Category Archives: musing

Provoking vs. Disrespecting: anatomy of a fatal falling out

I will use a personal story to flesh out a mechanism that commonly leads to violence and sometimes death.  It is a mechanism that is particularly ubiquitous in this black and white zero-sum society we are living in at the moment.  It is the reduction of a complicated story to a simple, primary concept, like betrayal, or loyalty.   One party wins all, the other loses all, or it’s mutual destruction — fine, everybody loses and everybody wins, sort of.

In this particular personal anecdote no punches, kicks or bullets were exchanged, though both sides wound up feeling hurt and completely justified in their final anger at the other.  Every person who knows my once good friend, including two who claimed recently to love me, has cut me dead, which is as bad as the underlying impasse with a guy I’ve known since fourth grade.   In some ways it’s worse, more painful, this tribal closing of ranks after an ultimatum to forgive without condition or forever be seen as the vicious loveless party persecuting a weaker man. 

This is an aggravating story Sekhnet, who tries her best to take care of me, urges me to somehow put out of my mind every time I mention anything connected to it.   I don’t know how that’s done, until I am done working through it to my satisfaction.   A gnawing, vexing story untold is just a fucking tumor in waiting, as far as I can see. There is nothing I can do about a lying sociopath president or a lockstep political party who seems to have, with alarming speed, acquired a taste for the inside of their new leader’s ass, but this situation with an old friend I can wrestle with directly.  I believe it also sheds light on our larger problem as a culture, which comes largely from partisan oversimplification and a mass failure of empathy.

The common response to a fight is to take sides, be loyal to your people.  They call this tribalism now, reminding all of us homo sapiens that when it comes to war, we jump with those closest to us.  Loyalty has been elevated to the highest value, they used to call this kind of reflexive patriotism “my country– right or wrong” — you defend whatever America does because you’re American.   Somewhere far down the list of civic virtues, after loyalty, are being analytical, and fair-minded, and trying to find the causes of friction and the best solutions for difficult problems, including interpersonal troubles like I had with an old friend recently.

My mother always expressed frustration, even anger, at her daughters’ children’s seeming ingratitude.   My sister (my mother’s daughter) always expressed frustration, even anger, that her mother could not just give with grandmotherly generosity without demanding a “thank you”.    I always thought that a skilled mediator could convince my sister to teach her kids to say “thank you, grandma” when grandma gave them something.   This simple act would have gone a long way toward reducing tensions, but they were both too angry, and too stubbornly committed to being right, to ever go to a mediator.   Each one dismissed the idea of mediation as something the other would never agree to do.

Sekhnet reminds me of all the other things I should be worrying about, instead of this intransigent former friend who is too hurt and angry to make peace.   I have worry enough to cover these other things, and have made appointments, or at least calls, about all but one of them. [1]   Seems funny, in light of these other immediate worries, that I’m returning over and over to the sad and now sickening falling out with a friend of more than fifty years, but here we go.   On the other hand, this is the only vexation I have any chance of getting closer to solving today.

Much violence among armed teenagers is over the issue of perceived disrespect.  “He dissed me,” more than one violent young man will say in complete justification of why the person he shot needed to get shot.   Disrespect is a fundamental blow that we are taught not to tolerate.   For purposes of my friend’s case against me, I explicitly told him I don’t respect him and I gave several specific reasons why I don’t.   It would seem to be case closed for our friendship.  

I disrespected my friend, first by my actions and then by explicit words, and that’s all she wrote.  If you don’t respect someone it’s impossible to be friends with them.   End of story.   There is no coming back from this.   It’s as bad as lack of trust, lack of mutuality, lack of empathy, lack of affection.   There is nothing else to tell, many would say, closing the case, though I will tell the rest, as is my way.  The details may be useful in seeing how this sort of irrefutable tribal conclusion is often reached.   

What I was seeking from my friend, by the way, was that when he saw me getting aggravated as he pressed ahead in some conversation — the reddening of my face, the clenching of my arms and hands, the gritted teeth, the labored breathing, the other universal signs of approaching anger, plus my words to that effect — that he could take his foot off the accelerator, apply the brakes a little and change direction.   He was increasingly unable to do this in recent years, as his own life got more and more stressful.

During our last discussion my friend told me, three separate times in the course of about twenty minutes, that he felt disrespected by me.  He felt this because I had been ninety minutes late to meet him for an important discussion to try to save our failing friendship.  He told me at once, and slightly sheepishly, that he knew the feeling was irrational, since we’d been loose about the time, and he’d declined to accompany me on the errands that took longer than planned so that we could meet at the original time.  This talk was important to him and he’d saved the entire day for it, from two pm on.  

He told me we could meet at any point, true, but still, I didn’t show up until almost 3:30 and ninety minutes is past the border line for disrespect.  It was even worse when you start the clock at 1 pm, which was my initial suggestion, making me a full one hundred and fifty minutes late.   It was true, he said, that I’d called as soon as I knew I was going to be late, spoke to him from the middle of a traffic jam on the Grand Central, and that each time I called he’d reassured me that he wasn’t, for once, under any particular time pressure. He’d told me not to worry, in fact.   All this was true, he said, and so it might seem irrational to me that he felt disrespected, but there it was.  Ninety minutes.  It’s hard to ignore ninety minutes.

The second time he told me how disrespectful I’d been to him, about ten minutes later, he was in the middle of denying that he had provoked me again recently, intentionally or unintentionally.  He told me that he’d only apologized to me in the most egregious previous instance because I seemed so peeved.   He had actually been in the right, he told me, to insist in the face of my rising aggravation, on the annoying thing he’d been insisting on me hearing, for a second time in a week, as it turned out.   In fact, he added, he’d do the same thing again, if it came to it.  

I was just wrong, he said, to see what he’d done as provocation.  He is not provocative, he is actually a lifelong peacemaker by nature, and besides, I was the one who’d behaved disrespectfully toward him and was now not accepting his most recent apology.  Ninety minutes, he reminded me, more than enough time for my disrespect, intended or not, to sink deep inside of him.

This line of counter-attack is familiar from my childhood.  My father liked to reframe everything away from whatever I was concerned about to a discussion of my terrible temper, how angry I always was.  When I was young, this used to piss me off pretty quickly, the abrupt pivot from what I needed to talk about with my father to the general subject of my crazy anger.  Once I got mad, I lost any chance to talk about anything.  “You see,” he’d say with a smug smile, “this is exactly what I’m talking about.  The People rest, you’re irrationally angry again.  You really have a fucking problem with your violent fucking temper.”    

My father did me a favor, in a roundabout way, since by the time I was a middle aged man this kryptonite became a weaker and weaker weapon against me.   It took years of work, but years well-spent, in my opinion.

My disrespected friend, on the other hand, had been actively taught never to show anger.   Anger is a threatening emotion, particularly to someone raised never to express it by word or conscious deed.  “I was taught to swallow it,” his mother told me recently, “avoiding conflict at all costs is how I was raised.   My mother used to tell me to use any means necessary, including creatively altering any details of what happened that could possibly make anyone mad.  The only supremely important thing, according to my mother, was avoiding confrontation.”  

I experienced a few untruths from this now very old woman over the more than fifty years I’ve known her, but I never held that personality quirk against her.  She’s a lovely woman, outside of that.   I spent hours on the phone with her last month advising her about a very aggravating and frightening situation I must keep secret.   That’s the other piece about her approach to anger, fear, shame — really emotionally explosive things must always be kept secret.

The son is like her in some fundamental ways.   His occasional bending of the truth was something I just accepted as a regrettable feature.   I always felt I could trust him about the big things, in spite of his tendency to be less than truthful at times about small things.   Funny that this equivocation was never a terrible issue in my friendship with him, I guess because our affection went back to childhood and since I always felt I could trust him in the larger sense, I never worried when he did that dance he sometimes does to try to make sure everybody is happy.   I suppose I never questioned his motivations when he was being less than honest, it was for the sake of avoiding what he saw as an inevitable confrontation, I could always see that.  

Now here we were in a real confrontation, and his dance was not at all endearing nor did it give me any reason for optimism.   He simply could not admit, beyond saying the words “I’m sorry”, that he’d been wrong to blame me, based on a casual remark made to his wife in passing, for willfully, or recklessly trying to destroy his long-troubled marriage.   I was his oldest friend, and I tried my best to help him get the full context to that particular, unfortunately weaponized remark.  

I was not at all angry at the pointed accusation, odd to say.  I was on the spot, I was concerned, there was a slight tightness in my gut, I felt under pressure, but I wasn’t angry.  Seeing him in such distress I did what I could to try to help him.  It took an hour or more to get things to a reasonable place that he could offer to his wife and their therapist in explanation of his oldest, closest friend’s alleged treachery.

When I was finally done with that he asked me if I harbored anger at him, conscious or unconscious, and told me I’d never once in our long relationship ever admitted I was wrong, had never apologized to him about anything.   These are faults I work on not having, when I become aware I’ve hurt a friend I do my best to make amends as soon as I can.  He brought up a thoughtless thing I’d apparently done to him years ago and I told him I was wrong and apologized, for what it was worth.

As soon as I was done telling him how sorry I was he accused me, based on something “someone in his family” had disclosed to him, of insultingly treating him like a helpless child.   The vexing information he complained of being spilled by a family member (there are only three possible candidates) was something I later realized that I myself had told him months earlier.   It was quite an emotional trifecta in his car that afternoon.  It took a few days before it began to strike me as an unfriendly, and unfair, assault on my character and my friendship.   My friend kept telling me how impossible his life was, worse than ever, the pressure on him was unbearable.  I told him we needed to talk face to face, that things between us were very bad.

