Category Archives: History and Politics

Connect the Dots (law school digression notwithstanding)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                                                  ii

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

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

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

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

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

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

Point taken.  But here are some dots to connect:  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Connect the dots.  What have we become?

It Makes Perfect Sense

On the day after marchers clogged downtown NYC to protest America’s lack of a real response to catastrophic man made climate change I take a moment to set down, in my aggravatingly simplistic Devil’s advocate way, why the status quo makes perfect sense.  In the process you will no doubt see the folly of protesters who lack the economic clout trying to get serious attention from a government run by the private dollars, speaking loudly and freely, of those who do.

Let’s look at this from the point of view of the industry that produces and sells the amazingly lucrative products that result in the pumping of carbon into the atmosphere.   It may be true that carbon emitted by millions of cars, trucks, trains and airplanes increases the greenhouse gases that are warming the earth and already creating great climate disturbance.  May well be true, though those great climate disturbances may also just be part of a natural cycle or the wrath of a vengeful God.   It may also be true that an industry based on extracting an ever decreasing natural resource from deep inside the earth is a bad long-term business model.  Let’s also admit that could probably be the case, eventually, though you must also admit you don’t have a viable alternative plan at the moment.

Now look at it from an economic point of view in the here and now, from the perspective of the Oil and Gas Industry and those whose vast fortunes are based on its ongoing prosperity.   The internal combustion engine, powered by fossil fuel, made most of human progress in the last hundred years, a time of unprecedented human progress, possible.  We transport things from coast to coast, around the globe, fly airplanes everywhere, commute long distances to jobs, travel in gas powered vehicles to beautiful places for holidays.   Our economy depends on this wonderful engine, which is powered by the transformed and processed remains of dinosaurs.  Industries related to automobile and other gasoline powered transportation employ literally tens of millions.  

Let’s take a quick look at the bottom line and we’ll evaluate who is the foolish party in this debate over whether man is really destroying his home by allowing carbon to flow freely from smokestacks and exhaust pipes.    From the dawn of the automobile the oil business has been a gold mine.   Billions and billions in profit are made every year from the production and sale of this liquid gold.  As the supply gets smaller and smaller, and demand rises, the price only goes up.   The immutable law of economics.  Talk about a business model!   If you were an executive in an oil company, or an investor, rich beyond your millionaire father’s wildest dreams, with a product whose supply is ever diminishing and whose price has tripled in the last decade, would it not behoove you to spend however many millions it took to convince people that those who march in protest of the unfettered use of this miraculous product are misguided idiots, at best?

They hate our freedom, you will say, and it will certainly be true that they hate yours.   They gullibly and blindly believe the vast majority of scientists who have studied the climate and are constantly issuing alarming findings about ice caps melting, sea levels rising, droughts, floods, murderous super storms, raging wild fires.  What do you call someone who is alarmed by supposedly alarming news?   That’s right, an Alarmist.   These are Climate Alarmists, freedom haters.   If you had to use one word it might be Communists.   You see, if they had their way, free enterprise would be ended and we’d all be back to using horse drawn carts.  It is far wiser to be skeptical when so much is at stake.  After all, we have scientists too who will tell you this is all ideologically driven liberal alarmism.   They will say, with no equivocation, that carbon produced by human activity has nothing to do with the natural cycles of climate or the wrath of God.  And the wrath of God will surely be upon those who hate freedom.

If a kid has a genius idea for a website he sells for a billion dollars, the pressing question on the minds of the business community is– how will he make even more money for his invention?  How will he keep it relevant, monetize it more efficiently, keep it moving forward, dynamic, maximize its profitability?   A billion dollars may look good on a balance sheet, or in a headline, but what is this bright 27 year-old’s next move?  The pressure is on the young man now, you see. The engine of our economy does not rest on making a fortune and living a life of good works, doing what you love, living on your fortune.  The engine of our economy does not rest– it drives ever forward, onward, upward.  And the engine it drives is powered by gasoline– and never being satisfied to have merely enough.

Horrible Wiki with a Happy Ending, kind of

African-American resistance to lynching carried substantial risks. In 1921, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a group of African-American citizens attempted to stop a lynch mob from taking 19-year-old assault suspect Dick Rowland out of jail. In a scuffle between a white man and an armed African-American veteran, the white man was killed.

