Category Archives: History and Politics

From A Heck of A Book of Fate, Brownie

It’s a book about the invisible hand of fate, extending its fickle finger here, tickling a cooing baby there. 

In 1921, or possibly 1923, Yetta Marchbein, Yetta “Marrowbone” (her father was a butcher), about 20 years old and full of ambition and idealism (the Bolsheviks billeted in her home during the Revolution had been gentlemen and also inspired her), crossed the Atlantic Ocean from some European port, having made her way there, alone, far under the deck, terrified for life by the rats who walked the partitions there between the bunks.  She, alone, of her large family in a muddy little shtetl in the Ukraine called Vishnevitz, would be alive twenty years later.   The rest disappeared without a trace into the nightmare that was Hitler’s fondest dream. In the U.S. she’d take the Americanized name of her cousins, Miller, and two years later, long before the slaughter of her family and town, marry her strong, frightened fiance Sam Mazur, also from Vishnevitz, who followed her to the U.S. on a ship that embarked from Bremen during the presidency of Warren G. Harding.  The Mazur family, Sam’s six brothers and sisters, father, mother, extended family, was murdered along with the Marchbeins and the rest of the Jewish town of Vishnevitz.  There is a monument in the cemetery in Queens, behind the gates of the Vishnevitz Benevolent Society, where Sam and Yetta are buried, commemorating the slaughter there.

Sam and Yetta Mazur were my mother’s parents.  They had one child, a girl they named Helen, who, as soon as she was able, changed her name to Evelyn.  Evelyn grew up on Eastburn Avenue in the Bronx, a once thriving street with one end at the stylish Grand Concourse.  Eastburn Avenue, at some point in my mother’s childhood, was cut in half, literally, and its neighborhood destroyed by Robert Moses and his Cross Bronx Expressway.  In that apartment house, where the Mazurs lived on the first floor, a family named Stamper also lived.  Yetta and Dinch Stamper (who called each other “Mazur” and “Stamper”) became lifelong friends.  There is a great photo of the Mazurs and the Stampers, probably from before they had children, relaxing on the grass somewhere, in front of dense trees, dressed in the style for going out on Sunday in the early 1920s.

Dinch Stamper had been born Dinch (Diana) Gleiberman in a town in Belarus called Truvovich, a Jewish hamlet about 300 km. north of Vishnevets.  The Jews of Truvovich met the same terrible fate as their landsmen in Vishnevets, wiped away with barely a trace, Truvovich now erased from the map.  Dinch had come over by ship years earlier with a cousin named Chava Gleiberman, youngest sister of my father’s Uncle Aren.   Aren had arrived here a decade earlier from Canada after fleeing involuntary service in the Czar’s army and the Russo-Japanese War.  Chava, a good-looking, deeply religious red-headed Jewish girl, had her hopes for a happy marriage dashed when Aren’s wife broke up a romance with a Jewish postman in Peekskill who’d fallen for Chava.  When Chava’s indentured servitude to Aren and his wife ended a marriage was arranged hastily with a man named Harry Widem, a man my father described on his deathbed as “an illiterate country bumpkin completely overwhelmed by this world.”  What my father probably didn’t know about were the routine beatings, with club-like boards, that young Harry had received daily from his step-mother in the mud-floored farmhouse in Connecticut where he was raised.   What I didn’t learn until recently was that Harry spoke English with no accent, unlike Yetta and Sam whose Yiddish accents and inflections spiced my childhood.  I never met Harry and Chava, both died before I was born.  I am named after my father’s father Harry (Eliyahu in Hebrew) and my sister after Chava.  What is now well-known is how much Chava despised her husband, and that she whipped her oldest son, Israel, without mercy, from the time he could stand.

The hand of fate, gentle reader, spared these two couples, Sam and Yetta and Chava and Harry, my grandparents, while the rest of both of their large families (several of Harry’s siblings and half-siblings in the US survived to produce families, as did Chava’s brother Aren, who has dozens of descendants here and in Israel) disappeared into the night and fog the world remembers hazily as World War Two.  The good war America fought against unequivocal Evil.  

