Category Archives: muttering to myself

The Madness of Being Mad

First, let me just say, I have never felt more mentally alert, focused, articulate, in the moment, centered.  Second, let me just add, I have never more frequently done things like locking my keys inside the locked house, making foolish mistakes on simple, routine strategic matters, being unable — some might foolishly say ‘unwilling’–  to move a foot in any direction, alienating more people or doing so more pleasantly, listing more commonplace small forgettings as ruthlessly or judging over and underwhelmed people, including myself, more harshly, if never in a calmer, more measured way.    

The phone?  It weighs a hundred and fifty pounds.  Why are you bothering me about picking up the phone?  I will send out a mass email, surely somebody I know, or used to know, will come by to help me lift the goddamn thing to my head so I can make those thank you calls.  “Thank you, thank you!” I will say cheerfully to people confused into silence by my sudden gratitude.  Suspicious, they’ll wonder if I’m mocking them.  They will be right to wonder.  That’s why I don’t pick up the phone, a small piece of metal that ridiculously weighs as much as many full grown human beings.   A once state-of-the-art cell phone that belonged to my now dead mother, she used it every day when she was alive, how the hell did she lift it to her ear?   

“You use the phone that your mother, dead more than four years, used to use?” asks a friend, already knowing the answer, but somehow having to ask anyway.  You are not the only one who is insane, I tell myself to console myself, wondering who is the one who is saying this reassuring thing to me.

Such is the madness of the mildly mad, or maybe not.

The ongoing snit over who had it worse

Once again, writing here is the last thing I should be doing at the moment, but with Kristallnacht commemorated so evocatively the other night by a priest, a cantor, a pianist and singer, two dancers, the mournful sob of a shofar, the lighting of candles, the breaking of glass, I find myself thinking again about the mass murders of the early 1940s, the slaughter of both sides of my family in those years, equally atrocious mass murder during World War I (the war to end all wars), the Khymer Rouge Killing Fields, so-called Ethnic Cleansing mass killings and the ongoing large scale slaughters in Africa, the Middle East and wherever else they break out, plus the killing of innocents in wars, declared and covert, that is going on as I type these words.  This roll call of organized mass murder, genocide, if you prefer, puts me in mind of the painfully counter-productive, idiotic debate about which mass killing was worse than which other one.  It is not hard to figure out that every one of them is the worst.

“The Holocaust was a novum,” said a professor of mine once, introducing a theory that was not his own.  He was a German Jew who had left the Fatherland as a young boy, escaping with his family right before the heavy fist came crashing down on the Jews of Europe.  A novum, he explained, was something never seen in the world before but explainable by science — and he ticked off the features that according to this theory made the Nazi killings a novum— the systematic, mechanized organization of it (never seen before), the singling out of Jews and others (but primarily Jews– unless you were one of the others, of course), the unprecedented hideous efficiency of the bureaucratized killing machine, the incredible numbers rounded up, deported and killed in such a short period of time.  

I recall the professor seeming a little perplexed that some Blacks were angry about the term “The Holocaust” and the feeling, among certain Blacks, that the Jews were trying to corner the market on suffering when the Middle Passage, which went on for centuries, was as brutal, and killed as many, as Auschwitz and the rest of the novum of the capital H holocaust.

“But,” say those who argue that the Holocaust was the worst and most horrible example of man’s inhumanity to man, not an unreasonable claim, although the quibble misses the larger point, “6,000,000 Jews systematically murdered in four years, plus a couple of million others, is worse than perhaps 4,000,000 Africans killed over the course of hundreds of years, I’m sorry to say.”

“4,000,000?  Are you serious?  The number is more like 20,000,000, Mr. Novum.”  

The number of Africans killed during the slave trade will never be known with any precision, the slave operation was conducted by several countries over hundreds of years and there was nobody keeping count, or interested in anything but maximizing the  profit to be derived by increasing the number of live slaves that arrived fit for sale. The lives of those millions of enslaved people who managed to survive?  Not much better, in many cases, than the life of a slave laborer from Auschwitz, though the American slave master had an economic, and sometimes Christian, incentive to keep his slave alive whereas the slave laborers from Auschwitz were in most cases disposable.

“The death of one man is a tragedy.  The death of a million men is a statistic,” noted mass murdered Joseph Stalin is said to have opined.

It should be remembered that Hitler laughed off concerns that a mass killing program would be a public relations nightmare for his administration.  “After all, gentleman,” the famous psychopath is reported to have said, “who today remembers the slaughter of the Armenians?”  

