Category Archives: musing

Labor Day

I heard a piece on NPR just now about apprenticeship and somebody mentioned digging a ditch.   On Labor Day in America today I celebrate the time I spent the day digging a forty foot long ditch in the East Bay in earth that was like cement due to several years of drought.  This was back in the 1970s.  The signs in California bathrooms read “if it’s yellow, it’s mellow, if it’s brown, flush it down”.   Sekhnet’s friend Uncle Tony had a sign in his rustic bathroom that expressed a similar sentiment:  “on these isles of sun and fun, we never flush for number one.”

I was in my early twenties, broke and strong.   A friend negotiated the job for me.   This guy was a genius negotiator, always getting the best deal possible for himself.   I don’t know what his motivation was in making this particular deal, but as I remember it I was paid $20 for the long trench I was supposed to dig.   I didn’t kick.  I needed the money, and twenty back then was like a hundred today, and headed out in the morning with a borrowed mattock and shovel.  

The job required not only strength and determination but great delicacy, as it turned out, and a certain amount of ingenuity.  I was digging around a thin water pipe, buried about a foot deep in the hard ground, that connected the house to the water main.    I had to work around the old pipe, which was about the thickness of a big toe.   I discovered on my first swing that my friend had negotiated an absolute shit deal for me.   The heavy mattock hit the earth and barely dented it.  

It took a while, but using the pick end of the mattock I was able to poke holes in the baked earth on either side of the pipe and then sculpt out little chunks with the flat end, carefully working away from the pipe.   I worked shirtless under a decent sun, and I remember feeling glad that it wasn’t too hot out.   It was slow work, impossibly depressing at first, but I made steady progress from the sidewalk toward the house, across the the baked brown expanse of hard dirt that was previously a lawn.   I probably sang as I swung my mattock and later, and more to the point, my pickaxe.  My friend had dropped off a pickaxe with a handy sharper point, after he came by to check up on me during his lunch break.  The pickaxe helped.

It was just one of those days in the life of a young man with big dreams.  I was about three feet from the end of my work, had skillfully dug a channel around the thin pipe, and had maybe an hour left.   The muscles on my back were starting to twinge a bit, and I had slowed my pace.  The end of this shit day of work was quite near.  It had been a long and productive eight hours or so so far.    I was taking a few breaths, leaning on the mattock, when a friend rode up on her bicycle.     I told her I was almost done and started back to work.    

She was one of these people who know everything.   She is the expert on everything, without exception.  It turned out, according to her, that it had taken me so long because I was going about it all wrong.  My form with the mattock, apparently, was ridiculous.  To stop her unwanted lecture I smirked and handed her the mattock, which I’d been using to lift out the dirt the pickaxe had loosened around the pipe.   She told me to watch carefully as she showed me how it should be done.   She raised the mattock high over her head, almost tottering backward at its weight.   Then she brought it down hard, directly on the center of the ancient pipe.  

A geyser of water shot up high into the air as the pressurized water made its hissing escape.  The long trench immediately filled with water, the baked dirt of the former lawn was now mud.  I never heard her drop the mattock as I turned to kick her as hard as I could in the ass.   She was off on her bicycle before I could take any revenge at all, outside of hurling a few curses at her as she sped off.  

Thinking about it now, I realize that fuck who offered me $20 for that job got exactly what he paid for.   I have wised up over the years, finally casting out people like the great negotiator, a highly successful businessman who resembles nobody as much as Trump in his need to win at all costs and his inability to maintain friendships that are not purely transactional. The know-it-all lasted a few years longer, but in the end, the spectacle of her pummeling her feeble husband became too sickening to endure.  

I will always fondly remember that day digging that ditch in Albany (or maybe El Cerrito).  Oddly enough, I had a date that night, in those free love days.  I cheerfully rode my bike a few miles to Berkeley where I was going to have sex with a young woman I’d known for some time.   It was the first time we’d gone to bed.  I recall, in the middle of things, literally while we were making the beast with two backs, she had to excuse herself to go pee.  She may have had some kind of urinary tract infection, I think.   I don’t remember the rest, I may have fallen asleep while she was in the bathroom leaving some mellow yellow in the bowl.

An Excellent Short Discussion of Depresssion

Johann Hari, writer of the excellent dissection of the drug wars, and drug addiction, called Chasing the Scream,  gives a short, remarkably common sense description of why we feel depression and anxiety.   Check it out here. 

We seem unable to grasp the simplicity of so many perplexing human riddles.   A person who feels loved, has a place in the world, work that is appreciated and a life without terror is unlikely to be chronically depressed or anxious.   It is the brutality of our tyrannically Free Market, a forum of endless, unfair competition,  that isolates us and fills us with dread of a bleak future.  There is no safety net.  Not for losers, safety nets are for winners.   Get over it, motherfucker, fear and insecurity is good for our bottom line.   Pick up your prescription over there.   NEXT!

Melancholia, Anyone?

Live with sorrows long enough and they will sometimes gather and swoop down in a wave of melancholia.   Allowing these sorrows to gather and swoop is something I have done since childhood.   It is familiar, somewhat understandable and without any terror to me at this point in my life.    I know the drill and accept it now, there is no sense fighting melancholia.   It has its seasons.  It is best just to slowly go with it, it arrives to make you consider your life a bit.

The semi-hollow body electric guitar you love to play, with that genius little looper that allows you to stomp, play, stomp, play along with your first track, stomp, add a second track, has no appeal when melancholia descends.   “Fuck it, maybe later,” you think to yourself, passing the guitar and looper on your way upstairs to tap these words.

There are cures for melancholia, of course.   You needn’t passively suffer from the blues, blues you don’t even have the energy to play or sing.   You can call a friend, if you have one.   The world is less lonely when you are talking to a friend.   You can go for a walk, or a bike ride, though your mood will accompany you, at least for the first part.   You can go shopping.  It’s what we’ve been taught since childhood, buying something new will cheer you up.  It works for millions of happy consumers everywhere, even if what you buy soon turns out to be crap.   You can read a book, watch TV (and we are in a renaissance of television at the moment), devour content in dozens of electronic forms. You can distract yourself until the cows come home, and when the cows get home, you can distract yourself some more.  It’s called entertainment, be entertained.   Yo, there are also anodynes, many of them handy, like eating something tasty, though the relief of that is momentary at best.

It doesn’t take melancholia to make you notice the brutality of the set up. We are told that statistically the odds of being killed by somebody else have never been lower in human history, unless you live in one of the many dangerous killing spots currently smoldering on the earth.  Of course, the odds of dying by your own hand, intentionally or inadvertently, have never been higher, are actually, for the first time in human history, more likely than your odds of being killed by somebody else, but that too is just a statistic, you dig.   We may, arguably, have a suicide epidemic in the greatest country, the most exceptional nation, the world has ever known.  Add the more than 72,000 overdose deaths from opioids last year to the tens of thousands accomplished by Second Amendment enthusiasts with their instrument of choice, add in drunk driving deaths, and murders by car, your goddamned vehicular homicides, and you start to get an impressive number of dead Americans.   We don’t need to talk about these motherfuckers really, they are not only losers, but dead losers.

This notion of winner and loser is a sick one I should pick at a bit here, just because this idiotic worldview is at the source of so much human misery.   You are a winner at the moment you win the lottery, a matter of pure luck, just as you are a winner when your Nazi-loving father dies and leaves you $300,000,000, another kind of lottery, albeit one you have paid dearly for by having a Nazi as a father.   Still, these are momentary victories, like every win is.  

That is the key thing: winning and losing are happening constantly in every life.  They go by other names, good luck and bad luck, providence and accursedness, good randomness vs. bad randomness.  Work is involved, of course, in preparing for victory.  I don’t discount the amount of hard work necessary to win a competition, nor do I necessarily shrink from it.   The thing I want to get across here is that winning and losing are relative and transitory, think about it even for two seconds and you will grasp that piece too.

