Category Archives: muttering to myself

The Price for Getting Paid

I’ve been paid for an infinitesimal percentage of the many words I’ve written over the last forty-five years.  I need to up the percentage in the coming months.  It is imperative, especially now that I’ve had a taste of getting paid for writing .  And because my money is running out possibly faster than the time I hopefully have left to spend it.

The theoretically easy gig, writing short, 1,000 word memoir type anecdotes for $250 a pop, was presented to me about a year ago.  I sent the guy two pieces that he loved and published immediately.   $500, not bad.   My friends were happy to see me finally getting paid for work I’d been doing for decades.   I had the impression I could send him one or two a week, but the arrangement quickly became hard to bear.  

It seems incredibly petty to blame my father for the sourness that quickly crept in, especially at my ridiculously advanced age of sixty.  Maybe I should blame this editorial fellow’s father for it.  I know that my arbitrarily adversarial father did not make it any easier for me to cheerfully abide the whimsy of arbitrary assholes.

The editor, if he can be called that, had grown up with a major problem with his own father, who had been a felon, a man of great superficial charm, adored by his wife, and who had hidden his criminality and long prison sentence from his sons.  The son wrote thousands and thousands of words about the trauma of his father’s treachery and published it on the site.    The piece could have been tightened up by a decent editor, but it made its point, at great, if not always elegant, length.

I wrote a piece about my father’s deathbed confession, which started off at about 2,500 words.  I managed to cut an almost fifty year anecdote down, somehow, to about 1,500 words, and sent it off to him.  He told me he loved it, but that the “sweet spot” for the website was around 1,000-1,100 words.   I exerted myself to send him a draft, cut to the bone like a haiku, that came in at a little under 1,100 words.  He loved it and told me he’d publish it in the next on-line issue.

Although challenged to edit his own story, he was fearless taking the red pen to my carefully chosen words.  I’d worked to tell exactly what I meant to in as few words as possible.   I read the piece he published on-line while waiting for my paycheck and noted that he’d swapped a precise phrase of mine for a cliche, inserted a fairly stupid parenthetical, changed a few other minor things.  Sure, I thought, why not?  

Then I read a line that stopped me, since it completely changed the sense of the entire paragraph that followed and made me appear to be as hapless a writer, and clueless a person, as this fellow himself.

I’d written:  

It made no sense to me that a man with all the qualities he possessed could be such an intractable asshole.

His version had me write:

It never made any sense to me that a man who my mother absolutely adored could be such an intractable asshole.

I never had any confusion about why my mother adored my father, or how anybody can adore anybody else.  That was more his issue, you dig, since his mother had absolutely adored such a despicable lying, murdering weasel and helped him lie to his sons.  

My point was that my father had every quality to be a wonderful father, and a great friend, that I saw each of those qualities and it mystified me that he was so rarely capable of living up to that great potential.  That’s what didn’t make sense to me, that is the contradiction I found impossible to reconcile throughout the senseless, trackless wars of my childhood.

 There was no mystery whatsoever about my mother adoring him, nor did that have anything to do with what I said next.

“But you got paid $250,” a practical friend pointed out, quite sensibly.  

That’s one part of it, and the good part.  If it had ended with that small handful of his stupid edits, I could have kept sending him things, letting him lift his leg over my words as he saw fit, and cashing the checks.  But it appeared he may have had some feelings about how quickly I sent him finished 1,000 word pieces whenever he asked.  

Each one I sent him, he said, was beautifully written, although this one was, funny to say, a bit too personal, that one, surprisingly, a tad impersonal, that one too private, this one too public– and this one, while absolutely harrowing, he’d found oddly unmoving.  

In the end, I decided there was no point to tell this hack to go fuck himself, take a writing course or anything else that might have hurt his sensitive feelings.  I just stopped sending him my work.  I am looking for other places to send my writing.  If you will excuse me, I have to crack that directory now.

Why So Glum?

