Category Archives: musing

Short version

Wrote this as part of a futile letter I am working on, an exercise in trying to digest something that is indigestible, addressed to the chef and server of the unpalatable dish.  I don’t know if it has any interest, but it’s a much quicker telling of the encounter laid out in the previous post, and I will most likely delete it from the letter I wrote it in:

P.S.

I wrote this letter right after an encounter at my local post office. The encounter illustrates a personality type, all too common, that gives no quarter in defending why they are right and you, whatever the facts, are actually the asshole.

My rent check, in the landlord’s mailer, was returned to me, the stamp cancelled and no other explanation. Went to the post office to have it delivered.  The monkeylike clerk wordlessly studied it for a long time before telling me I needed to talk to the supervisor. The supervisor also studied the envelope for a moment.

“Must not have read the address,” he said, pointing to the address printed on the business envelope. “Machines, we use machines, sometimes they make mistakes.” I asked him to expedite delivery of the check, since it was now a week late. He told me he couldn’t expedite anything, only “overstamp” it and put it back into regular mail, unless I wanted to pay for overnight delivery.  He apparently thought I was being a dick, because he’d already admitted a machine had made a mistake, that it was nobody’s fault, and yet I was still demanding something from him. “Haven’t you ever made a mistake?” he asked me.

At this point, the guy who should have simply said “this shouldn’t have happened, I’m sorry for the hassle. I’ll hand cancel this, put it on the truck and make sure it gets delivered tomorrow, the address is only five miles from here” was staring at me like I’d just taken a piss at his window.  He slid a paper with a number he said was for complaints through the window, told me his name. He refused to give me a receipt or any proof I’d re-mailed my returned envelope to my landlord. Told me he could only give me a receipt if I paid for it.

The number on the form turned out not to have an option for “complaints” and the waiting time was 40 to 50 minutes to speak to a human. I have no idea if this dickhead gave me his actual name, whether he put my letter in the bin to be sorted and delivered or into the garbage bin. How would I know how much of a vicious psycho this guy potentially is, particularly after I finally told him to fuck himself after he told me he could only give me a receipt if I paid him? He’d certainly showed me a nice snappy catalogue of politely sociopathic traits.

With a stranger who is an asshole, this is standard behavior: never sympathize, or admit any wrongdoing, give a reason that sounds reasonable enough, deny any obligation to fix the mistake, put the complaining consumer on the spot by blaming him for being a hypocrite, and a complainer, tell him to fuck off, politely, give him a fake number to file his fake complaint and make up a name for yourself.

A loved one who does this is in a different category, no?  Do you want the lesson your kids get to take with them in life to be that trust is a delicate, transactional illusion, that to live you have to learn to tell yourself, and others, any lie that makes it possible to conceal shame and manipulation?

 

Anger Update

Be reluctant to declare victory in the war on difficult emotions, my friends.   It is important to remember that battling our powerful lowest impulses is a constant wrestling match.   I had a nice reminder of the hubris of claiming victory yesterday, and the letdown in vigilance such hubris often causes, when I momentarily lost my verbal shit in the post office yesterday.   This came a day after delivering learned comments about recognizing the signs that you are about to get angry, taking a breath and pulling yourself back from the explosion.

My rent check, in the printed mailer provided by my landlord, was returned to me several days after I mailed it.  It was postmarked and returned with no reason for its return anywhere on the envelope. I brought it to the Post Office today to have its delivery expedited.   The woman at the window studied it for a long time, turning it over and over in her hands, peeling back the stamp, turning it again, her lower lip hanging down pensively. After a few minutes of this, and before she could reach for a magnifying glass, I pointed out that she was not going to find any further information.  I told her it was a rent check, returned to me in error, and that I needed it delivered as soon as possible.   She asked what day I had mailed it, when it had been returned to me.  She looked blankly as I told her “I mailed it Tuesday,  it was returned Saturday” then consulted her phone, presumably for a calendar.   After a long pause she looked up at me without expression, slid the envelope back to me and sent me over to her supervisor.

The supervisor looked at the postmarked envelope, turned it in his hands, shrugged and told me maybe the printed address had not been read through the window.  I pointed out that it was quite legible, printed in caps, in fact, and in the place where every business correspondence is addressed.  He countered with “machines, these are read by machines, which sometimes make mistakes.”  

