Category Archives: History and Politics

Learning fear or resilience

Neither of my parents ever learned much about resilience from their parents, something I can easily understand the reasons for.  My mother’s parents were the sole survivors of their two large families, the last of their 12 combined siblings survived hell only to be marched to a Ukrainian ravine on the edge of town where they were each shot in the back of the head one August evening in 1943. 

My father’s parents experienced something similar, my grandmother and her older brother, my tough, intrepid great-uncle Aren, were the only two survivors of their family, from a hamlet in the marshes south of Pinsk that cannot be found on any map of the world.  There was an aktion, a coordinated massacre of virtually all the Jews of the Pinsk area and, as in many areas the Nazis overran, little Jewish towns were erased from history.   

Like my mother’s parents, my great-uncle and his sister came to America decades before the mass murder.   I know nothing of what happened to my paternal grandfather’s family, or even where they came from in Europe.

You learn that powers arose not long before you were born who decided your entire family needed to be exterminated, and then rolled up their sleeves and did it.  It’s an unsettling thing to learn as a kid.  What the fuck? you think.  I still think that.  Like slavery, like seven year-old American prostitutes, like a century of public lynching, the genocide of Native Americans, like all unspeakable things done by certain humans to other humans, all you can wonder is ‘what the fucking fuck?’.   Nothing unique in any of this evil, the history of humanity is still being written in our blood, on endless scrolls, by killers who believe they are doing what must be done.

The new field of epigenetics studies the genetic changes produced in survivors of severe trauma, genetic changes that are then passed on.   Having your entire family massacred is surely a severe trauma, even if you weren’t there to see it.   Passed along with these changes in the body’s DNA are traits like fear and resilience.  Some, in the face of terror, resolve to be brave, to fight, to hide, to survive, to live to take revenge by thriving.  Most, in the face of a mob of murderers coming to kill them do not fare as well.

In the 1970s certain right-wing American Jews seized on the slogan “Never Again!” to unite in a hard-nosed organization to smash the stereotype of Jews going meekly to the slaughter.  I understand the impulse, I really do, but unless you want to become a violent bully so that you won’t be bullied, more context, as always, is needed.   

Take any group of bookish, peaceful people who have no guns, lie to them about their destination, give them false hope of survival as you shepherd them toward their slaughter and– well, you can see that determined men with guns will have no problem getting folks like these to line up anywhere they are told to line up.    There were young Jews who, once they saw what was happening in places like the Warsaw Ghetto, took up weapons and killed a few Nazis, but they mostly died as anonymous martyrs, leaving behind many thousands killed in reprisal.  Your classic no-win situation: outgunned by a trigger-happy enemy only too happy to kill a thousand for every one of them killed.

My family never discussed any of this history directly.  My grandfather was a frightened man, understandably so.  My grandmother was the tougher one, but she also drank increasing amounts of vodka as she got older.  My grandfather, I learned to my surprise, was also capable of downing huge draughts of vodka. I observed this once, unseen, toward the end of his life.   He picked up the bottle and drank it like he was drinking water.  He didn’t even wipe his lips afterwards, just screwed the cap back on and put the bottle away.   

My father’s parents I never met, both died before I was born.   I visit their graves when I visit the cemetery north of Peekskill where my father and uncle are also buried.   I knew their son very well, my father, and though he took a few principled stands over the years, it is hard to see him as a resilient man.  He took things hard.  He locked his fears inside of himself.  He suffered mightily from severe psoriasis, which grew more inflamed whenever he was under stress.  He raged as an over-the-top tough guy in the safety of his little family.  He felt bad about these things as he was dying.

I can’t say where I fall on the spectrum between despair and resilience.  What I have learned of resilience I have had to learn on my own, my parents knew little about it.   I’m remembering my father’s advice when I asked him about becoming a member of The National Lawyers Guild.  This would have been in the year 2000, when I was admitted to practice law in New York State.

The Lawyers Guild, founded in 1937, is a progressive legal organization with roots in labor struggles, anti-Klan activities and The New Deal — also some more radical strands.   My father, as a college student after World War Two, was drawn to Communist ideas.  After all, why should certain people continue to be born booted and spurred to ride the rest of us?   Jared Kushner?   Really?   His feces emit no bad odor, reportedly, but he is, in virtually every way, very much like a duller version of you or me, is he not? 

My father was raised in extreme poverty, during the Depression and FDR’s New Deal, he came by his egalitarian beliefs honestly.   He believed in the struggle for justice, even as he was hampered by the terror instilled in him early.  I will never know if he attended the 1949 Paul Robeson/Pete Seeger concerts outside of Peekskill.  He would have been a student at Syracuse University by then, or possibly just starting graduate school at Columbia.   

My uncle had a copy of Howard Fast’s account of the bloody mass assault that prevented the planned benefit concert for the Civil Rights Congress from happening.  I first saw the brown paperback on a bookshelf in the apartment he shared with my aunt in the assisted living facility in Bethesda.  My uncle had already passed away.   I asked my aunt, quite dotty by then, if I could borrow the book.  I read it and have it still, but by the time I read it there was nobody alive who could tell me if my father, or my uncle, had been at the ill-fated concert, or the one held a week later, with increased security provided by labor unions and American communists.  These events are now collectively known as the Peekskill Riots .   

Paul Robeson, former All-American college athlete (he played two seasons in the NFL while at Columbia Law School in the early 1920s), lawyer (briefly), actor and singer, was an outspoken black man who, after a political awakening during the Spanish Civil War [1] eventually found himself at the center of the Cold War.   He may or may not have been a member of the American Communist party (which was never legally banned, that I know of).   I recall he visited the Soviet Union in the 1930s and afterwards, and advocated peace with The USSR, a place where he was never called ‘nigger’.   

But for all the racists and reactionaries in Peekskill and its environs, there was no doubt that this black commie troublemaker should be strung up as an example to the others.   They burned crosses and lynched him in effigy the night of the first concert, the one that didn’t happen. During the month I was born the House UnAmerican Activities Committee was putting the last nails into the outspoken Robeson’s professional coffin, for being critical of American racism, and economic exploitation, and praising the Soviet experiment.  The U.S. government really fucked Paul Robeson up, but the Klan and American Legion thugs who converged on the planned concert north of Peekskill never got their hands on him.

The haters had to content themselves with ambushing, stoning and beating up people who came to the concert, as the cops looked on in amusement.  That Pete Seeger, a local white guy who’d be blacklisted as a possible commie a few years later, was among the performers there made it irresistible for local racists, antisemites and other authoritarian types to go to the  outdoor concert grounds to break  heads.

The following week the brotherhood crowd were better organized.  Thousands of young idealists in t-shirts formed a human wall around the perimeter of the concert area.   The concert, to raise money for a civil rights group, was held.  It was only afterwards, in nearby Cortlandt, on the narrow road near my father’s grave, now called Oregon Road, that elated concertgoers on their way home were ambushed and pelted with rocks the size of fists.  The gauntlet they had to run went on for miles.

I’ll never know if my father was there either night.  What I learned shortly after he died was that he had spoken to Parent/Teacher groups in New York City public schools about Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that stated the obvious about the destructive nature of racial segregation.  In New York City the man who’d soon become my father was pelted with crap, cursed at, snarled at by white parents and teachers appalled by the speaker’s support of the landmark, and largely symbolic– it must finally be said– Supreme Court ruling.  He went to the next school with a police escort.  These strike me as brave, principled actions, but I will never know any more details about them than what I learned from my mother as I was preparing his eulogy and have written just now.

It was 2000, I was looking for work as a new lawyer, and I was somewhat half-hearted about it.   My father, in a stream of lawyer jokes he sent me during law school, included the one about why they were using law students instead of rats in lab experiments.  The NIH defended the practice as follows:

1. The lab assistants were becoming very attached to their little rats. This emotional involvement was interfering with the research being conducted. No such attachment could form with a law student.

2. Lawyers breed faster and are in much greater supply.

3. Lawyers are much cheaper to care for and the humanitarian societies won’t jump all over you no matter what you’re studying.

4. There are some things even a rat won’t do.

I’d wind up practicing subsistence lawyering  for ten years, maintain my license to this day, but it was ten years of bitterness, I can assure you.   Early on I heard about the National Lawyers Guild and called my father to discuss joining it.   I rarely sought his advice about anything, as he always pointed out on the rare occasions that I did, but I called him about joining the Lawyers Guild.   

His fear came directly through the phone, even as he applauded everything the Lawyers Guild did and the principles they advocate for.  He was worried, though, that by joining the Lawyers Guild I might be putting myself on a blacklist that would prevent me from getting paying work.  Cheney and Dubya Bush were already president and a dark day for America, and the world, was starting to fully dawn.  Our nation was about to head to the dark side, to do what must be done, in the shadows, as the evil Mr. Cheney told the mass media, with his characteristic smirk.   