My parents met, of course, in that apartment building on Eastburn Avenue in the Bronx where my father, and his younger brother Paul, would visit their cousin Dinch and her family.   During these visits my future father spied my future mother, the beautiful, dark-haired, popular and completely haughty, Evelyn Mazur.   She had an active social life, many boyfriends, and considered the shy, skinny guy from Peekskill a laughable hayseed, and besides, he was clearly poor as a church mouse.  In time she would agree to go out with him (to get the insistent Yetta off her back) and would watch, amazed, as he transformed himself from hick to urbane, witty, increasingly sophisticated boyfriend, fiance and later husband.  They would build a middle class life together, she’d come to think of him as the most secure and brilliant man she’d ever known and he would (when not making her cry) give her all the credit for transforming his life into one worth living and striving to improve.

If Yetta, Chava and Sam had not left Europe before the slaughter of everyone they knew (Chava lost her brothers Yuddle and Volbear and her sister Chaski as well as the rest of her family in Truvovich), had not Harry (who came to the US as an infant) survived the passage and a childhood of blows to the head with whatever wooden truncheons came to hand, Evelyn and Israel would not have been born.  If they had not come to be, and meet, and procreate, neither would I have.   If the bleeding my mother endured one frightening day late in her time pregnant with me had been worse, if this, then that. 

The hand of fate, gentle reader, including its fickle, tickling finger.   More details to follow, perhaps, if fate and the spirits will it.

 

Clever Marketing is the Key to Success

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

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

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

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

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

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

Too Big Not To Bugger Thousands

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

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

Chill Pill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Affordable Health Care Act (update)

I’m on hold with Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield, providers of the health insurance I bought on the New York State of Health Marketplace.  This second hold muzak features a piano and a jazzy guitar, but it is a very short loop.  It has played many times so far.

The first hold music, the one the robotic female voice kept interrupting to thank me for continuing to hold to, was obnoxious for the entire fifteen minute wait.  This music is better, but it’s starting to wear on me after ten minutes.

The reason I am holding again (with no robot thanking me over and over for my patience, I note sourly) is that the number on the back of my card connected me, mistakenly, to Stacey, who, while sympathetic, had no details of my account.  She seemed mystified by my fairly straight-forward billing question and finally said “Oh!  You’re in New York…  I’ll get you a NY representative who can help you.”  

It was my turn to be mystified, and I told Stacey so.  She confirmed that I’d dialed the right number from the back of my card, and promised to stay on the line until the NY person picked up.  She readily sympathized with my problems with the ACA.  It sounded like she had her own, and has spent many a long day (for minimum wage, apparently) listening to the details of the problems of others with Obamacare.  I may have pushed her sympathy with a nonchalant, but acidly snide, reference to the insurance industry insider who was the primary author of the ACA and who’d made her past and current bosses at Aetna very happy while in the government.

Stacey didn’t hold the line until the NY person picked up, and though the muzak has changed to another equally annoying ten second pseudo-jazzy loop, I am starting to get the feeling I am in corporate hold purgatory and that nobody is going to pick up the line.  After all, it is now going on fifteen minutes, this second plague of blood-pressure raising muzak.  It actually turns out to have been reassuring, that female drone telling me how important my business is to them and thanking me for my patience.

Just as I am about to give up hope, Stacey herself comes back on the line, tells me the information is pretty much universal from one state to the next, and, from her swivel chair in a cubicle in Virginia, pulls up my account.  Unfortunately, until the doctor submits a bill and the insurance company reviews it and sends the patient an explanation of benefits form setting out what the patient is responsible to pay, there is no way of knowing whether the visit will cost only $50 to the insured party– that would be the nominal co-pay– or several hundred dollars.  It all depends what the doctor has agreed to charge Empire and what Empire will then inform the patient is owed to pay for service, until the $1,750 of the deductible is paid down by the insured party.  Stacey agrees that it’s a shame there’s no way to know the cost before you visit a doctor for the first time.  

Obama’s proper punishment should be to have his health care at the mercy of the ACA and to wait on hold, listening to this muzak loop, for the remainder of his term, as his blood pressure climbs and nobody is there thanking him for continuing to hold.  On the other hand, Stacey was quick to say, when I expressed disappointment in the president, that Obama had nothing to do with this, even though a public option would have, admittedly, been the most sensible way to resolve the crisis in the obscenely profit-driven business of treating American sickness.  USA!  USA!

