Category Archives: musing

Facts: 0, Emotions: 1 (F) (Politics clipped from an e-mail)

It horrifies me that brilliant and courageous journalists like Jeremy Scahill, Jane Mayer and a few others, can make such airtight cases for their important and just causes, shine a clear light into unspeakably cruel darkness, and…. it changes nothing.  The detailed and coherent telling of the actual facts, even if they stir the emotions terribly, do not have any effect on organized human action (politics) next to the raw emotions alone, stirred violently with a buzzword or two and chanted over and over on the mass media.
 
Jane Mayer, in The Dark Side, lays out the many horrifyingly criminal illegalities involved in the torture program, with dates, names, details, memos, who authorized and ordered what, how the laws were violated, the exact techniques routinely used, the destroyed tapes of torture interrogations, etc.  A few years later President Obama, either in an unfortunate ad lib or reading a dick fingered teleprompt, admits that “unfortunately… we tortured some folks.”  Tortured some folks.   Harry Shearer does a good Obama imitation and that week on Le Show he did a musical number (at 42:00) with the hook, in unison with the Obama sound bite, a nonchalantly harmonized “we tortured some folks.” 
 
Scahill, as he details in his book Dirty Wars (a NY Times best seller it seems the NY Times never reviewed), travels to a village near Gardez, outside the Green Zone in Afgahnistan, to investigate a rumored massacre of civilians. There had been a party in a village called Khataba early into the morning of February 10, 2010 to celebrate the birth of a child.  The locals all have videos of the party on their phones, smiling faces, men dancing.  Suddenly a  helicopter lands, guys in heavy boots jump out, walk on the roof.  
 
One of the men who had been dancing at the party goes out to see what’s up and gets pumped full of lead by American commandos.  Likewise the two pregnant women who run to him screaming, likewise a teenage girl and another man, also shot to death.  Only a couple die immediately, the cop and one of the women linger, groaning, for five hours after the Americans dig their bullets out of the bleeding bodies with their tactical knives.  It would have been embarrassing and incriminating if local authorities, or NATO investigators, found American bullets in the bodies of the deceased, after all.  The commandos stop the others from taking the two mortally wounded family members to the nearby hospital.  They handcuff the remaining men, march them to the helicopter and drop them somewhere miles from home to have a nice day.   
 
Scahill sees the videos and still photos of the victims, talks to the eye witnesses.  The brother of one of the murdered men, whose pregnant wife was also killed, tells Scahill that when he finally got back from where the Americans dropped him he was ready to put on a suicide vest and go kill Americans but his father wouldn’t let him.
 
Scahill follows other similar stories in various countries and eventually learns that these killings are all the work of JSOC (Joint Strategic Operations Command), the highly secretive, elite Special Forces killing units that work directly for the president.  “Do what you’ve got to do, boys,” says the president, presumably, and they eventually track down and kill Osama bin Laden, to the cheers of American hockey and football crowds.  Scahill, who had been slowly and painstakingly unearthing details about the secretive JSOC, was amazed to hear JSOC, a name that is rarely spoken and never seen in print, suddenly lauded on CNN, Fox and everywhere, embodied in heroic Seal Team Six.  
 
Scahill discovers that the kill list, once a few dozen names, now includes thousands of names.  The lists of those killed, and the civilians killed along with them are highly classified, naturally, although Scahill puts together a rough list of confirmed raids, drone strikes and confirmed kills that shows these happen multiple times daily, mostly by drone now, in literally 40 something countries the US is not at war with.  Every dead male of military age is considered a dead terrorist, like in the old body counts in Viet Nam where every dead civilian was counted as neutralized Viet Cong. It is unknown how many of the undisclosed numbers of killed children, older men and females of all ages are also terrorists, though it is also, probably, if we are justified in killing them, a substantial number, eh?  
 
Scahill, a guest on Bill Maher’s show, lays out some of the hellish details for the audience.   Fellow guest Jay Leno asks Scahill  “why haven’t they killed you yet?” and Scahill just gives him a grim look, says nothing. 
 
Fair question.  So much easier just to kill a troublesome motherfucker like that, you know?  Not that he offers any real threat to the tireless killing machine, the only thing the American people have endless funds for… but still, there is a principle here, one would think.

All The Time in the World

Beware, if you think you have all the time in the world.  You are afforded a very small slice of all the time in the world, and before you can blink they are shedding tears for your passing and heading toward the buffet table.

My grandmother, long gone, used to watch a soap opera called “The Days of Our Lives”.  I remember the name because the opening featured an hour glass with the sands rushing down it.   “Like sands through the hour glass,” intoned a sonorous actor’s voice, “so are the days of our lives.”  The miracle of the internet lets you click here and hear it for yourself.

The nostalgic sound of that clip can bring tears to a sentimental eye.  My mother, for example, would probably sob to hear it, reminded of her mother, newly retired and quickly hooked on the afternoon melodrama, reminded of being 37 herself when the show first aired.  She’d be thinking this seemingly ten minutes after being 37, suddenly 78, a 21 year battle with endometrial cancer behind her and not much happiness ahead.  “So are the days of our lives,” would have socked her in the kishkas, the music would have twisted the fist.

Since we do not have all the time in the world, how do we justify time wasted?   The days we accomplish little or nothing?   We can take some solace in the paycheck we’ve earned, if we’re working, or in a job well done, if we do a job well.   In the things we’ve created, a family, a nice home, a business, nice craft items.  In the progress we’ve made toward becoming kinder and smarter people, if we have made such progress.  

