Category Archives: History and Politics

Dropping the Mask

Zora Neale Hurston has a great scene in Their Eyes Were Watching God when her heroine, Janie, finally realizes that her critical grandmother, a former slave, her domineering first husband and one or two others who influenced her so much had been poisonous influences that made her doubt and hate herself.  She sees them as a row of idols, suddenly revealed not be be special at all, falling off a shelf one after another.   That moment of clarity, as the false idols lay smashed on the floor and Janie no longer was bound by their strong opinions about her life, was the beginning of her self-discovery.

People treat you the way they do because of their inner lives, not always because of yours.  Advice is as often as not given from fear, from jealousy, from resentment, things that may have nothing to do with the object of that advice.  Follow such advice at your own peril, or learn which advice to spit out.

Human affairs are not primarily guided by logic or consistency, nor are the ideals we claim to hold always what we hold them out to be.  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator, blah blah blah” for example.  The genius who wrote those lines owned 300 men, women and children who were his property, bought with money inherited from his wealthy parents. Nobody would seriously claim those poor souls were endowed with the same unalienable human rights their master was.  Rhetoric is one thing, reality something more rugged.

We recently celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington.   Pious, eloquent speeches were delivered, reaffirming our deepest held American values: that all humans are worthy of respect, dignity, an equal chance at life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  The president made a fine speech, full of feeling and passion.  It almost sounded like commitment to the things he was saying.

But, please, don’t try to sell that empty speechifying to the doomed children of Harlem, Appalachia, inner city slums and rural areas every where.  Sing it from the mountaintops, from the rooftops.  Yeah, right on, baby.

I shuddered recently to see some footage from 1964 where Malcolm X points out, irrefutably, that in the ten years since the Supreme Court ruled “separate but equal” to be in violation of the US Constitution and ordered the integration of public schools “with all deliberate speed” that the schools were as segregated as ever. Now, going on fifty years later, much the same can be said about “all deliberate speed.”   The only thing moving with deliberate speed now is the determined campaign to dismantle public schools and place education, like much of the prison system, in the hands of profit-driven private entrepreneurs.

Some lament how far America has come from the golden age when there was actual democracy here, where groups of now powerless people could unite and have their voices heard.  It may be slightly worse now, or slightly better, depending on your point of view, but representative democracy is still a flawed and difficult experiment and, as a wag once had it, the worst form of government, aside from every other form.

During the golden age of American freedom we did a lot of terrible things to millions of people, many of whom died, or wished they were dead, as the great wealth of this nation was created for the enjoyment of a smaller and smaller group of people.  Advances were made toward greater equality, then backwards steps smartly taken.  

Right now, for some reason that is hard to understand, particularly in light of recent regrettable American military decisions, American warships stand poised to rain down perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars worth of powerful Tomahawk missiles, targeting with powerful explosives certain areas of Syria and the inadvertent “collateral damage” surrounding each target.  Let us not think, for a second, of the hideous irony of naming these weapons of mass destruction after the war axes of a native people our great democracy systematically all but wiped out.

Whatever thinking people might think about this course of hands-off military action against Syria, nothing is likely to dissuade those in charge from doing it.   We are told that the Syrian dictator used poison gas against his people.   We are told this is unacceptable under international law and that we must teach the Syrian dictator a hard lesson.  Let’s see how he feels about US missiles destroying a bunch of his infrastructure, killing a number of his people.   We will teach tyrants about killing people just because they feel like it.

The mask drops away as we hear the official voice of America yell:  Do as I say, not as I do.  Freedom is on the march, for some.  And democracy shall be spread, as long as it’s the democracy we want to see spreading.

“Doesn’t this make you glad to be an American?” the sardonic skeleton of my father remarks from his lofty grave on a hill outside of Peekskill.

 

Rage on the rise?

I don’t know if it’s just me, or if the level of rage around us has increased dramatically.  I know why my father was in a rage much of the time, his mother whipped him in the face with a heavy cord from the time he could stand.   Anyone would be subject to rage with that kind of upsetting start.  I had some insight into my mother’s anger, though she’d get angry when I’d try to be sympathetic about it and I learned to change the subject, on a dime, when she got that look on her face.   My sister’s anger is not hard to figure out. But the most perplexing thing is the amount of anger simmering, some behind smiles and the best of intentions, in people around me, in the world at large.

