Category Archives: muttering to myself

Facebook Nation

I’ve got to face the muzak, I am a member of facebook nation, whether I ever click on facebook or not.

“Social media” connects us in the most superficial possible way.  Which is cool, it is the least we can do to keep up the pretense of connectedness, and for many, also the most we can do.  It takes a few seconds to see the update, and if we’re not interested we click the next tab, no need to be polite or interested in the privacy of cyber friendship.

What has long irked me in real-life irks me on-line: it is rare for people to simply answer a simple question.  We are distracted all the time, much more now with powerful personal computers in our shirt pockets.  I don’t remember the last meal I ate in a restaurant without somebody at the table consulting a tiny, irresistible glowing screen for real-time updates.

“Oh, I’m sorry, did you say something?”

I had a friend of many years, somewhere on the Aspergers spectrum, I would think, very active on social media.  We eventually had a terminal falling out, no doubt years in the making, after he promised to do a small favor in his area of expertise and then, after not doing it, was peevish about me not answering his missed call to let him explain why he didn’t do it.  I wrote a series of pieces here about the unraveling situation, and in that month my “readership” spiked dramatically.  In fact, it set a personal record for this largely unread blahg, a record that could stand as long as DiMaggio’s hitting streak.

The nice thing is that through writing about the situation as clearly as I could I emerged as the vicious bully and he, unrepentant but cruelly misunderstood, came out as the victim, at least in his mind.  In our last call he actually attempted to bully me, which surprised me, but the point was made, if it needed making again:  written words can wound.   Over and over again, apparently.

After my final post on the slow-motion falling out went up I had an email from a friend.  “Good thing he doesn’t have a gun,” wrote my friend about the piece.  I hadn’t thought of that, but it was a good thing.

That’s the thing about being a cyber-presence, you don’t actually have to look anyone in the eye when you shoot them in the face.   Look at the comments on-line sometime.   I am often impressed by the level of civility and intelligence I see in comment strings on some sites.  People actually support each other and try to exchange differing views in a mature and nuanced way.  Then someone jumps in swinging virtual fists, light sabers, burning paper bags full of dog shit.  There are some sites where fisticuffs is the norm.  Put two of these bellicose trolls in a room and it’s unlikely they would be so fierce in each other’s actual presence.

Whenever I told the story of the end of the friendship with this former friend of mine I always added a line I never said, then admitted I didn’t think of it at the time.  The line was “if you want to bully me, come on over, I’m home.  I’ll wait for you.”  This is the kind of line we would write for a laconic tough guy narrator, which I am not.  But I play one on-line, you see.  Not that I would have needed to be any such thing to get this particular fellow to stop talking shit.

Writing here is the easiest thing I can think of to do at the moment– it’s almost like scrolling down a friend’s facebook page.  The least I can do and also, at the moment, the most.  Once I send it into cyberspace I plan to get on to many things I have been thinking of doing for the last couple of weeks.  In fact, let me do that now.

But first, how are you doing, my friend?

The power of “nice”

Nice people, while they may well actually suck, are a lot better, as a group, than mean people, a sour-smelling pack of unhappy assholes.  Most of us are not strictly nice or mean.   We swing both ways, according to circumstance.   One good “fuck you” deserves another much of the time and the reciprocating can be done in every flavor from affectionate to sadist.

I was grown in a hothouse of rage.  It took me decades to start to understand the obvious:  that it’s better not to engage with insane anger.  There are things you can do to become less angry yourself, to resist the impulse to engage with a person who is mad.  But only if the pain of that pushes you to change the pattern.    

One of the most important things is recognizing what is intolerable to you.  This will help you stay out of situations where anger starts to look like the best option.   Easier said than done, of course, in this often infuriating world, where the aggressive and unscrupulous always seem to have a much bigger say than the meek and kindly, but it is something you can work on.  That’s all I’m saying.

My sister once gave me a great compliment, by expressing confusion that I wasn’t like either of our angry parents (although, of course, she noted that I am angry too, just not obviously like either of them).  