Or we can brood and set variations of our brooding into type, watch them march across a computer screen, tinker with the tipsy words, arranging them this way and that until we’ve made them coherent enough, post them on the internet for a guy in Eastern Europe to read.  Yes, we can also do that, I suppose. 

Connect the Dots (law school digression notwithstanding)

I went to law school thinking I would learn how society is actually organized.  They would teach me the syntax of making a coherent case, analyzing and litigating an issue.  I’d learn to use language the way the masters have always done to maintain their many advantages.  My discursive instincts would be tamed, I thought dreamily, by the sleek logic of the law and I would learn to package and sell my ideas in the lingua franca of our world.  

The imaginative impulse I have always been prone to in telling a story might succumb, I believed, to the structured logic of the law.  This turned out to be mostly fantasy, as was the idea that the law’s sometimes merciless logic is not, in many cases, close to madness.  Much evil is, and has always been, justified and maintained by the law, after all.  

I imagined, for some reason, that the study of the law would help me dispense with frills and make a clear and convincing case for things I believe in.  It turns out, unsurprisingly, that the law, a man-made institution negotiated by men paid to make sure the law is malleable enough for their patron’s purposes, larded with obfuscating frills and no solution to many human woes.  The law famously regards many essential things as trifles, but this, apparently, should not unduly trouble a calm mind.  

It must be noted that most people study the law to obtain a license to practice a well-paying, or idealistic and less well-paying, career fighting either for or against justice, or for the highest bidder.  Few, if any, sensible law students dream of learning some mystery the law never promised to reveal in the first place.   I did learn some of the things I studied law for, in spite of myself.

In the law, if you have a cognizable injury the law has a remedy for, you state clearly what you want.   You pay your filing fee and ask the court to set a date and time when the court may hear the parties, to state your case, let your adversary show why an order should not be signed granting your party the relief it seeks.     

The exact nature of the evil complained of is set out in its most pertinent details and the relief sought is laid out precisely, supported by the appropriate laws.  The argument then proceeds to show the truth of every detail of the complaint, or of the defense.  It is an exercise in skillfully marshaling the facts, pertinent law, and court decisions; persuasively presenting them in the best possible light for your position.  The presentation ends by reminding the court of the justness, fairness and, respectfully submitted, Your Honor, necessity of granting the remedies sought.  

In the strongest legal argument every detail is clearly supported by the law, the facts line up obediently to carry the burden of proof.   Specific details of the law, the intent of the legislators, pertinent legal tradition and favorable Supreme Court cases are cited to make the case air-tight.  The easiest case to win is the proverbial slam dunk, every factor the court will use to decide the matter solidly on the side of your argument.

“Why would anyone bother to oppose you if you had a slam dunk case, supported by law, tradition and precedent?” I asked, early on in my career at law school.   Such was my idiotic innocence at the time.    The question was greeted as a deadpan joke on my part, as I was one of very few in law school given to any kind of overt irreverence in class.  Every first year in the lecture hall was smiling after my question.    

“Excellent question, Mr. So and So.  Does anyone have an answer to this?” asked the professor with a wry crocodilian expression.     

Mr. Flores answered brightly, “The only reason anyone would possibly oppose a slam dunk case is if there was a lot of money at stake.  Other than that, professor, it never happens.”   More smiles all around, the obvious point driven home.

An old friend of mine is a lawyer for the earth.   He has been burned in effigy by angry mobs, a straw man of him has been lynched by fishermen, the swinging scarecrow wearing a placard with his name on it has appeared in newspapers and on TV.   He argues in federal court for why the law requires a federal judge to force federal agencies to enforce environmental laws against powerful corporations to stop chemical poisoners and species murdering mercenaries.   These top businessmen and their legal counsel are paid lavishly so that poisoning, killing, plundering and pillaging can continue and spread nationally and worldwide as lucratively as possible.  For some odd reason, these characters rarely seem to be burned in effigy while they put the torch to my friend’s stand-in as often as they can.

“Dick Cheney’s son-in-law is actually a polite and superficially sociable guy,” my friend told me once, after litigating a case against him and his team of corporate mouthpieces.  Though he’s not the sort of person my friend would have lunch with, he has a modestly winning social persona and does not immediately come across as the kind of monster he represents.  One of Antonin Scalia’s sons makes an excellent living slashing at laws like McCain-Feingold, the old campaign finance law, and driving a fleet of Mac Trucks through the complicated, lobbyist vetted Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.  Another fabulously wealthy lawyer, probably much smarter than Cheney’s  son-in-law and no doubt wittier, although you might not necessarily like to have lunch with Counselor Scalia either.

In general, though there are exceptions that we get to applaud, the party with the most money, power and purchased free speech wins the day in American courtrooms.

                                                                  ii

But, I digress.   Here are some dots to connect, then.

We had a popular two-term president who, soon after taking the Oath of Office, broke the one union (PATCO) who supported him when he was running for president.  The Air Traffic Controllers  were not striking for better wages, they were striking for safer working conditions, less consecutive hours guzzling coffee to stay awake trying to prevent planes from crashing into each other.   The private sector is the solution for this sort of thing, announced the president, and unions are, well… unions make it inconvenient to do business for the job creators, they’re bad for competition, bad for America.   The private sector can do things better, goes this form of logic, while we cut the funds used to run public programs and shrink government to a size where it can be drowned in a bathtub.  

