Category Archives: musing

Culture? You’re soaking in it.

When I was a kid there was a long running TV commercial for a dishwashing liquid whose maker claimed it was so great at softening and moisturizing a woman’s skin that Marge, the manicurist, would soak her customer’s hands in it (on the sly, of course). Marge would quickly work how beautifully this wonderful dishwashing product worked to soften skin into every chat. When the customer asked Marge where she could try this amazing product Marge hit ’em with the punchline “you’re soaking in it!” The startled customer would start to pull her hand back, but Marge would gently but firmly put the hand back in the dishwashing liquid and everybody smiled and remembered the product was so good that you could literally soak in it to soften and moisturize your hands.

“You’re soaking in it” serves as an excellent (if mildly strained) metaphor for how dimly we see culture and most other things that surround us, seemingly immutable things that appear to be inevitable. The way things are, and have “always been”, is a powerful reinforcement of just about anything.

There is a compelling reason the US government doesn’t provide health care to all citizens as a right of citizenship. It’s complicated. Same for the reason that millions of underemployed Americans can’t presently go through a government sponsored training program to become skilled home health aides, with a guaranteed decent income, benefits and a pension. Both have to do with what we’re all soaking in, how the “free market” profit motive drives American health care, the lucrative middle man corporations who rake in billions selling these services, skimming a percentage off the top, usually underpaying the unskilled workers who often provide tender, intimate care to homebound older Americans in their last days. There are laws in place, and overlapping regulations, customs, cultural beliefs, etc. that keep things like affordable health care as a right and the right to decent pay for doing a tough, shitty, very important job out of the public discussion most of the time.

If you watch commercial TV you are going to see television commercials. Duh. Nothing is for free, and our constitution acknowledges, in its copyright clause, that all creativity is motivated by a desire for profit. You want something for free? Pay the premium to not see ads or shut up about the constant commercials. It is unthinkable that anyone in a free society would do anything for free, except perhaps favors for friends and family members. In God we trust, YOU pay cash, brah.

Some men see things as they are and ask, “”Why?”” I dream things that never were and ask, “”Why not?””

We can either, in the great old phrase (made famous by Robert Kennedy, who tweaked a line from George Bernard Shaw), talk about things exactly as they are, limited by existing law and culture, or imagine better things that don’t presently exist and change culture and laws to make them real Maybe our worst failures, as humanists who believe in basic human equality and a right to dignity, are failures of imagination.

To me, one of the features of Hilary’s 2016 campaign that doomed her to win the popular vote by only 3,000,000, and come up 78,000 short in the Electoral College (how about that vestige of slavery and rule by the wealthy for a “why?”) was her assertion that changing institutions takes time, sometimes generations, and that steady, incremental progress is the best we can realistically hope for, that radical change is unwise and uncalled for, no matter how pressing the need might seem, and so on.

The status quo, she implied, while not perfect, was pretty good for most people. Her opponent, the malignant Orange Polyp, spoke directly to the grievances of millions of disgruntled Americans when he said he knew how rotten to the core and corrupt American politics was and that he alone could fix it. He’d drain the swamp, build the wall, repeal Obamacare and replace it with something much better, and cheaper, that would cover everything.

This is a simplistic little post on an obscure blahg by a know-it-all who works for free, but there is hopefully a kernel of a thought in it for somebody. The best, and the worst, are things we imagine in the absence of actual experience. Few things we dread turn out to be as terrible as we fear, not everything we look forward to turns out to be as great as we dream it will be. Still, it’s a useful exercise, I think, in looking for solutions, to suspend disbelief based on the reality of a seemingly unalterable legal/social/cultural arrangement that we are all soaking in and that nobody can change. For generating possible solutions to complicated, miserable, often deadly problems, why not imagine something better and ask “Why not?”

Divergent thinking vs. strict logic

If you read this blahg you’ve probably noticed that I am almost always annoyed by irrational narratives. Sounds judgmental, of course, to call somebody’s worldview irrational at a time when an angry crowd screaming “we know who you are! we know where you live!” to people who testified in favor of a mask mandate for school children is just as entitled to their opinions as those following scientific advice about preventing the spread of a persistent and sometimes deadly pandemic.

Every one of us is at times ruled by irrationality, even the most doggedly rational among us — fear of the dark, fear of appearing fearful, fear of death, what have you. We all may come to mistaken conclusions, based on what we know, since what we know is often not the complete picture. Add a single piece of solid information, missing from our previous evaluation, and we will come to a different logical conclusion [1]. Entire nations are subject to irrationality, as we see daily in these troubled times. By changing the concept of “destructive asshole selfishness” to “freedom!” wars are launched and bombs begin to fall, to the cheering of “patriots”.

I was thinking of divergent thinking, a way of thinking that generates a web of connections, sets out many things to consider and sometimes leads to unexpected creative solutions. Divergent thinking is not linear, not strictly logical, sometimes the leaps from thought to thought cannot be explained to others, or if they can be explained, others sincerely won’t give a shit, but it is a way of making new connections and coming across surprising, sometimes important, ideas or solutions that a strict logical flow chart will never provide. Creative people operate this way without thinking about it, it is part of creativity to let the mind wonder where it will during creative pursuits.

It’s the difference between hitting up google for an answer and going with it and reading something that refers you to an unrelated source that teaches you something new about the question you googled. To confirm a definition, or get some background, or a source for what you’re talking about, a search engine is great. To find a concrete answer that is irrefutable (location and hours of a restaurant you want to go to) it’s amazingly handy.

