyway, Mein Kampf was a main source of Hitler’s livelihood until he went on the public payroll years later as Chancellor of Germany.  It was a best seller in Germany during those wild years.  The best selling book that nobody ever read, it was a popular wedding present and also given for birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, confirmations and, by black-humored wags, bar mitzvahs.  Try reading it some time.  It’s impossible to get through more than a couple of pages, although the short section on propaganda is breathtakingly chilling and very well presented. 

Much as I am biased against him, horrific as his own nightmare childhood undoubtedly was, as much as I hate the man, if I’m being totally honest here, I have to give him this much:  he was a visionary as far as how to sell an idea to the public and he forever changed the way it’s done by most governments and virtually every advertiser of political campaigns:  

You want to influence the masses with facts and reason, logic and persuasion?  HA!  You stupid bastard, I’ll hang you from a meathook by your ass!  You want to influence the public, my friend?  You stir their emotions, shake their emotions, stomp violently on their emotions, mainly their fear.  You TERRIFY THEM!  Yes, that’s what the Allies did, inspired terror and hatred of the German army in the World War.  That was the right thing to do!  

Our commanders were no different than others, in fact, a few vomited when they saw what the fucking Turks did to the Armenians (don’t get me started on the Turks, or the Armenians, for that matter).   But our propagandists took the high road in the Great War and lost the war for hearts and minds, the war itself, even though our military was far superior.  They idiotically stuck to the truth, told our people that we were a superior culture and a great nation and that we deserved to win because we represented the highest values civilization had so far attained, and the Americans, English and French were inferior and contemptible.  All true, but useless as engines to drive war machines of hatred and revenge.

The Allies were smart and effective, they were ruthless and not hobbled by quaint scruples about what was true, sportsmanlike, decent.   They knew that  primal fear and visceral hatred motivate far better than intellectual appeals to pride and contempt.  They used any lie they could think of to make their people, and their troops, fear and hate the Germans.  The filthier the lie, the more brazen and sickening the lie, the better.  The Allies had it right, alas!

FEAR and HATRED, I’ll say it again, that’s the goal and the more explosive and terrifying the lie, the more gigantic and atrocious the lie, and, YOU KEEP SCREAMING IT UNTIL THEY ARE QUAKING IN THEIR SMELLY BOOTS, the better.  You get them TERRIFIED!   TERROR!!!  You fill them with nightmares until they shit themselves.  BOOO!!!   VOOO-OOO!!!!!  Then they will listen eagerly when you tell them what they must do to save themselves, they are ready to obey, march in columns to kill.   Their savior will assure them with absolute confidence:  we will face this fearsome enemy together, bravely, our complete and glorious triumph is preordained by GOD.  Follow me and we will KILL THE MONSTER!  And they will lean forward, hushed and expectant, to hear the details, commit any acts necessary to KILL THE MONSTERS!!!  You have them in the palm of your hand, agents of your will, if you keep them in terror. And simple, terrible, unimaginable lies endlessly repeated are the best way to keep them terrified.

Not long after Hitler outmaneuvered the rest of the complacent German right and had himself named Chancellor, the Reichstag, the German Parliament Building, went up in flames.  The man who started the fire, amazingly in twenty places simultaneously on several floors of the huge building, was captured, tried and executed.  The convicted arsonist, a Dutch Communist named Marinus van der Lubbe, is referred to in at least one famous historian’s account as a “Dutch half-wit”.  The lone arsonist was tried and beheaded, although symbolic justice was eventually done.

The Reichstag fire was as instrumental to Hitler’s dictatorship as the 9/11 attacks were to extreme right wing American politicians who seized the chance to consolidate all kinds of special extra-constitutional powers in their executive and themselves.  The Weimar Constitution needed no revision the day after the Reichstag fire– an Enabling Act,  triggered by the national emergency, was immediately passed and Mr. Hitler ruled under the emergency powers granted by the unamended Weimar Constitution until the day twelve years later he killed his newly wed wife and his beloved dog and shot himself in the mouth.  It must be noted that it’s hard to blame him for those final acts, though he might have spared his wife and his faithful Alsatian.  And at the risk of sounding opinionated, the only shame is that he didn’t put the gun in his mouth twenty years earlier.