He told me he could not expedite delivery of this erroneously returned mailing, then, when I appeared dissatisfied with this answer, asked me if I had never made a mistake.  I told him, of course, we all do, but that in the case of this properly addressed, properly posted letter I hadn’t made a mistake, the Post Office and its sorting machines had.   I was asking him to correct this mistake.  He said all he could do was send it again, by regular mail, and that hopefully it would go through this time.  He told me he would draw arrows directing the machine’s attention to the place where the address is on the business envelope, that hopefully it would be properly routed by the machine this time.

“Arrows,” I said, “directing the machines to the ordinary place for an address.  Presumably these arrows will get a postal machine to remove its head from its mechanical ass and sort the envelope properly this time.”

“Those are your words,” he said, unnecessarily.

 When I  still appeared unsatisfied, realizing he was dealing with an angry, implacable dick, he slid a postal form, PS Form 3849, under the glass and told me if I had a complaint, to call the number on the form.  The move removed any doubt I had about being in a conversation with an immovable asshole, in this case one named Umar, but I managed, for a time, to maintain a grim cool.   

This was the time, as I urged my friend the other day, to notice the signs that this was going badly, not going to end well, the physical signs that fight or flight chemicals were flowing, the familiar, climbing feeling that generally happens when I find myself confronted by a robotic attitude, by some insistent jerk sitting behind bullet proof glass who won’t back down no matter what.  This was the time to walk away, there was clearly nothing to gain in this interaction.

All he could do, he told me again, was “overstamp” it and draw arrows on the envelope pointing the machine to the address, and hopefully it would get there, by regular mail, in a few days.  Unless I paid extra, there was no other option available to me, nor anything else the post office would do, or had any obligation to do.  “Feel free to make a complaint,” Umar told me, giving me his name.    I told him to overstamp it and send it again.  He did.  I thanked him for his time, through gritted teeth.

Walking out of the post office I was steamed.  After walking about a block I realized I should have gotten a receipt of some kind of the re-mailing, in case of future trouble with the landlord (and to avoid a $25 fee to stop the original check, in the event the letter didn’t make it the several miles to my landlord’s office).  

As I turned to go back to the Post Office I passed the ongoing standoff over a parking spot.  On my original trip to the Post Office, fifteen minutes earlier, I’d seen one car backing in to parallel park as another nipped in quickly from the other direction.   Neither car could get into the spot now, and neither driver was willing to concede an inch to the other.   The two drivers were locked in their positions, neither one backing down, while a traffic jam built up behind them, a bus trying to make a turn was now blocking all traffic on Broadway.   Horns were blaring.   “The human condition,” I thought, as I entered the Post Office again, to enact my part.

Umar would not come to the window, though he saw me standing at the window.  I called him and pounded on the bulletproof glass with my fist as he disappeared around the wall.  I continued calling his name in a loud belligerent voice.  When he returned, affecting the unflappability of the perfect asshole, he refused to give me any kind of receipt.  Impossible, he said, unless I paid for it.  I then exploded.

“This place is fucked up and you are the fucking supervisor of it!” I snarled idiotically, if also accurately, and stormed out, banging the door hard enough to break it.   A moment later it occurred to me that his next move would be to reach into the bin, retrieve my letter with the rent check, rip it neatly in half, ball it up and toss it into the garbage.

The “complaint” number he gave me had no option for complaints.  It was not a complaint number.  The wait to speak to a human was “40 to 50 minutes”.   I found myself flooded with fight or flight chemicals as I searched the web for how to make a complaint against customer-relations challenged civil servant Umar, to protect myself if he did the angry thing and destroyed my payment to the landlord.  He could also simply have left it on a shelf, to sit for a few weeks.

I called the federal agency that oversees the Post Office, spoke to a very sympathetic woman (whose name I foolishly did not take, though she gave me my case #) who assured me this will be investigated and an email would come back to me within 3 business days.  She told me it was a good move on my part to have photographed the returned envelope, and that I should hold on to the photo.