Now I was in a suddenly aggravating conversation, doing what I could to try to save a friendship that was hanging by a thin, fraying thread.   The conversation was hard work, because he’s very smart and quite capable of putting up a strenuous emotional and intellectual fight.   His position was that he’d apologized to me already, about everything, including that “thing in the car”, and that it appeared to him that I was unforgiving, unreasonably demanding more than an apology.   “I apologized to you already, but my apology apparently wasn’t enough for you,” was his opening line to this conversation we needed to have to better respect each other’s feelings if our friendship was going to survive.  

In his defense, I’m pretty sure he honestly does not see himself as capable of expressing vehement hostility.   That, he likely believes, is my area of expertise.  I am the one who expresses anger, after all.    All of his efforts in interpersonal relations are intended to keep the peace, make peace, be a mediator between angry people.  In the short term, his efforts sometimes work, two angry people kiss and make up.   Long term, his record is not as good — as nobody’s can be when “peace” is based on persuading everyone to let bygones be bygones and a polite agreement that everybody loves each other.  That’s not how love, or anger, actually works.  In any event, the impasse between him and me is a special case and he really couldn’t be expected to make peace with someone as angry and unforgiving as I apparently am.   Plus, of course, the disrespect, how do you get past that?

In the end, the third time he brought up the disrespect, about five minutes after the second time, I finally lost it.  Outside of provoking me, I have no other theory for why he kept mentioning this perceived feeling of being disrespected.  I snapped.  I told him he was right to feel disrespected, that I don’t respect him, not the way he treats people, not many of the choices he’s made in his life, not his inability to empathize, to be honest about his feelings, to have any insight into his anger, to make a meaningful apology.   If you apologize for hurting somebody, I said, and you continue to do the same hurtful thing over and over, your apology is a shit apology.   A lie.   A meaningless fucking lie, dude.    

It may be worth mentioning here that we spoke for another four or five hours after that.   We talked quietly, but in circles, each trying our best to somehow rescue our deeply wounded friendship.   Oddly enough, he seemed to calm down and fight much less after making me explode at him.

 My childhood friend now spends a lot of time studying the ancient wisdom of Judaism with an orthodox rabbi, though he chose not to contact me during the Ten Days of Repentance, a time when Jews are supposed to make amends with people they know they’ve hurt.   Feeling the aggrieved party (victimhood is one of the most frequently and potently weaponized feelings in Trump’s America) I am sure he contented himself praying for his soul and the souls of his loved ones.   I thought about this falling out, blamed entirely on me for my inability not to be provoked by what I falsely claim is provocation, extensively during those ten days and beyond.  

I heard a rabbi talking about apology, atonement and forgiveness.   A fascinating seven minute segment on On The Media (click here for the excellent conversation) .  The rabbis apparently require someone seeking forgiveness to apologize at least three times before they can give up with the human and atone before God.   Element number one of an apology is empathy– I know you’re hurt, if someone had done to me what I did to you I’d be hurt too, just like you are, I’m sorry I hurt you, I’ll try my best not to ever do it again.   Remove empathy and you have only the empty form of an apology:  I see you’re hurt and waiting for an apology, so I’m sorry, can we just move on now?

Can we just move on, you merciless fucking irrationally hurt self-righteously enraged prick?

Think about any member of his family who might want to keep in touch with me– impossible.   There is a huge cost to taking sides against your own family, going against the current of your tribe’s strong feelings, even in a small way.  This conflict in the soul when a person opposes the will of the tribe has been the stuff of drama forever.  First, it is seen by those who trust you as disloyal.   Second, if you are critical of the accepted tribal story your head can be next on the chopping block, you see how upset everyone is.   Best to say nothing.  

I have a friend fond of quoting his grandfather’s aphorisms, gleaned from the teachings of the rabbis.  One of our favorites is “yaffa shteeka leh cha-chameem”   beautiful is silence to the wise.   Dig it.

 That said, the only hope we humans have, if we truly seek to change things for the better, is looking as deeply and dispassionately as we can into things that are sometimes, frankly, terrifying.  It is easy to resolve conflict in your own mind by reducing something to a simple scenario.   Few scenarios are actually as simple as we easily convince ourselves they are.

 

[1]  I have a CAT scan of my kidneys, bladder and ureters early next week, then a camera on a long stick up the penis into the urethra to look for the source of a large blood clot, gross hematuria, some emergency dental work I need to set up and a bit of fancy footwork to do playing the insurance odds, by the December 15 deadline to buy health insurance for 2019, trying to learn before then if I’ll need another $88,000 infusion of chemotherapy for my eventually life ending kidney disease.  

Fighting with the Only Weapon They Have

It’s a fairly safe assumption that someone who regularly suffers from a physical condition he reasonably believes is caused by rage is frequently angry.   He may not often know exactly why he is angry, or even that he is so angry, but then a car cuts him off on the road, his skin cracks open, his spine painfully seizes up, and he literally can’t move without agony.   So angry, he can’t even scream.

There are releases from the choking grip of anger.   Vigorous physical exercise, for example, is frequently thought of as a great outlet for stress, including rage.   You work up a sweat, breathe hard, drink in oxygen for your hard-working muscles, endorphins are released,  you experience a sense of well-being.   In movies we often see a persecuted protagonist sweatily taking out her frustrations on a punching bag,    It is better to pound a heavy bag than your own head against a wall, for sure.   Probably also better than the fake catharsis we so often see in American movies, vengeful violence as the final and best answer to unbearable pain.  I’ve found that writing clearly while thinking through something thoroughly can sometimes make a difference, help me contextualize, understand  and digest my anger.

Many people don’t see anger as a chance to work through an aggravating issue that has long plagued them, but something to repress at all costs.   If a friend you admire is secretly screwing the girl you love, a young woman who then inexplicably scorns you, well… that’s something for a novel you might dream of writing some day.   Bros before hos, yo– no reason to get angry about even a double betrayal.    A person given to repressing anger, no matter how reasonable that anger might be,  will not be tolerant of someone who sees anger as part of a process to be worked through, with important insights to be gained.  

For example,  if you feel yourself getting angry there are steps you can take to control how you express that anger.   That modicum of self-awareness and self-control is sometimes the only thing that can prevent violence.  The first essential thing is learning to recognize the initial rising of anger, that is the moment when you must become super clear in your mind and body about what you need to do differently than what the chemicals coursing through you are now urging you to do.   It is not an easy process to get better at controlling an angry reaction, but I have two friends who’ve made great progress controlling their tempers and I take courage from their examples. 

“Yeah, but he still makes that face,” a mutual friend will observe with a wry smile.   OK, but making that face is much different than following it up with a provocative insult, violently smashing things or bashing your face, isn’t it?  A much better reaction, the face, with no violence in word or deed beyond that.   I’d say that is tremendous progress, and I find it inspiring.   Plus, you can’t help the look on your face, beyond a certain point.

To someone at the mercy of  the constantly percolating violent impulses of repressed anger, there are only the tools at hand to crudely express it.   This is where the passive-aggressive playbook comes into play.   Anger is threatening and must not be expressed, but I am enraged.  I am also terrified, because if I express anger there’s no telling how cataclysmically destructive the violence will be.  The best course of action, for someone with a mortal fear of anger, is passive aggression.  In fact, it’s often the only course of action available to people afraid of conflict.

“You are a judgmental motherfucker,” the individual I have in mind here snarls, departing from his usual high civility.

We are all judges here, friend.  We judge what we can accept and what we can’t, what is proper and what is out of bounds, what is fair and what is unfair.  We judge crime and punishment.   We all do this every day, in many choices we make.   We judge this better than that, this one a friend, this one an acquaintance, this one an enemy.  

“Only vicious people like you have enemies,” says the person too angry to be angry.  

I rest my case.

“Yeah, easy for you to set up a straw man and knock it down, with nobody here to contradict your pontification,” says the nonjudgmental one.  

Nothing could be easier, buddy.  

So here’s what you do, the only power left to you.  You withhold.   I know all about the power of this, having been raised by a father with many weapons, but none more effective than this one.   You listen to the heartfelt expressions of someone close to you who is in pain, you read them laid out at length in writing, if necessary, and then reply, simply:

You’ve expressed your view of things here very clearly and I truly appreciate the mildness of your formulations.  

Period.  

Many people would find this reply to a long, thoughtful letter inadequate, annoying, perhaps even provocative, but no matter.   As all decent writers learn at some point, no iron can stab the heart like a period placed just right. [1]  

 

[1] this truth was expressed by the great Isaac Babel in his wonderful story about writing and editing “Guy De Maupassant”.

 

Weaponizing civility

I had a falling out with a friend from my childhood over his tendency to ignore my feelings, something that seemingly got harder and harder for him to control as time went on.   It was irrelevant to him that he was making me angry about his insistence on one thing or another, my anger was my own problem, the painful truth he was driving at was too important to turn into a referendum on the propriety of putting an old friend in an aggravating position, attacking him or ignoring his clear discomfort.

My childhood friend has a troubled relation with anger, something he was taught to swallow by parents who were also taught to swallow anger, whether they had a right to feel angry or not.   His mother recently described to me how she was taught by her mother, who I knew and could believe it of, to concoct a story rather than ever confront anybody in a way that might result in anger.   Following this practice, she learned late in life, did not always have the intended result.

Every one of us has to deal with anger, a difficult, sometimes scary emotion that is often quite appropriate in an unjust world.   Most things that provoke people  are things most people would be angry about if subjected to.   The key to how you view these provocations is often whether you personally are provoked or not– it is a matter of whether or not you identify with the anger personally.  