The greatest baseball players in history, in their greatest all-time record-setting seasons, lost 60% of the time they went to bat. [1]   They were out more times than they succeeded.  An impressive majority of the time they were losers.  A 40% success rate, for Shoeless Joe Jackson, Rogers Hornsby, Ty Cobb, Ted Williams, was a season for the ages, a .400 season.  A small handful of historically elite players have ever achieved that.   Babe Ruth, the greatest hitter of them all, by many estimations,  made it to a personal best of .393 one year.   Anyone hitting .350 today is having a season for the ages, but still– losing more than they are winning.     Winning is a relative term, unless you understand this you are a loser.   Even if you understand it, you are still a loser, as often as you are a “winner”.

We’re told there is an attitude that winners have, an ineffable quality that makes them winners.  I think of the greatest American exemplar of winning, a man who has won every contest he has been involved in (by his account, anyway), including the greatest prize for an American winner, the presidency of the United States.   Being the world’s greatest winner means that you have conquered the game, are at the top of your game, on top of the world.   No reason to be angry, or peevish, oversensitive or insanely needy — you’re a great winner and therefore happy in a way a loser will never be.  

Still, check the man out.   Five a.m. rage tweets lashing out at the unfairness of his envious, unfair persecutors,  an inability to be truthful except in rare, unscripted moments (“I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and these gullible morons would still support me”) a life of manifest unhappiness and gnawing insecurity, behind a gaudy front of blustering compensatory over-confidence, for the world’s greatest winner.  What’s up with that?  You want to be a winner like him?  Go for it.  Start with choosing the right dad.

The winner/loser game has one measuring stick: wealth.  If you are rich you have won.  Except, of course, that there are always other motherfuckers richer than you (some have vast, interest generating hereditary wealth, going back generations), which is a goad and a motivation.   Being filthy rich is no longer enough, to be a real winner you have to be richer than Jesus Christ and his father combined.   The Greeks used to have myths about foolish humans sucked into this thing called hubris.  The insatiably greedy Midas got the gold touch, and that was the end of him.   His food turned to gold, when he wiped his ass that turned to gold.  He was done.  [2]  The Midas touch, which we think of as the gold standard of good luck, turns out to be one of the more clever curses of the gods.  I always loved the Yiddish curse:  may you be very successful in business, may you become very rich and build a mansion of a hundred rooms — and may the devil chase you from room to room.

Of course, I am a bitter man, melancholic today or not.  I tend to think of winners like the fucking Sackler family, several generations of doctors who have evolved into a clan of fabulously wealthy drug pushers under the corporate name Perdue Pharmaceuticals.   It turns out they researched which areas of this great country were most plagued by drug abuse, specifically opioid abuse.   They targeted these ravaged, hopeless areas where despair was rampant and options few, coal mining country, rust belt, foreclosed farm communities, etc., with trained doctors, nurses and pharmaceutical reps claiming that their patented product, Oxycontin, had an “exquisitely rare” chance of addiction “less than 1%” (a number they pulled out of their collective, corporate asses).   The Sacklers made billions upon billions marketing this highly addictive patent protected anodyne poison to America’s most desperate while addiction and overdose deaths predictably sky-rocketed.   Winners vs. losers, yo.

Civil suit after civil suit against Perdue Pharma resulted in nothing but wasted legal fees and shrugs all around, and anger and despair for the loved ones of those now dead from the exquisitely well-marketed opioid.   You can’t prove the lying corporation killed your boy, ma’am, nor can you make them pay you shit for his death.   It was the drug addict’s own damned fault, after all.   Nobody held a gun to his dumb head and forced him to overdose.  De minimis non curat lex, sir.

The U.S. Attorney in Virginia finally brought a criminal case against Perdue Pharma.  In 2007, after a series of negotiations (pre-dementia Rudy Giuliani was brought in to do his magic for Perdue) the parties agreed to a plea deal where the corporation, charged with a series of felonies, pleaded guilty to the single felony of “criminal misbranding” a crime that had been committed continuously for six or seven years by then.   Three executives took misdemeanor charges.  Justice was done, as well as it ever is done to extremely wealthy malefactors.

In a nation that was not insanely racing against death by trying to acquire everything in sight, and blindly worshipping those who can,  this would not appear to be a reasonable, fair or just outcome.   At the very least this gigantic corporate drug dealer, after “criminally misbranding” its deadly anodyne and profiting obscenely from its crime, with deadly consequences for hundreds of thousands (and counting), would have to lay out the cash to set up rehab and treatment centers in every area they had targeted to sell their lucrative, criminally mislabeled product.   That’s not how it works in the land of winners and losers.   We don’t punish the powerful here.   What kind of message does that send?   We punish the weak, send them to private, for-profit prisons.  They are losers anyway.  Yo, be serious!  Punishing losers equals corporate profits: win win!  

Not to say this hideous picture is all bad.  In the impoverished West Virginia town of 400 that received 9,000,000 tablets of Oxycontin one year, many were able to keep their noses just above poverty by selling the pills, which go for up to ten bucks a piece.  The free market, being free.

I am content with the things I own.  The guitar I love cost a few hundred dollars, a fraction of the price of the one the Chinese factory skillfully recreated.   I am a good enough guitarist that I “deserve” a guitar costing many times more.  I don’t need it.   Do you understand what I am saying?  Owning a $5,000 or $10,000 guitar would be lovely, sure, but I don’t need it.  Can you grasp that?   It is worthwhile to grasp a thing like that.  Otherwise, in the words of an ex’s Hindu guru, you are like a deer, dying of thirst as you chase a mirage of water.

Our failure here is a failure of imagination.   We fail to imagine the many real possibilities that would make the world a more decent and merciful place for all but the richest and most psychopathic among us.   We simply cannot imagine the great philanthropists of our age, the finest people, folks like the Sacklers, ever being held accountable for any crime they may or may not have committed.   “Criminal misbranding”, I mean, how bad a crime is that really, in the hierarchy of felonies?    It’s a fraud perpetrated deliberately year after year to the harm and death of tens of thousands, but it has to been seen in context.    The Sacklers donate wings to museums, they endow professorships, they are culturally generous with their billions.   The men who paid themselves a record $135 billion in compensation in 2009 after almost causing the second worldwide Great Depression by their systemic, highly lucrative, fraud, same deal.   Does it really help anyone to put these kind of folks in prison?  Aren’t they really too big to jail?   Seriously, am I suggesting that such fine people deserve to be held accountable for the petty crimes they may, arguably, commit?  Unimaginable, the luxury prisons we’d have to construct to house such fine people.

Our failure of imagination, in this nation where we are trained from birth to be passive consumers,  makes us replace the universe of possibilities with the world we have in front of us.   You see, there is no way, in a free country, to make sure no children are raised in dire, hopeless, life crushing poverty because…. the Free Market.   Communism obviously failed, was put out of business and taken off the map by the only form of social organization that makes sense, that truly reflects human nature, Capitalism.    

We reduce many undreamed of possibilities to our famous imagination crushing false dichotomy.   If you hate Capitalism as it is practiced today, as it has always been practiced, then you are a Communist, by definition a discredited loser.  History proves how much you suck.   Winners win, losers whine, suckers walk.  Freedom is on the march.  Democracy equals capitalism, winning equals fabulous wealth, end of the story, boys and girls.  Koch Industries, sponsors of the NY Yankees, makes products you use and are dedicated to a level playing field where everyone has an equal opportunity.   They say so in their own ad.   Nothing else to see here.  Bird Wins [3].

This is a world of losers, friends, every one of whom will die without any hope of eternal, corporate style, life.   Losers with costive imaginations, hemmed in by mass-marketed external reality.   That’s a peevish and dumb way to put it, ‘costive’ being an old-fangled word for constipated.   Imaginings are not shit, of course, though they are constantly shit on.   Neither are they all good, some in fact, would benefit from not have been shitted out at all.  

We are led to imagine that all the problems in the world caused by runaway, unregulated capitalism are the fault of illegal aliens and refugees, poor people sneaking through our porous borders to rape and murder, while bringing illegal drugs in.   Many are, quite possibly, terrorists who hate our freedom.   Imagine that!   All of our problems, caused by those ruthless, relentless fucks, millions of them, lawlessly overrunning our once great nation like cockroaches.   At one time, even now in many parts of the world, in some of the best parts, the best parts, my people get the blame.  The fucking Jews.   If Hitler had finished his important work every ignorant racist fuck in the world would now be a king, once the goddamned colored people were dealt with the same way. It’s only a matter of will, of winning.  