He made the comment only about twenty years after the last of the brutal killings of Armenians herded into the desert, toward what is now the Syrian border, and in Turkish villages and towns, drowned in rivers, marched to death, burnt, whipped to death, shot, starved.  By 1940 few indeed remembered it.

This organized murder of more than a million people happened during the catastrophic World War, which was followed by revolution, the wildly roaring twenties, the stock market crash, worldwide economic depression and the violent, fevered lead up to the next World War.  The world was busy, busy!!!!

The world is still busy, busy!!!  We cannot stop to consider all the terrors we and this poor world are hurtling headlong into.  If we reach any conclusion at all about it we shudder to think of the continual murderous horrors, some done in our name, that we are powerless to stop.  The murderer may be sometimes be a patriotic American, pursuing a complicated policy designed and advertised as protecting our freedom, but the outcome for the murdered child and the grieving grandparents is the same as it has ever been. 

On the other hand — I smash yer fez

[warning:  this post contains violent, heavy handed irony which does not always work in written form.  In fact, it didn’t fare much better in an out loud reading, where it caused a tearful plea to please stop reading it (right before the too late redeeming ending, too).  Abhorring slavery, assassination, lynching, maniacal use of firearms, it uses violent language to try to show the amount of righteous rage violence unleashes, but it is a dangerous game not to be played lightly, as I have attempted to play it here.   I regret any upset this post may cause, even as I leave it here, for whatever redeeming social value it might have.  A less visceral, more humane version is here if you prefer your points made less brutally.]

 

And, with accursed French nuance, I confusingly add that, naturally, it also feels almost irresistibly good to be righteously outraged, you fucking fuck!  

What are the laws, after all, but the organized expression of this rage to be right?   They are made by those with the power to institutionalize their unfair advantage, no matter how grotesque, and to enforce it by deadly state action, if necessary.  Slaves?  We need them to make ourselves wealthier, fuck you.  Free the slaves?  Fuck you, get a rope, we’ll show you how we deal with fucks like you.  Oh, go ahead and call the damn sheriff, he can hold the end of the damn rope we hang you from, Mr. All Men Are Created Equal Pantload, sir. 

Or even better, and a more recent example– Rumsfeld, after 9/11, facing a reluctant chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Shelton so concerned with legal safeguards for protecting the innocent and due process when using elite, secret black ops squads to kill foreign nationals suspected of involvement in terrorism.  “You’re fired, general,” said the jaunty Secretary of Defense, hiring a new guy who agreed that all terrorists and potential terrorists, everywhere on earth, must be hunted down and killed and the more secretively, the better. Any collateral damage?  Also secret.  State secret.  Classified.  Need to know. Don’t ask, we kill you.

The funny thing, if it is funny, is that even those circumventing the letter, spirit and intent of even the most high minded laws, or especially those, will hire the best lawyers in the world to write a preemptive justification for why they are legally allowed, even obliged, to not follow the law that they are willfully violating.

Where can we find these legal justifications, we citizen members of the general public of the world’s greatest democracy?  Top secret, bitches.  We have a 1917 anti-espionage statute carrying the death penalty, you want to be charged and prosecuted under that deadly law, journalist bitches?   I don’t think so!  You want to act like the truth doesn’t embolden our enemies?  Get the rope!

Righteous rage feels good for a second, while you are spraying machine gun fire and screaming at the top of your lungs at inhuman enemies, real or imagined.  After that, though, if you reflect for a moment, you’re as likely to turn the gun on yourself as to do anything else.  I would err on the side of pausing to take a few breaths before capitulating to rage and smashing your fucking fez.  

I would argue, if I was an arguing fellow, that, when not under direct physical threat, being gentle, calm and soft-spoken is usually much more productive than being righteously enraged, agitated, loud, and ready for justifiable violence.

Of course, that’s just me, fucking Ahimsa-Boy.  What the hell do I know?

 

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

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

Living in an Immature Nation

Each time I find my blood boiling these days I’m surprised.   I feel that my blood should have learned how not to boil by now.  It has been several years now,  trying to make myself a mild man, with modest success.   The surge of anger some things stir, often things on the radio news, still takes me by surprise.   Like doomed children in NYC I’ve never met, and am trying in vain to work with, the anger often flares over a seeming abstraction– like the senseless death of another doomed kid. My abstraction-inspired anger seems weak compared to the concrete things most citizens of an immature nation become enraged about.

