Category Archives: History and Politics

Great Summary of the Age of Obama/Clinton

Lee Carter recently unseated Jackson Miller, Republican majority whip, in the Virginia House of Delegates.   He ran as a Democratic Socialist and resisted attempts by the local Democratic party to steer his campaign.  He won by a nine percentage point margin of victory.   He spoke to Jeremy Scahill last week on Scahill’s Intercepted podcast (at 01:17:50) and summarized the current dilemma in knee-jerk red hat/blue hat American politics better than anyone I’ve heard do it.

Lee Carter:  2008 saw a massive collapse of the global economy on a scale we hadn’t seen since the Great Depression.  The fact that we never really fixed the global economy after 2008 has built up this simmering discontent with politics as usual, on both sides.   You have politicians, particularly in the Democratic party, because Barack Obama was the president at the time, who, for the last eight years have spent the entire time saying “look, we’re in a recovery, things are going great, we don’t need to change anything about us, the problem is the Republicans.”

And then the Republicans were pointing to the actual problems with the recovery, the fact that prior to 2008 we had millions of people who had a single, full-time job that was able to pay the bills, now they’re having to work two and three precarious jobs to get most of the same amount of money as they had before and they’re saying “the economy is not recovering, it’s still in the tank, and the problem is the Democrats.”   So the center of American politics in that environment is not really holding anymore.   

If you look at the polling, obviously the most unpopular thing in American politics is President Trump, but the second most unpopular thing in American politics is the Democratic Party.  So the Democratic Party,  right now, the leadership, certainly, seems to think that just by tying all elected Republicans throughout the country to Donald Trump they can see electoral success.  And in the short term that may very well work.   

But unless we actually clean our own house, and recognize that the recovery we have overseen since 2008 has been incomplete, that we never addressed the structural problems of America’s economy, that there are people who are being left behind, if we don’t address those problems and become the kind of party that fully embraces the working class and the health and welfare of 98% of people, once Donald Trump is gone we are going to go through the floor, because we won’t have that crutch anymore.  Donald Trump is not going to be around forever and once he’s gone, if we haven’t fixed our own problems, we are in a lot of trouble.   

Me:  Well said, sir.   Thank you for your service.

NOTE:  just spent a good deal of time accurately transcribing Lee Carter’s statement, since last time I checked the Intercept did not publish a transcript of its podcasts.  Now, looky here, darn it, all I had to do was cut and paste (note, the remainder of Jeremy Scahill’s interview with Lee Carter is at the bottom of this note):

JS: Now Lee, you, of course are at the beginning of your political career and it seems to me like there’s this bifurcation within the Democratic Party right now where you have the kind of more corporate, elitist, old school Democratic Party headed by the Clintons and their supporters. And then you kind of have everyone else who seems to want the Democratic Party to move in a different direction, more to the left and more in sync with the visions of the most popular political figure in the country right now, Bernie Sanders.

What’s your analysis, Lee, of the state of the Democratic Party?

LC: This is something that’s happening on both sides of the aisle. 2008 saw a massive collapse of the global economy on a scale that we hadn’t seen since the Great Depression. The fact that we never really fixed the global economy after 2008 has built up the simmering discontent with politics as usual on both sides.

You know, you have politicians particularly within the Democratic Party because Barack Obama was the president at the time, who, for the last eight years have spent the entire time saying, “Look, we’re in a recovery, things are going great, we don’t need to change anything about us, the problem is the Republicans.”

And then the Republicans were pointing to the actual problems with the recovery and the fact that prior to 2008, we had millions of people who had a single full-time job that was able to pay the bills and now they’re having to work, you know, two and three precarious jobs to get most of the same amount of money as they had before and they’re saying, you know, the economy is not recovering, it’s still in the tank and the problem is the Democrats.

So, so the center of American politics in that environment is really not holding anymore. If you look at the polling, you know, obviously that the most unpopular thing in American politics is president Trump, but the second most unpopular thing in American politics is the Democratic Party. So, the Democratic Party, right now, the leadership certainly seems to think that just by tying all acted Republicans throughout the country to Donald Trump, they can see electoral success. And in the short term that very well may work, but unless we actually clean our own house and recognize that the recovery that we have overseen since 2008 has been incomplete, that we never addressed the structural problems of America’s economy, that there are people who are being left behind, if we don’t address those problems within our own party and become the kind of party that fully embraces the working class and the health and welfare of 98 percent of people, once Donald Trump is gone, we’re going to go through the floor, because we won’t have that crutch anymore.

You know, Donald Trump is not going to be around forever, and once he’s gone, if we haven’t fixed our own problems, we are in a lot of trouble.

The interview begins:

JS: Lee Carter, first of all, congratulations on your victory.

LC: Thank you so much.

JS: You have, also, an interesting story as to how you decided to seek political office.

LC: Yeah, so, I served five years on active duty in the United States Marine Corps from 2006 to 2011, deployed twice with the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, went to Haiti after the earthquake in 2010. You know I decided to run for office after an injury on the job in the summer of 2015, long after I got out of the Marine Corps, but I was installing a lighting control panel and I got shocked and I blew my back out pulling away from that panel, and I could barely walk for about two and a half, three months. You know I couldn’t walk more than about fifty feet at a stretch, and I just got shuffled around from doctor to doctor on worker’s comp and none of them really wanted to address the actual problem, they just wanted to give me pain pills and get me out the door.

But finally, I decided to pay out of pocket for a specialist to figure out what the problem was and he was able to get me back on my feet fairly quickly. And when I was able to get back to work, I called my boss and I said, “I’m ready to go, put me back to work.” And they said, “We have work, but we don’t have any for you. Because our customer is not comfortable with you on their job site.”

That’s what sort of pushed me into politics, you know? There was this rage that I put my body on the line to make this company rich and when I finally got hurt, you know, when that dangerous job caught up to me, they just threw me under the bus. So, I decided I was going to step forward and run for office and fix this. Because there’s a very common phrase in the construction industry that goes, “If you fall off a ladder you’re fired before you hit the ground.” Most construction workers have heard that and you know they’ve heard it, not as a joke, as a threat.