A few weeks ago a friend set a misunderstanding into motion for seemingly inexplicable reasons.   He later had an insight — he was provoking a fight between his two older brothers by his actions.   His brothers were each over a thousand miles away, so others were cast as gladiators.   He cast me in the role of the tougher of his two brothers, I imagine.   I had a friend years ago who bizarrely mistook me for his father, unbeknownst to me, and was enraged, for years, apparently, that I never praised his teaching.   Many of us seem to spend a good deal of our lives playing out scenarios with surrogates standing in for dead abusive parents, absent abusive siblings.

I blame nobody for being enraged in a world like the one we live in.  People are livid all over the place.  Look at the highways in Florida, general incivility, the unsportsmanlike behavior of trash talking millionaires on TV, the wars raging on several continents, the indifference to the death and torture of innocents done in our name, the bitter zero-sum impasse in our government, the continued war against the weak while the richest grow much, much richer as the world becomes more and more crowded, warm, polluted.   You may have a nice group of friends, a supportive community, a sanctuary from the violence and hatred afoot everywhere these days, but the murderous rancor in the papers every day is hard to ignore.   A wit, Harry Shearer, tweeted today:  On FTN, Colin Powell calls Assad a “pathological liar”. I clearly remember when Assad assured the UN that Iraq had mobile bioweapons vans.

Of course, there were no mobile biological weapons vans in Iraq, nor any other signs of a nuclear weapons program, no ties to the 18 or so Saudis who were the suicide pilots on 9/11, but, for some reason, a lot of death was rained down on Iraq, in my name and yours — countless Iraqis and thousands of dead, maimed and permanently disabled American veterans of a war as senseless, and brutally patriotic, as World War One.   The wartime president who ordered the pre-emptive attack on Iraq recently told a group of Shock and Awe veterans with prosthetic limbs that he deeply appreciated their sacrifices and that he’d tried diplomacy to avoid going to war with Saddam Hussein.   

Maybe it’s true we can do little to change the big things.  Change starts with ourselves.  I have to be thankful that I’m able to remain mostly mild, instead of flying into rages.   Hard work, and good work, and I’m glad and grateful to be doing it.  Maybe it’s true the only thing we should focus on is taking care of the people in our lives, being kind, and helping, and always giving the benefit of the doubt to our friends, until they prove us wrong. 

It isn’t easy to be consistently kind and empathetic when things are difficult.   It’s hard to be patient when events press in on us, or to be mild when people treat us badly.   Kindness and mildness are more important than most people know.   Like hope, they are the things that remind us that life is good, they make an unbearable situation worth enduring.    

A friend wrote recently of a yoga tale in which the snake, badly beaten, complains to his friend the guru, who finds him bloody in the road, that the guru told him not to strike back.  “Christ,” says the guru, “I said don’t bite. I didn’t tell you not to hiss!”

Sometimes it is necessary to hiss, I suppose.  But when confronted with things we can recognize as expressions of generalized hostility, my approach nowadays is to walk away, remain silent, there is no last word to be had worth the letters it takes to spell it.  There is usually little to be gained by talking to people who will argue to the death that you are nuts to be hurt by things that were not intended to cause harm.

My elbow that accidentally broke your nose?   What is mysterious about “accidentally”, asshole?

We get variations on that from angry people sometimes and experience teaches that the best response is to seek medical attention and stay out of harm’s way in future.  You will not win any arguments with people like that.

Nor is there any point in trying to.

I began writing this musing over whether people who were the victims of angry people when young are attracted to each other.  The little brother who was sucker punched by his older brothers, the middle sister who never got a dollar, nor any credit, from her parents, the older brother who bore the brunt of his mother’s rage and her random slaps across his face, the little sister terrorized by her insane bully brother.   There may be a magnetic force at work, drawing a certain type together.  I hate to think that is so, but it’s hard to imagine that everyone out there is the victim of some kind of crime against them when they were a child.

On the other hand, take a look at the world we live in.  Sadly, you will not have to look very far.

Opening A Can of Worms

A friend who leaped out of character to shout me down in a discussion of Bradley Manning a month or two ago, replied to my mild-mannered email making the points he hadn’t let me make in the car by telling me I deserved a more thoughtful reply than he was able to craft at the moment.   I probably posted something about it here at the time (here, at the end of this post).   I was shocked at his ferocity, after he asked me casually what I thought of Manning’s disclosures.

