Category Archives: musing

If it was me

If it was me and a close friend I’d had for decades, since I was a kid, a person I loved, a person who finally found it impossible to remain friends with me in my embattled, inflamed marriage, called me to reconcile and be friends again, I would have taken him up on it.

Especially if it was true that I found this person unique in my life, funny and smart, still dreamed about him regularly, and both of my boys had very warm feelings toward him. I would have arranged a jam session with my two musician sons and my old friend, that would have been my first move.

There were many things I would have done that would have probably been better than sending him this text in response to a music clip he’d sent a few weeks earlier.

Just lovely! But I can’t contain my rage at the pussy assed Democrats and the pussies that they make Attorney General
who are too scared to put an ex President in jail. Fuck Garland. Imagine if the shoe had been on the other foot? Would have been the electric chair for Obama.

Well, on the plus side, at least he’s praying to God every morning with great devotion. As long as you’re right with your Creator, what do I have to say about anything?

If I don’t trust you…

I can’t make myself vulnerable, you might hurt me. You always hurt me, that’s why I don’t trust you.

You want me to be honest with you, but if I am honest, and you get upset, you will say I am attacking you. So I don’t trust you.

Since I don’t trust you, I am afraid because I don’t know what you will do. You can do anything. That’s what I’m afraid of, because I don’t trust you.

And around and around we go in this insane circular dance because there is no trust between us anymore. If we don’t have trust, what do we have?

All the love in the world can’t fix the crippling fear that takes hold, at the worst possible moment, when trust is dead.

Mediation to solve a dispute

Some conflicts lend themselves to mediation. Mediation, when successful, results in a compromise that gives each party more than they had when they came into mediation. Each party leaves a good mediation feeling that they now have enough.

My mother always felt that my sister and her children were ungrateful. She felt this because none of them ever said thank you when my mother took them to dinner every week. It burned my mother that my sister had never taught her children to say the words “thank you, Grandma.”

My sister’s position was that parents and grandparents give things to children and grandchildren out of love, and not in expectation of a show of gratitude. It annoyed my sister that her mother expected a polite show of gratitude from children she considered perfect as they were.

In this situation, had they been willing, a mediator could have made a great difference. The issue was very clear, and how to improve the conflict was also clear.

For purposes of their grandmother only, my sister’s children could have started saying “thank you, Grandma.” It would have made a big difference.

But, of course, my mother and my sister both insisted the other one would never agree to go to mediation and I dropped the idea after a while. The conflict lasted until the last days of my mother’s life.

In the situation where the conflict is “you hurt me” versus “no I did not, you fucking asshole,” I’m not sure what role a mediator would play, outside of hearing each party’s grievance against the other. Where is the mediated compromise in a conflict like this?

When trust is gone between two people

When trust is replaced by fear and defensiveness, your relationship is moribund, dead or starkly inauthentic.

Superficial friendship may be the best many people can do. It has its virtues. It rarely, if ever, hurts, it can be easily walked away from, should the need arise. Only a troubled friendship that felt like mutual trust and love over a long time can rip your heart apart.

“You broke my heart,” says one, feeling unfairly blamed for everything bad that happened between them.

“I did not, you just want to blame me and end our friendship.”

Set and match, if the stakes involve anger and a shudder of humiliation that makes honesty way too dangerous.

Stop Comparing Tragedies, dummy

Michael Rappaport makes an excellent point — we all have to stop comparing horrors. Suffering is not a goddamned competition.

The slave trade was murderous, it’s hard to imagine a worse life than being an American slave in 1850. The recent genocide of the Rohinga, last century’s slaughter of the Armenians, two holocausts among several. In between those genocides the Nazis built death camps, taking it to the next level.

Your new religious faith aside, Kan Ye, abortion clinics are not Auschwitz. And your self-avowed mental illness is not a defense for spreading insane hateful ideas, pant load.