“Why so glum?” she asked.  It seemed to her that he had many reasons to be cheerful.   His work was moving steadily forward, even if he was no closer to getting paid for any of it.

“Because I live in a giant toilet bowl where the biggest pieces of shit make the biggest splash,” he said.  

“That’s pretty good,” she said, “did you make that up?”   

“I don’t fucking know,” he said, and she recoiled as if struck.

“Don’t forget to flush,” he added, to the empty room.

Prohibition was a great success

Though, of course, it depends on what your definition of success is.

Prohibition, the Volstead Act, the Eighteenth Amendment, was passed to curtail the plague of drinking with its host of terrible social repercussions.  During its thirteen years (the “roaring twenties” into the beginning of the Great Depression) it did nothing to stop the consumption of alcohol, as it was intended to, but it did create mass contempt for a misguided law, many criminal millionaires, a wave of violence and a very lucrative, highly structured black-market industry which came to be known as Organized Crime.

Well-meaning citizens, and a certain proportion of religious fanatics, racists, xenophobes, enraged teetotalers, militantly organized to get the Eighteenth Amendment ratified in 1920.  It then became unconstitutional to manufacture, transport or sell intoxicating spirits for the purposes of relaxation or enjoyment. 

There was massive enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment, on a scale unimaginable for the Fourteenth Amendment, which merely sought to protect the new freedom of millions of recently freed slaves.  During Prohibition there was a surge in general lawlessness, thousands died getting high on bootlegged ‘bathtub gin’ and  the murder rate spiked as bold, suddenly wealthy criminals who had no hesitation to use machine guns on competitors, cops and bystanders used such weapons.

Prohibition was repealed in 1933 when the Twenty-first Amendment was ratified.  Americans had far worse problems by then than enforcing a useless, failed war on illegal booze.  Hitler had already come to power in Germany.  1933 was a low point of the Great Depression, millions stood on line for bread and watery soup.  And so forth.  The Volstead Act had done its work, and good riddance.

Now we fast forward to 1970 and the reign of President Richard Nixon.  It was the height of the rising “Culture War” and Nixon, although reputedly brilliant, was widely hated by millions of liberals and young people, whose pinko hatred he returned with grim, paranoid resolve.   He was known to drink a lot of alcohol when under stress, and he was under continually escalating stress.  Millions of his enemies were out on the street, loudly protesting the Vietnam War, the Draft, the continued de facto and de jure racism of our great freedom-loving democracy.

Nixon signed The Controlled Substances Act (“CSA”) into law in 1970, with the avowed purpose of regulating dangerous drugs that people increasingly used to get intoxicated, to run wild, to turn on, tune in, drop out.  This federal law criminalized the distribution and possession of certain dangerous controlled substances and mandated harsh punishments of up to years in prison for the possession and use of such substances.  

By a felicitous coincidence, under this law’s federal criminalization of drugs like marijuana, it was possible to arrest and imprison as many of Mr. Nixon’s hated enemies, including but not limited to Hippies and Yippies, as was deemed necessary, anywhere in the United States.  These degenerate dope smokers, like jazz musicians, certain Negroes and many itinerant Mexican migrant workers before them, were now felons who could be put away under a federal law.

But how do you justify these arrests and long imprisonments for something it was possible to see as an infraction essentially no more evil than drinking a beer?

Schedules of dangerous, unlawful drugs were created as part of the CSA.  Drugs were organized into legal categories, with Schedule One containing all the most dangerous drugs.  These were drugs like heroin, with a high potential for abuse and no currently accepted medical use in the United States.  These drugs were deemed extremely destructive, even under controlled medical supervision, drugs so harmful that even research on these terrible substances was generally banned.

Naturally, marijuana is a Schedule One drug, classified with the most pernicious drugs known to man.  Oddly, cocaine, produced pharmaceutically and used by dentists and millions of others, was not included on Schedule One (heroin was much more prevalent in 1970, cocaine didn’t come into its own until later).  Marijuana and cocaine, two of America’s most popular illegal drugs, are at the heart of the ruthless, highly lucrative, decades-old international production and smuggling cartels that kill thousands every year in places like Mexico.