Odds are Umar didn’t rip it up, the landlord will have it the day after tomorrow, cash it by 3/20 and done and done.  In the odd event that he did ‘go postal’ on my check to the landlord, there is at least a record, a complaint with the federal office that investigates alleged improprieties by postal workers.  For whatever that might be worth.  

But if that impenetrable wall of glass hadn’t been between us, and Umar had stepped toward me, I can’t say for sure, in spite of not being a fighter, in spite of my conscious attempt to remain peaceful, that I would have been able to resist what nature would have been imploring me to do.  I’d had fair warning as things went from fartlike to actual shit, but it was no help in this instance.

This is one reason anger is such a dangerous thing.  It is waiting, always, particularly for those of us who were victimized by angry adults when we were children, and anger can almost always convince you that you are 100% correct in your reaction.  Umar had probably had a shitty day himself, didn’t feel like being reprimanded by some snotty, disgruntled customer for a simple mistake he had nothing to do with.   When the customer poured salt on his shit-sandwich of day by telling him “if you had said ‘this shouldn’t have happened, I’m sorry for the hassle, we’ll get this over to your landlord ASAP,” Umar could only claim he had said that.  “I told you I was sorry,” he said sullenly, then slid the fake complaint number under the glass by way of saying “lick my unwashed, crusty asshole, sir.” 

There is no winner in this kind of transaction.  It is best to keep them short and to the point, though that is far more easily said than done.   Remain humble, do not proclaim that you have surmounted the ugly thing that will soon be ready to bite you in the ass again, hard, and with very sharp teeth.

Moms Demand Action

I heard a great interview (conducted by former U.S. Attorney Preet Barara on his podcast) with Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, now a nationwide organization with more than 4,000,000 members.   You can hear the entire interview here.   From Moms Demand Action’s website (clickez zis link):

WHO WE ARE

Moms Demand Action was founded by stay-at-home mom Shannon Watts on December 15, 2012, in response to the devastating shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The organization quickly flourished into a leading force for gun violence prevention, with chapters in all 50 states and a powerful grassroots network of moms that has successfully effected change at the local, state and national level. In December 2013, Moms Demand Action partnered with Mayors Against Illegal Guns to unite a nationwide movement of millions of Americans working together to change the game and end the epidemic of gun violence that affects every community.

Shannon Watts has educated herself on the issue, and on the numbers.  Once more I am reminded how important having the actual facts and the data are in any complicated discussion.  In any talk about our violent gun culture, we need to take the actual facts of the grisly fucking case into consideration, in order to, as Barara pointed out, prioritize our efforts at fixing the problem.  

For example, I had the impression that semi-automatic weapons, and the automatic ones created by using a “bump stock,” were responsible for much of the American gun carnage.   Wrong, those killings amount to something like 2% of all gun murders in the U.S.   Still a fairly large number, but banning assault weapons would leave 98% of all American killings by gun untouched.  

Not to say it’s not important to keep powerful combat weapons out of the hands of maniacs, out of any hands, but it is perhaps more important to make sure no domestic abuser gets to legally carry any kind of fire arm.  For every rich white fuck who rents a hotel room as a sniper’s nest and rains bullets from his fancy assault weapons on a crowd gathered to enjoy some music there are apparently as many as 49 incidents where somebody with a documented history of violence just takes a handgun, delivers a line from an action movie, and shoots somebody in the face.

Kids that torture small animals grow up looking for bigger game to torture.   We don’t generally help these miserable kids, we smack them down.  There is a lot of free-floating anger in this world, in our country, a place in which more and more people are increasingly without attractive options, or any prospects, really, more and more of them locked up in gigantic numbers for small, seemingly insignificant crimes (like a bag of marijuana, or having an attitude with a frisking cop) while the wealthiest white collar criminals coyly flaunt their immensely profitable crimes, are interviewed smiling on TV, are appointed to high government positions, never at any time in danger of prosecution.  We live in a society that, in many ways, fundamentally makes no sense — outside of creating profit and wealth for an increasingly small number of winners.  

So belief systems arise to explain the vexing irrationality of society.   Napoleon noted that religion is what keeps the poor from killing the rich.  Another old chestnut is the common historical belief among countless millions that all of our troubles come from some fucking minority group that is causing all the problems, or from mouthy women who don’t know when to shut up, or baby birds who think they are so fucking cute.  

