Category Archives: History and Politics

States’ Rights & American racism

This is a huge topic, obviously, which becomes emotionally charged when you throw the word “racism” into the mix.    America needs to confront our long history of virulent racism, and I will dip into the subject a little here.  Leaving racism aside for the moment, there are historical scholars on both sides of this long running debate over federalism, who should have the final say in local matters, the state or the federal government.  

Our federal system gives the states the final say on making and enforcing criminal and civil law, including family law and business laws.   Only certain legal matters, essential to the nation’s functioning, are ceded by the states to the federal government.   Printing currency, for example, and a nationwide postal system, have long been federal functions.  It was simply impractical for either of these things to be left to the individual states.  Other rights, such as a woman’s right to choose to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, have been extended nationally by a Supreme Court decision recognizing a Constitutional right, even if it was creatively found in the penumbra of some other Amendment.

The absolute right of the States to decide the laws for their citizens, without federal interference, has long been an area of controversy.   Some states have outlawed the death penalty, others, like Texas, are perennially among the world leaders in death by execution.   Several states were “dry” before Prohibition became the law of the land for thirteen lucky years (for organized crime) and a few states, and many counties and towns, remained alcohol free after repeal of the 18th Amendment.   Some states allow concealed carry of handguns, others allow open carry of rifles and handguns, others restrict the right of citizens to carry guns anywhere [1].   Certain states are leaders in environmental law, for example.  California has passed strict emissions and gas mileage laws for cars sold in California and driven by its citizens.   Our new president is challenging California’s right to impose environmental standards higher than the federal mandates, put in place by his hated enemy Obama, standards which he is now lowering.   This fight over States’ rights has been going on since our nation’s earliest days.

The classic States’ rights battle was over an American’s right to own Negroes as property.  At one time chattel slavery, an ironclad right guaranteed by three of four discreet clauses in our the Constitution, was left up to the citizens of the states to vote on.   The introduction of slavery to a new territory or state was always a matter of bloody contention.   Trouble is, whatever you want to say about the “Peculiar Institution” now, slavery was lucrative as hell for the people who sold and owned the most slaves.   Certain crops, like cotton, were not nearly as profitable if you had to pay the people who did the difficult picking.    Those super-lucrative crops, planted year after year on the same fields, quickly depleted the soil, which meant that periodically moving the plantation to new fertile territory was essential for the continued profits of those who employed the vast majority of the enslaved.  It’s why the enormous Louisiana Territory, and later the annexed Republic of Texas, both came in as slave territories.

The Civil War was not waged by Lincoln to abolish slavery, as he stated succinctly to abolitionist publisher Horace Greeley and others.  Lincoln prosecuted the war against the states in rebellion in order to preserve the Union, and he would have given ground on the issue of slavery to achieve that end.   More Americans spilled their blood, and lost their lives, in that war than in any other war in U.S. history. The total dead was greater than all Americans killed in all other wars since 1776 combined, until the police action in Vietnam finally tipped the scales over a hundred years later.   You could look it up. 

I am always trying, or most often trying, to be as objective and fair as possible in analyzing things here.  We live in a nation as divided as it was in 1854, the year the Supreme Court declared that slavery was protected by the federal government everywhere in these United States, that there was no such thing as a “free state” for a slave to escape to.   A few years later we had the Civil War.   A hundred years later, to the year, the Supreme Court finally whacked another hornet’s nest– segregation.   It was held to be inherently unequal, and in the case of public schools, was ordered to be stopped “with all deliberate speed.”   People were enraged and people died after this decision too.   In every state that favored segregation, and they weren’t only in the former Confederacy, mandated desegregation was seen as federal overreach.

Where I feel I may have been unfair the other day, in bringing up this issue, was when I called today’s States’ Rights advocates racists.  That is such an emotionally charged word.  We live in a racist society, to put it plainly.   Segregation is still pretty much the rule here, although it is now de facto rather than de jure segregation.   There are no longer laws that demand continued separation of the races, it is just what’s generally done here, it’s the way most Americans act.  