So, you know, I decided to step forward and run for office and make sure that what happened to me didn’t happen to thousands of other Virginians.

JS: Talk about the struggles you had in fighting both the Republicans and the institutional Democratic Party in Virginia.

LC: Yeah, we were able to put together a coalition of groups, you know we had the Democratic Socialists of America, we also had the anti-gerrymandering group, Let America Vote, which was founded by former Congressman Jason Kander. We had, you know, the support of the Sierra Club and Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-choice Virginia and the Virginia AFL-CIO and sister district and all these sort of women’s march type groups.

So, we had the support of the base of the Democratic Party, and also, you know, the Democratic Socialists of America and we put that coalition together sort of in defiance of Virginia’s Democratic Party leadership.

The leadership here certainly wanted a lot of minute to minute reports on exactly what was happening in the campaign that I wasn’t comfortable providing. They wanted some editorial control over my message that I wasn’t comfortable providing. So, I decided, you know what? I’ve got the manpower to do this. I’m going to go ahead and do this and I’m going to do it my way.

And the mailers that my opponent sent out, he actually sent out to 11,000 homes, a mailer that had Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung and Lee Carter’s face on them, all the text on it talked about my health care policy, because, you know, if there’s one thing that people remember Stalin for, it’s the health care.

JS: [Laughs.]

LC: But clearly that sort of 1950s, 1960s, you can’t go to the left or they’re going to call you a commie type of common knowledge in politics doesn’t hold true anymore.

U.S. Armed Forces Video: If a person defends the activities of the communist nations while consistently attacking the domestic and foreign policy of the United States, she may be a communist.

source

Practical Consideration

Rachel Yehuda, among many excellent points in her talk with Krista Tippett, asked a very good question:  who would you rather have with you in a war zone, an experienced fighter or a cultured philosopher who has never faced a murderous enemy?  This question was answered “fighter” by many Jews after the Hitler regime, determined never again to be quiet victims of mass violence.  Being eternally tough and ready to kill can lead to overkill, certainly, but it is an understandable enough answer when the question is survival when an entire army is determined to kill you. 

In my quiet life I may feel pacifism is the best option in human affairs, and mildness the best choice when dealing with others, but I would certainly not feel that way faced with an army of murderers intent on killing me and everyone I love.   I’d want an experienced killer next to me to show me how to kill the motherfuckers who were after us.

I was thinking of the same thing in regard to electoral politics and influencing public policy in the USA.  Would you rather have millions marching in the street in protest of evil done in our names, or legislators strategically placed in state houses and Congress to vote in blocks to pass actual laws and give the official nod to secret horrors?   

A few years back, a movement of right wing zealots, funded generously by billionaires, formed a “grass roots” organization called the Tea Party.  This rag-tag army of staunchly conservative patriots got tremendous publicity and, with a shit-ton of money, managed to move the Republican party even farther to the right.  They made the party more extremist by “primarying” moderate Republicans out of office.   The Koch brothers and their ilk looked on approvingly, funding the campaigns of these radical reactionaries, sponsoring this group of servile champions of the already powerful, making the current crop of Republican legislators move to the right or lose their jobs.  Once in office these Tea Party true believers literally held the government hostage, at one point even shutting it down by refusing to fund government programs at a budget deadline.  That’s how you make policy, if you are a ruthless motherfucker intent on changing the world to reflect your worldview, and have the monetary clout, and organization, to do it.

It turns out not to be a matter of right and wrong, who rules, even in a democracy.  The fiction is that our elected representatives act on our behalf.  In the real world of winners and losers they act on behalf of those who pay for their campaigns and keep them in office.   It is not much of a choice on election day, in most cases.  It’s Lewis Black’s two bowls of shit and you’ve got to pick one.   

Might makes right in the Darwinian jungle of electoral politics.  If your party controls Congress you can tell a popular sitting president who won in a landslide to shut the fuck up.  You can simply deny him his constitutional right to fill a Supreme Court vacancy, nothing he can do about it.  You can do everything but outright call him a nigger, even though you’re free to insist he’s a lying Kenyan Muslim and an illegitimate president and doesn’t mean shit.   That’s the power of organized lobbying and the leverage a loud-mouthed celebrity can exert if he is given a big enough public platform via the mass media. 

A stage full of Republican hopefuls in a presidential debate– not one can admit outright that humans evolved from apes, or that the climate is changing in dangerous ways, or that human activities, driven by unchecked greed, are  destroying the planet.  That’s the co-opted Jesus and fossil fuel lobbies, respectively.  The Democratic party is not quite as bad, but it is also an incorrigibly corrupt machine oiled by the money of those legally created psychopaths, corporate “persons”, and their human counterparts who expect their will to be done.    Both parties serve their masters in a society based on the bottom line, and in this case, anyway, the customer is truly, always right.

The bottom line here — was the Bernie Sanders campaign a one shot novum, never seen before in America and never to be seen again?  Or could a candidate with principles and a convincing analysis of why there is so much poverty, misery, desperation and rage in our wealthy nation, funded by small donors (Obama bragged of the same kind of support, but took the bulk of his money from corporations and wealthy folks and opted out of the campaign finance law designed to limit the influence of these forces, and outspent his opponent two to one — and he, uh, ruled accordingly) actually win an election that was not otherwise rigged? 

On one side, a slickly marketed, relentlessly publicized, opportunistic demagogue, saying whatever was necessary to keep angry people enraged, greedy people salivating about all the luxurious things they could buy with their even greater wealth, on the other side someone actually analyzing the legitimate causes for rage, despair, the logical consequences of heedless greed, our nation’s greediest protected by laws they bought and paid for.   

The second candidate never even made it on to the ballot, since his opponent in the primary was supremely qualified, wealthy, politically connected, corporately funded, anointed next in line and the party had an immense thumb on the electoral scales before the primary even started.   