I did not join the Lawyers Guild.  I didn’t get involved in the legal fight against encroaching tyranny, nor did I water the tree of liberty with so much as a drop of my blood.  I am thinking now that had I been given a few lessons in resilience, I might not have been as susceptible to my father’s paranoia, understandable though it was.   Just ’cause you’re paranoid don’t mean they ain’t trying to kill you, as the great Satchel Paige observed. [2] 

 

[1]  Robeson: “The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.”[158]

After the mass lynching of four African Americans on July 25, 1946, Robeson met with President Truman and admonished Truman by stating that if he did not enact legislation to end lynching,[184] “the Negroes will defend themselves”.[184][185] Truman immediately terminated the meeting and declared that the time was not right to propose anti-lynching legislation.[184] 

[2] Jeeves ascribes this observation to Joseph Heller, in Catch-22, to wit:   just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.

 

Context Again

Without context it’s impossible to intelligently evaluate anything, to truly understand anything.   Think about that for even a second, in a world too busy to consider context.   Should we make the wall higher?   Should we make it illegal to pay women less than men?   Shall we allow homosexuals to marry?

Depends where the wall is.  Sometimes making a wall higher, say between the ocean and a seaside villa, creates a death trap.  If the waves are high and the villa is flooded, high walls will retain enough water to drown everyone.  Why are women still paid less than men for the same work?   What the fuck is up with that in 2018, seriously?   As for the gay newlyweds, if one is dying the other now has full legal rights at the hospital, hospice and thereafter.   I’ve yet to see anyone explain how gay marriage destroys American families, outside of Louis Black’s wonderful explanation.

Black gives us the context that shows us exactly how gay marriage destroys normal, heterosexual families.  He himself was an eye witness to this, he said, and it was a horrifying and illuminating moment.   Two gays (husband and wife, presumably) sneak up on an American family having dinner.  The gays are dressed as ninjas and silently enter the dining room where they immediately start fucking each other up the ass.  And then: boom!  Another American family, completely destroyed.

At least it’s a story, anyway.  A good story is the essence of what homo sapiens wants, a story that will tell you what the right thing to do is.   Murderous religious fanatics are coming to kill us, therefore we must do the following things to defend ourselves.  Make the list.   It makes no difference how nonsensical some of the tactics are: take the newly liberated and unemployed en mass to the notorious prison where their former dictator used to torture people and torture them.  Explode potential terrorists at a wedding in a “signature strike”, even if no actual terrorist targets are present at the wedding.   Hit the funeral for those killed at the wedding as well, just to be sure.   Do not wonder why the surviving friends and family of the killed might hate our freedom.

The whole project of trying to become wiser is about gathering context, making connections, seeing a certain cause and effect to actions.   A child learns not to burn his hand on hot metal by burning his hand on hot metal, once.   The cause and effect are immediate and dramatic there and the context instantly understandable — the hot metal is fucking hot and will burn you.  Many of the events unfolding on the news seem random and unrelated, unless you see them as part of ongoing history, parts of the seemingly inexorable march from one epoch to the next.

We homo sapients need a story in order to act.  It doesn’t matter how stupid or wise the story is, either.   One pervasive story we all know is that a good person gets up early and works hard, earns every moment of leisure.   Most of us seem to believe this is true.   It shows an industriousness and eagerness to tackle the day.   It also shows… what?   Is it really morally better to wake up at 6 a.m. every day than to go to bed at 4 a.m.?   Alas, this is something I will never know for myself.  

I am constantly aware of how we are so often denied context.  Often this concealing is done because transparency would bring shame to somebody, like revealing that a man had beaten his wife for twenty years.  Maybe the wife had beaten him for twenty years.  Anyway, something shameful there, nothing to see!  What are we to make of the cup of hot coffee the wife suddenly dashes into her husband’s lap one morning?  Weird shit happens!   People snap, for no reason!   Or, if there is a reason, for those who insist on such quaint things as reasonableness, it is a long, long story subject to many interpretations, many interpretations.   Who among us really knows?  Who really knows?

We have a society more and more influenced by simple, maddening stories, told without nuance or context, to people who are eager to confirm what they already believe. Hillary Clinton, obviously she had a child sex business out of the nonexistent basement of that Washington, D.C. pizza shop.   Now the context: Hillary is a liar and a criminal who needs to be locked up.   If you chanted “lock her up!” along with Mike Flynn you will not need coaxing to believe that Hillary kept young sex slaves for high rolling left wing whack jobs to use, Afghan high society wannabes.    The fucking hypocrites!   So you read the story on your feed, drive up to D.C. with your gun and arrive at the pizza place to liberate these child sex slaves, as any decent person would have done.

Watch the news, you are seeing the first draft of history.  What is reported, what is followed up on, what is not reported, what is not followed up on. There are sponsors to please, for virtually all of the mass media, and so certain items, bad for business, must be downplayed or omitted entirely.   One thing all seem to agree on, to watch the corporate talking heads: when the president blows shit up, launching deadly warheads on powerful missiles, the man is presidential.   That it is a meaningless attack, its only context being that in a moment of anger the president authorized millions of dollars of killing technology to be unleashed… well, God Save the POTUS!   No context here… just vigorously stirred patriotism.

One of my beefs with the Grey Skank, journal of record, is how faithfully it always seems to serve the narrative of the status quo.  Obama was portrayed, in its pages, as a principled man who made wise use of his secret kill list.   Almost never will questions of the morality, legality or efficacy of a president’s secret fucking kill list for extrajudicial execution by drone-fired missile be seriously raised by anyone on the Times editorial board.  That’s what letters to the editor are for, I suppose.  (Not to mention independent outlets for journalists like Democracy Now! and The Intercept.)

In the parade of things that will eventually drive me mad, the systematic denial of context is one of the biggest, most annoying floats.  If you don’t know that Iran had a democratically elected president that the C.I.A. and British intelligence arranged a coup to get rid of in 1953 (in fairness, they were defending their oil companies), you have no context for understanding the long antagonism with a country ruled for decades, against its democratic will, by a ruthless, U.S. supported, secret police-wielding monarch, the last Shah of Iran. [1]   The CIA admitted its key role sixty years later, in a report that came out in 2013, but, you know, for those first sixty years — nothing to see here!  

I wonder whatever happened to that copy of the recent American Torture Report produced by Congress that Obama designated for preservation in his presidential library, even though he agreed to keep it secret for a number of year into the future.  Obama’s move, problematic though it also was, preserved a vital historical document Republicans were intent on collecting all copies of and destroying forever.  A plague on all their fucking houses.

The Koch boys want to keep it simple.  It’s a matter of freedom versus totalitarianism.  That’s why they are Libertarians.  Keep everything absolutely free, maximum liberty for everyone, and make sure tyrants never make the rules, unless, of course, they’re our tyrants.    Nothing to see here!

Propaganda

Years back, when I was studying the Nazi rise to power in Germany (which is what my work in history often boiled down to) I found and read Mr. Hitler’s famous pages about how essential galvanizing propaganda is to any great cause.   Propaganda, he pointed out in a surprisingly coherent section of his hastily dictated Mein Kampf, must enflame the passions of its audience.   For that reason Hitler applauded the ruthless, lying propaganda of the Allies in World War One which made Allied soldiers righteously hate the Germans.  Propaganda must arouse strong feelings and inspire fervent faith in the rightness of the cause.

That’s propaganda in a nutshell.   

Back in the days before the internet, when research was conducted in libraries, I pulled down and read through books that referred to other books.  You would consult the bibliographies, jot down the titles and authors of other books that promised to deal more directly with the exact question you wanted to grapple with.   In one such book I found that the word “propaganda” was first used by a Pope who decided to use the mass media of the day to propagate the faith.   If you were so inclined, you could find the encapsulated story, the exact year, the name of the Pope and all that, in seconds, by saying a few words into your phone.  [1]

Pope Gregory XV was late to the party.   The first to arrive was a highly principled monk named Martin Luther, who propagated his faith almost a hundred years before Pope Gregory XV coined the phrase.   I saw a documentary about the life of Martin Luther recently that opened my eyes.   I’d read quotes of Luther’s over the years about the Christian duty of obedience to rulers that made him sound like an authoritarian type.  He’d stated that the duty to obey one’s masters was clear because God had not put a fox tail in the hands of the rulers, but a knout.  Here is what a knout looks like:

knout.jpg

I also knew him as something of a famous anti-Semite [2].  I watched the biographical movie with great interest, it was very well-done.  Here is what I gleaned.

Young Martin Luther studied law.  His father wanted him to become a lawyer, to assist him with his business troubles.   At some point the Lord called Martin Luther and he abandoned his legal studies.  His father, feeling betrayed and bereft of the badly needed brilliant legal counsel his son should have provided him, was furious.   Martin Luther felt intense guilt over his decision to abandon his father.  Luther did what any devout Christian monk with a troubled conscience would do, he mortified his flesh, flogged himself, fasted for days, wore a hair shirt, burdened himself with heavy chains, and he prayed.   One assumes that none of this made a favorable impression on his disappointed father.