“If the only option was being like one of them, I’d have bashed my own head in years ago,” I told her.  It never occurred to her that there could be a choice beyond one from Column A or one from Column B.   Given two bad options, she chose the seemingly strong one to model herself on and has done pretty well struggling against the mean side of what she learned from the Master.  

It’s hard work, Brownie, to overcome deeply ingrained reflexes, but something that can be worked on. That’s all I’m saying.

So on the old “what is hateful to you do not unto others” tip we have the woman who told me the other day that it bugs her that the excellent writer she sends her work to usually writes nothing more than “nice!” in reply.  “Sometimes not even the exclamation point…” she exclaimed.  

“Whell, shoot,” I said, spitting a stream of terbaccer juice past my horse’s ass, “ain’t nothing wrong with ‘nice’, especially from an excellent writer.”  I spat again, much more taciturn than I am in real life.

In real life I explained, in tedious detail and dispassionately, that I’d learned, after decades of aggravation, that most people you send creative things to are at a complete loss for how to respond.  They think, incorrectly, that writing something like “nice!” is insufficient, perhaps even insulting.  They figure they need to write more than that, the ones who even click on the link to see the unsolicited creative work.

And even if they opened the work in question and thought it was cool, not having the thirty second attention span it would actually take to make a comment more detailed than “nice”, they forget about it.  Even if they were in that 5% that actually clicked the link and thought the thing was genuinely nice.

If someone has paid for the creative work, people are much more likely to understand why you did it and take thirty seconds to reply.  “You’re so talented, glad somebody paid you for it.  Good work, brilliant!” they will write of such things.  But anything else?  Good luck, kid.  

Most people have no idea why anyone would spend time doing something creative unless someone was paying them for it.  Just the Free World we live in, brothers and sisters.

“Nice is nice,” I told her.  “Nice is excellent.  Nice is all you need.” I neglected to tell her the excellent point some wise man made on a TED stage about the difference between a teacher who encourages and a teacher who discourages her students being one tiny, elemental thing.  

Overworked teacher looks over the student’s work, searches it for completeness, hands the kid back the work without a comment.  This is the way of the world and it is basically discouraging — all you get is a grade.  

The other overworked teacher reads the work, searches it for completeness, hands it back with a small smile and says ‘nice’.  Investment of time and effort– almost none.

But the second student’s work is no longer Sisyphic, as the man on the stage who described this said.  That five seconds of connection and appreciation is all it takes to make the other person feel they are not talking to a wall, a fucking firing squad wall that stinks of the shit and piss (while mention the bile, blood and puke?) of everyone the commandant’s ever lined up there, the line of Nazi sharpshooters spattering their fucking guts on it.  Can you dig that?

“Nice!”

 

 

Projects

There may be individuals, I suppose there must be, who can continue uphill, pushing a worthy long-shot project, undaunted by the continual climb, the lack of landmarks, fellow-travelers, encouragement, the barren landscape.   Could be part of the myth of the rugged individual, of course, the invigorating but pernicious idea that one person, alone, can create a community to play a small role in changing horror into hope.   There are the usual outliers, guys like Don Trump, who start with nothing and wind up– or who start with relatively little, a few million, say… and…. ah, fuck Trump and the Trump he rode in on.

There is, it is written, a time to reap and a time to sow.  There are other worthy projects I’ve been neglecting as I neglect the larger one, an ambitious undertaking that has already showed its potential to do what it purports to do.   Few alive today are aware of its great potential, true, but, anyway, it seems a good time to list and try to advance the other worthy projects I must also put my back into.  Progress in one thing helps in another.

Among the 901 posts I have put on this blagh since August of 2012 there are a dozen or more that can be raked into the approximate bones of the Book of Irv, the tragic and illuminating story of my difficult father.   There are posts on my mother, an equally compelling character, probably another dozen.   One of each of these story types was published, in abbreviated form, for a small but decent payday.  You can see them here and here.  Although each bears the mark of sometimes arbitrary editing, the small violence done to my prose, the random insertion of a cliche here and there– a very small price to pay for the nice cash money I received for them.

There are several posts about animals, my ongoing vigilance against doing harm, musings on friendship, etc.   Each should be raked into a little pile, organized, submitted somewhere for money.