The problem is that the twitch of a few fingers and the instant answer replaces the old, more time-consuming, way of researching and learning about things — finding a footnote on a page that leads you to a source you never heard of where you read something that alerts you to an entire body of knowledge you never knew existed. The “answers” that experts and idiots put out there are easy to find online, but the underlying ongoing discussion that leads to these conclusions is not as readily available from a smartphone. Hitting a screen for an answer is much different than turning the pages of a book, which has an index, bibliography and so on that contains many more leads you’d never see with a Google hit.

In law school, during the first semester, students (at least in my day) were not allowed to use to electronic legal databases that provide updated legal sources instantly. We were left to struggle in the library, searching the stacks for a book that could give us a clue, a lead to another set of books we’d never heard of, where the answer might be provided. This forced us to acquaint ourselves with the wide range of legal sources in the vast rooms full of books in the law library. The CFR (Code of Federal Regulations), which can be found instantly with a few keystrokes, was something each of us had to discover the existence of for ourselves in the course of those frustrating first semester hours in the law library. You’d find a legal decision that seemingly helped your argument, but you were instructed to always consult the pocket part, the annual update inserted in the front of the book, that contained the latest action on the case you thought was promising. The pocket part might contain a mention of your case. Oops, reversed by 19 U.S. 173 (2001)… Searching online you’d get this reversal of precedent instantly, without having to read the previous case, or even the case notes, of the overruled case. Sometimes these prior cases have important information not even mentioned in the ruling that reversed it (this is a specialty of ideological judges like Kavanaugh and Roberts). Read only the decision overturning the case and know less about the issues than you did going in.

Divergent thinking is useful for many things, especially things like looking at history. Human collective action is rarely motivated by strict rational consideration. Why did this mob feel this way on this date? That open-ended question leads down many avenues that a strict quest for “the reason” will rarely turn up. Here’s a divergently derived example:

Ukrainians slaughtered almost my entire family, on my mother’s side, one hot evening in August 1943. My grandmother, who lost everyone, was a lifelong leftist, influenced by the internationalist Marxist commissars who came with the revolutionary Soviet troops that liberated her area of the Ukraine briefly. They taught her that the future of mankind was one without anti-Semitism, without wars between nations, without the forever exploitation of the poor by the rich. It was an intoxicating message for my teenaged grandmother, that she was living in the dawn of a new era of human justice. A few years later, the leader of the Soviet Union, a mass-murdering psychopath some called Uncle Joe, killed as many as four million Ukrainians (mostly by starvation) to prove his point about his view of international justice (which he’d changed to Socialism in One Country). A few years after that, Herr Hitler’s forces “liberated” Ukraine from the Communists. The execution of my family? Logical in that context, Ukrainians viewed Jews as Communist sympathizers and took revenge on their murderers. But, logical?

The helpful term ‘divergent thinking’ was apparently coined by the psychologist J.P. Guilford in 1956 (the year I was born), as I learned from more than two minutes of exhaustive internet research. Guilford contrasted Divergent Thinking with Convergent Thinking, and the little two minute video I’ve linked to in the last sentence sets the whole thing out nicely. Spoiler alert: both forms of thinking are important.

Divergent thinkers can be a pain in the ass, constantly bringing up random ideas seemingly unrelated to anything, prolonging the discussion endlessly. Convergent thinkers can be a pain in the ass, continually focusing on the problem as having only one logically correct solution, being intolerant of “distractions” in this quest. We are all pains in the ass to people not exactly like ourselves.

I tend toward divergent thinking much of the time. If you are this way and you write, vigilance is required (and the passive voice used), since you need to lay things out in a way that doesn’t confuse, or lose, the reader. My solution, sometimes, is footnotes. A paragraph that slows the flow too much (like the digression about law school above) might be better shoved into a note at the bottom, for anyone interested. On the other hand, a strict linear telling, without providing pertinent background perspective to aid understanding and even empathy, can create a dry and pedantic piece [2]. Like anything else, balance between these two ways of thinking is crucial.

I’m listening to historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s excellent Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. I will post an abstract of the book when I’m done listening to it and making notes on it. One thing that strikes me again and again is the way she eschews the strict chronological telling, jumping from Berlusconi to Putin to Mussolini to Mobutu to Trump and back to Herr Hitler. In this way we are constantly struck by the uncanny similarities in how all modern “strongmen” operate. She is not making a checklist and comparing A-B between these various dictatorial leaders, in order, in one chapter after another. Instead, without making direct comparisons, she provides a ton of detailed information that makes her point for her.

Example: In describing the excellent work lobbyists did to internationally legitimize the rule of Mobutu, longtime dictator of Zaire [3], she lays out a few crucial services the lobbying firm Manafort and Stone performed for the corrupt, murderous African leader. She doesn’t mention Manafort’s heroic and well-paid efforts to get corrupt pro-Putin Ukrainian Viktor Yanukovych elected president of Ukraine (he was forced to flee to Russia after a popular anti-corruption uprising drove him from office), at least not there. She does mention that all strongmen deploy pardons for those who perform arguably criminal services for them.

Anyway, friends, I could obviously go on all day. Let’s end it here, with a final thought on the usefulness of a little daydreaming that can generate a web of ideas for problem solving. It’s a good way to generate ideas, as you relax and exercise the muscles of critical thinking, if nothing else.

The Fuhrer indulges an adoring young fan.

[1]

I heard a great anecdote, from Zen teacher Jack Kornfield (on the late Joe Frank’s show), that illuminates this. A man on a train is angry that several children are wildly carrying on as the father sits head in hands, not stopping them. He confronts the father about controlling his unruly kids. The father nods, apologizes and explains that they’ve all just come from their mother’s funeral and nobody knows what to do. Perspective instantly changed from anger to sympathy, based on that new fact.

[2]

To paraphrase the Orange Polyp, “I prefer my pedantic pieces juicy, not dry.”