Martin Luther took a principled stand against the corruptions of the Catholic church of his day.   It burned him, for example, that rich people could buy “indulgences” which exempted them from penance for certain types of sins.   He preached against these corrupt practices and eventually was given the choice of publicly recanting his blasphemies or facing excommunication, which sometimes came with a gruesome execution.  He braved the consequences, stuck to his principles, and his faith in God, and was not flayed or burned to death by the Church.

He had begun writing about his beliefs, and apparently had a genius for it.  Gutenberg’s new printing press, invented 43 years before Luther’s birth, would become the vehicle for propagating Martin Luther’s writings.  The filmmakers suggested that it was the popularity of his writings, mass distributed in the manner of sixteenth century Europe, that may have saved the heretic Luther from gristly death at the time of his excommunication.  The world’s first best-selling author, writing powerfully on matters of conscience, Christ, and the relation of humans and God, he was simply too popular, too loved by many in the rabble, for local authorities to burn at the stake.  The filmmakers didn’t mention it, but it probably didn’t hurt that he spoke with authority of the rabble’s duty to obey those who wielded the knout.

We are told that Luther preached a message of liberation to the masses that millions of hardworking Christians were delighted to hear.  You pray directly to God, not through a paid, corrupt, intermediary.  A poor man has the same access to his Creator as a baron or a king.  You don’t need a priest to interpret what God expects of you, read God’s words for yourself, in your own language.  Luther himself translated the scriptures into the vernacular. 

All over Europe people would read his writings and rush to set more copies in print, churn them out on the printing press, the Twitter or Facebook of its day.  Luther himself was shocked at how quickly his writings spread.  He was, apparently, an inspirational writer who wrote things like:

Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.

So, but for the invention of the printing press, which spread Luther’s ideas to every corner of Christiandom, who knows if there would have been a Protestant reformation?  It certainly would not have gotten underway during Luther’s lifetime, anyway.

Propaganda can be as tricky to identify as pornography.  It can be slippery to describe.  People of good faith may differ on what is pure manipulative propaganda and what is good information to base your decisions on, but we can all say, as a famous Supreme Court justice wrote in a famous ruling on pornography, “I know it when I see it”.  Leaving aside, of course, as in any discussion of The War on Terror, the jarring fact that one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.  

The world is complicated.  Propaganda makes it easy to understand.  Vote for me and I’ll set you free.  Ball of confusion, that’s what the world is today. [3].

[1]  today any snot-nosed bastard can come off like an authoritative genius, the accumulated knowledge of the world one click, or voice command, away:

The term “propaganda” apparently first came into common use in Europe as a result of the missionary activities of the Catholic church. In 1622 Pope Gregory XV created in Rome the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith.

[2]  The filmmakers took some trouble to explain the unfortunate strains of anti-Semitism in Luther’s later writings.  It appears he expected the Jews, once the corruptions of the Pope’s church were cleared away, to flock en masse to his perfected version of Christianity.  He’d been quite nice to the Jews in the beginning, in expectation of welcoming them as brothers and sisters in Christ.  The Jews, for their part, stubbornly refused to give up their ancient religion and convert to Luther’s.   After that, understandably, Luther had little use for the Jews and concluded there was no saving them.   He began to write mean things about them, but, the filmmakers suggested, you shouldn’t really hold those unfortunate writings against him.

[3]    Ball of Confusion   (1970)     The Temptations

 People movin’ out, people movin’ in.
Why, because of the color of their skin.
Run, run, run, but you sho’ can’t hide
An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
Vote for me and I’ll set you free
Rap on, brother, rap on.
Well, the only person talkin’ ’bout love thy brother is the preacher
And it seems nobody’s interested in learning but the teacher
Segregation, determination, demonstration, integration, aggravation,
humiliation, obligation to our nation
Ball Of Confusion that’s what the world is today (yeah, yeah)
The sale of pills is at an all time high
young folks walkin’ ’round with their heads in the sky
Cities aflame in the summer time, and oh the beat goes on
Eve of destruction, tax deduction,
City inspectors, bill collectors,
Evolution, revolution, gun control, the sound of soul,
Shootin’ rockets to the moon, kids growin’ up too soon
Politicians say more taxes will solve ev’rything, and the band played on.
Round and round and around we go, where the world’s headed nobody knows.
Great googa mooga, can’t you hear me talkin’ to you, just a
Ball of Confusion that’s what the world is today. (yeah, yeah)
Fear in the air, tension ev’rywhere
Unemployment rising fast, the Beatle’s new record’s a gas,
and the only safe place to live is on an Indian reservation,
and the band played on
Eve of destruction, tax deduction,
City inspectors, bill collectors, mod clothes in demand,
population out of hand, suicide too many bills, hippies movin’ to the hills
People all over the world are shouting end the war and the band played on.
Round and round and around we go, where the world’s headed nobody knows.
Great googa mooga, can’t you hear me talkin’ to you, just a
Ball of Confusion that’s what the world is today
Let me hear you, let me hear you, let me hear you
Ball Of Confusion that’s what the world is today

Songwriters: Norman Whitfield / Barrett Strong
Ball of Confusion lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

No Sense of History

Often you can trace a line from what’s happening now, back through a series of events that made it not only possible, but, in hindsight, inevitable that the things taking place now would be taking place.  Along the way the steps may be indiscernible, although looking back afterwards, the patterns often seem hard not to see.  Some sense of history, cause and effect, is important for avoiding the worst of our past collective mistakes.

One trouble with tracing these lines, how we got from point A to point W, is that the world of human affairs is as complicated as the cellular and sub-cellular maze of the human body.   Even though  science has solved many terrible puzzles in the case of the human body, it is still a bit hazy about a lot of things that go on in and among our intricate, interactive body systems. 

I am being treated, for example, for an idiopathic kidney disease.  “Idiopathic” means cause unknown.  Western medicine doesn’t know how people get this disease.  We know that shooting certain chemicals at it sometimes cures it, or puts it into remission.  We don’t know exactly how this works, but it often does.  We don’t keep data on the percentages of cure, remission and failure, because… I don’t know, patients might not want to spend $88,000 for a drug that only works, say, 26% or 18% of the time.  There is no point giving this depressing number, whatever it might be.  You want the cure?  Yes or no.

I am writing here about history and our culture’s consistent failure to make thoughtful connections as events unfold.  Add to the complication of human affairs the essential roles of irrationality, chance, short-sighted greed, basic stupidity.   Many reason, not unreasonably, that since there seems to be so little an individual can do about this gigantic unfolding, there is no reason to get bent out of shape about it. 

Until, to the shock of perhaps 65% of the country, we get a boastful, angry, insecure, impulsive con-man as our president.  On his desk, the button to instantly kill millions of people.  

“How can Americans be so fucking stupid?” cry a chorus of hand-wringers from all over the political spectrum, gnashing their collective teeth.   

I don’t purport to answer that question.  I would just like to trace a few points, to show that this president, while undeniably unusual as a personality, is not a complete outlier as president.  He is continuing the work of his predecessors, including some of the ongoing work of the beloved champion of freedom and justice, Mr. Obama, and his equally gifted, equally compelled by the tides of history, predecessor, William Jefferson “Bill” Clinton.  Not to mention, of course, Ronald Reagan and the presidents Bush, father and son and every other previous chief executive.

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist James Risen, now working at The Intercept, reveals some key details of how we got to this era of “Fake News” in his recent long article about the seven years’ long government prosecution of him (by Bush and Obama) for writing about the government’s massive, illegal, top secret surveillance program, the one that Edward Snowden eventually revealed the details of.   Risen’s excellent, thought-provoking article is here.   Risen writes:

My case was part of a broader crackdown on reporters and whistleblowers that had begun during the presidency of George W. Bush and continued far more aggressively under the Obama administration, which had already prosecuted more leak cases than all previous administrations combined. Obama officials seemed determined to use criminal leak investigations to limit reporting on national security. But the crackdown on leaks only applied to low-level dissenters; top officials caught up in leak investigations, like former CIA Director David Petraeus, were still treated with kid gloves.

Risen’s federal prosecution began during the second term of the Bush Administration.   Risen had been reporting for the New York Times when he learned, from sources within the CIA, of the government’s illegal secret domestic surveillance program, being conducted by the NSA.  He began writing about it during the lead up to the Bush-Kerry presidential contest of 2004.   

The Bush administration requested that the New York Times not publish this detailed account of the top secret program. The details, they argued, if revealed, would undermine U.S. prosecution of the existential War on Terror.   Bush himself eventually told Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger that he would have “blood on his hands” if the Times published the story, because the secret program was so effectively squashing terrorism.

