Category Archives: musing

Why Do You Write? (2)

The world comes into focus when I sit down to write. As I write, and rewrite, what I mean to say becomes clearer and clearer, to me and to anyone who reads the words. Writing feels very much like having a meaningful conversation with another person, an unhurried exchange with no regretted, blurted word, as little ambiguity as possible, the endless chance to make things as clear as they can be made, nothing that can’t be fixed before it’s a problem. Writing and careful editing can make everything more understandable, which in itself is a beautiful thing.

Writing feels like a talk where everyone is listened to, all confusion is heard and responded to thoughtfully, every complexity clarified. This is rare in conversation, sadly, and we fondly recall those conversations where we take the time to really hear and are listened to this way. I feel the embrace of this kind of intimate talk virtually every time I sit down to write. It matters little to me, as I write, that very few people, or no people, will read a particular piece. The conversation goes on in any case, ready to be joined at any time.

What is it, exactly, that is spurring me to write today? What do I want to talk with you about? Once you give your thoughts a title (an excellent suggestion from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. I read, and took to heart, as a sprout) it becomes much easier to follow them, to corral them, to get the flow of them to make sense. Today I am writing about why we write, though, of course, I have little insight into why YOU write.

I speak for myself, obviously, as I write these words. I’m certain that many of you experience a similar feeling of connection to others when you sit down to write. This feeling is particularly precious in our atomized, virtual world where much of our communication is done in short text bursts or other digitized interactions, without the nuances of eye contact or body language. The conversational/connection angle of writing and rewriting will resonate with those of you who are motivated the same way I am.

Vonnegut said he always wrote imagining his bright, well-read sister’s reaction. If he could picture her shaking her head over something he wrote, that passage would have to be rewritten until it met her high standards, or tossed. When I write, I sometimes picture a literate stranger, in India, China, or the Ukraine, and strive to make my prose as clear and my train of thought as focused as I can. I also sometimes picture my mother’s reactions when I write, she was a keen appreciator of good writing.

When I was a boy, I used to write much more emotionally, driven by the mistaken belief that I could include everything I’d ever felt, thought or learned in the piece I was writing. I was driven by a strong need to sum everything up every time I sat down to write. I have heard this impulse compared to trying to hit a mammoth home run every time up. It took time to adjust my expectations, get better control of my swing, to learn that making good contact is the point of this game. It took time to learn to choose one thing to focus on at a time. That’s where Vonnegut’s advice comes in so handy. The universe swirls, an infinite multi-dimensional kaleidoscope, in constant, frenetic motion, making it impossible to focus on the giant themes we often feel up against. Unless you focus on one specific thing at a time, and naming that one thing up top helps. Which, of course, is not always as simple a matter as it seems.

For example, I heard a few snippets of some of the speeches at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (mein kampference [1]) in Dallas. The former president, a compulsive liar loved by 39% of Americans, continues to lie about his second term being treacherously stolen from him in a fake election. The faithful do not doubt that his lie (which would, of course, require a national, bipartisan conspiracy against him) is true — if not literally true, based only on evidence, then true in the higher, faith-based sense that true believers believe is a higher truth than the earthly, limited fact-based variant. To verify that his endlessly repeated claim of a stolen election is an audacious, incendiary lie, we need look no further than the many Republicans and Trump-appointed judges who found there was no fraud in the election the Orange Polyp still claims was rigged to steal from the rightful winner, him. To see how provocative and dangerous this lie is, we need look no further than the deadly January 6 riot and the GOP’s continued far-fetched defense of a stirred up insurrectionist mob that violently stormed the Capitol and successfully stopped the peaceful transfer of power for several hours, at the exhortation of the former president and his faithful, like his son Junior, Rudy and Alabama Representative Mo Brooks. Yet, the CPAC crowd [2] drowned the lying speakers in adulation, chose the ex-president by 70% in a poll of who these extremists want to represent their party in 2024. This paragraph would become the seed of a post, after I called it something like “Nazi rallies had nothing on these cute pups!”.

So I realize another reason I write is to digest things that are otherwise indigestible to me and to make my point of view known. Most people I know have little tolerance for discussing the depressing battle over our nation’s soul, they want to relax, enjoy life, be out in nature, eat good food together, not be tortured by someone making an all-too convincing case that we are living in Berlin, 1932. Or the soon to be violently sundered United States of 1860. I can gently judge them without blaming them, I understand their point of view, nobody likes a fucking party pooper, I hate them myself. Here, on the other hand, I can lay things out that would otherwise suffocate me, if left unvented. Writing it out here helps me process things and leaves me able to say much less to friends about the details of this ongoing horror movie we are all living in.

Thoughts lead where they do, and if we follow them carefully we can make the path of those thoughts intelligible. It gives some comfort, at least to me, to be able to see things in perspective. In the case of the paragraph about CPAC, it leads, invariably to certain related thoughts and questions. The MAGA riot actually stopped the function of government, as it was intended to, which is the legal definition of an insurrection, so why is nobody on trial for inciting insurrection? Why have none of the funders ($50,000,000 on advertising alone), organizers and promoters of the attack on the Capitol been indicted for anything? Why are there no senate investigations into senators who actively spread the Big Lie and then actively contested the counting of uncontroversial votes, based on the prevalent Republican belief in the Lie they had helped to spread (Lying’ Ted, you brazen little vampire!)? Same in the House, why no ethics investigations if members were seen conducting tours of the building for the rioters in the days before January 6? Is Merrick Garland, a thoughtful, decent man who cried at his confirmation hearing recounting how this country had saved his family from the Nazis, the right man to face off against our home-grown American Nazis? I’d have loved the even-tempered, fair-minded jurist on the Supreme Court, but I don’t know that he has the stomach to do what must be done to face down the virulent antidemocratic threat we are up against.

I see I’ll have to go where these thoughts lead me today, but I’ll go there later, in another post. Another great feature of writing is that you can leave off wherever it makes sense to leave off, and hours, even days later, pick right up after reading everything you wrote in the previous session. What you have already written leads you directly to your next thought.

Which is a magical thing about reading and writing, along with our human ability to string letter symbols into words which can then be fashioned into expressions of even our most complicated thoughts and feelings. Wow.

Another beautiful thing, you can go back, proof-read, trim, fix, reorganize, restate, clarify, polish, as many times as you need to. I’ll no doubt be back to this post a few times in the next day or two, making little tweaks.

Hey, stop me if I asked you this before: why do you write?

[1]

An obnoxious little (parenthetical) darling, adding nothing, likely subtracting, that I should almost certainly murder …

[2]

reads a bit like it was written by Dr. Bronner, but surely the work of a true patriot:

Why do you write?

People write for different reasons, just like we play music for different reasons. Thinking of music, I know some people who play music for the applause, in hope of fame, dreaming of playing to and impressing large, appreciative audiences and being thought of by others as a real musician. In writing it that way, I see I am passing judgment on them, just for doing the normal, natural thing in a competitive society where all we are is what we can prove to others we do better than most. It also suggests there is another way to think about making beautiful sounds, about writing, about doing anything we love. I will explain.