We had a more measured discussion a few weeks later, inconclusive.   Then, earlier today, I opened the following can of worms:

ME:  I agree with the  ACLU Comment on the Bradley Manning Sentence 

“When a soldier who shared information with the press and public is punished far more harshly than others who tortured prisoners and killed civilians, something is seriously wrong with our justice system. A legal system that doesn’t distinguish between leaks to the press in the public interest and treason against the nation will not only produce unjust results, but will deprive the public of critical information that is necessary for democratic accountability. This is a sad day for Bradley Manning, but it’s also a sad day for all Americans who depend on brave whistleblowers and a free press for a fully informed public debate.”
 
 
HE:  I heard that the government asked for 60 years and that the defense sought 30 years.  Although I didn’t follow the case in depth, my sense is that the sentence of 35 years, in the context of the history of Bradley Manning, is cruel.  The Union’s proportionality comment and its comparison between treason and leaking, are hard for me to address without a better knowledge of the pre-trial and trial record of the case. Puzzling, is why the defense sought 30 years. What’s your guess?  
 
 
ME:    The defense asked for 25 years, I guess they figured that was the best they could hope for, given his guilty pleas to many of the charges, the trial, and the judge’s rulings.  35 years does seem an unduly harsh sentence, but Manning’s head goes on a pike as a warning to any other conscience-stricken nerd who may fancy himself a person of conscience.  We do that now.

 
Many of the issues are hard to address knowledgeably since most of the trial record has not been released.   Kind of a neat loop they have there, in a dark side Dick Cheney kind of way.  Although it seems the gov’t stipulated that no actual harm was caused by Manning’s disclosures.  Nor was any war crime apparently investigated as a result.  What happens in war stays in war.
 
Nothing ambiguous about this part of the ACLU’s statement:
 
When a soldier who shared information with the press and public is punished far more harshly than others who tortured prisoners and killed civilians, something is seriously wrong with our justice system. 
 
Lt. Calley, for his part in the belatedly reported My Lai carnage, three years under house arrest.  I think Calley was the only American punished for that massacre.
 
I guess the judge considered herself merciful for shaving four months off Manning’s sentence for the cruel and unusual (except for Gitmo detainees) detention Manning suffered while awaiting American Justice, you know, the nude solitary confinement in an outdoor cage and that kind of thing.
 
As my old man used to say “doesn’t this make you glad to be an American”?

HE:  In this era, there is a violent war between secular and sectarian in which we have been killed and injured and are in danger.  The theory is that government exists to protect us.  In such anomic times, it seems as though the community approves of giving the government a good edge when it comes to social control over autonomy.  In kinder times, the edge swings back to civil liberties. 

I thought about replying, then thought better of it.  The man has a fine vocabulary, I had to look up “anomic”.

Dig it, complete with a fitting quote from Charles Krauthammer:

an·o·mie or an·o·my  (n-m)

n.   1. Social instability caused by erosion of standards and values.

2. Alienation and purposelessness experienced by a person or a class as a result of a lack of standards, values, or ideals: “We must now brace ourselves for disquisitions on peer pressure, adolescent anomie and rage” (Charles Krauthammer).
[French, from Greek anomi, lawlessness, from anomos, lawless : a-, without; see a-1 + nomos, law; seenem- in Indo-European roots.]

Smart ALEC

ALEC,  the American Legislative Exchange Council, is a little known, very influential, law-making and lobbying group.  Funded by money from the Koch Brothers and others of their magnitude, ALEC recruits state law makers to sponsor model legislation written by ALEC.   This model legislation often benefits a certain industry or corporate interest.   One piece of legislation written by ALEC, and the language is virtually identical in the 21 other states that have passed their own version of the law, is Florida’s Stand Your Ground Law.

Under this law a man with a suspicion has a right to get out of his car, with a concealed gun, and confront the person he suspects.  If the person confronted does not treat him respectfully, tells him, say, to go fuck himself, the man with the suspicion is free to raise the ante, even grab the suspicious person.  If an altercation follows, and he feels in danger, he then has the right to kill the person with his gun, particularly in situations where it is his word vs. the dead man’s and there are no other eye witnesses.  True fact.   The NRA loves this law, so do firearm manufacturers.  Here’s some more history of this law.

A Short Discussion about Proportionality

We have a political culture, for lack of a more accurate term, in which the nuance/complexity of a given issue is generally crushed under the dualistic false equivalency favored by corporate sponsors and those millions who crave certainty and don’t like a lot of confusing detail.  Raise the issue of massive American poverty, the shrinking middle class and the increasing income chasm between the super-wealthy and everybody else?  Class warfare, unless you’re on the winning side, in which case, taste dictates not bringing up the ugly subject.