We are number five worldwide in executions, by the way, after China, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia and squeaking in ahead of Sudan, Somalia and Yemen.  Not surprisingly, the Lone Star State accounted for 41% of U.S. executions last year.  Hang ’em high, boys.   USA!   USA!!!!

But there I go again, being snide and negative instead of looking on the bright side (as Stacey did, mentioning the $15/hr. minimum wage in Seattle, as we searched for a reason to be optimistic about our nation’s future) and realizing how lucky I am to be doing what I love, even if there is no payment involved, except, perhaps on the karmic account.  It’s true.  I’m going to be happy.  USA!  USA!!!!!

She asked me why the vets who died waiting were so docile

I have a feeling these 40 dead veterans are just the tip of the iceberg.  Doesn’t seem right that they could have been so docile, my only theory is depression over their powerlessness.
 
We routinely say “thank you for your service” to people our great democracy has fucked over so many times in recent years. Redeployed over and over, deployments extended, sent into combat without combat armor against non-uniformed insurgent armies whose main weapon is the roadside bomb, criticized by the former Secretary of War (“we fight with the army we have, not necessarily the one we might like”), kept alive, due to advances in technology, with traumatic and disabling injuries that would have killed them even 15 years ago.  It’s hard to imagine who among them would NOT have PTSD, something the military resists diagnosing, since so many soldiers would rightfully use it as a reason to get sent home.   Let us not forget, hyper-masculine army culture prevents many soldiers from admitting they are depressed, anxious, in a panic whenever they hear noise.
 
Suicide has become the leading cause of death for our military lately.  I’m sure they feel hopeless, are promised over and over that they’ll get the life saving services they need and– uh, maybe next month.  Hang in there, buddy!  Have a nice day!
 
To me it’s a mindless extension of the selfish notion that everything, including schools, should be “privatized”, run with both eyes on the bottom line, with the attendant diminution of the value of human life (unless, of course, that human is wealthy).  The corporate mentality — hide inconvenient things, have robots answer phones so you don’t have to pay people to do it, screw the customer if they don’t like it, pay yourself first, maximize profits in every possible way, change the laws to keep more profit, and, above all, get your bonus.  Why the hell would you give pay incentives to VA administrators for properly running their hospitals in the first place?
 
This country may never have been the place it pretended to be, but it is worse now, in terms of the partisan hatred afoot, than at any time since the Civil War (or for the 100 years after that if you were what was nonchalantly called a ‘nigger’, especially if you didn’t know how to act).  I read about that June 21, 1964 lynching in Neshoba County, Mississippi the other day and shuddered to think I was alive and in 3rd grade when it happened, ten days after my 8th birthday.  This is not ancient history.
 
Around that time local racists sent my mother’s friend Mildred Rose an anonymous letter, on whose envelope some hate-twisted coward had scrawled COMMIE.  Mildred was a Commie (and my mother too, for that matter) because she supported busing to achieve racial integration TEN YEARS after Brown v. Bd. of Education.  Talk about incrementalism.  Schools are as segregated now, I’d wager, as they were in 1953.  All deliberate speed, yes indeed.  
 
Apparently when Senator Eastland pushed for the overtly racist William Cox (who first dismissed the indictments against most of the lynch mob who killed three young men, after burning down the black church they were using to organize a voting drive)  to be appointed to the federal bench in Mississippi he told Robert Kennedy “tell your brother to appoint him and I’ll let you have the nigger”.  The nigger was Thurgood Marshall, who got a seat on some appellate court without the dixiecrat’s opposition.
 
This country has traditionally been very bad for (apologies in advance to anyone offended)  homos, niggers, spics, Jews (I still like that we get that capital letter), Asians, Native Americans, socialists, intellectuals, a lot of other people.  I heard the other day that homosexuality was listed in the DSM until 1973, the year I graduated high school.  No wonder Ricky S____ was so coy about staying in the closet, light in the loafers and giggly though he also was (when not tearfully depressed).  Being gay was a shameful mental illness, the experts said so, don’t you know?  Many teenagers still kill themselves every day because of homophobia, in spite of a more nuanced understanding of homosexuality, and great social advances in attitudes toward it.
 