When you play an instrument to produce the best possible sounds you can on it, you are attuned to it, related to it, and you will always play as well as possible. When you pay attention to your intonation, the dynamics of your notes, how you produce different sounds, which sounds most make you love the instrument in your hands, how you bend the note, or slide to the note, or hammer it from a lower note, you are playing in a universe that has nothing to do with others appreciating it. You play for love of what you are doing, love of the sounds your fingers (or breath) and the instrument are making.

I suspect every great instrumentalist plays this way, because they love the sounds they begin to master, love the instrument that produces the sounds, love the way it interacts with other instruments in the mix. When you are in this zone, nothing else really matters to you. When you play out of this kind of love, you naturally get better and better, because it’s not a matter of practicing to attain a goal, it’s always a matter of joyful play. You are absorbed in making a beautiful melody sound as beautiful as you can, laying in a harmony or counterpoint line as perfectly as you can. There really is no better work.

You play a note on the piano. You can bang it hard, stepping on the sustain pedal, and have it ring like a gong. The instrument is called the pianoforte because it is capable of playing pianissimo (quietly) or forte (strong!). A good player can make a piano whisper too, whenever needed. You can sound some notes loudly and others quietly to achieve all kinds of subtle effects. There is a range of things you can do on an instrument capable of this palette of dynamics that were impossible to do on the instruments that preceded the piano, like its direct ancestor the harpsichord. Writing is the same thing, there is a vast range of what you can do with words, lining them up in different ways, loud and soft, for different effects.

I’ve been writing since I was a kid, and I’m officially an old man now. I often wrote out of a feeling of being unable to understand and make myself understood. Though I always spoke well enough, it was not enough. There were things I struggled to express, things I barely understood myself, and I found early on that writing, and thinking, and editing, clarifying what I felt and what I was actually trying to say about what I was wrestling with, was a very helpful process. Writing led me to understand things that perplexed me and it allowed me to share them, through the writing itself or talking, in light of what I’d worked out on the page.

What struck me more and more as I went along was the incomparable beauty of clarity. The writers I admire most set things out clearly. If you don’t give the reader all the necessary background, set out concisely so as not to waste her time, you are doing nobody any favors. If the solid back story needed to understand a point is missing, ambiguity floods in. There’s enough of that in life, it does not enhance expository writing, in my experience.

My goal when I write is clear expression, and I cut away anything that interferes with clarity. I often have to murder a darling, resist the impulse to make the words dance, or shimmy, or call attention to themselves. My main thought when I’m reviewing and revising my words is to make them as plain and clear as I can. This is particularly important when dealing with a difficult, perplexing subject.

For example, and this example stretches over decades, you are perplexed at an unresolvable contradiction about a parent. In my case my father was very smart, very funny, his politics always favored the underdog, the oppressed, he loved animals and treated them with great tenderness, he was insightful, keenly interested in the world and could be very reassuring when he wanted to be. A wonderful man. At the same time, he was very often irritable, angry, critical and mean. He was an abusive prick to my little sister and a determined enemy to me for most of my life. How do you reconcile these things? How is it possible not to take your father’s seething anger at you personally?

If you internalize this kind of parent’s view of you, it makes no sense, the world makes no sense, your life is a painful jumble. A devoted friend of the underdog, a man who believes deep in his soul in human equality, in a right to be free of tyranny, who teaches you to be kind to others, to treat animals with tenderness, snarling every night that you’re a venomous snake … WTF?

How do you understand this? You take an insight, like George Grosz’s comment that in order to understand how someone can behave brutally you have to study the humiliation they underwent. You read this in a biography of Grosz you are reading as you research how this political artist used his talent as a weapon, how he was forced to flee by the Nazis, who would have happily made a gruesome example of him, how he struggled in the US. You started reading about Grosz because your father once compared your drawings to Grosz’s, a compliment you did not take to heart at the time, but one you cherish in hindsight.

You have to study the humiliation that makes a man act with brutality. How do you do this? You can’t really ask the man. One kind of writer would write a novel, create a character she could interrogate, put in different situations, see how he acted, what made him brutal, fill in the imagined humiliation that made the story make sense. I am not this kind of writer, though I love good fiction I’m not drawn to writing it, my attempts over the years strike me as mostly sketchy. I need actual details to work with directly, to describe as accurately as I am able.

So I spent many, many hours conversing with my father’s beloved seventeen years older first cousin, Eli. The man was mostly estranged from his own three children and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, the result of his tyrannical insistence on raising them as he saw fit, not as they might have liked to have been raised. He could be very difficult, flew into a rage easily, but also, as with my mother, was very easy for me to placate if I acted the right way, backing off just a bit, like I was easing up on the gas pedal.

As easily as Eli’s face turned purple, spittle formed on his lips and he became savage as a leaping panther, he would calm down and return to being a funny, wonderful story-teller. I suppose it was the same dynamic between him and me as the one between my mother and him. They loved each other and fought constantly.

As often as he was blind to the needs of others, to his own role in making people miserable, he also had frequent moments of great insight. It was fascinating to watch these two contradictory things marching forward side by side in our conversations. If I’d spent 40 hours talking to him, I’d never have learned what I needed to know. It took hundreds of hours, over the course of dozens of drives up the twisting Sawmill River Parkway to visit him, before he thought to reveal the difficult truth I needed to know about how my father was humiliated, from the time he could stand.

It was a crushing revelation and he made it with all appropriate hesitation and regret to have to tell me, but describing it to me was an act of love that turned a light on in the universe and enabled me to start to let go of much of the pain and anger that had been building in me for decades. It allowed my father, a few years later, to have a son standing next to his deathbed who knew exactly why he felt his life was over by the time he was two. In a sense, it is a miracle my father did only as much damage to my sister and me as he did.

I have mused about this, and Eli’s gift, over the course of a thousand page first draft that is sitting on this blahg, needing another pass to start turning it into a book you could read and extract lessons from for your own life. Click on the subject “Book of Irv” to the right of this post and you will see what I’m talking about.

A word about “by Oinsketta” instead of publicizing my name, Eliot Widaen, as any normal writer would do. When I started this blahg it was to get access to a supposed archive of research on Malcolm X compiled by Manning Marable a scholar who died shortly after (or maybe right before) the publication of his biography of Malcolm X, El Hadj Malik el Shabbaz. I’d read the book in fascination, thinking it was a great and insightful work, and then the critical shit hit the fan. People who loved Malcolm (as my father had, as I do) were outraged by some of Marable’s assertions in the book. I’d seen a reference to an online archive of Marable’s research, went looking for it, found it, logged in and found virtually nothing of use there.

I remember feeling quite disgusted at the “archive”, that the sources of the controversial parts of what Marable had written had apparently gone with him to the grave. Before being able to access the Malcolm research archive site, I had to log in to something called WordPress. I logged in as my late, beloved cat, Oinsketta, created a PIN and was given a blog. That was about ten years ago. I don’t think I can change the author’s name at this point, on the other hand, I never really checked it out. On the other hand, I suppose I don’t really care enough to research it. At the same time, the clock is ticking, and I’m trying to get some of the best of my thousands of pages of writing into publishable form.

Why do you write?

