Category Archives: musing
Thinking About Thinking
I’ve noticed a mysterious little flurry of viewers to a post I wrote two years ago about Hannah Arendt and her view of thinking and creativity. It is lack of imagination, Arendt asserted, and the dumb obedience this crabbed view of the world produces, that leads men, seeking to escape loneliness (among other things) to join movements in which they may be required to function as monsters, carry out unthinkably inhuman orders. They simply accept the rationale they are given, join a movement and execute the wishes of a Leader who may or may not be wise, capable or decent. A leader who may, in fact, be Adolf Hitler.
Adolf Eichmann, portrayed to this day as one of history’s most infamous monsters, was, as observed by Arendt during his sensational, important trial in Jerusalem, an unremarkable man of modest intellectual gifts who insisted it had been his duty to obey the laws of the new order in Germany. He spoke in cliches, often repeated stock Nazi phrases and was incapable of imagining that a regime that made mass murder ordinary, normal and lawful could have anything wrong with it. The several psychiatrists who examined him prior to his criminal trial in Jerusalem concluded he was not a “man obsessed with a dangerous and insatiable urge to kill” or a “perverted, sadistic personality” (as the prosecutor later wrote of Eichmann — and as the ad for the current Netflix offering about him suggests).
Half a dozen psychiatrists had certified him as “normal” — “More normal than I am after having examined him,” one of them was said to have exclaimed, while another had found that his whole psychological outlook, his attitude toward his wife and children, mother and father, brothers, sisters, and friends, was “not only normal but most desirable”– and finally the minister who had paid regular visits to him in prison after the Supreme Court had finished hearing his appeal reassured everybody by declaring Eichmann to be “a man with very positive ideas.”
(Eichmann in Jerusalem, pp. 25-26)
It was Eichmann’s utter lack of imagination, his willingness to believe what his superiors told him, his ambition to succeed and advance in his career, that made Eichmann the hardworking cog in the Nazi killing machine that he became. He was not troubled by conscience because what he was doing he had been legally ordered to do, he had only been doing his job. He literally could not imagine refusing to do his legal duty. A refusal to do it would have resulted in his own demotion, imprisonment, probably death — all unimaginably harsh and self-destructive outcomes. End of inquiry. Arendt was internationally vilified for “humanizing” this monster in her 1963 masterpiece. I’m with Hannah, she gives us a crucial understanding in her deep portrait of an otherwise ordinary enabler of evil.
In law school students are drilled in thinking through and articulating both sides of an argument, imagining as many avenues of legal attack to the client’s position as possible in order to defend against them. Rigorous thinking means sometimes considering ideas you might find repellant, overcoming the reflex to simply cast them out with a grunt of disgust. A mark of the agile mind, someone said (F. Scott Fitzgerald?) is being able to keep two contradictory thoughts in mind at the same time. We live in the instant information age, so here you go:
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” [1]
We are not trained to be nimble, creative thinkers — we are trained to be earners and consumers, as well as reflexive moralists who do not dwell on crazy-making nuance. From birth, here in the United States, we are exposed to hour upon hour of commercial advertisements, teaching us what to buy. By the time we are in kindergarten we can recite countless commercial tag lines and sing (at least when I was a kid and every product had a catchy little tune attached) dozens of jingles. I often lament that I can easily sing the entire “Veep” (a lemon lime soft drink, circa 1961) jingle perfectly but can’t recite a single line of Shakespeare or the Bible accurately.
In a sense it’s not anyone’s fault that we are a largely superficial, stubbornly opinionated culture, we’ve become this way by design, for the massive profit of the beneficiaries of this commercialized state of affairs. Imagining a fundamentally different way of life is almost impossible, given the pervasiveness of the one being sold to us 24/7 and now, literally so: carried on smart devices in our pockets, with little notification sounds to remind us to look at them. We tend to latch on to whatever suits our views, gravitating to items that support our confirmation bias.
Every moral and political issue is reduced to an oversimplified false duality — yes or no. If you critique an extractive, highly polluting consumer society that may well be destroying the earth for short-term profit it is easy to see what you are: a Communist, a soul-dead enemy of freedom and liberty. There is no other frame to think about such things here, though a desperately needed one is evolving with things like The Green New Deal.
Thinking about crowds carrying torches, united in some cause, often a violent one, we can set them in virtually any epoch in history. The rationale of the march is always similar — we are in pain, we are afraid, we’re angry, we are the victims, we are going to kill the people who are victimizing us! It’s true that once we have murdered the evil bastards our miserable life remains pretty much the same, the anger, pain and fair have not vanished — but that just means we haven’t killed enough of them. It is the triumph of action without thought, without imagination, without Reason, that leads to every mass catastrophe (not caused by “Acts of God”) that humans have ever fallen into.
It’s tempting, of course, to make comparisons between a guy like Eichmann and some of the political actors of our time. What “belief system” must one accept to justify the caging of children forcefully ripped from their mothers’ arms? It’s tempting to compare the thousands in perfect solidarity at a Nuremberg rally to the crowds today at certain political rallies, the fascist goon squads of 1930s Germany to a gang of men who take up arms to protest the tyranny of mandated mask wearing to slow the spread of a deadly pandemic. These types can imagine only one version of the world, as they believe it is, with powerful, evil cannibal child molesters trying to gain the upper hand, doing whatever they can to destroy our cherished way of life.
These crowds live, as we all do today, in echo chambers that magnify whatever bias they had last night, the one they wake up with today. A few guys are getting incredibly rich running these massive echo chambers while the rest of us face ever greater peril from endlessly magnified real problems that require deep thought, serious discussion and ingenious solutions, problems that are reduced to idiotic black or white, red or blue, yay or nay.
Thinkers are easily killed by violent men of action, men with guns, ropes, bombs. Violent, unthinking emotion, time after time, prevails over reflection, understanding, mercy, wisdom. That doesn’t make the attempt to understand, to be merciful, foolish. Understanding, and imagining a better future, is the only chance we have against the hoards who increasingly believe that politically powerful cannibal child rapists are coming to get all of the little white, Christian children in America and that only one man, an admittedly flawed vessel– but one secretly filled with Christ’s love — can save them. Decency prevails, when indecency becomes impossible not to see. The unimaginable stink of the thing can finally wake dozing souls to say: enough, goddamn it.