Whites retaliated by rioting, during which they burned 1,256 homes and as many as 200 businesses in the segregated Greenwood district, destroying what had been a thriving area.

Confirmed dead were 39 people: 26 African Americans and 13 whites. Recent investigations suggest the number of African-American deaths may have been much higher.

Rowland was saved, however, and was later exonerated.

Trying to Negotiate an Old Friendship in A Partisan Nightmare

I have known this woman since childhood, when she worked with, loved and, later, was psychologically pummeled by, my father, who sometimes couldn’t help delivering an onslaught of blows to someone who loved him.   Back then she was a member of MENSA, a folk-singer who hated war and intolerance, and an outspoken leftist who worked hard at a difficult and idealistic job in the newly integrated NYC high schools.   When she moved out of NY, some time after the disillusioning ugliness with my father, I lost track of her.   Fond memories led me to look her up on the internet some time before my father passed away.  As I recall they had an amiable chat about old times a few months before his sudden death.
 
It is a few years before he died, the wreck of the smoldering World Trade Center is still emitting its foul, toxic smell.  I get an email from her describing the recent political revelation she’s had.   The world is dangerous, we are surrounded by deadly Islamic enemies intent on slitting our throats, and destroying Israel.   She has moved from her former political stance and embraced the politics of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.  They are friends of Israel and not afraid to do what is necessary to combat enemies from hell.
Though she considers herself politically independent, most of her views align with the right wing in American politics.  She supported the invasion of Iraq, supports torture, would defend Sarah Palin’s unfairily maligned statements, is critical of the Liberal Media and disgusted by liberal guilt.  She asks, since all of her former liberal friends have cut her off, if we can have a reasoned discussion of politics.  She tells me she’d greatly appreciate it.  
It turned out we could not have a reasoned discussion of politics.  The aggravation of trying to have one led me to cut off communications with her finally.   Years later we resumed emailing and agreed to leave politics out of our correspondence.   It has been a 99% excellent correspondence since.
 
In the name of seeking common ground, she once in a while sends me a political piece she thinks I might agree with.  Most of these pieces originate from passionate people who do not attempt to give a nuanced view of what they are describing.   Although I delete many, I find myself beginning to reply to some of the more incendiary ones.  The substance of most of my critiques is about the emotional nature of the emails, the citing of convenient facts and the omission of any that might weaken the emotional punch.   I write and don’t send these, there are a few in my drafts folder.  
 
It’s pointless to send them, since it has been her practice to respond not to the substance of my reply, but to the righteousness or veiled anger in it and it’s pointless, and poisonous, to get back into the emotional cul de sac of partisan back and forth.  I do not believe a police choke hold that results in the death of an unarmed citizen is ever an appropriate action to take in response to a non-violent crime.  Though she would probably agree with that statement, she would probably also see some nuance there.
 
She sent one recently with a photo captioned “this is what a broken orbital bone looks like” and it was horrendous.  The side of the guy’s face was bashed in and all around his smashed eye socket it was a hideous purple, the color of a flayed cow’s torso.  The photo illustrated an email slamming the notorious Liberal Media for repressing this photo of the officer who shot the threatening black thug in Ferguson, MO. in self-defense warding off a vicious and deadly attack.   I wrote back pointing out that the caption of the photo hadn’t claimed it was a picture of the officer who shot the kid, and that it was surprising the right wing media wasn’t showing this photo everywhere.   I suggested it might be a hoax and, after a few moments on google, sent her a post identifying the subject of the photo as a race car driver after a 2006 accident.   She wrote back aghast, but still didn’t appear totally convinced, that photo or not, the kid hadn’t bashed in the cop’s face or done something else violent that justified the officer shooting him to death.
 
Since I greatly value this woman’s insights in all other regards, but can’t stand any more right wing emails, I asked her again, with a long explanation, not to send me any more political email.  I wrote the following to her.   She wrote back that she promised not send any more and underlined everything in my email that she agreed with, just to show how much we can still actually agree about even contentious things.  Naturally, I found the things she didn’t underline very interesting.   
 
I wrote:
 
I want to err on the side of not having to engage any of this ‘political’ stuff.  I’d rather not have to parse or vet any of it because so much of it just upsets me.  I have enough in my life at the moment to vex me without fear of opening an email from you containing something upsetting.
 