Not everyone is taught that swallowing anger, and coming up with an anodyne story to bring a close to the underlying conflict, is the best way to deal with that harsh emotion.  It may be a widely practiced method, but that just puts it in the same category as racism, misogyny, advocating mass killing for a patriotic reason or for no reason and a lot of other widely practiced human emotional excesses.  Compared to raging outright whenever one feels aggrieved, swallowing anger is probably a better alternative, though neither approach leads to a good outcome.

Swallowing anger is a demonstrably bad long term strategy.   Anger is corrosive, comes out one way or the other and it leads to many terrible things including a tendency to irrationally fly off the handle, to lash out at people it’s safe to attack who may have nothing to do with the source of one’s anger, to be stricken by bodily pains so severe that the sufferer cannot even move.  

Maybe the worst thing about swallowing anger is that it makes any anger shown by anyone else, no matter how reasonable it might be, infuriating.  Denying another person’s right to their feelings is a common cause of anger, which must then be swallowed.   It also, sadly, makes friendship ultimately impossible with anyone not committed to pretending about fundamental things that might be absent:  like the right not to have their feelings repeatedly hurt by their closest friends, the right to swallow or not swallow anger, the right to try to make things right when a relationship is about to be lost.

The reasons this old friend was so angry at me are hard to know exactly.   I don’t seem as jittery in my own skin as he is, I’m a little more affable, more comfortable in social settings.   I play guitar better than him, I seem to stand up for myself and my beliefs in a way he can’t and I can express anger when I need to.  

I don’t know what exactly it was that made him provoke me so frequently, beyond the fact that he knew he could lash out at me without much consequence for him.   As mad as he sometimes made me, as furious as some of his attacks were, I never hit him back very hard.   There was probably nobody else in his lifetime of swallowing rage that he felt safe enough to do this with.  

Just because a person can take punches and kicks without responding in kind doesn’t mean he likes being punched and kicked.  There comes a time when even the fondest sentimental attachment frays and finally tears apart under this kind of regime.   My competitive friend’s anger, in the end, was as much about this as anything:  even though my life is manifestly a failure in every way our society uses to measure a life (beautiful home, nice car, good income, social status, quantifiable financial success), he somehow felt I have the upper hand, have the more enviable life.  My squalid rented apartment in a marginal neighborhood somehow provides me the same sense of security as his beautiful home in a wealthy suburb, which is objectively unfair.

His anger at the unfairness of this, it appears, became like a snowball rolling down an immense hill in heavy snow.  As his troubled  marriage reached a new crisis, I became the go-to guy to lash out at.   Finally, when he petulantly told me his extracted apology was apparently not good enough for a prig like me, that my stubborn demand that he actually change the way he behaved toward me was very unfair, especially considering that he was actually the victim, now and forever, we were finally done. 54 years and … poof!

Now we come to the killing power of civility.   You can rage in a polite way, as our newest Junior Associate Supreme Court justice did at his recent hearings.   Nothing he said while raging is unprintable, he never lost control to the point that he uttered a line that could cost him his position on the nation’s highest court (like when I recently referred to him as a “piece of shit” and a “motherfucker” — the end of my Supreme Court dream).   He never cursed, never even came close to using an off-color term.   He never crossed the line into easily dismissible rage, everything he said while raging, however childish and regrettable it may also have been — every word was printable, “good enough”, anyway.  

Reading a transcript of his remarks you may not feel he acquitted himself as the brilliant, impartial jurist he presented himself as, his responses make him look like an hysterical zealot to some, and less than 100% candid and truthful, beyond question, but he clearly adhered to the rule of civility, firmly, if crudely.   It is that angrily clenched sphincter of a mouth, whenever confronted with a question he was in any way threatened by, that speaks louder than anything he actually said.

So it is with civility, being civil means never really having to say you’re sorry.

I recently saw the end of a long email correspondence with a friend who is a master of civility.    He was a mutual friend of the old friend mentioned above, the guy with the unexpressible, irrepressible anger problems.   He suffers periodically from disabling physical conditions he sees as directly related to the ongoing, inchoate rage he has to swallow daily.   He subscribes to Dr. John Sarno’s theory of Tension Myoneural Syndrome (TMS), the mind/body’s creation of crippling physical pain to mask even more terrifying psychic pain.   We’ve had many discussions over the years about this, and I’ve learned things from the exchange.  He is an excellent writer, a smart man and over the years we’ve regularly exchanged countless facts, observations and opinions that have enriched both of us.    

Recently he informed me that he’s unwilling to hear any story even tangentially related to our once mutual friend, or to be part of any conversation in any way related to any of the issues raised by that long friendship, the impasse we came to and our current estrangement.  I made a last attempt to get back on the same page with him.  

I laid out the harm of preemptively forbidding whole areas of conversation,  This ban, I pointed out, ruled out some of the most fundamental things friends should do for each other, starting with hearing what’s on your friend’s mind.   To him, his stance was simple loyalty to an old friend and a refusal to take sides.   Reasonable enough, on one level, and one might ask why I could not abide by his request to talk about anything else.   I couldn’t help but think of Switzerland during the Second World War, neutral, not taking sides, right and wrong — not our business… and my correspondent’s longtime aversion to difficult topics of conversation.  

I imagined the conversations available after the ban on any talk related in any arguable way to my falling out with my childhood friend.   Out of bounds: the corrosive nature of unacknowledged rage, the sharp brutality of denial and the nimble, desperate inventions of shameful secrecy.  The blackout would render our once frank correspondence untenable from my end since it closes the door to the things I am wrestling with daily.   I wasn’t looking for a taking of sides, though my correspondent felt that taking sides was inevitable, once the door opened, and that he would not allow himself to be placed in that position.  I took considerable pains not to offend my sometimes fussy correspondent, rewriting my email a number of times before sending it to make sure not to bruise his feelings.  I raised a handful of separate points, as tactfully as I was able.   Perhaps the most important section was:

We’re touching on a core belief about life: you explore freely and openly with those closest to you to try to get to larger truths, learn something from our own experiences and the lives and choices of those we know, trusting a good friend, in the course of a larger conversation, not to deliberately fuck you or thoughtlessly put you in an untenable position — or, out of deep loyalty or some other principle, you put up a wall, set parameters on what can be discussed against the possibility that such fucking and untenable torment is as inevitable as the next attack of TMS whenever anger is some part of the equation.

It points to the very different expectations we have of our closest friends, of our inner lives.  Also to our different relationships with anger.   I’m drawn to this kind of troubling but sometimes illuminating inquiry and the related stories, the more insight I can get the better; you appear to be drawn away from it.  Conflict, like pain, instructs us about which way to go sometimes.   Conflict is supremely uncomfortable, I know, but it’s also occasionally unavoidable if people are to grow, change, become wiser.   

It’s possible to work through conflicts if you can clearly see the part you’re playing, and there is openness to honest discussion on both sides.  There is a way of viewing conflict that is not starkly black and white, right or wrong, zero sum, winner/loser.  It is rare, and hard, but conflicts can be resolved without war (and can never be with war).  You can look squarely at what needs to be changed to resolve a conflict and, for the sake of a valued relationship, change it, sometimes.  There are general principles and a lifetime of beliefs involved in every choice a person makes, things that should be fair game for discussion, or… apparently not.

I didn’t have to wait long for his short, quick reply.  I read it to my sister.  She chuckled and said he was really smart, and agreed that he had channeled the DU (our relentless father) beautifully, it was the model wonderfully civil fuck you.   It reads, in its entirety (outside of a closing sentence wishing me luck, good health and good times in the coming weeks):

You’ve expressed your view of things here very clearly, and I truly appreciate both the re-send (with a more navigable font) and the mildness of your formulations.

We’ve had a great run with this correspondence for ten years now.  But in light of what you’ve written, and other developments over the past year or so, I think we may well have reached the point where our differences outweigh our many affinities, and that it is indeed time for a break.

Heh, can’t argue with that.   I particularly loved the lawyerly genius of  “and other developments over the past year or so”.  The DU himself could not have topped that one.   Reminiscent of the immortal line, uttered by my defeated father at the end of a desperate fight not to have an honest discussion with his adult son:  “if I ever honestly told you what I really think of you it would do such irreparable damage we’d never have any chance of ever having any kind of relationship between us.”  

Set and match.  

Nicely done, dad, we’ll revisit this on your death bed a few years from now, when I’ll have one last chance to be mild about how wrong you were, you poor bastard.  

Have a blessed day.

Partisan, zealot, citizen

Many of us, living in these highly polarized, partisan times, have taken to calling everything partisan lately.  We are increasingly told that our perceptions of reality itself are entirely dependent on which tribe we belong to, this is the new mantra which equates truth with partisanship.  There are partisans, zealots and the rest of us, ordinary citizens, living our ordinary lives, hoping for the best.

What is a partisan?  [1]   Republicans marching in lock step to support a nominee for the Supreme Court even if an artificially rushed, heavily redacted sham hearing and reluctant, extremely limited last minute FBI probe (the report of which is being provided to Senate Judiciary Committee members on a top secret basis) are required to cover up the many unseemly things about the nominee, many things that many Republicans no doubt, on a personal level, find as repugnant as the majority of regular American citizens do.   Partisans are loyal, and when they vote, they vote in a block.

Republican partisans march in pretty strict lockstep, taking orders and talking points from leaders, talking points they will not deviate from.   Democrats unify to oppose the Republican march, although rarely with the same unanimity of voice that characterizes the highly disciplined Republicans.   When Republicans are in power nowadays they revile the out-voted Democrats as ‘obstructionist’ losers.    