It is impossible to live here without noticing the racism.  Token blacks become fabulously rich, and powerful, which gives the impression that we are “post-racial”, as racist pundits and conservative jurists like to claim.  A mulatto was even elected president a few years back, though he was subjected to ruthless personal attacks about where he was born, in an attempt to delegitimize him and defeat all of his policy initiatives.  These symbols of post-racialism aside, for the masses of blacks in America today, as for many “non-white” immigrant groups, racism is still a big, often murderous, monster.

I am trying to think of the States Rights argument divorced from racism.  It shouldn’t be so hard to do.   Community standards determine what is or is not pornography, for example.   There are many things that should legitimately be matters for the locality to decide.   Like if you want an oil pipeline bringing toxic tar sands sludge across your watershed.  Or if you want to ban powerful toxic chemicals used by agribusiness from your local farms.   Powerful forces have ways of defeating massive local resistance.   If there’s enough money in it, watch how quickly, whenever convenient, federal sovereignty is invoked to clobber the will of the local citizens.    Monsanto/Bayer is in the process of doing this to eliminate local opposition to their toxic agribusiness products.

One of my favorite bits of hypocrisy, from otherwise staunch States’ Rights folks, usually political conservatives who claim to favor “small government”, is ongoing federal enforcement of Nixon’s draconian Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 .  That law classifies marijuana as a dangerous, highly addictive drug with no potential medical use.  The necessity, almost 50 years of medical research later, to have a national prohibition on drugs like marijuana?   Uh… it’s the fucking law, fuck face!!!!   Only evil people smoke weed!   In the case of something like PTSD, marijuana has been shown to be as effective as, and sometimes more effective than, the cocktail of pharmaceuticals currently being served up to a population that kills themselves in large numbers every week.   140 desperate U.S. war veterans a week, according to Obama one Veteran’s Day.

Even the enforcement of Nixon’s federal drug law has a large racist element to it, which is part of its design [2].  The Controlled Substances Act has been applied to people of color way out of proportion to their numbers in society.  When Nixon passed the law it was envisioned by him as a way to keep his enemies on a short leash.   Hippies, Yippies, blacks, Mexicans, musicians, liberal intellectuals, young anti-war protesters, homosexuals, often seemed to prefer marijuana to good old American booze.    Nixon got drunk every night during the final phase of his presidency, but nobody would accuse him of being a pothead.  The numbers of people prosecuted and locked up for long prison terms under this federal law, and its many state analogues, are disproportionately “minority”. 

So I’m not just gratuitously badmouthing these racist fucks when I call them racists. We can look at the situation on the ground dispassionately and call a spade a spade, no?   The resistance to federal Civil Rights laws, including the ongoing attacks on the Voting Rights Act, like the derailing of anti-lynching legislation for a hundred years, was led by racists.   There is no way to sugar coat this.  If a state does not prevent lynching, and resists federal efforts to do so… do you have another reason, outside of good, old-fashioned American racism, handy?    The antebellum South, we were told with a straight face for decades, was a place where God set the superior white race as rulers and protectors of the inferior black race.  If you want to call that racist, go ahead.

That said, the most racist place I can recall visiting, and that includes areas between New York and Florida we drove through when I was a kid in the early 60s, where unimaginably squalid shacks could be seen by the interstate with unimaginably ragged black kids playing out front, was Boston.   We went to get ice cream at a famous Boston ice cream place, I think it was called Steve’s, and our route was blocked by a gigantic protest march.  It was 1974 or 1975.  The white parents were livid, red-faced, screaming.  Twenty years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, it was still not time to have their children taken out of the neighborhood to sit in classrooms with “niggers.”   They roared the word, it was no secret back then.

