Category Archives: muttering to myself

Why so Pissed, El? (final)

There are many reasons to be angry, no doubt.  Many reasons to be grateful for the miracle of life, also, though those reasons seem not to be as compelling, as demanding of action, as the reasons to be mad.  I’m thinking about the myths we are fed here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.  Not that every nationstate does not have its myths, every culture its signature values, but… fuck.

I think about the record disparity in income we have here now in the land of the American Dream.  Men with $35,000 toilet bowls and others, homeless, arrested for shitting in an alley.   What kind of disgusting person do you have to be to shit in an alley?   Can you blame a cop for roughing up a despicable fucker like that?  

America is ruled by advertising, has long been, but now the ads come directly to our pockets, targeted by algorithms that single us out by expressed preferences.  We elect our public representives  based strictly on advertising, branding and marketing.   Everything we see or hear is “brought to you” by some corporation with the money to bring it.   Sponsors pull out, the show is over.  Ten million people used to watch that shit every week, then something that couldn’t be spun quickly enough is said by the host and, bye bye.   Corporations taking principled stands.  We will not support a celebrity who makes a stink when everybody else on TV supports the next war.  Fuck that, we are Americans!

As individuals, we are powerless in the face of what is done in our names.   The champions we are sometimes allowed to vote for, and I think of recent liberal icons who have been devoted, flexible servants of the status quo, Bill Clinton (the “best Republican president of the 20th century”, our “first black president”) and Barack Obama (“the first black president”), are also men who will make every necessary compromise without flinching.  Every president has to pass the psychopath test before being put on the ballot of one of the major parties.  Some are better than others, but each of them, in crunch time, will do what needs to be done.  Usually that involves dropping some massive fucking bombs and selling billions in the latest killing technology to despots.  Few of us get excited about it anymore.   “It’s just the president being presidential,” spoken in the way disgusted but resigned Red Sox players and fans used to say “that’s just Manny being Manny”, referring to the mercurial superstar’s self-centered childishness.

So we cultivate honesty in our dealings with others.  Sometimes that is more fruitful than at other times.  Not everyone is comfortable with everything being on the table.  Honesty, really, what is that shit actually?  How fucking honest do we want to really be, anyway?

Many people I know have stopped watching the news.  You have a famously rabid bullying (though obsequious to superiors, allegedly) war hawk from the Cheney-Bush administration, elevated to sit at the president’s right hand, foaming at the mouth about Libya-style regime change in Iran.  Everyone recalls how well that went.   The Koch brother’s personal former congressman, elevated to Secretary of State recently by the world’s greatest deal-making winner, vows the most severe sanctions in history if Iran does not stop pursuing nuclear deterrence against the U.S., does not stop meddling in the Middle East.  He announces this with a straight face:  Iran must get the fuck out of fucking Yemen or we will fucking fuck you up.   Says this as we are giving massive military support to our close democratic friends in the House of Saud as they pour the explosions and famine on impoverished Yemen.   So, to avoid massive aggravation, you tune out, turn off the news.  Go on a nice vacation, come back, feel a bit better that life is still good.

Not a bad move, my friends.   Take a nice trip, recharge your batteries.  Look after your health.  If there is nothing we can do about the kind of country we live in, the kind of world we leave to the future, at least grant us the serenity to accept that and try to live as well as we can.   Our lives here are only the wink of an eye, after all, and each of us is suspended by a strand of a spider’s web during that wink.   It behooves us to look within, find peace, be grateful for every beautiful thing in our lives, do a little good wherever we can.  It does. 

There is something perverse in me that cannot look away.  I am driven to gather the available facts, try to understand, to put the jagged puzzle pieces together in this dark, stinking room.  I am fucked up.  I get that.  But it is my life, and my world, and it burns me sometimes that, no matter how clear and convincing the truth is, that mere truth doesn’t mean shit against a nicely spun pile of steaming horse shit.  Hell, in our new post-factual world, you don’t even need to spin that shit– just keep it constantly coming.  Heh, you completely dizzy yet, motherfuckers?

Why so Pissed, El? (2)

We live in a culture ruled not by a desire to meet everyone’s basic human needs, or even recognize them, but by an unreasoning competitive lust to acquire more than we can possibly use.   We all need food, shelter, clothing, exercise, love, sex, companionship.   We get tasty, cheaply produced toxic foodstuffs, overpriced shelter that is a burden, (if also a major investment), for many citizens, clothing made in countries where labor is cheapest and health and safety regulations least intrusive.  Instead of walking, most of us drive everywhere in fossil-powered cars whose pollution is destroying the planet.  