All I can say is “motherfuckers”.  Makes me want to run for office, but without at least one cocksucking billionaire to fund me (not to mention politically inconvenient skeletons cavorting in my closet, and right here, openly, in the room behind me as I type), I may as well try to start a successful non-profit organization to help poor kids prove they are not disposable pieces of shit.  In the greatest, most exceptional nation the world has ever seen.  

How It’s Done

Our cat is dying of kidney disease, it’s chronic and incurable.  The vet told us we could keep him around for a while by sticking a needle into the skin of his back every day, attached to a line and a bag of liquid, and pumping some hydration into him.  In his experience, he said, cats in The Baron’s condition usually live six months to two years.   The Baron has only one kidney, it was discovered recently, but he’s been doing pretty well on the cat dialysis. [1]  Once he starts losing weight, the vet told us, the end is approaching.   

He lost his appetite back in June, a month or so into his kidney treatments.  The vet prescribed a drug called Mirtazapine, developed as an anti-depressant for humans, that is a known appetite stimulant for dogs and cats.  The Baron will not be forced to take a pill, but a vet tech, after wrestling with the determined cat to give him a pill, told us this drug also comes in a transdermal form, you rub it into the skin.   The only place a cat has skin is the pinna, the furless area inside each ear.   Presumably the pads of the feet are also skin, but the cat or dog would lick it off and the drug would not have the desired effect. 

We ordered the transdermal Mirtazapine from a formulary in Arizona, and after a stressful week or two of hassles,  the cat listless and eating very little, spoke directly to the pharmacist, Ashley, who was great.  She contacted the cat’s vet and immediately formulated the proper dose for his age and weight.  It arrived shortly after, in a pen that dispenses a perfect dose of the goop.  I massaged a small gob into his pinna, and soon his old appetite was back.   He gets the drug every three days, and his appetite and weight have been consistent.  The hydration, the cat dialysis [1], has been working pretty well so far and his quality of life is pretty good.  If you didn’t know he had a punched one-way ticket on the death express you’d think he was fine.   

He still cuddles affectionately with his female slave, Sekhnet, once all the lights are out, and he still puckishly claws and bites the hand of his male slave, when it lingers too long after giving him some treats or for the intolerable crime of attempted petting.  I sometimes point out to him that he is literally biting the hand that feeds him, but he glares at me so there will be no mistake: there’s more bloodshed in my immediate future if I continue trying to talk irony with him.  I have the scrimshaw on my hands and forearms to prove I’m not making this up.  Sekhnet always gets a good laugh out of my squeal of shock every time I repeat this timeless ritual with the imperious [2], well-armed Baron and get slashed by a fishing hook claw or cobra fang tooth – an always amusing example of the unlearned lessons of history, I suppose. 

The Mirtazapine pen was marked “Days supply 180”.  60 doses, three days apart.  I keep a chart on the wall to keep track of how many doses we give him and we were up to dose 45.  But the pen was empty.  I emailed Ashley, succinctly stating the facts and what we needed, trying not to sound peevish, and she got right on it.  The drug was formulated and in the mail overnight.   

Naturally, there was no explanation or any hint of an apology.  This is standard operating procedure in our culture, so it was no surprise.  The important thing was that we had the drug the next day, overnighted for the regular shipping cost.  Skaynes got his dose, a day and a half late, but, sure enough, his appetite returned. 

Here’s the thing that tickled and irritated me, both.   The information on the label on the new pen was identical to the printing on the first.  Only one detail was gone.  “Days supply 180”.  No promise, no basis for complaint for broken promise.  Like the uncertain duration of life itself, there was now no promise made, once it was pointed out that the earlier promise had been as solid and unimpeachable as a tweet from our current commander-in-chief.

[1] Sekhnet who is “in the business of accuracy”, as she says, points out that this is not dialysis in any sense of the word.  The cat’s blood is not purified by the process, he is merely getting hydration that relieves some of the stress on his kidney.

[2]  I get a great kick out of dictionary definitions sometimes.  My favorite is the great definition of “squeamish” from the dictionary I had in high school.   “Exhibiting a prudish readiness to be nauseated.”   Fucking genius.   I can’t accurately quote a line of Shakespeare, even those I love the most, but, like many TV commercials heard as a kid that I can recite verbatim, I’ll never forget that great definition.

I looked up “imperious” just now, since I am also in the business of accuracy, and before a great series of synonyms describing the Baron’s attitude toward his staff, was this thought-provoking definition: 

assuming power or authority without justification; arrogant and domineering.

“his imperious demands”

synonyms:  peremptory, commanding, imperial, high-handed, overbearing, overweening, domineering, authoritarian, dictatorial, autocratic, authoritative, lordly, assertive, bossy, arrogant, haughty, presumptuous 

What I love is the “without justification”.   Isn’t human history a continuous bloody scroll of those who assume power and authority without justification?   

Kings ruled by Divine Right, God gave them their indisputable powers, no matter how they came to the throne, God himself justified their bossiness.  Likewise hereditary ruling pricks like Barons and Lords derived their power from long custom, backed by force of arms.  The power to kill you, or have you whipped, is a pretty convincing justification for assuming power and authority, I guess.  “The consent of the governed” is the current fiction in democracy, but as far as “justification” look no further than these universally despised, or at least supremely disappointing, folks we have out there exercising power and authority, torturing some folks in our name and deciding how many poor people will need to die early so the super-rich can be even richer.

Son of Malum Prohibitum

The first few paragraphs of a previous post describe the difference between a malum in se, an inherently harmful, evil act that should clearly be illegal, such as the random murder of kindergarten students, and a malum prohibitum, an act neither good or bad in itself, but prohibited by law, as alcohol was for a decade a hundred years or so ago here, during Prohibition.   You can read the post here. 

It is, in some ways, a distinction without a difference, as they like to say in first year Law School classes.   You can often do a longer prison sentence convicted of a malum prohibitum, even though there is nothing inherently evil about the act that the law has prohibited.