Forty-six years later — leaving aside the many actually murdered during this almost half century of surprisingly unsuccessful new Prohibition —  millions of dope smokers have been arrested, imprisoned, lives ruined by criminal records, professional licenses revoked, because the CSA has never been adjusted to reflect current research on the many now amply demonstrated medical uses of marijuana.  

States that have legalized medicinal and even recreational marijuana have to be careful to narrowly tailor their laws to dance around the detailed prohibitions of the CSA, which can be brought down upon the states at any time, at the pleasure of whoever is running the federal agency at that moment.

Our current president, Mr. Obama, widely seen as a very cool guy (and, of course, also widely hated as such), can breezily joke about how high he got as an undergraduate.  He’s cool, you know, and in 2016, as he departs into the free market for millionaire speakers, he doesn’t have to pretend he never inhaled.  Sure, he outgrew it, obviously, hasn’t smoked that shit in decades, but, you know, back in the day, yo…

Nixon drank himself sick in the White House every night during the months leading up to his resignation as a paranoiac who abused presidential power and sanctioned illegal activity to bolster his chances to win a presidential election he would have won by a landslide in any case.  He got sweatier and shakier, and aged visibly, during those days and the booze he was sucking down was certainly no help.  

But nobody ever accused Dick Nixon of being the sort of heinous criminal who would ever smoke a joint, by God.  Ironically, a little weed might have actually helped him out.  I hear, under medical supervision, it can have a therapeutic effect on things like PTSD, panic, shattered nerves.

As for those who think marijuana should be taken off Schedule One of the CSA as a dangerous drug with no redeeming use — well, Mr. Obama as a private citizen will likely one day make a very cool, funny speech about it.  And we’ll all laugh, because most people by then will know he’s right, though, of course, millions will spit the fucking “n-word” at their TV screens and bitterly suck down their shots as they curse our permissive culture of drug addicts obscenely dancing their gay, miscegenating way to hell, and taking our great nation with it.  

There’s no pleasing some people, I’ve noticed.

 

Quiet Headline of a Forgotten Story: US gov’t pays Jessen and Mitchell $81M for torture techniques

Our country, long-time opponent of torture, began torturing suspects after 9/11/01.  Obama said it plainly not long ago, and I wince to quote him, “we tortured some folks.”

The torture did not necessarily make us any safer.  There are people, like Dick Cheney, who argue that torture got us actionable intelligence and saved American lives.  There are also people who can almost carry a tune with their farts.

Two enterprising psychologists, Dr. John “Bruce” Jessen and Dr. James Mitchell formed a company that got a $18o,000,000 plus contract to design a torture program for the “enhanced interrogation” of “enemy combatants”.   The two were originally hired on $1,000 a day retainers for these important services.

They were paid only $81,000,000 on that contract before their services were terminated in 2009 by the Obama Administration.   Unsung American heroes they do not deserve to be forgotten.

 

Man who kills his 14 year-old not guilty

I watched Hillary Clinton give a speech in North Carolina this afternoon, it was broadcast live on MSNBC.   She did pretty well and then gave way to the Campaigner-in-Chief, one of the great campaigners in American history, President Barack Obama.  As Mr. Obama hit it out of the park over and over, smiling, loose, feeling good, interacting smoothly with the audience, there was a constant loop of texts crawling over the bottom of the screen.

This constant flashing of unrelated text and images on the screen during other programming is a relatively new thing that has quickly become ubiquitous.  Advertisers and sales executives realized there was valuable real estate at the bottom of the TV screen going completely to waste.  Now, during many shows, ads for other shows will pop up, little characters cavort, ads and other messages scroll continually.  The modern American attention span is not fractured enough, I suppose, so why not put another 60 penny nail through its nervous system?