Of course, when I write of raking into little piles and organizing, the chaos in here strikes an ironic pose, winks at me saucily.  “You want to rake some piles and do some organizing, my friend?  Really?  Heh.”   I should take these sprawling dunes of paper, drawing books, boxes, cords, rulers, cutting boards, sunscreen, dropper bottles, rubber stamps, dead electronic devices, hats, zipper bags, music books and many other odd items and tame them, one by one.  Would make everything else much easier, no question.  One small triumph inspires the next.

There is also the memory of the excellent advice an adjunct professor in law school gave us at the end of that last semester.  When you study for the bar exam, he said, treat it like you are in training for a grueling fight.  Set a daily schedule of study, keep to it, but also eat well, work out, get enough sleep every night.  You need to be in the best shape of your life, he told us, mentally and physically.  Sitting for hours studying means you’ll need to schedule daily time for exercise.  The exercise will also help you unwind from your studies and improve your sleep.  I took him at his word and rode the bike for an hour every night.  It helped a lot as I passed two bar exams in three days.

After long days at the computer, mostly distracting myself, I rode my bike, briefly, each of the last two nights.  It was good to be rolling again, if also a little sobering to be reminded– when you get back on the bike it takes a while to build up to where you want to be.  Those hills you conquered on nightly rides in the past will kick your ass until you build back up to being able to kick their asses.  I’ve been there before, needing to get back into shape, getting back into better shape.  It is a pleasure when you do, a struggle to get back there, a longer struggle the longer you neglect to begin.

Like so many other things in life, my friend.

 

 

 

 

The Lifespan of Friendship

Having time, that most precious of resources, I sometimes brood, that most useless of uses for time.  I don’t brood at random, mind you.  I brood about specific vexing details of this life here, the life we try to celebrate, and wring every bit of joy, gratefulness and amazement from.   We try to appreciate the good things in our lives to the cadence of a constantly banging drum, and not only one drum, a million drums.  

The beat is constant, purposeful, and often drowns out everything else.  It is amplified and throbs over the wall to wall speakers of mass media.  Recently it was Paris, the murderous motherfuckers who slaughtered some innocent people there.  That was the only story.  Everywhere.  Oh, yes, and the accompanying footnote story of a similar slaughter in Beirut where less people were killed that same day in a part of the world where many are killed daily.  Then the only story was about some insane American motherfucker with a gun killing people he believed were killers because they worked in a clinic that sometimes performed abortions.  Trump.  The idiocy or atrocity of the day.  The kid who was killed by an enraged policeman in Chicago, the city paid the family $5,000,000 for the kid’s “wrongful death”.  The eventual release of the videotape, after a year of government stone-walling, showing there was probable cause to believe the policeman murdered the kid in the first degree.  Friday was Black Friday, run to stand on line for amazing deals.  Today is Cyber Monday, big savings on line, go go go!

But I am not thinking of any of these things today.  I am thinking about the death of friendship, how it happens, why.  As a kid I watched my father toss old friends over the side, not even look back as they disappeared without a trace in the wake of his mighty ship.  I thought this was horrible.  Over time I’d learn it is even more horrible to have vengeful people scowling and skulking on deck, spewing hatred, jealousy, anger, poison, insisting they are your best friends and that you don’t deserve any fucking better, asshole.  If you ask them nicely and they don’t play nice, don’t play with them.  If they won’t leave, it is kind of a moral duty to throw them over the side.

It is a matter of luck and sensitivity, and valuing the rare thing that true friendship is, to find and keep good friends.  A certain amount of work is involved in keeping a friendship alive and healthy.  I believe there are many people who do not have the luck and sensitivity to others to find and keep good friends.  It is much more important to them to be right, and feel superior, and justified in their anger, and not take any shit from anyone, ever.   I have been there, prepared to take no shit from anyone, ever.  But taking a little shit once in a rare while, from someone who sometimes needs to give it, as all of us do, well, OK, the price to be a good a friend, to have a good friend.  A little shit can be overlooked, within reason.