Happy Labor Day, my hard laboring friends.   Get out there and take advantage of your day off and your freedom to save big at malls all over this great land.   They’re practically giving the wonderful stuff away.   Go, go, go!  If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to slouch over to my guitar and see what comes out.  [4]

 

 

[1] for the quibblers, sure, their On Base Percentage for those seasons, the times they walked added to the times they had base hits, means that these baseball immortals, in their greatest seasons for the ages, only lost maybe 50% of the time.   Call me pisher.  

[2]  OK, fine, the Greek myth makers gave greedy King Midas a reprieve and his story a laudable moral.   Ecstatic about his new gold touch he hugged his beloved daughter, she turned to gold and he broke down.   He begged the gods to take the curse away, and they did.  Midas lived a life of generosity when his touch stopped turning everything he loved into gold and died beloved of his people.

[3] Bird Wins was the title of a book I once tried to write.  The title referred to the flashing sign in the Chinatown Arcade on Mott Street, mercilessly announcing that the tic tac toe playing chicken had beaten its human opponent again.   The bird went first, and always played to thwart a victory.   I doubt anybody, ever, beat the goddamned chicken, though many probably tied.   Bird Wins stands in for all fixed games, rigged contests, manifest abuses of the gullible and earnest alike.  

[4]  I‘m So Tired, it turns out, by the fookin genius John Lennon.

A Blank Slate

It’s got a cool sound in Latin:  tabula rasa, the writing tablet scraped clean.    They used to theorize that the newborn human was a tabula rasa. The sensory world begins making marks on that blank slate and it matures accordingly.   The Hindus, I was told by American devotees of an Indian guru named Baba Hari Dass, a man who had not spoken for decades, call some of these impressions on the tabula rasa samskaras.   These were like fingerprints in clay, as I was made to understand it.   Samskaras are dispositions, characteristics and themes left over from past lives, as I recall.

Somebody came up with the clever “wherever you go, there you are.” There are some clever bastards out there, really.   Writing in the darkness of night, intent on the words you are putting down, you will find no time to imagine the blank looks.   I speak only for myself, of course.  

I get angry.  At things like brutality, the random fuckings we are all subjected to, fuckings out of the blue, with absolutely no pleasure for ourself, no possibility of pleasure.   We are done this way, at random, for the pleasure of people who, like pedophile priests,  say “fuck mutuality, fuck decency, I see my fellow humans as base coin with which to gratify my passions.   My passions!”   These things are uttered by people who imagine themselves winners, and they do what they do to the rest of us losers feeling wholly justified.   Because they can, you understand.

My grandmother flew into rages, the grandmother I never met.   Her older brother was known to be a rough customer, a man with a formidable temper.   Her nephew was a tough guy with a bad temper too.   You did what they said or you paid the price.   What was the price?   How about I fucking whip you in the face, you like that price, asshole?

My father, a man whose poignant tenderness to animals was always in evidence, often flew into rages.   His mother, I learned very late in his life, whipped him in the face from the time he could stand.   Basic unfairness scalded him all throughout his life and he would cry out.  There was nothing I could do for him, when I was a tabula rasa.   Nothing but stare at him accusingly, with my big, black eyes.  He would look over from his pillow, with his glasses off and his 20/400 vision, and I would be staring at him through the bars of my crib.   A blank slate, staring without mercy at his own father.    

How insane is this arrangement?   It is hard to put it into words.   It is also good to try to put it into words, speaking only for myself, of course.    I heard that David Foster Wallace believed a good book made you feel less alone, less lonely.   There is a certain pain, familiar to most people, of feeling isolated, apart, removed from the community.   This pain is big business, a huge driver of our highly competitive economy.  

The anodyne business itself, huge, vast mountains of money.  People die behind that stuff every day, take enough of it and you will no longer need any pain killer.  The entertainment business, which lets us forget, while moved by an artfully told tale, that we are essentially, blank slates or slates scribbled with a hundred layers of glyphs, here in the darkness by ourselves, destined each of us to our own end.    A good book connects us with another mind, helps us forget all that.   The same can be said of music that stirs us, transports us, or visual art that evokes feelings that leave us in some kind of awe.

You will meet a few people in your life who are familiar, become more familiar. They put their fingerprints on you in the right way.   You learn things you need to know from such people.   They are rare, and precious.   Not everyone has the luck to meet them, and if they do meet them, not every two of us have the ability to hit it off.  Not every two notes make good music.   Where there is noise only, there is no soothing of the savage beast [1].

I’m thinking about this blank slate because of the empty page, the white screen.   Some people look at that expanse and say “shit…”    I always have a certain excitement when I see that empty canvas.   It can become literally anything you can imagine, speaking only for myself, of course.

 

[1] OK, fine, “savage breast”.

The phrase was coined by William Congreve, in The Mourning Bride, 1697: Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast, To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak.

What You Need To Do Now

“I’ll tell you what you need to do now,” he said, “and I know you don’t want to do it, but believe me, trust me, you need to do this now.”    

How did you get in here?

“I live here, my friend.   Don’t waste energy puzzling over  pointless questions.   This is what you need to do.”  

I don’t need anybody to tell me what I need to do.  

“Your opinion, which I respect as much as your asshole.   Look, we all have them, doesn’t mean anything, really, outside of excretion.   If you would be a little more wise, stop interrupting and listen to me.”  

Who died and made you the boss?  

“Dave.  His name was Dave.  Look, are you going to keep playing the fool or are you going to straighten up and fly right?   All you have to do is open your ears right now.”  

Says you.  

“Nobody else here.”  

How do I know that?  

“Jesus, man, you really know how to channel that old friend of your’s who read the article that pointed out that just because a thought pops into your head doesn’t mean you have to express it.   He told you how much of an impression it made on him, although not enough of an impression to stop him from acting like you are now.   You remember how things escalated and escalated simply because he could not stop to think if the thing he was about to say was about to make things better or worse?”  

You made your point, go ahead.  

“I just want you to know that you did good yesterday.   What you wrote was good.   You set the stage, the difficult father, the lifelong war, the fact that he was a good man and also a prick.    There was a distance to the telling that was not in the previous version where you tried to condense the whole personal story into a few claustrophobic pages.   The description of your father fading before your eyes, the brutal fact that he was astride a ticking time bomb and didn’t know it, though he also must have known it, that there was no time to waste, though you two managed to waste it nonetheless, all good stuff.”  

Do you know another adjective besides ‘good’?  

“Do you really not know how to simply shut the fuck up and listen?”    

The sound of cars shushing like a river on the nearby parkway.  

“What you wrote yesterday, with a little cover letter, may get your foot in the door somewhere, to the office of someone who knows how to get you paid.  The best authors work with editors, in fact, every published author works with an editor.   You remember Robert Caro’s story about finding the right editor.   These people are like midwives, the best of them experienced in helping to birth the most unlikely of creatures.   You need to find one of these, a talented one.   Before that, a literary agent is probably your first move.  The literary agent will help you sell something and find you an editor.”

Wake me up when this part is done, would you?  

“We’ve been over this a hundred times, ass-bite.   Now I have to show up to tell you what to do.  You resisted the impulse to be a smart ass in that piece you wrote yesterday, which was… good.   I know referring to being a lawyer as ‘the world’s second oldest profession’ flashed through your mind, and you resisted.   The impulse to whine about how hard it is to write a meaningful book, you cast that aside this time.  All of that, good.  Nobody who hasn’t attempted it knows what hard work, what an unlimited truckload and barge-load of hard work it is, to write a coherent book.  In less than three years, my dogged friend, you’ve assembled a 1,200 page first draft.  Mazel tov.  Now I’m here to tell you what you need to do.”

Go ahead.  

“That’s a good boy.   Now you need to write a very short cover letter, a few hundred words at most.   This letter will first and foremost not waste an extra second of anyone’s time.   It will describe the project you’re working on, perhaps refer the recipient to the website where you got paid to let them publish a couple of short pieces.   The first of those pieces tells a major story of the book in 1,000 words.   If your letter is good the recipient will read the four pages you wrote yesterday.   You need to send between 20 and 50 of these letters out, to literary agents, obviously.   You got that?”