But we have to think. We actually have to think.
[1] F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1936, yo. A year one would have done well to keep this test in mind.
A Few More Thoughts About Time
When I got the call from my sister, during a festive meal at the home of old friends, that my father had been admitted to the hospital after being brought to the emergency room, time changed.
“When I saw the doctor’s face I knew this was it,” my sister told me, “he looked like the malach ha mavet (Angel of Death).” The specialists my father had been seeing regularly — cardiologist, endocrinologist, hematologist — collectively had no clue that their patient was in the last stage of liver cancer, days from death. The ER doctor, assessing my father’s jaundiced color, difficulty moving and tapping his stomach, distended with ascites (liver-related fluid build up in the abdomen) [1] knew at once that this man was in the last days of liver cancer.
Two doctors were at the dinner table when I got the news. When I mentioned the ascites they both told me not to worry, that ascites can be from many things [2], that I should wait and talk to the doctors at the hospital. I consider their reassuring lies to have been a kindness, under the circumstances, and always think of their unspoken, united determination to shield me from extra worry with great fondness.
“If you have any family who want to see him before he goes, you should call them right away,” the ER doctor told my sister.
A couple of days later I arrived in Florida. My father was attached to a bag hanging off the side of the hospital bed. The bag was filling with the most unhealthy looking liquid I’ve ever seen. It was the color of cancer. It dripped away, along with what was left of his life, for the three or four days I was in Florida before my father breathed his last breath.
My father was eager to see his little brother, a man he had always bullied and dismissed. Once, late in his life, when my father was returning from a short visit to his brother I asked him how my uncle was doing. My father paused for a few seconds to reflect then uttered this great line: “let’s just say, he remains unchanged.” At the end my father was anxious for his brother to be there and his brother rushed to Florida.
I went to pick my uncle up at Ft. Lauderdale airport. When we got to the hospital he immediately stopped the doctor, who’d met us in the hall to update us about the patient’s condition, to ask if there was any chance of a liver transplant for his dying 80 year-old brother. I had to take my uncle by the arm to let the uncomfortable doctor get away. The way the two brothers clung to each other at the end was poignant to see.
My uncle was a bossy man and he instructed us all, at around nine pm, that it was time to let the dying man rest. For some reason we all left the hospital. I even attempted to get to sleep, hours before my natural bedtime, which is around four a.m. Suddenly I sat up, thinking “what the fuck?,” got in the car and headed back to the hospital.
My father, who’d told me earlier in the day that he wanted to talk to me, that he was still assembling his thoughts, was wide awake when I arrived around one a.m. He appeared to be expecting me. I’d always had an adversarial relationship with my father, one I’d tried many times to improve, but my father was so deeply, fundamentally wounded that meaningful peace with him was pretty much out of the question.
I’m a fairly creative person, with an active imagination, and, once I left my parents’ house, I’d tried everything I could imagine over the years to make peace with my old man. In the end, when he angrily told me that if he ever told me what he really felt about me it would do “irreparable harm” to our relationship, I saw that his desperation was too great for him to overcome. He would “win” by destroying what was left of our ability to discuss things beyond the weather, baseball, history and politics. I stopped banging my head against the locked door at that point.
I am writing about time. Two years passed from that final slamming of the vault on any hope for real dialogue with my father. Nobody knows from one minute to the next how long the rest of their life will be. I can measure it now: two years elapsed from the time I became certain that no true peace with my father was possible.
During those years I was in psychotherapy, and I finally reached a point where I was able to understand that my father was incapable of doing any better; that he was actually, sad as it was, doing the best he could. Knowing this allowed me to let go of a lot of the anger I had toward him.
Luckily, I had this revelation a few months before I got that call from my sister than our father was not long for this world. I was ready, in a sense, in a way I couldn’t have been holding on to the pain and anger my father’s righteous prosecutorial rage inspired in me.
Now, on April 29, 2005, it is after one a.m. on what would turn out to be the last night of my father’s life. The first question he asked is if I’d brought the digital recorder I’d bought for him earlier in the day. I’d left it with the nurse, got it, turned it on, propped it on his chest.
The next thing he said was that his life was basically over by the time he was two. He didn’t mention why, it was something I already knew (though not from him) — his angry, religious mother had whipped him in the face from the time he could stand. Add to that “grinding poverty” and turning five as The Depression began, being the poorest of the poor in a small town as everyone in your family back in Europe is being rounded up and killed, you begin to get the picture. Betrayal by a mother, shame and humiliation are not easily overcome. I can’t imagine the struggle my father had, to appear strong, infallible, while making only glancing references to the “demons” we all must deal with.
Because I was no longer that angry, because my father was dying, I knew my purpose in that room was to make his death as easy as it could be. I was not there to challenge him, I was there to comfort him. I understood without needing to think about it that these moments were not about me, they were about him.
When he apologized for putting obstacles in front of my sister and me, making our lives harder instead of helping us in times of need as a loving father should, I told him he’d done the best he could.
When he told me he’d felt me reaching out many times over the years, I nodded, thankful to hear him finally acknowledge it. He lamented that he’d been too fucked up and defensive for us to have this kind of conversation fifteen years ago.
At the time the number seemed off to me — thirty years of war, fifteen of peace? Later I realized that fifteen days, or even fifteen hours, of this kind of honesty would have been an amazing blessing.
We spoke quietly for several hours, the door to my father’s hospital room open, everyone else on the floor asleep. The nurse, an angel in human form, sat outside the room. The look of love she gave me when I left I will never forget.
Early next evening, as the sun was beginning to set, my father told my sister, my uncle and my mother that since I’d arrived it was a good time for them to take a break, go to the cafeteria and get something to eat.
As soon as they were gone my father said to me “I don’t know how to do this.” I assured him that nobody did, that it would be fine. The nurse helped take down the bar on one side of the bed so I could sit closer to my father. I don’t remember if I had my hand on him, or arm around him, or anything like that, but I sat close by.