As a young school child I was bullied by a sadistic older kid named Larry Zimmerman.   He menaced me at the bus stop every morning when I was six or seven years old.   I don’t recall him ever punching me, although he may have, but he made it viscerally clear as he grabbed the front of my shirt that he’d like nothing more than his fist concussing my frightened little face.   After a while, and an eventual visit from my father to the bus stop, Larry lost interest in bullying me.  Years later, walking home from that same elementary school, I passed Larry squatting on the sidewalk.  As I walked around him I saw that he was busy slowly decapitating a baby bird that had fallen from a nest.

In Junior High School Larry hung out in gym class with a kid who had a hook for one of his hands.   The crew cut blond kid with the hook was cruelly mocked by classmates who called him “Captain Hook” and shit like that.   Larry got the boy with the hook up on a rope, his feet clutching the big knot at the bottom of the rope, just slightly off the ground, and pushed the kid, brandishing his hook face-high, into groups of boys in their gym clothes.  Hell of a scene.  At one point Larry stepped back, directly into me, and fell on the ground.  I recall the calm feeling I had looking at him on the ground as he looked up fearfully, seeming to recognize me.

I don’t know what eventually happened to the poor bastard, but I suspect things did not work out that well for him.   By sheer happenstance, I learned that the boy with the hook grew up to be a very handsome and charming man.   A friend was chatted up by him on a bus, and she gave the report, confirming that his name was Paul, that he was our age,  had grown up in Queens, gone to my Junior High School (the one I own).    A kid who is a bully at eight, decapitating baby birds at eleven, gleefully pushing a classmate swinging from a rope to terrify kids with his metal hook… these are all signs that this fellow probably should not be given training in firearms or a license to carry a gun.

The big problem when you have a competitive country run by well-paid, highly skilled advertisers, industry lobbyists and spinmeisters, where everything related to corporate profit is falsely framed as an issue of “liberty” and “freedom,” is that we lose the ability to look at the bigger picture.  The National Rifle Association calls itself American’s oldest Civil Rights organization (it dates back to 1871, not long after the end of the Civil War many are still fighting).  

True or false on the NRA as freedom fighters is, of course, a matter of your perspective.   Thirty million dollars in campaign contributions to Trump in 2016 may give you some idea of their commitment to justice, fairness and responsible gun use.   There are many NRA members who are not deadly fanatics, I am sure, but good people who just want to go to the range and keep their aim true.   Angry people who want guns to protect themselves from human animals who need to be shot have civil rights too, I guess.  We can say the same for members of fraternal organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, formed only a few years before the NRA Civil Rights group.  The Klan is entitled to due process too, when they are accused of crimes and things like that. 

We live in a country whose citizens have long been led to believe that there is closure available through deadly violence.   The history of the old West is one example, watch any Western.   Most action movies follow this simple formula: establish good characters, establish evil character, have evil character inhumanly torment and kill some good characters, surviving good character gets gun, cathartically kills evil one.  Roll credits.  America, I hate to point out the obvious — shooting the evil fuck in both knee caps, kicking him hard in the face, in the ribs, in the balls, shooting him in each hand, taking a knife and inflicting a deep wound in his torso, and leaving him to scream and whimper as he bleeds out, will not bring your murdered family members back to life.  You think you will feel better after you torture the evil, murderous fuck to death?  I don’t know.  But that’s a persistent myth in the nation we live in.  It’s a central part of our culture.  

Is cathartic revenge the best way to address the heart-rending problem of murderous violence against innocents in a society as brutally unfair as ours?  Probably not.  But that’s a big reason we allow people to buy as many guns as they want.  Freedom, yo.

Anger Makes You Mad

Neuroscience has identified the part of the brain that lights up when we are angry — the insula, deep in the cerebral cortex.   When the insula is aglow fight or flight chemicals like adrenaline and cortisol are released and the mind is literally disabled from making fine, or even gross, distinctions.  

A truly angry parent may actually be physically incapable of seeing the harm in venting against a young kid who has provoked them to rage.  Incapable of seeing the damage done by slapping the kid, or locking the kid in a dark closet and turning the music up to drown her screams or raging wildly against the child’s sense of self. 