A few definitions

Some, I’m sure, will recoil from my use of the term Nazi for the public facing Republican party, with the lockstep obstructionist unity we are seeing these days. Highly partisan, sure, taking names and kicking ass, OK, sometimes a bit unfair, even unscrupulous, for sure, using the law to protect friends and prosecute, even persecute, enemies, fair enough, vindictive, all right, lying about an organized, well-financed riot to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, bad, sure, deliberately spreading a deranged lie about a “stolen” election and fundraising on that lie, not good, admittedly. Nazis though? Do I realize what Nazis actually did?

I know very well what Nazis did. They calculatingly used the rage of a suffering populace to fuel a right wing revolution in Germany and install an anti-democratic one-party government. Nazis were pioneers in the now popular technique of the Big Lie — an audacious and incendiary lie (Biden, the Clintons and Tom Hanks all fuck children and drink their blood, BLM and antifa stole your president from you!!!) to keep the rage and fear levels high. They employed street violence (brown shirt squads, kicking ass and taking names) which they defended as necessary to save the nation from radical leftists who wanted to destroy Germany. They called for the execution of all critics of Nazism (and soon got around to doing it). They had the backing of many of Germany’s top industries, who feared socialist reforms in poverty-stricken post-WWI Germany more than they did street violence in the name of the free market, militarization and, soon, vastly increased profit from Nazi government slave labor programs and the like. They instituted loyalty pledges and purged all non-Nazis from public positions, civil service, professorships, medicine, law. They went along, step by step, first “euthanizing” people in mental hospitals, then conducting nationwide pogroms against a hated minority, then taking the citizenship away from classes of citizens, then detaining them, confiscating their property, deporting now stateless “resident aliens”, etc. It was years until they had everyone ready for what they became famous for during the last three years of the war, high tech mechanized mass murder of hated subhumans. The Nazi one-party police state advanced step by step, with the support of millions of purposefully deluded Germans and the willing connivance of a fully Nazi judiciary.

So when I refer to these motherfuckers, fond of calling their Democratic colleagues “brown shirts” and Nazis (for crimes like trying to force people to take safety precautions during a highly infectious pandemic), well, I have to call a party committed to a series of absolute falsehoods (no systemic racism in US, bipartisan conspiracy to defraud the never defeated president who lost, witch hunts with no basis in law or fact, Capitol riot was a totally legal peaceful protest, taxation of the rich kills jobs, a screaming need to pass restrictive voting laws to defend “election integrity,” mask mandate = tyranny, vaccine = Nazism, etc.) and slavishly devoted to a deranged leader what they actually are: Nazis.

Some of them (Stephen Miller, for example) are literally the same as their Nazi forebears, driven by hatred and a radical desire to reshape the world according to their passionate prejudices. Most of the others, the moral mediocrities who make this scary moment possible, like many of the original Nazi party members, are simply ambitious careerists who calculate that the Nazi juggernaut is worth getting on if they want to attain and keep power.

Though he has lied about it, the former president’s first wife (he paid women he cheated on his third wife with to dummy up — no crime, no crime! His first wife retracted the claim that he raped her toward the end of their doomed marriage, retracted!!) revealed that he kept a book of Hitler’s collected speeches in a special cabinet near his bed. A friend always said his speeches, including his use of derisive, biting “humor” to reduce his many enemies to subhuman status, were remarkably similar to Hitler speeches he’d heard. I always said the clown was more like Mussolini, a strutting, posing, incompetent braggart who regards himself as a genius. Events have proved my friend was closer to the truth than I was.

In fairness to the former president, his ambitious rags to riches German born grandfather’s nationality and criminal instincts (he wound up deported from Germany) do not suggest any Nazi tendencies and, besides, he died in 1918 (of the last pandemic) before the formation of the National German Socialist Workers Party (NSDAP).

The same applies to his driven father, there is no proof that he attended a Klan rally in Queens as a young man because he agreed with their racist worldview. He may have gone as a mere spectator, the police arrest report is sketchy on which it was. It may be pure coincidence that as a wealthy builder of government subsidized (he made millions on tax breaks) middle class housing he refused to rent to Blacks and Hispanics, a practice that was not illegal until the Fair Housing Act of 1968 made it so. Roy Cohn got him out of that case, by settling the federal discrimination lawsuit with no admission of deliberate wrongdoing in trying to honestly preserve the segregation of his working class apartment complexes. So, you know, fair is fair.

Who are the most hated enemies of the modern Republican party and the armed militants who support the former president? Anti-fascists. I rest my case, boys and girls. And God bless these United Shaysssssh.

Why do they keep attacking the guy?

Unscrupulous prosecutors are now going after the small family business of the former president, the Orange Polyp, for allegedly cutting corners (and keeping two sets of books) the way any hugely successful business does to pay less tax. The man is out of office, out of power, all he does now is appear at rallies to continue insisting that the 2020 election was stolen from him and that he will ruin anyone in his party who says otherwise.

He is still immensely popular among his solid 39% base, he works closely with the RNC (who supported him in him in his literally hundreds of fruitless anti-voting suits) and his party leaders and foot soldiers obey him unconditionally, but otherwise, it’s not like he’s an active threat to democracy, unless the laws passed in many states based on his transparent but galvanizing lie about rigged elections work as designed and his candidates win majorities in both houses in 2022. Of course, that scenario is about as likely to happen as thousands descending on, and hundreds overrunning, the US Capitol building in the belief that they’ve been deputized to stop an injustice in progress by their lawful president.

Look, to be honest, the only thing they actually have on him are that his “university” was a fraud, though he didn’t have to admit it when he shut it down and paid only $25,000,000 to settle the case. They also have the fraudulent charity he ran, a charitable foundation that gave almost no money to charitable causes and was shut down after negotiations with vengeful NY State authorities.

Paying off a porn star for silence about having sex with her right after your wife gives birth? Nothing, at worst a technical violation of some kind of campaign finance law nobody ever heard of. Hundreds of pious Christian pastors defend him for that bit of prudent adultery, not nearly as bad as what God’s other flawed vessel, Kind David, did when he sent Bathsheba’s husband off to die in battle so he could possess the woman he coveted. And the union between King David and Queen Bathsheba gave us King Solomon, so, God indeed works in mysterious ways!

The rest of the accusations agains the Orange Polyp are all just allegations: his perfect call to Ukrainian president Zelensky asking for a political favor, arguably a tiny bit imperfect, his call to Georgia Secretary of State Raffensberger to get him to “find” 11,780 votes, that might have crossed a line, even violated a local Georgia law that makes it a crime to try to influence an election outcome. The fact is, they have nothing really concrete and airtight on the guy. Sure he’s on tape doing everything possible to get Raffensberger to change electoral results that have already been recounted and certified, but why wouldn’t he do that?

Sure, some “evidence”-based court may find differently at some point, after other indictments begin rolling out (hello, Fania Willis in Fulton County, GA!) but at least 74,000,000 of our fellow Americans believe that these cases will all be witch hunts, like the toothless witch hunt Mueller headed (he found nothing, less than 140 points of collusion with Russia, no collusion!), and the second so-called impeachment over simply making a speech that supposedly set off an “insurrection”, because when you’re a big star they let you get away with all these nickel and dime “offenses” they are trying to throw at the former celebrity pussy-grabber.