His breathing got shallower and shallower, death from liver cancer is supposed to be one of the gentler ways to go. After the liver goes, the kidneys shut down and you go to sleep, only forever.
A friend later told me the Talmud poetically compares the moment of death to removing a hair from a glass of milk. It is an excellent description in the case of death from liver cancer.
Within twenty minutes or so my father took his last breath. I reached over and closed his dead eyes with the fingers of one hand, like I’d done it a thousand times.
[1] A 0.66 second search reveals:
Ascites is when over 25 milliliters of fluid fills the space between the abdominal lining and the organs. It’s usually caused by cirrhosis.
[2] It turns out they were misleading me, not lying:
But the most dangerous problem associated with ascites is infection, which can be life-threatening. Ascites may go away with a low salt diet, and with diuretics (water pills) ordered by your provider.
Best Case Scenario
Only four years accelerating the doomsday clock,
melting all the arctic ice,
giving the greediest ever more,
a few strong new laws needed to prevent a repeat
no violent second Civil War to save the Leader
fought by the same passionate men who waged —
— and never lost —
the first bloody uprising against
the tyranny of angry,
lawless
slaves.
I May Need Some Reader Help with this one
I rarely get comments here on this seldom read blahg, so when I do I give the comment careful attention. Yesterday I got this one, from an American patriot and Trump supporter with the handle Muckeyduck (commenting on my totally unfair piece about five inspectors general that Mr. Trump allegedly fired during the so-called pandemic YOU CAN READ MY MINDLESS POST THAT INSPIRED HIS COMMENT HERE):
What a deep state motivated crock of shit. Trump administration has zero scandals thus far. You TDS enraged globalist hacks point to cronies, and lies, and unscrupulous activity but you never say who those cronies are, or identify those lies, or activities.
You are communicating with others who cannot think for themselves, the sheep. People who are likewise infected with TDS, like you. You are a stooge for the globalist, and deep state permanent political class that is intent on ending our freedoms in America.
People are being redpilled in massive numbers, because they see through you fackery. American is waking up. #walkaway #Blexit #TRUMP2020
My question is about Muckeyduck’s last paragraph. (TDS, by the way, is Trump Derangement Syndrome, the rabid insanity produced by a refusal to grant the greatness of our greatest ever president)
As far as I could learn online, in a few seconds, I took red-pilled, a term from The Matrix, as a term disparaging those who drink the Liberal Fake Media Kool-aid and believe the widespread lies being told about our greatest citizens. This misunderstanding of redpilled left me unable to parse Muckeyduck’s finale.
My mistaken understanding of “redpilled” was based on a hasty reading of this online definition:
“You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.
You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
Usually means that a Liberal has become more right winged.
Person 1: “Omg, Jennifer told me that she no longer feels she is Gender Queer!”Person 2: “Perhaps she is now Red Pilled.”
I think I may have just answered my own question with a few additional seconds of internet research. My eyes have been opened. The urban dictionary (in another definition) defines red pill like this:
“This is your last chance. After this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill: the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill: you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” – Morpheus, The Matrix
‘Red pill’ has become a popular phrase among cyberculture and signifies a free-thinking attitude, and a waking up from a “normal” life of sloth and ignorance. Red pills prefer the truth, no matter how gritty and painful it may be.
Now I understand my red pill friend Muckeyduck’s final comment and what he was trying to tell me. People are waking up en masse from a narcotized life of sloth and ignorance and finally thinking for themselves, grasping the gritty truth, unlike mindless globalist bots like me.
“Globalist” by the way, in the red-pilled sense, doesn’t refer to American corporations that produce products cheaply in places like China, and base their operations outside of the US, in order to minimize taxes owed and maximize profits. Globalist is not to be mistaken for a reference to good Americans like Ivanka Trump and her Chinese trademarks, making her fine fashion products at a shrewd discount in Chinese factories.
“Globalist,” as used by those who believe the Trump administration has been scandal-free thus far, is a completely objective term for Jews (like me), the internationally omnipresent people whose unscrupulous leaders secretly meet in the ancient Prague Cemetery periodically, at midnight (according to certain secret, unreliable “eyewitness” accounts you can read in many of the world’s languages), and plot the subjugation of the human race. It is this “globalist” conspiracy which is to blame for the powerful cabal of “Democrats” in the US, a party dominated by pedophile cannibals, their hideous secret revealed online to initiates by the mysterious Q-Anon.
For interested readers, the entire “globalist” plot is painstakingly laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (original Russian title: Протоколы сионских мудрецов), for anybody with the eyes, and the willingness to swallow a particular kind of red pill, to see.
For my globalist money, I’d recommend, instead, the madly delicious account of the creation of this infamous and widely influential antisemitic forgery The Prague Cemetery, by Umberto Eco. [1]
Also Pogrom: Kishniev and the Tilt of History, a brilliantly condensed, beautifully written short history by Steven J. Zipperstein, which also describes the creation of this influential Bible of conspiracy theory.
And now, my dear sheep, let me count you and back to sleep with us all.
[1] Be forewarned, though. The review I linked to above does not find Eco’s book as deliciously mad an account of the infamous forgery as I did. After praising the scope of the book’s ambition, the reviewer comes to the point (talk about red pills…):
In practice, though, The Prague Cemetery is a tiring plod. Eco is much indebted to Jorge Luis Borges, and this is the sort of exercise – a fictional version of a true story of a fake which had a powerful effect on the real world – that the Argentine writer would have turned into a dizzying, flawlessly executed five-page short story. But over Eco’s flaccid 400-plus pages, it is frustrating and unsatisfactory. All the vices of the historical novel are there: the wodges of researched material; the easy, silly ironies (that Austrian Jew turns out to be a certain “Dr Froide”). The characters are little more than vessels for the author’s erudition. What John Updike called Eco’s “orgy of citation and paraphrase” often becomes unbearable. His desire to cover pages with occult lore is unabated (“Secretary of the Savonarola Lodge in Florence, Venerable of the Giordano Bruno Lodge of Palmi, Sovereign Grand Inspector-General, thirty-third degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish rite …”, and so on and on). For all the homage paid to Dumas, the plot is stodgy and repetitive. It is hard, at times, to remember which blandly threatening puppetmaster or sinister Jesuit we are dealing with.