Forget about the many important things government does for people, has done over the years, things that only a government can do.  Forget that democratic government is supposed to be of the people, by the people, for the people:  drown it.   Crowds turn up to hail the Chief, support our troops wherever they’re sent, for any reason or for no reason, chant “USA, USA!” and vote for people determined to drown democratic government in a bathtub.  The private sector, companies like Enron, Halliburton, Monsanto, Walmart, Goldman-Sachs and Exxon, are held out by these bold new patriots as the best guarantors of our freedom now.

When the Twin Towers crumbled we saw footage of jubilant crowds in Gaza and the West Bank cheering that the Great Satan had been so grievously wounded.  At least we were told that these mobs were doing that as they yipped and threw their arms up in the air with huge smiles on their faces, carried coffins with American flags on them, waved bloody American flags.  It was unthinkable that crowds could be cheering the murder of thousands of innocent Americans from all over the world, the blood-thirsty bastards.  The images of their celebration of murdered Americans fueled our anger and thirst for vengeance.

Fast forward a decade or so, crowds of Americans all over this land, celebrating like their team had won the Super Bowl, honking horns, screaming, delirious, pumping fists, chanting “USA! USA!” after Obama announced that he’d killed Osama.   Newscasters stumbled over the announcement, more than one said President Osama had killed Obama, but everyone, almost without exception, celebrated the execution of the charismatic millionaire terrorist, at least with a private fist pump.  This televised display of bloodlust was not supposed to have any effect among the populations who already hate our freedom.

“Totally different story,” you will say, “when the Palestinians celebrated the killings on 9/11 it was the deaths of innocents killed by terrorists that they were cheering.  Americans cheered the death of a monster who had orchestrated the killing of thousands.  Totally different, dude.”

Point taken.  But here are some dots to connect:  

Right after the 9/11 attacks Congress authorized the use of force to strike back at the terrorists.  The invasion of Afghanistan had hazy goals from the beginning, outside of killing or capturing bin Laden and other al Qu’eda leaders, who were allowed to escape at Tora Bora.  Once they were gone there was no clear reason to continue warring there and no chance of installing a stable western style democracy, yet war on we did, for little discernible purpose.   Many of the billions for that war were spent on private contractors hired to do things army grunts, working for a fraction of the contractors’ pay, usually did.  The contractors were paid many times what American military personnel were paid, for doing the same work, and the politically connected corporations employing the contractors made a killing, as the saying goes.

The war in Iraq, a preemptive strike advertised as a war to free a random tyrannized population from the clutches of a random Hitler-like dictator, was even more unreasonable.  Here too, a tremendous force of private ‘contractors’ earned many billions of dollars for the corporations who hired them.   Already wealthy people with the right political affiliation got immensely more wealthy servicing these long wars.  Part of the beauty of the set-up was that since these private contractors didn’t work directly for the government, their employees were not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice and could do questionable, sometimes unspeakable, things without the usual questions being asked, with little or no accountability up the chain of command, if accountability could travel upward in a corporate hierarchy.  

Both wars, seen by many, not unreasonably, as wars of aggression and wars of choice, ruthlessly conducted, made America more hated worldwide, drove the recruitment of jihadists, insurgents, foreign fighters, suicide bombers.   Both wars continued far longer than any others in U.S. history, far longer than World War II and the Civil War combined.  The actual conduct of both wars kept from the public more than any previous wars.  Fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight ’em here, freedom on the march, the war on terror, killing those who ‘hate our freedom’, making the world safe for democracy, the war to end war.   Whatever.

The point is: we are a declining nation at permanent war against a shifting, constantly replenished world-wide enemy.  This entails some sacrifices in things like privacy and civil liberties, more government secrecy, less latitude for journalists who are not with the program, trials for espionage against journalists who try to push the boundaries of the muscular new government secrecy doctrine.   The attitude seems to be:  God bless America and God bless our men and women fighting for our flag, including those secret forces and private contractors working behind the scenes to hunt down and kill our enemies.    Damn those myopics who bitch about the curtailment of abstractions like privacy, complete freedom of the press, truth, justice and the so-called American way.

When they first started doing extrajudicial targeted assassinations of its enemies, Israel was widely castigated for it.  A car would be blown up in some middle eastern country, killing an infamous and elusive freedom fighter/terrorist, and the world would scream in protest of this murderous illegality.   Executions by governments, it has long been traditional, must be preceded, in virtually all cases, by a public trial in which proof of guilt for a capital crime is shown beyond a reasonable doubt.  Fast forward a decade or two and consider for a moment the massive and widespread American program of killing by drone strike whoever the president at the time deems worthy of death, with or without an accusation of a specific crime punishable by death.  Drone strikes are now the preferred method of American warfare and there is little discussion of its legality or propriety anywhere but among malcontents and nitpickers with nothing more important to do.

There has been, since the days of President Bush the First, a media ban on showing dead U.S. service men killed in combat.  There is no draft, we’ve had an all volunteer armed force for more than a generation now.  Nobody back home is asked to make any of the traditional civilian sacrifices for the ongoing wars, even taxes cannot be raised to pay for these amazingly expensive wars, we put them on the credit card.  The killing goes on largely by remote control, and since there are no American “boots on the ground” (very unpopular for our brave troops, and their much better paid mercenary comrades, to be killed or captured by freedom haters) nobody pays much attention to the actions of secretive groups like the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the elite units that carry out most of the killing of bad guys and innocents alike.  We justify or explain away torture now.  The president recently admitted that, after 9/11, unfortunately, and with the best of intentions, “we tortured some folks”, as well as conducting wars that are not defensive and killing by remote control in nations we are at peace with that may have enemies, even American citizen enemies, afoot in them.  