It is no secret now.  We may call it the “n-word” and agree to ostracize any non-black person in public who says the word “nigger.”  It is a hate crime for a white person to speak this word in virtually any context.   Racists have always been sly.   You never heard Obama called a nigger, not by any public official, though he was brazenly treated that way by his obstructionist Republican rivals.  He was, you know, nothing to do with his race, simply illegitimate, a liar, someone who cynically and flippantly pretended to be qualified to be president, someone who hid a telltale birth certificate that proved he was… well, you know, that’s how all those fucking people are, idn’t it?  They will lie, pretend, speak very well, make high-sounding arguments to cover their treachery.   Obama was called a secret Muslim by the same people who attacked his militant black Christian preacher.  

I can’t imagine being a black American today, born in a neighborhood where the infant mortality rate is higher than in some third world countries.  Life expectancy for black Americans… well, the NY Times has great news, the gap is closing, down to only about four years longer for whites.  Read all about it here.  How does a black person look around at our great and wealthy nation without fucking screaming?  I am a “white” Jew (an oxymoron, according to most non-Jewish racists) and I feel like hollering every day, though I can go anywhere I want with virtually no possibility of being stopped, frisked or shot.

Nothing to see here, folks.  We post-racial now, baby, and some of those folks marching with Nazi armbands and Confederate symbols, chanting “Jews will not replace us”– some of the finest people, the finest people, believe me, believe me.  It is on us to discuss this shameful history and continue to find ways forward, even as it is a difficult conversation to begin after centuries of ruthless silence.  The kids today are doing a much better job of ignoring racist distinctions than any other generation, by the looks of it, but we should all be talking about this, even our finest people, especially our very finest people.

 

[1]  Special shout out to major league asshole Wayne LaPierre, head of the NRA.  LaPierre advocates a federal law allowing citizens of states that allow concealed carry of firearms to bring their concealed guns into all other states.   This insane shit idea is actually being debated and has a lot of votes in the Congress.

 These highly principled gun rights advocates have banned guns from an upcoming address  by Koch puppet and Trump’s VP Mike Pence at the NRA’s annual national convention.   All those good guys with guns who can stop a bad guy with a gun will be prevented from carrying guns when they go hear Mike Pence address the upcoming pro-gun rally in Dallas.  Way to go, Wayne!

In fairness to Wayne and his murderous ilk, the Secret Service will not allow guns at the event.  The NRA is only following the law.  One still must wonder why the president’s own men have become such anti-gun freedom haters.

High school students, some of whom hate LaPierre’s freedom, pile on:

“Wait wait wait wait wait wait you’re telling me to make the VP safe there aren’t any weapons around but when it comes to children they want guns everywhere?” Matt Deitsch, a Parkland student who helped organize the March for Our Lives rally in Washington, D.C., wrote on Twitter. “Can someone explain this to me? Because it sounds like the NRA wants to protect people who help them sell guns, not kids.”

source

[2]     I quote:

In June 1971, President Nixon declared a “war on drugs.” He dramatically increased the size and presence of federal drug control agencies, and pushed through measures such as mandatory sentencing and no-knock warrants.

A top Nixon aide, John Ehrlichman, later admitted: “You want to know what this was really all about. The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”  Nixon temporarily placed marijuana in Schedule One, the most restrictive category of drugs, pending review by a commission he appointed led by Republican Pennsylvania Governor Raymond Shafer.

In 1972, the commission unanimously recommended decriminalizing the possession and distribution of marijuana for personal use. Nixon ignored the report and rejected its recommendations.        [Talk about the fucking N-word… ed.]

source

Corporate personhood

“You’ve got to stop thinking about this stuff all the time,” said Sekhnet just now with great concern.   Living on the dark side, and marinating in it this way, takes its toll.   A ticket to the madhouse.  Say you are shining a light into the darkness and a friend may from time to time cluck sympathetically about something you illuminate.  It is still a ticket to the madhouse, I realize that.