In certain ways we’re better as a nation now, in some ways much worse.  That profit drives everything and money equals speech may be the end of the game for democracy, no sense to even pretend otherwise.  I give $100 to some cause, everyone I know does the same.  Charles and David Koch kick in $1,000,000 and let’s just call that all Free Speech, how about it?  Can you say it with me, boys?  Free speech in the Free Market, Freedom on the damned march, get out of the way if you hate our freedom.
 
And the best part for those with the means to effectively exercise their free speech, you can buy your free speech anonymously, if your lawyers set up a 501(c)(4) nonprofit political action committee (PAC).  What Commies disparagingly call Dark Money is really a robust expression of freedom, in the opinion of those efficiently influencing elections and legislation.
 
On the other hand, can anyone tell me why a PAC is tax exempt, just like a charitable nonprofit prohibited by law from engaging in political action of any kind on pain of losing its tax exempt status?  Can anyone tell me why a 501(c)(4) is not required to disclose who funds it?  
 
The answer, of course, is as self-evident as the proposition that all men are created equal.   It is the same reason a dog licks its privates. Because it can.  Since money equals speech, those with the most money get to lick, or be licked, wherever they want, since it’s a parliament of pandering prostitutes.   Freedom is a beautiful thing, to those free to enjoy it.
 
But enough ranting, time to shave and exercise some of my other inalienable rights.  Goddamned shame about the way this country treats those brave souls we send into hell and then thank for their service, as we tell them to have a very nice day and let them wait, on secret lists, to die.  A small percentage of the corporate taxes unpaid by GE, Exxon, Apple and their ilk could fund a first rate health care system for veterans, but that would be so damned unfair to corporate CEOs!

Cultivate Mindful Empathy

I urge myself today– take a calligraphy pen and write it again, as handsomely and lovingly as you can:  cultivate mindful empathy.

Though it’s difficult, particularly when feeling dispirited and abandoned by friends and family alike: remember to be aware of the troubles of others and not to minimize them.   Remember to be sensitive to what others are suffering, even when it may seem senseless to you.  Yesterday a friend, thinking of people who mistreated him decades ago, expressed understandable thoughts of revenge.   As one of the most remarkable people I’ve met, the late, great Fran MacDonald, often said, to great effect: “I understand.”  

Think about the power of that simple response:  I understand.  I hear you, I feel what you’re saying, I have digested the import to you.   On the other hand, it may have been Fran’s way of gently telling me to shut up whenever I complained, which was often.  

A talent for complaint, a genius for it, really, runs in my family.  It just comes naturally to some people.  “You’d complain if you were hung with a new rope,” my father observed to his only son more than once.

Just the other day, in the context of complaining about the many weaknesses of the so-called Affordable Care Act,  I compared our brilliant president’s many laudable speeches with his many less laudable actions, to the great annoyance of a friend who thinks Obama is a great man.  The president has spoken eloquently about the need for a transparent government while invoking the 1917 Espionage Act to intimidate leakers and maintaining an administration more opaque, less accessible to journalists and seekers of information under the Freedom of Information Act, than even the secretive Cheney’s administration was.  Net neutrality, equal access to all websites, at equal speed, is something the president has often correctly called a cornerstone of democracy.  He has pledged over and over to defend it, his ominous appointments to the board that will decide who can sell what at which internet speed and service notwithstanding.  His first official act as president was symbolically closing Guantanamo Bay prison, showing that his heart is in the right place; never mind the devilish details of the many uncharged prisoners, detained now for more than a decade, that we are force feeding there as they try to starve themselves to death.  A commitment to renewable energy, laudable, and new records for petro-fuel extraction quietly applauded by the oil companies.   Add the boom The Wall Street Journal crowed about: pumping thousands of gallons of secret, highly toxic chemical stews into the earth in order to extract trapped, and highly profitable, natural gas from deep inside the earth.  The worrisome Keystone pipeline that will transport tar sand sludge thousands of miles, from Koch Brother owned land in Canada to refineries in the American Gulf of Mexico that will extract gasoline from it, so far Obama has only approved the southern half of it for operation.    No reason, but past experience, to believe he will OK the crucial northern half of the pipeline.