JSOC conducts secret killing operations in dozens of countries today.   The news does not report this, and the rare journalists who research and report on stories like this, like Jeremy Scahill (Blackwater, JSOC targeted kill list expanded to thousands of names) and Jane Mayer (Extraordinary Rendition and Enhanced Interrogation torture programs) … well, the most painstakingly researched articles, books, exposes, documentaries only have any effect on a tiny fringe of the population.  These hideous and troubling revelations are not mainstream in any significant way, don’t get much airplay, few get very upset about it, and even if they do, you know?   

The fact seems to be, killing by drone strike, “Signature strikes”(killing people who fit the profile of the ones we’re trying to kill, even though we can’t confirm their identities), works, is politically harmless (in U.S. politics, anyway) is good for business, and, therefore, good for America–even if an argument can be made that it’s not much different, when you shoot the wrong people and call in a Hellfire Missile strike on their house, killing groups of children and old people (collateral damage) than what guys like Hitler and Stalin used to do, and were rightly hated for.

The Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was the “go to” cleric after 9/11.  American born, reasonable, telegenic, abhorring the murder of civilians, calling for an end to violence, he appeared on the media many times in the years after that hellacious attack, until he began to recoil at America’s endless war against Muslims across the Middle East.  Openly critical of America’s war policies he left the country and returned to his family’s ancestral home in Yemen.  He began saying things on the internet inimical to America’s interests.  Yemen imprisoned him, he spent 17 months in solitary confinement and emerged as the most dangerous man since Osama bin Laden.  Radicalized, he called for jihad and death to American infidels.  His name was added to the kill list, targeted for assassination by Predator drone and he was duly executed by an air strike conducted by remote control.

Two weeks later al-Awlaki’s 16 year old American son, Abdulrahman, was eating lunch outdoors with friends when a Hellfire missile ended that meal in a splatter of meat.  No explanation necessary.

Connect the dots.  What have we become?

Maybe the DU was right after all

The old man was wrong, but maybe he was also right.  

He believed, after couple of decades working optimistically toward progressive social change, that hope for change was for suckers.  Our deepest fears, prejudices and hatreds, he concluded bitterly (as he’d suspected all along), were beyond reason, will and the most ardent desire for change.  

We fought this back and forth for years and I won’t recount the tedious exchanges I’ve already set out on this blahg and elsewhere.   He was wrong, clearly, things do change, as do people and their reactions and ideas.  He was right, though, that on a fundamental emotional level most people are set, blessed or doomed, by their genetics and programming.  

“That’s a depressive line of thinking, son,” a kinder, wiser father might say.  

“Maybe so, pops, but I’m looking at your own life, my life.  I’m granting you a measure of correctness against the position I argued for so many years, that people can, and do, change for the better, if they work hard enough at it,” I would reply.  

“Would, should, could,” said the kinder, wiser father wistfully.  “When you’re dead you’ll hear how poignant all those words really are.”  

It won’t take that long.  I recall the state the old man used to get into when he misplaced the change from his pocket.  He’d be beside himself, cursing, unable to get over his anger at himself, over the 43 cents he couldn’t find.   He’d received the change at the dry cleaners a few hours earlier, taken it out of his pocket when he changed his pants, goddamn it, and if I didn’t put it on the dresser where I always put it, what the fuck did I do with it?!  Goddamn it!!  He’d be inconsolable as he stomped around the house in a rage at himself, looking on all the end tables, the kitchen table, the bathroom sink, in the basement, upstairs again.

 “Losing 43 cents was the same to him as his favorite dog, or one of us, being hit by a car,” my sister pointed out correctly.   The loss of control of any kind was a lightning rod that electrified him right back into the center of his worst fears.  

“Easy for you to say,” he said.  

I suddenly think of the wallet I lost on the circle around the retirement village my parents lived in for their final years.  The wallet had dropped out of my cargo shorts pocket on to the road as I spoke to Sekhnet on the cell phone carrying the bicycle upstairs at 2 a.m.   I didn’t notice it was missing until the next morning when I went to get dressed and take a drive to visit friends.  No license.  No wallet.  Several days of desperate hope, checking with the security office over and over, until piecing together that the angry redneck security guard I’d disrespected a week or two earlier, and who’d been on duty that night, had found the wallet, had a good laugh seeing my photo in it, harvested several hundred dollars from it and tossed the rest in a garbage can somewhere.  Three or four years ago.  Randomly, the image comes up and punches me hard in the face, the stupidity of carrying my wallet in those baggy pants for a late night aerobic session, of not checking for the wallet when I came in, etc.  

“Depressive thinking, son,” the compassionate skeleton of my difficult father said softly.  I need to get screened for depression, though I haven’t much hope that anyone can help with it, certainly not a drug, beyond the placebo I already take.  I’ve made an e-inquiry with my health insurance provider and a robot wrote back telling me how to find a doctor with a specialty in mental health care on their website, no referral or paperwork required.