The rule of law is crucial to the administration of justice. Which is why these partisans have no business trying to come up with supposedly legal ways to get this guy. His trial, if any, should only be in the court of public opinion. If the public repudiates him, his ratings will go down and he will have less influence, that’s the way Free Market democracy is supposed to work, after all.

It’s not like he actually did shoot somebody in the face on Fifth Avenue (which, by the way, the law would have allowed him to do, without consequences, had Pence done his fucking job and made him president for life). People are always so brutally unfair to the true prophets of their age! They crucified Jesus, just for speaking God’s truth, and they’re trying to crucify this guy, just because he may have lied a few thousand times. Sheesh.

Facts, anyone?

In light of the wide acceptance of Trump’s Big Lie (that his “landslide victory” was stolen by a bipartisan conspiracy against him), by tens of millions of Americans, it would appear that making a winning argument based on evidence and what you can actually prove, from a practical, tactical point of view, is a thing of the past — at least to a good 40% of our fellow citizens.

The real Big Lie, according to Trump, is that that everybody beside him, and those completely loyal to him, is lying about the rigged election he actually won in a “landslide.” The truth, Tump insists, is that a landslide victory was illegally stolen from him by massive voter fraud and a wide-ranging bipartisan conspiracy to deprive him of his rightful office and illegally install the illegitimate Joe Biden as the “president”. Hence, the rioters who stormed the Capitol January 6 had, as they believed, every right to be enraged, to fight like hell to protect their country and do what their president insisted was their patriotic duty — fight like hell to stop the steal of democracy in progress in the Capitol.

Not that long ago, facts (things that can be shown to have actually happened, things that are witnessed, that people swear to, that are recorded on cameras from multiple angles) supporting each side of an argument were weighed before deciding who was right and who was mistaken. Now, for purposes of American politics, one need only repeat the party line (“alternative facts” work beautifully), loudly and without deviation, and the “perception” of truth will do just fine for that loud minority of Americans.

If a violent mob unleashed by your party’s leader attacked you and threatened to kill your vice president, who, arguably, deserved to be punished for his cowardice and treachery, after all, you must say that there never was a lawless mob and nobody threatened violence against anybody. Anybody who says there was an armed, angry mob, 140 injuries to police, five deaths and threats to Pence and other elected officials is a bald-faced liar! Case closed, loser!

If a sitting president’s deliberate, months long, coordinated, well-funded attempt to violently stop the peaceful transition of power at the last possible moment doesn’t demand a fact-based reckoning, and accountability for the organizers and inciters of the violence, we all might as well just wait to be told where to report for re-education.

Facts still mattered in American court cases, in arguments over public policy, in basic agreement about what is reality and what is delusion, in our very recent history… (this doesn’t necessarily apply in the unappealable Supreme Court, of course, that non-political body Justice Breyer defends the impartiality of… [1])

It’s easy to forget important facts when a powerful firehose of ever more violent bullshit is constantly flooding our perceptions. Remember how Trump mega-donor Postmaster William DeJoy openly removed hundreds of mailboxes from urban areas and ordered urban high speed mail sorting machines dismantled? These moves were targeted to minimize the mail-in votes of Democrats. DeJoy was ordered to put the mailboxes back, but the high speed mail sorting machines could not be replaced, they were literally in a million pieces, already shipped somewhere to be sold for scrap. Sorry.

Polls showed Democrats were much more likely than Trump anti-maskers (future anti-vaxxers) to vote by mail during a pandemic. Trump and his mega-donor then made every effort to eliminate as much mail-in voting as possible, as he and Barr continued to spread furor with unfounded, evidence-free claims about fraud-rife mail-in voting, setting the stage for #Stop the Steal and the January 6 MAGA riot. (After the damage was done Barr claims to have told Trump the voter fraud business was “bullshit” and that he’d “suspected” that was the case even as he ordered — and announced — federal investigations of criminal voter fraud).

Trump won in 2016 by 78,000 votes delivered in key Electoral College districts in three states. One of them was Pennsylvania which he won by less than 1%. He could improve his odds of winning greatly in 2020 if he could eliminate a sizable percentage of anti-Trump votes in swing states where voting is always close. His party’s chances of winning elections are tied directly to voter suppression, particularly after Trump lost an election where he had the second highest number of votes cast, all-time, in an election that set the record for voter turnout, (during a pandemic, mind you).

CandidateYearPartyPopular vote
Joe Biden2020Democratic81,268,924
Donald Trump2020Republican74,216,154
Barack Obama2008Democratic69,498,516

The sixty baseless lawsuits challenging the 2020 elections brought by Trump and the RNC were famously all dismissed, often for lack of evidence. Sometimes forgotten is that before the 2020 election Trump and the Republican National Committee brought literally hundreds of lawsuits to stop forms of voting they felt would put them at a disadvantage. One was a federal suit in western Pennsylvania challenging the state’s plan to expand mail-in voting, and drop boxes, for an election during the second wave of a deadly pandemic. The judge ordered Trump/RNC to produce evidence of their claims that these long-used methods of voting would introduce massive fraud into the election. If they did not produce evidence, the judge ordered, they must state that they have no evidence.

The federal judge, J. Nicholas Ranjan, had been appointed by Trump and for a time it looked like he was bending over backwards not to dismiss the case. He wasn’t, as it turned out.

The Trump/RNC’s legal team’s initial response to Judge Ranjan’s order (which granted the state of Pennsylvania’s motion demanding evidence) by Trump’s attorneys was (according to Reuters):

The Trump campaign says the ballot drop box invites fraud. The federal judge asked the campaign to provide evidence of actual fraud, but the campaign declined, arguing it did not have to do so in order to win the case.

source

In the end Trump’s lawyers obeyed the judge’s order by submitting several hundred pages, screenshots and stories from Breitbart, FOX, OANN, Newsmax and similar outfits, alleging massive fraud, without presenting any actual evidence of widespread fraud. Even the right-wing non-profit Heritage Foundation’s zealous crackpot documenter of voter fraud, Hans von Spakovsky, has found a statistically insignificant number of actual voting fraud since 1984.

When Judge Ranjan finally dismissed the Trump/RNC case he wrote that since Trump and the RNC were likely to file an appeal, that he would explicitly lay out the law supporting every facet of his dismissal, basically appeal-proofing his dismissal of the evidence-free lawsuit. He did so over the course of more than 100 pages.

“Frivolous suit” is the usual term for a lawsuit submitted without any credible evidence in support. These lawsuits are designed to harass, intimidate, bully, bankrupt and they are deeply frowned on by American courts. Law students are taught that lawyers who submit frivolous lawsuits abuse the legal process, violate their ethical obligations as “officers of the court” and are subject to sanctions including disbarment.

Millions of Americans are waiting, without much hope, for the legal consequences of this wave of frivolous, evidence-free Trump lawsuits that created the “perception” that there was massive voting fraud because an angry, powerful man who has never lied told us it was true, and filed countless lawsuits. Suspending Rudy’s law license seems a few hundred wrist slaps too few.