The deeper horror, to me, someone gravely injured by a childhood lack of response and honest engagement, is that most of this stuff is just a way people express their anger and doesn’t lend itself to productive conversation of any kind.  Any comments I make are met with complete silence most of the time, like in the recent case with the hoax article.
 
It surprises me every time I get something from you, an otherwise thoughtful, sensitive and insightful person,  that is clearly a reflexive jerk of the right wing knee– like the recent one claiming the black kid who was killed by the cop in Ferguson, MO. bashed the cop’s head in and deserved to die, in spite of the easily discoverable truth or falsity of the incendiary– and false–  assertion.   
 
We live in a violent, polarized society that is going the way of all empires, it seems, one ready example: militarized police forces in riot gear and tanks use tear gas against American protesters that would be a war crime if used on a battle field in war.   Our country is as divided, hypocritical and poised to kill each other as at any time since the Civil War (what was so civil about it, I wonder).
 
In the midst of our fear, rage and powerless we focus on what we believe to be the source of our problems.  To the right it is the entitled “takers” those race baiters who wear their victimhood aggressively and demand “reparations” who pay nothing and demand everything.   To the left it is the moral descendants of the slave holders, extremely rich and powerful people manipulating everybody else to increase their already extreme advantage:  no teacher contracts beyond one year, “right to work” no unions, fight “minimum wage” increases, no abortions for any reason, cut food stamps and other safety net programs that keep millions of children and seniors from hunger and starvation, stop funding the EPA, unlimited guns for the free and privatized prisons for the bad guys, alcohol yes, marijuana no, stop hating our freedom and engaging in class warfare, your envy is sickening. 
 
There is truth in both of these views, though you and I weigh the relative truth on very different scales.  No more, OK?
 
Make love, not war, as you Californians say.  Do you understand what I’m saying?

 

Peace, out.


Ixnay on Ein-May Ampf-Kay

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

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

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

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

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

“Shut up,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I digress.

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

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

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

Standing on the edge of the ditch

In a sense, my father, who once cried about the murders of our family but always denied its relevance to our lives, was right.   I never stood, nor did anyone I ever knew, on the edge of a ditch waiting for a murderer’s bullet.  Not when I was an eight year-old with a terrifying imagination and first learned of it did I actually stand on the edge of a ditch with the rest of the family waiting for the order to lie down and be shot.   Much less fifty years later when I am that much closer to my own natural end, after standing beside the open graves of loved ones many times now.  

To be truthful, these things happened thirteen years before I was even born.  I’ve never been machine gunned, or shot with even a small caliber gun, never been tied up with ropes or even been hungry for more than a few hours.  For crying out loud, I’ve never even been whipped in the face or beaten bloody.  My father took the manly stance that his dramatic young son was just sniveling, looking for pity in the echoes of the murder of our family back in some far away Ukrainian hellhole more than twenty years earlier.   Some of us never get over anything, it would seem.    

If I’d been a Black kid it would have been the fucking slave ships I’d have been whining about, the millions crowded below decks in airless holds, chained, driven insane, thrown to sharks if they grew too indignant.   Then I’d have been worked up about the hundreds of years when I could have been sold, whipped, sodomized like any flesh robot you could own.  It wouldn’t have soothed me to hear that life here for the former slaves was better after the Civil War, or that not millions, only thousands, of former slaves were ever beaten, raped or killed for being indignant.  And probably less than ten thousand, total, who were ever burned to death or hung from trees while crowds laughed and whooped and had picnics, sold body parts and photos as souvenirs.

My father would have said “for Christ’s sake, son, they put those Klansmen on trial in Mississippi for what they done to those boys down in Meriden.  The country is changing, for the better, it has changed a lot in your lifetime.”  It would have been peevish to tell him only one of the murderers of those Civil Rights workers would ever see the inside of a jail cell.  Or that sixty years after the Supreme Court ordered an end to segregation, schools would be as segregated as at the height of Jim Crow.  Hindsight, you know what they say about it.

“Is this really what you are thinking about at 4:36 a.m.?” asks a concerned voice.

“No, not at all.  I was thinking about this hours ago, but couldn’t shut off that great documentary about how they did the animated life of Graham Chapman I’d seen earlier…”

“Drawing again, I heard the scratching of your pens….”

“Yes, Sekhnet wandered in like a zombie, saw the animation on TV, looked at the drawings on the couch and said ‘Oh, God, he’s generating more papers…'”

“You can see her point.”