[3]

Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga was a Congolese politician and military officer who was the President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1965 to 1971, and later Zaire from 1971 to 1997. He also served as Chairman of the Organisation of African Unity from 1967 to 1968. Wikipedia

The Limits of Human Empathy

Even among good, kind, well-meaning people, which most people are, empathy has its natural limitations. Unless we have actually experienced a thing, the specific suffering it causes can be hard to understand, even inconceivable, until someone who has suffered a certain way recounts it to us in a way that moves us to empathize. We can also get overwhelmed by empathy when we watch a video of victimization that is particularly harrowing. Both of these forms of empathy are of generally short duration, because we are most enduringly empathetic to the troubles of those most like us.

I was reminded of this the other night when a woman I’ve known for decades told me she always took the NYC bus rather than the subway, had done so since her teenaged years. It took her longer to get around, but she always sat near the driver and didn’t have to worry about creeps bothering her. When she told me this I understood immediately, and it made perfect sense, but I have been on 2 a.m. subways many times over the years and never once worried about a creep making a creepy sexual advance in my direction. I literally never thought about how regularly menacing things are on a late night subway for a woman.

Same with race, whites argue about the extent of racism all the time, pugnacious experts like Bill Barr use it as a potent “fuck you”, saying there is no systemic racism in the American justice system and Blacks better show gratitude to the cops who disproportionately, inadvertently, manhandle and kill them, or else.

Like my female friend on the bus, no black person I’ve ever met has any doubt about the prevalence of racism in the USA. When you directly encounter a reality every day, it takes on a much different aspect than when you imagine something in a thought experiment, with no danger of actually experiencing the thing you are weighing in your mind.

Any black person I’ve ever talked to about history immediately identifies famous progressive president and League of Nations idealist Woodrow Wilson as a racist, klan sympathizer, and wanton slaughterer of brown people. I was an adult before I came across the indisputable proof that the man who re-segregated the federal government and gushed over D.W. Griffith’s epic three-reel paean to the heroic Ku Klux Klan as being “like history written in lightning!”, the only US president who was a child of the Confederacy, was, whatever else he might have been, a white supremacist. He put the first Jew on the Supreme Court, distinguished champion of justice Louis Brandeis, but it’s safe to assume Wilson didn’t think much of the masses of Jews, particularly the poor ones that were teeming into North American slums during his time.

This same principle of the empathy/experience disconnect works for just about any vexation you can think of. Think of how truly empathetic you can be about a situation you have never remotely experienced yourself. You feel terrible, sure, and empathize at once, even if abstractly, because suffering is suffering, but, truly, how much can you actually identify with an unfamiliar horror?

A terminal cancer diagnosis, dementia, a child with a terrible lifelong disease, or who dies as an infant, sudden blindness, being a quadriplegic, being poor, being the victim of serial rape, or beatings, working full-time for less money than you need to pay rent, being unfairly imprisoned, being a family member or close friend of the wrongfully convicted and executed, or the family of the guy busted for selling joints who causes his entire family to be evicted and disqualified from public housing for life, or the guy who spends many pre-trial months in prison after arrest because he can’t afford to post bail — and then, on advice of counsel, takes a plea for “time served” for a crime he didn’t necessarily commit, the list is literally endless.

So, sure, many of us are kind, well-intentioned people who truly hate injustice and will leap to help anyone in trouble when we see it. That is not the question here. I’m raising the slippery idea that unless you’ve actually experienced a certain horror, empathy is far from automatic or intuitive. We can imagine the pain of a certain disease or loss, the agony of being wrongfully convicted and having the rest of your life become a one-sided battle you cannot win, but we are imagining it.

And sometimes we imagine it only when confronted with an evocation of it so wrenching that even a monster would be moved by it. Like watching big, strong George Floyd, legitimately in fear for his life, in a nation with arguably no racism in policing, being slowly murdered by several police officers who will file a routine, false report about Floyd getting hysterical (you know how they get) having a medical emergency and dying en route to the hospital, poor guy.

Cover note to a former close friend

I will fold this up, put it in an envelope, and send it to this longtime friend who told me he loved me like a brother, before repudiating me forever. Oh, well. I don’t write it for him, I write it for myself. You be the judge:

Maybe friendship, like everything else in nature, has a natural life span. On the other hand, long, close friendships that end in mutual enmity, while both former friends are still alive, reflect an unwillingness (or inability) to reach a humane understanding. Not that humans are primarily rational, of course, as we see on the world stage daily, and friendship is not an entirely rational thing. On the other hand, concluding that a person you once loved and trusted is an irredeemably hurtful asshole reflects a fundamental emotional/intellectual disconnect, an irreconcilable battle with your past self. Most tragically, in a world where we’re lucky to connect with a few kindred souls over the decades, this fatal falling out cuts off all possibility of redemption, a more nuanced understanding that leads to reconciliation and a better life. The traditional image of heaven, old misunderstood enemies tearfully embracing — not for chumps like us.

To clarify, I’m not trying to change your mind about anything. It’s pointless to go over the angry phone call when you rang to confront me about what you said was my dangerously out of control anger. If nothing else, your aggravating show of “concern” was a reflection of emotions that had long been simmering in your heart. We’ll agree that your inability to understand why I was so upset when you dismissed my right to have strong feelings about a screwing you couldn’t personally relate to was genuine.

We can safely assume I’ve always been the kind of vicious, hypocritical, ruthlessly angry hurtful fuck you now conclude I’ve always been, regardless of my protestations of patience and mildness, and that you’ve always been a hectoring bully confidently pessimistic about the possibility of real human growth. Not a problem. I try to learn lessons from things like a falling out with a friend of fifty years. I know saying that is provocative, especially to someone who doesn’t believe people are capable of truly learning from pain, or making meaningful changes in their emotional lives. It is one more of my irrationally superior tics, something that makes a lazy lost soul like me so despicably infuriating.