There is sadly little love in our society, for most people, in part because advertising creates impossible dreams as divorce rates soar.  Sex is often a commodity in our pay to play culture, pornography is readily available to every adolescent with a phone.   Companionship, in the sense of mutually respecting friends spending time together, having a few laughs, exchanging views, is more and more rare.    Look at me right now, I’m typing these words into a void instead of chatting with a friend.   More and more of our communication, as a society, is via what is grotesquely known as Social Media.   It isn’t hard to see why people become internet trolls in this kind of inhuman environment.   Why not take out your frustrations by shitting on your countrymen when nobody can look into your pathetic eyes?

Why so mad, El?  This sick shit is the only game in town, unless you make herculean exertions to get off the grid.   If you choose not to participate in what is euphemistically called the Rat Race, the competition for wealth, you find yourself a sucker betting against the house.   When I was young banks paid a substantial interest rate to hold your money.  If you had a sum you were saving, you could put it into a long-term, federally insured, bank account that paid 10% interest.  This way you could live on a budget and keep up with inflation without putting your savings on a crooked roulette wheel.  Today banks have merged with investment houses and insurance companies, the whole game is a casino.   Rather than FDIC insurance for your life savings in the bank, you have the federal government turning a willfully blind eye to the massive Ponzi Scheme that is our financial industry-driven economy.

In fairness to the ass-dicking architects of this system [1], I have heard there is nothing like taking a dump into a $35,000 toilet bowl.   It may be nice to own as many homes as you want, I suppose, although you have to wonder about why that might be.  In order to allow these masters of the universe to live such lavish lifestyles there are certain sacrifices the rest of us must make.   Not long ago they came up with a brilliant fraud to ensure that this sacrifice by the 95% would be perpetual.   I refer you to Matt Taibbi’s The Divide, pages 38 and 39, for a clear, concise description of the details [2].

You create a system where large sums of money are continually flowing in.  This is necessary for any Ponzi Scheme.  You need a steady flow of money coming in, to pay off people, to pique their greed, to make them invest more, to keep the shell game profitable.   Some unprincipled geniuses realized there was a huge reservoir of money in the housing market and came up with a scheme to defraud unsuspecting losers of billions, perhaps trillions, of dollars.   For all of its intricateness, it is deceptively simple.  You package and sell misleadingly labeled debt.

You allow millions of people to take mortgages they can not possibly afford to keep paying.  Give them “liar’s loans”, it’s not a problem, the point is to create mountains of debt you can package and sell, the more the better.  Make the initial mortgage payments small, it doesn’t matter, you can always add a clause for balloon payments that nobody will read, or understand.   As long as housing prices are going up, these poor suckers can always sell or borrow more money against the rising price of their homes, to keep their nostrils above water.   Meantime, you package these debts into huge bundles you can sell as rock solid investments, sliced into tranches of collateralized debt obligations, or whatever you want to call them.  

To make these bad debts attractive to investors, you get the ratings agencies to assure buyers that the derivatives they are investing in are AAA-rated, nothing safer than a triple A-rated investment product.   You make the transfers and investment opportunities for these toxic assets insanely complicated for anyone outside of the financial sector to begin to understand.   It doesn’t matter as long as you keep paying high interest rates on these toxic investments in the short term.  You make this golden investment opportunities irresistible.  Then you sit back, skim off the vast profits, and wait for more foreclosures to bundle and sell.  

Since we live in a culture where winners are rewarded with obscene wealth, and losers can go fuck off and die, all this makes perfect sense.   Obama’s justice department, along with not holding John Yoo, Mitchell and Jessen, Cheney and the other creators of our torture program accountable (come on! you will say, that would have been politically impossible– and besides, Cheney would have killed everyone), prosecuted nobody for this massive systemic financial fraud against millions of Americans, a fraud that resulted in the loss of gazillions of dollars for pension funds, senior citizens’ life savings, etc.  Suckers walk, yo.

Why so fucking angry, El?  This has always been the way of the world.  You think the serfs had it any better under feudalism?   Why blame perfect presidential candidate Barack Obama for not seriously addressing the most horrific failures of the system? He was no bomb thrower, he was a pragmatist.  He joked about making some “serious Tubmans” when he was out of office.  I have confidence in his abilities, I’m certain he will be the first ex-president to monetize his talents and status to become a billionaire.  Why not dream huge in the land of the American Dream?  

While we have Obama on the waterboard, I understand that the deep hatred he inspired in much of the country, merely by being “biracial”, may have led him to be more cautious than he would have been in a more just, less racist, society.   He faced a racist lynch mob every day of his presidency.  The most vocal leaders of that lynch mob are literally running the Executive branch today.  OK, leave my man out of it, then.