Of course, it is the other way around when the Democratic party is in power, when Republicans shut down the government (extremist Newt Gingrich was the first to do this, to try to hamstring Clinton, more recently it was the Tea Party fighting Obama) and vow to defeat every idea of the sitting, illegitimate Democratic president.   When Democrats proposed policy, like a conservative health care plan, Republicans united in opposition at every step,  trying to repeal it dozens of times once it was law.  There is no question of the two parties working together to fix the many things in Obamacare that need to be fixed.   There is little question of all (or even any of) six female Republican senators voting against Kavanaugh after the credible testimony that he attempted rape back in high school while stumbling drunk.  They will quickly lose their jobs if they vote against their party’s pick, at least the four who represent states of solidly Republican old Dixie.

Partisans are closed minded, see only  black or white, two sides, right or wrong, good or bad, fair or unfair, just or unjust.  Partisans don’t see nuance, can’t hear arguments that are inconvenient, can’t smell the mess they make.  Partisans will not discuss the many things that need to be fixed, they won’t compromise to address even the most pressing problems, they stick to their guns, their talking points, no matter what.   As long as they win, they’re good.  Winning/not losing is the only thing that drives a partisan.  Discussing an issue based on facts, and policies or candidates based on the actual merits?  So twentieth century, man!

A partisan is a fighter willing to go to extremes to advance his zero sum cause.   In the current American government, many partisans also fight to keep from being killed by their own more powerful partisans for the crime of insufficient partisanship.   Partisans are often willing to do things that violate norms, rules, laws, as long as their risk advances their cause.   A true partisan will never compromise.   We have many of these motherfuckers in government today, most of them on the right, sad to say.   They have been training them for decades, with glittering rewards for loyalty.   A supremely loyal partisan is poised to be confirmed for a seat on the Supreme Court by other partisans, on a straight 51-49 vote.

Zealots [2] are uber-partisans willing to die (at least metaphorically)  before they will surrender.  They will do whatever it takes, no matter the cost.  They will strive to win no matter how undignified, how ugly the battle might make them look.   “Extremism in the defense of freedom is no vice” is an expression of zealotry that cost Barry Goldwater a lot of votes in 1964.  It made him sound like an extremist.  The trick for zealots is, no matter how extreme your beliefs might be, to never, ever appear extreme.  The Kochtopus has learned this over the years, present your ideas in an attractive way, even if it means lying about your actual ideas.   Always appear reasonable and do not publicly reveal details of your plans that will make people angry.   Call your favorite far-right think thanks things like “The Institute for Humane Studies” (Charles Koch reportedly loved this particular institute).  Couch everything in terms of unrestricted liberty, even, and especially, when proposing a form of serfdom for 90% of citizens.

Everybody else in a nation where partisans fight for control of the government is a citizen, or an immigrant.    Citizens are concerned with their neighborhood, with public services, with the habitability of the world around them.   As a general rule, citizens want fairness and decent treatment.   You would think senators and representatives, the president, the Cabinet, the justices of the Supreme Court, are also citizens, they must be, under the law.  In a narrow sense they are citizens.   In a larger sense, they are an elite that is not accountable to the needs and desires of the less powerful citizens.    

Democracy, which is supposed to be an expression of the will of its citizens, majority rule that respects and protects minority views, becomes a casualty of unprincipled partisanship.   Particularly when unlimited money to support extreme partisan politicians is thrown on to one side of the scale to decide elections, manipulate citizens.   For the first time in American history, we see beautifully produced ads extolling a Supreme Court nominee, to counter the stink of his sworn testimony, the credible charges against him.  

Of course, limiting the numbers of citizens opposed to your party who can vote is also very important — disenfranchisement of the poor has been on the upswing in recent elections.  Voter suppression has been an important goal of the Kochtopus.  A small turn out favors the right wing status quo.  Any kind of change takes millions and millions of votes to initiate.

Brett Kavanaugh is a partisan, even a zealot, who will do whatever is necessary, including appearing to be a smug, entitled jerk and publicly crying in frustration, to advance his party’s beliefs.   He started his political life, after being a law school (and lifetime) member of the ultra-conservative Federalist Society, as a Republican operative, pressing for an aggressive investigation of Bill Clinton’s sex life to find grounds to impeach him, rushing with other young Republican lawyers to stop the recount in Florida, providing legal advice on judicial appointments, torture and other classified matters to Bush and Cheney.  

He railed, immediately after he was nominated for the top court,  against a left wing claim that Bush staffed his White House with former Kenneth Starr assistants, noting that he was the only one.  Let’s take him at his word.   For our present purposes we need only look at him and the current FBI director, Christopher Wray, a partisan presidential loyalist who was also an assistant of Kenneth Starr during the long, ranging investigation of Bill Clinton that led to his impeachment for perjury about oral sex.   The FBI director had the last word, along with his boss, the president who appointed him, on the scope of the belated, rushed probe into fellow partisan Kavanaugh.   Therefore neither Kavanaugh nor his accuser Blasey Ford were contacted for follow up interviews.  Fair is fair.

Those who had any doubt that Kavanaugh is a partisan, should no longer have any after the speech he gave defending his ruined good name.  In that speech, which he pointed out he wrote himself, he ranted intemperately about a vast Left Wing Conspiracy, motivated in part by revenge for Hillary Clinton’s loss, that had spent untold millions to produce fake charges against him, at the eleventh hour of an urgently rushed confirmation process, for purely political reasons.  

Nobody who is not a partisan would have made that speech, those over the top assertions of persecution by political enemies.   It would never have occurred to most nominees to claim that the person complaining credibly against him was strictly a political plant, part of a “calculated political hit”.  He called desperate Democratic opposition to his immediate confirmation a “circus” and a “disgrace”.  Clarence Thomas used identical words as support for him plummeted from 90 votes to 52 in the days after Anita Hill’s handlers orchestrated his ‘high tech lynching for an uppity black’.    Sadly for Kavanaugh, he couldn’t use that last bit of wonderfully moving innocent victim rhetoric.

Confronted with Blasey Ford’s strong testimony, another nominee might have withdrawn their name, as Reagan-appointee Douglas Ginsberg did when confronted with proof that he smoked marijuana on occasion.  He might have tried to address the woman’s credible allegations against him, though that would have been fairly hard to do, given the apparent sincerity of the witness and her damningly credible allegations.   He might have called for a full FBI investigation, having nothing whatsoever to hide, to clear his good name.  Seems the best move for an innocent man, let them interview everyone who was supposedly there, including himself and his accuser, confirm his innocence once and for all time.  Instead he screeched like a wounded animal about a despicable partisan lynch mob coming to get him for no reason except ugly political calculation and he fought, smug-faced, against any additional delay for an investigation of any of the new charges against him.   It pleases and energizes Trump’s base to hear someone screaming indignantly, angrily blaming and vilifying others, as long as he’s a powerful white man from their tribe.

Republicans were soiling themselves over Kavanaugh’s chances for confirmation when they saw how compelling Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony was.   Unlike most liars, she did not claim to know anything she didn’t remember clearly.   She was meek, and clearly frightened of the spotlight.  Her account was credible, quite specific in what she was able to recall.  She was believable and made a very sympathetic witness.   Importantly, she had nothing to gain by subjecting herself and her family to the angry reaction they faced, except that it was important to bring these ugly facts to light, for everyone’s sake.  Even the Fox news partisans were saying as much by the time she was finished testifying.   The president reportedly complained that nobody had warned him what a good witness she was.

Kavanaugh’s nomination— and this is a judge who has written that he doesn’t like the Special Counsel Statute (the one that authorizes the Mueller probe), that a president, on his own, should be able to declare laws unconstitutional, and that a sitting president should not be the subject of a criminal or civil  investigation– was in real trouble when Blasey Ford was done testifying.   She may not have given enough concrete detail to support a criminal indictment of Kavanaugh, as Rachel Mitchell concluded in her report to the Judiciary Committee Republicans she acted as mouthpiece for,  but Christine Blasey Ford gave more than enough specific detail, under oath,  to trigger a full FBI investigation.

After a long lunch break, (Grassley had called for a half hour break, which I thought at the time niggardly, they were out three times as long) Kavanaugh would have his turn to tell the truth.   Kavanaugh apparently spent the break steeling himself, and putting the finishing flourishes on the passionate, angry opening statement he wrote himself, as he stated.   At one point during the hearing, Rachel Mitchell, the female prosecutor brought on by the 11 man Republican majority on the Judiciary Committee to avoid the optics of the Anita Hill hearing, closed in on a date on Kavanaugh’s calendar, July 1, 1982, an entry with the names of others Blasey Ford had named as being present in the house, and began asking about it.   Kavanaugh seemed to begin coming unhinged as he carefully answered questions about his former drinking buddies, named in the box for that day.   When Senator Amy Klobuchar next asked him about his drinking, he became testy, surly, and finally outright rude.  He lost control of himself when he defiantly asked her if she was a black out drunk.  He then called for, and was given, a five minute break, to compose himself.

After crying it out and pulling himself together, Kavanaugh apologized to Ms. Klobuchar for his outburst and the hearing proceeded.  The outraged men of the Judiciary Committee left their mouthpiece,  Rachel Mitchell, sitting silently at her tiny desk as they hurled invective at the unprincipled partisans on the Democratic side, the ones who were making the hearings into a circus, a forum for disgraceful political grandstanding, seizing a chance to crucify a good, super-qualified, impartial judicial nominee.  The Jesuits and the nonpartisan American Bar Association would soon weigh in on the side of not confirming Kavanaugh, but that’s neither here nor there.  They have no power to do anything, so who cares?