A fanatic takes a large sharp knife, forces one of ours to make a speech to a video camera, then brutally cuts the man’s head off.  Unspeakable savagery abhorrent to any decent person.   We can be dismayed that our Saudi Arabian allies publicly behead people for a variety of crimes, but at least that is a sovereign government rather than some random vicious asshole with a sharp knife and an internet hook-up.

Murderous fanatics launched an ingenious and horrific attack on America thirteen years ago that succeeded in changing many things in the nation they hated.  They killed thousands of random citizens.  They caused unimaginable emotional and economic devastation– the immediate economic costs of the attack alone were literally billions of dollars (some sickening graphs are here).  

America changed overnight from a nation coming to terms with the necessity for international law to one that justified torture and any practice that could inflict damage on this inhuman international enemy.   The 9/11 attacks provoked two decade long wars, one a “pre-emptive” war entirely unprovoked, shoddily planned and disastrous, that cost over a trillion dollars, stalemated America, left the Middle East shattered, angry and violent and thousands more Americans dead, maimed, disabled for life.  Not to mention Iraqis, Afghanis, Syrians, Lybians, Egyptians, Yemenis, Pakistanis– countless millions displaced, orphaned, torn apart.

Recent polls showed that Americans are finally sick of endless war, even if it is far away and fought only by those who sign up and an army of highly paid mercenaries.   Even if American military dead can no longer by shown on TV, Americans are sick of the wars.  They accomplish nothing, cost zillions, make the opposite of friends for the U.S.A., are pointless, less than pointless.  Some argue they play directly into the hands of terrorists bent on destroying the West.

Even if there are no American “boots on the ground”, most Americans seemingly have come to realize that bombing raids over impossibly complicated conflict zones seem like a stupid idea for solving knotty, centuries-old problems. Particularly when this American murder from the air often makes things worse in unforeseen ways. Particularly when those knotty, centuries-old conflicts are being played out thousands of miles away, across an ocean and another continent.

While Americans were telling pollsters they are not anxious for the next war, the president was lambasted by his many enemies as a weak, vacillating, nuance-pondering  sissy for hesitating to authorize a “muscular response” to the latest provocation, for not immediately ordering the slaughter of guilty and innocent alike each time a new horror happens somewhere in that oil rich region.  Recent polls showed that most Americans have come to support this hesitation to use state violence as the first option.  It’s almost as if we have finally tallied up the results of our bold, muscular war policy of recent years and realize perhaps a bit more reflection, and less reflexive muscular activity, might have led to a better result than rushing in boldly to blow things up and declaring ourselves victors before the battle was won.

What had my blood boiling the other day?  The newest polls found that a majority of Americans are now behind the president who finally stopped wringing his hands and did what good red-blooded patriots have wanted him to do since those horrible videos of the beheadings came out.   Recent polls show Americans love the bombing of these monsters, these ISIS savages.  ISIS, crucifiers, beheaders, rapists of children, using an explosive public relations campaign, did what American advertisers strive to do all the time — dramatically sold a brand and inflamed imaginations to change hearts and minds.  The president’s friends and enemies alike applauded when he finally announced that America would kick ISIS’s fucking asses.

I think of this endless cycle of blood-crazed lynch mobs, the vicious haters proving their point over and over.  I can provoke you and make you kill, make you step over your mother and even kick her in the face, to rush out to murder and, in turn, justify my revenge killings.  Nyah, nyah, nyah nyaaaaaa-yah!   I put my smirking picture on the internet cutting one of your people’s heads off and you’ll kill more civilians than I ever slaughtered (and I crucified, disemboweled, burned to death, shot, stabbed, hacked more faceless chumps than you can count).  “YOU SUCK, AMERICA!!!!” I taunt on viral video.    Then I sit back and wait for American bombers to help me do my important work.   You fools are my greatest recruiters!

Here’s the wild part about living in an immature nation– we have little sense of anything outside of our own immediate concerns.   We’ve been raised and trained this way.  We think of ourselves as exceptional, different and better than those born in slums without sewer systems or even outhouses.  It is truly not in our nature to equate every other human life with our own.  We will, of course, knit our brows in true sorrow when we see footage of a dozen little children’s bodies, blown up in some remote village where we also blew up many adult men we had good reason to believe were mostly terrorists.  Sure collateral damage happens, but way over there, you know, it happens to “f-ing sand n-words”, if we picture them at all, badly drawn faceless creatures randomly scurrying on a computer screen.  You can blow them up for extra points while fighting the haters of our freedom.   Just don’t accidentally kill one of our own!  LOL!