Why am I so fucking mad?  Because of how little choice there is in how to live by merciful human values in a corrupt, morally bankrupt, insatiably appetitive society like ours.  It is nothing to turn children into charred chopped meat somewhere thousands of miles from here, if you spin it as done in the cause of freedom and democracy.  Collateral Damage.  Sanctions against Iraq over the years cost many thousands of Iraqi children their lives, long before “Shock and Awe”, a perpetual war of aggression for no moral or legal reason.  Nothing to see here.   Drones replace “boots on the ground”, American lives are saved.  It’s all good!  We torture… some folks… call us pisher, as my grandfather used to say.   The bottom line is the economy, stupid.  The Stock Market hums along, practices largely the same as they were right before the big transfer of wealth in 2008 that was disastrous to many millions of people worldwide.  

“Nothing to fucking see here, commie bastard.  You want humble people to be left alone?   Where does that ever fucking happen?  I thought you wanted everyone’s basic so-called human needs taken care of?   How does that happen if you want to be left alone?  Asshole.  Grow some balls, go compete, monetize something, instead of whining to nobody about the infernal unfairness of life among the wise apes.  Nobody cares, do you understand me, you stupid loser fuck?  More than that, nobody is even fucking listening.”

I sit here, sucking my teeth, petulant.  I’m mad, yo.  Get me to a laughing academy, eh?  

And, smartly on cue, the spotty but expensive internet service provided by a duopoly headed by the highest paid CEO in the world, winks out.   God bless.

 

 

[1] Apologies to any loving, consensual practitioners of anal intercourse out there.  I don’t mean to disparage anyone’s sexual preference, I just get tired of using “motherfucker” to describe these ruthless motherfuckers.  “Cocksucker” is subject to the same offensive limitations as ass-dicker.  What a fucked up world… I suppose men who behave like the genteel “Planters” of old who raped their slaves for fun and profit are best described as what they are, motherfuckers.  Keep it simple.

[2] On the second of those pages, Taibbi writes:

It was a modern take on the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale.  Big banks took great masses of straw (i.e., the risky home loans of the poor, undocumented and unemployed) and spun it, factory style, into gold (i.e., AAA-rated securities).   They used a technique called securitization that allowed banks and mortgage lenders to take vast pools of home loans belonging to underemployed janitors and immigrants and magically convert them into investments that were ostensibly as safe as Microsoft corporate bonds or the sovereign debt of Luxembourg, but more lucrative than either.

Then we have this “fun fact” about the robust federal investigation into the causes of this great fraud, from page 407.  Try to read it without clenching your jaws after the punchline:

Fun fact:  When the economy crashed in 2008, the federal government formed an investigatory group to look into the causes.  The Financial Crisis Inquiry Committee was given a budget of $9.8.  Committee chairman Phil Angelides acidly noted that this was “roughly one-seventh of the budget of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.”

Meanwhile, that same year the federal drug enforcement budget leaped from $13.275 billion to $15.278 billion.  That meant that just the increase in the national drug enforcement budget for the year of the biggest financial crisis since the Depression was roughly two hundred times the size of the budget for the sole executive branch effort at formally investigating the causes of financial corruption.

How It Is Done Here

I spent three hours at the opthamologist’s yesterday and left without what I went there to get.   I was screened for glaucoma and every other eye disease, after a very detailed vision test with the nurse.   Unfortunately, the doctor said, he could not give me a prescription for new glasses because nobody would pay him for it.   “I used to get $20, I’d charge $40 sometimes,” the solo practitioner with the crowded waiting room told me, with only a slight complaint in his tone.   In a few months, when I get the EOB from my insurance company, I’ll learn how much he made to spend ten minutes with me yesterday, above the $25 copay I had to make in cash. I’ll bet they pay him less than $100 for all those minutes.

The doctor claimed, at 4:00, seeing me for my 1:30 appointment, that the optometrists’ lobby (who knew, but why wouldn’t they have one?) had made it virtually impossible for an opthamologist to write a prescription for glasses.  Then, twenty minutes later when the drops had fully dilated my pupils, he chided me for my reflex to close my eye when something with a bright light approached to touch my eyeball to measure it’s pressure.  

“It’s not a reflex,” he corrected me, possibly incorrectly, “you just have to control it.”   On the second or third try he was able to touch the sensor down on my right eyeball, move it around.  The left eye wasn’t as cooperative.   Three tries and I was still blinking when he tried to touch the probe to my eyeball.  He snarled at my lack of cooperation.

“I’m not trying to be a difficult patient, doctor,” I told this affable, slightly gruff eye doctor.

“But you are being a difficult patient,” he said, suddenly graduating from gruff to asshole.

Funny, I had no reflex to say “I might have been a less difficult patient after waiting, say, only 90 minutes, or a scant two hours, for this exam you already told me will not result in what I came here to get, namely an updated prescription for these fifteen year old glasses.”