And also, at the risk of sounding opinionated and slyly insinuating, both, I note that it was not until the massive and sweeping Patriot Act was passed immediately after the attacks on September 11, 2001, that the word “Homeland” came into general use here to describe the land of the free and the home of the brave.  Naomi Wolf, in The End of America, pointed out that this was a direct translation of Hitler’s preferred term for the German Reich, die Heimat.   Ditto “war footing” which we were on until Shock and Awe began, which was another Nazi coinage, kreigsfuss.   Not for nothing, I’m just saying.

But I digress.

We live in a world made black and white by paid haters on both sides, and the hissing flames are tended by the hate profiteers, self-made millionaire professional dealers in partisan hatred.  There is a bottom line, non-negotiable and debated not with an exchange of reasoned arguments, but emotionally, from roaring throats with veins distended.  Freedom or tyranny!  Liberty or Death!    In theory freedom is the right to do whatever increases your happiness or protects your interests without harming others.  Tyranny is force used ruthlessly against the exercise of freedom.

There’s theory, and each side marshals its simplified version of the truth to support their ‘theory’, loaded and problematic terms like “the free market”, “democracy” and “justice”  are angrily spat back and forth into the open spittoon of public discourse, and then there’s reality on the ground.  It is in the reality on the ground, as both sides argue deafeningly over the moral high ground, where faces are being stomped into the dirt with heavy boots.

Thinking back to my friend’s excellent advice, I’ll leave the word “struggle” out of my title and work with something like “Love and the Empowering Echoes of Hope”, something that might sell in liberal arts college bookstores.  He’s right, to hell with the incessant Hitler jokes.  Hitler was an asshole, and about as funny as a meathook to the old trapezius.

Clever Marketing is the Key to Success

Sekhnet came up to urge me to join every social media site linking businesses that I can find.  I am isolated and it is an increasing problem, especially for someone trying to run a shop and attract customers.   She showed me the social networking entry for an accomplished man we know, an angel investor on a site where these entrepreneurs mingle looking for opportunities.  She showed me how clearly he laid out his interests, qualifications and expertise.  She urged me to do the same, to advance my stalled not-for-profit business.   I agreed that she was right about the usefulness of joining more sites where I might meet like-minded people, then read her part of the email I’d spent the past hour writing.

I’d been led to pet one of my favorite peeves by my friend’s emailed, on target, comment:

(“You spend way too much time petting your peeves,” Sekhnet observed.)
 
I’ve grown more and more bitter over the fact that nothing succeeds on its own merits–that whatever makes it in our world, does so because someone has packaged and sold it cleverly.  Which helps to explain why we end up, in the culture, in our food, in our politics, with so much rancid shit.
 
Well said and I share the bitterness, though I try (mostly without success) not to let it stop me. A sociologist who wrote in the 1930s (Harold Lasswell, I think) whose work I read decades ago while researching Hitler’s rise to power and how ruthlessly Herr H. used the mass media to influence public opinion and promote his famously rancid ideas, concluded that “the religion of the United States is advertising”.  He proclaimed this self-evident truth before TV, in the infancy of radio, when the mass media was being cranked out and printed on pages that were disseminated by child hawkers on street corners.  He described how American industry sent Polish immigrants back to Poland to unfurl giant painted banners of American streets literally paved with gold and lie to the workers they fronted steerage tickets for to bring to work in factories.   Greek Americans went to Greece, Italians to Italy, wherever they were recruiting they sent native recruiters to lie in the mother tongue.   Woodrow Wilson’s Committee for Public Information was run by an ad man named George Creel who whipped up patriotic fervor for a war being fought by the rest of the world in muddy trenches along the lines of the worst of the Civil War, except made even more hellish by the addition of machine guns, poison gas and airplanes.   There were parades in the streets and long lines at the recruiters because of Creel’s genius in whipping up support for WIlson’s senseless (except to those who made a killing) War to End War, War to Make the World Safe for Democracy, War for Fuck You We’ll Kill You Under the Espionage Act For Trying to Use the First Amendment in Time of War to Aid Our Enemies, You Fucking Traitor!
 