My Regimen

Depressed because you don’t know any other creative types?   That’s a lot to expect in our mercantile workaday world, my friend, creative types.   If you go through life being depressed at the scarcity of creative types you will have a very sad, lonely life.   Creative souls can be found everywhere, the trouble is, these souls are also carrying immense burdens. 
 
Consider one, an alcoholic with a schizophrenic brother, both beaten by their father from the old country.  In the old country a severe beating was a hallmark of good parenting.  In the new country, the ghosts of the old country howled when his long-demented mother finally died at 99 years-old.   “DO SOMETHING!!” screamed his mad sisters and so he leaped up and began mouth to mouth resuscitation of his mother’s dead body.  
 
He’s a very creative guy, good sense of humor, inventive and a bit zany.  He’s an alcoholic from an insane family who gave his dead 99 year-old mother mouth to mouth resuscitation at the rabid urgings of his mad sisters.  We are neither this nor that, though it may seem to us otherwise.
 
The alarm is set, everybody has a time they have to hop out of bed and get busy.  Many people start their kizatskis with sunrise, some even before.  Up at 2:30 for a live shot, out the door like an arrow at 3:00, on location 4:15, set up and ready before the talent arrives for the shot at 5:00.   The show must go on, office opened at 8:00 for the first patients, I am there drinking coffee at 7:45 every single day of the week.  To do that I have to wake up at 5:40, my morning routine is almost an hour and my commute to work usually about 40 minutes.   I need fifteen minutes to sit in the silence with my coffee before I turn the lock and bring the office to life.  I open the office door and start my jumping jacks, 200 of them, then I put my palms on the floor and do 400 squat thrusts.  Some kizatskis and then 150 leg presses.  All the time I am speaking to clients over a speakerphone, so it is imperative I not grunt. 
I have made myself able to perform these exertions without ever sounding winded, but it takes training.
 
If, on a given day, I miss the 200 jumping jacks, 400 squat thrusts and 150 leg presses, (plus kitzatskis)  I do double the number of each on the following day, in two equal sets.  It is crucial to do them double-time on the make-up day, because they have to all be done before my first appointment at 8:30 and I’m going to need a quick shower and change into a crisp suit before that meeting.  I shave at home, so that’s already taken care of.  After my morning appointments I play racquetball against an energetic bot at the gym for one hour, a good workout.  After a sauna and a rinse I have lunch for 20 minutes, green leafy vegetables lightly steamed and seasoned with fresh herbs.
 
Then, in the afternoon, I spend an hour in the woodshed, and then I go to the well.

It Makes Perfect Sense

On the day after marchers clogged downtown NYC to protest America’s lack of a real response to catastrophic man made climate change I take a moment to set down, in my aggravatingly simplistic Devil’s advocate way, why the status quo makes perfect sense.  In the process you will no doubt see the folly of protesters who lack the economic clout trying to get serious attention from a government run by the private dollars, speaking loudly and freely, of those who do.

Let’s look at this from the point of view of the industry that produces and sells the amazingly lucrative products that result in the pumping of carbon into the atmosphere.   It may be true that carbon emitted by millions of cars, trucks, trains and airplanes increases the greenhouse gases that are warming the earth and already creating great climate disturbance.  May well be true, though those great climate disturbances may also just be part of a natural cycle or the wrath of a vengeful God.   It may also be true that an industry based on extracting an ever decreasing natural resource from deep inside the earth is a bad long-term business model.  Let’s also admit that could probably be the case, eventually, though you must also admit you don’t have a viable alternative plan at the moment.

Now look at it from an economic point of view in the here and now, from the perspective of the Oil and Gas Industry and those whose vast fortunes are based on its ongoing prosperity.   The internal combustion engine, powered by fossil fuel, made most of human progress in the last hundred years, a time of unprecedented human progress, possible.  We transport things from coast to coast, around the globe, fly airplanes everywhere, commute long distances to jobs, travel in gas powered vehicles to beautiful places for holidays.   Our economy depends on this wonderful engine, which is powered by the transformed and processed remains of dinosaurs.  Industries related to automobile and other gasoline powered transportation employ literally tens of millions.  