As the president spoke there was a scrolling caption about South American authorities looking for a former Guantanamo detainee, out finally and apparently mad as hell and hating somebody’s freedom.  Then this bit that caught my eye:

Father who accidentally shot his 14-year old son at a shooting range will not be charged, witnesses and surveillance video confirm the shooting was an accident.  The boy, apparently an asshole– the father, no intention of shooting the contumacious little bastard in the face and killing him, the kid is dead and so be it.  A well-regulated militia being necessary for the security of a free State, and so on and so forth, witnesses say the kid was shot by accident, so does the video footage.  Video footage does not lie, neither do witnesses.  Case closed.  Stay tuned for details of this purely accidental tragedy at eleven.

I could not help but make the immediate connection to Trayvon Martin, the black kid shot by an armed white man who’d taken it on himself to patrol the neighborhood and confront the kid with deadly force to find out what a black kid was doing in his neighborhood with a bag of Skittles and a cell phone.  The boy was shot after a possible struggle and Skittles were found near the dead boy.  

The boy, we learned, was four inches taller than the man with the gun and, at 17,  was fit, while the young man with the gun, at 5’7″ and 204 pounds, was ‘clinically obese’.  The boy’s blood tested positive for recent marijuana use, and so there’s that.   He is alleged to have used the f-word and not shown this armed civilian the least bit of respect when the white man got out of his truck to confront the boy and “stand his ground” with a handgun, as he was permitted to do under a Florida law underwritten by the Koch Brothers and their ilk, operating under the name of ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council, you can visit these dangerous, sharp-toothed cocksuckers here; a less self-serving version is here and here with Bill Moyers).  The killer also claimed the kid viciously attacked him and that, in fear for his life, he shot and killed the boy in self-defense.

The killer’s father was a local judge and there was a long period, perhaps a month or more, before charges were brought against the judge’s son for the killing of the unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin.  Martin, in addition to marijuana in his bloodstream, also had been in a fight at school and, additionally, was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, a “hoodie”.  Pictures of him in the hoodie were shown on TV, he did present a slightly menacing aspect in those pictures.  There was an outcry when the man with the gun was not being charged with anything in connection to the boy’s death which had come directly from the barrel of the man’s gun.  The man with the gun was named George Zimmerman.  

The president went on TV during the rising tensions over whether the killer was going to be charged with a crime.  He gave his first speech about race in America, after several years in office.  It was an eloquent speech, as all of his speeches are.  He identified with Trayvon Martin and his family, said he could have been Trayvon Martin, or his son, if he’d had one, could have been Trayvon.  He told everybody to be cool, to wait and see what American justice had to say about the events leading up to the killing of the unarmed boy.

So we stayed cool, we waited and we saw what American justice had to say about the apparently completely justifiable killing of an unarmed boy with a bag of Skittles and, apparently, a big chip on his shoulder.  Zimmerman was acquitted of all charges.

I saw a crawl a couple of years later claiming that Zimmerman had been involved in a second domestic violence incident, allegedly throwing a wine bottle at his then girlfriend and possibly threatening her with a gun, as he had another ex, who declined to press charges.  Zimmerman, in his own home, had every right to stand his ground, though he did seem to lose some of the moral high ground after that alleged beat-down of a third unarmed woman (his estranged wife was in there too).  You can read some sordid details about the piece of garbage here.  Or just wait for the next crawl.

Or just read this, from USA Today:

In September 2013, his estranged wife, Shellie, called 911 claiming he had punched her father and was threatening her with a gun. She did not press charges. Two months later, Zimmerman was arrested and accused of domestic violence by girlfriend Samantha Scheibe.  Scheibe dropped the charges.

(rest of the sordid story)

 

 

Solving the World’s Problems

While I am just sitting around on this pleasant Saturday afternoon, and as I have not mounted my soapbox in a while, let me solve the problems of, if not the world, these United States of America.

In passing let me also note something that occurred to me last night.  Only writers are interested in reading a manuscript.  Readers are interested in reading a finished, well-edited book that they can read an interesting review of, in a publication they respect, before taking the long plunge into its hundreds of pages.   I love to write as much as I love to read, so I am not the one to ask about these things.  However, it was a realization that struck me with great force last night.  