Where the Trump-appointed J. Nicholas Ranjan demanded actual proof of fraud, the 6-3 Federalist Society majority on the Supreme Court (5 of the 6 appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote) had no such scruples before ruling in favor of their party. The “perception of fraud” was good enough for Samuel Alito to rule that perception of fraud alone is sufficient reason for, admittedly partisan voter suppression laws you can’t actually prove were passed with anything but good old partisan intent. It’s the quiet Nazis you’ have to watch out for, the silently smoldering ones, particularly when they’re protected by a robust like-minded majority of extremists.

Even (or especially) in a country where a good 40% of voters are entirely faith-based, rather than reality-based, facts need to be known. Thousands of enraged Trump supporters violently assaulted the Capitol to Stop the Steal. The procedure for calling in the National Guard had been changed by “federal officials” shortly before the riot, delaying the deployment of waiting troops that quickly stopped the riot when they arrived, four hours too late to prevent the multiple breaches of the Capitol. When the National Guard arrived, and surrounded the crowd, the riot was quickly over and, instead of the arrest of every rioter, the rioters were allowed to go in peace, no harm no foul. They celebrated their triumph, they actually did stop a joint session of Congress, and posted selfies and videos that got many of them arrested weeks later.

It is too simple a point to make that had this been a crowd of angry Black people, January 6 would be remembered as the day police and National Guard massacred hundreds of American citizens in front of the Capitol.

We are to be consoled, six full months later, that perhaps as many as half of the violent “protesters” who breached the Capitol that day and beat down police officers are facing charges for things like trespassing. Merrick Garland is no radical, after all. Now, calling for an investigation of this violence, planned and incited by the former president and several sitting Congressmen, aided and abetted by multiple senators, is a political hot potato in a land where facts are as malleable as the clay God originally formed into the first man.

On the other hand…

It may be that in following an unhinged but popular leader the now extremist GOP may have finally sealed its fate — no matter how many voter suppression laws they pass, their over the top extremism may be punished at the polls by voters determined to vote, and organizing to defeat the laws designed to disenfranchise them. Heather Cox Richardson provides a great historical echo for that proposition. It may be that, like celebrity psychopath Al Capone, it will be the former president’s greed, cheapness and true belief that he is untouchable, even for shooting someone in the face, that brings him, and his whole criminal empire, down. I can hear his faithful, should that day arrive: “For that? For that?!!!”.

For those who have the stomach for the hideous facts, here’s the NY Times visual account of Trump’s January 6 MAGA riot, very well-done — the video is harrowing [2].

see the full video here
  • Video Investigation: Day of Rage

    [1]

    “My experience of more than 30 years as a judge has shown me that, once men and women take the judicial oath, they take the oath to heart,” [Breyer] said last month in a lecture at Harvard Law School. “They are loyal to the rule of law, not to the political party that helped to secure their appointment.”

    source

    Just ask any of your six Federalist Society colleagues about that one, Steve. I’m sure even Clarence Thomas would agree with you…

    [2]

    A few handy links from the NY Times video investigation of January 6, 2021 .

    Capitol Riot Fallout

    Perfectly good reasons for inchoate rage and despair

    Last year in the US we set a new record (since the CDC began compiling these numbers) for drug overdose deaths of despair, 92,000. Depression that leads to suicide is sometimes described as rage turned against the self. There is certainly a loss of hope before someone slips the needle into their arm, takes just one or two more highly addictive pain pills, trying to make the psychic pain stop.

    There are certainly reasons for great concern, despair and anger, even if we can’t always be sure of the direct cause of either of these destructive emotions. The news is more and more nightmarish, more and more a reflection of Trump’s vision of American Carnage, of our current dystopia. Our planet is heating up, polar ice caps are melting faster than predicted, sea levels are rising, devastating climate catastrophes are increasingly regular occurrences — and, not long from now, there will be tens of millions of climate refugees with no food and no place to go. Poverty rages in even the most prosperous countries; the disparity in wealth here in the USA is as great as it was right before the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Health outcomes for Americans, who pay the highest rates for medical insurance/care anywhere in the world, are mediocre, tens of thousands of us die preventable deaths every year. In spite of our country’s great wealth, our infant mortality and maternal mortality numbers are up there with much poorer nations. While tens of millions suffered during the worst months of a pandemic, American billionaires, sometimes capitalizing on this widespread misery, increased their wealth by more than a trillion dollars. A trillion dollars, a thousand billion, looks like this $1,000,000,000,000.00. It was generated for a few hundred of America’s richest in about a year.

    We watch all this horror and injustice more or less helplessly as politicians, well-paid by various industries, and serving at their pleasure, wrangle. If you are on the left you are angry that, in our current political culture, with corporate moderates (and some rigid extremists) firmly in charge of the political process, no progress can be made to fix any of these longterm, worsening problems — no matter how pressing the emergency is (think daily American gun massacres). If you are on the right you know exactly who to be angry at — the fucking liberals of the overbearing nanny state who keep failing to fix anything, despise Liberty and Freedom, hate the Free Market, are making things a hundred times worse for everybody and who should just keep their mouths shut and go back to the shithole countries they came from if they hate our freedom so much.

    We are not alone with a front row seat to this maddening power-driven shit show. Worldwide nations are roiled by angry demagogues, many gain control of populous nations, speaking directly to the boiling rage of their most agitated citizens. Hindus are roused to stop taking shit from Muslims, Muslims from certain countries are banned from flying into other countries, rage against Mexicans is stoked, rage against immigrants, rage against homosexuals, urban elites, rage against an imaginary cabal of powerful Satanist cannibal “Democrat” pedophiles, rage against so-called cooler heads urging us to talk to each other honestly, based on the best facts we can get, if we hope to solve mutual problems.

    The rage is real, we can all feel it sometimes, as well as the deepening despair the inability (or unwillingness) of our elected representatives to act together to address any of this causes daily. We are, as they say, outraged regularly. The outrage is weaponized. What makes you feel a little better? Guy in a MAGA hat likes it when a libtard gets called out, enraged, humiliated, it makes his day. Anyone not wearing a MAGA hat gets a bit of schadenfreude when some MAGA person makes a fool of herself, gets called out, makes it worse trying not to apologize in a way that will hurt her fundraising. Does this meaningless sideshow help us solve any of the vexing problems that we all face? Rhetorical tic, that dumb question, obviously the sideshow is a fucking sideshow to make us forget what is really going on.

    I’m going to Physical Therapy to try to get my arthritic knees to work better, have less pain, get back into better shape. The guy who runs the place has FOX blaring on a TV in the exercise room. The other day I was on the stationary bike and he sat next to me and asked if I’m a fan of Larry Kudlow. I told him I don’t know much about Kudlow, asked if he was a Queens boy (we were sitting in Queens, a block from where I grew up, near where he grew up, less than a mile from Frederick Christ Trump’s former mansion on Midland Parkway). He didn’t know, though, now that I mentioned it, he detected a little New York accent in Kudlow. “He worked for George W. Bush, and for President Trump,” he informed me. Within a few seconds we established that I am not a fan of Trump, and that the owner of the thriving PT practice is a conservative. He doesn’t like everything about Trump, and he didn’t agree with some of the things he did, but believes that Trump definitely did some good things as president, he said.