This will not be a history of corporate personhood in American law.  We can condense that history to its essence by outlining how corporations acquired more personal rights than most American citizens.   After the Civil War, which is still being waged by sometimes powerful people we benignly call racists today (though there are, of course, some very fine racists, the finest racists), Congress forced the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments down the throats of the militarily defeated Confederacy [1].  Forced to ratify these amendments in order to receive federal funds to repair their decimated infrastructures, the former slave states signed on, but bitterly, and determined not to be enslaved by these punitive laws.   

The 13th Amendment outlawed slavery, “involuntary servitude”, except, coyly and significantly, as punishment for certain crimes.  The 14th Amendment ensured that no state denied citizens the full rights of American citizenship.  The 15th extended the franchise to black men, though it would be almost a hundred years until a federal law was passed, the famous Voting Rights Act, so that black people could actually cast ballots.

The 14th Amendment was used, mostly unsuccessfully, by former slaves being fucked over by repressive state laws.  The Amendment’s scope was severely restricted by a series of Supreme Court cases in the decade immediately after its ratification.   In its intended role as a civil rights remedy, the 14th Amendment was effectively nullified for almost a century.   Unless, of course, some state interfered with your right to use a navigable interstate waterway.  I know of no case brought for that infringement.  There were few remaining causes of action for individuals under the unappealably reinterpreted 14th Amendment.  

Of the hundreds of cases brought under the 14th Amendment in its first fifty years, a few dozen were complaints of discrimination against black citizens.  They rarely brought any good result, because the Court had severely restricted application of the 14th Amendment almost immediately.   The bulk of the 14th Amendment cases were brought by clever lawyers for corporations, aggrieved “persons” for purposes of the 14th Amendment, deprived of the human rights of citizenship that were guaranteed to all Americans by the Amendment.   As the families of lynching victims found no relief in federal courts, corporate “persons” won a series of important cases, until we got to where we are today.

Bill Moyers said it all very succinctly a few years ago.  “I’ll believe corporations are people when the state of Texas puts one to death.”   These bulletproof legally created persons, many of them too big to regulate, jail, not bail out with taxpayer funds when they are in financial trouble, etc. do not get the kind of power they do by not being willing to break a few heads when necessary.  We know what kind of person the corporate person is: a psychopath.   Like sharks they have only one imperative: to move forward and eat.  

Actually, that is unfair to sharks.  They are only swimming in the ocean God gave them, doing what nature provides, occupying their place in the food chain, trying their best to survive. [2]   Corporations, by contrast, have created the legal ocean they swim in, made nature itself conform to their desires.   Their desire is only one two-part thing: profits and power.

Why rattle on about this, belaboring the obvious?   Corporations make our laws, laws that protect business interests, and the sacred feelings of these lawyer-made “persons”, above the interests of the ordinary human citizens.   It is not only in America, corporations are now global and have no particular allegiance to any state or nation.  Yeah, yeah, we know all that, but it’s the only game in town, why go on and on about it?  Because of how it shapes the world we live in, I suppose.

Advertising is essentially propaganda, one-sided, persuasive mass communication to advance a worldview, in the case of advertising, a product.  Advertising is commercial propaganda that shapes our values.  Living in a culture where advertising is ubiquitous and unavoidable it is easy to see this relentless influence machine as part of nature.  It is not part of human nature, any more than the occasional mass murder is just part of the human condition.   The irresistible urge to grab a pitchfork, or a torch, and head out to the lynching — just human nature, regrettable as it also is.  Corporate personhood is just some gigantic force acting on all of us that we are unable to do much about, outside of, hopefully, profiting by investments in the most successful ones, if we have the money.  Better to think of other things, if we can.

So, again, why am I kvetching about corporations today?  Because more and more interpersonal human interaction is now based on the corporate/psychopath model. Never apologize, justify, shift the conversation.  Don’t admit wrongdoing of any kind, counterattack.   It’s not truly a lie if it is effective in advancing your cause.   Bad shit happens, nobody’s fault, even if it is done in our name, with our money.   There are two sides to every story, equally valid, except that your side is irrelevant bullshit.    All men are created equal.  Free market.  They hate our freedom.  Freedom is on the march.   