“Yes, I can certainly see her point.  These twenty thousand fucking drawings are a plague.  I do myself no favor drawing them.  But listen, do you mind if I get back to what I was thinking about?”

“Who are you asking?”

“Good point,” I say.

It was an accident of birth, and dumb good timing, to be born in a place and era when I was not forced to lie face down on top of dead bodies and wait for a bullet to end my life, as all of my grandparents’ families were.   Pure luck not to be living in a 2014 slum without sewers or any kind of toilets, where babies die by the truckloads from ragingly contagious excrement borne diseases that basic sanitation prevents.  Good fortune not be born in a place where children are dragged from their homes and forced to kill, or are ‘collateral damage’ statistics in drone attacks, or fated to live in neighborhoods where human predators attack, or if the criminals don’t get you the cops will.  A blessed accident of birth to be born wearing this face instead of one that invites real kicks and blows.   The kicks and blows I receive are gentle indeed compared to real ones.

“No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep.” [1]  The pains we are given to deal with are painful enough for each of us, unbearable sometimes, though they’re not as painful as many more terrible things countless people are enduring at this very moment.  It doesn’t give us perspective, sadly, not to be standing on the edge of a ditch waiting for the order to fall in and be executed.  In a sense we are all standing on the edge of a ditch in a world where ditches for mass graves are dug all the time.

“Take this shovel, dig a hole deep as you want to be buried and stop crying and farting about it,” is about the worst thing any of us can hear.  In that childhood nightmare where Nazis in storm trooper uniforms were slicing through the screen of the back porch of our house to get at us I remember thinking “a lot of good those screens did” a second before I woke up with my heart pounding in terror.

That no idea, no matter how good or well-presented, can be sold in the marketplace of ideas without properly calculated marketing?  A female mosquito landing on your shoulder for a drink.  That unscripted candor has no place in a salesman’s pitch?  Please.  That’s as self-evident as the fact that all men are created equal and endowed by our creator with inalienable rights that may vary, according to circumstance, history and financial situation.    The world is just the world, although it is not always easy to keep perspective when the world is chanting something loudly and continuously enough to drown out all other thought.  

They were apparently banging drums and making a racket on the hill by the ravine to the north of Vishnevets those days in August 1943, to mask the cries and other sounds of the massacre.  The noise of the drums and lusty screaming, as you can imagine, was a fearful sound to the remaining ragged, starving citizens of Vishnevets, waiting their turn at the lip of the ravine.  

The world of competitive commerce and war constantly and insistently beats the drums, to drown out the silence that might lead to forgetting about the drumbeat of commerce and war and allowing people to recall matters of a deeper nature, to gain a more humane perspective.  

It’s possible, I suppose, that these two lusty drummings are only comparable in the mind of a madman.   Then again, many things in our world are the work of madmen.

 

 

[1] Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Flick My Bic

Back when cigarette smoking was much more prevalent, still cool and not as sneered upon by society, there was a commercial often shown in movie theaters, oddly enough.  Before the movie started you’d have a jolly ad designed to drive you to the concession stand to buy fantastically expensive drinks, popcorn and candy.

Then, in a quick companion commercial, two Bic lighters would walk stiffly up to each other on the giant screen, poised like two rectangular plastic erections.  As each spoke the top of their metallic head would burst into flame.   The ad’s tagline was a jaunty “flick my Bic!”, and the distinct cadence of “suck my dick!” was not lost on any of the fifth grade boys in the audience.

I think not of the geniuses who came up with that memorable ad campaign but of the French genius capitalist who first realized you don’t need to make fine products that people will own with pride and take care of.   His breakthrough, which led to a vast fortune, was understanding that you could make a lot more money selling cheap disposable plastic pieces of shit to people increasingly addicted to convenience.  

Bic pens, a revolutionary skipping ballpoint refill in a clear plastic tube, were crap, sold by the billions, used briefly and simply tossed into landfill — no problem.  Bic later made disposable razors, sold a billion of them in no time.   Ditto the Bic you could flick, hold up flaming at the end of the concert to ask for an encore — when its fuel was done, toss it into the gutter.  You could flick all the Bics, actually.   Soon every capitalist in competition with Bic was making disposable products out of the cheapest plastic they could find — the race was on.    Sixty years later it’s hard to buy a pen, or anything else, that’s not disposable.