Here is a bit I wrote the other day, trying to work out some more lessons from life, as I wait for the update on whether or not I am dying of prostate cancer. Have a great day, man!

Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur

The similarities between famous authoritarian regimes of the past and the Trumpist push toward autocracy are remarkable. The eternal lying is one thing, and it is seemingly integral to the fascist idea: making people doubt and despise evidence that points away from the infallibility of the Leader and letting the Leader have the last word in everything. The goal of a fascist regime is to make the majority of the population see the world through the special fascist lens. That lens presents everything in a light most beneficial to Party and Leader. I think it’s fair to call that lens “culture.”

Those who seek an honest accounting of American history, an open discussion of things like racism at law here in the USA, are often disparaged as “culture warriors”. When I hear culture warrior I always think of Bill Barr, the most pugnacious public example (excluding right wing cable TV and radio ‘personalities’) in recent memory. Barr has a rigid religious worldview in which he and his fellow believers represent good and all critics are evil, depraved, corrupt degenerate atheists.

Blacks and people of conscience turn out in the millions to protest the routine police mistreatment, violence toward and occasional killing, of unarmed minority citizens, (after one outrageous example of cold-blooded murder captured on video in its entirety). Barr warns them that if they expect protection from the police they’d better start showing some fucking respect. Calls them ‘anarchists,’ godless anti-fascists, denies there is anything close to systemic racism in policing, threatens them with the full power of the State if they continue to protest, and so forth.

Culture is how you see the world, what you cherish, how you expect others to behave. In some cultures playing music loudly in a beautiful public space is a generous service to others who might enjoy the same music. Other cultures regard this as an aggressive intrusion on nature and privacy. Freedom from tyranny is a value in most cultures, defining what exactly freedom is, and what constitutes tyranny, varies from culture to culture.

You can phrase certain forms of coercion in a way that makes them sound very much like freedom, or like the worst form of tyranny. I learned in high school that words like “freedom” and “tyranny” are “glittering generalities” — they sound great but mean very little on their own. A mask mandate during a raging pandemic is tyranny, or prudence, depending on the culture you belong to.

The real political battle in the USA, and in many parts of the world, is over culture, since your view of culture determines everything. Culture is a powerful weapon in the hands of political hucksters and ambitious, partisan conmen, just the mention of a deadly threat to our “culture” and way of life galvanizes crowds. There is a huge, lucrative industry enlisted in the fight over culture, market testing resonant catchphrases (“death tax,” “death panels,” “climate alarmists,” “right to (fetal) life”). The idea is to phrase everything in a way that will make people agree with you, and “owning” your enemies, while ideally simplifying the discussion to whose culture will prevail.

“My body, my choice,” depending on which culture you are part of, is either a declaration of a woman’s right to decide whether to give birth or of a patriot’s right to resist a vaccine, not be forced to wear a mask, to be able to freely spread a so-called pandemic to whoever the hell he wants to spread it to.

When thinking about Trump and the GOP, all roads seem to lead back to Germany and Herr Hitler, who was a Trump-like rock star to millions of Germans. Listening to some “alternative factual” dissection of culture and current events by a member of MAGA nation, I flashed on the old Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur, the original Nazi outfit that fought the war for control of German culture. Though its organizer, Alfred Rosenberg, may have been a less adept a Hitler ass-kisser than others in the ambitious, highly competitive, jealous Nazi hierarchy (particularly Josef Goebbels, who soon took jurisdiction over Nazi culture), the group did its work from 1929 (a few years before Hitler took power, think culture champion Rush Limbaugh) until it was eventually absorbed completely into other Nazi agencies eight or nine years later. Rosenberg, the thinking man’s Nazi, nonetheless held high office in the Nazi hierarchy to the end and, for all his hard work, was eventually executed after the Nuremberg tribunal ruled he’d committed crimes against humanity [1].

What was the work of the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur? As you might expect, fighting a war for how Germans saw the world. For example:

Degenerate jungle music. Here is a cartoonishly unhuman Negro, wearing a Jewish star, making hideous jazz music that is obviously degenerate and not fit for good German ears. The Nazis banned jazz (though the Gypsy jazz of Django Reinhardt in occupied Paris was prized by many SS officers) and launched a massive national campaign against degenerate visual artists, displaying the works of Picasso, Matisse, Chagall and a bunch of German-Jewish degenerate artists in a wildly popular traveling museum art show.

Real Germans, citizens of the Third Reich learned, loved realistic, idealized depictions of Aryans, healthy, strong and happy. This kind of art is known as Heroic Realism and is often used by autocrats for propaganda purposes. Odd note, the Entartate Kunst museum show of degenerate art in Nazi Germany was the most well-attended art show of all-time, until the Metropolitan Museum in NYC mounted the wildly popular Treasures of King Tut exhibit a half century later.

High ranking Nazi Hermann Goering (who owned a large collection of plundered Entartate Kunst) famously said “when I hear the word culture I reach for my gun.” Indeed.

The Poisonous Dwarf, Nazi Minister of Public Enlightenment, J. Goebbels, in a chipper mood

[1]

The author of a seminal work of Nazi ideology, The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), Rosenberg is considered one of the main authors of key Nazi ideological creeds, including its racial theory, persecution of the Jews, Lebensraum, abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles, and opposition to what was considered “degenerate” modern art. He is known for his rejection of and hatred for Christianity,[2][3] having played an important role in the development of German Nationalist Positive Christianity.[4]

source

Drop me a line

When I was a teenager, and I made friends who lived in other states, we’d keep in touch by letters and phone calls. Long distance calls were expensive, but letters could be written any time, drawn on, dropped in the mail and delivered within two or three days for the price of a full-sized chocolate bar (in those days less than a quarter, believe it or not). “Drop me a line,” we’d say, taking our leave of each other, and get busy, on a bus, a train, lying on a couch, setting pen to paper. It was always a great moment when a return letter arrived, particularly when a friend came up with an inventive envelope (for a time we always tried to top each other with wild, ridiculous hand-made envelopes).