I have been having trouble staying asleep the last few days, the wheels in the mind begin to turn and soon it becomes useless to stay in bed feeling frustrated about how tired you are.  I was listening to the beginning of an excellent discussion of the president’s predictably moronic response to the Opioid Crisis (FAIR’s great podcast) and realized I had one more piece of jello to nail down in this discussion of mala in se vs. mala prohibitum.   

A fabulously wealthy family of doctors and advertising geniuses, the Sackler family by name, eventually had their own pharmaceutical company.  That company manufactures Oxycontin, a time-released opioid that they marketed to doctors and patients as having a greatly reduced addictive danger, compared to previous iterations of pharmaceutical opioids.  The only problem with this claim, allowed by the FDA as part of the Sacklers’ wonderfully effective marketing campaign, is that it was, and is, complete bullshit.  It was a bold claim backed by no evidence or research whatsoever.  Mere, uh, puffery, yo, arguably nothing illegal about puffery, which is bragging, intended to cow or otherwise influence, that does not have to be backed up.  We are all now intimately and sickeningly familiar with puffery, getting daily overdoses of it from our Puffer-in-Chief. 

Oxycontin proved to be highly addictive to people desperate to escape their psychic pain.  It also proved immensely profitable, netting the Sacklers a shit ton of money, billions.  With that money they settled several big law suits in various states, the terms of the settlements sealing records and gagging everybody involved.  You can read the whole sickening fake news investigative report about this family of immensely rich and successful pieces of shit here.   Who are you going to believe, an Oxycontin package insert or some smart-ass writing for the failing New Yorker?  You decide.

Here’s the obvious point I didn’t make in the previous post.  A guy in a trench coat with a bottle of Oxycontin for sale to addicts, at ten or fifteen dollars a pop, is a criminal, an illegal drug dealer, he gets sent away for years of nonconsensual sex.  The law says so.   

The cultured multi-millionaire who manufactures and falsely markets the drug single-most responsible for a national emergency of drug overdose deaths by opioid addicts?   “Keep the terms of our fucking settlement secret, you piece of shit, or I’ll drag your ass back to court and you’ll be fucked.  Enjoy the millions, you fucking litigious prick….”

The toxic orange turd has vowed to spend big bucks on a new “Just Say No” ad campaign, to simply tell addicts they should have more will power.  That should do it, don’t you think?

In fairness to our president, and nobody likes being referred to as a piece of shit, particularly a toxic one, of course, he has made the previous worst president in American history look articulate by comparison.   Check this out, very well done example of Mr. Trump’s remarkable power of analysis and his unique speaking ability.  It is very funny, even as it will also hammer home the horror.  Oh, the fucking horror. 

Now, maybe I can get a few more winks….

Madness may not be an unreasonable option (And Mike Pence on guns)

In fairness to Lennox Hill Hospital, they did give me a long list of side effects to watch out for– cold/flu and high blood pressure among them.  I’ve never seen my blood pressure this high, day after day, even after doubling the dose of my blood pressure medication (at my doctor’s suggestion), but they did warn me.  Fair enough.  I just learned that it will take up to two months after my immunosuppressive treatment to see if my kidney disease is in remission.  Oh, well.

I don’t suppose my high blood pressure could be at all related to the recently announced deadline to re-apply for private health insurance by December 15th (if I want health insurance on January 1).   I have the choice of continuing to pay 500% to 1000% more than the law requires for a person of my income, as I did this year, in hopes of getting better health care than I did in 2016, or once again finding all new doctors to continue treatment of my kidney disease and skin cancer.  Oh well, just part of living in a Free Market in our exceptional nation, I suppose.   

The thing that riles me today, of all things, as I ponder the real possibility that going mad may be my best option, is fucking Mike Pence.   Google “Pence on concealed carry law” and you will quickly learn that he is rated A by the NRA.  Just scroll down the first page of hits:  

He voted in favor of national concealed carry reciprocity, a policy that would … Pence further undermined Indiana’s already weak gun laws – which pose a dire … 

Authorizes a person who has a valid permit to carry a concealed firearm in one state and who is not prohibited from carrying a firearm under federal law to carry … 

Or, go no further than this one, the third:

NRA-ILA | Freedom Fighter Mike Pence

https://www.nraila.org/articles/20161026/freedom-fighter-mike-pence

Oct 26, 2016 – Pro-gun candidates don’t come any better than Mike Pence. … amendment that allowed law-abiding gun owners to carry concealed in national …

The NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, at the link above, approvingly quotes  Freedom Fighter Mike Pence (one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s…):

In stirring language, he said, “No state has the right to legislate away the blood-bought constitutional right of every law-abiding American to protect their person, their family and their liberty.” 

He noted further, “This decision is a victory for the Second Amendment, but as a 5-to-4 ruling among the justices, it also sends a warning. The Supreme Court is closely divided and at least four of its members would not extend a basic constitutional right to all 50 states. For that reason alone, the nomination and confirmation of any Supreme Court justice requires careful deliberation to ensure that the members of the high court will protect the rights handed down by our Founding Fathers.” 

With Hillary Clinton’s contention that “the Supreme Court is wrong on the Second Amendment” and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s stated intent to overturn Heller, Pence’s words of warning resonate even more today than the day he said them.

source

OK, we know that Mr. Pence, who while running for Congress in 2000 advocated diverting funds set aside for indigent HIV/AIDS patients to “programs for those seeking to change their sexual behavior,” is famous for being a slippery, deniable advocate of Gay Conversion Therapy [1].   This is a debunked, one might say medieval, method for turning sinful homosexuals into God-fearing straight people by an intervention that makes the homosexual see the evil of his or her sexual preference and become a normal heterosexual.   

Mr. Pence is an extremely religious Christian, we are told.   He believes that every abortion is an act of murder and signed a law as governor of Indiana making burial or cremation mandatory for every aborted fetus or embryo.[2]. 

Now, far be it from me to say that someone who believes things like these is fucking insane.   The degree of an individual’s religious fervor, even fanaticism is their own concern.  Arguably only our business if that religious person imposes those views in a lawmaking capacity.   But let’s get back to guns, a subject less fraught with emotionalism, superstition, faith and bigotry.