Let’s take a quick look at the bottom line and we’ll evaluate who is the foolish party in this debate over whether man is really destroying his home by allowing carbon to flow freely from smokestacks and exhaust pipes.    From the dawn of the automobile the oil business has been a gold mine.   Billions and billions in profit are made every year from the production and sale of this liquid gold.  As the supply gets smaller and smaller, and demand rises, the price only goes up.   The immutable law of economics.  Talk about a business model!   If you were an executive in an oil company, or an investor, rich beyond your millionaire father’s wildest dreams, with a product whose supply is ever diminishing and whose price has tripled in the last decade, would it not behoove you to spend however many millions it took to convince people that those who march in protest of the unfettered use of this miraculous product are misguided idiots, at best?

They hate our freedom, you will say, and it will certainly be true that they hate yours.   They gullibly and blindly believe the vast majority of scientists who have studied the climate and are constantly issuing alarming findings about ice caps melting, sea levels rising, droughts, floods, murderous super storms, raging wild fires.  What do you call someone who is alarmed by supposedly alarming news?   That’s right, an Alarmist.   These are Climate Alarmists, freedom haters.   If you had to use one word it might be Communists.   You see, if they had their way, free enterprise would be ended and we’d all be back to using horse drawn carts.  It is far wiser to be skeptical when so much is at stake.  After all, we have scientists too who will tell you this is all ideologically driven liberal alarmism.   They will say, with no equivocation, that carbon produced by human activity has nothing to do with the natural cycles of climate or the wrath of God.  And the wrath of God will surely be upon those who hate freedom.

If a kid has a genius idea for a website he sells for a billion dollars, the pressing question on the minds of the business community is– how will he make even more money for his invention?  How will he keep it relevant, monetize it more efficiently, keep it moving forward, dynamic, maximize its profitability?   A billion dollars may look good on a balance sheet, or in a headline, but what is this bright 27 year-old’s next move?  The pressure is on the young man now, you see. The engine of our economy does not rest on making a fortune and living a life of good works, doing what you love, living on your fortune.  The engine of our economy does not rest– it drives ever forward, onward, upward.  And the engine it drives is powered by gasoline– and never being satisfied to have merely enough.

Isolation Chamber 

 

Solitary confinement is probably the cruelest form of incarceration, as has been noted in many contexts and by various schools of experts.  

Youthful offenders subjected to periods of solitary confinement may suffer irreversible damage, to pull a dramatic sounding, likely indisputable, fact from a nether cavity.   Routinely, for disciplinary reasons and others, teen prisoners in America are shut into cells by themselves and allowed to stew for days or weeks.   It is very cruel, but apparently quite usual, just the way we do business here in the U.S.A. these days.

 “Ah, another soapbox!” says my old friend.

“Just so,” says I.   And I’ll tell you something else, isolation is not an isolated problem restricted to forced detention.  Look at the wild popularity of social media, which is neither, strictly speaking, social nor media.  It is a constant contest for attention in a distracted world that has only so much attention to pay to any of its hundred million media creators.  How often do we note that people with 10,000 friends on Facebook don’t have one to call when they are feeling down?   140 characters, gaily and bravely tweeted out to the world, somebody…. follow me.   Into the breach, follow me!!   Hello? Can I get a tweet back?  Retweet?  Ping?  Hello?

 “Turn that burner down, partner, your pot’s about to berl over, and you’re sounding a bit… crazy…” my friend says.

 “’My friend’…” I think, recalling Napoleon’s great remark, to his diary, about friendship.  After noting that he regards man as base coin existing merely to gratify his passions he records that he fully realizes he has no true friends, only people who suck up to him because he’s powerful, charismatic, etc., he sniffs to his diary “as for me, you don’t suppose I care?”

 “To his diary, you say?” says my friend, getting the ironic point I will belabor briefly now.  Napoleon denied that he needed friends, intimacy or anyone to confide in.   He denied it to his best friend, the journal he confided his most intimate thoughts to.

 I know very well I have no friends, I say to this apparition, this flimsy literary device, “my friend”.  To the extent that I can make people laugh, or think, or feel something, I am a wonderful guy and liked just fine.  Like Napoleon in power, I know I will have all the friends I need as long as I remain as I am.  I recall walking with a group of friends on a long hike a few autumns ago, first with one, then another. We caught up, exchanged a few anecdotes, touched base.  Before I left each friend they were laughing.  I left ‘em laughing, each one, and each in a unique way.   That’s neat, I remember thinking.

 “But you say these people are not your friends?” he asks.

 “You need to shut up too,” I say, very, very tough.