It’s a depressing thought, finding a doctor to screen me for depression, even though the Affordable Health Care Act apparently covers me for it.  The doctor is most likely to prescribe a drug shown to be better, on a certain blind test, than the placebo that was 84% as effective as the patent drug overall.  You can read a wonderful scholarly article that lays out the whole psycho-pharmaceutical industrial complex here. 

“Do you sleep more than usual?” the doctor will ask.  

“No,” I will say, and I have the data to back it up on my fitbit profile on the computer.  The average of  seven hours is steady going back two years.

“Are you exercising less?”  

“No,” the five to six miles I walk a day is pretty steady across the time I’ve worn the tiny pedometer.

“Have you had a change in your eating habits and weight?” the doctor will ask.

“No,” I will say.    

“Do you ever think of suicide?” the doctor will ask.  

“Not as an option for me, no,” I will say.  

“Why is that?” the doctor will ask.  “If my life was like the one you describe yours as I would honestly have to at least consider it as an option.  Why do you think you close your mind to even considering that?”

The doctor I go to might not necessarily be quite that moronic going through the checklist of diagnostic symptoms, but these would be among the questions asked to screen me for depression.   The thought of reading the list of two hundred names of unknown doctors to pick the one I might consult with, hoping for a doctor of great insight, is like buying a lottery ticket.  

“Better not to help yourself at all?” asks the skeleton who raised not a bony finger to help himself, before he fell into that predictable long-term state.  

All of the time honored, proven ways of beating back depression, vigorous exercise, cleaning your place, making and keeping to daily to do lists, require an energy and optimistic sense the depressed person is often hard pressed to muster.

Sunday afternoon, chilly, the short days of winter creeping up.   Outside Sekhnet’s plants shiver under the flapping plastic covers she’s tucked around them.  The clocks have been turned back.  The only sound is the ratlike tapping on these metallic keys, clack, clack, clack-clack.  The clicking is a comforting sound a person could almost dance to.  There is a certain music in it, I have to say.  I say it.   Having said it, what now?

 

Letter from Hell

Once in a while, at least in a life where you know a few people for a long time and have developed the trust to share confidences, a letter from hell arrives.   It usually begins with a prelude apologizing for the burden, explaining that it can’t be borne alone, that the writer didn’t know what else to do.   At wits’ end, the writer of the letter from hell writes because everything else is a far worse thought.  

Setting the story down at least gives a momentary impression that the unspeakable can be made intelligible, put at arm’s length, even if the arm is only as long as a Barbie doll’s arm.  The unbearable story then pours out, the details unimaginably hellish.  A novelist would be a brutal bastard indeed to invent these details.

“The Devil is in them details,” he winks, eyes glinting merrily, taking another slug of his honey colored drink.   The Devil is in the details and in, truly, not really giving that much of a damn.  Many people, we realize, have only a limited ability to fully consider another person’s pain, keep comparing it to their own and finding it so much less compelling.  

It’s kind of a tic in our celebrity culture, not being able to listen empathetically.  We are not a listening culture, we’re a bit of a narcissistic one [he opined, on his self-published weblog– ed.].   I suspect the harshness of that failure to be listened to comes into play each time a celebrity gets divorced, or commits suicide, or acts out badly enough to get sent to jail.  It goes as well for everyone who is not a celebrity, or very wealthy, or some kind of star.  We are not taught to listen very well, if you know what I’m saying.  We’d rather be entertained, even if our entertainers are often fairly tortured souls.

If you care for the writer of the letter from hell, you carefully read the terrible stories, interlocking like so many pythons, and, even if you care a lot, you may find yourself at a loss for what to say.   “I feel your pain,” once a perfectly decent thing to say at such times, has been ruined by everyone imitating Bill Clinton saying it, the phrase has become a joke, a politician’s parrot line that means the opposite, get it?   Your voice will become croaky, cartoony, Elmer Fuddish, Bubba-toned  as you say the words.  This will happen if you are me, anyway.    

In recent years I’ve learned to say “I’m sorry for your loss,” but that is for the children and mates of recently dead people, usually at funerals.  “Yikes,” is often the best I can do after I read such a letter, and assuring the person that I am around to listen.

The best we can give many times is some sign we have read the letter from hell, taken in all the details, were witnesses and sympathetic.  It is also about the least we can do.  It’s kind of good, if you think about it, that the least we can do is sometimes also the best.   

It is true that we often play a major role in bringing on some of our most hellish trials, though it does nothing to diminish the hellishness.  In fact, it probably enhances the torment.   We don’t check the reflex to get the last word when we know the other person will be infuriated by yet one more bon mot.  We are more witty, perhaps, a maddening bit quicker on the draw.  Or, since we can take a punch, we pretend the shot in the face was nothing.  “That was nice,” we say sarcastically, nose unbroken, “what shall we do now?  Movie?”  

“I’m in the details, asswipe,” says the Devil, finishing one honey colored drink and pouring himself another.  “You’ll have to do better, nobody knows what the hell you’re talking about.”  

“You’ve heard of the Repetition Compulsion, Debbil?” I ask.   The Devil, who is a master at not listening, just smirks a bit as he swallows his drink.  “It’s the neurotic need to play out some early life trauma over and over with people you meet over the course of your life.  These people stand in for the original abuser you never worked things out with.”  

“You’re a putz,” says the Devil, absently swirling rocks in his glass.   