That five minute break, and a quick on-the-fly change in Republican tactics, saved that unethical partisan motherfucker’s lifetime dream from going down in flames. His nomination, burnt toast as he called for the time out, was golden again once he came back and the other partisan bullies stuck up for him, privileged white men angrily, indignantly attacking, like the partisan hacks they are.   There is only one thing for partisans, winning.

Which is why, when he was a young, extremely conservative political operative, working for Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, Kavanaugh strongly advised that under no circumstances should President Bill Clinton be permitted to take a break when they were grilling him under oath.   He knew that a guilty man will crack, no matter how smart a lawyer he is, if the pressure is not relieved.  Smart guy, Brett Kavanaugh, even if hypocritical, unethical, and fit only for partisan purposes.

David Brooks, moderate Republican smart guy, cannot admit that Kavanaugh behaved atrociously at the hearing because… partisans don’t admit shit.  It all depends, you dig, on what tribe you’re in.  Truth is tribal now.  My tribe is winning, suck it.

And God bless these United Shayyyssssh.

 

 

[1]   par·ti·san (n):  1.  a strong supporter of a party, cause, or person.                      synonyms:  supporter, follower, adherent, devotee, champion                                        2.   a member of an armed group formed to fight secretly against an occupying force, in particular one operating in enemy-occupied Yugoslavia, Italy, and parts of eastern Europe in World War II.         synonyms: guerrilla, freedom fighter” underground fighter, irregular (soldier)

partisan (adj):  prejudiced in favor of a particular cause
synonyms;  biased, prejudiced, one-sided, discriminatory, colored. partial, interested, sectarian, factional

[2]    zealot (n):  a person who is fanatical and uncompromising in pursuit of their religious, political, or other ideals.     synonyms: fanatic, enthusiast, extremist, radical, young Turk, diehard, true believer, activist, militant.

 

Study their mothers to get to the roots of their misogyny

Men who are violent toward women, even those who simply hold them down while trying to have a few sexual thrills, even if they indignantly claim to be feminists while defending themselves against actual women with credible complaints against them, behave this way for a reason.   They felt traumatized, or abandoned, at some point in their early lives, by a woman who had power over them.  I would think that in most cases this woman was the boy’s mother.  This is not to blame the mother for raising a misogynist.   Sometimes the most harmful things a mother did were also very subtle, even done with love. Sometimes nothing the mother did or failed to do could have changed the outcome for the angry son.

My father’s mother, for example, whipped him in the face from the time he could stand.   This had an effect on my father’s personality — he tended to be dismissive of women most of the time.  He married a woman who pretty much worshipped him, his great intellect, his moral stance, his unshakably secure ego.   That last bit struck my sister and me as particularly hilarious, nobody was more shaken by a particular kind of challenge than our father.   Anyway, a guy who’d been whipped in the face by mom grew up to marry a very bright woman who believed the sun shone out of his ass.

Brett Kavanaugh, only child, often claims that his mother was his inspiration.  I believe him.  She was an ambitious woman who went to law school as the mother of a ten year-old, became a lawyer, a prosecutor, a judge.  Before that she taught in predominantly black public high schools and taught her son that racism was bad.   Pretty impressive.   All she expected from Brett (or perhaps only he expected it from himself) was the same kind of diligence and ambition, all the way to the Supreme Court.   

Kavanaugh claims to have been number one in his class at elite Georgetown Prep (number one?  smells more like number two to me…).    This claim is possible, I suppose, at least as plausible as his claim that he got so shit-faced he didn’t know what teams were playing at games he was at, so drunk he didn’t black out, just fell asleep, by drinking good old American beer. 

In senior year, he points out, when he was eighteen, it was legal in his state to drink beer.   He did it legally, after a few years of doing it illegally.  Beer.   He stated many times that he drinks beer, only beer.  Beer.  Who hasn’t been so drunk on beer they fell into a deep sleep after raving drunkenly, with no memory of any of it afterwards?  Beer is really pretty harmless, as everyone who has ever drank a couple of six-packs on a hot summer day knows, worst that will happen— you fall asleep.  That’s the only reason they don’t sell beer in stadiums after the fifth inning, they don’t want the fans falling asleep.  Now turn your head and let me piss in your other ear.

It is clear that Kavanaugh has a lot to hide.  He is hiding his extreme right wing views, his long pedigree as a strict partisan, hiding his right wing zealot resume, the thousands of questionable memos he wrote for Bush and Cheney before they rewarded him with a lifetime federal judgeship. 

It could not be more clear how much he has to hide after his defensive, tearful temper tantrum the other day during which he whined that he had to wait weeks, WEEKS, to find out if— yo, I have to quote this amazing talking turd in his own words, they are curiously vulnerable, childish words:

“When I at least did OK enough at the hearings that it looked like I might actually get confirmed, a new tactic was needed.”   (and the passive voice used)

What a fucking worm, what a victim.   Yes, at least OK enough that you deserve your lifetime appointment, no questions asked, no witnesses called.   The woman who remembers clearly that it was you testified credibly and convincingly.   It was clearly wrenchingly difficult for her to step forward.  You did nothing but double down on your denial, ratchet it up to 100% to match her 100% certainty that it was you.  Then, like the simple-minded partisan hack you are, you stood to deliver your indignant defense about the Clintons having it in for you.

The Supreme Court was my mommy’s one and only dream for her number one son!   How dare they?!!   

Indeed.

How dare this woman, Christine Blasey Ford step forward to accuse somebody of your sterling reputation, your impeccable credentials?  She may have had hard years learning to deal with the traumatic memory of the mocking laughter of you and your asshole friend Mark Judge after the two of you, allegedly, allegedly,  locked her in a room, turned up the music and had some fun she wasn’t on board with, but does that give her the right to step forward at the eleventh hour?   This seemed to be his point, that there was barely time to get fucking Mark Judge into hiding.  The fucking Clintons, the ruthless Democrats who call ME evil!!!  They did the same thing with Anita Hill, boom, sneak attack two days before the vote to confirm Clarence Thomas. 

They always do this shit, it’s what they do, keep in mind all the people the Clintons  murdered, starting with Vince Foster, and GOT AWAY WITH – THEY GOT AWAY WITH MURDER!    It’s why they must be permanently crushed, no matter what ethical shortcuts must be taken (and the passive voice used, to avoid, you dig, saying out loud that we are the ones taking ethical shortcuts).   This hearing has nothing to do with what I did or did not do one early evening when I was stinking drunk on beer, only beer, America’s favorite beverage.  This is about anger at our wonderful president and revenge by losers, fucking vicious losers.

I have to think the reason Kavanaugh was a black out drunk in high school, and a mean and aggressive one (the tendency shown even while sober, angrily defending his ruined ‘good name’ and raging against the machinations of his enemies, a cabal of well-funded, unprincipled weasels conspiring against his good name, ruining his life, traumatizing his family), while studying hard to be the number one student at Georgetown Prep, and going to church, and being of service to everyone, and having many close female friends, just friends he had beers with, and following in the good Christian footsteps of Ignatius of Loyola  (the Jesuits have since abandoned him, up there on his cross)– well, I have to think that Brett’s mom had something to do with it.  Quite possibly through no fault of her own, sometimes kids are just irrationally needy creatures that nobody could love enough.

Perhaps she was as demanding of Brett as she was of herself.   She expected even more of her only child than what she herself had achieved, which was considerable.   Imagine growing up in this household, with the pressure to do even better than your accomplished mom.   So, it stands to reason you need to blow off some steam from time to time, get shit-faced, hammered, so drunk you are visibly staggering.  A cute, younger girl comes in, goes upstairs to use the bathroom.  The parents aren’t home.  You and your drunk friend Mark, just as a goof, go upstairs push her into a bedroom across from the bathroom and lock the door. 

Nothing, so far, that any two drunken male high school assholes wouldn’t do.  The rest, the things that would sear themselves into the hippocampus of the young woman, traumatize her for decades to come, are things that only misogynistic drunken high school assholes do.  Throw yourself on top of her, grab her, rub against her.  Suddenly she starts to cry for help.  Fuck that, a meaty hand over her mouth will put an end to that!  The girl’s bathing suit, under her clothes, is what saved her from worse, Brett was too drunk to forcibly remove the bathing suit, keeping his other hand over her mouth as she struggled.   Oh, well!   Have a good laugh, go outside and ralph on the lawn.  Have you boofed yet?

It seems to me that in the cases of most rapey assholes, the uncontrollable misogyny at the root of that power-crazed behavior often comes from mom.   Not to say that all boys raised by difficult mothers grow up to hate women, but some do.   The extreme right wing partisan zealot Neil Gorsuch (Georgetown Prep, ’85), Trump’s first Supreme Court pick,  had a mother so powerful Ronald Reagan appointed her to head the Environmental Protection Agency, to make things a little more comfortable for his super-wealthy job creator friends who were being badly hurt by the hysteria over potential catastrophic climate change. 

Gorsuch’s mother was a powerful conservative ideologue with a mission.  You can only imagine the humane values young Neil imbibed with his mother’s powerful milk.   The results can be seen in his fair-minded, even-handed application of the laws, his unflinching instinct to protect the rights of those eternal “persons” who have been so unfairly oppressed in this great, deluded nation liberalism has brought to the edge of godlessness.

Perhaps the most obvious case is the misogyny of Donald J. Trump.   He rarely makes a peep about his sainted mother, in contrast to the many things he’s said about his father over the years.  Everyone knows his father was an overbearing, ruthless, larger than life asshole who reluctantly groomed his younger son for the job he’d hoped his oldest, Fred Jr., would take.   Fred Jr. was too nice a person, too decent a guy, by all accounts, and so Fred Christ Trump groomed the younger Donald, who had always exhibited the required meanness of spirit, to be his successor, inheritor of the great Trump Empire.  The wife and mother was at home, she had everybody’s backs.