This automatic black and white analysis with its bogus equivalencies is not done by chance.   It is supported by research– people want their answers simple.   If 99.5% of climate scientists have documented the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere, rising ocean temperatures, the melting of polar ice, the cluster of alarming evidence that we are heading toward a man-made tipping point on the way to massive earth-wide disaster, there is another side to the story.  

For one thing 99.5% is not 100%, let us not forget that.  And then there’s the machine that influences public opinion, and it runs on millions of dollars.  It provides comforting certainty in an uncertain world by confirming what we’d all like to believe.  

The fossil fuel industry and others profiting handsomely from the status quo have the dough and the motivation to dispute burning carbon’s role in Climate Change.  The rest, as they say,  acrimonious, corporately sponsored public debate between Climate Change Skeptics and Global Warming Alarmists.  

Al Gore, with his depressing Power Point presentation?  Alarmist.  Guy with an on-line doctorate from Holy Trinity University reassuring his audience that man’s activities have nothing to do with global warming?  Skeptic.   Now, be logical: who do you believe, an alarmist or a skeptic?

The alarmist is emotional, the skeptic rational.  So who’s more credible on such an important and potentially frightening issue?   Of course, victims of crime tend to be alarmed and emotional, but why bring that up?   The tens of millions spent by the main polluting industries have influenced a large segment of the American populace to believe that the “liberals” and their godless scientists are alarmists perpetrating a hoax.  Manipulating the true facts because they hate our freedom. Case closed, next.

Theory of evolution vs. Intelligent Design– an unproven “theory” vs. God’s infinite wisdom as the ultimate genius designer.   Death Tax vs. Paris Hilton Tax–  a ruthless tax levied on your death by a relentlessly invasive government vs.  a tax effecting only the heirs of the very wealthy, an affirmation of a dead billionaire’s right to pass along every hard-earned cent without inheritance tax.   Collateral Damage vs. War Crimes– bad things happen during war vs. the quaint notion that killing innocent non-combatants is often a war crime.

My father died full of regret that he’d seen the world as black and white, rather than the full-color, vibrant, finely gradated world it truly is.  There are plenty of desperate idiots here, no doubt, and violent people, and even the most evil convince themselves they are doing the right thing.  But the world itself, as God made it, is an endlessly fascinating kaleidoscope of color, a cornucopia of subtle and sometimes wonderful textures, tastes, smells, things to touch.

To proportionality, then.  If someone hurts you, a friend of many years you rarely see, and you are committed to mildness, what to do?   If you never get a chance to talk about it, and are feeling overwhelmed, you might write about it, try to comb through what happened.  I have a blahg with two or three regular readers.  I posted something about inexplicably insensitive behavior I experienced at the hands of two friends recently.   The post may have stung the anonymous persons described unsympathetically.  

The stung party writes something in return, an email from a conspicuously fake address.  Knowing that I am having a devilishly hard time rolling the massive rock of my idealistic program up a hill alone, and how impossible it’s been so far to find true allies, he sends the kind of note I’ve been longing to receive, someone who gets the program’s potential, loves it, offers some of the very expertise I’m seeking.  

And in the body of the email, while he is dancing out, in the manner of the dancing sadist in Reservoir Dogs, on his toes and grooving as he cuts off the ears of his bound, gasoline soaked victim,  this “don’t you wish somebody actually cared like this?”, he turns his stiletto heel once, twice, comparing his fictional self to Mother Theresa, and mocking the program I have been working on, unpaid, for three years, the program I am staking my life on.

A proportional response?   Only if you believe a ten year war in Iraq was a proportional response to the 9/11 attack justified by WMD, Saddam’s connections to Bin Laden, Freedom on the March, Oil to pay for the War, strategic geo-political considerations, Supporting our troops, war on those who hate our freedom, war on terror, war to end war, shock and awe, whatever.   “Whatever”, by the way, is the most convincing rationale of those listed above and one of the few that is not either an outright, intentional lie or a tissue of smelly ruminant feces.

If my friend was hurt by my confusion as to why he’d lie to me, stated so bluntly and inappropriately in this “public” space, there were many less bitchy ways he could have brought my insensitivity to my attention.   But that surely couldn’t have been as much fun as dancing like that.  Hurt real good, must have been very satisfying, even if a bit cowardly.  Rage is rarely pretty, even when it feels justified.