Now, those were, to be sure, primitive times, very similar, in terms of communication, to the previous hundred years or so. We did not carry small, powerful personal computers in our pockets that could also be used to text, tweet, make phone calls and video chats. We sat and wrote by hand, folded the pages, put them in an envelope, addressed it, put a stamp on it and dropped it in the mail box. Seems unreal now, even though I sometimes still send drawings and scrawled notes to a small circle of people from time to time.

Here’s a “funny” thing, though. People regularly don’t know what to say when they get something in the mail (and, admittedly, my letters are often more visual than literary, so theres’s also that). As often as not I never even find out my letter has reached its intended recipient, unless I follow up later by text. I have a few theories, including that people in general don’t know how to react to “art” (particularly if it is not monetized, official, etc.), but it is notable, I think, that if you ask a question in a colorful, handwritten letter, you will virtually never get an answer to that question. Although, of course, it’s not hard to see why this letter may not have received a response:

I get that there’s something a bit maniacal-looking there. It is part of my graphomania, when it strikes, I am helpless against it. On the other hand, it is not uncommon to have a question, asked simply, unaddressed when it is written on a page, with other stuff, and mailed to somebody. This is my experience anyway, not many people are attuned to the art of old-time correspondence in our era of super-terse hyper LOL instant response-demanding knee jerks. It was not always this way, my young friends, and, like anything else, the old way was not without its pains in the ass.

I had a close friend for many years, a prodigious correspondent, who was a solipcist. By this I mean that he was convinced of his own reality in the world, (because he thought, and therefore, he was), but was not convinced anyone could ever truly know what was in somebody else’s mind or heart, or even if they actually existed, independently, outside of his perception. This belief, to me, is the essence of intellectualized alienation and a ticket to misery, as it was in his case, but he sure loved to write long, complex letters, in spite of his deep skepticism about anyone actually being able to truly understand anything he expressed.

At a certain point, tired of getting ten page, two-sided letters, mostly about his troubles and unresponsive to anything I’d written, I negotiated a deal with him. We agreed that in every letter, often at the end, we’d re-read the other person’s letter and briefly respond to everything of note. These quick responses would be set off between ellipses, the old dot dot dot (or in the Orange Polyp’s case dot dot dot dot dot dot) in the manner of famous antisemitic doctor and novelist Ferdinand Celine… the Celine section we called it… as in “now I will review and Celine your latest”.

It turned out to be a great innovation. You’d get actual feedback on things you’d written, a response.

“Yer description of the putz — on the nose … no, I never tried ayahuasca, did you ever find some?… she’s always like that, remember August 1971 for but one famous example … they suck, as you have noted whenever the name of their Nazi owner comes up … funny bit about your urinary troubles, if you know what I mean … further comments on the issue of solipcism are in order, remind me next time, if you actually DO exist independent of my perceptions of you …”

While not spontaneous or ideal, this enforced mutual responsiveness was a great improvement to our correspondence and probably extended our friendship by several years.

To me, having a dialogue is like having a leisurely catch. You throw me the ball, I hold it for a second, feeling its texture and its weight, and I toss it back to you, placing the ball in the air where you can easily catch it. We do this until we agree we’ve done it enough. Nothing is more natural, I think, than tossing a ball back and forth on a nice day.

This kind of meditative back and forth is tragically a more and more rare experience in our always in a hurry, time is money, make your point in 140 characters, too late, wait, I was distracted, what was I saying? society. Because we are always in a hurry, and time is not only money but money is free speech, and because so much free speech is also false, and the firehose of mendacity sprays full bore, torrent so powerful it can rip your skin off … I’m sorry, what were you saying? Wait, I’m getting another call… oh, God, here’s a text coming in too, a very important one, can you… hang on, Oh I don’t believe it! I don’t fucking believe it! Wait til I send you this… on second thought, maybe not, can you hold, can I call… what the hell do they want now?… can you text me later?

Ah, you know what, I’ll drop you a line.

Though I’ve learned to deal with it better and better in recent years, I am predisposed to a tic about silence by way of reply, because my father, in his most sadistic moments, would simply refuse to reply, deploying the old deniable silence (“what are you whining about, I didn’t even fucking hear you”) to wound quite effectively. So silence by way of reply when I ask a question has long had a kryptonite effect on me. Still, as a general rule, we all want to know we are being heard and replied to sensibly. It does not happen enough these days in general, which is one major reason people are so isolated and ready to jump into an online rabbit hole like QAnon that provides a false sense of community to those lonely, crazy souls who embrace it, “where we go one, we go all”, and shit.

It is worth the minute or two it might take, when a friend asks you a question that requires an answer, to actually digest what they are looking for, indicate confusion if there is any, wait for clarification and then think for ten seconds or so before giving your thoughtful reply. Worth it in my humble (and my conceited) opinion, anyway.

With the benefit of hindsight

Sometimes it is impossible to see a thing clearly, if you you feel a certain way about it, until you can look at it with the benefit of hindsight. Something you had no way to understand as significant when it happened can become clear as part of a pattern you can only see looking back. A seemingly small thing you didn’t see as any kind of problem can come into focus as an important clue to what went wrong, once the entire situation is in the past tense.