Trump, in addition to his many fine attributes, his finest attributes, is clearly a cruel man.   He takes pleasure in humiliating others.   You want to know the roots of his cruelty toward women, which is as famous and often displayed as his cruelty toward blacks, Mexicans, the children of illegal immigrants and asylum seeks, Muslims and other rapist-types, look at his mother.

Fred Christ Trump’s father, the president’s grandfather, an immigrant from Germany, was a self-made wealthy man.   Fred Christ Trump took a small fortune and made it a much bigger fortune in the decades after his father died.  At some point he was looking for a wife.   A poor immigrant woman fresh off the boat from Scotland somehow caught his eye.   He married her.   She was a rich man’s wife, now rich herself.   She would put on a mink coat, have her driver take her in the limo to one of the Queens laundromats they owned.   She would collect the bags of quarters in that outfit.  Take them home and count them. 

Not much more is known about Trump’s mother, except for her proud professions that she always knew little Donald would grow up to be a great and important man, but I can only imagine he never received her love in the quantity needed.   His rigidity speaks to that, his insistence that he has never, ever, been wrong about anything, even his multiple bankruptcies were all the right moves, made after winning bigly.  

He makes a canned remark about his mother any time he is asked about her.  Identical words each time.  A great woman, a great, great woman.   Very smart woman, very smart.

Unsaid, of course, but hinted at like the artist of innuendo he is:  if any of my wives had been half as great as her, I wouldn’t have cheated on them, wouldn’t have divorced them after publicly humiliating them.  My mother was a saint.   My bad luck to marry a series of whores.  I can’t tell you how much money I’ve had to pay to these fucking bitches over the years, you wouldn’t believe it.

Trump’s misogyny is beyond dispute.  He treats men badly too, but he feels a special urgency to belittle women.   If you are reading this, Mr. President, I don’t blame you, not entirely.   You apparently had a pretty bad  mother, even though she arranged photo ops for you with a series of pretty models every weekend when she and dad visited you at the military academy they sent you to because they worried about your uncontrollable bullying.  That was the beginning of your Ladies’ Man brand, those photo ops with pretty girls hired to make you not look like the cringing bully douche-bag you’ve always been.   You were voted Ladies Man of your school by your all male classmates at the Maladjusted Sons of Wealthy Assholes Academy.

It is no mystery why Trump supports Kavanaugh.   Kavanaugh has changed his opinion on the accountability of a sitting president for ordinary civil and criminal prosecution.  As a zealous young Republican operative he believed with all his heart that a Democratic president who lies under oath about a blow job must be aggressively investigated, impeached, thrown out of office for the felony of perjury and then prosecuted for it and imprisoned, if possible.   A president like Trump?   He has such a hard job, the hardest job, the hardest job, a job that he can’t do well while burdened with civil and criminal investigations into his alleged conduct while he is the sitting president.   Kavanaugh writes in that tell-tale 2009 law review article that his views have changed a little, or evolved.  Wait,  I thought you twats don’t believe in evolution.   I’d say Kavanaugh’s views changed by Intelligent Design.

The larger reason that Trump is insisting on Kavanaugh as the only Supreme Court justice he wants, of course, is that Trump sees himself in the unfairly maligned Kavanaugh.  It’s always about The Donald, after all. Many people sincerely hate Trump, many women accuse him of things they can never prove 100%.   Women are always trying to attack Trump, according to him, because they are jealous, or simply liars, now there are three women falsely accusing Kavanaugh of the same kind of utter crap, this bitchy “she said, I said” slander.  All lies!  Thank God for the law in this great nation that says they have to prove it 100%!   100% you fucks!

Trump apparently told Kavanaugh to show some balls at the hearing, come out swinging, attacking, they can’t prove shit, they’re liars, a well-funded attack network of lying liberals propped up by a couple of freedom hating class traitor billionaires — blast ’em, Brett, with both goddamned barrels.   He defended the impeccable moral credentials of his nominee at a rare presidential press conference the night before the Blasey Ford testimony.   An object lesson in being a brazen alpha male.

Now, after Kavanaugh’s alpha bitch performance defending his “good name”,  he and Trump are definitely BFFs, two victimized wealthy white men, being unfairly held to the same standard as powerless Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Blacks, poor whites who do– allegedly!– the same things to women that they’re accused of.   Those types go to prison behind the same charges we have to face down, Brett.  See, it pays to be a rich white guy with mad connections to powerful people, LOL!  Am I right, Brett?  Am I right?

Kavanaugh’s victims, ALLEGED victims, well, he’s very sorry that they had some kind of traumatic experience they mistakenly recall he was involved in, things he has 100% no recollection of, but that he is, at the same time, 100% sure never happened, not him.  100% positive.   The gold standard of irrefutable rebuttal, 100% certainty, just like Christine Blasey Ford.  These women may believe they are being truthful, but they are the tools of liars.

It is because I have always been an unwavering far-right partisan that these false allegations have been orchestrated by a powerful group of well-organized, well-funded rabidly liberal enemies.  By bitches.  I treat ALL women with dignity and respect, even these lying ones intent on destroying my reputation as a pious and humble church-going Christian on the cusp of fulfilling a lifelong dream, my mother’s and mine.   SO UNFUCKING FAIR!!!   Arrrgggghhhhh!!!!!

Kavanaugh’s mother and father sat in the small audience in the Senate hearing room during his passionate, petulant rebuttal.  I wonder if Judge Martha Kavanaugh was as proud of her boy as Trump’s mother always publicly pretended to be of her troubled son Donald. 

The Stories We Tell Each Other

My mother used to complain to me about a certain person’s conversational style, said that it eventually drove her almost insane.   The talk was always rapid fire, the meandering stories long, involved, usually about friends or acquaintances of people this person knew, who my mother didn’t know, had never met or heard of.  There would always be many twists to the endless, meandering tales, and a large, shifting cast of characters, and, not knowing any of them, my mother was hard-pressed to follow most of the drama, let alone care about it.  

My mother would be at a loss for how to respond, she’d venture a polite, inane comment once in a while, just to prop up her end of the monologue.    Her friend understood this non-engagement as a sign of my mother’s dementia and looked at her with a mixture of concern and impatience.   My mother didn’t have dementia.  She had strong opinions, and she spoke them to the end.   She also tuned out when she was bored, like many of us do, but she was not demented.   It was rare for my mother to have nothing to say and when she honestly had nothing she was at a loss, stumped, reminding herself that there was really nothing in the conversation for her.  Trying to remember not to make another lunch date with this high pressure talking hose.

To the other party in these chats, it was easy to make the case that her old friend was demented.   “First, she can’t really follow a simple story.   I had told her all about these people already, only last week.   Memory is another issue, she has no short or medium term memory, none!  She stares at me blankly, her mouth partly open, like she’s in a daze.”

“It’s true, I go into a daze, like an alpha state, just to try to keep myself from screaming.   I’m pretty sure if I ever started yelling it would hurt her feelings, there’d be some kind of trouble afterwards.   But every week, these endless tales of interlocking, uninteresting strangers she barely describes, over generic food I can hardly eat.  I hate that place, but it’s the only restaurant she likes to go to, it’s cheap.  

“If she was a good story-teller, at least, but she’s not, she doesn’t set anything up right, there’s no through-line to anything, no dramatic shape or pay off,  it’s all just:  ‘So X and Y go over to Z’s house, and everybody knows what Z’s house is like, I must have told you about that shithole.  Now, if you recall from three weeks or so ago, there is a couple named G and H, they were friends of U and V, the ones from college that they sort of aren’t really close friends with anymore, though they all claim to love each other and their kids, and those goddamned kids are another long, terrible tale, but anyway, as you may recall, G recently lost her hot shot job, a big blow to the ego and also to the family checkbook, and so H says…”

“It’s sad, the dementia.  I still try to tell her stories, keep her engaged, interested in life, but it seems she’s sunken into her own dour thoughts, whatever they may be.   It’s impossible to arouse her interest or engage her at all.  She doesn’t even seem to care about eating anymore.  It’s so sad, she was such a bright interactive person and now she’s just… like this.'”   The eyes half close, the mouth falls half open, under the dropped eyelids the eyes move around slowly, without plan or hope of a plan.  

“I become a zombie, I really do.   After ten minutes of her endless narration I just want to sink my teeth into somebody’s arm and go ‘ahhhhnnnnngggggghhhhh….’ the way zombies do.  I just want the noise to stop, that’s all it is, nervous, chattering white noise.   ‘So H has the temerity to say, and when I say temerity, I mean, you can’t compare H to even Z in that regard.  How people get so brazen and oblivious I will never understand.   Anyway….’  

“Last time she called I told her I’m sick and she said she’d come over, bring me that prepared overly salty chicken soup from Publix.  I told her she’s very kind but that the doctor told me I’m very contagious.  I almost told her I might bite her face, hard, if she didn’t let me hang up the phone right then, but thought better of it.  I’m lonely enough and at least she calls, you know?”

I understood my mother’s loneliness better than most things.  I urged her to write, but she never did.   There was a world in there that was too painful to relax in, let alone explore, better to keep the mind busy with books, murder mysteries, and murder mysteries on television.  It was uncanny how quickly she would tell you who the murderer would turn out to be, she pounced on plot points with the lightning quickness of a terrier grabbing a rat by the neck.  She’d give it a quick shake and leave it twitching when the commercial hit.  In the end, she was never wrong about the killer.

How Do We Learn About Life?