Yiss.  

“Now here is the important part.   This thing you wrote yesterday, once you’ve worked it over a few more times, is probably as close as you’re going to come to giving this your best shot.  Don’t worry over that part much more.   This is important: give yourself a date to send these letters out.   You can do it in waves, ten at a time.  The main thing is that you send some of them, say ten, by a date certain.   What capitalist guru Seth Fucking Godin calls your ‘ship date’.   You need to keep to a schedule now, otherwise, you’re riding in a car, astride a ticking time bomb, talking to imagined dead people instead of the father who was disappearing in front of your eyes, as your life itself slips away.   You got me?”

 Yes.  

  “Good.   Now, pick an arbitrary date.”

September 30, 2018.

“Excellent.  My work here is done.”  

Heh, you do know an adjective besides ‘good.’  That’s good!  

Hello?   hello?

Reading and writing

I have noticed this before.   Faced with two library books to read, one beautifully written and deeply considered,  and the other telling a story that makes me turn the pages, I will always read the second book first.  

Not to say the writing in the story book can be crap, the story has to be well told, which takes skill, but I can tolerate a lapse of sloppy writing in the service of a good story that I can’t abide in the deeper kind of book (even though lapses of this kind are extremely rare in a beautifully written book, or in the book of any good author, actually).  The compelling story-teller’s book makes me turn the pages, gives me a tasty revelation at the end of each chapter that compels me to read the next.

Walter Mosely, whose Down the River Unto the Sea I am imbibing now,  is a universally appreciated master story-teller, like Stephen King.  Both are also excellent writers, make no mistake, but they are primarily in business to tell a story.   That is, on one level, the business of every writer, to make us want to read the rest of the story.  The genius of non-fiction writer Robert Caro is to take a mountain of careful research and turn it into a seamless, self-propelling story that sucks us in.  Journalistic writers like Jane Mayer and Jeremy Scahill do no less.   The words matter, and none of these writers wastes a word, but the words always serve to advance the story.   The story is king, Stephen, as you know.

In a life, what is the story, what is the overarching story of a life?  What are the essential small stories in a life that make us sit up and pay attention, make us turn the pages, hungry for the next set of revelations?   I have no fucking idea, really, but I know it when I read it.  And you do too.

The Awful Ease of Incoherence

I’ve been getting a bit of the incoherent narrative full-stink in my personal life lately, and, of course, we are all subjected it to it daily in the news.    Here’s a quick illustration of the difference between a coherent story and an incoherent one, so we’re all on the same page.

Coherent:   Humans and animals are in escalating danger of habitat loss and extinction, in large part due to massive, destructive, human activities.   We don’t need science to tell us the earth herself is regularly screaming in alarm.   The largest California wildfire in recorded history is raging at the moment, along with several other wildfires in the state.   Climate disruption has increased the number of these catastrophic events every year:  record hurricanes, monsoons, floods, droughts, landslides, earthquakes in regions that never had earthquakes,  tornados in regions that have never had tornados, plus a new horror, never seen before:  fire tornadoes.  We regularly endure record heat waves, record cold streaks, new records for heat set year after year, “hundred year storms” coming along to devastate us every year or two.  

The science only confirms the disastrous state of nature we are able to observe taking lives all over in the globe on a regular basis.  Citizens of the entire world are aware of this perilous situation, only in America is there any controversy attached to this, and only because billionaire fossil fuel titans have invested countless millions to create armies of zombie-like deniers called, elegantly, “climate change skeptics”.

Incoherent version:  Human liberty itself is under attack.   Our government has become a tyranny.  Scientists with an anti-freedom agenda have conspired to make it look like there’s a correlation, a cause and effect, if you will, between the millions of barrels of fossil fuel, and the tons of clean coal, burned every day, the lucrative, clean extraction of natural gas from deep inside the earth, and the supposed warming of the earth.   The earth warms and cools in natural cycles.  Humans have nothing to do with it.   Government is the enemy, not humble servants of the people like us who want to make sure everyone has enough gas for their cars.   Without gasoline the trucks can’t deliver food to the cities.  Our very culture, our survival and our liberty, is under attack and those vicious partisans are weaponizing disputed science as the tip of the spear.  The science is disputed, there is no consensus among the mere 98% of climate scientists, including at NASA, who say this is so.

We are treated to the weaponized tweets of an infantile, irrationally angry winner-in-chief every time we turn on the news.   These tweets make no sense except in one way:  they constantly shift the focus back to incoherence.  If there is a focused discussion of some important issue being maintained in the media, there will be a nasty presidential tweet suddenly calling out son-of-a-bitch Lebron James, attempting to denigrate the NBA great with a strongly implied “nigger” thrown in there for good measure, because the people who love real winners don’t shrink from non-politically correct speech.   Lebron James is overrated– not as good as MIKE!  Lebron should shut his fucking mouth and stop being a loser.   I could beat Lebron in a game of one on one, Lebron sucks.   Etc.  

Soon, that’s today’s story.   “The President today attacked the NBA’s greatest player, LeBron James.”   The president will double down by tweeting  the name of another player, who played his last game fifteen years ago, who supposedly (incoherently) makes Lebron look like a pile of poop.   Lebron will be interviewed about this, will respond with his characteristic aplomb, but seriously, WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK?

It is not a problem.  The world we live in now is largely ruled by incoherence.  Do not be fooled into thinking the facts matter, that the identical stories of fifty eye witnesses who are complete strangers to each other make any difference, same with recordings of actual conversations, videotapes of the hideous thing happening right in front of the camera phone, the world itself as you perceive it does not actually exist!  WINNING exists, and LOSING.  If you’re not winning, you’re losing.  You’re all fucking losers, tweets the world’s greatest winner, only I WIN and you all can’t stand it, losers.   Jealous, pathetic losers.   SAD!

The fish rots from the head, they say.   The only trickle down I’ve ever seen in my sixty-two years living in America is the trickle down of incivility, in-your-face hostility, hereditary entitlement, the corporate killer mentality coming home to roost in every argument everywhere.  Never admit fault, that concedes liability.  For the same reason, never apologize, unless with massive qualifications before, during and after the calculated apology.   If confronted, hit back harder.   If confronted with something you cannot counter, become indignant, completely change the conversation.  If necessary, invent some inflammatory provocation to put the enemy on the back foot.  If necessary, gather allies and threaten violence.  Most people are cowards, outgunned ten to one they will usually give up like the pussies they are.  People talk big, but a loaded gun talks much, much louder than any bigmouth, no matter how smart he thinks he is.

This is the only thing that trickles down, this psychopathic impulse to dominate at any cost.   It’s the only game in town, yo.   I note that most of us do not play this game, or that we try our best not to play it.   Anyone who has whiffed this foul game full-stink will make every effort to not to replicate it.  Still, it is pervasive.   The values of our society come from what we see reflected in the public behavior of our elected officials, ambassadors, celebrities.   The party of “I’ve got mine and fuck you, you fucking whining loser” has been prevailing the last few decades.  It is America’s one truly bipartisan coalition.

I console myself by reading histories of fascism.   There are always good people– on one side, on one side — who stand against the encroaching totalitarian incoherence.  On the other side there are millions who go along with authoritarians out of a genuine desire to put their boots on the necks of the enemies of the people.  There are also even more millions who have learned from birth to simply conform.  You do what you are told, don’t make waves, and you will generally be OK.   This is the tragic swing group, since they are the ones who, by doing nothing but obey, allow incoherent authoritarians to call all of the shots.  The millions who hate your average Hitler type, an ill-tempered, oversensitive type who won’t hesitate to use as much violence as his enemies demand,  have to tread very carefully until they can figure out the small acts they can do to put a finger on the other side of the scale.  A scale that eventually, and always, tips against these ruthless authoritarians who must always rule by coercion and terror.

Yesterday I went to see the great Jose James play outdoors at Lincoln Center.  I’ve had the pleasure to talk with Jose a few times at the home of  my close friends.   We made arrangements to get on the guest list for reserved seating on a day when the real feel temperature in NYC was 99 degrees.   This was due to the high humidity which made a mere 90 degrees feel much hotter.  I stayed hydrated and went to the show.