But then there is the line drawn in the sand:  all shit all the time!  I didn’t sign on for this, you will think to yourself, protest to the friend who declares this drastic new policy.  Doesn’t matter, your friend will say, you’re the only one I can throw this on, need to get it out of my large intestine, can’t leave it on the floor.  The color goes nicely with your eyes.  Makes kind of a warm hat and scarf for you, my friend.  At first, anyway.

This is really disgusting.  Is this really the best I can do at the moment?

I like to think not.  I like to think I can do better.  It is not always possible.  Time is money.  Tick tick tick.  

If you want your friend to listen to you, not cut you off, consider the things you say: listen to your friend, do not cut them off, consider the things they say.  The Golden Rule, from the mouth of Jesus, was Love your neighbor as yourself.  This may be possible for the son of God, or a saint, but does not seem possible for the average human.  The Golden Rule, from the mouth of Hillel:  What is hateful to you do not unto another.  This gives us a handle on a better way to act, seems more practical.  Everyone knows what they hate.  If you hate it, don’t do it to someone else. What are you, a sadist?    

Many are sadists, sad to say, and sadism, it seems to me, comes from being victimized by another sadist.  What is hateful to you do to anyone who is weaker than you– the credo of the sadist.    Some victims are made more sensitive by what they have been forced to undergo, become protectors of others.  Many, sadly, become fucking sadists.  Is it possible to be friends with a sadist?  If you are a masochist, I suppose.   The old one:  the masochist says ‘hurt me, hurt me!’ and the sadist says ‘no…’

This is most muddled, my friend.  Is there some lesson to be drawn from this?  I do not see it.  Are you saying your friends will treat you no better than you treat them?   Are you once more taking a bold stand for the obvious, that it is better to be a mensch than an asshole?  Those things are kind of subjective, no?  Don’t most of us consider ourselves justified in our actions, on the high road, compromisers taken advantage of when things go south?

I think of the line between mensch and asshole like that Supreme Court justice wrote of obscenity: we know it when we see it.  In a place where there are no men, strive to be a man, as it is written in the Book of Proverbs.   Or maybe it was in Pirkey Avot.  I’m sure every religion and culture has some variation on this.  Our’s in the west is: go someplace where there is something of material value, claim it, stand tall and use your quick drawn gun to kill anyone who contests your claim to it.

Madness creeps down like a curtain, like the darkening sky at dusk, like a thumb on to an ant.   I don’t know what to make of this.  Hopefully the next page will be a little more edifying and entertaining.

 

 

 

Writing for Pay

Writing for pay, like doing anything for pay, is not a job for the squeamish.   Squeamish, we are informed by a wonderful dictionary I have somewhere, means “exhibiting a prudish readiness to be nauseated.”  Such prudish readiness is not a desirable quality for a person entering the marketplace.  You want to do business in the marketplace and never be nauseated?  Good luck, pal.  That’s why you write here on WordPress, after all.  Here on a blahg read by a small handful, nobody will ever randomly change your words in exchange for a check.  On the other hand, no check for $250, or even $5, will ever be mailed to your home to pay for  your single malt scotch.   So get over it.  

I mean, really, isn’t it churlish, childish and even a bit arbitrary to be upset when a sentence that you wrote:  

It was always hard for me to understand how a man with my father’s many great qualities could be such an intractable asshole.

is rendered:

It was always hard for me to understand how a man my mother absolutely adored could be such an intractable asshole.

There is meaning, there are shades of meaning, and things that simply mean what they mean, if you know what I mean.  I can easily understand that many people love other people who are intractable assholes.  It may be another thing to recognize the lovable qualities myself, even as I also see the intractable asshole.  But that, I suppose, is simply nuance.  And nuance, as we all know…. fuck nuance.  You want nuance or a check?  Your choice, it’s a free country.

Cliches are another thing.  Just because I avoid them like the plague doesn’t mean some editor will be able to resist quickly swapping in the familiar rather than yielding to the more precise description I’ve put together.  

But I am a whiner by nature, as should be clear to anyone who has read even a couple of these posts.  In fact, instead of writing my next pay day, a generous fee for not a lot of work, something I sat down to do, I am whinging here about how hard it is to see even the most innocent and well-meaning violence done to my inviolable prose. 