By the way, I learned recently that the Koch Brothers’ father was a founding member of the John Birch Society, the outfit that contended then president Dwight D. Eisenhower was an agent of Communism.   The old reactionary is smiling in his grave at how skillfully his billionaire sons are advancing his old agenda.   Breeding will out, I suppose.

I say these critical things about our president sadly and fully realizing the virulent hatred this half-black man faces, the troubled, divided, ravished country he inherited and the additional pressure to accommodate that is placed on him, as a half-black man and our first “post-racial” president.

But I was talking about empathy a moment ago.  I can hear the haters, and I should pause to understand:  

Whoa, nothing “half” about it, dude.  We are stricter here than the good folks who made the Nuremberg Laws.  One half black equals black.  Shoot, a damn quadroon is black!  Same for an octoroon, damn it.   We American racists are strict, son, what the hell you talkin’ about “half-black”?   Did you bother taking a look at him lately?  The only half-black thing about him is his damn policies, and his embrace of virtually every policy G.W. Bush ever enacted, and that’s the only good half.  The indisputable fact is: the man’s still black.

Which puts me in mind of my friend, the fan of Obama’s, and his measured, reasonable sounding point about incrementalism.  With all the faults of Obamacare, he said, it’s a step in the right direction that was made against unprecedented, rabid opposition and something that no previous president had the courage or political will to do.  Leaving aside that it may in many ways favor the profits of private insurance companies over the needs of American medical patients, that it leaves millions of Americans without insurance, that it makes no sense compared to a public option, it is still a step, an incremental improvement over what came before.  Of course, he works for a corporation that provides his health insurance and so is not directly effected by it, but he’s read a great deal about the details and knows many things about the law that he’s sure even those suffering under it don’t know.

I gave him an example of incrementalism from history that caused him to crease his brow and agree to disagree.  After the Civil War the 14th Amendment guaranteed the rights of citizenship to all Americans, promising due process and equal protection of the laws [1].  It also granted Congress the power to pass any laws necessary to enforce its provisions against recalcitrant states, formerly in rebellion and forced by economic necessity to ratify the amendment as a condition for federal aid, that might be intent on violating these rights.  

Within a few years of the Amendment’s ratification, in the depths of a severe economic depression caused in large part by the war to preserve or abolish slavery, the Supreme Court clarified matters.  The privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States were spelled out explicitly by the wise and unappealable jurists of the nation’s high court:  the right to migrate freely from state to state, the right to freely use navigable interstate waterways and a third, equally important right of citizenship.  

The remaining privileges and immunities of American citizenship, the Court held, were the business of the States, and if the Ku Klux Klan itself ran the damned state, well, that was not the business of the federal government, unless, of course, the State was trying to abridge any of those three enumerated rights.  Case closed.  “Call me pisher,” as my grandfather used to say.

That remained the constitutional law of the land for more than 90 years, talk about incremental.  It remained so until some clever New York radical attorneys came up with a way to invoke the long slumbering century-old enforcement statute, never repealed,  to enforce the 14th Amendment, after the murders of civil rights workers Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman in June 1964,  down in the bowels of Mississippi.  Courageous southern judges on the federal bench ruled that the old statute could be used to bring such cases into federal court.  It has been used, literally millions of times, since, after a refreshing almost hundred year nap, to enforce the original intent of the 14th amendment. 

In that Mississippi trial, by the way, seven of the nineteen accused members of the lynch mob who murdered Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman, after indictments against them were dismissed and the dismissal was overturned by the Supreme Court, eventually were convicted and sentenced to three to ten long years in prison [2].  The grinning sheriff was not convicted, though his deputy eventually served four years of his six year sentence.  Incrementalism, my man, something to be happy about — if you live to be 150 or so.

It is easy to be distracted, that’s for sure.  What is hard, and well worth doing, is cultivating mindful empathy.  It is at times very hard.  I suppose those are the times when it is most worth doing.  Today would be a good day for me to work on it.  It’s either that or jump out of my skin, leap onto my skeleton, already posed horse-like, and gallop off howling.

Come to think of it, that might be a better idea.