The hierarchy of the Grey Lady, ever the sober, measured, compliant, even-handed journal of record (of our beloved status quo), that genteel colleague of the powerful, agreed to keep Risen’s story out of the paper, and did so for a year.   After all, revelations of widespread illegality by the Bush Administration, like conscience curdling reports on its unaccountable, secret torture program [1] and false causus belli for the war in Iraq, would only be cynically exploited by their political enemies in the upcoming election. 

The Times held the story as the 2004 election campaign wrapped up, as the votes were cast and counted.  Risen, in frustration, had been writing a book about some of the Bush administration’s excesses in the so-called “War on Terror”.  It contained a chapter detailing the routine illegal surveillance of millions of Americans. 

The Times eventually reported Risen’s NSA surveillance story, just before Risen’s book was released.  Bush and Cheney, meanwhile, had won the 2004 election.  Risen and Eric Lichtblau, his co-reporter on the NSA surveillance stories, won Pulitzer Prizes for their work.  The Bush/Cheney Department of Justice set about investigating and prosecuting James Risen in connection with his use of leaked classified material.

Risen writes in his Intercept article of the Valerie Plame case, and how it demonstrated to the Executive branch that, given the right optics, the public would not get excited about courts ruling the First Amendment doesn’t apply to journalists, that journalists could be forced to reveal the identities of their anonymous sources who had leaked sensitive information and that the court had a right to hold reporters in contempt, and lock them up, for refusing.   New York Times reporter Judith Miller actually went to jail after being found in contempt of court for refusing to identify a confidential source in the Plame case.   (Miller, one could argue, deserved to be locked up for being Cheney’s ambitious, credulous shill and writing his bullshit in article after front page article for the NY Times, though Risen, gallantly, doesn’t mention that.) 

Valerie Plame was an undercover CIA agent, working to monitor loose nukes, whose husband, Joe Wilson, publicly disputed what turned out to be straight up lies by the Bush Administration about Saddam Hussein’s alleged WMD program.   In apparent fury over Wilson’s Op Ed piece, someone in the Bush Administration revealed Plame’s secret identity. 

It was a peevish, rash, rage-driven reaction worthy of President Trump himself.   President George W. Bush, in the immediate aftermath of the revelation that someone in his administration had “outed” a covert CIA agent, vowed that if anyone in his administration had committed this treasonous act they would be punished to the fullest extent of the law.   

Vice President Dick Cheney’s office was, almost certainly, the source of the leak.  Cheney’s assistant, “Scooter” Libby, later took the fall for ‘obstruction of justice’ for lying to cover up the source of the leak and nobody was ever punished for the act itself.   Cheney, as evil a motherfucker as this sad world has ever seen, was later reportedly furious when Bush commuted Libby’s sentence instead of pardoning him outright. 

Risen points out that the opposition to Bush and Cheney led many to applaud Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s no holds barred investigation of the leak, including the jailing of Judith Miller for refusing to divulge her source in reporting the story. Few saw at the time, Risen writes, the lesson those in power would draw from this clampdown on freedom of the press. 

Obama went just as hard against Risen as Bush and Cheney had.  Obama was infamously aggressive toward leakers and journalists who revealed inconvenient truths.  He used Woodrow Wilson’s harsh 1917 Espionage Act, with its death penalty and no defense regarding intent, against more citizens than all previous administrations combined.   Risen writes of Obama’s legacy for freedom of the press in the federal court that covers Maryland and Washington, D.C.:

That debate [Obama DOJ’s position that ‘reporter’s privilege’ was not a defense against the reporter being forced to testify in a criminal case — overturning the ruling of the trial judge] became moot in 2014, when the Supreme Court refused to take up the case. That allowed the appeals court ruling to stand, leaving the legal destruction of a reporter’s privilege in the 4th Circuit as Obama’s First Amendment legacy.      source

The things that go on at the highest levels of power are often unspeakable.  The people at the top are insulated by many levels of bureaucracy, and, in most cases, protect each other.   There are plenty of fall guys below to take the heat, when necessary.   Why bring Rumsfeld or Cheney into a legal discussion of the American torture program, or the White House lawyers who twisted language and decency to argue that torture was fine, as long as we were torturing terrorists (or even the two psychologists paid $81,000,000 to design the torture program, for that matter)  when a couple of low level, selfie-snapping grunts, acting on orders traceable directly to Rumsfeld and Cheney, can be prosecuted and jailed for participating in the torture program at a notorious Iraqi prison?   Justice done.  Case closed.

When it was discovered that General David Petraeus had revealed a large trove of sensitive, classified information to his mistress/biographer, he was not prosecuted.   He was forced to resign from his government post and went, unmolested, into an extremely well-paid position in the private sector.    Even as journalists were increasingly threatened for revealing sensitive leaked information that embarrassed the Executive branch or could compromise the lucrative interests of war profiteers.

I am extremely vexed by habitual, deliberate obfuscation, in private life as well as public life.  The opposite — honest openness —  is frequently called ‘transparency’.   It is impossible to discuss anything intelligently without transparency.  Transparency is increasingly curtailed when frank and open dialogue is undesirable for any reason.  A lack of transparency is essential for the continued operation of truly unspeakable practices.

A transparent government operates by law, laws which have been publicly debated and passed, in adjusted form, by our elected representatives, who cast yays and nays in our names.  That is the theory of representative democracy, anyway.  Corners are often cut, of course, as powerful monied forces exert pressure on campaign donor-dependent lawmakers to cut deals advantageous to their mutual financial interests.  The key to cutting these corners is keeping unpopular details secret until after the law is passed and there is nothing the average citizen can say or do about it. 

As was done with the recent 51-49 party-line Republican Tax law.   As had been done by Mr. Obama with the TransPacific Partnership agreement, which no legislator was allowed to take notes of, photocopy or share with constituents before the “Fast Track” up-down “yay-nay” vote on approving its countless secret provisions.   As was done days after the attack of 9/11 with the massive and far-reaching Patriot Act.  Extended public debate on any of these bills would have had a dramatic impact on the final form of the proposed laws.   Which is the point of participatory democracy, so that no minority (or silent, powerless majority, for that matter) gets screwed too vigorously by their elected representatives.  Democratic decision making, which includes protections for minorities and the weak, is never supposed to be done by strict 51-49 majority rule.   Lack of information makes it easier to whip up the emotions of people who already feel overwhelmed and full of anxiety.  Turn up the anxiety enough and people will shrug at just about anything.

Journalism is our only way of being informed of the things being proposed and done in our names, of things being done to others acting in our names.   The flow of information we get via journalists has been severely curtailed by increasing corporate consolidation of the mass media.   Very few corporations now operate most of the mass media, the place where most Americans get their sketchy information about what is being done in their names.

The consolidated corporate media is a conspiracy of silence only in the sense that very wealthy media corporations have a common interest in keeping the machine running the way it brings in the most profit.  War and mayhem are always good for business, except when they are clandestine wars, as many today are, in the global War on Terror.   

The CEO of CBS corporation commented during the presidential campaign that while the candidacy of Donald Trump might raise some troubling issues, DJT was a goddamned cash cow and the station was making a shitload of money off the tireless tabloid extrovert’s ubiquity across mass media.  Viewers were drawn irresistibly to the freak show of his candidacy — we couldn’t help ourselves, he was that good.  Trump stories were great for ratings and advertising revenues.  Trump had made his name in the tabloids.

There are good reasons to keep shameful things secret.  You can trace secret, evil shit done in our names going back as far as you’d like to go in the history of our great republic.  From the wink and two nods in the Constitution that ensured the rights of slaveholders would be protected by law in perpetuity, to the “Removal” of the “Indians” under our laws, to unprovoked wars of naked conquest against Mexico, against Spain, to the two unnecessary atom bombs dropped on Japan, down through the years to the secret overthrow of democratically elected leaders in Iran, Chile, the Congo, who knows how many other places.  COINTELPRO, a long time FBI program to intimidate, marginalize and imprison suspected American dissidents exercising their First Amendment rights, was only revealed when activists broke into a local FBI office and stole files that proved its existence.   The sensational patriotic propaganda following the “friendly fire” death of American hero Pat Tillman (only debunked years later due to the tireless courage and persistence of his family) is another example of lies shoved directly down the throats of Americans kept in the dark by a cynical, goal oriented administration.  The recent examples are too many to detail here.

My point:  you cannot productively look at the mess we are in now without examining the many concrete steps that led us inexorably to the mess we are in now.   When chickens come home to roost, as the cancerous, zombie chickens of our failure to heed the small steps toward the world of shit we now find ourselves in have, well… what can we say?

“Yo, we, uh, we didn’t fucking know?   Wait … wasn’t Obama supposed to reverse all this shit?”   

Obama, in one instance when he wasn’t misusing his great talents, told us himself that we would have to push him to do the things we needed him to do.   Too many organized, disciplined, well-funded people hated him for much of the hope and change he promised to work, maybe, but, still, he had a good point.   

It’s on us.  In the end, it is always on us.  How we do it is a difficult question, but it is a question that is on each of us to do our part to answer.