I used to be good friends with a cheerful madman, hospitalized periodically for bouts of mania, who inflicted terrible, fatal damage on his old friend’s beautiful Gibson ES-335 (BB King’s Lucille was an ES-335). The lovely guitar, a pleasure to play, had its F-holes gouged out with a file, its mellow Humbucker pickups pried out, it’s perfectly formed, smooth mahogany colored hollow body partially bashed in. The neck was violently pried off, splintering some more great wood. Its remains were then left floating in a bathtub full of soapy water covered with hair the nut had maniacally clipped from his partially shaved head. The guy in the guitar shop just shook his head sadly when he saw the brutality of what had been done to this wonderful instrument. He pronounced it dead.

With hindsight I came to understand how deep my friend’s reservoir of rage was, but that was a lesson I’d learn much later. As for the guitar he destroyed, I knew the back story right away. It makes no sense in the cold light of pure Reason, but I understood part of the rage that made the gleeful desecration seem momentarily justified to my out of control friend. The occasionally crazed man was a fairly good musician who could sometimes come up with cool parts for the songs of his friend the songwriter. He often added inventive keyboard parts that greatly enhanced his friend’s songs. The songwriter always viewed his friend as a side kick, his loyal accompanist. The songwriter, like Lennon and McCartney before him (when they gave Harrison no credit for his many great arrangement ideas and melodic contributions, like the brilliant, soulful song-making opening riff in “And I Love Her”) never gave him any songwriting credit. It wore on him over the years. Finally in a bout of mania he fucked up the guy’s expensive, vintage guitar (this guy I’m talking about, not George Harrison).

Footnote: credit or no credit was purely academic since not one of the songwriter’s songs was ever published, let alone performed and monetized. As a sign of respect and friendship, the songwriter would have been well advised to give some credit to his friend for his major help on a bunch of his tunes. Particularly in light of how things ended for that beautiful guitar, and their long friendship.

I had a friend, since Junior High School, who became a locally well-known lawyer. He explained to me, when we were adolescents, that he had to work hard in school, to graduate at the top of his class, to maximize his chances for getting into a top school that would be a ticket to professional success and ultimate happiness. His vision of success, he explained (as I smoked a joint he would no longer share — he had extra credit homework to complete), was coming home every night to a beautiful home where his beautiful wife would hand him a perfect drink as he relaxed, admiring his sunset view, as the final touches were put on his gourmet dinner. It struck me as a shallow vision of the good life, even at fourteen, but who the hell was I to judge? To each his own, or as we learned to say in our Junior High School French class “a chacun son gout“.

He worked hard, graduated at the top of his specialized high school class, went on to Harvard and then Columbia for his law degree. He got a highly paid job at a prestigious law firm which involved, among other things, defending toxic polluters against lawsuits from tree huggers. After a relatively short time, he changed sides. He took the litigation skills he developed at that corporate law firm and, taking a big cut in pay, went to work defending the environment as the lead lawyer in a branch office of The Earth’s Law Firm, fighting the same powerful world destroying scoundrels he used to represent. This move was the right thing to do, and as far as I know, he never regretted making it.

We remained close friends over the years. He didn’t like to talk about personal troubles of his own very often, feeling that the world is a bitter enough place without adding his complaints to the conversation. He seemingly enjoyed talking about my personal troubles, though, probing for the intimate details, playing devil’s advocate to show me that, arguably, the person I was having trouble with no doubt saw me as the culpable asshole, and not without reasons, which he would lay out and I would counter. I took all this in the spirit of what I thought of as friendship, in accordance with the emotional limitations of what this unhappy, critical old friend was capable of giving.

Until one day not long ago, when he called me in agitation, to challenge me about strong feelings I’d expressed to him in an email. He was very concerned, he said, that I seemed to be so disproportionately angry about a relatively small thing that had happened to me (the illegal termination of my ACA health insurance in January 2020). He was angry, in fact, that I seemed so irrationally angry, and was worried that I was going to kill myself with unhealthy rage. It appeared to him that I was full of destructive self-pity, seeing myself as the only person fucked by a giant fucking machine he was up against every minute of his life, as was everybody else. He eventually challenged me to tell him to go fuck himself. I declined, which, in hindsight was a mistake. Within a few months, after a lot of futile effort to avoid it, I essentially had to tell him that anyway.

But here’s the thing that hit me so clearly, looking at it in hindsight the other day, out of the blue, as I kept a steady pulse with a few simple chords on my guitar. I’d visited him at his new girlfriend’s house in California. He had two nice guitars and I began playing a steady, easy to improvise to rhythm part on one guitar. He began soloing over the simple changes on the other guitar. His girlfriend passed by with a big smile, commenting on how good we sounded. I played rhythm guitar behind him for the whole time we played together. The sound of a few notes in harmony, placed just right against the beat, and keeping the pulse steady as a heartbeat is the soul of guitar playing, to many of us. I never mind playing accompaniment behind a singer or another instrumentalist.

We’d both been playing since we were fourteen, he’d started a bit before me. He had been a hardworking lawyer while I’d spent those same working years, as a lawyer, working as little as possible, mostly as a low-paid court appointed piss boy, and before that, a teacher. I see now the great advantage I’d had over the years in the music department, because I loved guitar I’d spent countless hours of my life of leisure learning to play it. In his busy life of great responsibility, with much less time to play, he focused on mastering scales and modes, to solo. His soloing sounded pretty good.

After an hour or so I asked him to play a three or four chord vamp, so I could show him a bit of Gypsy guitar I’d learned. He said he couldn’t do it. The chords were simple, I don’t know what his reason was, but I didn’t press the matter. When it came up later, I told him it was fine, I’d had fun accompanying him, he sounded good.