Now, on to saving the world.

The central problem that leads to every sort of violence and abuse is a lack of meaningful, life-affirming connection.  To others, to ourselves.  Follow me here, if you will.   If you have work that satisfies you, or at least pays you well, people who empathize with you, listen to you, trust you, if you have regular joy in your life, you are unlikely to go on the internet and join a hate group.   You are less likely to join a gang, become addicted to dangerous drugs, engage in violence or other destructive behavior.   You will have healthier options and outlets.  When you have a problem, if you have someone to listen to you and give you good advice, people who remind you of the essential goodness of life, you are much less likely to do something desperate.

 Yeah, yeah, you will say– and you will know what I am driving at: helping the fucking losers.

Our societal problems are kept at a boiling point by a competitive worldview that puts only one value on everything in the world: how much is it worth in money?  Human lives are reckoned according to this irrefutable calculation:  lifetime earning potential times earning/pension years likely to be lived.  There are actuarial tables that allow experts to calculate the value of the life of a murdered 30 year-old hedge fund guy on the 98th floor vs. the dead 30 year-old busboy formerly at Windows on the World.  Hedge fund guy: several million dollars, and his widow will be angry at whatever the low-ball number is.  Bus boy: $20,000.   Guess what?   If we did the actual calculations the lump sum payment for the bus boy’s life would be much more, but what is this jerk-off’s mother going to do about it anyway?

 Actual case.  She lived in NYC public housing and, because she got this lump sum payment after her son was among thousands killed by enraged assholes on 9/11/01, she lost her Medicaid.  She was ineligible for this free health care for the poor until she spent down the $20,000.  Couldn’t afford her psych meds, or could, but they were brutally expensive and she resented having to pay the settlement money to Big Pharma.  She got angry instead, and, when Gupta the NYCHA functionary arrived at her apartment and may or may not have suggested sex in exchange for the repairs she was demanding, or may or may not have made a grab at her, threatened to castrate Gupta.   I met Gupta in court during NYCHA’s attempt to evict this woman.  Mr. Gupta was indignant about the whole thing and laughed off the attempted “rape”.  

“She’s crazy,” he told me with a big, winning smile, and he may well have been right.  But crazy women get hands put on their asses all the time, have people with even a drop of power use it to try to get some of that crazy woman sex.  I will never know the truth of what actually happened, nor, to be wearily brutal about it, do I really care all these years later.  Fact is only this: if this woman had had the money to hire a good lawyer and contest the $20,000 payment for her dead son’s life– a clear undervaluation on any scale– she would have come away with many times that amount, minus the 33% for the lawyer.  

Our society measures everything in money, everything in terms of return on investment.  When a business is profitable it succeeds.  Take agriculture, the source of our food, and also a major source of our health or lack of it.  You cut out the expenses that maximize nutrition, safety, sustainability.  Fuck it, it’s all about maximizing profit, right now.  You plant monocultures, no real profit in diversity.  You get the government to subsidize these crops, look the other way regarding your hiring practices.  You use whatever chemicals are needed to make the crop as cheap to grow and as plentiful as possible.  You feed the excess to animals you raise for maximum yield and efficiency.  There is no reason to be humane here either, that costs money, eats into profit and, let’s be honest, nobody cares about cows, chickens, pigs, turkeys, only how much beef, chicken, pork and other meat actually costs.  

Why put only one chicken per pen when you can fit ten in there?  They will go insane, begin pecking at each other, you will say.  Not a problem– cut their fucking beaks off when they’re babies.  What about disease? you will say.  Antibiotics, we shoot ’em full of it the same day we’re cutting their little beaks off.  Hormones in the food, steroids, whatever– yo, it’s meat.  This is not your pet bird we’re talking about, this is produce, product, the stuff you buy packaged raw in the meat section or deep fried at the fast food joint.  