And so on.
The Glue Trap of The Daily Horror
“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”
― Martin Luther King Jr. [1]
A friend told me the other day that he’d had a realistic anxiety dream that woke him in horror after a few hours of sleep. A true nightmare that left him sitting bolt upright, breathing hard. I empathized. Shit, even in sleep, when you’re supposed to be relaxed, getting rest from all this, letting your body regenerate itself and regathering your strength, the daily horror all around us intrudes to rob you of that needed relief. We talked about the dream for a moment then I expressed thankfulness that I rarely have such dreams (inviting Murphy, of course, to invoke his law).
Naturally, this morning, after maybe four hours of sleep, I woke up from a disturbing dream, not a nightmare, exactly, but disturbing enough to keep me from falling back asleep. In the dream I’d been urged by an old friend to stop being such a hermit, to become friends with neighbors, people he’d met, who he touted as very nice people.
These neighbors seemed friendly enough, until they began expressing their great admiration for Mr. Hitler, which was active and ongoing. They considered Mr. Hitler a genius philosopher and benefactor of mankind and enthusiastically believed in the ideals of Nazism. We eventually got into a violent confrontation over Mr. Hitler’s arguably one-sided view of human history. It was several of them against me, and the facts we were disputing made no difference at all.
“Motherfuckers,” I thought as I sat up and realized that was going to be the end of my night’s sleep, “they got me too.”
I checked my phone. Herman Cain, wealthy black Trump supporter and former contestant for the Republican presidential nomination, had died of covid-19, contracted a month ago at Trump’s mask-free Tulsa rally.
Louie Gohmert, vocal Representative from Texas, who proposed recently in Congress that the “Democrat” party be banned from the House of Representatives because they are the party of the KKK, a fiercely defiant “anti-Masker,” tested positive for covid-19 yesterday. Gohmert does not allow his staff to work from home, social distance or wear masks in the office. They were not wearing masks when he addressed them all personally in his office today, not wearing a mask himself (why would he?) to tell them he had covid-19. They already knew, from this article on Politico.com.
Louie Gohmert said today that he probably got the disease from his mask, which he wears Texas-style, off his face around his neck, as he did at the recent Bill Barr hearing. Some virus must have gotten on the mask, he said, and he must have breathed it in. See, masks can kill you! He said he’s taking the hydroxy now, like Mr. Trump claimed he was, like the dictatorial former military junta member leading Brazil to disaster, and the world’s second highest covid-19 infection and death rates, claimed he was when he became infected.
It’s a death cult, this science-denying, reasonable precaution-defying, mouth-breathing pandemic spreaders. SO? They love freedom and hate tyranny! You got a fucking problem with that, puny earthling?
I’ve been trying to reassure worried friends that this idiotic death cult will not sweep all the same heedless criminals back into office in 2020. I tell them that, after being pushed to accept increasingly unacceptable government by force, we have actually reached a national moment of conscience, a moral tipping point, that the margin of victory by the forces of ordinary human decency will be too big to rig.
I point out that the military has not gone along with the would-be authoritarian’s command to forcefully clamp down on peaceful protesters. Defense department leaders have distanced themselves from their Commander-in-Chief on this issue. The courts still regularly uphold the laws that the president and his loyalists routinely violate. They violate these laws still, true, (think of countless little Hispanic kids still in cages) and every norm of democracy, and the courts are now stacked with ideological rightwing zealots chosen for their loyalty, but still — we are a nation of laws.
I emphasize to them that this is not a replay of 2016. I point out that Biden, doddering, shit, sell-out, compromise candidate that he is, is not nearly as hated, or as awkward a politician, as Hillary “Benghazi” Clinton was — there won’t be the same reluctance by tens of millions to vote for him (as there was among millions who could not bring themselves to vote for Ms. Clinton) if it means getting rid of Mr. Trump, who has now proven what he is capable of, over and over. And over. And then doubled down on his bad bets, his cruel, divisive strategies.
Then, in my dream, I find myself fighting with friendly Nazis who insist they would be my friends, if only I’d accept Mr. Hitler’s worldview. I am suddenly stuck to the glue trap that is this present, perilous moment of human history. With no clear way to band together in realtime with the millions of my countrymen and countrywomen who feel exactly as I do, I sit sweatily in front of a fan blowing hot air on me, fearing the worst again as the corporate Democrats continue to run the show, as they always do in the land where money talks and power walks.
I think of the power of the irrational in human affairs, how every atrocity in history was committed by mobs whose blood was violently stirred by their masters. I start recalling past Democratic presidential campaigns, particularly ones running weak, compromise candidates, where huge projected leads were squandered, and I begin to shudder too. The fear in our United States of Fear is palpable and pervasive.
I found myself thinking about epigenetics again, the messages of despair deep in my DNA, or at least on approximately the same genetic level as my DNA. After all, when my mother was a fifteen year-old girl, any of her twelve aunts and uncles who were sill alive, along with their families, and any of my mother’s surviving grandparents (and several were alive and corresponding with my young mother, until the letters stopped one day) were marched to a ravine on the northwestern edge of their Ukrainian town, shot and buried in layers in the soft dirt. Shoot, that August, 1943 massacre was only of a few thousand souls, it’s not even recorded anywhere in the books, there were so many similar slaughters in those dark days of 1943.
My grandmother, by then an American citizen twenty years in the Bronx, was the only survivor from her large family. My grandfather was the only survivor from his large family. My mother was an only child. When she was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, was a word mentioned about all of these murdered relatives who suddenly stopped writing back to her? I don’t know, but I’d wager not. I myself rarely heard so much as a mention of any of them, even when I was old enough to start asking about them.