Psych 101

Traumatic experiences in childhood often have long-term effects [1] on a person’s ability to trust, to form close bonds with others, to be honest. Let’s just apply a little psychology 101 to this needy disturbed, dangerous when wounded guy who’s constantly in the news.

His father was known to be a psychopath. He was a famously hard charging judgmental workaholic who parlayed millions of dollars in government grants and his own great business acumen, and willingness to take risks to keep and pass on every dollar of his money, into a billion dollar empire. The father had little use for his young fuck up son as he was grooming his charismatic oldest son to succeed him. Imagine the psychopathic father’s disappointment when he learned that his heir apparent was not a killer, didn’t have what it takes to take everything from everybody by constantly fighting to the death. So the much younger brother, an incorigible bully with limited smarts and very poor people skills, was eventually chosen and groomed to be a killer like Dad.

You don’t get much love from a psychopathic father, the best you get is approval when you carry out his orders. It’s a hard life for a sensitive young person.

When that sensitive young person was in his period of most intense need for his mother’s love and protection, before he was two, his cool, slightly distant and distracted mother became ill and was out of the house for many months, while her youngest son cried for her and got disgusted looks from psychopath dad when he got home from a long day of making the world in his image.

In other words, the time when this kid most needed love, understanding, appreciation and guidance, he was left alone and made to feel weak because of his whining. Is it hard to understand the kind of adult this hurt little boy would likely grow up into?

Imagine his relief a few years later when he got a younger brother, someone he could take out his frustrations on by tormenting every day. Kind of restored the little fucker’s belief in God.

Look at the rest of this now widely adored, widely despised, infamous, beleaguered rich reality TV star/F POTUS. You can draw a straight line from his early childhood injuries to his total war against anybody inclined in any way to contest his will.

And we are all, here in the United States and worldwide, much the poorer, and our lives much more precarious, than they were before this twisted creature came onto the world scene to prove to his psychopath daddy that he’s not a loser.

Winner!

[1]

Adverse Childhood Experiences, Part 23

Demons, fear and reflexive distrust

There are demons within us all, stirring terrors too formidable to face unless we’re forced to.  They are extremely painful to confront, even when we’re aided by somebody who has the skills and gentleness to help.  My father, a man with more demons than most, and better reason than most to host so many of the merciless little fuckers, always stressed that everybody has his demons and that it’s impossible to know what to make of someone else’s demons.  Never truer, in my experience, than with my father.   

Although, towards the end of his life I came to understand the source of some of my father’s major demons:  regular childhood face whippings from his mother, daily hunger, excruciating, humiliating poverty, illiterate, defeated-by-life father, low expectations from his extended family, a feeling of shame for being stupid because he couldn’t learn to read — they only figured out he was legally blind when he was about eight and the brand new New Deal made it possible for him to have his 20/400 vision corrected with glasses (he went on to get a graduate degree in history).   If that’s not enough childhood pain to support a thriving colony of demons, I can only imagine what the rest of the story was.  At the very end of his life, he still believed he’d been the dumbest Jewish kid in the haunted small town he grew up in, by far.

Our most ferocious demons make us rage sometimes.   If someone touches one accidentally WATCH THE FUCK OUT!   Often, after losing your cool and lashing out, you feel embarrassed, particularly if the people you care about are victims of your anger.   If one of your demons is shame, it is humiliating to acknowledge that you did something wrong and hurt somebody. You will have developed strategies to not feel the burning of deep shame.  Better to get angry again, indignant over and over, than to feel mortified that you’ve hurt someone you care about for a weak reason, or no reason you can talk about.

You stop trusting the person you hurt, if they won’t shut up about their need to talk about what the hell happened, their need to put everything on the table.  If everything is laid out clearly, your understandable human weakness is exposed.  Weakness may be understandable to others, but it’s intolerable to you, because your demons will immediately start painfully sodomizing you for being imperfect, weak, capable of hurting others who, sometimes, maddeningly, refuse to pretend they weren’t hurt. 