The rulers of our society have always ruled by selling lies to people raised from infancy on advertising jingles and tag lines.  By the time kids are ten they’ve done their Gladwell’s 10,000 hours quota of commercials on TV, they are masters of being marketed to.  Presidential debates and elections?  Decided by image, body language, sound bites.  A few years ago promising presidential candidate Howard Dean lost his political future by cackling euphorically into a microphone at a rally.  Might have had good reason to be euphoric at that moment, he was leading in all the polls, but they played the 3 second clip of a cackling madman 24/7 until he was toast.  It’s despicable what greed and cynical marketing have done to the world and it explains much of the misery, disease and early death.   Capitalism is a cancer and the only cure, it would appear, is the total destruction of life on earth, which they are well on their way to accomplishing. God bless ’em.  But in this context, in our competitive free market society, there is only one way to successfully sell an idea– the old fascist way, the single-minded way Mr. Hitler had such brutal insight into, to put the most distasteful possible gloss on the gentle and perfectly neutral art of persuasion.  Trying to do it without retching, not always easy for the squeamish.
 
Sekhnet told me I should clean it up, lose the ending, and send it to the Nation as a letter or note, that people would be interested in the little history I’d presented, that I write these great things and never send them anywhere to find an audience for them.
 
“Did you ever read the Nation?” I asked her.  She hadn’t for a long time, but knew their politics and thought their readers would appreciate a letter to the editor containing this well presented information.

I appreciate her feelings, I really do, and her desire to help.  Motivated by love, and my best interests, and an understandable desire to see me step forward in the sticky muck.   She agreed that it wouldn’t do to send it in without cleverly packaging it, somehow, and relating it smartly to some current hot topic, the hook.   The irony was not lost on me, though I took the way of the world and said nothing about it.

Then her native optimism and desire to help rose up again– the stories of a Big Lie are so common that I won’t have long to wait until the next news cyclone generated by one, and I can send it in then!  

Meantime, I do the online equivalent of printing it out, rolling it up and sticking it where the sun don’t shine.

Too Big Not To Bugger Thousands

“The corporate man is the man of the future.”   Heinrich Himmler

I am urged to be proactive about this, now seven week, lack of internet and phone service.  I call today on Sekhnet’s land line, browsing the internet as I  punch in my various responses on the phone’s keypad.  After a remarkably short five minute wait a human at Verizon picks up.
 
“Do you have a contact number?”  he asks and I give him the cell number they’ve already made several robocalls to, the number I was promised Tuesday, falsely but hopefully by a sympathetic young woman in Pittsburgh, would be called on Wednesday.
 
He will email the cable maintenance department, they will contact me.  He has no way of checking what is going on directly. His last record shows a service call on May 9, which is what the robot that greets me every time I call keeps asking me if I want to reschedule.
 
“Is the Cable Maintenance department part of Verizon?”
 
“Yes, sir,” he says.
 
“Would you please connect me to them, then.”
 
“We’re not able to do that.  I’m going to send them an email and they’ll contact you.”
 
I take a breath, ask the young man to put himself in my position.  I tell him the story, without snarling.  Then I ask, if he was me, would he thank him for the help and wait for Verizon to contact me?  Especially if multiple promises to contact him had already not been kept, and a bill for undelivered services sent to him five weeks after the service was promised to be restored?
 
“I would not like it,” he admits.
 
“Please connect me to your supervisor,” I tell the pawn.
 
“She’ll tell you the same thing,” then he promises to walk over and get her.  Fifteen minutes of blaring muzak follows.  Can you spell GO FUCK YOURSELF ASSHOLE, I work for these Nazis, do you think I have a good life?
 
Someone who is not programmed to be a victim, I suppose, maybe someone tenacious, with legal training and great verbal and people skills, would find a way to fix this, I guess.   Seems impossible as I waited for a ‘supervisor’ (the minimum wage worker in the next cubicle, most likely) that I was forced to hear blasting, ever more maddening generic music on a speaker phone that even at the lowest volume was at an unbearable level.  I suppose I could have put it into the drawer here and closed it until the supervisor came on.
 