The philosophy was incredibly simple, liberating and lucrative.  Use the disposable piece of crap a few times and don’t worry about it — no need to refill or reuse it — just toss it in the garbage when it’s done and take the next brand new one from the pack.   Life is too short to be sentimental or worry about a future featuring millions of tons of indestructible plastic in landfills and oceans, or the loss of a sense of design, craft or pride in one’s product!

I would like to go back in a time machine to meet this genius, Marcel Bich, in much the same way, when I was ten, I used to fantasize about meeting Hitler.   Not to shake his hand, you understand.

The old Brooklyn baseball fan’s dilemma:  you are in an elevator with Stalin, Hitler and Walter O’Malley, the guy who moved the Dodgers from Ebbets Field in Brooklyn to LA.  You have a gun with only two bullets, what do you do?

Answer:  shoot O’Malley twice, make sure he’s dead.

Unfair joke, really, since it turns out O’Malley did everything possible to keep the team in Brooklyn — he got screwed by Robert Moses, an evil bastard who probably deserves to be in that elevator more than O’Malley does —  and finally took the team to greener pastures in Los Angeles rather than give in to Moses and relocate to Queens.

But I digress, and although it’s probably just as unfair to blame Marcel Bich for the devastation his billion dollar idea led to, I can only say:

Fleek my Beek, Baron Bich.

 

from Wolfgang Saxon’s 1994 NY Times obit:

Baron Marcel Bich, whose inexpensive Bic disposable pens, lighters and razors made him wealthy enough to sustain an 11-year quest for the America’s Cup, died on Monday in Paris. He was 79 and lived in suburban Neuilly-sur-Seine.

After fixing up a leaky shed in Clichy, a northern Paris suburb, after World War II, Baron Bich and a partner, Edouard Buffard, began turning out inexpensive penholders and pencil cases. Later he obtained the patent rights to a ball-point pen invented by a Hungarian, Ladislas Biro, and formed Societe Bic in 1953. (The baron’s name and the pen’s are pronounced beek in French.)

The inexpensive pens proved irresistible to consumers, beginning with the French. The corporation rapidly expanded, with factories in many countries turning out billions of pens sold singly or by the carton. Later he produced disposable razors and lighters. Annual Sales of $1.1 Billion

 

 

 

 

Uncanny Echoes of Babel

The following are from survivor accounts in the Vishnevets Yiskor book. They sound uncannily like the characters and narrators in Isaac Babel’s wonderful, terrible tales (in the incomparable Walter Morrison translation). Many of the worst, and the best, of these finely compressed little stories are set in benighted, bloody little towns like Vishnevets.   

My grandmother fondly recalled the Red Army men who were billeted at her family’s home in Vishnevets.  I think she said they were Cossacks, who were generally White and not Red, and rarely friends of the Jews. Babel’s Cossacks fought for the Revolution, and eventually came to tolerate the Jewish Babel, though occasionally raping or killing Jews here and there.

This doomed pregnant woman’s plea is right out of Babel, who may well have been in Vishnevets with the Red Cavalry at some point during the Revolution.  
 
“Vasye,” she said. “Look, Vasinke, look at my condition. I’ve never harmed you. Have mercy on me and my baby, have mercy, Vasinke.”  
 
(Vasye did not have mercy)
 
And this grimly poetic narration, right out of Babel, by a nameless survivor: 
 
One day I stood by the window looking through a crack and saw a young man around the age of 17 returning from work. He left the group, approached the fence, and threw a package over into the ghetto.

A Ukrainian saw it and grabbed the youth – the boy. And the boy didn’t realize that he had seen him. I knew the Ukrainian; he was a reptile but not one of the worst. I called him.

He came to me, and I said to him, “Vaske, what are your intentions?”

And he said to me, “He’s done something that deserves punishment by death.”

I asked him to give him a fine. Punish him with money and let him go, strongly warn him, and in this way, he would satisfy his “conscience” as keeper of the law. But he held on his own and explained to me in a beautiful way:

 “You have to understand, he doesn’t have any money. If I punish him with a fine, he’ll have difficulty paying it. Why should I enforce something that will make his life more difficult and cause him trouble with the Germans? It’s better for me to kill him. It’ll be a lot better for him.”