To sit in the reserved seats you had to have an orange wrist band.   These were given out on the opposite side of the large venue from where the reserved seats were.  It was hot, I was dripping, but walked over there on my painful knees to get my pass.   The young woman who gave out the passes was there at her small table alone.   There was an opening in the moveable barricade about six feet from her.  I went to the opening.  

A guard stepped into my path, pointed to an empty labyrinth of barricades and told me I had to go the long way around.   I gestured toward the empty table, to the girl with the iPad and a bunch of wristbands, the completely empty labyrinth of barricades.   I asked him to please let me pass, my knees were killing me, I’d walked a long way already, and that, please, since nobody else was waiting, might I just get my pass and go join my friends who were already seated?

The guard, a dark-skinned African man in a crisp, white uniform, told me that I had to go all the way around.   That was the rule.   He had no discretion to violate the rule or make exceptions no matter what, was apparently not even supposed to be discussing anything with anybody.   I soon learned why, he was being watched intently by two of his bosses, who immediately made their sharklike way toward me to find out why I was giving their hired hand such a hard time.

The large man, who had a huge pallid head like an overinflated albino melon about to burst, advanced one step too far into my space and told me with a glare: “first of all, relax”.   I told him to relax.  One step behind him was a woman, a dead-ringer for Betsy DeVos (but with dark hair), probably from the same social class (we stood in the shadow of the David H. Koch wing of Lincoln Center, after all), and about to prove herself as brilliant as DeVos in the arts of persuasion and argumentation.

Pumpkinhead told me the rules are the rules, they’re there for crowd control and I had to walk.  I told him my knees were killing me, my friends were waiting and I’d appreciate the small courtesy, which was only common decency, especially since nobody else was being inconvenienced and I was an easily controlled crowd of one person.  His turd-like smile told me exactly how far this line of moral reasoning  was going to take me.

At this moment DeVos’s cousin stepped forward with that famous well-bred idiot smile and said reasonably: “imagine if fifty people were here and they all asked us to just let them break that little rule, to give each of them special treatment?”   You see, her smile said, just common sense, just like your’s!  It’s a draw, so the rule wins!

I started asking her if this was really the kind of country she wanted to live in, where the Nuremberg Defense was the final word in any conversation, where unreasoning adherence to rules no matter what the circumstances trumped every other consideration?    Neither of them, I saw, had any problem with the downside of anything I was saying.  I was unwittingly describing exactly the country they want to live in, a place where people who don’t like the rules are kept strictly in line.

Before I could point out that while it might be a problem if there were fifty people simultaneously demanding preferential treatment, I was the only one in this actual, real-life non-hypothetical, and the favor I was asking could be considered a request for special treatment only by a rigid, rules-bound, unreasoningly authoritarian type, the girl with the iPad and the wrist bands came over from her table, where she had been waiting patiently for the next customer.

I thanked her and gave her my name, as Pumpkinhead said something I don’t recall.  My name didn’t come up, to another eructation from the pallid Pumpkin.  I gave Sekhnet’s name and that seemed to work, Pumpkinhead said something else I don’t recall.   I told the girl “please, just give me the fucking wristband so I can get away from this asshole.”

This one two punch (“fucking” plus “asshole” equals “resisting arrest”) gave them all the moral ammunition they needed to leap into indignant defense of all that is decent.  I’d said FUCKING, a Bozo-no no!!   How dare I rape the ears of this innocent young black woman after assaulting the black hired guard with my offensive, nakedly racist insistence on my white privilege.  

“That’s it!” said Pumpkinhead triumphantly, “don’t give him the wrist band.  You’re not getting it!”  I had one bit of restraint left, and I used it.  

“Ah, not only an asshole but a vindictive asshole, nicely played.”  

Just as I turned to storm off, muttering incoherently about letting him take me to court for slander where truth is an absolute defense to the charge, Sekhnet came up.   Turned out DeVos and Pumpkinhead had given her some crap earlier, a variation on the same issue (she’d gone a few steps into the empty labyrinth and took a shortcut, hopping the barricades).    They gave her quite a stern talking to  about that, you can be sure.  I walked a hundred yards, sat on a plastic chair in the sun, stewing a bit, letting the anger dissipate.

Someone I knew came up and said hi, when I gave him a 20 second capsule description of my recent confrontation his eyes turned into two ping-pong balls, lolled out of the sockets on to his cheeks.  He waved a wan goodbye and I fluttered a few fingers.

Ten minutes later Sekhnet had my wrist band, texted me her location, and we sat in the “V.I.P” section to watch the show.  Jose put on a great show, singing the songs of Bill Withers, songs he was born to sing.  On Grandma’s Hands, a song about the love of a grandmother who always protected and comforted him when the world was kicking his ass, he did an inspired improvised section that blew me away.  

It was brilliant, using the musician’s many arts to drive home the obscene incoherence of a violently angry caregiver.   Grandma’s “Matty don’t you whip that boy” turned into a long, staccato, rhythmically complex, inventive reinvention of the morphing syllable that began with “whip”. Jose’s improvisation evoked the twitch of a grandmother’s pain to see her grandson mistreated, the violent idiocy of the mistreatment itself– well beyond words. [1]  His singing and wild invention took me to another, far better world, and after the show I had hardly a thought of those two incoherent fascist disease carriers who’d tried to ruin my day.

 

[1] I described it in an email to a friend this way:

There’s a point in the song when Grandma is stopping the father from whipping the boy.   Jose did a long improvisation here, where the words “what you want to whip him for?” turn into scratchy nonsense syllables, percussion, wordless hiphop, rhythmic, robotic, spastic, absurd, endless, obscenely ridiculous, the single syllable of “whip” turning into a million senseless acts of incoherent brutality.  Man!  Needless to say, I loved that shit, it was truly inspired and done with superb musicality.   Turned to Sekhnet with a big smile and said “brilliant” and M turned, smiled and nodded.  Then she looked at me one extra beat.  Tears were falling out of my eyes.

 

An Incoherent Narrative

The triumph of irrationality in human affairs is made possible by the ready acceptance of incoherent narratives.   A narrative that supports our point of view is generally accepted at once, even if it makes little or no sense.  This is often called the ‘confirmation basis’– we tend to agree with anything that supports what we already feel or believe.   The shapers of public opinion have made a science of exploiting this bias.  

They take a feeling, say anger, or dispossession, or fear of dispossession, and create a narrative to mobilize a mass of people who feel this way.   The narrative gives body to the shapeless feelings of malaise, fear, rage.  The story does not need to bear any scrutiny at all, can be internally inconsistent, key details can be changed at any time, on the fly — the main thing is that the story is simple in its outlines, easy to repeat and available to forcefully offer in support of a point of view.   The effect doesn’t follow from the purported cause?  The story is incoherent?   Who cares? Fuck you!  I know you are but what am I?  Make me!

I had a PT therapist the other day tell me that he thinks Trump is doing a great job, particularly with the economy.    I pointed out that Trump inherited a good economy [1], the same way he’d inherited a fortune, that virtually all of his businesses except his reality TV show were failures, that his trade war policies are beginning to have bad effects, that he recently had to give $12,000,000,000 in emergency relief to farmers hurt by his tariffs.    

The opinionated PT therapist allowed that Trump doesn’t care about anything, but insisted he is doing a great job with the economy.   Besides, he said, China is screwing us big time, and then went on to describe an out of control China, madly polluting the air and water, lustily fucking away, while laughing at America.  Good to know America’s big problem is those fucking Chinese, I thought, as the therapist wrenched my knees into uncomfortable positions.

Each of these things could be discussed, many of the PT guy’s opinionated statements countered with facts, but that that is not the point.  The point of any narrative is to give your own feelings a rational sound and to have a ready story to shove down somebody’s throat if they disagree with your feelings.  Trump would smile to see this PT therapist who likes him, a brown-skinned Indian immigrant with an accent, led away in handcuffs by ICE agents, while his children bawled, but I thought it an insult to mention this inconvenient counter-fact to the incoherently opinionated fuck.    