Wee wee wee.  Or as the editor might style it:  oui, oui, oui.

 

Reprieve for Thanksgiving

I heard the bit on the radio yesterday about the president pardoning a turkey.   They do this every year, I’ve heard it many, many times over the years.   I heard it before I was a vegetarian (or pescatarian, as a friend corrects)  and every year for the seven or so since I stopped eating terrestrial meat.  Though the bit annoys me every year, it was not until I heard about Mr. Obama’s scripted bit of mischievous mercy at the White House the day before Thanksgiving that the obvious bludgeoned me.

The two pardoned turkeys, Abe and his understudy Honest, were presumably picked out of a group of condemned birds.  The rest of you butterball bitches, over to the slaughterhouse.  Have a nice ride, boys! The good news was announced on the radio, coast to coast, Abe and Honest would be spared from having their heads cut off and would live out the rest of their lives on a nature farm.  Children could smile at the heartwarming thought of these two lucky birds escaping the hatchet.  

Something I’d never thought of before, in my general disgust at this lightheartedly sadistic ritual of symbolic mercy: if these birds got a presidential pardon, what capital crime were they on Death Row for?   They’d been condemned at birth, true, but what was their actual crime?  Then it hit me.  They’d been found guilty of the crime of being meat.  Not one had been on trial for so much as a second, outside of Abe and Honest in 2015, they’d been condemned by the millions before they were born.

There was no denying their guilt, even if they could have been given due process of some kind.  There’s no defense, even if a genius turkey emerged and somehow made it through Harvard Law School. Guilty as charged:  when cooked skillfully we are delicious.   We can’t really do anything about it, my eloquence and accomplishments notwithstanding, we, as a species, are way too stupid.  Even pigs, who are much smarter than dogs and cats, can do nothing against their executioners.  No pig is ever pardoned, or if she is, we don’t hear about it on the radio between ads for great savings on Black Friday.

I’d heard a guy on the radio several years ago talking about how depressed pigs are when they are shoved into tiny pens too small for them to move around in and force fed.   They understand quickly that they are in Auschwitz, that any plans they might have had regarding their life are now over.  No more wallowing in mud, nuzzling the piglets, no farm kid’s affectionate hand on their bristly side.   Just a horrible life in an industrialized killing plant until they are fattened up enough and then a frightening and brutal death, carried out by underpaid workers who have one of the world’s most gruesome jobs.  

Nice that Abe and Honest got pardoned.  It was the right thing to do, Mr. President.  Kids need this kind of good news in a world where kids are slaughtered every minute of every hour.  On the other hand, sir, what the fuck?  I mean, seriously, what the fuck?

A guy like your predecessor, a likable idiot with some misguided and repugnant views about the world, well, he can get away with it.  I suppose I have to let you off the hook, as a matter of basic fairness.   I try not to ride a high horse just because my cat looked at me with great sensitivity as I was hearing about how depressed pigs get in their mechanized death camps.  

He looked at me like “this surprises you?   That humans are brutal, ruthless creatures who obtain their meat in the most despicable and highly profitable way?   You look surprised.  Pathetic.  How about a treat, you guilt-ridden prick?”  

Could not eat bacon after that, or cow, or even chicken or Abe or Honest’s relatives.   Gives me no right to pontificate about it, I just lost the ability to disconnect the soul of the animal raised for the slaughter from the delicious once-living tissue on my plate.

“Don’t even think about that moral high horse, man.  I got two words for you:  Adolf Hitler, motherfucker.”

Yeah, I know.  The psychopath who set the benchmark for evil was a vegetarian for the last twenty years or so of his hideous life.  A flatulent one, if the accounts of people who didn’t like him can be believed.  Supposedly did it in penance for the murder or suicide of the niece he was obsessed with, probably tried to have sex with.  Too bad his penance wasn’t a bullet through the temple.  Only tragedy about his death was that it didn’t happen twenty years earlier.

“OK, don’t change the subject.  What about the souls of the sentient sea creatures you have no hesitation to eat?  Less sentient than the ones who live on land?  Too alien as a life form to relate to, as you can in your sentimental attachment to cute mammals, anthropomorphized birds?”