I will grant you at the start, learning real lessons in this difficult life is hard work and many people do it only haphazardly, when some crippling tragedy knocks them back and forces them to take stock.   In fact, if you’re like most people, you might want to skip this entry entirely, because I am pretty much talking to myself, and for myself.

I find I learn some of the most valuable things I know by studying the lives of people I know well who do not learn the lessons of their own lives.   My father was one I knew very well, watched very closely for decades, and there are many others.   This makes me sound judgmental, I know, but I don’t stand by, like a scientist with a gigantic pair of tweezers, observing my lab rat friends.   I was once accused of that, actually, by one of the cheekier lab rats, he actually said to me “I get it now– you’re the scientist and we’re all your lab rats!”   I smiled, because he was right, in a way, but I said nothing, because, you know, I don’t talk to lab rats, as a rule.  I try to help the people I know as I hope they will help me if the need arises.   It is sometimes subtle, but I like to think my good will is always apparent.  I am willing to listen and keep talking until the story breaks apart into incoherence.

Humans need a story to grasp anything.  I’ll tell you an old one, featuring the brilliant, troubled lab rat above.   He was the youngest of three brothers, always felt he got the short end of everything, that life was a zero sum game he was always losing.   He learned to negotiate, wheedle, demand, pout, glower.   These things served him well in business, I suppose, I believe he eventually made a shitload of money by nickel and diming everyone involved.  It did not make him successful in friendship or love, sad to say.   But here’s the thing:  over the years I watched him stage and brilliantly perform an identical three act play maybe a hundred times.    There is a lesson in this.

Act one: meet a new person and view this new person in glowingly idealized terms.  If the person is funny, he’s the funniest person ever.  This goes for coolness and every other perceived quality.  Act one is animated by playfulness, infinite promise and  the protagonist’s belief that he has finally found a great person, not just another neurotic asshole like all the ones who have previously let him down.    You will always be compared, unfavorably, to the new person, just so you have a personal stake in the rest of the play.  Audience participation, you dig.

In Act Two: complications arise, as in any good drama, or any good comedy, for that matter.  The person is still very funny, sure, but there’s a snide edge creeping in sometimes.   Yes, the person is very charismatic, but also, careless, not very thoughtful, kind of dumb, in a weird way.   The promises made in the first act are being strangely revisited in act two and everything is suddenly coming into question.  Reality itself is starting to come into doubt.  Drastic corrective action is called for and eventually taken by the protagonist.

Act Three reveals that this is no tragicomedy we are watching, it’s a rather stark tragedy.   In Act Three the inevitable betrayal comes, sometimes in a terrible form.  One time it’s an anti-Semitic outburst and threatened punch in the fucking face.  Another time it’s the trashing of your commercial kitchen.   People break into your house, almost certainly people you know, steal a bunch of your things, including every valuable in the house, take a shit on the piano bench, for good measure.    Or you’re invited to the wedding of illegal immigrant, underpaid workers of yours and are then served food stolen from your own kitchen.  Or the new best friend is fucking your now ex and the two of them are laughing about it when you confront them.  Or, paint your own betrayal picture here, the possibilities are truly endless.

Classic repetition compulsion, one of the defining neurotic behaviors of our time, maybe of any time.  I could not have learned about it more thoroughly from even the best psychology course as I did from watching a close friend tirelessly at work for many years.   It’s a simple process, keep repeating the same painful thing the same way until, well, just keep repeating it.  

If at first the play seems a tragedy rather than an enlightened comedy, recast the play and play it again.  You dig how this works, right?  You get a new star to play opposite you, you stage the thing with a genius director, or better, direct it yourself, who knows your vision better than you yourself?   No need to change the script, because this time– THIS TIME– everything is perfect for the desired result.   The play cannot fail to entertain and enlighten because– look at the incandescence of the new star I have cast!

But back in the dressing room, it’s always the same.  Opening night and the incandescent new star is loudly having sex with your mother, who is loving the sex and shockingly uninhibited about expressing it, not even looking away when you walk into the dressing room shocked.   Another fucking putz!   Un fucking believable… Another shocking betrayal, is it not?  IS IT FUCKING NOT?!!!

You look at this lab rat, after he tells you story number one hundred identical in every detail to the ninety-nine that came before: idealized new person, disillusionment, betrayal.    Every story exactly the same dramatic arc, exhausting.   You think to yourself: how can you not see this, my dear lab rat?   Hard for the scientist in me to truly understand.   When they hook me up to the machines that deliver that awful shock, I try to figure out how not to get the electricity full blast, there is always some way to get less pain from the sadists who designed the experiment.  That’s just me, OK, I get that, and maybe I haven’t come up against a sadistic enough experimenter, but still.   I’m left holding my clipboard and scratching my head when I see a rat rushing constantly, inexorably toward the button that delivers electrocution.

Now I have told you a simple story, about a rather extreme case, yes, but true in every detail, I assure you (except for mom and the star in the dressing room).  Most people conduct their repetition compulsion business on a much more subtle level.   We are, virtually all of us, geniuses of justification.    We can give a rationale that makes insane behavior seem more or less rational.   Why did you march all those indigenous people to their deaths when you could have made an arrangement that would have served everybody, preserved peace, honored wisdom and honor itself?   Manifest Destiny.  Social Darwinism.   Freedom on the march.   Done.  What is your fucking point, asshole?  Get off my land.

I am trying, as I believe I sometimes demonstrate in these pages, to understand the sources of pain in my life, in the lives of my friends and loved ones, and behave in ways that seem productive, healing rather than harming.    It is better to be gentle than to be harsh, better to help than to hurt.  I may not always be up to that challenge, but it seems better to struggle with remaining gentle than not to.  For me.

Not everyone welcomes this kind of struggle, it’s a matter of temperament.  I understand that, even as it sometimes makes me sad.  It is, to my way of thinking, cheating yourself out of the full richness of this life, not being open to looking deeply into these highly educational situations that shed what little light there is to be had here in a world of darkness.  

If I manage to reel myself in from anger over and over, while provoked without mercy by someone who believes I am stronger than them and therefor able to take multiple punches and kicks, it is a good day for me– not giving in to rage, remaining calm enough to remain open and almost cordial.   It is not as good a day, of course, as a day when I don’t have to prove my ability to take multiple punches and kicks, but there is something worthwhile in it for me– proving to myself again that constantly giving in to righteous rage is not my fate.   If the person I finally have to walk away from is sobbing piteously, or cursing me angrily, convinced that I am a heartless bastard, it is something I just have to live with.   

All this is well worth thinking about, I think.  And if not– well, there’s always the weather, good books, politics, culture (and lack of same), our well-stocked catalogues of frustrations and the relative fascism of various nations to discuss. The vexing smugness of powerful lying fucking hypocrites who make decisions the rest of us must live by is always easy enough to bat around (see previous several posts, and the next few, no doubt).

There is also philosophy, of course, observations about life made in a general sort of way that don’t need to  touch on tangible details that are personal or difficult, don’t force us to take sides in moral pissing contests.   No need, in a philosophical chat, to go into the well-known intimate examples of the thing we are talking about– why go there?   There’s always all that to kick around.   But that shit is really not the beating heart of a human life, or why it sometimes grabs us by the throat, this flickering miracle of being alive.

Reconciliation vs. Prayer

Reconciliation is crucial for restoring trust after violence has been done between people.  An apology is a good first step, as long as acknowledgement of the harm done is part of it, and an honest vow to try not to do it again.   I know that what I did was bad, I know how much it hurt you, how much it would have hurt me, I am sorry I hurt you, I will try hard not to do it again.    Hard, hard words for anyone to utter.  

It takes humility and self-confidence to speak that way to someone we’ve been unfair to, and a strong desire to mend torn feelings and have an ongoing relationship.  It takes resolve to keep a promise to try not to repeat the harm, and sensitivity to the other person’s expression of discomfort when you start doing it. The most important single part, after the apology is accepted, is to be vigilant against repeating the harmful behavior.  Without that last step the apology is as empty as an abuser’s protestations of love. 

A soothing apology comes from a real desire to make peace, to abandon all the quick, limitless rationales that are the human genius, the imagined scenarios where what we did was not really so bad, where the unforgiving asshole waiting for our demanded apology is actually the aggressor, the self-righteous fuck.  The sufficiency of my apology, which I gave without condition or eye roll, is now under dispute!  Fuck him!  Fuck that fucking prig!

I am a prig.  I had a friend weaponize a casual observation I made during a conversation.   My weaponized remark was shoved up the spouse’s ass at a therapy session, with explosive results.  The spouse contacted me in utter panic, showed up eye lid twitching, informed me that either through malice or stupidity I had rendered their marriage untenable.  My words, “oh, that makes more sense, I was left with some questions after X’s story” adduced as proof that X was a chronic liar, made me responsible for the destruction of a long marriage.  Neither spouse was sure they could still be friends with someone like me. That would depend on how convincingly I recanted the awful thing I had said.  Their therapist had recommended I be confronted, and so I was.

We live in a world where fucked up shit happens continually.  Nothing personal, really, except in a case like this, where there is an element of choice in how this stark, allegedly vicious crime by an old friend is framed and prosecuted.

So I brought what I thought was logic to bear.  Y told me a story over the course of five minutes, relating in detail events involving X, Y and Z that had happened a few months earlier.   X had told me the same story right after it happened, in about thirty seconds, and hating Z, I had zero follow-up questions about it, though the story made little sense to me at the time.   X had concluded his short telling with the words “I probably shouldn’t have told you this…”.  Y’s longer version made much more sense than X’s short one.  I said so.  

That was the crime I was on trial for.  My friendship with X and Y was at stake.  I had to remember very clearly exactly what I’d said weeks ago when I compared one story to the other version I’d heard several months earlier.