Hillary Clinton was not the most naturally gifted politician but it’s hard to believe she’s running a vast pedophilia ring with young sex slaves for hire in the basement of a pizza place in D.C.   Hard to believe, perhaps, even impossible to believe, particularly when we learn that pizza place doesn’t even have a basement, but, though the details might be a little wrong– it’s exactly the KIND OF THING a despicable person like that would do, according to those who hate her.  In fact, there’s a story out now, tacitly endorsed by the president, raging across the internet like a California wildfire, that the corrupt liberals are all in on this pedophilia thing, with fucking Tom Hanks fucking away as lustily as China is fucking the U.S.  Hanks using young children for his sick sexual thrills… disgusting. [2] Make America Great Again!!!!

We can see incoherent narratives at work throughout history.   Hitler’s forceful story comes to mind:  Germany was never defeated in World War One, it was betrayed by Jews.   These treacherous Jewish criminals, in addition to controlling the world, fomenting war and profiting from it, were determined to impregnate as many Aryan women, preferably virgins, as they could.  They were intent on polluting the gene pool with their poisonous DNA, in this way undermining and eventually destroying the superior race.   It was a matter of simple self-defense then, to fight these preternaturally evil degenerates.   The only way to deal with these ruthless fucks was by rooting them out, every one of them, and doing whatever was necessary to ensure they would never reproduce.

That’s the basic blueprint of an incoherent narrative.  The beauty is the simplicity.   You hear the story, it confirms your suspicions, and now you know what you must do.  I always hated that fuck who ran the candy store, that Jew bastard.  Now, after listening to Mr. Hitler,  I know exactly why I was right to hate that piece of dreck.  My spider sense, tingling, in the presence of the very evil that is destroying everybody and everything I love.   What must be done is now clear.

In America we had a huge economic crash in 1929 that reverberated around the world as The Great Depression.  Our capitalist economy was saved by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s bold initiatives.   With tens of millions of Americans destitute and hungry, FDR devised plans to put as many as possible back to work, to ensure that those who had no work didn’t starve.   The New Deal “social safety net” was our nation’s first real attempt to make sure masses of people didn’t die, or become Communists, because the richest Americans were, in a sense, lustily fucking them.  Like Tom Hanks, like China.  

One of the first key pieces of New Deal legislation made it illegal for banks to make huge speculative gambles using customer money.  That was the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933.  For almost seventy years it protected the U.S. from another massive economic collapse.  Then some very rich people had an excellent idea: why gamble with our own money when we can use those countless billions people have put in the bank, money that’s just sitting around, idle?   Deals were made, Clinton signed off on the repeal of Glass-Steagall, his successor made many cynical decisions that benefited the richest Americans et, voila, the massive misery of the fraud-driven 2008 economic collapse.  Now the right wing project is dismantling the entire New Deal.

You can’t do this without a compelling narrative.   The brightest and most determined of these super-wealthy radical right wing folks have been playing the long game to convince Americans that government is not the solution to anything, using the incoherent narrative brilliantly.   Government is the problem.   Simple and direct.  Government regulation fucks everything up, destroys liberty and kills initiative along with freedom.  Government is the enemy of liberty.   We need to restrict the government’s power, shrink government until it is small enough to drown in a bathtub.  We do this by starving the beast.  The monster runs on tax dollars.  Stop the tax scam.  If millions of parasites on dismantled government programs die, so much the better.  Eh, scratch that last statement, it does not advance our narrative really, true though it is.

The only trouble with this narrative is that the government performs a host of crucial functions and that many government programs are greatly appreciated by millions of participants who benefit from them. Clearly not every beneficiary of Medicare, or Social Security, is a parasite. So here’s what we do.  We fund campaigns to put people in office who will sign a pledge to advance our anti-government agenda.  Once the government can be literally shut down by obdurate, disciplined zealots, our point is beyond dispute.  

See, can it be more clear?  Government, fucking government, can’t do anything, deadlocked, stupid, corrupt.  All despicable, self-serving whores. We should know, we paid many of the whores, raised them out of obscurity, put them in office after they pledged to cripple the hated liberal president and his overreaching government programs.  

In 2012 our network spent $120 million, lost the presidential election, damn it.  In 2014 we spent $180 million, did much better.   In 2016 we spent twice that and the results speak for themselves.  We have more than $400 million in the war chest for the 2018 midterms.   Plus, campaign funding practices that were once illegal are now TOTALLY legal, constitutionally protected “free speech” and we have a clear corporate wealth-friendly majority on the Supreme Court for the foreseeable future.   How far we have come in convincing millions of average Americans that their government sucks!!  

See, government is the problem.  Fuck the 40 hour work week, minimum wage, workplace safety regulations, the right to collective bargaining, anti-pollution laws, a so-called environmental agency to enforce those laws, the Communist inspired catastrophic climate change hoax supported by partisan NASA scientists, so-called Civil Rights legislation, programs to make sure children and old people don’t starve, all the rest of that fucking liberal bullshit.  The government is fucking you as lustily as Tom Hanks, China, Oprah.   Disgusting!!!

I suppose it is the mind-fucking prevalence of these incoherent narratives in public life that makes me so intolerant of incoherent narratives in my private life these days.  If I can’t have a conversation with a back and forth, a serious mutual effort to understand the other person’s point of view, and some internal coherence to the thoughts presented, I’m out of there.   I thought of this one the other day, which I offer as my last example.

A friend has an issue with his memory, sometimes things we agreed on are simply forgotten.  Shit happens.  He’s quite sensitive about his memory issues, I’ve learned.   We had an uncomfortable confrontation on my apparent treachery: I had not told him something I’d told his family (waiting to tell him only if and when my efforts had born fruit) and he felt betrayed and belittled.   He confronted me about this.  It was an uncomfortable confrontation.

Later I recalled that I’d told him the entire story, starting with the recent good news and including why I’d left him out of the loop, months earlier.  I mentioned this to him, as an example of his faulty memory, responding to his insistence that his memory of our recent conversation was clearly as good as mine.  

Granted  he was on the defensive, but what he said next surprised me, and not in a good way.  He told me that in fact he hadn’t forgotten that I’d told him the entire story weeks earlier, that he remembered the whole thing, every detail.   Apparently this vindicated him, his memory is fine.  

“That makes putting me on the spot like that much worse!” I said in exasperation.  “If you remembered that I’d told you everything already, how can you then confront me about it in an inquisitorial way as though you knew nothing about it?”    

He bulled right past this point, for purposes of his narrative that I was wrong about his faulty memory, my last point made no difference at all.   This kind of thing works fine in current American politics, as we have seen, though it has does nothing to support friendship, let alone love.

 

 

[1]   Good economy, in this case, being synonymous with a thriving stock market.   More money for the wealthiest investors.  More profits for corporations.  Less taxes for the wealthiest.   To the bitch on the street, working two or three jobs, this “good economy” bullshit is a little fucking galling, considering her real wages haven’t gone up in decades.   Millions of children in poverty going to sleep hungry every night in the wealthiest nation on earth has nothing, really, to do with the “good economy”.

[2]  Why the talented, down to earth, self-effacing Tom Hanks?  I have no fucking idea, except, maybe that he said something these trolls found offensive and why not make the story really fucking good?   If the all-American seeming Hanks is in on it, who could have any doubt that Bill and Hillary are gang banging five and six year olds in their secret sex dungeon, not to mention all the child sex Jay-Z and Beyonce, George Soros, the hated Obamas, Oprah, Al Franken, etc. are in on?

 

Irrationality 101

For most human purposes, rationality takes a back seat.   All that is necessary for human action, most of the time, is a rationale, a slogan, an emotionally resonant excuse.   It is hard to think of a collective misfortune more horrible than war.   Yet every war is always somehow justified, even when it is inexcusable aggression, illegal under the spongey law of nations and conducted solely for the profit of a few who don’t care how many others must die so they can grow richer and more powerful.  Justified.  Read your history book, read virtually any history book.   War, unfortunate, yes, hell, of course, but necessary, you see, because… that guy over there is Hitler.  He’s fucking HITLER!   Nuff said.