To cheer myself during the wait I looked on the bright side.  I had printed out the actual size mock up of the label Sekhnet painstakingly designed and created.  It fits the Idea Book nicely, looks great, I’m going on-line to order a thousand as soon as Verizon gets done with me.  A very handsome piece of propaganda it is, really gorgeous– if the stickers look 70% as good as this print on matte photo paper I’ll be delighted.  I also paid for and have so far taken three CLE credits from a corrupt outfit that allows you to do an hour’s required Ethics CLE in only 15 minutes or so, if you’re prepared to be a weasel, which I might be tempted to become as I have eighteen more credits to amass in the next few days to keep the shackle lawfully attached to my leg. 
 
Then, suddenly, the muzak stops and the lovely Ms. Green introduces herself. 
 
During our conversation, making this call to Verizon a svelte forty three minutes at its end,  I learn that three to six months would be optimistic for renewed internet service, that they will in fact be replacing miles of crappy copper wire they no longer service with fiber optic cable all over northern Manhattan, eventually.  
She tells me that I will continue to get bills during that time that I must pay, but I’ll be reimbursed when and if my service is ever restored, and she’s sorry if I think that’s unreasonable, it’s just the way they do it.  The bills are generated automatically unless her office informs the business office that there’s no service, and that’s more complicated for everyone.  Just pay the bills and you will be reimbursed, and also, we will never come in your mouth or in any other orifice you may or may not have.
 She promises she’ll call me tomorrow when she hears back from the Cable Maintenance Department.  She stops me as I begin again, she promises, gives me her word again, even though she tells me she understands why I’d be skeptical to hear her say that.  She will give me the details as to what they predict as far as resumed service to tens or hundreds of thousands in my neighborhood and she suggests I call the business office if I want to complain about being billed for services they will continue to bill me for until service is restored, if ever.  There is no direct number to her, but she promises again that she will call me by noon tomorrow, and reminds me that Verizon offered me a free second cell phone that I declined.
 
To her credit she neither thanks me for being a Verizon customer nor apologizes for her employers’ treachery.  After all, I realize, they’d lose maybe a hundred thousand customers at a shot if they told them the truth or kept them informed.  Fair is fair, you know what I’m saying?
I resist urging her to ‘have a nice day’ or making any of my obligatory references to corporate psychopathy, Hitler, or anything else illustrative of the corporate culture we must endure daily, as she tells me again that she’ll talk to me tomorrow.   Under the circumstances, which must be extremely trying for her, she sounds pleasant as a spring breeze.  No wonder they pay her ten dollars an hour to supervise the other, far less skilled, telephone operators Verizon employs in that cube farm where human misery is cultivated while Verizon fosters communication while tending assiduously to the corporate bottom line.

Chill Pill

Sekhnet recommends multitasking while listening to blaring corporate hold muzak and being thanked periodically for your business, which is so important to the modern corporation that they take the trouble to play a recording of their gratitude, at the expense of their on-hold captive audience advertising time.  

This multitasking usually involves something like paying bills on-line or doing some research on-line, or playing some mindless on-line game.   Since I am using my cell phone to call Verizon about my lack of phone and internet service, these options are not available.  I decide that while I’m on hold I will grill two processed fake meat hamburgers, probably as healthy for the vegetarian as a Big Mac is for everyone else.   They are almost as tasty, when prepared right, and probably slightly less toxic than the real thing.

After only a few minutes, upon being told the wait is longer than usual to speak to a human, I’m given the option to tap in my number and a representative will gladly call me back.   Nice touch, I think, feeling slightly pleased with myself, since today I am calling the “buy new service” line, rather than “trouble with my existing line” department.

Flipping my burgers when the phone in my shirt pocket rings about two minutes later.   Total time so far under ten minutes, I note.   Excitedly I pick up and am greeted by another robot, then several minutes of loud advertisements, then too loud muzak.  I put the phone on speaker and place it on my kitchen table, volume turned down as I continue to prepare my lunch, making a kind of slaw (finely chopped scallions, red cabbage, romaine lettuce) to put on my burgers.  I am trying to remain calm and friendly so I can get help, not take my understandable (going on 7 weeks with no service) frustration out on the pawn who is talking to hundreds of angry, powerless customers today.