My grandmother drank more and more vodka as the years went by. She was generally cheerful when she’d had enough vodka, with only flashes of weepiness and other wild emotions. I never knew my grandfather drank vodka, but I once saw him down a good quantity like he was drinking cold water on a hot day. It seems likely he did it more than that one time. They were both silent about their painful losses, except for the fear they conveyed to me about the world. Their fear was not passed on in any conscious way, but it wound up in how my genes allow me to organize myself to fight.
I assemble as many facts as I can. I approach a position I find hateful and oppose it with arguments based on all the facts I can use. I organize my thoughts, try to comb out excess emotion and express my ideas as clearly as possible. I have achieved a reasonable degree of clarity in my writing.
I do this in a world that has no use for this kind of argument, this kind of unpaid, involuntary writing. Sure, everybody I respect pretty much operates somewhat this way, you know, show me convincing evidence that I’m wrong, I’ll change my behavior. The fear creeps in looking around at the world beyond my close circle, a world not ruled this way. A world where irrationality is King.
The graph of coronavirus infection is shaped like a pyramid in most countries. Infections spread, authorities started to act, figured out what worked and what didn’t, as rates continued to climb, at the peak the “curve” was eventually flattened and began to decline. The US graph, like Brazil’s, like Russia’s, is shaped like a ski jump. It goes up, levels off, goes up again and continues to climb. It is the highest ski jump in the world right now, like jumping off the edge of the Grand Canyon into the end of the natural world.
Sure, the president is a very nasty man, his few remaining loyal henchmen/sycophants are likeminded, unprincipled men on a mission. Their mission is power and domination, on behalf of a tiny percentage of citizens, our few greatest citizens, people who increasingly enjoy most of the country’s vast wealth and a more merciful system of justice and health care than the rest of us. Their mission is aided on the ground by millions of angry white men with grievances and guns, men willing to believe anything but what is actually coughed into their faces.
The president and his very fine people care as much about these common, angry, fearful men as the wealthy Planters of the antebellum south who formed the Confederacy cared about the so-called White Trash they sent to fight their own country in a bloody war to preserve their privileged way of life.
A way of life, based on proud, open and often grotesque inequality they call “liberty,” a thing worth dying for, the thing that most of the very wealthiest among us are still fighting like the Devil to preserve.
[1] this was quoted by a commenter on this beautiful video of Bill Frisell’s recent performance of a great Burt Bacharach tune. Heck, this one:
1924 (5)
All this focus on the year 1924, a time when there was still no federal law limiting child labor, before any kind of governmental social safety net existed, when the resurgent Ku Klux Klan was at its all time peak in membership, and organized xenophobia, following a senseless World War, a massive slaughter the exact cause of which nobody has ever rationally explained, was at fever pitch… why?
It was the boiling world my father was born into. Add to it that young Irving was a tiny, impoverished member of those teeming, sweating immigrant masses that so alarmed the descendants of the original Anglo-Saxon Americans. Add to it that fear of drunken foreigners was one of the driving forces of the Temperance movement that led to the ill-fated Eighteenth Amendment, which stated “the manufacture, sale or transporting of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States … for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.” 1924 was year five of the failed fourteen year experiment in banning alcohol.
Eliyahu, my father’s father, a man who never drank alcohol, died young of liver disease. My father was a lifelong “teetotaler,” as he would say from time to time explaining why he almost never lifted an alcoholic beverage to his lips. He’d have a sip of sweet red wine, on ceremonial occasions, but outside of that, I don’t believe he ever drank so much as a beer. He certainly never tasted whisky. By sheer coincidence, Irv died of liver cancer.
My teetotaler father was a lifelong student of history. When I used to have a “current events” assignment in grade school my father stressed the importance of making sure I clipped the date of the article I was reporting on. He instilled this habit in me, the historian’s instinct to place events into a sequence that could be followed later, to note, to the extent possible, cause and effect in historical progressions.
Finally, unable to restrain himself, the skeleton of my father sat up in his grave outside of Peekskill, in Cortlandt, New York. “OK, look, Elie, I know the thought of going through those 1,200 pages of your first draft is exhausting to you– but don’t you think it’s time? Are you seriously trying to write draft two completely from scratch, with this clunky chronological time line? Telling instead of showing, since you know so little about my early life, outside of a few stories from Eli.”
“Well, I do see your point, dad, but I can’t very well skip to the drama of the misshapen blue pants I was so reluctant to wear for the visit to NYU hospital when you were hospitalized with bleeding psoriasis, the round of temper tantrums my refusal to put on those hideous pants caused…”
“Sure, go right there, that’s the way to do it…” the skeleton rotated his head, for effect. “Obviously, I’m in no position to tell you how to write this, or do anything. I’m just saying, it makes a certain amount of sense to review that huge draft you’ve already written and start organizing the best of it into draft two, where you act like you knew what you were doing all along.”
It does make sense, a lot of sense.
For example, I could include something like this (I Just Want You To Be Happy, Nov. 18, 2017):
We were driving north on the Throgs Neck Bridge, my lifelong adversary at the wheel. When my sister and I were little kids, and the family drove back to Queens over the Whitestone Bridge after visits to the U.S. mainland, my father would point to the towers being built in the channel between the East River and the Long Island Sound. “When that bridge is done, we’ll have a much quicker ride home,” he said, or words to that effect. He must have said it several times, because the bridge opened when I was four and a half and I clearly remember him pointing at the bridge being constructed across the Throgs Neck.
We were heading to my apartment on the northern end of Manhattan, I’d had dinner with my parents in Queens, as I did periodically in the years before they moved to Florida. I was close to forty, and had finally gotten rid of my car (impossible to park in my neighborhood). I used to make the drive, around 25 minutes each way, but once I ditched my car it was a ninety minute trip each way by subway and walking. My father was driving me home this particular night. It was a rare stretch of just the two of us being together in a car. On the Throgs Neck Bridge, about five minutes from their house, I asked him, point blank, what it was that he wanted from me.
“You seem eternally unhappy, disappointed, disapproving of my choices in life,” I told him. It must be said, at that point I’d been fired from a series of jobs and most recently blacklisted from teaching in the public schools after a long ordeal by bureaucracy. “What would you like me to do to relieve you of those, no doubt painful, feelings? Is there anything? Would law school do it for you?” I asked. “Would you be happy if I became a lawyer?”