My sister and I had a good laugh when she pointed out a howlingly imbecilic line I’d written in an otherwise promising first draft about our family life.   Describing our nightly fights around the dinner table as a battle field I went a step too far.   My sister read the line with beautiful archness: “the brutal battlefield of our family dinner table was as nightmarish as any war scene you can imagine.”    ANY war scene, she repeated, with deft intonation for maximum ironic emphasis.  In the beat it took me to reply she reeled off a string of famous atrocities that left no doubt of the idiocy of my claim.   Instead of a reply I burst out laughing.  We had the best laugh we’ve had together in years.   Then I caught my breath, pulled myself together and deleted the absurd line.  

There I had a rare moment of good fortune, somebody gently pointing out my foolishness, and doing it with humor and superb understatement that made me see it for myself.   The laugh made it undeniable, how laughable my claim had been.   I submit that this moment was an outlier in general human affairs, a rare moment when rational good sense triumphs over a feeling of poetic license, shoddy but justifiable thinking, emotional overstatement.    

Yes, of course, no child should ever be subjected to the mistreatment my sister and I regularly endured from our parents.   Yes, of course, I have a right to be hurt and indignant, even angry, about the abuse we were made to suffer.   But was it really as horrific as Turks on horseback driving helpless Armenians into a river to drown, worse than the Janjaweed, ISIS, the viciousness of the fanatical SS?

Eh, probably not, now that you put it that way.

But there’s the thing about irrationality, as a general rule it doesn’t stop anyone.    We have an irrational chaos-monger insisting he will make our country great again, apparently by wiping out every vestige of decency that people have fought for centuries to achieve here.   All he needs is a slogan and his base will roar, full-throated support, chant anything, no matter how idiotic.  “Drain the Swamp!” which they chanted during his historic presidential campaign, a slogan he told an interviewer he had his doubts about, but then decided was great when he saw how the crowds took to it, was actually translated from the original Italian– it was a mantra of Benito Mussolini as he rose to power [1].  Many people are saying Mussolini was a fascist, but there are many views, on many sides, on many sides.  Just sayin’.

There is no point feeling superior to a stadium full of desperate people chanting “lock her up!” or “Fake NEWS!” or “Suck my ass!!!”.   No reason to feel superior to a strutting, supremely confident-seeming cruel bully with seemingly very few actual thoughts in his head.  As a species, we are no more rational than anyone in that Make America Great Again crowd.   Which is not to say we don’t each have the ability to be more rational — all it takes is somebody stating the truth in a way we can hear it.   After my sister and I had a good laugh, there was no way to deny how laughable my claim about the atrociousness of our family war was.   Is being called a “fucking cobra” as bad as being locked in a church with everybody in your town and having it burned to the ground?   I suppose not.

And so it goes down virtually every issue we constantly debate in our battling society where unfair competition for material possessions is shrugged off as merely the law of nature.  One of the “debates” that drove me most insane during those madcap Cheney-Dubya days was the torture debate.  A fucking “debate” that will not fucking die, I might add.  We had an administration determined to use practices we’d long ago signed on, as part of the civilized world, to ban forever.   All that was necessary to overcome all those treaties was a horrific event followed by convening a small team of partisan lawyers to craft an argument — how idiotic an argument didn’t matter, just a secret memo to justify it in the odd event anyone was ever held accountable for the illegal program.  

In light of the secret torture memo a hard kick in the balls was now “enhanced interrogation” instead of “torture” because it was not as painful as the shutdown of a major organ system.  Nobody in their right mind could argue that a little kick in the balls is as bad as, say, your lungs shutting down.  Are you fucking crazy, you’re going to claim a kick in the balls, or sleep deprivation, or a freezing cell, or stress positions, or “walling” or water-boarding is as bad as your goddamn heart stopping?  Fuck off, peace bitch, we reframed this “debate” and there’s nothing you can do about it.

The other day I had a tiny moment of blessed relief, when a friend who loves to argue somehow drew me back into the fucking torture debate for a moment.   “You’re saying even if you have the person who planted the ticking time bomb that’s about to kill 5,000 children, you can’t use torture to make him talk.”   I took a breath.  

“In that one in a million scenario, where you have the actual guilty fuck strapped to a chair, and in a matter of minutes 5,000 kids will die if you don’t get him to talk– yeah, sure, put the fuck on a water-board, electrodes on his balls, the works.  I’ll fucking torture him myself, if we somehow know for sure that this is the actual psycho who planted the bomb.   The murderous fanatic probably won’t talk in any event, but it’s worth a shot, to save that stadium full of kids.    But the likelihood of that imagined scenario ever happening  is less than a lightning strike, winning the lottery,  inheriting 300 million from dad, like David and Charles Koch did.” 

In that liberating moment I felt free from the moronic “ticking time bomb scenario” hypothetical always used to justify torturing anyone who might possibly “hate our freedom”.   But it was a momentary feeling of relief.  My friend, although he backed off a bit, still seemed to believe that there are situations where, the absurdity of the highly unlikely (how about NEVER) “ticking time bomb” hypothetical notwithstanding, that you would be justified in torturing somebody.   It reminded me of our long ago torturous debate on the subject via email when I eventually asked in exasperation: what next, are you going to start actually torturing me?    To which he wrote something to the tune of: Oh, but I already am…  

So here we have a man, highly intelligent, well-read, a skilled debater, a moral person with nuanced political views, many of them progressive, for whom a “hypothetical” with a likelihood of 0.001% is good enough to justify, in some cases, an otherwise morally unjustifiable position.   Not to say I could picture him torturing anyone (not physically, anyway) but that idiotic hypothetical is all he needs to keep arguing the position of the most vicious, ruthless, cruel and lawless among us.  

Imagine the average person, without my friend’s fine education, generally refined moral awareness, wide reading, long professional experience making and dissecting arguments,  confronted with an irrefutable bit of logical sounding rhetoric like “we got to fight ’em over there so we don’t have to fight ’em here!”   Jesus, that makes perfect sense.   We just need to go over there, kill or capture all of ’em, detain the live ones forever, torture ’em — end of problem!  Next!

You see, they hate our fucking freedom.   They’re not like us.  They don’t love their children, they use them as human shields.  They’re terrorists who hate us because we’re better than them.  You get that?   They have a massive cultural inferiority complex that makes them insane.  Somebody who would do what they do is not a human in the same sense that a middle class white American is a human.   They’d kill us all, and certainly not hesitate to torture us, in much worse ways than the many techniques in the $10,000,000 manual our legal team deemed totally legally defensible.  You see, we’re talking savage, primitive fucking fucks here.   You do understand the difference, don’t you?  

On the other hand, my dear fellow American, you can see the obvious flaws in that stinking pile of horse diarrhea.  I know you can.   You just have to look directly at it, get a real whiff, think of your friend from school, the kid from Pakistan, a self-effacing, warm, funny guy…  well, you would exempt Fahrid from any torture program, if you could…

 

 

[1] According to Madeline Albright in her recent book Fascism: A Warning.

The Process

Humans are not strictly rational beings.  Human Nature 101, people will kill, march to certain death, commit unimaginable atrocities, for seemingly insane causes, or for no rationale they can articulate.   In America millions of us routinely vote against our interests, in nakedly profit-driven elections now decided by the unlimited “speech” of legally created “persons” who exist only in the minds of unappealable activist judges.     We vote for imperfect candidates who serve these interests,  in the states where we’re still allowed to vote, our ability to vote less a given now than a few years ago, when the Supreme Court deemed the Voting Rights Act unnecessary in our colorblind, post-racist, er, post-racial democracy.   Yeah, we all know, n-words can’t take an f-wording joke, particularly about American history.  I’m not laughing either, and I’m technically a white man.

As fucked up as human beings so often are, there is a quality called integrity that many of us admire.   The dictionary defines integrity as “the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness.”   The synonyms include — honesty, probity, rectitude, honor, good character, principle(s), ethics, morals, righteousness, morality, virtue, decency, fairness, scrupulousness, sincerity, truthfulness, trustworthiness.

It’s plain to see that the definition of integrity will vary based on your beliefs about the nature of decency, fairness, morality.    There are often arguments, in democracy, about what is moral, honorable,  right.   These debates, in our smash-mouth culture, are often conducted by adamant partisans (many of dubious intellect) on a maddeningly reductionist level: abortion is always murder, a sin despised by God; abortion is a mother’s difficult decision and her absolute right to choose, at any time and for any reason, even the day before birth.  