 

[1] How many Americans today remember the horrifying case of Maher Arar, Canadian citizen of Syrian origin, detained at JFK airport early in the War on Terror?  Pulled off an airport line where he was waiting with his family, he was locked up and interrogated for two weeks before his “extraordinary rendition” by CIA jet to Jordan en route to Syria, shackled, blindfolded, drugged, diapered and jump-suited.  He endured almost a year of torture at the hands of Syrian masters of torture before his eventual, long-delayed release.  No charges were ever brought against him.   

Maher Arar’s imprisonment without charges (not to mention his torture) was a clear violation of fundamental legal norms in the West dating back to the Magna Carta (1215 A.D.).  The Canadian government conducted an inquiry, heard from 85 witnesses, and exonerated Arar of any connection with terrorism.   

Prime Minister Stephen Harper formally apologized to Arar for Canada’s role in what the prime minister described as his “terrible ordeal.” In January 2007, the federal government [of Canada] awarded Arar $10.5 million in compensation, and another $1 million to cover his legal costs.

“On behalf of the government of Canada, I wish to apologize to you, Monia Mazigh and your family for any role Canadian officials may have played in the terrible ordeal that all of you experienced in 2002 and 2003,” Harper said. “I trust that, having arrived at a negotiated settlement, we have ensured that fair compensation will be paid to you and your family. I sincerely hope that these words and actions will assist you and your family in your efforts to begin a new and hopeful chapter in your lives.”  source

US courts threw Arar’s lawsuit out, citing “national security” reasons related to the ongoing, and endless, War on Terror.

One principle often cited in philosophical discussions of capital punishment is that it is better for many possibly guilty persons to escape punishment altogether than for one innocent person to be executed.   Ditto for torture, no? 

There is no doubt that many, many people — and many innocent people turned in for rewards, for grudges, by sloppy work, were tortured in our names.   “We tortured some [no more than a thousand or two -ed.] folks”, as our former president wanly admitted a few years ago, with impressive  maladroitness.

Politics smells like Meat 2018

The president’s press secretary, former Republican presidential aspirant Mike Huckabee’s daughter, recently praised what she called Donald Trump’s impressive accomplishments in 2017.   He had given everybody a historically huge tax break, she said, while slashing regulations to allow entrepreneurs, and all Americans, to prosper.

Admittedly, that’s one spin to give to the president’s accomplishments so far. [1]   Don’t forget his appointment of a single-minded corporate extremist, to the right of Scalia, to lifetime tenure on the U.S. Supreme Court.  Appointing a dependable right-wing political zealot really pleased his base.  Mr. Smartypants Constitutional Law Professor Obama sure couldn’t do that for his adoring rainbow base!

I was impressed by the recent remarks of a Republican senator from Colorado, Cory Gardner by name, made while standing up for an actual democratic principle in the Senate.   This is something that neither party is particularly good at, and I thought Mr. Gardner’s stand against logically inconsistent partisan political lock-step was laudable.  Here is the essence of his principled remarks (as selected by the Godless commies at Democracy Now!).  A tip of the yarmulke to Senator Cory Gardner.  Good for you, sir.  Good for you!

Meanwhile, the party of the slightly left of corporate center, the Democratic party, (or Democrat party as the southern boys now call it, coyly refraining from so much as a hint of the familiar n-word) was busy getting rid of one of their most articulate and publicly visible Senators over yucky allegations of uninvited kissing and touching that took place before he was in the Senate.   The party of principles!  No point setting a precedent — the accused himself calling for an ethics investigation to decide his fate.  No, sir.  He must resign, immediately.  No political future for someone who could ever do something like that. 

Even though the precedent of the accused calling for an ethics investigation of his own behavior, and the ethics committee making a ruling on, and setting a punishment for, this vexing, widespread, suddenly publicly spotlit problem, would extend the real conversation about how to fix it for good, at least in the halls and chambers of the political whorehouse in question, Congress. 

Tongue kissing a Playboy model, who didn’t want to be kissed, before you went into politics is wrong and gross.  It is offensive and should not  be tolerated.  The offender himself acknowledged this.

Then the offended at the zero tolerance party of the politically correct (donor), always playing to their proven “Identity Politics” demographic, got to work.   It doesn’t matter that the victim publicly accepted Franken’s sincere and groveling apology, what he did was disgusting and intolerable (no matter when it took place).   According to his generally spineless blue colleagues, backs suddenly stiffened, he must face the lightning quick no- jury-needed justice every cattle rustler in the old west used to face, if caught, or strongly suspected, or accused, or a stranger.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if the Republicans, the party that has no public beef with powerful men who grope and harass, elected the first female president?  Wouldn’t surprise me, those far-right punks know how to fight to win on a national scale.  My mother, as she was dying, begged me to promise her that Sarah Palin would never be president of the U.S.   I did.  Not so sure now, after this prissy winner who is our current president managed to bully, bitchslap and gerrymander his way to an impressive (unless closely examined) Electoral College win.  It won’t be Ms. Palin, but it could well be some other equally unqualified creep.

We have fake news, left and right, in our corporately consolidated, post-Fairness Doctrine mass media.  Top-rated Rachel Maddow, for example, who my mother used to love, who I used to enjoy watching, has pulled her share of howlers.  The good folks on the right who grossly distort empirical reality need no introduction.   Their fans simply do not care if they bend the truth a bit, or make up some things about the people they hate, or omit details needed to grasp the full context of statements or events.   We believe what our emotional biases tell us is true: the confirmation bias.   

The person who hated Trump, and, during the viciously gladiatorial election campaign, got a facebook link to a story about Trump and Sheldon Adelson gang-banging a 13 year-old in a Vegas hotel room was about as likely to forward it as the person who hated Hillary and got the bit about her pedophilia emporium in the basement of a pizza place (that has no basement) was likely to forward that equally rancid piece of incitement.   When we hate, it is easy to believe the worst about the Other.

And when the fight is vicious, and ugly, and neither of the two champions is particularly likable, it is hard not to hate. When we hate, the insula section of our brain lights up, shutting down critical faculties.  When we are enraged we are actually biologically incapable of nuanced critical thought.

The brilliant Yuval Noah Harari (who refers to himself as both historian and scientist) notes the difference between intelligence and consciousness.  They are closely related in humans and other highly sentient creatures, and are often thought of as the same thing, but they are distinct from each other.  Intelligence is our ability to think, use language to communicate, solve problems.   Consciousness is our awareness of everything around us, our ability to feel.  Both are involved in creativity and problem solving. 

Only consciousness makes us able to perceive the suffering of other sentient creatures.   The industrial age, made possible by scientifically organized intelligence, led inexorably to what is sometimes referred to as the Anthropocene era– the present epoch, in which humans have developed the ability to destroy all life on the planet, many times over.  Intelligent people can argue over what price may be “worth” the destruction of most of the earth’s population, most of its animal and plant species.  Conscious people, who can feel the suffering of other sentient creatures, are less likely to argue about how much death or extinction is “acceptable” in reaching maximum profit.   

Intelligence (and its appearance) is valued greatly in our society.  Consciousness, which includes the capacity to experience joy, to suffer and to feel empathy for the suffering of others, sadly, not as much.  Too much consciousness is bad for business, downright unAmerican.

Meanwhile, politics continues to smell like meat.  In a world of wildly self-justifying jive talking cannibals. 

 

[1]  We should leave aside, for purposes of this post, that the lion’s share of the tax breaks go, in perpetuity (under this law) to the wealthiest Americans and those profit-driven, psychopathic “persons,” the legally animated multi-billionaires we call corporations.  Also, that the modest tax breaks for the lower brackets of the tax table are phased out over the next few years.  Why let those losers share in an economy meant for the benefit of our greatest winners?

As for the slashing of all government regulation, and the gutting of all regulatory agencies, putting those protections back in place will take a long time.  A new government can recalibrate the President’s grotesque new tax law but it could take years — if ever–  to undo some of the damage President Fuckface’s (crap! I meant to type “President Trump”, damn those fingers…) crippling of regulatory agencies will cause.

Take just the tip of the iceberg — the environmental impact of deregulation.  Opening millions of acres, on land and in coastal waters, for fossil fuel extraction?   Hey, what could go wrong?  It’s not as though offshore oil spills are any kind of concern.  Not only short-sighted, greedy and stupid but dangerous and, actually, evil — not to put too fine a point on it.  Our extractive economic model, heavy on disposables and eternally accumulating toxins, is unsustainable, we need a regenerative model if humans are to have any future on this little planet.

On the one hand we have the longterm habitability of our planet, its ability to sustain life.  On the other hand, massively increased profits for fossilized, super-wealthy ubermenschen like Charles and David Koch, two of the fifty most important people on the earth.   It’s no mystery which side of this existential argument the enraged and unbalanced dotard-in-chief and the Koch Brother’s favorite Vice Presidential uber-Christian are on.   It’s, truly, a no-brainer.