Great short video editorial about the Trayvon Martin killing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6OuP-wiiQg

views 7-17-23         at 1:48 AM   570,960

                                     1:20 PM    706,908

7/18  at                         2:19 AM   759,556

                                      1:41 PM     785,302

7/20  at                      3:10 AM     823,483

7/24  at                       1:51 PM     1,250,202

De Minimis Non Curat Lex

There’s a book in this old judicial maxim “the law does not concern itself with trifles”.  An entire library of trifles with which the law does not concern itself.  One man’s trifle is another man’s indigestible, unvomitable hairball, after all.

Think of the things that may bother you most.   Trifles, virtually all of them.  The Law does not regard or concern itself with them.   Like a demented four year-old on first discovery of the equally chilling “I know you are, but what am I?” the justice system’s got one for you right here, pal.

“De minimis non curat lex“

 

Letter to Poland

So here’s the deal.  Over here a lot of bad stuff is going down, I think we are actually in the grips of a societal insanity that is rapidly approaching critical mass.  I know you try not to pay attention to the news from here, being an expatriate and all that, but I’ll give you a quick run-down of what’s been shaking since you’ve been gone.

In 2000 there was a presidential election, another of those farcical exercises in mass-marketed democracy we have every four years.  I heard the president described recently by the great Harry Shearer as the man (or woman) who has climbed to the top of greasiest pole in American society (listen to the first two brilliant minutes).  Word.   And, as you know, the higher the monkey climbs the more everybody can see the monkey’s behind, but forget that, if you can.

It was a close election in 2000.  Goon squads were actually sent to disrupt the recount of votes in Florida, the state whose electoral votes would decide the election.  A challenge was made by lawyers for the Republican candidate in the Supreme Court, claiming irreparable harm if the count was allowed to continue.  It was decided  on partisan lines for the Republican, in a one-off decision that oddly cast itself as setting no precedent.  You know that we were attacked on 9/11/2001 by 19 Saudi fanatics.  In the aftermath of that attack Congress voted special wartime powers for the president and we invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq.  These wars were very costly, and bloody, and corrupt, and rage to this day, though we are no longer officially fighting in Iraq.  

The war powers were abused, as war powers often are, and these abuses continue to this day in the name of The War on Terror.  Things that shocked the conscience of many Americans no longer seem to bother too many people.  The War on Terror is to our basic freedoms and general sense of decency what the War on Drugs has long been to people who like to smoke a joint once in a while– as well as to the many victims of violence by international drug cartels who sell pot and other drugs to Americans.  Get as drunk as you want sometimes, that’s your right as an American, you know.  Smoke marijuana and you’re a drug addict and probably a pervert.   Everybody knows that.  

Just like everyone now knows you have to rough up people you suspect of hating you.   In fact, a jury just acquitted a hopped up, gun toting asshole in Sanford, Florida for shooting a black kid to death.   This guy was patrolling his multiracial neighborhood one night when he saw a black teenager in a hoodie.   He called the police to report the suspicious Skittles wielding young black man.  The cops told the guy to stay in his car, that the cops would come.  The guy followed the kid, got out of his car and confronted him.  The subsequent fatal shooting of the young man was deemed self-defense by a jury of six white women.  People are outraged and don’t know what to do.  Officials are warning blacks not to think of rioting.  Other people are rejoicing, that we are still a country that believes in laws, even ignorant laws like the Florida “Stand Your Ground” law that allows a person with a gun, who feels in danger, to kill the person he reasonably believes to be threatening him.

So, dude, if you come here, don’t hang out with your young black friends, at least not in Florida.  Some disturbed asshole with a police record can stalk you, confront you, grab you, and if you defend yourself, can argue that he felt in danger and then be legally justified in killing you with his handgun.

Hell of a day here in the USA.

On the other hand, I felt an unexpected surge of pure joy today watching the naming and honoring of a young baby girl, the new granddaughter of old friends of mine.  Impossible not to feel the love and good vibes in that room.