I remember the dark Long Island Sound stretching out to the right of us as we headed toward the Bronx. My father paused. Then he told me that he would feel differently about my life if only I were happy in what I was doing. My happiness, he said, was the most important thing to him. I managed not to say anything snide.
“You know, if you were happy being an artist… you know, I never understood why you don’t try getting a show in a library, or a hospital, or some place like that, just to get some exposure, get a foot in the door. You work in isolation and you… I mean, it just seems like a very unhappy life. I just want you to be happy. If you were happy, I’d be satisfied.”
I explained to him that a show at a library or a nursing home was not a stepping stone toward becoming a professional artist. An artist only makes a living working in advertising, illustration or becoming a darling of wealthy art collectors, curators and influential art critics. None of those options appealed to me, I told him, yet I love to draw and that’s that. I asked him again what it was that I could do that would leave him feeling I was not wasting my life.
“You don’t have to do anything for me,” he said, steering his Cadillac into a lane for the toll booth. “I don’t know where you get the idea that you have to do anything for me. You’ve never sought my advice or input before, I’m a little surprised you’re asking me now.”
I’m asking you now, I told him, weary from decades of senseless war I had little insight into. I’d been an antagonistic newborn, an implacable infant, a relentlessly defiant toddler, an angry, fearful school boy, a rebellious, sharp-tongued, disrespectful teenager. I’ve digested all of these things by now, the first few being patently absurd, the remainder fairly predictable, based on being treated as a challenging little adversary from before my first memory, but at that moment in the car I was seeking a way off of this boundless, senseless battlefield.
“Only if it would make you happy to become a lawyer,” he said. “I mean, obviously, I think you have the mind to be an excellent lawyer.”
And extensive experience with adversarial proceedings, I pointed out. I don’t recall much more about that long ago conversation, except that I took the LSAT review books out of my local library and took a few sample tests. I learned later that many people take courses to prepare them for this highly specialized test, but I had long experience cramming for Regents Exams in high school and had always had a knack for these standardized tests (though I had mediocre scores on my SATs, as I recall, but those were taken at my personal height of not giving a fuck about anything).
I did well enough on my LSATs that, with my college transcripts, I was accepted to all three of the law schools I applied to. I chose one, took out loans (that I am still repaying more than twenty years later) and the rest, as they say is history.
“So you’re saying you went to law school in an attempt to please a father you knew to be impossible to please?” said the skeleton of my father, a much different creature than the man who drove us across the Throgs Neck Bridge that night.
Pretty much. I’ve spent the day today immunosuppressed, working out different ways to play Hoagy Carmichael’s great Lazy River on guitar. What a beautiful, bluesy, ingenious tune. Hoagy graduated law school and passed the bar exam on his first try, just like I did. He was a musical genius and was soon making money as a musician and so never had to experience the grinding that is the fucking law. I, on the other hand, was forced, for more than a decade, to earn my crust of bread by the stinging sweat of my brow, in the manner of Cain, cursed by his maker.
Playing that tune, with an involuntary smile when he pulls out some of those great lines, I can forget all about it, until it’s time to put the guitar down.
“Well, you know Elie, we all have to put the guitar down some time,” said the skeleton with great tenderness.
I Am SO Judgmental
It’s hard for me not to be, especially living through this deadly public denial of an out of control pandemic. As the disease rages, and new infection records are set almost daily, we are barraged by constant public denials of the proven best ways to control the spread of this killer disease, by many of those in power here in the land of the free and the home of the brave. If only I could stop being so darned judgmental…
I look at our floridly insane president, an incoherent man living in his own, demon-infested, world. He cannot answer a simple question posed to him, he rambles about unrelated matters he thinks will make him look good. He lives the life of the tormented rich man from old Yiddish curse, racing from room to room of his mansion, the Devil in hot pursuit.
We can pretend he’s not insane, as we do, even when confronted with the latest proof of his madness, but it changes nothing. “We must not let science stand in the way of the fact that the president wants the schools open,” says his most recent press secretary yesterday, sealing the deal, in case there was any doubt.
Donald Trump’s revered grandfather, Frederick, by the way, died of influenza in the 1918 Pandemic. You can’t make this shit up.
What has me so judgmental today in particular? I’m thinking about the under-reported story of how much richer the richest Americans have grown during this time of suffering and plague and judgmentally wondering why this story is not on the front pages.
During this pandemic, between March 18 and June 17, our 614 American billionaires increased their wealth by $584,000,000,000.00.
These are people who each already had over ONE THOUSAND million dollars, becoming richer by an average of another almost THOUSAND MILLION dollars, during a time of historically disorienting fear and mass suffering. Take this little factoid, from the above article (which originally appeared at Common Dreams. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely):
Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, and Larry Ellison—the five wealthiest billionaires in the U.S.—saw their collective riches grow by $101.7 billion between March 18 and June 17, according to the new report. A dozen other American billionaires saw their wealth more than double during that same period.
By now, a month after these figures were published, we are pushing closer to an additional trillion (A MILLION MILLION) dollars in wealth for the wealthiest and most deserving among us. And why not?
It’s not as if it would be fair to take that money, earned fair and square, and use it for the public good. Do not wonder how many PPEs, incomprehensibly still in short supply in Jared’s America, could be immediately manufactured and distributed with a fraction of that kind of money. Unthinkable! That would be Marxism! Unconscionable, sick, unAmerican!
It’s not as if a trillion dollars would be more than a drop in the bucket anyway, once you divide it by the 100,000,000 or more Americans already in increasingly desperate need. Let’s do the math, shall we, based on last month’s $584B total.
Shoot, that’s only $5,840 a person (or a shade under $13,000 each if we gave it only to the 45,000,000 recently unemployed Americans), how much good could that pittance actually do for anyone? How long would that really prevent a foreclosure or eviction, anyway? Is delaying the inevitable a good use of the hard-earned money of our most valuable, precious and productive citizens?