   
 

My father’s take

As a boy, when I first learned of the Nazi period, and saw black and white filmed documentation of the worst of their handiwork, I vomited.  An appropriate response for a nine year-old that seems as appropriate now, almost fifty years later.  Some nightmares followed and then, the reality that Nazis come to power from time to time and lead mobs to do unspeakable things, and that many enraged sociopathic types scattered through daily life are glad to do their personal versions of these things with whatever power they can amass, became the background of my life. The continuing news from all over the world, Rwanda, Sudan, Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, Cambodia, El Salvador, East Timor, Syria and too many other places to list, keeps the reality alive and sickeningly well.

Hitler is supposed to have reassured his colleagues, some time before the meeting in that villa in swanky Berlin suburb Wannsee where the Nazi brain-trust secretly worked out the best way to go about the “Final Solution” — a plan that sounded like a possible public relations nightmare to some of them — “Don’t worry, gentlemen.   After all, who today remembers the slaughter of the Armenians?”   An excellent question, Mr. Hitler.  What about them?   He was speaking twenty-five years after the massacre of an estimated million Armenian souls, by the Ottoman Turks.  

It is now a hundred years later and the story of the genocide against the Armenians (the word ‘genocide’ was coined, in 1943, to describe what was done to the Armenians) comes as a surprise to most people who hear of it.   I myself knew very little about it, beyond the death marches, mass starvation, concentration camps and the fact that German officers witnessed, sometimes in horror, the brutal deportations carried out by their allies, the Turks, during World War One.  Then ambassador to Constantinople Henry Morgenthau wrote of the sickening slaughter, and how it was smiled on by Ottoman officials, in terrible detail.   The ongoing massacre was apparently regularly written about in the NY Times and widely deplored.  But the world was too busy strafing and gassing each other, and cheering the carnage or dying of typhus, to notice as trainloads of Armenians, packed in cattle cars, were taken to concentration camps where they could be gathered to die more efficiently.  

Today genocide is so common we use the shorthand “Ethnic Cleansing”, a phrase almost as innocuous sounding as “collateral damage”, the shorthand for that unfortunate externality of war, the murder of non-combatants like babies, five year-olds and senior citizens.  In recent years revisionist “scholars” have been claiming the Nazis didn’t really kill people in death camps and surely one day there will be those who deny these other sickening atrocities ever really happened.  Like the state-sanctioned mass killing of the Armenians, though it clearly happened, it’s very controversial now, to some.   Tutsis mass murdered by Hutus? What?

I saw my father cry twice.  Once was at the seder table where he was overcome while dedicating a cup of wine to those slaughtered by the Nazis.  His face turned almost purple as he struggled not to cry, and he wept suddenly and violently before quickly pulling himself together.  My little sister and I watched helplessly as this etched itself indelibly in both our souls. 

“Those people were abstractions, for Christ’s sake, you can’t claim that we were personally effected by Hitler, we never knew any of those people, their letters just stopped coming one day, that’s all, it didn’t effect our family,” my father insisted dismissively (and ridiculously) years later when I brought up the murder of our entire extended family, on both sides.  He had been a twenty-one year-old Jewish kid stationed in Germany immediately after the war, a war that had wiped out his mother’s entire town and his father’s as well.  Of his feelings about being there he said little, though my sister can also tell you the name of the little dog they adopted on the air base, Schickelgruber, and what happened to the poor mutt when it got under the moving wheels of some heavy vehicle, maybe a plane.

I have always been given to brooding, and thinking too much, it must be admitted.  “Think less– do more!” is a mantra I would do well to get in my heart, like today when I am writing this instead of researching and writing things much more practical and badly needed.  Still, reading yesterday, for the first time, what actually happened to my grandmother’s large family, and my grandfather’s, and seeing the names of family members in survivor accounts, chills me too much and I cannot do otherwise. 

Marched to a prepared ravine on the northern end of town, after two years of random killing and death by starvation, ordered to undress (but for some reason to leave their underwear on) and lie face down, they were shot and covered with dirt by local haters who were paid in the clothing of the murdered to make a devilish layer cake of fresh corpses and earth.  Then another terrified group was ordered to undress, lie on top of the previous thinly covered layer of dead bodies, be shot, another layer of dirt, more bodies, repeat as necessary until, by the time I was born, all that would be left of the local Jews was a canyon full of loose bones on the outskirts of Vishnevets.  Among them the scattered bones of every member of Sam and Yetta’s families who were still alive in August of 1943.

Abstractions.