Natalie Portman, a dual American-Israeli citizen, recently turned down an invitation from the state of Israel for a prestigious award with a $2,000,000 check attached.  That’s four MacArthur  genius grants, if my math is correct.   She said, through her spokesperson, that she could not accept an award from Netanyahu’s government.  That government is aggressively  conducting an endless and often brutal occupation of Palestinian territory, the brutality has escalated in recent months to the Israeli army’s ongoing shooting of unarmed civilians in Gaza.     

Portman’s principled stand has provoked outrage among the loudest official voices of American Jewry .  We jerk our knees, instead of engaging in honest discussions about complicated, and horrific, issues of human rights, decency, basic fairness.  This clamp-down on real debate is the corporate mode.  Portman, say influential American Jewish public relations firms, is an anti-Semite.  You’re with us or against us.  Black or White.  Jew or Anti-Semite.

Every psychopath in the world can relate to this formulation.   Psycopathy 101.  It’s our way or the fucking highway, asshole.   America right or wrong, kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out.  

Simple is better, we feel.  There is so much incredibly complicated injustice and horror in the world today that we simply can’t expend emotion on too much of it.  Anything that doesn’t touch us directly we are usually glad to exclude from our universe of moral worries.    That Palestinian teenager shot in the head by an Israeli sniper recently, the long shot caught on camera, along with the hooting of the sniper’s colleagues, impressed by his amazing shot?  Maybe the boy shouldn’t have been so fucking infuriated at the anti-occupation protest earlier that day.  OK?  Good enough for most of the world, sad to say.

While I was writing this I had a call from a 212 area code.  The woman identified herself as working for the corporation that provides my health insurance.  For security purposes, she said, she needed my phone number.  I told her it was the same number she had just dialed.  She called me Eeloit instead of Eliot, suggesting that she was calling from a country where nobody is named Eliot.   She informed me that she could not continue the conversation unless I gave her my number.  She acknowledged that I had every right not to give the number and told me I could call back to find out why they were calling.

A great weariness falls over me as I try to tell this little anecdote as quickly as possible.   To save myself the hassle of being on hold while they valued me as a customer,  I gave her the number she already had, barked out my date of birth.

 “Thank you for that, Eeloit.  The reason we are calling, Eeloit, is to confirm the address we have for you.  Your last invoice was returned to us by the Post Office as undeliverable.”

Umar, you fucking piece of shit, was my first thought.  Umar is the gratingly polite supervisor of my local post office, a man offended that a customer would complain about a properly stamped business mailer being returned to him.  It could have been Umar, on his way to an early shift, leaning on my buzzer at 5:30 a.m. the other day.  Or, like the insurance invoice sent to me and returned to sender, it could have simply been random stupid stuff that happens in our random world.  

Whatever the case, the nice woman who called me from Hyderabad said she’d be unable to send me the returned invoice, in it’s marked envelope, so that I could make a formal complaint to the federal postal inspector about the interference with my mail delivery.  She understood why I’d want it investigated, but, unfortunately, Eeloit, we cannot contact the mail department, they are the ones who would have received the returned bill and there is no way to contact them.  I am only calling to inform you that your invoice was returned to us.

Even if you live a comfortable middle class life in America, there are many frustrations, of course.  These frustrations increase the lower you are on the income scale.  If you are well-to-do you will still sit in brutal traffic, even if you are in a comfortable car with a great sound system.  Frustrating as hell, but somehow, it is different from being on public transportation that simply stops dead while you wait in darkness in a tunnel.   After five minutes an announcement comes on. “Thank you for your patience, customers, and suck a big one while we wait for this unexpected train traffic ahead to clear up.  We should be moving shortly.”   It’s hard not to recall, at such regularly occurring moments,  how much money the CEO of this poorly functioning public corporation makes.