What is this concealed carry reciprocity?   It is a turning on its head of the old States’ Rights argument, the long time rallying cry of conservatives everywhere.  States’ Rights is a relic of the Civil War with roots that go back to the days of the Articles of Confederation when states kept control of virtually everything and were very zealous about what powers, if any, they’d cede to the federal government.  States should have the ultimate say on what goes on within its borders, most Americans seem to agree.  States today maintain control of most of their legal affairs, business, civil, criminal and family laws, etc. except where there is an overriding need for a superseding national law.   Nowadays most Americans recognize that in certain important matters, like, for example, the treatment of former slaves and later so-called Civil Rights matters (more properly called Human Rights, as many have said), citizen’s rights can only be protected by federal law and federal government enforcement.   Regulation of dangerous working conditions, pharmaceuticals, toxins in the environment have traditionally been the realm of the federal government.

Look, we know one shouldn’t look for any kind of consistency, or even logic, in political ‘ideology’, particularly now in the Post-Fact age we are expected to live in, but this National Rifle Association initiative, to expand the state right of concealed gun carrying (and these aren’t rifles they’re concealing, by the way) into every state in the US by ‘reciprocity’, is inconsistent beyond reason or even madness.   

Here’s the logic for overriding the will of states who want to limit guns that these otherwise States’ Rights advocates use:  State A, say Mississippi, passes a law that allows citizens to walk around with licensed guns concealed on their person.  Now I have a damned valid Mississippi license to carry, why should fucking Massachusetts have the right to prevent me from carrying my legally concealed legal gun when I go to Boston?  States rights have nothing to do with it!  It’s a matter of basic damned comity.  My Mississippi driver’s license allows me to legally drive in every state in the union, why do some states get to arbitrarily deny me my blood-bought constitutional right to carry my licensed concealed gun?

We already have plenty of gun-friendly legislation in various states, but this is not enough for those who truly believe the right to have and use guns is the “blood-bought constitutional right of every law-abiding American”.  Look no further than  ALEC’s  “Stand Your Ground” which is the law in roughly half of the United States. Written to give legal grounds for shooting someone you reasonably fear anywhere you may encounter them, all a peaceful citizen who doesn’t believe guns are the best way to solve the problems of fear and violence can think about it is “what the fuck?!!”   But there it is.  Under this law a citizen can jump out of a car, confront a black kid on the sidewalk, feel reasonable fear when the kid tells him to fuck himself, shoot the kid to death and be exonerated at trial under “Stand Your Ground.”  USA!  USA!!!  Tip of the cowboy hat to the Koch boys and other funders of ALEC, and to the legal eagles at ALEC who drafted the nifty bill/law.

Granted the NRA is a very powerful conservative lobbyist.  Granted the American love affair with the gun goes back to the earliest days of colonization, when the only cure for lawlessness was a brave man with a gun who was not afraid to shoot when decency and public order was at stake.  Or, say, in a field where sullen black slaves might seek to threaten and physically overtake the overseer.   That overseer, without an Equalizer, as the Colt .45 revolver was called, would be dead meat in any slave revolt.  One man with a gun that could fire six shots in a row was a match for any three muscular brutes with bad intentions.  Same goes for godless savages intent on thwarting America’s God-given Manifest Destiny.  You want to scalp our women and children?   We have gatling guns for you motherfuckers.

I am idly wondering about the beliefs of devout men like Mike Pence, one unhealthy heartbeat away from becoming the most powerful man in the world.   He is loved and supported by the Koch Brothers, the two billionaires most responsible for making their father’s lunatic fringe right wing vision a reality,  and he is loved by the National Rifle Association.   He is a devout Christian who seems untroubled by the fact that, on average, 33,880 Americans die every year by gun shot [3].  Jesus may weep, but Mike Pence is clear eyed about it. 

He is a Christian who would, first of all, dispute that number of annual American gun deaths as gun nut propaganda.  The actual number is indisputably way, way less than 33,880 [4].  Say we take the inflated Brady Campaign numbers, on the high side it’s more like 10,000 Americans a year outright murdered by people with guns.  It’s not fair, as the NRA consistently insists, to include the 21,037 gun suicides a year.  That wildly skews the numbers.   How is that fair?  If someone uses a gun to blow their own brains out, isn’t that the fault of the crazy person?  How do you blame the God-given right to own a gun for that?  So unfair!  SAD!  Skews the “facts” completely, inflates the numbers artificially.  Guns don’t kill people, especially when those people are only hurting themselves.   Partisans will point out that American suicide by gun is 800% the world average [4].   Exceptional, you have to admit, but nothing to do with the annual number of Americans killed by guns. 

So as you follow the news of the Mueller investigation, watch the noose tightening around many of Trump’s lawyered up inner circle, tingle at the seeming inevitability of our provocative, supremely unqualified president being designated, like Nixon, an “un-indicted co-conspirator,” remember that this white haired Christian soldier, Mr. Pence, is one heartbeat away from doing a Jerry Ford for all those best people unfairly targeted by relentless partisans.  And then going on to be chief executive according to his conscience, and the consciences of billionaires David Hamilton Koch and Charles de Ganahl Koch.

And, like I say, madness may actually be a not unreasonable way to go.  If you’ll excuse me, I have to try to expectorate more of this greyish white gunk.

[1]  quote:

Vice President-elect Mike Pence has also appeared to support conversion therapy. When he was running for Congress in 2000, Pence’s website declared that money set aside by the federal CARE Act, to help indigent HIV/AIDS patients, also be “directed toward those institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior.” (The Trump transition team has not responded for a request for comment.)

source

[2]  quote:

Indiana Governor Mike Pence signed House Enrolled Act 1337 into law on March 24, 2016, a hulking piece of “kitchen sink” legislation that the National Network of Abortion Funds called “one of the most vicious omnibus anti-abortion bills the United States has ever seen.” Among its 31 draconian provisions is a requirement that miscarried and aborted fetuses must be buried or cremated.