Nor did it occur to me, angry, scrappy, no tolerance for assholes person I have long been, to say “nor is it a reflex to be a dick, particularly after keeping a patient waiting for almost three hours.  You can control it.   I don’t give a fuck about how much you used to be able to charge for a prescription.   Or how important you think you are, or how sincerely you believe your droppings emit no foul odor, nor any of the rest of it.   I’d be tempted to tell you to fuck yourself a little, but I’m trying to be like fucking Gandhi these days, so kiss yourself instead, my brother.”

The doctor also informed me I have something called blepharitis.   I asked him how one gets blepharitis.   “Bad eyelid hygiene,” he said conclusively, making another note in my new file next to the large printed circle that was one of my eyeballs.   He didn’t seem concerned about it, told me to buy eye wipes and gently scour the area between the hairs on my lower eyelid and the eyeball itself.   I asked how often I needed to do this.  Every day, he said, for the rest of your life.

This guy was just a hardworking American doctor running a successful neighborhood practice.  People are used to waiting as long as they need to in order to see a doctor.   This guy had a waiting room full of people the whole time I was there (though the number grew over the course of the hours I was there).   They were all fairly passive, patient, used to waiting as long as it takes to see the great man.  Every one of them using their cellphones, though the office was plastered with NO CELL PHONE use signs.  The doctor, in fact, snapped at me to turn off my cell phone as he escorted me back to his office.   Nobody but me, I suspect, had any second thoughts about why it took more than three hours to see the great wizard. 

My conversation with the nurse who did the actual vision test was a bit more interesting.  She looked at my paperwork and insisted I fill in my social security number, as requested on the form.    I resent this insistence on something that was once very private and is now required by every bloodsucking corporation one deals with.   I described to her how I’d worked for a bloated, amoral leech, a collections attorney, who had taught me the great value, to creditors and their attorney partners, of a social security number.    You can freeze all their bank accounts, for example, take whatever money they owe you by serving a restraining notice on the bank, sitting back and waiting for the panicked debtor’s call.

“People owe the hospitals millions of dollars they never pay,” she said indignantly.  “Millions!”

I, myself, have an unopened stack of bills from hospitals, and collection notices from an attorney for the most aggressive of them.   I said nothing about this, what was the point?   I told her how many corporations now obtain legally enforceable default judgements, obtained fraudulently by not informing the defendants that there is a case against them.   Since they have no notice of any court case, naturally the alleged debtor doesn’t show up, and bingo, Bird Wins!  Default Judgment.  Their unethical attorneys get bundles if judgements on default, worth many, many millions annually, by simply not serving the required legal notice on millions of suckers.  It’s called “sewer service”, create the legally necessary “proof of service” and put the required notice that your proof swears was legally delivered, directly into the shredder, or sewer, whichever is handier.  No harm, no foul, courts are too busy to inquire into cases where only the powerful side shows up.

I told her that American medical care, the most expensive in the wealthy world, also has far from the best health outcomes.   We argued this point for a moment, with her going on about how poor people in America have the best insurance in the world, then I made my next point, about medical insurance.  

A big part of the cost of expensive American health care is the army of private middlemen who take their cuts.  Why are insurance companies involved in health care, again?   It was an interesting talk, after I conceded her the last four digits of my social security number.  She gave me an excellent and thorough vision test, the results of which I, arguably, do not own.    We call this free enterprise, the free market, the right of entrepreneurs, large and small, to be rewarded as handsomely as possible for the risks they take to make a profit.

Dr. McGruff did give me a recommendation to a local glasses store where there is a young optometrist who seems pretty sharp.  I require a prism lens in my glasses, to make my eyes cooperate more smoothly with one another as they get tired from the endless tracking that is reading.  Prisms are tricky, the opthamologist told me, and I should go to a recent optometry school grad to prescribe the exact prism I need, slightly different from the ones I’ve been wearing for more than forty years.

The insurance company offered me “vision” with my health insurance plan.  It was about $10 or $20 extra a month, but did not include glasses.  It would, presumably, pay the $30 to $50 I will pay this young optometrist for the eye exam.  I figure for the $120- $240 it would cost me for the year, I will make out OK on this particular deal, just like I did with the $88,000 I was charged for Rituximab.  

God bless these United States, eh?  Will you do that, God?   Can I get a fucking “amen” here?

Slowing Down

Like the drag of age on the muscles, gravity, the wind, an ever more giant hand in the chest, I notice a diminution of my energies lately.   This could be nothing more than a little good natured depression, checking in to keep me honest.   It is the other side of creativity, after all, despondence when the creative impulse wanes.