If you’re vulnerable to the need to be perfect,  you’re in for a lot more pain than the average schmuck who can forgive herself for sometimes acting badly.   We all sometimes act badly, no matter how diligently we try not to hurt people we care about. 

The only way back to mutual care is through making amends and forgiveness.  Forgiveness takes place after the hurt is acknowledged, it can’t happen in any meaningful way if the person asking for forgiveness insists the other person is a pussy who simply can’t put the past in the past and insists on bringing up a painful situation that nobody can do anything about because it’s in the past, duh!  

Many people find it impossible to forgive themselves.  The hurt we suffered at our own hands can only be forgiven by being honest and gentle with ourselves.   It works with the self the same way it does with others.  We truly didn’t mean to hurt ourselves, acknowledge the accident, cure it with taking better care never to hurt ourselves that way again.   This doesn’t mean shutting ourselves off from others, it means accepting they we’re humans who do stupid things sometimes and there is no point whipping ourselves over them, much better to learn important life lessons from mistakes and avoid repeating the same bad pattern.

When you hurt somebody, and they tell you they’re hurt, listen to them, do not allow a demon you can’t control to jump in and angrily cut them off.  Understand why they were hurt, empathize, assure them you will do your best to not do that to them again.  The same goes for when we act in a way that hurts ourselves.  Unless you do yourself the kindness of letting yourself off the hook for dumb mistakes, the hook gets sharper and sharper, sinks in deeper and deeper.  In the end, that hook is never coming out.

The alternative to making amends is that the truth of hurtful past events becomes poison to you, and the one you hurt.  A clear recitation of the thing you can’t talk about is seen as an aggressive, threatening frontal attack.  You marshal your armies, but they have very little to work with in defending something that can only be defended by spraying ordnance wildly.  You accuse, express distrust, and fear, sprinkle in some regret, quickly followed by more anger, and tell them how merciless they are.   Direct questions can be uncomfortable, an assault. What can you say to something like: was anything I said inaccurate, unfair, unkind?  All you can do is hurl something back “you’re unfair and mean!”  Sometimes we are at fault, and if we never yield, do the same thing over and over, fight responsibility and the idea that we can change our behavior in any meaningful way, that’s about it for that relationship.

There is no genius mediator, supremely skilled at her job, who can fix that distrust, denial, anger and inability to forgive yourself enough to reach compromise with people you love, in a single short session where everyone gets a chance to express how they were hurt and the mediator makes sure each one knows they’ve been heard.   At least, I can’t picture that kind of alchemist mediator.   If there’s only mutual hurt and distrust going in, how does the process have a chance to heal anything?

A blessed life

There are among us, I’d imagine, people who don’t need to struggle with demons living inside of them.  Impulses and fears that gnaw and chafe and cause us to exert ourselves, sometimes at terrible cost, not to succumb to terror, shame and rage.  There may be some people who simply don’t have to contend with demons, though I doubt it.

I mentioned to an uncle that his nephew, though I don’t know him well, strikes me as someone who doesn’t wrestle with many demons.  Personable, strong, good looking, doing meaningful work that he is good at and enjoys, surrounded by loving friends and family, he seems to move through the world with grace and ease.  I told the uncle that I imagine he also has some demons.

“He has no demons,” said the uncle.  “He’s never had to really suffer in his life so far, he’s never had to deal with any of the pain the rest of us know.  He will, but up until now his life has been blessed.  From the beginning he’s been loved, protected, respected, treated as well as a person can be treated.”

Pretty good blessing, I thought, even though the uncle’s formulation of his nephew’s demon-free life seemed a little glib.   