    I determined to remain pleasant and decided not to ask how big a tax break he got from The Donald. I asked him instead if he thought Trump was the best leader of the conservative movement. He was coy in his answer. I said “leave aside everything else, just the fact that his university was shut down for fraud, and he paid a $25,000,000 settlement right before the election, and that when he was president his charity was shut down for fraud. Doesn’t that tell you maybe you should want someone more trustworthy to lead the party?”

    He wasn’t sure, he smiled as though maybe I had a point, didn’t say much. I decided to try one more question. “Can we agree that there is a criminal justice problem in the country, in addition to disparities of wealth determining the outcomes of cases, that black and brown people are many times more likely to wind up in prison than whites?”

    He could not totally agree, or actually, well, what he said was “isn’t it nice that we can have a pleasant conversation about politics, even though we are on different sides politically?”

    I agreed that it was, not bothering to point out that he had no answers to either of the questions I’d asked him. That is one of my perennial problems with talking to people on the right, those who avidly watch FOX and similar outlets and get their worldview set out for them every day. No answer to direct questions, only parrying counter narratives, often boldly false ones.

    During the Cheney/Dubya years I tried to resolve a long email debate with a onetime friend of my father’s, radically leftist when I knew her decades ago, who’d had a “political awakening” (and a religious conversion, the blonde midwesterner was now Jewish) and now was a politically “independent” extreme right-winger. She had initiated the conversation about politics because none of her former liberal friends would talk to her any more and she wanted my honest feedback, as an old friend, to see what common ground we could find. She also hoped, by the sheer strength of her irrefutably moral position, to convert me to her way of thinking (this she did not announce at the start).

    The discussion had been infuriating and exhausting, because she had an instant right wing talking head non-answer to everything. The racial disparity in arrests and sometimes deadly police violence against people of color? She shot back an angrily written piece, by a then “hot” right wing provocateur, about how blacks murder each other in atrocious numbers. How did this answer my question? She’d sent it, she said, to open my eyes about the propaganda I’d been exposed to that made me think police regularly use force on blacks for no reason. Clearly, she’d changed her view of America’s most persecuted race since her days singing protest songs and marching for Civil Rights, and living with a fellow Mensa member from Haiti.

    Toward the end of this agonizing exercise I asked her one question, about torture. I may have gotten this idea from David Bromberg, a singer and multi-instrumentalist Sekhnet and I both like.

    In every show he does a song inspired by the Rip Van Winkle story, a guy wakes up after being asleep for twenty years and doesn’t recognize the world. Bromberg, during a musing instrumental interlude, makes a few political remarks, he’s a progressive-seeming fellow with a good sense of humor. This night in Town Hall, as he fingerpicked a background to his remarks, he began musing about some of the worst things Cheney/Bush were doing [1] a guy in a military jacket rose behind us and called for him to stop with the politics and get back to playing music. Bromberg looked at him thoughtfully, said “we torture people now? We torture people?” and went back to singing.

    I wrote her something similar, it may have been a two part question. Why are we at war in Iraq, a country with no connection to al-qaeda and no WMD? How do you justify torturing people, many of whom had nothing to do with terrorism, people who had been turned in by personal enemies for large cash rewards?

    Iraq she’d have to get back to me on, she wrote (she needed to research the issue). As for torture, what we were doing to these terrorists was not torture, it was fully justifiable and certainly not deadly, we were just standing up for ourselves, speaking to them in their own language, to protect us all from having our throats cut in our beds — as one right wing friend of her’s predicted would happen to me one day, to shut my big, liberal, New York Jew lawyer mouth, a Muslim jihadist would break into my house and cut my goddamned throat, in my bed, because people like me are friends of the terrorists but terrorists don’t care about any of that, they’d slit my throat in a second.

    If the crazy old bastard had said that to my face, of course, I might have been tempted to shiatsu massage his sweaty mug with my knuckles. I don’t do that kind of thing, and it has been a long project of mine to learn to avoid reacting with anger, but, seriously? That is an answer to my question about how the greatest democracy in history justifies endlessly detaining and torturing captured Muslims?

    If you can’t get a serious answer all you can do is remain pleasant until you can walk away. Not very satisfying, for someone who hopes to solve problems and come to an understanding, rather than agree that we can never agree because we are loyal to radically different views of the world. Infuriating, in fact. The fury is the heart of the entire right wing exercise (as the enraged right-wing always says of the left, and Blacks– whew! so fucking angry!). The beauty of emotion-driven righteousness is — no thought or a working through of actual facts is ever required of you.

    “You call me childish? I know you are, but what am I? Make me! Make me!”

    So the rage is out there, and it’s very real, and potentially very destructive, as is despair. There are good reasons for anger and feelings of hopelessness, when, as a friend sang the other night “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” and added that Biden was just cleaning out the ashtrays and burying the bodies, that business would proceed largely as usual. I agreed that in terms of the Department of Justice’s actions so far, it certainly seems to be the case. You want real change? You have to stop shopping at the same store that keeps selling you the poison that’s killing your family. But it’s the only store in town, an aggravating, maddening problem.

    Oh will you please shut the fuck up?

    [1]

    That Trump’s predictable cruelty and petty vindictiveness makes Dubya Bush (America’s second worst president — and arguably a war criminal) look like a decent guy always reminds me of the no-brainer hypothetical about who would you rather live under, Hitler or Mussolini? No contest, give me the bragging, strutting, blustering Italian fascist any day, if those are the only choices. The only people who pick Mr. Hitler over Mr. Mussolini are, literally, very fine Nazis — on both sides, on both sides!

    Reason to feel slightly heartened

    This is the man the organized right-wing and the entire Republican party is putting all of its money on going forward.

    Selfish, incapable of loyalty, petty, cruel, vindictive, delusional, bigoted, America’s greatest sore loser?

    Perhaps, but all of the smart, dark, right-wing money, at this second, is on the Orange Polyp and his loyalists, by a nose, in a midterm already being fueled by hate and threats of further violence, amid litigation challenging new voter suppression laws in the fourteen states (and counting) now actively making it harder for people in cities to vote [1].

    If it was me donating the big bucks to keep the GOP firmly in the driver’s seat, I’d be looking to base the operation on a genius just a little bit more stable. Maybe someone who hadn’t had his “university” and his “charity” both shut down for fraud? Just spitballing here.

    This photos doctored, I LOOK GREAT! Biden’s a walking cadaver.

    [1]

    Between January 1 and May 14, 2021, at least 14 states enacted 22 new laws that restrict access to the vote.  The United States is on track to far exceed its most recent period of significant voter suppression — 2011. By October of that year, 19 restrictive laws were enacted in 14 states. This year, the country has already reached that level, and it’s only May.

    source

    The Wisdom of Optimism

    It is a good practice, menacing worst case scenario looming, to delay worrying until you know there is something concrete to worry about, a fateful choice is in front of you and you must do something. Speculative worry is draining and unhealthy. The trick, of course, is how to remain optimistic in the face of news that is legitimately scary.