This shut off of the moral faculty when rage is upon us seems like an obvious point, but it really isn’t.  Angry and “mad” are synonyms, but even that is only a hint of the obvious.  

The other side of being angry is that we instantly justify our anger, even though these deeply-held justifications often don’t bear much scrutiny.  All available evidence, when we are mad, points to our being absolutely right to be angry.   The urgent reason we feel angry couldn’t be more obvious, to us.   It’s telling, and very human, that the only non-physical faculty that continues to work when we are enraged is our homo sapiens ability to justify ourselves.

This trait, rage making one resolute and incapable of seeing another person’s point of view, is what makes war possible.  It explains mob lynching and every other atrocity.   Rage makes people support deadly policies of all kinds.   We don’t see the victims of war, lynching or deadly policies as humans with souls as unique and precious as those of the people we love.   We see them as irredeemable fucking assholes who deserve what they fucking get.   If Donald Trump had a massive stroke during a nationally broadcast speech, many Americans would feel no empathy for him, some would even laugh.   Reminds me of a great line of Trump’s, from early in the presidential campaign when he was picking off his Republican opponents one after another.

 I think it was Ted Cruz, right before he was voted off the island, who introduced a woman, I think it was Carly Fiorino, as his running mate (turns out Carly introduced “our next president” Ted Cruz — ed.).   The woman turned on stage and seemed to fall into a manhole.   She stepped forward and just went down.  Trump showed the great clip to his crowd at a rally.  The crowd loved it.  He pointed out that nobody on stage had gone to help her.  “Even I would have helped her,” Trump said with a smile and a little shrug.  “Even I!”   Cracked me up.    

My grandmother, no stranger to anger, liked to calmly say, after she’d provoked me with some harsh comment about my work ethic, “I know, I know… the truth hurts, I know…”   I’d sputter on in defense of the thing she had just attacked and she’d smile, and nod, and sympathetically tell me that the truth hurts, that she knew, she knew.   I loved her, but that was some hard to come back from shit.  

There is this, though: the things that will make us most angry are things that attack us where we are most vulnerable.   A shameful secret, dangled sadistically.  Noting a particular weakness we know we have.   Bringing up something painful in a way that seems unfair.   Making an issue of our greatest fear.  

I’m no expert on anger, but I have studied it for many years, since it played a terrible role in my life going back to my earliest days.   It turns out there are ways to avoid an angry confrontation, methods to defuse anger rather than escalate it.  

The intellectual part is hard enough, recognizing the maddening principle at work, the exact, familiar thing that pisses you off, before the anger takes over, and then learning what you need to say and do next to avoid escalation.   That intellectual understanding is crucial for de-escalating the situation.  It’s hard, but over time we can get better at recognizing the signs that we are about to get mad and take the steps that have worked in the past to calm our reactions.

The emotional component of anger is the truly hard part to master.   The overwhelming feeling of injustice hits us hard out of nowhere.  Suddenly we are under attack, the stress chemicals flowing, the insula lit up, the justifications for our anger mounting aggravatingly.  That, my friends, is the fucking hard part.   Something to think about while you consider how you feel about the idea that anger, even rage, is inevitable in human affairs.   I would not concede that in my own relations.

 

 

Two or Three Approaches to Dealing with Vexation

When dealing with a problem we can assemble all available information, analyze it as best we can and honestly discuss all options for solving the problem.   We can select only the information we agree to put on the table and talk about that, a more limited approach.   We can agree not to talk about controversial or embarrassing subjects and agree that the problem is not something we will ever solve.   I’ve always been in favor of the first approach, though it is no longer generally accepted as the way to solve problems.  The second and third ways are much more common.  These approaches apply to solving problems in our civic and personal lives.

As a citizenry we no longer expect disclosure from the powers that rule us, we expect spin.   We are not given access to all of the pertinent facts, we are given a few facts in the context that will cause us to hopefully buy those facts, as presented.   There is a fundamental divide in how people approach the things that vex us: we can yell at the television or we can read, analyze, discuss and write.  

For those who yell at the television I will say this: at least you’re paying attention. 