Not that anyone asked me about God…

I have no kick against righteous practitioners of any religion, those who use religion as a way to become more empathetic, more humane, more active doing good works, more righteous.  It’s ignorant and dangerous to tar an entire religion because of the actions of violent zealots, or the smug establishment that is often religion’s double-talking political voice. 

I don’t think any less of Jesus because his American Evangelical followers were so fervent in their lockstep support of someone like Trump, as irreligious a duck as we’ve ever seen striding this earth.  It’s no reflection on Jesus or his teachings.  The rituals of my own Jewish religion leave me fairly cold, though I recognize that its teachings have provided the core of my moral awareness. 

Every religion contains contradictions.   Followers of the Prince of Peace put peaceful civilians to the sword, Allah’s name is shouted by psychos who murder innocents for some imagined higher purpose.   Religious Jews, Hindus, Jains, Taoists, Muslims, Christians in every nation embrace vicious political ideologies.  Even the Buddhists are persecuting and massacring religious minorities now, for Christ’s sake.   Truth is one, paths are many, as one guru or another once said.

At its best, religion offers fellowship, community and comfort to those who gather to pray, study the religion, do good works.  All of these things are important, the last of them essential.  I do not sneeze at any of them.   My own experiences with religious hypocrisy when I was an impressionable boy soured me on the organized religion business, but I recognize that people can be genuinely touched by their faith in God.  I don’t sneeze at it.  I don’t sneer at it.  I take each religious claim solely on the basis of its action in the world, whether it makes the person wiser and kinder, or an even greater asshole.  In the case of religious assholes, of course, few types are more insufferable than those who are always right because God told them they are. 

An old friend of mine is up against it these days.  I’ll call him Dave.  We sat down the other night for a long overdue check in.   He is overwhelmed, as so many are today.   We are supposed to be happy, optimistic, we are supposed to feel secure.  Why are we so unhappy, so fearful, so goddamned insecure in our homes, our very lives?   Religion offers a timeless explanation, so it is no mystery that people so often turn to it when times are scary.

Dave spoke at some length about some of the insights he’s getting from his study at the synagogue he attends.   He described, by way of example, the complex mystical explanation about the ten veils that keep man from seeing God.  Humans cannot see God, he explained, because of these veils, one veil veiling the next, until God, who is always present and beyond any and all veils, may appear invisible to man.  This is the reason, presumably, to study the holy books.  To be able to perceive God’s presence.

When I hear the word “God”, I immediately think of man’s greatest, and also most destructive, creation.  I consider myself, like Sekhnet, a somewhat spiritual creature, but, unlike Sekhnet, I leave God out of it.   “God is a concept by which we measure our pain”, as Johnny Beatle put it so well.  God is not dead to me, as many have suggested, but understandably driven mad by grief. 

If God is a loving deity, his heart was long ago broken by the doings of his crowning creation homo “don’t call me homo, you fucking homo” sapiens.  Either God, and/or his amanuensis, is/are, and I hesitate to sound judgmental here, fucking psychotic sometimes.   

I was at a bar mitzvah last year, reading along as the boy chanted in a beautiful voice.  I read that God had instructed the Jews to do as he had done, work six days and take the seventh day as Sabbath, a day of rest, contemplation, relaxation.  “You shall do this because I, who created you, did this.  You shall rest to remember that I rested.”

That sounded pretty good to me.  Then, as the bar mitzvah boy chanted the next line, I read: “And whosoever shall work on the Sabbath, he shall be put to death.”   Bingo.

My friend Dave has come to recognize that the good Jews of that prosperous town, with whom he studies God’s works and His unknowable plan, are largely knee-jerk Trump supporters that would make their good, civil rights championing grandmothers vomit.  This has been hard for him to reconcile with the rest of what he is learning.   It is hard for all of us to reconcile.

Letter to Barron

I had a call from an old friend in France right after Donald Trump’s historically slim, brilliantly engineered 70,000 vote Electoral College Victory.

“He won, fair and square.   It was good enough for the slave holders,” one of us observed about the Electoral College.   As far as I know the Electoral College was invented to ensure that wealthy voters in places like South Carolina, which had a majority black population during slavery, had as much say as voters in other mostly white states about who would become the president.   One of the Federalist papers crowed about the brilliance of the Electoral College as a mechanism to ensure that an angry, cynical, selfish, possibly unhinged demagogue never became president– the Electors would serve as a check against an angry lynch mob swayed by a charismatic celebrity crank to misuse democracy at the ballot boxes.

“Well, that worked out brilliantly,” observed my friend in Albi.

After we shared our fears about the reign of a born rich, spoiled, fame-crazed, megalomaniacal, many times failed authoritarian tycoon, fourth child of a ruthless, driven, demanding father, son of German immigrants, Fred Christ Trump [1],  and a nouveau-riche Scottish immigrant mother born in poverty and arrived here aboard the SS Translyvania in 1930, Mary MacLeod Trump, [2] my friend came to the point.

“You have to write a letter to Barron Trump.  Barron is the only hope we have.  You are the only one who could write the letter to persuade him,” he urged me to take his proposal very seriously.  “As serious as cancer,” my friend said grimly.

“Look, first of all, Barron has to hate his father.   Look at the facts.  We hated our fathers for far less than Barron has to hate The fucking Donald for.  Of course, you and I, being contemplative sorts, and now old bastards, have finally become philosophical enough to understand our fathers’ monstrosity and come to terms with it.   But Barron, I mean, he’s a boy, how painful must it have been for him to stand next to Trump as he was bragging about how, if not for millions of dead Mexicans voting against him illegally, he would have easily won the popular vote? 

“You can see how much his current wife hates him, the spokeswoman for anti-bullying.  She’s only staying with him for the money, clearly.  She can’t bear to have him touch her in public, let alone in private.  Barron has got to be even more full of anger, being raised by this hollow, perpetually sucking creature with no soul.  Imagine having that piece of toxic shit as your father, and being a kid.   Barron’s righteous anger and hatred is our only hope.  Certainly you can see that, can you not?”

I tried to dissuade my friend from going any further.  I explained to him that all our phone conversations are now illegally surveilled, the way Obama illegally wiretapped Trump Tower to listen in on Trump’s private conversations with other Birthers who could definitively prove that Obama, who is actually a Muslim, was not born in the United States.  They don’t need permission to do it, I explained, and they have no hesitation to collect any data that can give them legal grounds to take extreme actions.  I urged him to be careful. 

He reminded me that the French had created Les Droits de L’Homme, the doctrine of inalienable, universal human rights enshrined in the fundamental document of the French Revolution in 1789.  The Rights of Man include liberty and equality and a right, indeed a duty, of citizens, to oppose tyranny in all of its forms.  He also pointed out that the French are the Peuple de Lumier, the torch that lit the world’s thirst for our inalienable rights as born equal citizens of the earth.   

I told him that was all well and good, but that I lived in America, the most exceptional nation in history.  I told him it can be very dangerous in America to take a public stand about anything of any importance. 

He told me I was being a typical American pussy.  The fate of the human race was literally at stake, he told me, with this unbalanced frontman for the forces of insane greed and intolerance in office, and I was worried about petty personal danger to myself. 

“You fucking Americans really are a pathetic people,” said this personification of the Peuple de Lumier, the People of Light.  “We supported your revolution against King George, turned the tide as your nation struggled for birth, gave you the statue of Bartholdi’s mother, ‘Liberty Enlightening the World’ and, in the wink of an historical eye, you’ve become a nation of cowardly, persecuted billionaires.   Why don’t you take some of your billions, buy a book of stamps, a sheaf of 100% cotton paper, a Montblanc fountain pen and a bottle of the most expensive ink in the world,  and get started on that letter to Barron.”

I patiently explained to him that while I could afford a Montblanc pen, the world’s most expensive ink and the 100% cotton paper, I wasn’t going to use them to sign my own death warrant by writing the letter to Barron that he was urging me to write.   

“If you couch it skillfully enough, as I’m sure you’d be able to do,” he said, “they won’t be able to use it against you at the trial.” 

I asked him what they would call the letter at my trial.  He was silent for a moment on the French end of the call.   

Exhibit A, I told him.

“Pussy!” he said.  He went on laying out his demonically simple, fiendishly ingenious plan as I protested, for the sake of those listening in on our call.  I’d rather be a pussy than a patriot convicted of treason, I told him. 

“Look, they don’t disembowel traitors anymore, it’s not that Elizabethan horror show where they strip you naked and slowly kill you in front of a jeering crowd of toothless sadists.   Death by lethal injection is quite often painless,” he told me, before reminding me of, and then discounting, the many botched lethal injection jobs that led to long minutes of witnessed agony for the condemned.   

“Plus,” he added, “they let you wear pants, and a shirt, you just have to roll up the sleeve.”

“Be optimistic,” he urged me, “most of the time, from what I can tell, the execution goes without a hitch.” 