Now, in the cool light of hindsight, this odd refusal to do a simple thing makes a certain amount of sense. Since reading the fable of the Grasshopper and the Ant together in ninth grade French class, my hardworking friend often referred to himself as the Ant, while I was, clearly, the Grasshopper. In this morality play the Grasshopper played violin all the time and wanted nothing to do with his fretful friend the Ant’s constant neurotic reminders that winter was coming and that he’d better start gathering food for those long cold months. The Grasshopper mocked the Ant, played some fancy violin, and the Ant furrowed his brow and went back to work. When winter came, and food became scarce, the Grasshopper, starving, finally swallowed his pride and went to ask his friend the Ant for food. The Ant, who had worked his ass off and had no time to “enjoy” life in the reckless manner of the self-indulgent Grasshopper he had tried to warn, tells the Grasshopper to fuck off. The Grasshopper starves to death. FIN.

In that context, my friend’s anger at my anger is as understandable as his claim that he couldn’t play a D, G7 and C chord, the chords every guitar player learns in the first week of playing. He has always been a competitive man, number 26 in his highly competitive graduating class in HS, degrees from two top Ivy League schools. I have always been an under-achiever, trying my best to gain insight and become a better person. To him, as to many ambitious people, achievement and success are the only measures of self-worth, and trying to become a “better person” is an illusory pursuit, a foolish exercise in self-deception. To me, doing what I love as well as I can and treating myself and the people I care about gently seem to be my top two loser priorities.

So, picture this — he’s playing live music, with a friend who plays a steady vamp that is open and easy to improvise to, and his girlfriend loves it. Why would he start playing possibly shaky rhythm guitar, which he hasn’t spent decades perfecting and polishing (as the fucking Grasshopper, in his life of infinite leisure, has) so that his shiftless friend can start improvising in a way that could, possibly, make him look bad? It’s lose/lose for him. So he simply says “I can’t do that.”

Seen in this new light I’m tempted to drop my old friend a line, tell him concisely how contemptible and ultimately self-destructive his reflexive competitiveness is, using this petty but telling example of his inability to play three simple chords for two minutes. I’d follow up with a couple of choice politically incorrect insults from our adolescence characterizing the unfair, childishly insecure type who is afraid, in front of his girlfriend and the best friend he ever had (“I love you like a brother”) of “looking bad” somehow — or worse, letting his unworthy friend look good. Because, as every successful person knows, playing music is actually about proving your dominance over the other players…

Funny, in the moment, most of us tend to let these kind of things slip by, in the spirit of not sweating the small stuff, not making a friend uncomfortable for no reason. Those of us who are not, by nature and long habit, carping, argumentative, super-competitive douche bags (his favorite phrase for worms, from back in the day), at any rate.

And the Lord slew him, also

The Bible is full of great, if sometimes divinely ambiguous, passages. Somewhere in the Book of Leviticus (chapter 26) God tells His People about the blessings He will bestow on them if they heed His commandments. He does this in a full paragraph of generous promises. In the next few pages He details the escalating curses He will afflict them with if they disobey His commands. In the end their great-great-grandchildren are eating their own children and fleeing in terror from the rustling of a leaf on a tree [1]. Great stuff from the All-Merciful.

Perhaps my favorite short bit is the brief story of Onan. Onan is known in polite society as the father of onanism, which is Victorian slang for masturbation [2]. It is not recorded that he actually did the solitary, self-pleasuring for which Victorian children were severely punished. Onan, every Bible reader knows, practiced coitus interruptus, as detailed in Genesis 38:9.

The story is that Onan’s older brother died and Onan’s father instructed him to do his duty to his brother, impregnate his widow, as the law demanded, and raise up seed to his brother’s name. This would allow the baby of the eldest son to inherit all of his grandfather’s property when the old man died, cutting Onan out of the inheritance entirely. Onan went to do his duty, had second thoughts, pulled out, spilling his seed on the ground. He apparently got in the habit of doing this, as Er’s widow, Tamar was not getting pregnant in spite of his many conjugal visits. Then, my favorite bit:

And what Onan did was hateful in the sight of the Lord and the Lord slew him, also.

Also!

Meaning, one assumes, that the Lord had slain Onan’s older brother, for some wickedness not reported in the Bible.

I am not a faithful or careful reader of the Old Testament, am only fleetingly acquainted with the New Testament. Of course, the fault here is my sloppy reading. The Holy One, blessed be He, didn’t spring this as a mischievous surprise, a punchline, the way I did, He carefully explained everything in Genesis 38:8, writing in His customary third person:

…6 Now Judah acquired a wife for Er, his firstborn, and her name was Tamar. 7 But Er, Judah’s firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the LORD; so the LORD put him to death. 8 Then Judah said to Onan, “Sleep with your brother’s wife. Perform your duty as her brother-in-law and raise up offspring for your brother.”…

Genesis 38:6-8

Always remember, the Devil can cite scripture, for a laugh. If you think that’s funny, try swallowing a bite of your child’s tender flesh as you fight your need to flee in terror from the sound of the wind rustling a dead leaf on a tree branch, punk.

Further reading:

Job 5:2
For wrath killeth the foolish man, and envy slayeth the silly one.

[1] from the final part of the great Leviticus 26:

36 “‘As for those of you who are left, I will make their hearts so fearful in the lands of their enemies that the sound of a windblown leaf will put them to flight. They will run as though fleeing from the sword, and they will fall, even though no one is pursuing them. 37 They will stumble over one another as though fleeing from the sword, even though no one is pursuing them. So you will not be able to stand before your enemies. 38 You will perish among the nations; the land of your enemies will devour you. 39 Those of you who are left will waste away in the lands of their enemies because of their sins; also because of their ancestors’ sins they will waste away.’”

more here

[2]

OK, you got me, I pulled that Victorian reference out of my ass, here’s the actual origin:

early 18th century: from French onanisme or modern Latin onanismus, from the name Onan (Gen. 38:9), who practiced coitus interruptus.

We brought out the worst in each other

I stand by my original comment.