The Categorical Imperative

Hannah Arendt reported her  surprise to hear Adolf Eichmann, a self-righteous fool of ridiculous proportions who wrestled with his native German language while defending himself in front of three German Jewish judges in Jerusalem, correctly answer a judge’s question about his understanding of Kant’s categorical imperative, which he himself had made reference to.  Arendt seemed shocked that Eichmann, who lived in a world of mindless cliché, had grasped the principle: acting in a way that, if everyone acted that way, the world would be a better, more just place.  Of course, Eichmann’s understanding of Kant came with it’s own grotessquely idiotic punchline.

Eichmann told the judges that Kant’s imperative was a moral test of one’s actions.  If your action was done by everyone, would it make the world a better, more just place?   Or, as Kant put it:  Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

It would be a better, more just world if everyone agreed never to torture another person, say. You could apply that agreement to mankind as a whole and everyone would benefit from it.  Except, of course, those who make their living by torturing others.  Your actions, of course, should never be dictated by comparing yourself to the worst humans, but by holding yourself up to the standards of the best among us.

In Eichmann’s mind he had merely done a difficult job as well as he was able in the interests of what was best for everybody.  You could argue with the Nazi methods, yes, he himself agreed that the mass extermination of people perhaps better banished and sent to live in distant lands, might seem extreme.  He himself, he pointed out, had never personally killed anyone.  However, much as he may have disagreed with his superiors in their method, if the goal was a noble one, a goal you believed in, and the world would be better if the goal was achieved, who was he to question the decisions of wiser people he owed allegiance and obedience to?   If everyone stopped doing their duty because they had a twinge of hesitation, what could humanity ever hope to accomplish?  The universal principle, to Eichmann, the Categorical Imperative, if you will, is that duty is the highest calling, or something along those lines.   And, anyway, he was only making sure the trains were full, and left on time, and arrived on time at their destinations.  As his duty and oath of obedience prescribed. 

As we know, the Devil can quote scripture and a medicore-minded Nazi can wrap his murderous employment in Kantian morality.  Try seriously applying the Categorical Imperative to anything Donald Trump has ever done in his life.  

Every day in the news there are new revelations about the rot at the center of Donald Trump’s world.  A new scandal, some corrupt new detail that turns the stomach.  Picture anything the man and his minions do and imagine everyone in the world doing it. 

Your boss foments a violent riot to overturn an election he lost — you dutifully cover up his crime by destroying all evidence and obstructing all investigations.  You are his Secret Service, after all, you took an oath to protect him.   Your agency paid up to ten times the going rate for hotel rooms while defending POTUS, while his idiot son lyingly claimed he was giving the SS rockbottom, preferential rates.  1.4 million dollars and counting for security to stay in hotels owned by the guy you were sworn to protect, paid to that same grifting, lying dog-hater.  SO?   Do it if you can get away with it is a good universal law, no?

During a deadly pandemic, government health officials were replaced by unqualified loyalist drones like Pence, Kushner and economist Peter Navarro.  Under them the CDC was ordered to cover up how infectious and deadly Covid-19 was, weaponize attempts to combat it, fight masks, vaccines, all efforts to try to control it — America sets the world record for Covid-19 deaths, as a direct result of your boss’s need to score political points during mass death he himself added tens of thousands of American corpses to by his policies, and lack of same.   

Go down the list and see if you can apply even Eichmann’s twisted version of the Categorical Imperative to it.  Everything the motherfucker does — from compulsive lying and bragging, to constant childish whining, to viciously attacking anyone who does not obey his will, to throwing every loyal sidekick under the bus when it benefits him, to his world-class petty vindictiveness, to profiting on misery, to his indifference to mass death while surrounding himself with corrupt cronies who defy legal subpoenas and take the Fifth over and over when forced to answer questions about their flawed vessel master under oath — is despicable and crassly self-serving.

And isn’t that just the point for people who bask in the reflection of the very worst among us and luxuriate in the indulgence of their worst impulses, secure in the warm embrace of their angry, cynical leader who praises Ku Klux Klan supporters and Nazis as very fine people, while begging, deceptively and quite successfully, for money from the least among us?

I picture the book Hannah Arendt would write about their trials.