 

[1]  No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

[2]  On December 29 (1967), Judge Cox imposed sentences.  Roberts and Bowers got ten years, Posey and Price got six years, and the other three convicted defendants got four.  Cox said of his sentences, “They killed one nigger, one Jew, and a white man– I gave them all what I thought they deserved.”   source

 

A few patriotic thoughts on Memorial Day

What we are to remember on Memorial Day is sometimes hard to recall.  If I’m not mistaken, this holiday used to be called Decoration Day, a day when Sunnyland Slim tickled the black notes and sang the blues for his dear, departed Freddie Lee every year.  “I never will forget about my Freddie Lee, I sing the blues for her on Eh-eh-EV-ry Deh-CO-ray-ZHJUN Day” he sang off the DJ copy of the LP my father had in his collection.  You can hear a few bars of it, with great sax by King Curtis, here   (track 6).  Somebody my father knew in college, probably one of the college station’s DJs, laid it on young Irv, knowing he was passionate about the Human Rights of the Negro and other underdogs and a lover of race music.

My father attended college after World War II on the GI bill and for the first time in his life, I think, was widely recognized for his intelligence. He did well at Syracuse and enrolled in a doctoral program in history at Columbia University.  Somewhere along the way he picked up the Sunnyland Slim album and a couple of early King Curtis records, as well as some by John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy.  I never heard him listen to anything but Sam Cooke and cantorial music on the stereo at home, but these were definitely his records I listened to in the basement of that long-ago sold house in Queens.

Slim’s Shout, the album was called, probably the only LP recorded by the piano player.  (The internet shoots this theory to hell, the album was released in 1960– years after my father’s college days ended.  It is also one of several LPs Sunnyland Slim recorded during his long life.  The instant genius memory of the internet also informs us that the tune Slim sings with such conviction about his Freddie Lee was written by Sonny Boy Williamson II.   Presumably Freddie Lee was the other bluesman’s lost woman.)

What we remember on Memorial Day– the lives men and women in uniform gave up fighting in wars.  We remember their sacrifice, the ‘ultimate sacrifice’, as it is usually styled.  Some of these soldiers, sailors, fliers, fought to keep our nation safe and secure.   Many were heroes.   Many were not, nor did they die fighting to keep The Home of the Brave free to those able to fully enjoy the pursuit of happiness; they fought in human terror, trying to stay alive and not managing it.

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What we do not remember on Memorial Day– the hellish hideousness of war.   That few wars make any sense, except in the cruel calculus of those intent on remaining in power.  That most of the men and women who die in wars do not go into harm’s way voluntarily.  Many over the centuries were conscripted, others, for lack of a better choice, join an army they could be shot for deserting.  Heroism and cowardice, and patriotism, and keeping the world safe for democracy, or opposing a series of modern day Hitlers large and small, have very little to do with most war or most of the people killed in war.  

Decoration Day, Wikipedia informs us, began after the Civil War when families would go to cemeteries all over the country to decorate the graves of the fallen.   The Civil War, our simplified history teaches us, was fought to keep this great nation whole and to free the slaves.   It is only in an advanced placement high school course that students may learn about the Draft Riots in New York City, a pogrom during which blacks were hung from lamp posts and the national guard fought the enraged white citizens driven mad by the fact that the rich could buy their way out of this bloodbath while the poor were conscripted to fight for the rights of southern blacks held as property, who, once freed, would be competitors for the scarce work these poor whites were looking for.

Memorial Day is also not the day to remember that the wealthy men who began the Civil War, those aristocrats romanticized history sometimes calls “The Planters”, who painted the destroyed landscape of the American south with the blood of Americans, were deemed to have suffered enough by the loss of their slaves.  The forty acres and a mule that idealistic Americans thought were the least the freed slaves should be given, well, would you settle for Black Codes, you special favorites of the law?

I recently found a paper which had somehow worked its way to the top of a table, a page I photocopied more than a decade and a half ago, when I was a law student trying to make sense of the history of American racism at law.  The unknown author wrote of the debate in Congress after the Civil War, men like Thaddeus Stevens advocated seizing the millions of acres owned by the Planters, a few hundred people, and distributing it to the millions of freed slaves and poor whites, to make them self-sufficient and to ensure that the sacrifices of the war would not have been made in vain.