Well, I’m just happy as hell that Abe and Honest will be living out their full, bird-brained lives at some game farm somewhere.  God bless this great nation, whose exceptionalness is more exceptional than the exceptionalness of any other people.

Happy Thanksgiving.

 

 

 

Ten Minute Drill

On your mark, get set….

wait a second.  I forgot my timer.

OK, here we go.

Wait, wait.  OK.  Ah, it’s no use.  The mind is like a molasses pond.  Hands like spoons.  Nothing good will come of this.

“There you go, again,” comes an uncanny Reagan in my ear.  

“Some boys are not content to let these nocturnal emissions come naturally,” says the Boy Scout manual, in the years before one spoke openly of masturbation.  “While this may cause no real harm, any real boy knows that anything that causes him to worry should be shared with a scout master or priest.”

“Father, I don’t know what it is, but I am not content to let these nocturnal emissions come naturally to me,” says the boy.  

“Oh boy,” says the reader, eyes rolled heavenwards, tired of this frog march already.  

“Have no fear, gentle reader, less than five minutes left,” writes the blahgger reassuringly.  

“We are not reassured….” says Meryl Streep, in her uncanny Eleanor Roosevelt voice.   It was her, the credits revealed, who read Eleanor’s part so perfectly in the brilliant Ken Burns documentary on the Roosevelts.  

“THIS is what you are doing today?” asks a disembodied voice incredulously.

We could use a class traitor like FDR in the White House today.  Is nobody inspired by his example any more?

“That’s it,” says the guitar in the stand, “you will pick me up and play some standard in C.  How about the intro to Stardust?  There, that’s a good boy.  Leave everyone alone now.”  

When she’s right she’s right, I think wearily, either that or a short nap, or both.

Still 50 seconds left.  Are you concerned about that?  I am not, just waiting for the beep.  Turns out I don’t have pneumonia, something much more vague.

BEEP!

 

 

Collateral Damage, yawn

This will no doubt seem a peevish time, an ill-timed time, to bring this up, days after the hideous terrorist carnage in Paris, and Beirut.  There is never a good time to bring things like this up.  Why is it that I cannot help but bring things like this up?  It’s just a government policy, after all, mostly secret, designed to kill those who hate us, why the necessity to fuss over it like a bone caught crosswise in the craw?

When someone who is objectively evil, driven to do evil things, like Dick Cheney, or his bully lawyer David Addington, or generously rewarded torture justifiers tenured law professor John Yoo and Federal Judge Jay Bybee, authors of the secret Torture Memos; when someone sees the world in simplistic terms and is seemingly gullible, like George W. Bush, well– it is understandable that to them a bit of “enhanced interrogation” or “collateral damage” would mean little in the general scheme of things.

Who but a pussy, after all, would worry about the rights of people who are quite likely guilty of the most unthinkable crimes?   Or even if not guilty, nothing like a little brutality and a decade or so of detention to weed out the true haters from the ugly fuckers who just look like true haters.

In the case of evil people, or true believers, insisting that their actions are decent and morally justified, all you can really do is clench your jaw, in all but the rarest case you can’t stop them.

But what is one to do when the person ordering daily murders by remote control, from a kill list, and referring to murdered children as “collateral damage” is an excellent salesman who has made of himself the most likable product, an articulate and winning expression of our highest democratic ideals?    The quick-witted, cool exemplar of human decency?

This is, of course, a purely rhetorical question.   Candidates lie.  Presidents spin, conceal their worst acts.  Some give stirring speeches about government transparency that make lovers of participatory democracy tingle and then have a worse record on state secrecy and the concealment of government crimes than Mr. Cheney.   If Israel is condemned for “extra-judicial” killing of its enemies, so be it.  If it then becomes our national policy, secret kill lists, body counts, any dead, dismembered male over 18 presumed to be the enemy, who the hell are you to get all self-righteous about it?  

An excellent question, sir.  You are nobody to get all fucking self-righteous about it.   Better a thousand innocents die over there than one of us be murdered by them over here.  End of story.  

Any other questions, jerk-off?