 Here’s the thing. I was in mid e-conversation just now with somebody about a business mentor, and setting up a meeting with a business solutions specialist when I realized I was no longer online. “Hello?”   I had a response ready to send to one, was phrasing one for the other when… “hello?”  The line was dead.  Silent.   The dreaded silence descended like a gigantic, hideous, world masking testicle.

 “There goes a gigantic, hideous darling you should murder toot sweet, that gratuitous and disgusting testicle image,” says a friend with a keen editorial bent.

 Isolation does things to a person who lives alone.   I can tell you for sure. The internet suddenly winking out looms like a major catastrophe to people who communicate largely on line.   Silence.

 Oh, you have plenty of people you interact with every day. I understand. You make sales calls, have meetings, colleagues, discuss business, consult, talk to clients, josh with customers, prospects, make dinner plans, plan trips, talk to waiters, drivers, talk to strangers while waiting on line at the movies. You chat up everybody, and I don’t begrudge you that small, important pleasure. I don’t even ask you to consider what I’m writing here—there is no reason to ask or to consider.

The entire exercise — gratuitous.   Maybe that subway poster advertising The School of Visual Arts back in the 1970s hit the mark and will always hit the mark: having a talent is not worth much unless you know what to do with it. Talent is worthless, they intimated artfully, unless you monetize it.  All art is commercial in a commercial society, you dig?

“Art…” Hermann Goring grunts in disgust, although he plundered more than his share of valuable Degenerate Art during the Nazi gravy years, “when I hear the word culture I reach for my gun.”

Hard to blame the Nazi bastard on that score, you know? I don’t own a gun, except for the metaphorical one I fire off here from time to time.

“You are a chattering rictus,” an observer observes.

“Yes,” I say, “but I’m sure you don’t want your guts blasted with this metaphorical Glock 9.”   End of that particular story.   I stop, turn full face and flash my adorable rictus, gentle reader.

 

Please Tell Me You’re Kidding Me

“So you, a man without a megaphone, with no idea of how to get a megaphone, have as your goal giving a megaphone to poor, feral kids who have no voice in the world?” she said, not as a question.

“An uncharitable way to say it, but yes,” he said.

“Are you starting with the ‘he’ again?” she asked, her smile catlike.

“I leave that to you to figure out,” he said.   These conversations with the internalized victimizer were tedious, but sometimes unavoidable.  The thing was to be patient with the cruel voice in his head, he reasoned.

“Yes,” she said, “be patient with the voice of reality, the voice of the world, the voice of sanity and reason, the voice you’ve made it your life’s work to be deaf to.”

“Of course,” he thought.   It was true he was taking a beating.  No rest in his slumbers, eyes tired as soon as he opened them, the world a slippery uphill slope from the time he put his foot on the floor by his bed.  He could not escape the several ironies, heavy as anvils, clumsy as tortured metaphors.  

“You are so talented!” his friends’ children often told him in childish amazement.  

“You should monetize your art,” many a shrewd friend of a friend had told him years ago.  “Get used to rejection and just keep sending your stuff out, it’s as good, or better, than much of the stuff that’s selling.  You can make a fortune, with persistence and a little luck.”    

It was never a dream, making a fortune, or being loved by rich people.   The dream, somehow, had been making a difference, somehow.  The dream always involved brooding over people, particularly young ones, who were irretrievably fucked by the bad timing and placement of their birth.  

“Bingo!” she said, “now look in the mirror.  Happy Birthday!”

“I take my spirit and I smash the mirrors,” he said, singing Jimi’s triumphant couplet.  The song died in the cluttered room.   There was much to do, but where to start?   He’d heard a spot on the radio about New York City Business Solutions, a great resource for small businesses at any stage of development.  Prematurely thankful for this piece of  luck, he went on-line and got the number.

“The number has been changed,” the recording said and he jotted down the new number.  This new number turned out not to be the number for the office he was looking for, but one in Harlem where he was invited to leave a message.  He left a cheerful message but had no answer on the third business day.

He called 311, which gave him yet another number, which connected him to someone in the wrong office, a bright young man named Adam who promised to set things straight, and by the end of the day, spoke to the supervisor of the proper office who cheerfully promised him an appointment that week, which would be set up by Carlos, cc’d on the follow up email.  

“Thanks so much,” he wrote back three business days ago.  Perhaps they construed it as sarcasm?  

“Are you not used to the fact that virtually nobody ever gets back to you on matters of any importance at all?” she asked, yawning ostentatiously.  

“I’m going to call Adam back at the Lower Manhattan office,” he said.  