It is possible, when ideas are flowing and possibilities seem endless, to see the world as a kind of infinite feast.   During such times you are not troubled by the concurrent reality that this world is a truly infinite feast only for connoisseurs of carrion.   Your vultures, rather clever birds, and hyenas, often regarded as cowardly, are the most well-known beneficiaries of this unlimited smorgasbord.  Although these intelligent birds and plucky scavenging wild dogs will soon enough go the way of the Dodo Bird.

It becomes an uphill push to sustain enthusiasm for any long-term project in the complete absence of positive feedback.  It is like anything difficult– if you have one stout supporter, one person deeply interested in what you are doing– that is often enough to get you through a sluggish period.   In the absence of at least one person who truly gets what you are trying to do– the wall you hit periodically will look like the end.  

This is just one more reason that most people prefer the rewards of working hard every day at a job that pays them decent money, and hopefully also provides a sense of satisfaction,  to the day-dreamy reward of playing a perfect guitar part, or drawing something beautiful — for no pay.  “Then ’tis like the breath of an unfee’d lawyer, you gave me nothing for it,” says the Fool to King Lear.

Looking for inspiration, one resorts to superstition.  I was born in The Year of the Monkey.  I once read a blurb about everyone born on this every twelfth year Monkey year.   We are clever, can be very sociable, even charming, we have a million ideas, but we rarely are able to follow through to see any of them to fruition.  My father was a Rat.   Rats have all kinds of complementary traits to the Monkey, but not framing everything as a war is apparently not one of them.   I don’t really remember much else from that paper placemat of the Chinese zodiac I read in the Gran Via on Dyckman Street many years ago.   The Gran Via itself, run by Chinese Spanish speakers from Cuba, is long gone.

I had a long email debate with an old friend, a very clever fellow (also a Monkey, it occurs to me now) over the issue of American torture.   He argues by habit and he’s very, very good at it.  It is sport for him, as well as his vocation.  I grew frustrated by his continual deflection of my points about the so-called Enhanced Interrogation program, by his refusal to accept any point I made, instead making endless deft lawyerly pivots.  In the end, exhausted by this futile exercise with a devilishly clever Devil’s advocate, I wondered aloud if, in order to clinch his debate victory, he was going to start actually torturing me.   “Oh, but I already am!” he wrote back, wry as you please.

I had a long chat with him recently about  a matter that has been torturing me for some time.   It came at a particularly inopportune time for him, I realized immediately after making it the subject of our dinnertime conversation.  I dropped him a line to apologize for belaboring the point at such a bad time for him.  He assured me that he was always pleased to be a sounding board and was glad I feel free to continue discussing such things with him.   I took the opportunity to send him another copy of a piece I wrote about it, something too private, ironically, to post here.

In the thinly fictionalized story I had set up my dilemma from another angle, having a narrator tell the story from her point of view, dismissing mine while revealing all the pertinent facts in the least malignant light to herself that she could provide.  The story is about a ten minute read and I’m unable to tell if it presents a fair sounding story or if the narrator is a hapless puppet with grotesquely visible strings clearly grinding my ax for me.

Everyone I know is somewhat familiar with the outlines of the story and the personalities involved.  In seeking a reader who could read the story objectively, someone who didn’t know any of the players or the events, I asked a good friend of a good friend if she’d be willing to have a look.   She agreed at once, told me she’d be delighted to read it.  I emailed it to her eighteen days ago.  

After about ten days, hearing nothing back, I wrote to tell her I wasn’t looking for literary input, just a general impression on two things: is the narrator credible and is she sympathetic?   I had an immediate apologetic reply about a particularly hectic week, assuring me that she was looking forward to reading it and that it would be her pleasure to give me her take on those two things. 

Since then, and after his assurance that my ruminations on this long standing situation didn’t faze him at all, I sent the piece to my old friend, recounting the story I have told just now about the reader who has been very busy but assured me again she is anxious to read the short piece.

I had his reply immediately:

I would be happy to read it, and offer my feedback!

To which, several days ago, I responded: Hah!

The world is a fucking hoot, to those not too bloody and bruised to wink at its puckishness.   A couple of days of ten hours of sleep ought to bring out a bit more of its wicked humor, I would hope.  Otherwise, I fear, this recent listless, sore kneed limping I’ve been doing may turn out to be the harbinger of something more ominous.

 

 

How they kill you, part 2

On March 10th the rent check I’d sent to my landlord was returned to me, without explanation.   I took it to the post office the following Monday to have it re-sent and the clerk who examined the envelope was a very dim bulb.   She studied it for a long time before realizing her supervisor was the only person with the wisdom to do anything for me.