There is a divide between the open and closed approaches, a vast, deep chasm.  There is no bridging this gap, sad to say.   The advocates of a closed approach have their compelling reasons: often involving something embarrassing, shameful, illegal or otherwise painful that must be concealed.  The advocates of transparency can be said to be unaware that all the rules of human society have changed– we live in an endless, brutal global war against violent extremists and the expectations we had before Terror are no longer reasonable. Transparency is a luxury people up against Terror can no longer afford.  

This same divergence in approach applies in personal life.  Some things are just too threatening to put on the table.  So we agree not to discuss them.  It doesn’t mean the things are no longer threatening.  It means they are safely taken off the table as things we may talk about.   It depresses the hell out of me, sometimes, that information people need to make intelligent decisions about their lives is withheld from them, by deliberate policy, by an unshakable decision.   But on I march, as though the hell wasn’t depressed out of me.

Widaen Begins Freaking Out — study for the book proposal

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Kurt Vonnegut had a great bit in Slaughterhouse Five, a scene where American POWs are shipped by cattle car in the brutal cold to serve as slave laborers in Nazi Germany.   The first day men were struck with dysentery, and the car filled with their runny excrement, which then froze.   To the groans and complaints a bum in the corner said, “you think this is bad? I’ve seen much worse than this.”

The next night, in frigid temperature, with no food or water, men began to die.   Conditions got progressively more desperate as the train made its way to Dresden.   “You think this is bad?” said the bum “I’ve seen much worse than this.”

The third day, writes Vonnegut, the bum died.  

Dig it.   Welcome to Widaen begins to freak out.

 

A writer’s dream

A writer dreams of his words moving a reader.   Leading a reader from one place, through other places, to a place where the reader understands the bigger picture, the tiniest part of the big picture, sees something new, is moved in heart and mind.   Pretty good dream from deploying some symbols on a page.

We arrange these symbols for words until they make the sense we are searching for. The words, once arrayed, can be tweaked, and shifted, until they become unmistakably clear, or infinitely suggestive, or soothing, or terrifying.   A miracle, really, that so much can be conveyed with the dedicated use of these symbols.  Writing/reading is probably the highest evolution of human ingenuity.    

“What do you think of Western civilization?” someone asked the little Indian man in the diaper-like garment.  

“A great idea, I think they should attempt that shit,” said the snide little devotee of Ahimsa.

Context Again

Without context it’s impossible to intelligently evaluate anything, to truly understand anything.   Think about that for even a second, in a world too busy to consider context.   Should we make the wall higher?   Should we make it illegal to pay women less than men?   Shall we allow homosexuals to marry?

Depends where the wall is.  Sometimes making a wall higher, say between the ocean and a seaside villa, creates a death trap.  If the waves are high and the villa is flooded, high walls will retain enough water to drown everyone.  Why are women still paid less than men for the same work?   What the fuck is up with that in 2018, seriously?   As for the gay newlyweds, if one is dying the other now has full legal rights at the hospital, hospice and thereafter.   I’ve yet to see anyone explain how gay marriage destroys American families, outside of Louis Black’s wonderful explanation.

Black gives us the context that shows us exactly how gay marriage destroys normal, heterosexual families.  He himself was an eye witness to this, he said, and it was a horrifying and illuminating moment.   Two gays (husband and wife, presumably) sneak up on an American family having dinner.  The gays are dressed as ninjas and silently enter the dining room where they immediately start fucking each other up the ass.  And then: boom!  Another American family, completely destroyed.

At least it’s a story, anyway.  A good story is the essence of what homo sapiens wants, a story that will tell you what the right thing to do is.   Murderous religious fanatics are coming to kill us, therefore we must do the following things to defend ourselves.  Make the list.   It makes no difference how nonsensical some of the tactics are: take the newly liberated and unemployed en mass to the notorious prison where their former dictator used to torture people and torture them.  Explode potential terrorists at a wedding in a “signature strike”, even if no actual terrorist targets are present at the wedding.   Hit the funeral for those killed at the wedding as well, just to be sure.   Do not wonder why the surviving friends and family of the killed might hate our freedom.