Mandating interment means that women accessing abortion would be forced to state in writing how they want the tissue disposed of. The fetus would then receive a burial-transit permit and be transferred to a funeral home, where a funeral director would oversee its final disposition. These absurd requirements load additional administrative and logistical burdens on clinics. Further, says Jennifer Dalven, director of the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, “these laws are certainly attempts to shame and stigmatize women who have decided to have abortions. Telling them that the embryonic tissue has to be cremated or buried signals that the state is treating the embryo or fetus as a person.”

source

 

[3]  On average every year in America

33,880 people die from gun violence

  • 11,564 murdered
  • 21,037 die from suicide
  • 544 killed unintentionally
  • 468 killed by legal intervention
  • 267 die but intent was unknown

source

[4] see, for example USA Today

“The Era of Strategic Patience is Over”

Watching Amy Goodman’s War and Peace Report just now, while feeling semi-shitty from this antineoplastic agent doing its thing in my cells, yesterday’s pronouncement by The Best President, in the context of threatening to annihilate North Korea: “The Era of Strategic Patience is Over” kind of captured it all for me. 

I should be thinking happier thoughts, it’s true, sipping hot tea while chatting with a friend, keeping my blood pressure in check, I know.  But I have cabin fever and can’t even go for my daily constitutional, as Sekhnet has me confined to quarters while my immune system is suppressed, at least until I am free of phlegm.  I wonder, idly, if I ever will be free of phlegm.  My chest sounded like a mischievously creaking pirate ship doing weird animal imitations last night, I never heard some of those sounds.

This bellicose, bragging windbag who is done with strategic patience is only the front man for the American fascist chickens coming home to roost, the triumph of the methodical Koch brothers fulfilling the fevered dreams of their rabid father, a founding member of the radical John Birch Society.   He, like the Koch boys, is the product of inherited wealth and entitlement who, unlike those born to the manor who possess grace and dignity, also lacks noblesse oblige, not to mention empathy and decency. 

A many times failed businessman who played an infallible captain of industry on a wildly popular scripted “Reality TV” show, he now has people saying former president Dubya was not as stupidly certain and misguidedly evil as everyone thought at the time.  Impressive achievement, actually, when you think of it like that.   George Dubya Bush, among other regrettable accomplishments, destroyed Iraq and Afghanistan and started the perpetual and borderless War on TERROR that we all take for granted today.  No small achievement, that.  Particularly for the munitions industry and those who buy and sell its wildly, historically profitable stock.

So, in Sutherland Springs, Texas yesterday, another maniac at the end of his personal era of strategic patience, took the initiative to kill a bunch of people who were inside a church.   This is the kind of the thing we must have infinite patience for as a free society, we are told, the slaughter of random children in churches and schools.  The reason is because when God inscribed those words in the Second Amendment they had nothing to do with state militias, or keeping slaves in check in places like South Carolina where slaves were in the majority and you needed a militia with guns to keep those motherfuckers from rising up against what they felt were unjust working conditions (and they did so a few times, mind you) — it preserved a sacred and deeply personal American right to have guns and kill any and everyone we fucking want to kill.   

No sense being mad about it, or even sad.  The gun itself didn’t kill anyone, it was the enraged mentally ill coward who used the gun improperly, who, by the way, had every legal right to buy, own and fire those guns, until someone else with a gun could kill him.   It’s true he was discharged from the Air Force for being a violent asshole, beating up his wife and kid while enlisted, and spent a year in prison for the assaults before his Bad Conduct discharge (the military’s failure to link his imprisonment for breaking his step-child’s skull to the civilian criminal database was why he wasn’t barred from purchasing the gun he used to slaughter twenty-six, apparently) but why should that be held against him for the rest of his life? 

If we didn’t get legislation to keep guns out of the hands of maniacs after that kid in Connecticut shot his own mother in the face a few times and headed over to the nearest elementary school to massacre kindergarten kids and their teachers — don’t hold your breath this time.   Any Republican who supports sensible restrictions on gun ownership will be primaried out of office by the National Rifle Association, and plenty of Democrats are vulnerable too.    On the other hand, is not the era of strategic patience at an end?   I know my era of strategic patience is getting close to the fucking end.  

The message is hammered home day after day.  If you are a billionaire you are part of a despised and worshipped minority entitled to all the political influence you can afford to buy.  The same goes for middle class people and the poor, buy all the damn political influence you want.   It’s like the old Anatole France gem:  

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.

True dat.  The president sends his prayers to the folks of tiny Sutherland Springs, Texas who lost their five year old little girl, their fourteen year-old, the dead pregnant woman, more than twenty others.   Back in reality, he sends his son-in-law, Jared, a younger, more self-contained version of himself, to personally thank the Saudis for buying all that top-shelf state of the art murder equipment from U.S. munitions makers, keeping Americans at work at what we do best– killing and advertising.  It’s not our business that the Saudis are using American weaponry against the poorest nation in their region, creating a medieval plague of starvation and cholera in Yemen in the name of preserving their vast royal wealth and extremist Wahabist version of medieval Islam.  Why hate on the Saudis just because they’re rich?   

I’ve got to pull my mind out of this, somehow.   I have to call Albany today, speak to Mr. Bockstein, find out how to get my letter to the Attorney General read by someone in his office who can describe it in ten words to the busy A.G.    I have to drink more tea, this cup of coffee I just had will only DE-hydrate me when I need to stay well hydrated to keep my phlegm loose and flowing.  There is a flow to all this. 

You hear great athletes and musicians sometimes describe this flow state.  In this state all their years of practice and learned excellence is able to flow directly, without thought or bidding.   They see the entire court at once, hear the whole of the music, with every space breathing free and looking like an entire universe.  Every pass they make in the flow state finds the hands of the person they throw it to, every note they play finds its mark, reverberating perfectly against everything else that is happening in that moment.   This also applies to every other field of human invention.  I understand the greatest scientific insights come during these states, as well as the greatest poetry.