    During my miserable, subsistence lawyering years, I frequently stood in the broken, smelly shoes of some of the most vulnerable New Yorkers, trying to stop their evictions into homelessness. Back then the threat of merely losing your home did not trigger any kind of automatic legal representation (on the theory that “jeopardy” for constitutional right of counsel purposes only attaches if you face a year or more in prison) so Housing Court judges began appointing lawyers as Guardians ad Litem (protectors for the litigation.) I served in this largely thankless capacity many times over the years.

    Understandably, many impoverished tenants facing eviction, and the terrors of life on the cruel streets, particularly those tenants the judge found “inadequately able to represent themselves in court,” were terrified every time they had to come to court. My job was to delay the Housing Court proceeding until I could get an agency to fix the problem that the landlord was citing to evict the tenant. I was often in court five or ten times for a single case before it could be resolved. The landlord’s attorneys knew the drill, and most of them worked with me without complaint. The tenants were often, for obvious reasons, in terror the whole time. A big part of my job was reassuring them and trying to convince them not to be terrified.

    “I know it’s scary to be in court, and, of course, the idea of being evicted is very scary. You should know that I’ve done hundreds of these cases, at least fifty of them exactly like yours, and I mean exactly like yours. In the end, you won’t get evicted, I can assure you of that right now. It may take months, and many trips to court, which I will make, but this case will be over and you’ll stay in your home. Try not to worry. I know it’s hard not to, but please try not to worry, unless you hear from me there is something to worry about — and the chance of that is approximately zero.” And then I would smile and answer all of their questions.

    How nice it must have been for the ones who believed me and were able to relax a bit.

    “Here is an expert in stopping evictions, someone I don’t even have to pay, who has done this hundreds of times, fifty times exactly like my case, promising me he’s got everything under control. He seems calm and confident talking to that animal my landlord hired to evict me, the judge seems to listen to everything he says, maybe he’s right. Maybe I shouldn’t worry until he tells me it’s time to worry.”

    In the absence of this kind of Jesus Christ wannabe expert in your corner, you have to do it for yourself. Got news that is terrifying, something you can’t verify until you see the expert who can verify it? Your imagination can take you to good outcomes as well as bad. Here’s a theory for your alarming 300% jump in PSA — the lab could have made a mistake. It happens all the time. Go see your urologist as soon as you can, but the lab could be wrong too, have the blood test done again.

    A much better thought than “fuck me, I’m a dead man walking,” at least until you find out you are.

    Worst Case Scenarist

    If you are a pessimist, given to worry, and you have any kind of imagination, you have the tools to be a certain kind of novelist. As the disheartening plot turns, everything that can go wrong does go wrong, everything that could easily have been avoided is painfully collided with, every accident is for the worst, complications are always infinite. In the worst case scenario, luck turns inexorably against the doomed protagonist until the reader can read no more, or the reader simply dies, as we all eventually do.

    And so it was with your recent medical diagnosis, shocking, suddenly skyrocketing numbers that often indicate cancer. Your own fault! Why was it a year and a half, maybe even two years, all crucial months in catching tumors early, since your last blood test?

    Sure there had been a pandemic, but you attempted to get your annual physical on time only to learn, by a form letter from a corporation, that your doctor was no longer participating in your medical insurance plan. Not a problem losing your long time PC, you just pick a new doctor from a list, have an annual check-up, get a blood test, pandemic or no pandemic. Meantime, there were distractions, the pandemic was raging again and a crazed idiot was fomenting an armed insurrection that failed, in its first attempt, to impose a dictatorship in the country you live in.

    Later, as people in your city get vaccinated in high numbers and society begins returning to normal, seeking medical records from your former doctor’s office, you learn your longtime doctor is back on the insurance plan, his earliest appointment a few weeks away. You get the blood test.

    But, ominously in hindsight, it is now seven crucial months after you originally tried to get your annual physical.

    Is the number really so terrifying? It is PSA, prostate specific antigen, a number that roughly correlates with a healthy prostate (yours has been bleeding on and off for months, the urologist told you not to worry about it, just flush the system — and piss out the soft blood clots — by drinking more water). If your PSA is under 4 it is generally considered normal and nothing to worry about. PSA level is roughly correlated with prostate cancer, what they look for is a sudden increase, which sometimes is an early (or late) indication of cancer. The rise in your PSA is what the doctors watch out for, a steady four that is suddenly a five can sometimes indicate the presence of cancer. Your PSA almost tripled in the last year and a half, a long stretch for a tumor to grow undisturbed, the 300% upward leap gets your attention.

    Your doctor says “go see your urologist” because it is not his call to tell you “this is something to be very worried about, get to a specialist as fast as you can”. He may feel that way, but he’d rather have a specialist who knows how to treat it break the bad news.

    The only problem with seeing the urologist right away is that you will have to provide current insurance information to make an appointment. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act ends, with two weeks’ notice, at the end of the month you turn 65. Should have expected that, shouldn’t you have? Your window to enroll in Medicare suddenly shrinks from three months after your 65th birthday to two weeks after. If you’re about to turn 65 you find yourself, suddenly, with days to navigate a complex and unwieldy bureaucracy to avoid a gap in health insurance.

    Naturally, the best way to apply for Medicare is online. It turns out to be quite simple to do. You log into your Social Security account (ssa.gov, medicare.gov cannot help you apply) and within ten minutes your application is done and begins to be processed. The only problem you will encounter is if you have not been on ssa.gov since you last logged in five years ago when you created the account. Personal ID? No idea. assword-pay? Not the foggiest.

    Eventually a receptionist at Social Security, after you answer a few questions, tells you your Personal ID, which turns out to be the full name of your girlfriend’s beloved cat — of course. Now they can email you a PIN to reset your password, which they do. Now just answer three simple questions and you’re in. Street you grew up on, favorite teacher, make of first car. Easy.

    Except that the computer needs an EXACT match to verify your identity. Did you write Miss Richert, Mary Richert, Miss Mary Richert, Richert? Did you include make and model of the car or just the model? Did you write your street number with or without the “th” at the end of the number? You will never know. At least one of your guesses was wrong and you were locked out after the third try, unable to log in that day back in May, when you could have had Medicare in place before the Patient Protection Act stopped protecting you.

    No worries, the kind receptionist tells you, they will send you a new PIN, by US Mail, within ten business days. They do, it arrives the second week in June. Only a few weeks after your previous thwarted attempt you are able to log in. Ten minutes later your application is submitted and being processed. Ten days later it is 2/3 complete, pending final assessments of some kind. There are millions of people applying, there is nothing that can be done to expedite any individual application. The pandemic means that anything that once worked a certain way no longer does, because, the pandemic.

    There is also the matter of your kidneys, since you had a sometimes fatal (not in your case) kidney disease, you need to track certain things. Your last appointment with the nephrologist showed no sign of the disease, you breathed a sigh of relief and the doctor bid you goodbye. But you should still continue to track certain things.