The supervisor was a brusque man, blunt, using the word “sir” like a shit-covered baseball bat he casually waved around as we spoke.  A machine had made a mistake, sir, not a human.  Have you never made a mistake, sir?   I can’t guarantee anything, sir.   The machine will hopefully do better after I draw arrows on the envelope.    I can’t give you a receipt, sir, unless you pay me.   You want to make a complaint, sir?   Knock yourself out, call the number on PS Form 3849, here you are.  Complain away, sir.   That’s really all I can do for you.  Tell ’em Umar treated you badly, sir.

I did not react particularly well to this fucking lying asshole (the number on form 3849 does not allow a caller to make a complaint of any kind), and some might say I deserved what I got, the rent check to my landlord returned to me a second time, almost a week later.  In the meantime I’d made a complaint, a guaranteed confidential one, that I was promised would be followed up in two to four business days.   A few days later I learned the confidential complaint had been forwarded to Umar himself to investigate and resolve.  In the end I went to another post office, paid postage again and sent the check to my landlord.  It arrived, I was told, on March 23.

On March 26 I had a message from a woman who seemed to have a hard time pronouncing her own last name.  The voicemail was recorded at 3:10 pm.   She said: Hi, this is Kathy … at Inwood post office, in reference to your complaint, your service issue.  Please call me tomorrow, I’ll be leaving at three today.  Call me at 212-567-7821 in reference to it.   I want to go over it before I close the case out.  Thank you.

The phone rang, at great length, when I called back the next day, each time I called.  Nobody ever picked up.   Not a business you’d ever like to deal with again.

Then I had this email, under the subject “Your feedback is vital to serving you better” and immediately thought of the grinning Martian chirping ‘we come in peace’ as he vaporizes your genitals with a death ray. 

 

USPS.png

Another great public/private partnership, working harder to serve you better.  Would you like to take a survey for the service you are about to receive?  LOL!

It reminded me of many things, including the almost two hours I’d spent the other night trying to resolve an ATM error.  The machine sucked my $100 bill into the “checks only” slot, a second before I noticed that this machine, unlike any other at this bank, had a “cash” slot on the other side of the keyboard.  No receipt, no return of the bill.  Almost two hours on the phone with poorly paid, ill-trained, overworked women who apologized and thanked me over and over for being a preferred customer, as they placed me back on a brief hold while they waited for someone from claims to come on the line.  The four bar loop of hold music that they unfortunately had no control over played demonically, over and over and over.  

It was not until two days later, when I called and spoke to another rep, that I had the $100 ‘provisionally credited’ back to my account.  I’d told the kid that being apologized to and thanked as a ‘preferred customer’, while being treated like a grifter trying to shake this bank down for $100, after years of no such desperate acts, was kind of a crappy way to do customer service.  Imagine if I was not a “preferred customer”!   The kid got it, and as far as I can tell, fixed it.  

The first thought I had with this ‘preferred customer’ shit was echoed by this dark, dark, puckish (to my sick mind) entry in Wikipedia for one of the few German words I have committed to memory:

Screen shot 2018-03-26 at 9.31.20 PM.png

source

Fuckin’ A, yo.   Nazi perspectives, indeedy.  Getting a lot of those perspectives lately, from some very fine people, the finest people, the best people.  You got a problem with Nazi perspectives?   Call the complaint number on PS Form 3849 and please hold for a customer service survey that will only take ten minutes and will help us serve you better!

How we force you to lose hope

Government, increasingly the mechanism by which wealthy corporations, and individuals, make sure their profits are robust and their schemes unhindered by things like regulation,  accountability or prosecution, has learned tremendous customer relations lessons from their canny corporate cousins.   We have come to expect as little protection from our government as from the makers of very expensive toxically produced shit.  Right wing extremists have exploited, and whenever in power exacerbated, this disaffection with our own democratic government, now seen by so many as the enemy instead of the protector of our liberties.  Such forces find it easy to crush problem consumers/citizens.

Check out this example of the fiendishly simple means by which hope for correction of even the simplest error by an institution is snuffed out, routinely, for people without power who appeal to the institutions available for relief from mistreatment.

I got snotty treatment from a Post Office supervisor.  All he had to say is “whoa, that’s a mistake, that letter should have gone to the office it’s addressed to, not to the return address it was sent from.  We’ll fix it, it will be where you sent it in two or three days.”   Not even a ‘sorry’ needed.  “Sorry” is a word that our winner society has made the exclusive domain of weak losers who have no choice but to apologize.