I keep wondering why I am so fucking judgmental. Why does it make me so angry that someone who already has a THOUSAND million dollars has an indisputable right to have infinitely more than that? Why does the eternal well-funded argument by the finest Americans about their right to pay as little tax as possible piss me off so much?
Maybe it’s because I come from a once poor family and I am repelled by greed and contests of heedless vanity. Maybe it’s because my grandmother, Yetta, living in a land of pogroms sanctioned by local aristocrats, found hope and courage in the message of international brotherhood preached by the Marxist emissaries who arrived in her hellhole part of the world, holding out a better vision for the future than endless poverty, oppression and violence.
On a louder and more immediate note: I don’t know why the hell I am so fucking judgmental.
About Your Uncle
“What’s the single most important thing you think the country needs to know about your uncle?” George Stephanopoulos asked Donald Trump’s niece, Mary Trump on national TV the other day.
Mary Trump, daughter of the president’s older brother Fred Jr., has recently been unmuzzled by the court. Her tell-all book is out, she’s free to talk about the sordid life of the children and grandchildren of the famously sociopathic Frederick Christ Trump, Donald’s ruthless and demanding father [1].
“My father was a wonderful man, we were very close, he was my mentor and best friend,” our compulsively lying president has insisted, as anyone would of a man who gifted him $400,000,000 in today’s money [2]. It would be hard for Donald to say that his father was brutal, unfair, incapable of love, a sadist, a man who used the law to abuse others, a “winner” who demanded that his sons be “killers.”
But I’m not thinking of that family of psychos. I’m thinking of my own. If my niece or nephew was asked about me, what would they be able to honestly say?
“My uncle is smart, but very fucked up. He’s a judgmental person who holds a grudge to the grave for no reason. He’s a weird guy, frankly. We haven’t seen him in years, though once in a while he reaches out with some awkwardly heartfelt letters, or sends us books, or something like that. He’s an uncomfortable subject, really, so we don’t really talk about him. It’s weird that he keeps trying to contact us, even when we don’t get back to him. I guess he can’t take a hint, part of his stubbornly overbearing nature. But we love him, I guess. He’s the only family we have, outside of our parents.”
What other view could they have after almost a decade of not seeing them? Never having been told any of the reasons, they see no reason for this estrangement. It’s not as if one of their parents made detailed death threats, committed multiple crimes, defaulted on multiple promises, lied over and over, raged unrepentantly, bullied, manipulated. And, anyway, those things are all so SUBJECTIVE.
“What if he or she was morally justified in making the detailed death threats? What if the “crimes” were acts of necessity? What if the promises he defaulted on were things they were unfairly forced to promise to? What if their lies were to protect us? How about if they were raging against someone who deserved it? Bullying and manipulating are such vague, subjective things, we’d need proof of each one, and we’ve never seen any examples of it in our lives.
“So who is nuts here? Our uncle’s father was a brutal and unhappy man. It makes sense that our uncle would be a chip off the old block. We are not the jury or the judges. In fact, we don’t really have a strong opinion one way or another — we haven’t even seen our uncle in a decade. There is just something off about the guy, creepy, though it’s hard to put our finger on it directly. And, yes, he’s our uncle and we love him, so you can take that into account and picture what we might say about him if he wasn’t related to us.”
This, to me, is a snapshot of a central tragedy of the world. Shameful and common things that, if addressed, are part of a nuanced understanding of life; unaddressed and kept secret, compelling (but unknowable) reasons for permanent estrangement and eventually warfare.
[1] Check out what the president’s grandfather died of! You can’t make this shit up:
Frederick Trump – Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Frederick_Trump
Frederick Trump was a German–American businessman and the patriarch of the Trump family. … Trump and Christ married on August 26, 1902, and moved to New York City. :95. In New York, Trump found work as a barber and a restaurant …
Died: 30 May 1918 (aged 49); Woodhaven, Qu…
Cause of death: 1918 influenza pandemic
Born: Friedrich Trump; 14 March 1869; Kallstadt, …
Parent(s): Christian Johannes Trump; Katharina …
[2] lede paragraph from Town & Country article (April 5, 2017):
President Donald Trump has referred to his father Fred as his hero, role model, and best friend. He followed in his dad’s footsteps in many respects, joining his real-estate management company right after college and expanding on Fred’s developments in New York City. His beloved father didn’t live to see Donald’s very successful first foray into politics; Fred passed away in 1999 at the age of 93. “I don’t think I wanted to outdo him, but maybe psychologically I did,” Donald has said. “You’re always looking to do a little better than your parents… deep down inside, maybe I did.”
Three Pieces of Terrible Psychiatric Advice and their fallout
I’m reminded, by a recent chat with a woman I’ve known since I was eight, of how destructive following bad advice from experts can sometimes be. The cliché that the craziest people often go into psychology is borne out by the experiences of my close childhood friend whose family and mine grew close as well. I think of the damage done to them by following three pieces of catastrophic psychological advice they were given by professionals over the years.
I had a call yesterday, out of the blue, from Caroline, the soon to be 93 year-old mother of a longtime friend I haven’t been in contact with in a few years. She told me she’s going stir-crazy during lockdown, was tired of reading (she can’t bear to watch TV these days) saw my name in her phone book, decided to call and see how I was doing. I was glad to hear from her.
My mother and Caroline were good friends for many years, until my father eventually took a deep dislike to her, which began to come to a head when Caroline, who busily visited everybody, particularly the sick and elderly, apparently never once stopped by to see my mother when she was recuperating from cancer surgery. “She lived five fucking blocks away,” my father pointed out. He later added other charges, to finalize the break with longtime friends Caroline and her husband.
I’ve always liked talking to Caroline. She’s bright and sharp and a good listener, as well as a character with an interesting take on things and the occasional cool turn of phrase (Trump, if he loses, will remain a media force and “make borsht” out of Biden). Like all of us, she has her faults, but they never bother me when we’re chatting, as we did for a long stretch yesterday. At one point, after she told me of her son’s soon to be finalized divorce, I summed up the monumentally bad advice her family had followed, in desperate moments, and she immediately agreed.