 The CEO will talk about all the great improvements they are making to the infrastructure of the greatest mass transit system in the nation.  I guarantee that cocksucker has never spent an endless twenty-five minutes creeping between two local stations because “we are working harder to serve you better.”  His chauffeur uses an app that routes his limo around traffic, I’m quite certain.  If you never need to ride the subway, or do it once in a blue moon, these things will not bother you nearly as much as someone subjected to this daily.  

The same goes for anyone never kicked off a government program by mistake, say health insurance, which can take months to have reinstated.   Hard as hell  to fix those kind of mistakes, though people with insurance through work will never have to deal with them.  Poor people’s lives are famously more stressful, and shorter, than middle class lives, deal with it if you want to live like a fucking monk.  Otherwise, get the job your education and skills qualify you for, make some money, buy a house, and a car, and gold-plated health insurance and shut the fuck up.

“Are you done torturing yourself yet?” Sekhnet calls from the garden [3].  The garden is really coming along out there as Spring seems to finally be springing.   There are buds on the trees, the farm is beginning to come alive again.   She is right, of course, but also– fuck, this is not rocket science I’m doing here.  It seems entirely possible that people can begin to….  

Ah, what the fuck am I talking about?  Along with millions of others I read Jane Mayer’s powerful best seller The Dark Side, which gave excruciating detail about the well-justified, still defended, secret American torture program.  The last word on that was our president saying ” with the best of intentions, we tortured some folks, best to move on”.   Jeremy Scahill’s brilliant best seller Dirty Wars clearly sets out the hellish new paradigm of American power– secretly killing those who might hate our freedom wherever they may be.  The response to Scahill’s expose was a new president universally applauded by the mass media for dropping tons of explosives in some part of the world every time he feels really cornered.

I’m going to change any hearts and minds with these pieces read by a dozen people here and there?

Better to go out to the garden, or on a plane to a beautiful place where I can forget, for a few days, at least, the relentless corporate killing field our world has become.   If you live well enough, you can get yourself to forget that the only thing necessary for evil to flourish is good people doing nothing.  And now, a word from our sponsor.

 

[1] It is noted by war historians that the Confederacy, whose soldiers fought bravely, usually against larger armies, only lost the war because of the numerical superiority of the Union, and its superior wealth.

[2]  In fact, in the moral contest between sharks and the masters of the earth who named ourselves “wise ape”, the sharks win.  Human commercial fishing outfits routinely catch sharks in nets, cut their fins off, harvest any other salable parts of the mighty fish, and toss them back into the ocean to drown.  Sharks maim and kill a handful of humans every year, in their desire to eat.  Since humans tell the story, sharks emerge as vicious corporate persons, except infinitely more primitive.

[3]  this is a wholly invented bit of dialogue, a paraphrase made under my unofficial poetic license.  OK, Sekhnet?

Who gets to tell the story?

The cliché that history is written by the victors, as a rule, is hard to dispute.  We have to be a little careful about oversimplifying the categories of winner and loser, though.   Take the history of the American Civil War.   A generation or two after it ended the daughters and granddaughters of the great families of the South, the wealthiest families, the “best” families, in the popular parlance, became very concerned with how history would remember their glorious families.    An influential school of historians arose, largely supported by these well-born gals, who told the story the way they preferred it: a glorious history of high principle and protection of an inferior race who became predictably savage when liberated from the protection of their former masters.    

It may also be said that this history, written in the late 19th – early 20th century when most of the Confederate monuments were being erected to the heroes of the violent rebellion against federal tyranny, gave a moral fig leaf to a new generation of American racial terrorists.   The history is only now being written of the long, bloody decades of lynching and intimidation that went along with this sanitized, glorified version of the antebellum south and the Civil War.   It became cool, and often politically smart, for glory-seeking white racists to become “knights” in the Ku Klux Klan, membership soared nationwide after World War One.  Nothing like a good old-fashioned beating, mutilation and death by torture to remind everybody of their places.  The lessons of this brutality, even as it was most often kept a local secret, were not lost on anyone.