In other news, I got this mysterious email from an “edcsnowden@gmail.com”.  Makes me want to find the perpetrator (the sloppiness is revealing, methinks) and confront him, if you know what I’m saying.  I am, as you know, Ahimsa Man, but even I have my limits:

Ed Snowden <edcsnowden@gmail.com>
I saw  your site and was filled with wonder. Do you need an event planner and fundraiser? As I am both I also have experience with volunteers. I currently work with homeless families as well as homeless individuals suffering with the HIV virus.I would love to work with you as your are doing amazing things with small ones!
Sincerely, Ed Snowden

Cain’t Leave It Alone

Thought experiment.   Imagine:

Your father was brilliant and had a wicked sense of humor.  Your father was angry, and prone to panic attacks he could only calm by seizing control.   Your father was always alert, and on the defensive, because he perceived the world as a dangerous zero sum game, stark black and white, only one could win, everybody else: dead.

Your father had good reason to feel hopeless most of the time.    Mistreatment as an infant, we’ll leave it at that.   Brain research suggests that first-hand traumatic violence before the age of three can change certain souls into violent psychopaths.   It is all in the wiring of the brain, who is prone to become a serial killer or a Hitler, when he is violated mercilessly, or witnesses butchery, at a delicate age.  Let’s assume your father was not a psychopath, but that he shared several of the psychopath’s most salient traits.

Your father was brilliant, smart and cunning.  Although he felt helpless much of the time, he was adept at projecting an air of confidence and assurance.   He did this with his great intelligence, his antennae finely tuned to whatever emotions were stirring in the room.  He was expert at keeping people off balance, at controlling conversation.  

Most often he would take control of the conversation in the manner of Socrates, by directing the talk through a series of ever narrowing questions.  The answer to each would lead to the next link in the logical chain.  He was leading his adversary inexorably to a steep cliff, and would soon have him poised at the precipice, neutralized, at his mercy. 

Arthur Kinoy, famous lawyer and lifelong freedom fighter, once pointed out the brilliant legal reasoning in the Dred Scott decision.  The Dred Scott case was one of the judicial last straws before the so-called Civil War.   Kinoy was near the end, a brilliant version of Mr. Magoo, when I knew him.  “Read Dred Scott,” he told us, “you won’t regret it.  It’s a wonderful piece of legal legerdemain.  It’s extremely well-written and every link of the logical chain is perfectly connected to the one before it.  There’s not a single fuzzy moment of logic, actually; the conclusion is unassailable.  The only problem is the premise, the premise, as we all know now, is complete bullshit.”

Although Kinoy did not say ‘bullshit’, he found an equally forceful way to denounce the racist premise of Dred Scott.  As I told somebody the other day, I have a tin ear for quotations.  But that was Kinoy’s supremely important point, an unassailable legal argument, one that cannot be attacked from any legal angle, can be constructed on a pile of shit.

Let’s assume for purposes of this decision that (insert pile of shit here).  The structure that can be built on top of it can be a fortress all the armies in the world could not topple.  In Dred Scott the premise was the Negro’s natural inferiority to the White man.  This gave the White man a clear moral duty to protect the Negro.  From there it was a quick 90 page march to the incontrovertible conclusion that although Dred Scott, an escaped slave, was living in a free state he must be returned to his former master under the Fugitive Slave Act that was constitutional for most of the first century of our great republic.  Some people found this unappealable holding an outrage big enough to give their lives to overturn.

Anyway, I have a bike ride to take and no time to waste, you will forgive me if I plunge ahead to my point.

Imagine your father is like Antonin Scalia, brilliant, trenchant, sardonic;  a master at crafting an eloquent legal justification for his actions.   Your father asks your opinion of a current topic of debate.  Your father challenges you to justify your opinion.  As soon as you do, he seizes on one aspect of your answer and begins charging toward his inexorable conclusion.  Then you will be challenged to choose one of two answers to the question he’s been driving toward, a question only tangentially related to the original inquiry.  

In weighing your answer you will realize that both answers are traps.   If your father has had a particularly rough day, he will conduct this march to your capitulation in a very harsh manner.  

Afterwards, you will take the high road.  You will allow that as he’s framed the question, of course, he is completely correct, there is no possible argument.   You will point out that reasonable people could disagree about any of several key points foreclosed by his constant narrowing of the question.   Then you will tell him directly that you were perplexed to be asked for your opinion and then disrespected and browbeaten into answering an extremely narrow, re-framed question.  Email it off, go ahead, we’ll wait.  You’ll have the reply in seconds, no doubt.

Thanks.  Very interesting.  I’ll think about your take on all this.   I apologize  that our talk  got so contentious.  You deserve a more specific reply to your comments, one which I hope to tackle when things ease up around here,  More later..

And you will sigh, not more of this fucking shit.  And you will fashion, but not send, your heavy hearted reply.