 

 

 

 

 

Walking Pneumonia

I got up with the sun several days in a row, the reverse of my usual practice of retreating to a darkened room as the sun begins prying open the blinds here.  I walked many miles every day, seeing cool things, noticing and photographing great signs, calligraphy, sights. Walking with others, I did not stop when tired, although I often wanted to.  

I did notice the extraordinary heaviness in my lungs while climbing a steep hill.   I thought I might have suddenly aged forty years.    What the fuck?   I stood there gasping like a fish on the floor of the rowboat.  It took me a startlingly long moment to regain my breath.   My lungs were full of phlegm, green at first, lighter as time went on.   Was this the result of ten hours in the lung ward on the back of an international flight?  Sitting next to a robustly hacking man who also used my right side as a kind of body pillow?

I was sleepless on the plane coming back, looked with envy at the blissfully snoring Sekhnet across the aisle.   Afterwards she told me she’d felt my hand on her arm, periodically trying to get her attention so I could express my misery.   Wise of her, not a facial muscle twitched as I prodded her.

On arriving home I immediately crawled under the covers for a nap.  I slept five hours without turning over.  Glanced at the clock, it was already afternoon.  Next time I saw the clock it was the evening.

“Why am I so tired?” I asked Sekhnet, stumbling downstairs after a ten hour nap.

“Maybe you have walking pneumonia,” she said, helpfully.

The next few days passed in a kind of fog.  Shoot.  Maybe I do have walking pneumonia.  Glad my free Obamacare physical is coming up in a few days.  The last trip to that office, to see a clueless physician’s assistant, cost me almost $500.

Epilogue to Childhood Memory

The ideologically driven filmmakers of “Let My People Go” (see previous post) certainly made their point to an eight year-old viewer, at least until the moment he was forced to make a dash to vomit.  In the fifty years since that visceral moment, history, like freedom, has been on the march.  

There were several wars in those years between the Jewish State and its neighbors including a decisive one, in 1967, when the virtually indefensible 1948 borders of Israel were expanded to include the buffers of the Occupied Territories of Gaza, the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Sinai.   Since that time, various Israeli governments have put permanent, strategically placed settlements in some of those territories.  There has been a shit-storm of controversy, with violent fanatics on both sides having way too much say over the outcome.  No doubt, given the choice, most people on each side would prefer peace to endless war.  The tragedy is that the voices of modest, decent people are rarely as loud and persuasive as the voices of violent haters ready to kill, everybody and anybody.  Take no chances, don’t trust their words, kill them!  Make them pay!

Intellectual understanding only goes so far.  I can understand why powerless people living in hopeless camps for generations, subjected to curfews, checkpoints, searches, rough treatment, detention, torture, would feel desperate enough to resort to and celebrate violence.  I can understand why peaceful citizens on the other side would demand curfews, checkpoints and heavy-handed tactics in order to avoid being killed by people desperate enough to blow themselves up.   Like I say, understanding with the mind only goes so far.   Certain things, in the word of one peace-loving Israeli I once knew, are un-understandable.  

In hindsight, as they say, many things snap into the old 20/20 focus.  If you think of a handful of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, determined to take some Nazis with them to hell as the Nazis were ‘liquidating’ the ghetto, you have a clue how this rear-view moral vision works.

There is no real choosing which was worse, the killing of millions during the Middle Passage over the course of three centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, or the killing of millions during a frenzied three or four year industrialized killing machine fueled by German ingenuity and efficiency.   I could not say, generations later, that either atrocity gives anyone a right to kill anyone else over it.

I’ve got no answer, propose no equivalencies, no justifications, nada.  It’s a horrible situation over there in Palestine/Israel, Israel/Palestine, as in many parts of the world, many of them in the immediate neighborhood.  Violence and brutality are always passionately justified by the practitioners.   History shows that the violent and brutal often carry the day while voices of reason usually get their brains blown out if they speak clearly enough and get enough attention.   I’d like to believe that in the long run human decency and our eternal longing for peace win out, but, looking around, I realize I may be with Anne Frank there, and Jesus, and right before he got shot, the Gandhi I was cursing just the other day.