The wealthiest hundred families in the former Confederacy moved swiftly to make sure only their wartime sacrifices would not be in vain.  A few decades later history would be written to show that the South had been betrayed by vicious Northerners, a partial excuse for the many blacks burnt and/or hanging from trees in those years.  One of the things those vicious Northerners did not manage to do was to give the freed slaves a fighting chance in the former confederacy, or at law, the laudable intentions of the Thirteenth (ended slavery), Fourteenth (US Citizens have guaranteed civil rights) and Fifteenth (Black men may vote– unless not allowed to) Amendments notwithstanding.   A series of infuriating and irrefutable Supreme Court decisions ensured that a century of Black Codes, racism at law and lynching would not be hampered by Constitutional Amendments ratified by the former Confederacy (in exchange for federal aid to rebuild their infrastructure) virtually at gun point.

It is a shameful history, and in one important sense not very different from the history we are living today, when the richest few families in the country own more than the vast majority of the rest of the citizens combined, where they purchase the legislation necessary to keep their privileges and advantages in place, thank you.  Where wars are fought by the poor for the benefit of those who used to be called War Profiteers.

Let us not forget: you can get a good deal on a mattress on Memorial Day.  The malls are packed.  Beaches open for business tomorrow.  The summer begins.  Take a moment, as you are enjoying your freedom, to remember the men and women who gave their lives so that you could barbecue, watch TV, pursue happiness, go to the beach, and live proudly in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

And remember, while thanking the war dead, to thank those wise politicians who abolished conscription and moved this nation to an all-volunteer army. That went a long way toward our nation being able to whole-heartedly support our troops by cheering any war these brave, hapless soldiers are sent to fight and die in.  

Next year we will remember those additional brave men and women who fall at the hands of those pretending to be our allies, the many soldiers who fall by their own hands, as well as those killed in unwinnable combat with a hazy and implacable enemy who hates our freedom.

 

Just One Question for the President

There are very rich, cynical people who, because speech has now been equated with money by the Supreme Court, can speak ten or a hundred million times more articulately than the average struggling mutt.    It is now common knowledge that the extremely privileged have unfettered access to lawmakers, who, dependent on their wealthy benefactors’ generous campaign support, will move mountains to privilege the advantages of the already privileged at the expense of everyone else.  

There are two brothers, the Koch brothers (pronounced “Coke”) who are only recently becoming well-known for their tireless, well-funded and influential speech against sustainable environmental policy, universal health care, collective bargaining, a living wage and many other things an unbiased person might consider basic rights of citizenship in a wealthy democracy.   The Koch brothers combined “worth” of about 100 billion dollars, puts them close to the richest twosome in the world today.  As anyone who has been following the news recently knows, it will never be enough to be among the richest people in the world today without making every effort to become richer still.

 

The Koch brothers stand to double their money when Obama quietly signs off on the other half of the Keystone pipeline (he’s already opened the southern half).  This pipeline will pump oil sludge, tar sand, the dirtiest form of nonrenewable fossil fuel, from Koch-owned lands in Canada to refineries and shipping points in the American south.   It will enable the profitable extraction of a very dirty and unsustainable fuel source that climate scientists (but, in fairness to science-deniers, only about 99% of them) say will put immense amounts of additional carbon into the biosphere.   It will accelerate climate change at a time when we need to slow it down, for the survival of life on the planet.  The extraction leaves behind a ravaged strip mined landscape and the toxic consequences are frighteningly far reaching; on the other hand, the Koch Brothers stand to make as much as $100,000,000,000 when the president quietly signs off.

 

My question is a purely rhetorical one that I will never have access to actually ask:  do you work directly for the Koch Brothers, my man?

 

I mean no disrespect to our president.    I love a Nobel Peace Prize winner with a sense of humor.  I’m just frustrated because he speaks so well and people want so badly to believe pronouncements that let them cling to the ghost of idealism rather than accept the evidence of even more eloquent and entirely consistent actions.  It’s depressing to judge this good man on the damning evidence of what he actually does, rather than on the strength of the uplifting things he has the talent to say.

 

And so it is with Obamacare, written by a lobbyist for the health insurance industry who has since gone back to work for that industry.   There are corrupt scumbags on both sides of the aisle, and in the aisle, and sliding slimily through the revolving door between lobbyists and legislators, everything oiled by the money, er… speech, of the legally created persons known as Corporations, entities whose only consideration, like the Koch Brothers, is maximizing profits.  If the corporation was actually a person it would be a psychopath.  And so it goes.