“Sure you are….” she said, letting her voice trail off annoyingly.  “Oh, by the way, that excellent application you wrote to the New York State Small Business Mentor Program, did you ever hear back on that?  It was really a wonderful description of your program and your needs, very well-written and positive sounding.  You put on a good act, anyway.”

“There were some business mentors in Utica, Buffalo, Ulster County, Onondoga County, Syracuse and other places who were sent off as automatically generated possible mentors…” he said.    

“Did you ever hear back from their help desk after you checked ‘please help me with this application’?  Did you ever get a return call on your voice mail seeking assistance?”

“I said, I’m going to call Adam back at the Lower Manhattan Office,” he said with great determination.   What he was thinking was ‘somebody tell me you’re fucking kidding me with this fucking shit.’

 

 

 

Ixnay on Ein-May Ampf-Kay

The other day I was reminded that I’m no Vonnegut, nothing like the writer who started writing as a corporate PR man, who worked long and diligently, and faced years of rejection and lack of appreciation, to make himself into a marketable commodity, both his writing and his folksy wit on the speaking circuit.  After many years of hard work he wound up well paid and beloved for both.  Today I was urged not to use the word “struggle” in the title of the book I might work on, if all else fails, as appears may well be the case, my imaginary city burning as I fiddle here.  

“Not ‘Struggle'” my friend said, to remind me of what I myself noted a few weeks ago here– people don’t want to read about a losing, against the odds struggle, unless the protagonist miraculously prevails, in which case he becomes an inspiring winner and the story an uplifting fable about the power of individual imagination, resourcefulness and perseverance. 

I assured him I’d call it something else, tempting as it is, as I indisputably struggle, to puckishly riff on Mein Kampf, after the shortened German title editors insisted on as an improvement of the original “My Struggle Against Seven Years of Lies and Hypocrisy and the Fucking Jews and Other Filthy Maggots Who Want to Bugger Me Even Though I Have Never Enjoyed Buggery of Any Kind and I’ll Kill Anyone Who Says I Like To Take It Up The Ass!“.  The future Fuhrer was persuaded that the book would sell better with a strong, forceful, more succinct title.  “Those first two words, so powerful and perfect!” he was assured obsequiously, “the rest of the title, excellent though it also is, would be a distraction, and hard to fit on the spine.”

“You lay it all out so beautifully in the book, Adolf, no point giving away all that for free in the title. Build the suspense a little.  Make them buy the book if they want all that,” another cajoled, fawningly.  The author of that book, a strong-willed mentally deranged autodidact who had dictated it to a functional illiterate, was not a man to be trifled with.  He was a writer who needed flattery more than most.  In later years he’d have men hung by piano wire for offenses far less grave than second guessing the best title for his own book about his unspeakable struggle against forces hell bent on making the world a nightmare.  In that department, he was an expert.

“Did something bad happen to you today?” she asked, eyes looking sad.

“Shut up,” I said.

“You’re no Hitler,” she snapped, turning back to her computer game.

I understand.  Anyway, Mein Kampf was a main source of Hitler’s livelihood until he went on the public payroll years later as Chancellor of Germany.  It was a best seller in Germany during those wild years.  The best selling book that nobody ever read, it was a popular wedding present and also given for birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, confirmations and, by black-humored wags, bar mitzvahs.  Try reading it some time.  It’s impossible to get through more than a couple of pages, although the short section on propaganda is breathtakingly chilling and very well presented. 

Much as I am biased against him, horrific as his own nightmare childhood undoubtedly was, as much as I hate the man, if I’m being totally honest here, I have to give him this much:  he was a visionary as far as how to sell an idea to the public and he forever changed the way it’s done by most governments and virtually every advertiser of political campaigns:  

You want to influence the masses with facts and reason, logic and persuasion?  HA!  You stupid bastard, I’ll hang you from a meathook by your ass!  You want to influence the public, my friend?  You stir their emotions, shake their emotions, stomp violently on their emotions, mainly their fear.  You TERRIFY THEM!  Yes, that’s what the Allies did, inspired terror and hatred of the German army in the World War.  That was the right thing to do!  

Our commanders were no different than others, in fact, a few vomited when they saw what the fucking Turks did to the Armenians (don’t get me started on the Turks, or the Armenians, for that matter).   But our propagandists took the high road in the Great War and lost the war for hearts and minds, the war itself, even though our military was far superior.  They idiotically stuck to the truth, told our people that we were a superior culture and a great nation and that we deserved to win because we represented the highest values civilization had so far attained, and the Americans, English and French were inferior and contemptible.  All true, but useless as engines to drive war machines of hatred and revenge.