“Yes.  So, anyway, I knew a guy whose repetition compulsion was a regular three act play.  In fact, it was so consistent, and I noted it so many times, that I could predict exactly where we were in the play at any given time.  The guy sent me a letter at one point saying he refused to be my lab rat anymore.  I wrote back thanking him for the excellent laugh– a letter of resignation from a lab rat!  Priceless.   Anyway, I watched the mangey white fucker in his cage year after year reliving the same story over and over like Bill Murray in Groundhog’s Day, but without the redeeming Hollywood plot line.”

“Here’s the particular drama he kept running over and over.  He’d meet somebody who was the coolest person he’d ever met, brilliant, hilarious and nonchalant.  He’d describe in highly idealized terms this cool, funny, talented, generous, non-egotistical genius who was his newest friend.  Act one would feature his spirited singing about this great person.”  

“Who gives a lab rat’s ass?” says the Devil, reaching for another dusty bottle.  

“Anyway, act two would be the beginning of the realization that the person maybe had a few faults.  This was always a troubling discovery, and led to complications.  Not all dramatic complications are good, and these act two complications were always ominous.  The unhappy ending they foreshadowed was inevitable each time.  After I’d heard these stories year after year I would know exactly when the curtain for Act three was about to go up and how the dramatic betrayal would unfold.”  

“‘The curtain for fucking act three’, do you even fucking listen to yourself?” asks the Devil without a hint of kindness.  

“Yeah, so I’d ask him, I’d say, wait, did he rip you off, curse you out, trash your place or physically assault you?  And this would make him furious each time.  ‘Can’t I finish telling you the goddamned story?  I just want to tell the goddamned story, Mr. Smart Guy, can you let me tell the goddamned story?’  I would relent, put my pipe back in my mouth, I’d cross my legs, prop my notebook on my lap, blow a puff of smoke, nod for him to continue.  He’d be furious as he sputtered about this interruption of his aggravating story.”   

“I can dig it,” says the Devil.   

“I’d let him continue and he’d say ‘he physically assaulted me’ and I would try not to smile or show any satisfaction at all.  ‘Fucking bastard…’ I would usually say, though it was hard to sound convincing after about the fiftieth identical tale.  The guy had no insight into his role in making people ‘betray’ him.”  

“Fascinating, truly,” says the Devil, scratching his hindquarters and rolling his terrible red-rimmed eyes.  

“Well, these stories may seem funny to you, Old Scratch, but I assure you, to the person going through them they are hellish indeed,” I say.  

“Hey, that guy with the Repetition Compulsion was your lab rat,” the Devil says. 

“Fucking bastard….” I think as I walk off into the stinking night.

 

Short Bark

Explaining the perplexing standstill my life and work have seemingly come to, I described in great detail the workings and potential of the student-run animation workshop.  My friend grasped it in unfolding steps as I laid it out to him and said “wow, the kids must love it.”  

“They do,” I said.  

“Well, then you need to take your strength and inspiration from them now, until you figure out the next move,” he said.  

“True, but I haven’t had a workshop with kids since May,” I said.  

“Oh…” he said, the syllable expressing perfectly the enormity of what I’m up against at the moment.

Cause for Concern?

At dinner last night with old friends I told a story about a manipulative parrot at another friend’s house.  It was an amusing story, and I told it without frills or fanfare, in about a minute.

“They were there,” Sekhnet said when I’d concluded the short anecdote. My friends nodded.  

I wondered to myself how I could not have remembered that.  It was a little embarrassing.  That my friend, a moment before my story, had retold a parrot story he’d told us before didn’t occur to me until just now.  

I wonder now if I can avoid mentioning the worrisome incident to Sekhnet, who is prone to worry.   It could only serve as another reminder that I might be finally sliding off the deep end.  It certainly feels like the case today.

After FUNeral musings

The rabbi conducting yesterday’s funeral had actually met the recently deceased several times over the years, my friend’s father who passed away Sunday at 89 from a late diagnosed cancer.  The deceased had been a strong, vigorous man with a handshake like a vise, I was amazed to learn he’d been close to ninety.  His nephew ended his funeral remarks by calling him a mighty oak and there is nothing lacking in that description of him.

It occurred to me, listening to the moving stories of his youngest daughter and two of his grandsons, that stories told at funerals by people who love you present your best qualities while the rest, to reverse paraphrase the Bard, is oft interred with your bones, as Aaron’s were in the Jewish policeman’s funeral plot in some Queens cemetery.

I am muddling this, because in a hurry to pack up and get back to my cracked and depressing hovel which I have once again vowed to tidy and have patched up.  There is too much to tidy and too much work to patch and paint and re-tile all the things that need to be fixed once the clutter is removed.  A powerful metaphor for my life of action-stalling deliberation that went through my mind after the grandsons spoke lovingly of how their energetic grandfather never wasted a moment of his life.  After retiring from a long and vigorous work life as a police lieutenant and later insurance inspector, he was either strengthening his already strong body or keeping his mind sharp with a new book.  Or walking with or playing with his grandchildren.

The rabbi spoke of the dead man’s uprightness and nobility.  It would not occur to this man of integrity that there could ever be a good reason to depart from what is true, and right, and decent.   His name, Aaron, said the rabbi, was the name of the Jew who had created the priestly class and a fitting name, for the deceased was a true aristocrat.  I thought then of the analogous speech at my own funeral, the final rites of a man who has spent too much time brooding and too little time  pitting himself directly against life.