 

I received no invoice this month from Obamacare — which does not allow me to keep any of the doctors I’ve seen for years–  so I called on February 20th to find out how to pay.  Can’t do it on-line or by phone, it emerges, so the nice woman at the insurance company emailed me an electronic copy of their invoice, prepared 2/14 and not received by most consumers yet, with this maddening sub-punchline:

 

IMPORTANT MESSAGE: Our records show that you have not paid your premium for this month.   This premium is now overdue.  This bill includes your overdue premium in addition to the premium you owe for next month.  If we do not receive both of these premium payments by the due date set out on this bill, your coverage will be suspended.  Any charges for services (claims) will not be paid.

 

 So the consumer, not billed until the last week in February, deemed late and threatened with cancellation unless the “overdue” (payable by 2/28 at 5 pm. after all) premium and the preemptive March premium payments (payable by 3/31 at 5pm) are both mailed and received by the due date.

Punchline: there is no New York State agency, known to the operators and supervisors of the New York State of Health Marketplace, that monitors or oversees the business practices of the corporations that do business in that so-called marketplace.  

 

Nor is the hundred million dollar website easily navigable, or even updated, there is no on-line support to be accessed, nor any way to email anything to anyone at the Marketplace.   You can theoretically initiate a web chat, but that feature is not currently working.  The FAQ section, last updated in December 2013,  has nothing about complaints, grievances, appeals or getting help, outside of calling their overwhelmed help line.  

 

On the plus side, waiting times to speak to operators have gone down impressively, from over an hour to about ten minutes.  The operators are helpful, and overwhelmed and their hands are tied.  The consumers, well, can you spell SCAMMED, good citizens?  LOL!   Have a very nice day!

It all depends on whose ox is gored

This is so self-evident it seems silly to point it out:  that we are concerned mainly with what concerns us directly, everything that doesn’t touch us directly is an abstraction we are often too busy to ponder.   I offer this example, just because it goads me not to, and there is nobody to express it to who can be expected to have much sympathy.

If we are in an existential, eternal war with violent enemies who are hell-bent on killing as many of us as possible, it is necessary to protect ourselves by any means we have. Wars that leave Americans dead and maimed are understandably unpopular, yet we are constantly reminded how important it is to world peace and our security to continue killing our terrorist enemies and their families.  Luckily we have the technology to kill by remote control.  This requires large, loud killing machines constantly circling in the skies our enemies live under.  If you have never woken in the night, in terror, your children screaming and scarred for life, it’s probably hard to get too exercised about President Obama’s extensive killing by drone program.  He was so eloquent in accepting his Nobel Peace Prize, you know?

Similarly, the president’s oft-expressed commitment to do what he can to slow Climate Change must be seen in context.  The oil companies, which have made record profits under his watch, where off-shore drilling has been greatly increased, previously sacred lands have been opened to drilling, America finally producing more oil and gasoline than it imports, are rightfully concerned about these oft-expressed commitments to slow the carbon poisoning of the earth, directly at the expense of the non-renewable energy sector.   With billions and billions of dollars hanging in the balance, it would be unwise for the president not to reassure the oil companies, which, after all, wield tremendous political power and influence.   So he makes a speech touting how much more oil we are producing and how important it is that we continue to drill, baby, drill.   Does that make him a hypocrite or a liar?  Not necessarily, the world is complex.

But here’s one I can’t seem to get out of my head.  I am one of thousands, or tens of thousands, or maybe hundreds of thousands, who has been directly effected by the president’s little white lie about his health insurance plan: “if you like the health care you currently have, you can keep it.”  As I’ve previously reported, he apologized for lying, and as his lie statistically effects only a tiny proportion of the people he lied to, you know, small harm, tiny foul.  De minimis non curat lex– the law does not concern itself with trifles.

And in the general scheme of things, not being able to keep my doctors, including the ones following me for cancers I’m likely to get, and the one who was monitoring my possible hypertension recently to decide on the best path to keep me from having a stroke, and shit like that, well… pretty much trifles.  That my copays have tripled?  Another trifle.  I am a whiner and it behooves me to stop whining and find some new doctors, get my medical records transferred and shut the hell up, you know what I’m saying?