I was unable to make any real progress on my end resisting his call to write the letter to Barron.   I finally told him I would think about it, put pen to paper, see what I could do.   Thankfully, in our conversations since, he has not been too insistent protesting my long delay completing the letter to Barron.   Like the rest of us, I suppose, he has grown glassy-eyed watching the Reality TV Elizabethan horror show that is the Trump presidency.

We had a mutual friend, the youngest of three boys, a giant two year-old.  The guy reminded me of Trump, the fourth of five children growing up, another peevish attention seeker.  This mutual friend of ours was maniacal about getting the best possible deal for himself in literally every situation.  It wasn’t truly satisfying to him unless his gain came at someone else’s expense — the other person’s loss was as important to him as his win.  The world, for him, was a zero sum game, every encounter an opportunity to eat or be eaten.   My friend now living in France quickly took to referring to him as “Motherfucker”.  I always knew who he was talking about.  In the end his cannibalistic friendship exhausted me and I called his mother to explain why.

She sighed, and told me that she appreciated me hanging in there for so many years.  She knew how difficult he could be, and how many once close friends he had already lost.   I was, apparently, the last of them.  She thanked me for being his friend so long and asked me if I had any suggestion about helping him.  I told her I was at a loss, since any change has to come from a realization of the need for change and that her youngest son was as resistant as anyone I’d ever met to genuine self-knowledge.   She acknowledged that he was very difficult, superhumanly stubborn, very unhappy, very lonely, and very angry about it all.  She told me she understood everything I had told her and asked only one thing of me: don’t close the door on him.  “If he tries to make amends with you, at least hear him out.”  I told her I would.

She was a wonderful woman with a great spirit.  I wrote about her here.  I sent those words to his oldest brother, who had emailed me that their mother, my old friend, had passed away, at 98.   My former old friend wrote to thank me graciously for the kind words about his mother, to praise my ability to conjure her with words, and to blame me for my stubborn refusal to remain his lifelong friend.

The thing about people who would rather kill you than admit they could be at fault about anything — they will eventually actually kill you.  Even as I know this with grim certainty, I hesitate to complete that impossible letter to Barron.  The Statue of Liberty hides her face as my friend in France discreetly hides his disappointment. 

 

[1]  “That’s why I’m so screwed up, because I had a father that pushed me pretty hard,” he wrote in his 2007 book, Think Big.    source

The clever, superior writer for Politico wrote this irresistible sentence in the piece linked above:   

Judging by the biographical material, created largely by an aggressively unreliable narrator and those in his employ, the 45th president of the United States would seem to be the product of one domineering parent.

 

[2]   Typically, Trump blames his mother for some of his failings, while praising her (in another book nobody heard of):

“Part of the problem I’ve had with women has been in having to compare them to my incredible mother, Mary Trump,” he wrote in The Art of the Comeback. “My mother is smart as hell.”   source

He has tweeted glowingly, if identically, about her several times:

On Twitter, he has called her “a wonderful person,” “a great beauty” and not much more. “Advice from my mother, Mary MacLeod Trump: Trust in God and be true to yourself,” he tweeted on February 5, 2013, and also on July 30, 2013, October 24, 2013, and October 25, 2013, and also on March 21, 2014, May 15, 2014 and January 28, 2015, the same thing every time, a cut-and-paste aphorism ready for periodic posting—which itself was recycled from a page in his 2004 book, How to Get Rich. “I didn’t really get it at first, but because it sounded good, I stuck to it,” he wrote of this counsel. “Later I realized how comprehensive this is.”    source

Screaming Bloody Murder

My grandmother, Yetta, a dramatic, creative woman, was fond of the phrase “screaming bloody murder”.  Her husband, my grandfather Sam, who we always called Pop, was more subdued.  He referred to the same thing as “belly aching”.   Both phrases are evocative, but ‘screaming bloody murder’ resonates more at the moment, the moment when so many are inclined to belly ache, and often for very compelling reasons.   There is ample reason to scream bloody murder at this moment in time, when the habitable earth is being destroyed so that the profits of the insanely greedy can remain undisturbed.

I’ve been over the slaughter of my extended family several times in these pages the last few years, the six siblings of my maternal grandmother, the six siblings of my maternal grandfather, the three siblings of my paternal grandmother, probably all of my paternal grandfather’s, and I get why, on a subconscious level, my grandmother was so drawn to the phrase ‘screaming bloody murder.’   That was the reason for the banging of the drums that airless August night in 1943, and the dented, out of tune brass instruments, the drunken songs sung full-throatedly, to drown out the cries of those screaming bloody murder.   

The mostly Christian town of Vishnevitz knew it was bad for the Jews when the SS arrived in the area, when the Jews were forced to construct a ghetto barrier around the small Jewish area, when the bodies of starved and diseased Jews, the occasional dead by shooting,  started to pile up.  The ghetto, behind barbed wire and crude fences and walls, stunk of death, but there was probably more crying and moaning, more belly aching, than screams of bloody murder.   

History teaches us that where there is systematic starvation, rampant disease, filth, despair, violent intimidation, occasional murder, a dominant group turning a blind eye to the organized suffering of a despised minority, it is only a matter of time until the screams of bloody murder begin.   That was the reason for the marching band, the drums, the singing and yelling — to cover the screams of bloody murder of the surviving wretches being marched to the ravine to be bloodily murdered that humid summer night.   Nobody in Vishnevitz wanted to hear those screams.

 “Not so bloody,” says a 95 year-old SS man dismissively.  “First of all, most died from a single gunshot to the back of the head.  They went quickly and there is not much bleeding from this kind of wound, nothing to compare to a decapitation or disemboweling.  In any case, they were quickly covered with a layer of dirt and lime that absorbed whatever blood there was. Also, Jews were more likely to wail and keen when lined up to be shot, than to actually scream bloody murder.  Don’t forget, these Jews had also been demoralized, starved and occasionally murdered at random, for quite some time before we marched them out to be done with it and move east to deal with the more serious numbers we were up against.   They were weak and had lost all will to resist.   I think ‘screaming bloody murder’ is more a myth than a reality for these people.”

Still, I thought of my grandmother saying “he was screaming bloody murder” the other night, maybe in a dream, and it struck me.   They had every right to scream bloody murder, those who had grimly survived only to be marched to a hillside scooped out to serve as a mass grave. 

The bones of my great aunts and uncles, their spouses, children and everyone else they ever loved, are still in that ravine.   There is a plaque there now, I understand.   I read a piece in the New York Times written by a woman who traveled to Vishnevitz years after this mass murder.  She visited the ravine.  It was during a dry season.  As the wind blew, sandy top soil blew off the side of the ravine, tiny fragments of bone skittered by.

We are helping out with this kind of thing in Yemen right now, where mass death from cholera and increasing starvation of innocent civilians are the ongoing result of massive bombing and a Saudi-led blockade of food and medical supplies.  The Saudis, our allies, need our help, there are rebels in the country of their poorest neighbors.   Freedom for the Saudis is at stake, we do not hesitate.  We sell them powerful weapons and refuel their warships in the air.  What are friends for?  Besides, here in America, we do not hear the victims screaming bloody murder.

As the wind blows in that arid land, sandy top soil blows off the side of a ravine near a bombed out hospital, tiny fragments of bone skitter by.

Capitalism Marches On

It wasn’t the Russians who put the giant angry two-year old into the White House, it was us, Charlie.   It was years of increasingly right-wing Republican rule (the party is an appendage of what used to be its extremist wing) and increasingly “centrist” Democratic rule as the most unscrupulous of our wealthiest citizens organized to divide and conquer the country.  Bill Clinton, the “greatest Republican president of the 20th century”, and Barack Obama, two charismatic neoliberals, adhered to many of the same policies as their Republican colleagues.  Endless war on a global scale, mass incarceration, government secrecy, a graceful dance around American poverty, economic policies that keep wealth concentrated and the spoils of the economy distributed upwards.  In the end many Americans correctly saw little difference between the parties. 

Both work mainly for the interests of wealthy donors and their well-paid lobbyists and both parties have presided over increasingly stark income and wealth inequality.  Candidates of neither party are likely to risk alienating free-spending billionaires with pressing agendas, including many corporate “persons”, intent only on profit, who enjoy many times the rights of ordinary citizens.

Of course, it’s not that there is no difference between the parties, as we see daily.   We had a dramatic demonstration of what cynical fucks working for cynical fucks will do with their Reduce Tax on the Wealthy and Corporations Bill including doubling the already high threshold for “Death Tax” and backdoor Obamacare Repeal.   As usual, Amy Goodman and writing partner Denis Moynihan produced a thoughtful and inspiring commentary.  Check out their piece about The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (aka The Arbeit Macht Frei Act)  rammed through on a straight party line 52-48 vote late Wednesday night, during the winter solstice, on ‘the darkest day of the year‘.