This world we are living in right now is not designed, except for rare moments when we can pay to watch it at the highest professional level, to encourage real-time creative problem-solving, to have more people in a flow state.   It is a system of masters and slaves.  The masters are few, the slaves are the rest of us.  We who are not the masters sometimes dream of some way to smash our chains.  We wake full of hope some days, having dreamt of walking unencumbered by the heavy chains of a slave society.  It is easy to dismiss this hope.  It is essential not to.  If for no other reason than to say: fuck them.

 

No Reason to feel like a Chump, Chump

My bad, really, in not beginning that letter to the NYS Attorney General’s office with an unmissable disclaimer:  THIS IS NOT A BILLING COMPLAINT.

No wonder that a healthcare-related letter, complaining of the lack of any sort of government agency to resolve health insurance-related problems NYS patients have in New York State, would be dropped promptly on to the Healthcare billing dispute desk of the A.G.’s office.   My letter, foolishly, began:

Dear Mr. Attorney General:

I am appealing to you for assistance, on behalf of many thousands of New Yorkers caught in a sometimes life-threatening situation regarding their healthcare.  As described more fully below, citizens of our state have no government agency that intervenes in cases where patients are mistreated by the corporations we buy health insurance from.   This is true even in cases of apparent fraud.  

An idiotic idealism had me send it, for myself and on behalf of other people many Americans believe are lucky to have any health insurance at all– and who are in danger of losing the shit care they currently have.  I am not a campaign donor, or an Ivy League classmate of anyone close to the A.G., why would I expect my letter to reach such an important man?   If I was a wealthy, connected person, what would possess me to write such a letter in the first place?  Not being one, what did I fucking expect?   Perhaps anything but the mistaken response I received:

20171105_000124.jpg

But still.  And although the letter is non-responsive to anything in my letter, it is easily enough straightened out.  I could do it in couple of lines:

Dear Mr. Bockstein:

Thank you for your prompt reply to my long letter to the Attorney General, though it was clearly sent to me in error.   My correspondence did not involve a billing dispute (though one section contained examples of a couple), and I never heard of St. Joseph’s Physicians or Oneida Healthcare, let alone had a billing dispute with either of them.   Please transfer my letter, and the attachments, to the assistant for Mr. Schneiderman who reviews policy-related correspondence.  Or let me know to whom I should address a new copy, to avoid a similar fate to copy number two.

Thank you, and have a blessed day.

No need to point out the obvious irony to the overworked Mr. Bockstein — that his idiotic ‘response’ to my letter is yet another stunning example of the administrative cul du sac I described in my letter as so infuriating and soul crushing to aggrieved low income patients of New York who have no government agency protecting them from the predations of the health insurance companies they are mandated to purchase healthcare through.

Or that bureaucratic responses such as his are particularly dangerous to patients being treated for serious major organ disease and already suffering treatment-related extreme high blood pressure.   When your blood pressure is dangerously close to hypertensive crisis range, a letter like that, though polite, is the last fucking poison you need.  Although it is good for me to keep in mind that the preventable death of an American who is not at least middle class is, as the law styles it, a trifle, truly.  Nothing personal.

I rest my case, Mr. Bockstein.  I’d make an idle threat to rest it in a venomous letter to the editor of the Grey Skank, but we all know how silly that would be to threaten.  Theoretically, a tart letter to the editor quoting the AG’s response would momentarily embarrass your boss, who appears to be one of the few good guys, and who is tirelessly making a good name for himself with clear future ambitions.   On the other hand, a short description of the callous, or at best, inept, functioning of his progressive office would only serve to provide more ammunition to the powerful and well-funded forces of reaction bent on returning this country to its former greatness.

I am left idly threatening to unearth my Louisville slugger, Joe Pepitone model.  And fiercely pointing out that I can be up in Albany in the time it takes Mr. Bockstein to crank out a few dozen of these fine letters, man of peace and reason though I always aspire to be.  At the same time urging Mr. Bockstein, for purely legal reasons, not to construe this as any kind of physical threat– I mutter it mildly and abstractly, for expressive purposes only, through a haze of monoclonal antibody side effects.  Though, even in my asthenic state, I recognize that, truly, the many vexations of Americans with a low income, even the most theoretically easily preventable vexations, are strictly their own affair and attributable only to their poor choices in life.

You Can’t Make This Shit Up…

Which doesn’t mean, of course, it doesn’t make you want to smash the responsible parties in the face with a baseball bat, just once.   As a man who tries to practice Ahimsa, non-harm to fellow creatures, the feelings this can produce are complicated.

Many things are complicated, granted.  Our exceptional country, we can stipulate, has a sometimes spotty history for doing the right thing.  We know liberals are always banging on about the extermination of the native people, slavery, atomic bombs dropped on Japanese civilians after back-channel surrender talks were in the works, segregation,  a century of lynching, the “pre-emptive” invasion and destruction of Iraq, torture, drones, imprisonment of more than a million Americans for arbitrary crimes that harm nobody, a powerful, wealthy gun lobby that makes sure tens of thousands of Americans are free to kill tens of thousands of other Americans every year, blah blah blah– as if liberals never do anything wrong.   

Our world’s most expensive health care system, its expense inflated by fabulously paid private insurance middleman as much as by high tech medical interventions and Big Pharma, vital industries which are sometimes judgmentally called ‘predatory’, allows tens of thousands of Americans to die every year over money issues, even under Obamacare.   Oh, and intergenerational poverty and racism, and not paying women as much as men and not fixing that.  OK, we’re not perfect, but we’re always trying to form a more perfect union.   

Once in a while someone who thinks they’re smart tries, in the face of odds that say, overwhelmingly ‘shut the fuck up, anonymous, powerless asshole’, to write a cogent letter to someone in power who might be moved enough to address at least one systemic, institutional injustice.   I was one such person recently, and I exerted myself mightily over many months, to craft a letter that was readable and proposed solutions to the institutional problems it detailed.  I sent it to our activist, progressive,  not publicity-shy NYS Attorney General.   You can read the final version of my letter here, and the attachments to it here. 

To my relief, I got a prompt response, from the Attorney General’s Division of Social Justice, no less.  Here it is.  You truly can’t make this shit up.