Here comes my point, or what is left of it:

Make maximum production/profit the only motive, place about half of the population (and this percentage is growing by the day as the richest get richer) out of reach of a materially comfortable life, meaningful work, at the mercy of the cheapest and most lovingly advertised sources of food– highest calories for lowest cost– the American way, and you have the recipe for what we have now.  Millions of obese poor people with extremely expensive preventable diseases like diabetes, at a cost that the lives of 1,000 dead hedge fund guys a week couldn’t cover.   American health care is insanely expensive due, in large part, to the costs of procedures to prolong the sickened lives of the world’s unhealthiest population.

Here’s my immediate solution: create meaningful, decently paid work for poor people. At minimum, it will provide them the income to afford healthier food choices.   Instead of an army of off-the-books slaves making less than minimum wage to care, often shabbily, for old and infirm people, create a profession of skilled caretakers.    

There is a vast need for this life-saving service as Baby Boomers bloom into a huge generation of old people.  Train people for this important work.  Give the otherwise underemployed meaningful work that brings the instant rewards of connection to others, being of service, being appreciated, in addition to a decent income.  You will need to educate them, of course, but let Bill Gates and fucking Michael “Philanthropist” Milken and their filthy fucking ilk take care of that, if you prefer.  Let the billionaires reap the profit for this training if you like.  I am talking about the end-game.  

The many jobs, undone or done badly, because society, our “free market” culture, deems them of no value, that, if done well and fairly paid for would add real value to every life they touch.  Any room full of smart people could come up with a list of such jobs, jobs that would benefit millions, society, reduce poverty, crime, hopelessness, vastly improve our health and our way of life.  

Of course, I know what you’re saying: where’s the profit in any of that?   We’ll leave that up to President Trump, or President Clinton II to decide, eh?

Note about Irv’s Holocaust Denial

Here are the words of the man with the check book, about the piece that follows.  He’d emailed earlier in the day soliciting stories about family secrets.  Take his comments with a grain of salt, you might find the piece strangely moving, even if the keeper of the online Reader’s Digest-type site deemed it ‘strangely unmoving’. And, of course, he’s right, the details in those two short paragraphs about the actual slaughter do read like they’re from an encyclopedia.  And it would, of course, be peevish of me to point that out to the man who pays good money for things he likes.

“Again, nicely done, but I found this one strangely unmoving. I think the problem (at least for me) is that, since your grandparents never tell their individual stories, you had to rely on online research to find out what happened in August 1943 in this town in Ukraine. The details are horrific, but they’re the kind of thing you find in an encyclopedia. I wish you had some small, personal details of your grandparents’ experience, but I guess the story is that they never told you their story.”

Good guess, brah.

An Unbearable Family Secret
(Hitler who?)
 

“I’m worried about your grandmother, she’s drinking too much,” my grandfather told me one day, toward the end of their lives.  “I bought a new bottle of vodka Monday and now, on Wednesday, it’s almost gone.”   I knew my grandmother was a big drinker, apparently the colon cancer she was dying of had done nothing to reduce her thirst for relief.

I was sitting on the terrace later that day, screened from my grandfather’s view.  He walked into the living room, bent to open the cabinet below the lamp and took out the vodka bottle.  He regarded it for a moment, unscrewed the top and took a long, thirsty drink.  He downed it like water.  When he was done he calmly wiped his lips and put the bottle away.

“Holy shit,” I recall thinking.  I had no idea my grandfather was a drinker.  Then again, why wouldn’t he be?   He was a Russian Jew who shared an unbearable secret that would never be whispered.

My mother’s parents were Jews from Vishnivetz, a small, six hundred year old town in the Ukraine. They had emigrated to the United States when Warren G. Harding was president.  Each had been one of seven children.   My grandparents were the only members of their famil​ies to l​ea​ve Vishnivetz, the only two still alive after a brutal night in August of 1943.  