ONE
Mid-1960s: Her daughter was always a very dramatic and often unhappy girl. At some point dad began taking her into the city regularly for father-daughter nights on the town. They’d go to dinner and a Broadway show. Though she seemed to enjoy the nights out, they didn’t make the miserable girl any happier. Her unhappiness led to a threat of suicide, maybe even an attempt. Her alarmed parents brought her to a psychiatrist. The shrink told them to take her threats of suicide very seriously– basically to give her whatever she asked for, because if they didn’t, they could lose her.
Second opinion, anyone? No need. Instead they gave the teenager a credit card. She instantly developed a lifelong taste for the finer things in life. The bills came, the parents paid. What could they do? When she needed a car, she got one. Rent? They paid. The young woman did not become much happier, but she was able to live well without working, at least. In the end, she acquired disabling drug and alcohol addictions. Caroline agrees, in hindsight, that it was stupid, fifty years ago, to take the advice of that psychiatrist. At ninety-two she is still subsidizing her daughter’s lifestyle.
TWO
My childhood best friend had a series of Christian girlfriends during his college and post-college years. The relationships would fray when he informed each one he could never marry a Christian. At thirty, feeling desperate, he went to a shrink who told him he needed to stabilize his life by finding and marrying a Jewish girl.
He took this advice to heart, finding a Jewish girl to date (the younger sister of a guy we knew from Hebrew School), becoming engaged to her, in spite of several brightly flashing caution signs, (including vicious fights) and marrying her soon after, in a wedding notable for its openly simmering tensions. I didn’t understand the urgency of any of this, and told him so as he reported the latest fight while rushing toward his wedding day, but the shrink had told him it was imperative to his sanity to do it, so it was full speed ahead.
“I knew it was a terrible mistake,” said Caroline, “everybody did.”
The decision to marry was followed by thirty years of uninterrupted warfare between the spouses. A common early war theme involved my friend’s commitment to what he hoped would be a professional songwriting career. For some reason these activities (working with a singer, a guy, mind you) had to be carried out in secret. The secrecy led to occasional white lies, some of which were discovered. There was distrust, accusations of the husband being a fucking liar, screaming matches in the kitchen, the bedroom, the bathroom. An active war zone it horrified my friend to know he was raising his two sons in. He couldn’t imagine the damage he was doing to them by subjecting them to these regular explosions of violence between their parents.
“Sheesh,” said Caroline “yeah, that was some bad advice. Well, at least that long nightmare is over. The divorce will be finalized next week.”
THREE
This piece of bad advice led directly to me, the guy’s oldest friend, and it was also something of a doozy. I was on good terms with both my friend and his wife, felt like I performed a kind of peacemaking function when I hung out with them. They always seemed relatively fine when I was there. I always liked her, though I could also see she was troubled and subject to rages. I was only once on the business end of her anger, but it passed quickly. Later, I found out, she weaponized something I’d casually told her to beat her husband bloody with at a marriage counseling session toward the end of their marriage of a thousand atrocities.
Her husband had told me a quick story he regretted telling midway through. The little tale was truncated, it involved his wife and a third party I didn’t care much about it, he told me to forget it, I pretty much did. A few weeks later, his wife called to tell me the same story, which she laid out in great detail. For the first time the odd little anecdote seemed to make sense.
“Ah,” I said, unwittingly slipping my head into the noose.
” ‘Ah’ what?” she asked.
Here I made my fatal mistake, being unguardedly candid.
” Ah, I get it. Now it makes sense, when he told me about it I didn’t really understand why you stormed out at the end.”
“Oh,” she said, “what did he tell you?”
Looking back, I suppose I could have tried to sidestep the question, which would have been the discreet, if tricky, thing to do. Instead I spoke what I thought was a bland, harmless truth. I recounted what I recalled of the first version of the story and stressed that he’d told me the whole anecdote in about a minute and that I hadn’t asked him any follow-up questions, so he’d had no chance to clarify what I hadn’t understood about the little story.
She probably made some comment about what a fucking liar he was. If she did, I would have pointed out that it clearly wasn’t a case of lying, it was a quick story I didn’t much care about so I hadn’t bothered getting clarification of what was incomplete about it.
A few weeks later I had a text from my friend. He had to see me, immediately. I called to find out what was wrong, his voicemail picked up. He immediately texted me that he couldn’t talk on the phone, he had to see me in person. The texting went on for a few days until we arranged a time to meet in my neighborhood. When he arrived in his car he texted me, I texted back what corner I was standing on. He wrote back “got it” and, a minute later, drove right past me and turned right on to Broadway. I hobbled after his car and caught him at a red light a block away.
He was cheerful, but I noticed his eyelid was ticking. After a few minutes of small-talk I asked him what he needed to talk to me about. He came to the point: he was confronting me because I had deliberately tried to destroy his marriage.
“What?” said Caroline, as though I hadn’t also told her the story in detail at the time.
His wife told their marriage counselor that her fucking husband’s oldest friend confirmed that the guy was a fucking liar. She weaponized my remark about her husband’s “false” account of a story involving her. The marriage counselor and the wife told my hapless friend that he was not a man who could be respected, nor any kind of husband, if he let his oldest friend sabotage their marriage this way without confronting him. So he arrived to confront me.
“Oh, my God,” said Caroline.
I told her the funny thing was, in spite of the tensions between us by then, I really wasn’t that upset about the accusation. Seeing him in such turmoil, I tried my best to help him out of this impossible jam with his impossible wife in his impossible marriage. I gave him a reasonable account to bring back to his marriage counseling session, for whatever that might have been worth.
“Well, he’s a different person now,” Caroline said “he’s happier than he’s been in a long time.”
I told her to tell him mazel tov on his divorce and to tell him I was gratified that my attempt to destroy his marriage had finally born fruit.
At the end of a very pleasant ninety minute chat she asked me if she should tell her son we’d talked. I told her she certainly should. I told her again to tell him mazel tov on his divorce and to tell him I was gratified that my attempt to destroy his marriage had finally born fruit.
I made a note of the date of her upcoming 93rd birthday and hope to check in with her then.
gratuitousblahg 