“He embraced his arbitrarily given name, The Prophet Elijah, with humility and an absurd sense of purpose.  He accepted without apparent complaint the difficult, essential, unpaid task of returning the hearts of children to their parents and the hearts of parents to their children.   Only this reconciliation could prepare humanity for the coming of the Messiah.  Undeterred by the impossibility of the assignment, knowing that the Messiah is not of this world, as subject to wishful imagining as any concept ever dreamed up by people facing the worst and an idea more objectively dubious than all other such human imaginings, even if more laudable than most, he persisted.   Our Elijah was not dissuaded by any of these things, even though he received no reassurance from God, as his biblical namesake had, and thus had no expectation of being taken alive up to heaven as a very, very old man because God loved him so much.”   A pause to look around at the assembled in their suits and nice dresses, letting the immensity of this sink in.  

It is a depressive move to think of your own funeral at, or immediately after, a funeral for somebody else, I think.  I wonder idly now how many others were measuring their own lives against the life of this mighty oak in his flag draped coffin to the rabbi’s right.

Many who give these funeral orations have never met the deceased.  This man did, and gave a few personal reminiscences that were meaningful and moving.  I thought the bit about the name was a little forced, perhaps, especially when he added that the last name, written in Hebrew, formed the root of the word sustainer, nourisher, giver of life, and that he was, indeed, an aristocratic nurturer who sustained us all by his example.   It set my thoughts back to my father’s story about the funeral of our neighbor, Sonny Friedman.

“The rabbi said that he was called ‘Sunny’ because of his cheerful disposition, that he lit up the room when he walked in,” my father told me in his sardonic manner after Sonny’s funeral.   I wish I was artist enough to convey my father’s wry, disgusted expression as he recounted that clinked attempt at a warm, personal touch.  Sonny was a nice neighbor, but withdrawn, a bit dour, perhaps, and I don’t remember that his understated, slightly forced smile lit up any rooms.

Our view of a person, from life to death, is clearly dictated by our perspective, and you know how dictators are.  My sense of this man I’d met a few times was much different from the portraits those who knew him well, and loved him best, painted.  These paintings were striking, majestic, highlighting what was best in him, colored with bold, poetic strokes.  

My sister had seen our father paint such masterpieces at funerals, I had too.  He could make the person live again for a moment among the gathered as he led them through laughs and tears.  “The D.U. could do that for someone he hated,” my sister contends to this day.  “It was just a gift,” she says.

In the audience, in a suit that bound me here and there, to remind me it was not my regular, comfortable clothes, I compared my own life, with its generous swathes of wasted time, to the deceased’s energetic striving, even in the weeks before his painful death, his unflagging strength and discipline, the full exploitation of his engine’s potential, run full-throttle, every day.  

In my seat on the wooden bench, squirming in my suit, I felt the opposite of that.  A trailblazer with tired eyes and quivering rubber legs, resting up apprehensively for the big day as winter prepared to bluster in.

 

 

Protagonism

Twenty-five or thirty years ago a friend of mine coined this term, as far as I know, to indicate the tendency, in our celebrity culture, to present oneself as a protagonist.  In the years since, everyone vaguely inclined to it has become a star.  Some of these stars shine over a city of two or three, some over an entirely empty yard, but while they write or perform they indulge in the dream that someone, somewhere, gives a rat’s ass about what they think or feel.

“Protagonism!” my old friend snorted, to indicate that the long-ago soundtrack I’d improvised and recorded on magnetic tape was mere showing off, did nothing to enhance the audience’s appreciation of the movie, instead merely pointed a constant finger at its author.  

“Nobody cares, nobody cares,” the world-weary dispatcher at Prometheus Courier Service used to say many times a day, especially when people tried to share their concerns with him.  He drank himself to death alone in a rented walk-up in Chelsea, and indeed, nobody cared.  Not to say he wasn’t a very nice guy and a lot of fun to shoot the shit with.  

People photograph their lunch and post it online.  OK.  Same with opinions, which, like cloacae [1], every one of us former reptiles and our bird cousins possess.  Unlike these primitives, we can post them as fast as we think them up.

I wonder about this desire to make oneself known to others, in the form of writings, photos, videos and music posted on the weird electronic spider web most of the world is connected to.    Zora Neale Hurston, a woman who knew a good deal about it, called this desire to make oneself known to others the oldest human longing.  

But thinking about it now, I wonder:  who can possibly care that a stranger’s father, when he was a baby, was whipped in the face, setting in motion a long chain of regrettable events that weighed on his children and his children’s children?  Or about his speculation on the terrible life of the insane mother that caused her to whip her infant in the face, before she left forever the town that would be wiped off the map twenty years later, the blood of everyone she knew in childhood plowed into the mud.  

I suppose one might as well wonder why people read poems, or enjoy psycho-biographies, or watch violent movies where terrible events are portrayed vividly, or smile at idiotically idealized comedies, or love head-banging music.  The things created by human souls as they hurtle between infancy and death.  Could be I’m just thinking too much, having nothing better to do.  You wanna see what I had for lunch?   I’m almost done digesting it.

 

[1]   In birds, the cloaca is the terminal chamber of the gastrointestinal and urogenital systems, opening at the vent. Excretory systems with analogous purpose in certain invertebrates are also sometimes referred to as “cloacae”.

Birds also reproduce with this organ; this is known as a cloacal kiss.  