Thanks.  Very interesting.  I’ll think about your take on all this.  

Note:  He does not specify what is interesting or what parts of your take he will think about.

I apologize  that our talk  got so contentious.  

Elegant, the way the passive voice was used.  This is a technique law students are actually taught to employ.  “If your client is guilty, whenever you must make any kind of admission, use the passive voice.  Not ‘he killed Tom with a knife’ but ‘Tom was killed with a knife’.  Not contradicting a fact in evidence, something you can’t do in a legal argument, just not stating outright that your boy was the one actually holding the knife when Tom was killed with the knife.  You may not be denying it, but it’s as close as you can come to leaving the person who did it out of the equation.

You deserve a more specific reply to your comments, one which I hope to tackle when things ease up around here,  More later.

This is actually a mischievous, hipper way of saying “More never”.  It’s also a classy and gentle way to issue a challenge to the other party:  try to whine about it after I frankly admitted that you deserve a reply.  What do you want from me?  This is clearly your problem, not mine.  

The bit about  I hope to tackle when things ease up around here is another beautiful construction.   “I hope” is excellent, since it is an aspiration, the expression of a fond intention, something more noble than a promise but without the expectation built into giving your word.  “Tackle” is great, because it confesses that the work involved in giving the deserved reply would be strenuous, something of a challenge.  

But best of all is ‘when things ease up around here.’   An inspired echo of one of my father’s favorite lines, from his The Jokes That Killed Vaudeville collection.  “Let me borrow $20, I’ll pay you back as soon as my brother straightens up.”

And pocketing the twenty the vaudevillian gets ready to wink at the audience, “my brother the hunchback!”

Wink!

Eye Roll, please

I know how tedious stories of injustice are, and how depressing, especially here in America where we are by nature optimists.  You know, how many times can you hear about millions of indigent senior citizens being cut back from five Meals-on-wheels a week to four due to Sequestration, or the precocious little four year-old in Indiana whose mother can’t break it to him that he was lotteried out of Head Start next term, before you turn to the sports channel, or go shopping, or see what there is to snack on?

Or reading about some freshman  Congressman from Tennessee, let’s say, whose family owns a gigantic farm, and who gets a subsidy of $738 a day, (and, yes, some liberal prick actually took out a calculator and divided the average annual $269,000 farm subsidy this wealthy public servant gets into days…) while he advocates cutting the Food Stamp program that so many WalMart employees depend on?  (A more balanced, and almost incomprehensible, version of that story is here)

There’s a so-called debate in this country about values.  One side’s intellectuals cite the points made by a novelist who escaped from totalitarianism and had a lifelong hatred of “altruism” as though these strongly expressed opinions are slam dunk conclusions preempting any discussion of who deserves what.   The intellectuals of the other major party  dare not scream too loud at this, fundraising is a delicate art that must be constantly cultivated, and besides, most of the money in political campaigns is given by the top half of the 1%, and not all of them think that novelist Ayn Rand is an absurd source of moral, political and economic philosophy.

I may personally agree that it’s no sin for old people to cut back from five meals a week to four.  America has an obesity problem, you know?  I may agree that the brat in Indiana who wants to continue in Head Start when politicians have agreed to cut it across the board as part of their debate over who deserves what should stop whining, and so should his mother.  But if I do those things, I’m a bad person.  Really, think about it.  It’s only my opinion, but someone who justifies cutting food to the poor, on a philosophical theory about who deserves what, in a super-wealthy country where the wealthiest continue to grow wealthier while everyone else does not– bad person.

Of course, there is no law against being a bad person.  Nor about a bad person being an elected public servant, leaving office and working for an average of 1000% more in the private sector as a lobbyist.   And I know it sounds terrible when you use a number like 1000%, it’s really only ten times as much.  If you take the actual numbers, it doesn’t really look so bad at all.  The public servant makes, say, $120,000 a year to serve, that servant can make much more in the private sector, but they make a sacrifice in pay in order to serve the rest of us.  So is it so unfair that the public servant leaves office with contacts, entree and expertise and makes $1,200,000 as a lobbyist?  If you look at it like that, it hardly seems unfair.  Look at it this way, it’s like the person only made $660,000 a year for those two years, only $480,000 a year if you divide by three with two years of public service, hardly a top earner in the USA.

I know, I know, prepare the eye roll.  Here we go, I’m done now — and may we have…. an eye roll.