    One of those things is Vitamin D level, since excessively high Vitamin D levels can damage the kidneys, apparently. Sunshine and dairy products provide most people with enough Vitamin D, but if you’ve had five cancer cells removed from your nose, and avoid dairy, you may also avoid walking in the sunshine. Doctor gives you a prescription Vitamin D supplement, a mega-dose, once a week. The nephrologist, who had been tracking your Vitamin D, noted that it was a bit high when he tested it two or three years ago (the private, third-party lab, for whatever reason, didn’t follow his order and test it in the most recent, pandemic blood test…). He advised you to take it only twice a month. Latest blood test shows your Vitamin D level is excessively high, which is bad for the kidneys and other tissues and most commonly causes hypercalcemia [1] — none of which you are aware of.

    Doctor tells you your recent blood work shows your blood calcium level is also high (hypercalcemia, which you learn about the next day). When you ask what could cause that he tells you it may sometimes indicate a benign pituitary tumor.

    Five minutes on the internet tells you the six most common side effects of excessive levels of Vitamin D — elevated blood calcium levels checks in at the top of the list. Look, nobody is blaming you for not knowing any of this shit, it just is what it is.

    Why was your Vitamin D level not tested during your last physical in November 2019, by the private third-party lab (ignoring the nephrologist’s request, which was always done at the hospital lab) in 2020? Anybody’s guess. The pandemic, it was probably at least partly because of the pandemic.

    Best case scenario, Medicare is in place in time to make the appointments you need to make and you learn, to your great relief, that you have neither cancer nor the return of that sometimes deadly idiopathic (“cause unknown” from Greek ἴδιος idios “one’s own” and πάθος pathos “suffering”) kidney disease you underwent chemo for a few years back.

    Of course, doctors go on vacation this time of year. Plus, the pandemic. Could be a few months before you can see the busy urologist, the busy nephrologist, a competent dermatologist, etc. Nobody’s fault that you didn’t get everything in order months ago, pandemic or no, just in case the worst case scenario was the one that was going to unfold, especially during a pandemic, which messed so many things up, was itself a worst case scenario.

    And, seriously, why wouldn’t the worst case scenario be the one that is already unfolding? Hope is good, unless it’s dumb hope. Look at the signs and you will understand that you are most likely fucked. It’s been a good ride, bumpy but good. No complaints, no regrets. Try not to think of your prostate every time you urinate, ignore that slight stinging, it can be anything. Do NOT google warning signs of prostate cancer. Check your Medicare progress bar every other day, maybe it will move from 2/3 done to complete. Try to get some rest and forget those nightmares, things are never as bad as in your worst fears, until they are — which might not happen, except, of course, in the worst case scenario.

    [1]

    source

    My father and the Jewish Babe Ruth

    My father, once a skinny Jewish kid growing up in Peekskill, NY, was a lifelong Detroit Tiger fan. That’s because when he was a boy the Tigers had a big, slugging first baseman named Hank Greenberg. Greenberg was a large, powerful Jew who hit home runs like Babe Ruth, one season almost breaking Ruth’s record. Jews reportedly went into shock when the 6’3″ athlete ducked into Yom Kippur services in Detroit — nobody had ever seen a Jew that big. I was surprised to see, after my father died, that his 1941 Peekskill High School yearbook, under a picture of my father’s thin, bespectacled face, had printed his name as Irving “Hank” Widem. I always knew he’d idolized Greenberg, I never knew he’d gone by that name in High School.

    Babe Ruth was by far the greatest Major League baseball player ever. As a pitcher he was among the best to ever play the game, though he is famous for his batting. Before switching to full-time right fielder and setter of mind boggling home run records (he famously hit more home runs by himself, a couple of seasons, than other full teams hit), he also set pitching records that stood for decades.

    As a home run hitter, there was really nobody to compare to him. If he’d been up as many times as Hank Aaron, who decades later broke Ruth’s career home run record in four thousand more at bats than Ruth had, he’d have hit hundreds more home runs. The current record holder, asterisk Barry Bonds, batted 1,448 more times (about three seasons for the Babe) and hit 48 more home runs. Plus, Babe Ruth hit .342 for his career (tied for sixth highest lifetime batting average among modern players).

    When my father was fourteen, a decade after Ruth set the 60 home runs in a season record that would last 34 years, Hank Greenberg hit 58 in a season. I suspect anti-semitism probably played a role in Greenberg getting nothing to hit the last few weeks of that season, when he could have hit home runs 59 and 60, but, if so, that is not something that should be taught in American classrooms (as it would only serve to undermine American Exceptionalism and make beleaguered white Christian patriots feel bad…).

    Maybe the most impressive number Babe Ruth left behind was his lifetime slugging percentage of .690. Slugging percentage measures how well a player hits for power, how many extra base hits (doubles, triples and home runs) he gets. Ruth averaged that gaudy number, over his long career. For comparison, superstars Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle, two great Hall of Fame sluggers, 20 and 21 on the all-time list, had career slugging percentages of .5575 and .5568.

    When a current player is red hot, hitting home runs in bunches, his slugging percentage may soar to approach Ruth’s lifetime average for a short time, but by the end of the season it will almost always be below .600. Many modern-day sluggers in the Hall of Fame never approached Ruth’s .690 average slugging percentage in even a single season.

    Here is the top of the all-time slugging percentage list. Turkey Stearnes, Mule Suttles and Oscar Charleston, belated (posthumous) Hall of Famers, superstars of the Negro Leagues and victims of the racial segregation of baseball until after their careers were over, have recently been added to the list, as I learned last night after a few minutes of computer querying [1]. Check out where Hank Greenberg winds up on the very short list of baseball power hitters who have slugged at least .600 for their careers. And what company he is in!

    To put that in perspective, five “white” major league Hall of Famers, Ruth, Williams, Gehrig, Foxx and Greenberg have had lifetime slugging percentages of .600 or more. (Eight, if you include the other three Hall of Famers, which you should, it’s an American sin that they were forbidden play with the other greatest players of their time by a hallowed racist tradition, see FN 1; nine if you include Barry Bonds, who is creeping toward induction into the Hall of Fame after an amazing career).

    * Barry Bonds, is the sixth major league player to slug over .600 for his major league career, and he had some out of the world slugging percentages in his older years .863 when he was 36 (higher than Ruth’s best one season slugging percentage), .799 when he was 37, .749 at 38 and .812 at 39, after he went on his special, controversial asterisk fitness regime. Without those final few superhuman seasons, including the 73 home run season, at an age when most baseball players are slowing down, he would havie been under .600 for his career. For those who like eye-popping stats, here are the remarkable numbers Bonds put up for his career.

    [1]

    Suttles, Stearnes and Charleston were three superstars of the Negro Leagues, from the openly racist decades before Major League Baseball became racially integrated. All three are now in the Baseball Hall of Fame, inducted decades after each of their deaths, posthumously honored among baseball’s immortals, as they say.

    Mule Suttles was a power-hitting first baseman in the Negro Leagues from 1923-1944.

    Turkey Stearnes was a five-tool centerfielder who played in the Negro Leagues from 1923-40.

    Oscar Charleston, another slugging centerfielder from the Negro Leagues played from 1915-1941.