“From when I asked you what was the reason for your final, fatal estrangement?”

Yeah, when I told you we brought out the worst in each other.

“Yeah, I remember when you said that, but I have to confess, I never really got that.”

I fucking shot the guy, twice.

“OK, but it seems clear you had no intent to actually kill him.”

I took a gun and shot my oldest amigo twice, once in the thigh, once in the kneecap. In the kneecap, because it’s supposed to be excruciatingly painful to be shot in the knee. I would say the worst in each of us had been brought out by that point.

“Not so, I beg to differ, not the worst, he didn’t bring out the worst in you (though you may well have brought out the worst in him). The worst would have caused you to shoot to kill, you would have blown his brains out or shot him twice in the gut, so he’d die slowly and in great agony like in the Westerns when somebody gets gut shot“

Well, sure, killing him would have been worse, in a strict sense the worst, but goddamn it, I shot a guy I’ve been friends with since we were ten years old. I would say we brought out the worst in each other, or, at the least, very bad things.

“As you admit, not the worst, bad, sure, very bad, but by your own admission, not the worst.”

Well, as Shakespeare has some poor devil say in King Lear, “as long as you can say it’s the worst, it’s not the worst.”

“Ah, you mean:

  • Edgar. [aside] O gods! Who is’t can say ‘I am at the worst’?
    I am worse than e’er I was.
  • Old Man. ‘Tis poor mad Tom.
  • Edgar. [aside] And worse I may be yet. The worst is not
    So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’ “

Yes, I lack your eidetic, photogenic memory.

“You mean my lightning fast google fingers.”

Yes, I’m sure that is what I mean.

“But anyway, I’m interested in hearing more of this ‘we brought out the worst in each other’ business.”

Well, shooting my old friend was about as bad as it got, and, of course, I only winged the guy, or crippled him I guess is more accurate, so I guess nothing really bad happened between us…

“No need to be snide, Clyde. Precision in language is important, as you know, being an officer of the court. Bringing out ‘bad enough’ in each other is far from bringing out the ‘worst'”

Is there a point to this exercise in semantics?

“Are you referring to lexical or conceptual semantics?”

Plain old school yard semantics.

“It’s just that you are in the habit of making wild claims you later are unable to back up, I’m trying to help you communicate more clearly and not contradict yourself.”

So to avoid contradiction, for you, I need to make it clear that we brought out very bad, dark, violent things in each other, that while shooting him was, admittedly, bad, and I spent two years on probation (talk about a good lawyer), we did not actually bring out the absolute ‘worst’ in each other, unless you consider that perhaps the worst I could do was shoot somebody I’ve known for years twice, deliberately, to cause maximum pain.

“No need to be so snippy about it, I’m just making a point.”

Snippy, you say, could you give me the lexical semantic etymology of that term of art?

“Snippy is a colloquial phrase, as you well know. It means short-tempered, snarky, bitten off with an overtone of hostility, as in snipping, or perhaps, nipping. I don’t think it’s fair to take it out on me if you habitually seek a pass, a poetic license, for speaking with imprecision.”

I made the point that we stopped being friends for good once I finally understood that we were in an eternal struggle, that there was no chance of coming to any understanding, that we were locked in a zero sum game for who had the right to be more disappointed by the other, whose anger and hostility was more justified. Our rotting cadaver of a friendship had by then become toxic, septic, it had to be put out of its misery for everyone’s good. My shorthand for all that, and my abiding belief, when pressed for a summary of the reason we are no longer friends, after almost half a century, is that we brought out the worst in each other. We had no empathy towards each other, to put it as mildly, and unsnippily as I can.

“Well, there’s no reason to be so fucking snide…”

Argumentative, your Honor!

“I’m not the one making floridly exaggerated claims.”

Floridly, you say, as in floridly psychotic, complete with the fragrant bouquet of hallucinations and addled brain full of false beliefs?

“Whatever… you know, for someone as smart as you are it’s kind of sad that you can’t have a simple intellectual disagreement with somebody without getting all bent out of shape and taking it out on the other person, charging me with being argumentative. You know argument is sport with me, and I can as easily argue your side of the debate as the side I am staunchly defending against you. Why do you take it so personally?”

I only take it personally, I suppose, because I am personally being subjected to this hectoring lecture on precision in language, over a heinous and painful thing I personally did to an old friend after years of escalating hostility. I personally have to defend myself against your sporty, fun ‘I get such a kick out of being contrary!’ inquisition, or maybe prosecution is more accurate, I have to check to see if my poetic license has expired or not.

“Jesus, you really are a fucking hard-ass. You can certainly dish out the punishment but you seem incapable of taking even a gentle push to make yourself more clear.”

The only way I could be more clear, at this point, is by going home, getting my legally possessed gun (great lawyer!) and pointing it at your fucking knee.

“Oh, you talk a good game, tough guy, but this would be a second offense and you’d do prison time.”

Not necessarily, not if I killed you and buried your body here, at this scenic spot where your carcass would never be found.

(He pulls a gun out of his backpack and clicks off the safety).

“You talk a good game, pal, but now that you’ve threatened to kill me, this would be self-defense, standing my ground in reasonable, or at least articulable, fear of deadly assault, here in the great state of Florida.”

We’re in Mississippi, friend.

“Same shit, different state motto”

Well, you might as well shoot me, but, not in the knee, please, for the love of God.

“Don’t worry about that, there is only one reason to shoot somebody, and it’s not to make him limp for the rest of his miserable life.”

Your clearheadedness is an inspiration to everybody in the Laughing Academy, sir.

“Oh, I’m the crazy one? On your knees, motherfucker.”

You shouldn’t use the ‘f-word’.

“Are you fucking mocking me?!”

Oy, I wouldn’t dream of it!