Map of My Grandparents’ little town

Vishnevets

It may be too small to see here, and the half image is oddly distorted and cropped (click on it to see entire map), but on the key provided with this hand-drawn map of Vishnevets you can see, along with the post office, synagogue, cemetery and hekdesh (poor house) a large blot on the northern end, top left center of map, marked in Hebrew “brothers’ graves”, where the victims of the most recent slaughter in that town were buried together in a pit. The English words printed on the map there, “mass graves”, need no translation.  The mass grave was necessitated by “Nazi brutality and cruelty”, (enthusiastically carried out by local Ukrainians), in (August) 1943, according to the monument at Mt. Hebron cemetery in Queens, NY, erected by the Wishnevitz Brothers Benevolent Society and the Wishnevitz Ladies Auxiliary. 

Other information about the unlucky town is summarized in this on-line excerpt from the book of memory:

In 1500 the town was destroyed by Ivan the Terrible. In 1653 the Jews were killed by the Tartars. By 1765 there were 475 Jews in the Old City and 163 in the suburbs. In 1847 there were 3,000 in Wishnowitz.

I could not stop myself from reading the gut-wrenching survivor accounts, determined to get a clear picture of exactly how my grandparents’ families were murdered.  It chilled me to read their names mentioned in one survivor account:

March 16, 1943

On that date, which was a Tuesday, the order was given to set up a ghetto. The buildings to be included in the ghetto were marked. According to the order, the ghetto had to be constructed in three days. The Jews were assigned to build the ghetto with their own hands and with materials they had to supply.

To make sure the order would be carried out in full, two hostages were taken: Yakov Markhbeyn and the writer of these lines. Any diversion from the details of the order would jeopardize their lives.

The ghetto encircled a narrow part of the town and the length of one long street. It extended from Alter Layter’s house to Beni Mazur’s house and from the road leading to Lanovits to the entrance to the Old City.

The gruesome details of the massacre, which I learned for the first time a moment ago here:

At night we could talk, and we asked the two young men from Vyshgorodok to tell us what had happened. And the two young men from Vyshgorodok told me what they had seen with their own eyes-how Vishnevets Jewry had been destroyed-and here is their story.

All the people were brought to a ravine behind the Old City on the road leading to Zbarazh. The ravine served as a readymade grave, with a capacity that met the Nazis’ needs. The ravine had been prepared by Ukrainian farmers. They stood with their tools, clearing the surface of the ravine. They leveled it, removed small mounds, scraped the stones from the sides, and dug the walls. They covered the bottom with the stones and soil they had removed from the walls in order to create a kind of crushed-soil foundation for the victims.

Once the foundation had been prepared, the first group of Jews was led to their burial place.

Two policemen ordered them to take their clothes off and remain in their underwear. They undressed, piled up their clothes on the side, and were then ordered to lie down in a row in the ravine, face down.

When they were all lying face down, the policemen ran over them with their submachine guns in their hands, shooting bullets into the heads of the people who were lying down.

Afterward, they inspected. They walked from person to person and with a handgun killed those who didn’t die immediately, using the gun butt or a bullet shot into the center of the skull.

When they were done with one group, they brought the second, and so on.

The Ukrainians walked over the bodies inside the ravine with horrifying skill. They lifted the bodies that were not level and laid them straight. The Germans sat on the walls of the ravine and supervised the work. They gave the orders, and the Ukrainians executed them.

The farmers took over after the Ukrainian policemen were done inspecting and leveling the layer after the last round of shooting. They covered the layer of bodies with soil in order to place another layer on top. They used shovels to do this. They covered it with a thin layer of soil, and the area was ready for another row of bodies. The clothes piled up on the side were given as a gift to the farmers in exchange for their work. Immediately, they collected the victims’ clothes and loaded them onto their carts, and while the others were busy with their work of killing and taking care of the bodies, they set off to sell their booty.

That was what the two young men from Vyshgorodok told me, and it is the utmost truth, because while they told us their story, they were very detailed and corrected each other so as not to distort what their eyes had seen.

========

It was with another shuddering thought of ruthless fate that I recalled that Beni Mazur’s house was likely the same place where my grandfather Sam grew up, and narrowly escaped death by typhus during the epidemic after World War One.  If my grandfather had not escaped death from typhus (which killed at least one other family member and caused the deafness of one of his parents, and which he referred to as a “very bad item”)… you know the rest.