Instead of a reasonable response to a postal error you get, giving him the benefit of the doubt, dismissal from a tired, testy civil servant who doesn’t like the tone of the disgruntled customer.  It’s not his fault that the customer waited on line to be jerked around for an excruciating five minutes by an extremely dull, monosyllabic postal clerk before being passed on to him.   It’s not his fault the letter was returned to the customer without explanation, instead of going to the clearly printed address on the properly stamped business mailer.   None of this is his fault, yet he is taking the full heat for a postal system that sometimes simply just fucks up.   Doesn’t like the way this dick of a customer is making demands, relentless, unsatisfied with the explanation of machine error and his noncommittal shrugs.    Fine.  “No guarantee it will get there this time either, SIR, (the s-word) we’ll just have to hope for the best.”

The customer goes home angry, and finds a federal agency to complain to.   The person he speaks to there seems to be very concerned with the story of the poor treatment the customer has received.    He should not have been handed a complaint number that does not allow a complaint to be made, particularly after the brusque treatment of a customer who had every right to complain.   Especially since there was no explanation given for the illogical return of the letter, except machine error, “shit happens,” and no guarantee given that it won’t be returned to him again.  Not to mention the sly “fuck you” of the fake complaint number.

She promises the customer an investigation, gives him the case number and tells him a report will be emailed to him in 2-4 business days at which time he’ll be able to follow up, if necessary, including emailing photos of the canceled, improperly returned envelope.

Sure enough, two business days later, this email arrives:

Updated information regarding your recent inquiry (Case ID:137194142) (KMM50585860V79654L0KM)

Dear Elliott Widaen,  [got the tricky last name right, but misspelled the first name, one L, one T]

This message is to let you know that we have received your inquiry at the Post Office. 

After we review and investigate the information you have provided, we will contact you and work with you until the case is resolved. 

Thank you for letting us know about this issue.  We look forward to serving you. 

Sincerely,

Your United States Postal Service

D. McNeil
Consumer Affairs
(212) 330-3667
NYDistrictcao@usps.gov

PS: Please do not reply to this message as this email address is not monitored for responses.  Your privacy is important to us.  If you would like additional information on our privacy policy, please visit www.usps.com.

Ten minutes later, a US Postal Service bot sends this update:

In order to better serve you, your recently submitted inquiry was forwarded to an office that is better suited to address your needs. It is being investigated and you can expect a reply within 2 to 4 business days.

Which office?   Where is this office?   Who?  What?  Why?   Mysteries to be answered within 2 to 4 business days, if all goes well.  

The following day the original envelope with the rent check to the landlord, being sent a twenty minute truck ride from the post office it was returned to, arrives back in the customer’s mail box.  The issue very much not resolved.

You figure, for fifty cents I can put this small business envelope into a standard sized envelope, address it by hand, put a stamp on it and mail it from another part of town. Maybe the postal workers there will not have all been lobotomized, or addled on opioids, or drunk, or willfully assholic, or whatever the problem is when such a simple, routine task is not done properly.  A fifty cent stamp and done.

But for somebody like me, raised by an angry asshole, sensitized to that asshole reflex to testily shift blame to the person mistreated — hard to bite the bullet and do the easy thing.   On to another post office, in another borough (have to go there for something else tomorrow anyway), where everyone has been very nice so far, and humbly make what should be a relatively easy to make case that I have not received the service I paid for.    I’d like them to put it in another envelope, with explicit instructions to deliver it to the address it is addressed to and not, mischievously or imbecilically, to the return address.

This reflex to get some kind of just result is also part of how they break you like a fucking twig.    I don’t know exactly what to do about this reflex, but some part of me believes that once it is neutralized, in enough of us, the Klan will be marching down the main street of every town again, making America great again, like they did when my father was born, in 1924, at the height of their national power, 4.5 million proud members strong.

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?

 

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.

Letter to Alvin Bragg (draft one)

Alvin Bragg, we learned recently, is the New York State Executive Deputy Attorney General for Social Justice.   This is the person, I discovered, thanks to a friend who alertly picked up a news release during a press conference with the Attorney General,  to whom my October 2017 letter to the A.G.  should have been addressed.   I’ve been writing “Alvin Bragg” periodically in my notebook, going back a few months, intending to write a futile cover letter to him.  Figured I’d give it a shot here, on a slow day.  I’ll have to strike just the right tone.

Dear Mr. Executive Deputy Attorney General:

(if that is your fucking name)

Enclosed please find my correspondence with your office.   I naively sent the Attorney General a letter recommending actions the state should take to protect the rights of low income health insurance consumers.   Mr. Schneiderman never saw that letter, a letter that should have been addressed to you, I learned from the organizational tree in one of the A.G.’s press releases.

My letter details some of the systemic abuses of the private insurance health system, and the lack of any state oversight available to consumers, outside of a desk in your office, and proposes actions that your office could advocate for.  It was not a consumer complaint seeking redress of a particular grievance, though it was treated as one by your office.    