Who gets to tell the story?  In American politics mass media pundits (even drug addled ones), with no background in anything but self-promotion, are more influential than our most well-read, well-spoken, deepest thinking scholars.  Put the scholar on one side, a defiant blowhard on the other side, and America gets to watch another egghead get put in his fucking place.   It is a kind of thought crime here, basing your thoughts on too many fucking facts.  Fuck you and the fucking facts you rode in on, asshole!  You think you’re better than me just because you’re smart, and devoted to knowledge, and actively seeking facts and something you claim is truth?  I got your truth right here…

 Who gets to tell the story, even in your family?  Put any spin on it you like, dismiss the version that makes you feel bad.   No need to ever feel bad, just write anything bad out of history.  See how simple it is?     Most people I know, like my highly intelligent, idealistic father, eventually give up after enough time banging their head against the imperatives of our frequently merciless world.

I wrote the book about my father.  Not yet a book, it is a collection of stories and conversations, evoking the times, conflicts and the complicated spirit of a gifted man who did not fully enjoy his gifts, who died full of regrets.  More regretful than angry, even at himself.  How’s that for a deathbed surprise, dad?   The lifetime of rage and denial yields to the reality that death is hours away, your thoughts became more and more focused on how you missed out on the most beautiful parts of the ride your gifts might have otherwise provided you.

 “Oh, give it up, Elie!” says the skeleton of my father.   “Better to go through the hundreds of pages you’ve already written, picking likely lottery winning passages, pasting them together into a scroll.   Your lifetime of rage and denial will end in your own terrible regrets, when death is closing in on you, that you never managed to sell your book, be interviewed by Terry Gross.  I hear your man Leonard Lopate got canned for some likely sexual impropriety or other, so you missed that boat.   Keep paddling, Elie, is all I’m saying.”  

Righty-oh, dad.   I remind myself, while I’m wondering about who gets to write the stories we all come to believe, that there are many ways to see a given thing, a given person.   Not to say that every point of view is equally valid, equally interesting, equally revealing.  Can we separate a devoted Nazi’s beliefs from his watercolors?  I mean, the guy may have been a supremely gifted watercolorist, a regular Winslow Homer, but he was a major fucking Nazi.  A Nazi, dude, those beautiful watercolors were painted by an officer in the SS.    Nazi watercolors, dude.   Ain’t dassum shit?

The best artist I ever knew, a few nights before she died, expressed this very clearly.  She had no truck with Nazis who were otherwise very artistic people.

Nuance, Context and other quaint notions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Erased from History

Many assholes dream of immortality,
making an indelible mark on this world.
Most of us just want to live,
admire the perfect blue gradient the sky sometimes is,
play music, cook something tasty,
laugh hard once in a while.

Overbearing assholes want everything —
they want to own that perfect blue gradient,
devour all they see.
they build monuments to themselves
and hire guards to beat people
who lean against the monument
or look at it with insufficient awe.

My people have no graves.
killed wholesale,
there was nobody left to bury them.
A tiny handful
lived to have headstones,
four grandparents,
my parents,
the rest
as the world said of them at the time
“fuck ’em.”

Nobody alive now even knows their names.

In ancient Egypt
the rulers were chosen by the gods.
when the gods withdrew their favor from
one dynasty
and bestowed it on another,
workers from the new dynasty
would go into the tombs of the earlier rulers
and scrape their faces off the walls of the tombs
erasing them from history,
fucking up their afterlives.

It’s hard to feel sorry
for motherfuckers who walked on carpets
made of living human bodies,
but I know the feeling
of being written out of history

My concern is not for a time to come
it is for now,
the time remaining
to each of us right now,
that lush wink of a cosmic eye.

It’s Really About Who Gets to Write History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

What is worth reading, worth writing

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

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

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

20180405_204726.jpg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fifty Years Ago Today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Context — our winner-in-chief

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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