 

 

Lovey Cries for all of Us

Another one of the things I used to write.  Lovey, a ten pound poodle, had a short, tragic life, fighting with my mother, often bullying my mother.  My nephew, a boy of few words, said as we were leaving the apartment “that dog’s a tyrant.”  

It was not, strictly speaking, the dog’s fault.  My mother in the last years of her slow death from cancer was in no condition to give a puppy the care and patient guidance it needed and they both suffered for it.  Lovey died at five, a month before my mother, and it was a tragic blow, like losing an affectionate, troubled teenager.

 

Lovey cries for all of us

Thursday, March 26, 2009, 4:31:57 AM

My father told me the last night of his life that he’d never seen love or affection exchanged in his home. He said “I have no idea how it’s even done.” I did not have my hand on his as he spoke to me that night, with all the tenderness he could muster. He was not the cuddly or even affectionate kind.

When he was feeling maudlin, after a particularly stupid and bloody battle with his children over the dinner of steak he provided every evening, he would look at me with hurt in his eyes and say “you should read ‘I Never Sang for My Father”. He’d tell me to read this play with all the bitterness he could manage and I’d snort.

I had the play on the bottom shelf in my room in my parents’ house, it rested halfway on the floor, covered in dust. I never so much as cracked the cover of the old paperback.  I have no idea what the play is about, except for the sense my father, someone who never sang for his father, gave me of it.

I saw my father cry twice in life.  Once was during a seder, when he was talking about God pouring out His wrath against every tyrant who persecuted His People, from the Egyptians to the Assyrians to the Inquisition to Chmelnitski to the Nazis.  His tears were bitter as the Dead Sea, pouring out of his surprisingly light hazel colored eyes, and I’m sure my sister recalls that moment as clearly as I do.

The other time was during a visit in Israel.  I’d gone there for a year after High School and my parents came to visit the new kibbutz where I was living and working.  It was a historic occasion, the kibbutz was about to celebrate its first Passover, and so my parents and my sister came to visit.

My father swept the dining hall and helped lay the table cloths and set the hundreds of places for the seder, my mother worked in the kitchen, my sister probably did too.  I was out in the field picking the crops.  I spent most of the long seder in a friend’s room, listening to Jimi’s beautiful Axis: Bold As Love for the first time, then the second, then the third.

I got a day off for my parents’ visit.  We drove in a rented car to a stretch of the beautiful Aravah desert, an oasis.  It may have been Ein Gedi, I can’t think of where else it could have been.  It could have been the walk down to the Dead Sea, now that I think of it, judging from a picture I have from that day.  It is a picture of us standing on the rocky shore of some dark water at low tide.  My father, with big, black sideburns, my sister, thin with a big new bust in a yellow tank top, and me, skinny as a whippet, with a scraggly beard and veins roping down my arms.

My mother and my sister were walking ahead on the dusty trail.  My father motioned for me to hang back by the car a minute, then we began walking slowly.  The color of the land was like wheat, but there was no wheat.  It was dry, parched, biblical terrain that did not look kindly on strangers.

My father was trying to talk to me but I was seventeen, lean, tanned, and impossible to engage.  I’d hardened my heart to him, as he’d required me to do, and appealing to me was like appealing to a thug, a stone-faced adversary who gives no quarter.  I had the demeanor of someone who’d rather smash your face than listen to your side of the story.

Taking this in, what he knew in that moment was largely his own handiwork, he suddenly began to cry.  It lasted only a moment, long enough for him to beg me not to become like him, to let my mother hug and kiss me, to be humane to my mother.

“I’d have to hold his head, but your father would let me kiss him,” my mother told me after my father died.

I was on the plane tonight, the cranky old woman next to me had gotten on standby.  She was in the middle seat, spilling over to my seat, she’d firmly taken the entire armrest and part of the area where my shoulder and arm should rightfully have been.  I didn’t muscle her.  I’d already let another old woman ahead of me on the walkway to the plane.

“It doesn’t matter,” she told me with a lovely smile and an accent from the old country that told me she’d seen much more terrible lines than this one.  She truly didn’t care if I went first or she did, but she took my small gift, to make me feel better.  She was very gracious about it.

I’m sitting on the plane and it occurs to me that my mother finally said the words “I’m dying.”  Words easy enough to say when you are depressed, or angry, or manipulating somebody.  But to say it when you are dying takes a lot of work, and when she said it the other day, angrily and to manipulate me, she meant it and understood it.  Said the awful thing aloud for the first time.

A few hours later I was sitting at the computer keyboard and she rested her face on the back of my forearm as I typed.  Gently, it didn’t disturb my typing. And with infinite tenderness.

Sitting next to the fat old lady who crowded me on the plane it came to me.  Her relentless touch and the heat of her meaty arm reminded me.  I hadn’t hugged my mother much, perhaps two or three times while I was there.  I’d probably hugged my nephew as much, or my niece, and these were hugs like hipsters give each other in greeting.  Stylized, barely touching, they take a few seconds to execute and are done for the look and the gesture rather than for the feel.

I leaned into the car and kissed her goodbye on her cheek as she kissed me on mine, the way I kiss Ida whenever I see her.  Her dog cried like a human being, beside herself to see me leaving.  My mother for her part did not cry, neither did I.

The dog sat up on her lap, staring at me, stretching toward me, inconsolable, crying, imploring me not to leave.  The dog wept without shame or restraint, like a creature acutely conscious of love, affection and companionship and crying because it was losing someone it loved.