20171105_000124.jpg

Of course, it would seem churlish of me to note that I’ve never heard of St. Joseph’s Physicians/Oneida Healthcare, nor, to my knowledge ever had a billing dispute with either one.   

Hopefully I can remain calm and relatively civil tomorrow when I call this steaming pile of distracted dung, Health Care Bureau Intake Specialist Alexander Bockstein, and inform him that my letter reached his desk in error, as his did mine.   I will need to strike just the right tone to get my letter into the hands of someone who will thank me for it in a manner a bit more on point, indicating they may even have read a paragraph or two of it.  You know what I’m saying?

Nazi-style mass rally in NYC, February 20, 1939

“Well, you recall I told you about this rally at the old Madison Square Garden, the German American Bund mounting a mass rally, those documenting it taking a page from Leni Riefenstahl, the cinematically talented Mitläufer,” said the skeleton of my father.   “I was fourteen at the time, and it felt horrific enough to me to read about, but, you also have to consider the rest of my life at the time.  It was just another sharp lash of the whip, among an ongoing flurry of lashes.”  The skeleton looked out to the line of trees in the distance.   

“You know, if we could have talked for another 60 or 70 hours or so that last night of my life, I would have answered all your questions about this pro-Nazi rally in New York City right before the war, about the first attempt and rescheduled Paul Robeson/Pete Seeger anti-fascist concert in Peekskill after the war, violently attacked by the Ku Klux Klan and their merry fucking ilk, rocks through car windows on this road behind me, the one that runs past this boneyard,” the skeleton sighed, pointing over his shoulder.  “We just ran out of time, Elie.”   

I remember you mentioning this Bund rally at the Garden, but it’s one of those flickering black and white moments in long ago history…

“Well, not so long ago, it happened within the living memory of your father.  You discovered many things trying to reimagine my life, things that shocked you.  No child labor laws in the United States when I was a child, how about that one?   If the economy had been better, I could have spent my early years as a fucking chimney sweep, or whatever the equivalent in 1930 Peekskill would have been.  I’m glad you carried on my interest in history, Elie.  It’s some fascinating shit, even if the bullshit way the story is often told removes a lot of the mystery and excitement from it, makes it a tool of the status quo instead of an instrument to readjust it.”

Those Confederate monuments, for example, were mostly erected decades after the Civil War, in the early twentieth century, when the genteel society of the South was recasting history in a more forgiving, glorious light that blamed the damned freedmen for their savage inability to act like humans, depicted Reconstruction as an atrocity,  and recast the violent defenders of the philosophy of the Peculiar Institution as glorious idealists.   The Dunning School of history justified segregation, on racial grounds, while vilifying the federal government’s attempt to reconstruct the former Confederacy.   

“That cocksucker William Archibald Dunning cast a long shadow, having the imprimatur of my prestigious alma mater, a few of his disciples were still in the history department at Columbia when I was there, making their nuanced, intellectual arguments that blacks, being like children, were fit only for the protection of the states that knew them best.   One of them wrote that Yankees at the time of the Civil War and afterwards could never truly understand the Negro, uh, ‘nigger’ actually, having been given a false impression of their capacities by ‘Fred Douglass’.”   

Motherfuckers.   People don’t know anything about the devilish details of history writing, who its ideology serves, behind that smug impression of seeming objectivity, who it fucks. 

“True dat,” said the skeleton.

But let’s stick to other Nazis for the moment, dad.  A friend sent me a link today to a short, chilling movie someone put together from found footage of the February 1939 German Bund Rally.  It was posted the other day by The Intercept.

“Do tell,” said the skeleton, turning to fix me with a hollow eyed look. 

The Intercept published a thoughtful article featuring a short film of the Bund rally.   The piece is called ‘A Night at the Garden’ is the Most Terrifying Movie You Can Watch This Halloween.   The article is excellent and the six minute movie, in which the footage is allowed to speak for itself, is indeed fucking terrifying. 

“I see, fascinating shit,” said the skeleton, watching the clip and then speed reading, as was his practice when he was alive.   “It’s worth mentioning, since you’re so terrified, that there were five times more protesters than American Nazis out that night.   There were 100,000 on the streets around the Garden, protesting their rally, and that the police were on the side of the protesters, and that this was also the high water mark of the German American Bund’s pro-Hitler rally business.”

“On the other hand, I notice Jon Schwarz points out how this rush to organized hatred can happen to masses of desperate humans in a society that ‘rolls snake eyes ten times in a row.’   He generously estimates that we’ve, or rather, you’ve, only rolled snake eyes now four times in a row, gives you good odds for avoiding the worst.   I don’t see much reason for optimism.   This lying, cringingly insecure snake-oil salesman you have there now, while he’s just a clownish figure-head prone to talking and tweeting directly out of his ass, is doing the bidding of the same larger, implacable forces that brought you every mass tragedy in history.”   

Couldn’t have said it better myself, dad. 

“Ha ha,” said the skeleton, “I’m glad you’re feeling game enough to still joke about this, Bozo.   On the other hand, comedic detachment may be the only escape valve you poor fuckers have at the moment.”    The skeleton removed his left hand and playfully whacked himself in the face with it, deadpan all the while. 

Jesus, dad, that’s disgusting. 

“Aw, don’t be such a sourpuss!” said the skeleton.  “Look, Mueller is starting to close in on some of these motherfuckers.  Look on the bright side, Elie.  Maybe President Orange will not get the chance to pack the Supreme Court with any more extreme right wing zealots.  Of course, they have to get the Koch Brothers’ boy Mike “make the homos normal” Pence out of there too, and hold a new election, and nullify fifty year-old Neal Gorsuch’s confirmation as a Supreme Court justice for life and all the rest, on the grounds that the president who nominated him was, truly, illegitimate, particularly if he has to pardon himself for conspiracy to commit treason, but it’s a start.”   

I just looked at him. 

“Yeah, I know,” said the skeleton, using the detached left hand now to smack himself up side the head.