“You got a glass of water, Elie?    Even for a blahg that virtually nobody reads, this post is a little bit dry, no?   A tad academic, might we dare suggest?  A wee bit pedantic, preacher?” says a pile of bones, interrupting.  “Seriously, Elie, don’t mind me, I’m just here wearing the coxcomb, so to speak, to break the spell.”

Fuck me.

“Let’s get down to it, man.  You’re thinking hard about something that is stuck like a jagged fiber between your molars.   Play it out, motherfucker, work the damned dental floss.  This piece is called ‘Process’, explain the process.  Show us, don’t perfessor us.”

Fair enough.  There is little enough we control in our lives.  I’ve been in two discussions recently with people who doubt there is such a thing as “free will”.  Let us suppose that free will is like the “free market”, a tiny speck of truth in the ocean of bullshit it claims is all fact, all freedom.  There is little enough we have control of here in a world of chaos often run by the most ruthless psychopaths among us.    We have our reputations, which are built on the goodwill of people who… never mind.  

On the most elemental level, in our personal lives, all we really have is how we act in the world, how we are with the people we encounter.   Each of us almost without exception have hurtful things we do, morally neutral things, and helpful things.  If we are great, we also have the healing things that we do. There is no greater work, I think, than calming a distraught kid, listening with empathy, helping someone recover from trauma.   There is plenty of trauma in our troubled world.

“Like this excruciating fucking post, for example.   What the fuck, really, Elie, can you make your goddamned point while some of them are still alive?” said the pile of bones.  

Your friend Eichmann cited Kant’s Categorical Imperative during his trial for crimes against humanity in Jerusalem.   Hannah Arendt gave the otherwise dull defendant a gold star for stating it more or less correctly: to act in such a way that your actions could be universally practiced and the world would be better for it.  Kant’s imperative is related to Hillel’s famous formulation of the Golden Rule:  what is hateful to you, do not unto another.   Now all this is quaint stuff in our modern world, our commodified, monetized world where the exact worth of an individual;s life can be reckoned down to the nickel by calculating their “net worth.”   

“Elie, I’m fucking begging you,” said the skeleton.  

No good deed goes unpunished.  The sassy devil of this cliche is in the waggish details.  Say you take the high road with an old friend, somebody who we will stipulate can be difficult, prone to tirelessly trying to prove himself right, no matter how many contortions are involved, a man in deep trouble, at any rate.   He is unaware of the effect his actions have on those around him, seems to have little insight into how provocative he can be, is locked in a constant zero-sum war for survival.   In this war he has shown that he will do whatever he has to do to survive, even things most of us would shrink from.  That is what people often do in war.

“So why take the notoriously thankless high road?  Why not just take your leave of him if he’s such a toxic person?”

I don’t have a good explanation, except that I am trying to redeem a friendship we once had, for the sake of learning a better way than just shoving these types off the back of my yacht and leaving them bobbing in my wake. 

“Nothing better than a good shove and bobbing in the wake job, it seems to me, if the person has been loudly demanding it for some time.”

Well, I wont say no to that.   But here’s the point I’ve been stumbling toward about my process.    First I have to try to understand as much about the thing as I can, try to see the thing from as many sides as I can, extend the benefit of the doubt if a friend is involved.  I do that by thinking and then writing here.   I arrange things until they make sense.   I arrive at conclusions that help shape my actions.   In writing I see clearly…

“Unless you’re as deluded as your, eh, friend…”

… for example, that this chap has rage he is unaware of, pent up, waiting for an occasion to let some of it out.   He appears to be largely unaware of this rage or its unconscious seepage.  He is nervous, so that things that might not rile a less nervous person really drive him nuts.  He reacts pungently.  I have to map all these things out, to get a handle on how to best approach the problem.

“While exacerbating the problem by writing about it here where your angry, nervous, distracted friend can stumble on it and stoke his righteous anger at being once again betrayed.   A laudable process, I have to say.”   

Well, sure, he  would know the anonymous allusion to, say, a person who keeps forgetting key agreements and so on, are about him.   On the bright side, he’s too busy most of the time to read anything that’s not somehow related to his overwhelming professional life, so his stumbling on anything on my blahg is unlikely.   In any case, I always write with an eye toward preserving the anonymity of the people I mention in my “work” here.

“Your ‘work’,” said the skeleton, silently opening his jaws in a pantomimed guffaw, “I love that.  Thanks for tickling me with those quotation marks.”  

Shut up.  Here is my point.  Someone can make you mad, give a meaningless apology that is dragged out of them (“implied apology” asshole, I’m already covered, you merciless dick), and then continue aggravating you in the very manner he’s already apologized for.   That’s a person that needs to be extirpated from your world, no question.  Is it better or worse if the motherfucker has no idea of their neurotic habit of making others angry?  An irrelevant question, really.    

My point: I wrestle with the right way to approach all this and then, after a hellishly combative several hour long attempt at reconciliation during which I manfully avoided physically assaulting my decisively unrepentant old friend, I get an email congratulating me on the test showing a trend toward remission of my kidney disease (which I’d bcc’d to everyone on the list) and saying he’s looking forward to our next get together.

“Your fault, Elie, why on earth did you bcc him the health news?”

Point taken, bone breath.  I suppose in an ill-considered attempt to preserve relationships with his wife and kids.   Eichmann again: Hannah Arendt notes that the three German-Jewish judges who decided the war criminal’s fate were unfailingly humane and respectful to Eichmann.   Unaccustomed to this treatment, Eichmann took their attitude as sympathy and was cruelly disappointed when these men, who had treated him so decently, suddenly condemned him to death.  Arendt watched the face of the man in the glass booth and saw this reaction for herself.   He couldn’t believe it, they’d been so respectful, even kind, and now they were fucking hanging him?  

“Look, if you’re comparing an old friend to Eichmann, I’d say the poor devil is already off the back of your yacht and bobbing, utterly betrayed, in the wake.”  

My friend would never do what Eichmann did.  I take your point, but let me finish.   I am stuck musing over this, and because I cannot clear my mind of it, it floats up in conversation.  I made the mistake of bringing it up yesterday.   I myself don’t know a productive thing to say about this festering idiocy that remains so clearly oppressive to me.  I’ve done everything I know how to try to make this person understand the peril our long friendship is in,  I’ve been more patient [1] than I ever thought myself capable of being, in the face of mind-numbing obliviousness, denial and attack from my desperate old pal.  

“Yer a fucking saint, Elie, no question now.  Join a religion pronto, my boy, so you can be canonized.”  

Good idea.  Anyway, there is nothing anyone can say about this situation.  I’ve got nothing.

“Outside of the last few thousand words of postmortem.”  

Yeah, and I’m hoping this last bit of coughing will hack up whatever’s left of it.   The point is, this process has made me see all the issues very clearly, anyway.  If someone is unaware of their anger, and it causes them to provoke others, who then become angry, and they are bitter about the angry friend’s demand that they apologize for something they don’t even know they’ve done, no matter how clearly the facts point to it, and then they argue instead of being at all contrite… well, there you have it.  So there’s not much that can be said.  My experiment failed.  Case closed.  But still you feel compelled to rattle on about it.  What is a friend supposed to say at this point?

“You’re empowering him to bother you,” a friend says, in an attempt to be helpful.   The attempt was well-meant.   The effect of the comment is to blame you for being unable to put the hideous conundrum out of your head.  

“We’re back to free will now, Bozo.  If you have free will, your friend is right.  You’re giving this irredeemable neurotic the power to continue endlessly fucking with your mind.  Be done with the slimy little bastard.  Trust me, the clueless, enraged little fuck will look much, much better bobbing hopelessly in the wake of your yacht.”       

 

[1]  The Hebrew word for patience is more profound than our English word.   In Hebrew they say “sovlahnoot” which means the ability to endure suffering.  The Hebrew word for patience comes from the root “sevel” which means suffer.  It takes no patience to endure something that does not make us suffer, true patience involves enduring something that is difficult to endure.