I was a boy of about eight when I first learned about the Nazi atrocities, the millions killed.  I vividly recall my shock when I first saw the film clips from the death camps.  

After watching a guy in a cap wheel a huge wheelbarrow full of jiggling skeletons and dump them down a chute, I’d seen enough.  I ran to puke my guts out.   My mother cried and tried to console me, but the truth was the truth.  Over the years I would read many books on Hitler’s rise to power, the Nazi state and the Final Solution, but as a boy it was just a nightmare that was not to be shared.

Sitting around the dinner table, smiling at my sister and me, were the only two survivors, one from each large family, of a recent episode of mass murder.  It was never, ever spoken of.

Vishnivetz still exists, though I doubt there are any Jews there today.  I learned the exact fate of my grandparents’ extended family and the rest of the Jews of Vishnivetz only recently, after finding an online source of witness accounts.  

The Germans occupied the area in 1942 and forced the Jews of Vishenvetz to construct a ghetto within a very short time frame.  I was chilled to read the name of a member of my grandmother’s family, held hostage by the Nazis to force the Jews to keep to the deadline.  One boundary of the ghetto, I read with hairs rising on my spine, was the home my grandfather had grown up in.

In August of 1943 the Jews who’d survived more than a year of disease and starvation in the ghetto were marched to a ravine just north of town where each got a bullet in the back of the head.  This was after centuries of periodic small scale massacres in Vishnivetz.  

On my father’s side, the muddy little hamlet outside of Pinsk where his mother’s family comes from has been erased from the map.  No trace of it can be found in English or, as a Polish speaking researcher friend confirmed, in Polish.  Everybody there, and the little town itself, disappeared into Mr. Hitler’s famous Night and Fog.

When I asked about these things my father quickly dismissed my concerns.  “You act like these things happened to you personally, they didn’t.  Those people were mere abstractions, we never knew any of them,” he told me impatiently.  “The letters from Europe just stopped coming one day,” he said.   My mother was tearful, but said nothing.

Each of the “mere abstractions”, of course, had a name, and a personality, favorite things and things they couldn’t stand.  Each was known intimately by my grandparents.  Some were funny and generous, others were schmucks, each had certain endearing and maddening qualities.  The thing they had in common was the bad luck to remain in those accursed little towns when the Nazis came through the area.

​​Many years later, not long before she died, my mother told me of her correspondence with her grandfather in Vishnivetz.  She used to write to him in Yiddish, which she studied in school.  Her grandfather would send her letters and Russian coins.  When she was about 14 years old the letters, indeed, stopped coming.

My grandparents are now all long gone, and my parents have followed.  It may have been a healthier thing to have discussed these horrors when they were all alive, instead of making the subject off limits, but we cannot remake the past.   My childhood took place in a different time, before the importance of grieving was widely understood.

I find myself haunted by this terrible family secret from time to time, and sometimes, when I am feeling very low, I find myself standing by that ravine outside of Vishnivetz, with the other ‘mere abstractions’, waiting for the invitation to kneel for my bullet to the back of the head.

America’s Exceptional Exceptionalism

Other countries, other cultures, other People, may consider themselves ‘exceptional’.  This may be true —  to them — but American Exceptionalism is exceptionally exceptional, more exceptional than any other exceptionalism, as I’m sure you’ll all agree.  As I shall endeavor to demonstrate again here.

I don’t say this only to be arch– or only to avoid doing things I must do today while I tap blindly at these keys.  Those motives cannot be denied, I add in the spirit of complete transparency of the kind President Obama so forcefully advocated as a candidate.  If you don’t feel like reading my bullshit but still want a good reason to be pissed off, just click this link.

Consider this: America has been exceptionally successful selling the ideas of freedom, justice and the American way.  Selling is the American genius.  This is beyond dispute.  Nobody does it, or did it, better.  