I told my friend, at one point, if I maliciously confirmed your spouse’s opinion that you are a chronic liar, neither of you should be friends with me.   A friend waiting for a moment of weakness to strike a painful blow is not a friend.   If you don’t believe my comment was an honest reaction to a retold story that made more sense than the original version, there’s nothing more to be done here.  

Of course, it turned out there were some other old wounds that needed to be pried open and poked into, other accusations against my character that I needed to make an accounting for.  I did the best I could, seeing my old friend in obvious pain, without realizing how insane what I was being put through was.   That didn’t sink in until later.   In the meantime X reported that things were better with Y after the confrontation with me.

I know what you’re thinking, dear reader.   These people are clearly nuts.  What kind of example is this insane trap they put you in?   It is the insane trap of two desperate, drowning people.  What kind of example is it?

It is no more insane that a lot of wars.   Kill them over there so they don’t kill us here, freedom on the march, manifest destiny, Remember the Alamo, the Gulf of Tonkin, a new Hitler, a new Hitler, a modern-day Hitler.  We are not known for not being insane when we are whipped into a rage or goaded by terror.   My friend X in the car was mostly insane when he confronted me about all the malice he imagined I had toward him.  The confrontation was no more insane than many things in the news every day.  Of course, we have a fairly insane person in charge of a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons, so there’s that.

I wrote all about this as it was unfolding and didn’t intend to go so far into the details this time.   I am musing on it today because X’s mother has called me several times lately, looking for advice nobody can possibly come up with in the quantity she needs.   I’ve done my best to help her figure out the lay of some very troubling land.   X is very close to mom, though apparently has revealed nothing about our falling out.   X’s mom asked me to keep our conversation secret, as is their way, so I have already violated that trust, in a technical sense.  Oh, well.

To conclude, then.   During the last of the ten days when our religion requires us to approach anyone we have wronged and make amends, if possible, X sits in the shul praying with the rabbi of the congregation that awarded Donald Trump’s business partner, a convicted felon (grievous assault with a deadly weapon among other, more white collar felonies where he got immunity for giving evidence against his criminal colleagues) its Man of the Year award twice in recent years.  

They pray, for a better world, for more understanding, for forgiveness, for prosperity.  I begrudge them nothing.  But, truth, those prayers are not the same as taking an honest inventory of our deeds and seeking actual reconciliation, by our actions, with people we have recently hurt.

In the end, we choose to hear a friend who is in pain or to keep fighting for some kind of imagined supremacy in an ongoing war we have no insight into.    The endless, unreasoned war is some fucked up shit, my friend.  X is no doubt thinking the same thing as his rabbi asks the congregation, including their generous Man of the Year, to please rise, please be seated, please rise.

Fact or Fiction

My version of the story may be fact, or fiction.   You can take that to the bank, even though fact and fiction may be woven together without a seam and almost always are.  I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.   Think of any story you’ve heard, it contains the seeds of fact and the seeds of fiction grown together.  A little bit of fiction thrown into an otherwise completely truthful account of a well-recalled event can explain something in a very satisfying way sometimes.   Wisdom, if it is to be had, is choosing what is most useful, most evocative and real, among the interactive facts and fictions.

Wisdom, I joke.  There is only the way we treat each other.

I think of how many ways a child might be lied to.  The lies are limited only by the imagination and determination of the liar.  What do we call these lies?   Fact, because the world may repeat them loudly, over and over, in a chorus sung to an earwig tune that is hard to drum out of mind?  Fiction, because in the clear light provided by someone who loves you without selfishness or thought of profit, the ridiculousness of these lies can be easily seen?

How about the boy who watches his father be emasculated every day, what is the fact and fiction in his life?   Hard question.   What is it to be “emasculated”?   It is to take away from a man, by some kind of force, the vital sense that, in a rugged moment, he can protect himself, protect others.   This is the one thing a man has, at heart — the image of himself as strong enough to protect himself and those he loves.  Forget all the other trappings of what we think of as toxic masculinity, and no mistake, those are some toxic trappings to what we commonly think of as masculinity.  Emasculation is called that because the symbolism is easy to grasp: you hold a man powerless and forcibly remove that masculine quality that makes him think he has any control. [1]

We can call this rendering powerless by other names, or by no name, and it is certainly not restricted to use against men.   It is routinely and brutally done to women, and to vast multitudes of children, to anyone who attempts to act, as we all start off doing, with self-agency.   With the belief that our life is of infinite value, and unique, that our soul is a miracle, that there is right and there is evil and that we must be warriors against evil without becoming like those motherfuckers.

I see myself standing with the kid who is having his ass kicked.  I see myself there, even though I am almost never there during the actual ass whupping.   Kids have their asses handed to them every day, every minute of every hour of every day.  The things routinely done to kids make a certain kind of grown up want to scream.   Screaming is no help in this case.  A scream is only a reaction to horror, a turing up of the volume, it only makes things worse for everybody.  

Picture a hand moving quickly enough and strongly enough to intercept the fist heading toward the child’s face.  Picture Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kun Do, the Way of the Intercepting Fist, not practiced for personal glory, not for inflicting punishment on a violent jackass, but to intercept the fist, turn aside the blow, save the child from the punch, make the adult hesitate, afraid, perhaps become amenable to a larger discussion of right and wrong.

Picture the same child at dinner, watching someone she loves reducing her father to a puddle of fear, the awful lessons she must draw from it.   My father can’t protect me, my mother is a monster!   Fact or fiction, makes no difference in the individual case, everyone can picture this child’s dilemma.  The best fiction, of course, has the ring of truth throughout, is played without false notes.   Maybe it didn’t happen, maybe it couldn’t even happen, no matter, the story itself makes sense.  Real people would really do that, or want to do that, or dream of doing that.   The line is not always clear between fact and fiction, is it?

“Who are you talking to, dear?”  

And then, of course, there is always “who are you talking to, asshole?” which can be said in every shade of viciousness or perfect politeness if the tone is done just right.  And the tone is always done just right, done to a turn.

 

 

[1] Note, please, how daintily I have avoided any reference to the horrifically graphic castration.    Oops.

The Ten Days of Repentance

The rabbis have long spun the fable about how God, the All-Merciful, sits over His gigantic ledger, the Sefer Chayeem, the Book of Life, during the first ten days of the new year.   In that unimaginably vast book the fate of every human is mapped out in detail for the coming year.  Who shall live and who shall die.  Who shall wax rich and who shall be poor.   On and on, to every disease, accident, windfall, every twist of fate we can, none of us, imagine.    

The Sefer Chayeem and God sitting over it like a divine accountant is a metaphor, of course, and we moderns see it that way.  I think we do.  I can’t speak for the rest of the moderns, but to me the image has the ring of a poem written to explain the inexplicable.   Jews have the first ten days of the year to make amends to people we have wronged.   When night falls on the tenth day, Yom Kippur, right after the final long blast on the shofar, a ram’s horn, and before the Jews rush home to eat after a long, high-stakes day fasting and praying, God seals the Book of Life and everyone’s fate is sealed for the year.   That’s the poetic version, anyway.

The Jewish New Year (5779 this year) is the first day of ten days, Days of Awe, when Jews are required to search our souls and do whatever we can to set right whatever we have upset during the previous year.    This is difficult work, since we rarely do things that are knowingly wrong, making it much harder to see our own bad deeds than it is to see the ones others commit towards us, and as the songsters sing, sorry seems to be the hardest word.  It is rare, and the truest sign of love, to feel another person’s pain as strongly as your own.   In those situations, we are required to act, directly and without hesitation.

Meanwhile, God sits with the Sefer Chayeem open, watching.  God is watching for a hard heart to soften, for someone who has angrily told a loved one to fuck himself, at the worst possible moment, to approach that same person and sincerely show contrition, and love.   When someone who has wronged you is truly contrite, you should never turn them away.  Under that circumstance, especially during the Ten Days of Repentance, a Jew is obliged to accept a sincere apology, a repaid debt, an attempt to restore what was torn or taken.  

Like I said, this is fucking hard work all around, and, because humans are a deeply flawed species of ape, is work more often not done at all.   There are the endless prayers at this time of year, hours and hours in the temple, rising and being seated. Please rise, please be seated, please rise.  Special prayers are chanted aloud and others are recited silently, standing.  The prayers beseech God to show His infinite mercy, not like to all the victims of unspeakable horrors, who seemed to have died or been maimed without any mercy from the All-Merciful, but to those who promise their everlasting love and unfailing obedience to His will, whatever that may be, however it may stack up against Free Will, which, as far as I can see, is almost as puckish a phrase as Free Market.  Almost.   Unlike the Free Market, Free Will is something each of us possesses, in matters of our heart, in how we act, even if it seems to be the merest spark.

Personally, I am not one for prayers, for rising and please being seated.   It was ruined for me in my youth, the whole congregation rising and being seated again together, and rising, and being seated.   Struck me as an exercise in appearing to be doing the right thing, without the hard work of actually having to do anything more than turning pages, rising, being seated, mouthing words in a language you don’t know to a deity who may or may not exist.   A communal worship of the source of all that is miraculous, while all that is truly horrific is, we are told, the work of humans abusing the great God-given gift of Free Will.   God loved us all so much, you dig, that He left each of us free to become Hitler, if we can.   Nice work, God.

Of course, God needs my praise as much as He needs my prayers.   Which is to say, not at all.   The only thing God or, more to the point, my fellow creatures, need from me is my heart and my mind and the actions I take in this broken world.  Our life is only the things we do, no matter how hard we pray to be spared responsibility for the most thoughtless of our deeds and the people we hurt.