There is a big difference between the parties, of course, on certain issues, if not on the major economic and military ones.  The Democrats, for the most part, are not as extreme and ‘disciplined’ as their far right colleagues on the other side of the aisle.  On social issues, the polarizing “wedge issues” we are all now so familiar with reflexively fighting over, of course, the parties are far apart.  Democrats see homosexuality as part of nature, not a mortal threat to the family and a personal affront to Jesus Christ himself.  Democrats are more progressive on race relations, protective of a woman’s right to the final say over her pregnancy, in favor of humane immigration policies, concerned with controlling gun violence, concerned with providing a fig leaf of dignity to the least among us, believers in science, concerned with taking steps to slow catastrophic climate change, willing to discuss many issues based on the actual facts of the case instead of constantly repeating talking points and misleading mantras like “Death Tax”.   

It is possible, as we have seen, to have all of these “liberal” social policies and still rule on behalf of the wealthiest and most selfish while waging endless, self-perpetuating wars, mostly in secret, on a worldwide battlefield while leaving the disenfranchised at home to fend largely for themselves.  It is called “neoliberalism”.

I, like most Americans, am sick to death of this status quo.  I find it disturbing that most Americans have no idea what neoliberalism is: open-minded on “social issues”, a free-market capitalist on matters of the economy and war.   I was not blinded enough by my disgust with the spineless Democratic party, or my distaste for the unpopular candidate they skewed the primary process to put on the ballot, to vote for a huckster to blow the whole thing up, to end government as we know it, an insane and obvious  liar, born rich, who divides the world into winners (the rich) and losers (the rest of you contemptible motherfuckers).   The man is the perfect front man for his adopted party.   He advocates only for himself, serving whoever kisses up to him the most lavishly and those who share his shamelessly narrow self-interest. 

The people, except for beneficiaries of his in-your-fucking-face tax giveaway and those 30% still too blinded by anger and hatred to see how tragically foolish they were to vote for him,  hate him.  The losers mostly hate him.  Winners, of course, shit, he’s one of them!  And longtime wet dreams of extreme right-wing fringe nuts are finally within their sweaty grasp.  No taxes paid by the born booted and spurred inheritors of vast fortunes and the longed for dismantling of the New Deal social safety net, and Medicare and Medicaid, and food stamps, and Obamacare, and aid to children and to the old and infirm and all the rest of societies hapless losers. 

You see, now that the deficit has been increased by the amount given back to America’s wealthiest, a projected $1,400,000,000,000.00, deep cuts to social programs, those despicable “entitlements” that the poor seem to feel entitled to (who the fuck do they think they are?  The wealthy?), are more pressing than ever to keep the deficit in line.   The Koch brothers’ father, Mr. John Birch, and demented fucking Fred Christ Trump are coming all over themselves in hell.  Good for you, boys, good for you.

Having a Bully for a Parent

“Is it really fair to call me a bully?” asked the skeleton of my father, from his grave outside of Peekskill.  

Yeah.  

“Well, nice to see no equivocation, I suppose,” said the skeleton.  “I assume you have this whole thing worked out, how Uncle Aren and his wife bullied my mother, how she bullied me, blah, blah, blah….”  

Actually, I had something else in mind.  With a bullying maniac in the White House, someone who sees the world as black and white, the way you always did, someone as intent on winning…  

“Or actually, intent on not losing, as you pointed out a few weeks ago.  The battle is not really to win, it’s to not be defeated again.  That’s a genuine insight you had right there, Elie.  People who divide the world into winners and losers, black and white, good and evil, are desperate not to find themselves on the wrong side of that cruel chasm.  Their self-esteem is tied to never being beaten again.   They’re desperate not to be what they think of as losers.  If the world has no nuance, you are either loyal or a traitor.”  

All true, as far as I can see.  Anyway, having experienced that kind of upbringing, by a parent desperate never to be wrong, who bellows ‘it’s my way or the highway’ when he feels cornered, I have a certain understanding of this despicable creature we have dominating the news like an eternally crying baby with a voice as loud as an atom bomb.  

“Are atom bombs really loud?” said the skeleton.  “You should probably run that one by Jeeves, Elie.  What if the mushroom cloud is supremely silent as it melts all life within its radius?”

I take your point, but I don’t give a shit.  I had some thoughts about the psyche of this clown president, after seeing a short, well-done documentary about his family history.   The film was called Meet the Trumps: From Immigrant to President.   A 47 minute 2017 BBC production I saw on Netflix yesterday, and recommend  highly.

“Do tell,” said the skeleton, with a yawn, or a silent scream.

Trump had an older brother, Fred Jr., Freddy, who was bright, good looking, fun-loving, interested in others, beloved.  Fred Christ Trump senior, an immense piece of shit, as far as anyone can tell, a guy who ruthlessly took advantage of government contracts for middle class housing to enrich himself obscenely, if arguably just within the letter of the law (he settled a federal discrimination suit agreeing not to violate the new Fair Housing Act, without admitting he had), was grooming Freddy ascend to the throne of the Trump Empire.  Freddy cruelly disappointed his father by siding with the tenants of a building Trump owned and putting in new windows for them.  This inexcusable breach of business ethics demonstrated to Fred Christ Trump that Freddy lacked what it took to lead the House of Trump.   

Frederich Trump, Fred Christ Trump’s father, had made a small fortune by sheer audacity at the turn of the twentieth century.   He came from Germany (at sixteen to seek his fortune, the second time because he’d been deported from his homeland) to become an American immigrant success story.  He died fairly young, leaving a nice nest egg that his oldest son, Fred Christ, turned into an actual fortune after becoming head of the family and surpassing the entrepreneurial accomplishments of his bold, entrepreneurial father.

In the documentary they take a moment to follow the tragic demise of Freddy Trump.  Never suited to life as a ruthless corporate titan, he left the family business and became a commercial pilot.  At some point he lost that job, possibly connected with an increasingly intrusive alcohol habit.   He wound up working as a maintenance man in some Trump apartment building.  Then he finished drinking himself to death, and died, at 43.

Meanwhile, Donald, who’d shown an increasing mean streak as an adolescent, had graduated from the military academy he’d been sent to to man him up.  To build up his self-esteem while he was at the academy, his parents, Fred Christ and Mary, would bring a pretty girl with them every week when they visited Donald.  The girls looked like models, noted a former classmate of Trump’s, possibly because they were.   Donald would be photographed posing with this succession of good looking young women and went on to win the all-male academy’s Lady’s Man award.   Shades of The Apprentice, I thought when I saw that.

At twenty-five, with his father under investigation in Congress for shady business practices,  Donald was appointed president of his iron-willed father’s real estate empire.  He soon found himself under the stinking wing of a truly notorious piece of shit, vicious, closeted gay homophobe Roy Cohn. [1]  Cohn, among his other notorious works, represented the dons of the five crime families, as well as George Steinbrenner, and became Donald’s consigliere and mentor, before losing a four year battle against disbarment and dying of AIDS.  

In 1981 Freddy died.  There’s a clip of Trump describing his brother.   It is striking how uncharacteristically human his tone is, how clearly full of love he is describing his big brother.    He laments that his father, and he, pushed Freddy into a life he wasn’t cut out for, then goes on to explain:  

“… I had a brother who was an extraordinary guy, he was an absolutely brilliant personality, he was handsome, good at sports, he was wonderful, people loved him, he was nice, everybody wanted to be his friend, people confided in him, he was truly a nice human being….” Then he springs the trap shut, in characteristic fashion: “… and people took advantage of him.”  The lesson he learned from his wonderful brother’s life and death is ‘don’t be too nice, or people will fuck you.”

Years later the demented Fred Christ would agree to cut Freddy’s heirs out of his will.   Donald took the opportunity to give a final fuck you to his beloved too nice loser brother’s family by cutting off promised money to pay for medical care for Freddy’s grandchild, born with cerebral palsy.

“I understand that up there, above the ground, it is impossible to resist talking about, thinking about, bitching about, this giant, stinking pantload you have in the bully pulpit.  Makes me glad I’m already dead, I have to say. But this shit-smear too shall pass, along with the 32% who say they don’t regret having voted for him.  They all pass, the Roy Cohns, the Fred and Donald Trumps alike.  

“I know it’s not all in your hands, not entirely a matter of your will, but I wish you could somehow focus on finishing a nice sample of my story to send to agents.  Get an agent, Elie, before it’s too late.  Find a nice ten page sample, print it out, and send it to a dozen agents, and a few literary rags while you’re at it.  That’s how you avoid being too nice and having people take advantage of you.”

It’s my way or the fucking highway, dad.  You like that fucking dirt bed you have there?  Good, then be quiet and go back to sleep. 

“Yah-vold, mein herr,” said the skeleton, giving a feeble Nazi salute and slouching back into his grave.

[1]  Some readers (Jews in particular) might find this review of two biographies of Cohn the reviewer waded through, disturbingly fascinating.

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(above) the self-hating Roy Cohn, living picture of Dorian Grey.