The Allies were smart and effective, they were ruthless and not hobbled by quaint scruples about what was true, sportsmanlike, decent.   They knew that  primal fear and visceral hatred motivate far better than intellectual appeals to pride and contempt.  They used any lie they could think of to make their people, and their troops, fear and hate the Germans.  The filthier the lie, the more brazen and sickening the lie, the better.  The Allies had it right, alas!

FEAR and HATRED, I’ll say it again, that’s the goal and the more explosive and terrifying the lie, the more gigantic and atrocious the lie, and, YOU KEEP SCREAMING IT UNTIL THEY ARE QUAKING IN THEIR SMELLY BOOTS, the better.  You get them TERRIFIED!   TERROR!!!  You fill them with nightmares until they shit themselves.  BOOO!!!   VOOO-OOO!!!!!  Then they will listen eagerly when you tell them what they must do to save themselves, they are ready to obey, march in columns to kill.   Their savior will assure them with absolute confidence:  we will face this fearsome enemy together, bravely, our complete and glorious triumph is preordained by GOD.  Follow me and we will KILL THE MONSTER!  And they will lean forward, hushed and expectant, to hear the details, commit any acts necessary to KILL THE MONSTERS!!!  You have them in the palm of your hand, agents of your will, if you keep them in terror. And simple, terrible, unimaginable lies endlessly repeated are the best way to keep them terrified.

Not long after Hitler outmaneuvered the rest of the complacent German right and had himself named Chancellor, the Reichstag, the German Parliament Building, went up in flames.  The man who started the fire, amazingly in twenty places simultaneously on several floors of the huge building, was captured, tried and executed.  The convicted arsonist, a Dutch Communist named Marinus van der Lubbe, is referred to in at least one famous historian’s account as a “Dutch half-wit”.  The lone arsonist was tried and beheaded, although symbolic justice was eventually done.

The Reichstag fire was as instrumental to Hitler’s dictatorship as the 9/11 attacks were to extreme right wing American politicians who seized the chance to consolidate all kinds of special extra-constitutional powers in their executive and themselves.  The Weimar Constitution needed no revision the day after the Reichstag fire– an Enabling Act,  triggered by the national emergency, was immediately passed and Mr. Hitler ruled under the emergency powers granted by the unamended Weimar Constitution until the day twelve years later he killed his newly wed wife and his beloved dog and shot himself in the mouth.  It must be noted that it’s hard to blame him for those final acts, though he might have spared his wife and his faithful Alsatian.  And at the risk of sounding opinionated, the only shame is that he didn’t put the gun in his mouth twenty years earlier.

And also, at the risk of sounding opinionated and slyly insinuating, both, I note that it was not until the massive and sweeping Patriot Act was passed immediately after the attacks on September 11, 2001, that the word “Homeland” came into general use here to describe the land of the free and the home of the brave.  Naomi Wolf, in The End of America, pointed out that this was a direct translation of Hitler’s preferred term for the German Reich, die Heimat.   Ditto “war footing” which we were on until Shock and Awe began, which was another Nazi coinage, kreigsfuss.   Not for nothing, I’m just saying.

But I digress.

We live in a world made black and white by paid haters on both sides, and the hissing flames are tended by the hate profiteers, self-made millionaire professional dealers in partisan hatred.  There is a bottom line, non-negotiable and debated not with an exchange of reasoned arguments, but emotionally, from roaring throats with veins distended.  Freedom or tyranny!  Liberty or Death!    In theory freedom is the right to do whatever increases your happiness or protects your interests without harming others.  Tyranny is force used ruthlessly against the exercise of freedom.

There’s theory, and each side marshals its simplified version of the truth to support their ‘theory’, loaded and problematic terms like “the free market”, “democracy” and “justice”  are angrily spat back and forth into the open spittoon of public discourse, and then there’s reality on the ground.  It is in the reality on the ground, as both sides argue deafeningly over the moral high ground, where faces are being stomped into the dirt with heavy boots.

Thinking back to my friend’s excellent advice, I’ll leave the word “struggle” out of my title and work with something like “Love and the Empowering Echoes of Hope”, something that might sell in liberal arts college bookstores.  He’s right, to hell with the incessant Hitler jokes.  Hitler was an asshole, and about as funny as a meathook to the old trapezius.