The whole project of trying to become wiser is about gathering context, making connections, seeing a certain cause and effect to actions.   A child learns not to burn his hand on hot metal by burning his hand on hot metal, once.   The cause and effect are immediate and dramatic there and the context instantly understandable — the hot metal is fucking hot and will burn you.  Many of the events unfolding on the news seem random and unrelated, unless you see them as part of ongoing history, parts of the seemingly inexorable march from one epoch to the next.

We homo sapients need a story in order to act.  It doesn’t matter how stupid or wise the story is, either.   One pervasive story we all know is that a good person gets up early and works hard, earns every moment of leisure.   Most of us seem to believe this is true.   It shows an industriousness and eagerness to tackle the day.   It also shows… what?   Is it really morally better to wake up at 6 a.m. every day than to go to bed at 4 a.m.?   Alas, this is something I will never know for myself.  

I am constantly aware of how we are so often denied context.  Often this concealing is done because transparency would bring shame to somebody, like revealing that a man had beaten his wife for twenty years.  Maybe the wife had beaten him for twenty years.  Anyway, something shameful there, nothing to see!  What are we to make of the cup of hot coffee the wife suddenly dashes into her husband’s lap one morning?  Weird shit happens!   People snap, for no reason!   Or, if there is a reason, for those who insist on such quaint things as reasonableness, it is a long, long story subject to many interpretations, many interpretations.   Who among us really knows?  Who really knows?

We have a society more and more influenced by simple, maddening stories, told without nuance or context, to people who are eager to confirm what they already believe. Hillary Clinton, obviously she had a child sex business out of the nonexistent basement of that Washington, D.C. pizza shop.   Now the context: Hillary is a liar and a criminal who needs to be locked up.   If you chanted “lock her up!” along with Mike Flynn you will not need coaxing to believe that Hillary kept young sex slaves for high rolling left wing whack jobs to use, Afghan high society wannabes.    The fucking hypocrites!   So you read the story on your feed, drive up to D.C. with your gun and arrive at the pizza place to liberate these child sex slaves, as any decent person would have done.

Watch the news, you are seeing the first draft of history.  What is reported, what is followed up on, what is not reported, what is not followed up on. There are sponsors to please, for virtually all of the mass media, and so certain items, bad for business, must be downplayed or omitted entirely.   One thing all seem to agree on, to watch the corporate talking heads: when the president blows shit up, launching deadly warheads on powerful missiles, the man is presidential.   That it is a meaningless attack, its only context being that in a moment of anger the president authorized millions of dollars of killing technology to be unleashed… well, God Save the POTUS!   No context here… just vigorously stirred patriotism.

One of my beefs with the Grey Skank, journal of record, is how faithfully it always seems to serve the narrative of the status quo.  Obama was portrayed, in its pages, as a principled man who made wise use of his secret kill list.   Almost never will questions of the morality, legality or efficacy of a president’s secret fucking kill list for extrajudicial execution by drone-fired missile be seriously raised by anyone on the Times editorial board.  That’s what letters to the editor are for, I suppose.  (Not to mention independent outlets for journalists like Democracy Now! and The Intercept.)

In the parade of things that will eventually drive me mad, the systematic denial of context is one of the biggest, most annoying floats.  If you don’t know that Iran had a democratically elected president that the C.I.A. and British intelligence arranged a coup to get rid of in 1953 (in fairness, they were defending their oil companies), you have no context for understanding the long antagonism with a country ruled for decades, against its democratic will, by a ruthless, U.S. supported, secret police-wielding monarch, the last Shah of Iran. [1]   The CIA admitted its key role sixty years later, in a report that came out in 2013, but, you know, for those first sixty years — nothing to see here!  

I wonder whatever happened to that copy of the recent American Torture Report produced by Congress that Obama designated for preservation in his presidential library, even though he agreed to keep it secret for a number of year into the future.  Obama’s move, problematic though it also was, preserved a vital historical document Republicans were intent on collecting all copies of and destroying forever.  A plague on all their fucking houses.

The Koch boys want to keep it simple.  It’s a matter of freedom versus totalitarianism.  That’s why they are Libertarians.  Keep everything absolutely free, maximum liberty for everyone, and make sure tyrants never make the rules, unless, of course, they’re our tyrants.    Nothing to see here!