I don’t say this only out of bitterness at not being a sales genius myself, though admittedly that’s part of it.  America has packaged and ingeniously sold any number of wonderful and terrible things.  We are the undisputed genius of that ever-growing field which now encompasses advertising, public relations, spin-doctoring, marketing, branding, market research, demographic targeting, political persuasion, fundraising, data collection for targeted marketing, political advertising to influence the outcome of democratic processes, etc.

I think everyone can agree this amazing industry, employing many millions and influencing every American deeply (not to mention billions of others worldwide) is kind of exceptional.  To have the genius and ability to sell millions of rocks as pets?  Exceptional!  To be able to expertly package and market candidates for political office, and launch devilishly targeted attack ads to torpedo enemy candidates? Truly exceptional!  No shit, really, and no wonder these experts are paid enormous sums of money for the invaluable services they provide.  

Of course, it’s mostly the bitterness speaking. And glibness, which, though I sometimes flash, I know is also a vice.  So let me stop flapping me gums and post the link to the latest illustration of American Exceptionalism that has come across my desk.  

Apparently, to avoid another threatened government shut-down by those elected government officials who are hell-bent on proving that government is the enemy, certain compromises were made here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

Sekhnet warned me to take my blood pressure meds before reading this short article on five of the most infuriating political compromises that prostitutes, pimps and panderers struck recently in our name and in the name of preserving and funding our great democracy.  I made it to the end of number two, before going into the small room to do the same myself.  As I went I chanted “USA! USA! USA!”  If you’re feeling strong today, click here.

And God bless our exceptional United States of America.

 

 

Fun in the Sun

I had something closer to my heart to write just now, but decided to write something closer to my inflamed baboon’s asshole instead:

Dear NY State of Health:

 I had a message on the website congratulating me when I logged in recently. The green notice told me that there was nothing more I needed to do to keep my health insurance as it is for 2016. I then checked my Inbox for the message received on 12/20/25 and read that my subsidy was being removed. I called to straighten things out and two or three days later got an electronic disenrollment notice.

A confusing ninety minutes on the phone with NYS of Health on 12/22 resulted in erroneous information being inputted on my application on my behalf. The website crashed mid-conversation, which made things more difficult still.   During the first call Marlon told me he would list my income for 2016 as zero, since my income for the last three months had been quite low. I described to him why it would be inaccurate to list my 2016 income as zero and then the call was abruptly cut off.

When I called back I learned, from the next person I spoke to, Izahn, that Marlon had filed my application listing my income as “zero”.   I was unable to see my own application on-line because of the trouble with the website. Izahn assured me that he’d fixed Marlon’s mistake, submitted a new application for me and apologized for the website being down so I couldn’t see the application he’d filled out for my continued health insurance.   He advised me to send the most recent tax returns. They are enclosed.

I had two emails on Christmas Day, the first referred me to a notice that turned out to be the disenrollment notice at the bottom of this letter.     Marlon’s “zero” apparently triggered the other notice I was emailed on Christmas Day, informing me that the income information on the 12/23 application did not match income obtained from State and Federal sources.

 I’d like to maintain my insurance coverage. Your assistance is greatly appreciated,

 “Your assistance is greatly appreciated,”

He added ironically, disgustedly, clenching his face into a fist with which to smash the reader of his words to a powerless minimum wage bureaucrat working for the health insurance industry, under the guise of a program to help New Yorkers afford overpriced health insurance.

LOG INTO THE NY STATE OF HEALTH WEBSITE TO SEE IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT YOUR HEALTH COVERAGE

Two Christmas Day emails from the tireless Obamacare spambots after months without a peep from my ruthless benefactors.

Happy Christmas, sucker, (click the link to see, inter alia, the letter informing you that your health care insurance has been canceled, effective immediately, for unspecified reasons.) 

On the website, the message is a bit cheerier:

Congratulations

The email arrives, arrives again, reminding you there is a message in your INBOX.  It could be anything, it arrives on Christmas Day, should be some good news.

 

LOGIN to Obama's asshole

Have a nice day.  You have ten days to produce all required (if any) documentation at our Albany offices before this decision becomes final and binding.

Obamacare website