Enclosed are the two responses I had from your office’s Health Care Bureau.   Neither one is responsive to the letter I wrote, except that the second one attempts to be helpful by suggesting I’m a consumer, like many, who is unaware of the powers of the Health Care Bureau in the A.G.’s office.

My October letter, and this one, fall into the category of “in a more just world letters like this wouldn’t have to be written at all”.  My letter to the A.G. was in part a cry of anguish from somebody with a limited income stuck in a bureaucratic quagmire with limited options for getting treatment for an eventually fatal disease.   The PPACA, as anyone who is subject to it quickly learns, is a very flawed solution to the vast institutional problem of providing affordable health care to millions while preserving the profits of private insurance companies and private health care providers.    

I am well aware that people with a limited income have only so much right to be heard on even the most vexing institutional injustices: like the three to six month lag between a medical procedure and Explanation of Benefits,  with the inevitable multiple bills and collection notices that accrue in that time frame.  Or that past EOBs, even with the assistance of a diligent attorney from the Community Service Society, and all required legal documents signed, were never provided at all by the insurance company.  “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike from begging, sleeping under bridges and stealing a loaf of bread.”

Ah, listen, Alvin, I don’t know what I really hope to accomplish with this note to you.  What outcome am I hoping for?  A paragraph apologizing for the poor response from your overworked consumer help desk, sympathizing with the situation I describe in my letter, assuring me that the activist A.G. of New York is doing everything in his power to address some of the institutional vexations set out in my long letter.  Strength to your arm, friend, dictating that paragraph to your secretary.

My best to you and your staff,
Eliot

Extractive vs. Regenerative Economic Models

Few of us question the status quo on essential matters that seem beyond question in a free society, like the necessity for constant war, eternal poverty, other plagues of human misery like desperate addiction and mass incarceration.   One reason is that we don’t have the language to ask these questions intelligently, even if we know something is sickeningly wrong with the way business as usual is conducted.  If you come across the right term, as I did recently from an activist — “extractive economic model,” and consider it against her alternative, “regenerative economic model,” you have the beginning of your question.  Spoiler alert, the irrefutable answer to this well-framed question, if you are not very, very wealthy and have some means to influence people, is “oh shut the fuck up, you fucking loser fuck.”  Nonetheless…

The great fortunes of some of our greatest families are founded on wealth they had workers extract from the ground.   This model for ‘creating wealth’ continues unabated to this day, with the tireless extractors of wildly lucrative fossil fuels still raking in vast fortunes every year.  In fact, with the new corporate tax break, Exxon and their ilk will keep many additional billions in the coming years for their essential contribution to the bustling world economy.  Same for the Koch boys and the industrious geniuses who invented the invasive, highly toxic hydrofracking procedure to extract safe, clean, lucrative, natural gas from deep within the earth. 

Back in the days when America was great, and people of means could own other human beings, the economy of the South was based on non-food cash crops, cotton and tobacco, that required massive manpower to harvest and which also depleted the soil.  Plant any single crop long enough in the same place and you end up destroying the soil.   That’s why crop rotation has been around for thousands of years.  That was one reason the Planters (that’s what the slave-driving motherfuckers were called) were so keen to add new slave territories to our great nation, they had destroyed the soil of the south growing the same two highly profitable monocultures every year.  

It’s just the way we do business here.   There are externalities attached to most enterprises that create vast wealth.  The death of the Amazon jungle, the lungs of the planet, is considered (by winners) a small price to pay if it allows McDonald’s to continue selling healthy three dollar meals to poor people, and reaping massive worldwide profits.  We live in an extractive economy, extract what you need, as cheaply as possible, to ensure maximum profit, and sorry about any lifeless ecosystems we leave behind.  Read the fine print, also, you can’t sue us in court but we can hire an arbitrator together to tell you you have no rights a wealthy corporation is bound to respect.  In the worse case scenario, like in the battle between big oil and local activists in Nigeria, you can just hang a few of the local leaders and the rest of the protesters will go away.

But this is all just bellyaching.  Until, perhaps, you have the alternative model to present: the regenerative economic model.   Regenerative grows back, extractive removes with no thought or hope of replacing anything. Regenerative is the essence of sustainability, Extractive depletes unto extinction.  Regeneration supports living creatures, extraction eventually kills them all.  

“OK, fine, Mr. Idealist, a sustainable economy is better than an earth-raping one, but where is the money in your precious regeneration?   Extraction has a long proven history of profit going back to the Conquistadors who forced natives to mine and give up their gold.   In fact, it goes back way further, to when great conquerers just extracted what they wanted from loser cultures who went whimpering under the sword.”  

No argument there.

“So, sir, with all due respect– why don’t you fucking shut the fuck up you fucking loser fuck?”  

I couldn’t say, sir.  I suppose it is not in my nature.