I mix the bowl of slaw, flip my burgers, grill a flatbread in the pan next to it, then hear a human voice come on the line.  In my eagerness to speak to this human being I hit not “speaker” but “talk” and somehow this connects me to a robot at Verizon asking me for my account number.  By the time I link the calls so I can speak to the human, a maneuver that takes at most four seconds, the human is gone and the robot drones on about the longer than normal waiting time to speak to the next available representative.  I see that I’ve been on hold only four additional minutes since I picked up to speak to the representative, a total of slightly less than the fifteen minutes I usually wait.  The ads and the blaring muzak made it seem longer.

Why would anyone tolerate this kind of shit?   Why would anyone not shred the bill they sent yesterday, charges due for six weeks of service not provided?   A normal person would not stand for it, would not tolerate being powerless and fucked around by some company just because it happens to have a monopoly.  But these are not normal circumstances.  Normally a person like me would live in a nice house, like virtually every other adult he knows, with several options for internet service.  The neighborhood where my rent stabilized apartment is located does not have other options for internet service, unless I buy a TV and get a cable and internet bundle from Time Warner, another highly altruistic outfit.

I wrote this yesterday in the little book I carry in my shirt pocket, and I stand by it, especially now that the chill pill I took to end my cursing tirade before I started smashing up this place is kicking in:

If you choose not to avail yourself of the privilege of a hard-working middle class life, you would do well to cultivate stoicism in the face of the thousand small, vicious indignities that are the lot of society’s losers.

We live in a society where winners are now required to brag and losers medicate themselves, or become violent, hypertensive, inordinately sarcastic or completely inert.   Mass media shows it over and over again—winners do not tolerate losing, losers do not have any idea how to win.   The game is as unfair as it’s been since the eve of the famous stock market crash at the end of the Roaring Twenties.  This is not a problem to those who are not being gamed by the game.  The question for someone like me would be:  if you had every opportunity to align yourself with the rest of the middle class, why would you choose being a powerless person at the mercy of a merciless system rigged against those at the bottom?

$300 out of pocket to have my ears cleaned?  Not anyone’s problem that I know but mine.  $280 for a urologist to spend perhaps 40 seconds palpating my prostate?   The Affordable Care Act, after all, is not responsible for the fact that my primary care doctor doesn’t consider ear cleaning, even for a patient who needs it annually, or a digital prostate exam, for the son of a man with prostate cancer, part of their overall wellness.  There are specialists for that.   He didn’t decide that there would be a $50 copay for the insured under Obamacare, or a $1,750 out-of pocket deductible before any of the insurance premiums paid by the patient every month would begin to kick in in the form of covered medical service.  Or that dental services, or eye glasses, were not deemed to be part of the average person’s health needs.

A wealthy friend suggested that I get rid of the remaining money I have in the bank and apply for Medicaid, which would cover all these things.  I pointed out that it would mean giving up my apartment, of course, and, if things went as badly as they sometimes do in our winner take all society, spending some time in a homeless shelter, assuming I could find one to suit my tastes.   He agreed that I was probably better off paying for Obamacare than going on Medicaid, but allowed that it was atrocious, the poor, expensive medical service I am getting under the Affordable Care Act.

Is it better to be comfortable than uncomfortable?  I would definitely say comfortable.  I am not poor.  If I knew now that I had five years to live, I could probably have a more or less middle class life style.  The problem is, I could live twenty more years.   I would actually like that, living a long life.

For one thing, that might give me time to have a small impact in this merciless world.  Imagine for a moment that I could show that a talented kid born in a slum was just as creative, and worthy of human rights, as a slightly less talented kid born to wealthy parents.   Imagine, in spite of the ridiculously daunting odds against it, that I was able to get funding for a program I have already designed to do this.  Imagine that program producing a thousand animated films a year, shorts that won awards all over the place and actually changed the conversation about education and the lot of thousands of children our society now regards, if at all, as future criminals, profit generators for lucrative privatized prisons.  Imagine the book I could write about that program, illustrated and illuminated by the imaginations of dozens of brilliant future inmates.

You can write that book now, one might say.  True.  But to have it published and widely sold I would have to have made the dream real in the world, monetized it, skillfully marketed it.  The talk shows don’t waste time interviewing even well-spoken losers with nice dreams.  Even I know that.