Category Archives: muttering to myself

Too Big Not To Bugger Thousands

“The corporate man is the man of the future.”   Heinrich Himmler

I am urged to be proactive about this, now seven week, lack of internet and phone service.  I call today on Sekhnet’s land line, browsing the internet as I  punch in my various responses on the phone’s keypad.  After a remarkably short five minute wait a human at Verizon picks up.
 
“Do you have a contact number?”  he asks and I give him the cell number they’ve already made several robocalls to, the number I was promised Tuesday, falsely but hopefully by a sympathetic young woman in Pittsburgh, would be called on Wednesday.
 
He will email the cable maintenance department, they will contact me.  He has no way of checking what is going on directly. His last record shows a service call on May 9, which is what the robot that greets me every time I call keeps asking me if I want to reschedule.
 
“Is the Cable Maintenance department part of Verizon?”
 
“Yes, sir,” he says.
 
“Would you please connect me to them, then.”
 
“We’re not able to do that.  I’m going to send them an email and they’ll contact you.”
 
I take a breath, ask the young man to put himself in my position.  I tell him the story, without snarling.  Then I ask, if he was me, would he thank him for the help and wait for Verizon to contact me?  Especially if multiple promises to contact him had already not been kept, and a bill for undelivered services sent to him five weeks after the service was promised to be restored?
 
“I would not like it,” he admits.
 
“Please connect me to your supervisor,” I tell the pawn.
 
“She’ll tell you the same thing,” then he promises to walk over and get her.  Fifteen minutes of blaring muzak follows.  Can you spell GO FUCK YOURSELF ASSHOLE, I work for these Nazis, do you think I have a good life?
 
Someone who is not programmed to be a victim, I suppose, maybe someone tenacious, with legal training and great verbal and people skills, would find a way to fix this, I guess.   Seems impossible as I waited for a ‘supervisor’ (the minimum wage worker in the next cubicle, most likely) that I was forced to hear blasting, ever more maddening generic music on a speaker phone that even at the lowest volume was at an unbearable level.  I suppose I could have put it into the drawer here and closed it until the supervisor came on.
 
To cheer myself during the wait I looked on the bright side.  I had printed out the actual size mock up of the label Sekhnet painstakingly designed and created.  It fits the Idea Book nicely, looks great, I’m going on-line to order a thousand as soon as Verizon gets done with me.  A very handsome piece of propaganda it is, really gorgeous– if the stickers look 70% as good as this print on matte photo paper I’ll be delighted.  I also paid for and have so far taken three CLE credits from a corrupt outfit that allows you to do an hour’s required Ethics CLE in only 15 minutes or so, if you’re prepared to be a weasel, which I might be tempted to become as I have eighteen more credits to amass in the next few days to keep the shackle lawfully attached to my leg. 
 
Then, suddenly, the muzak stops and the lovely Ms. Green introduces herself. 
 
During our conversation, making this call to Verizon a svelte forty three minutes at its end,  I learn that three to six months would be optimistic for renewed internet service, that they will in fact be replacing miles of crappy copper wire they no longer service with fiber optic cable all over northern Manhattan, eventually.  
She tells me that I will continue to get bills during that time that I must pay, but I’ll be reimbursed when and if my service is ever restored, and she’s sorry if I think that’s unreasonable, it’s just the way they do it.  The bills are generated automatically unless her office informs the business office that there’s no service, and that’s more complicated for everyone.  Just pay the bills and you will be reimbursed, and also, we will never come in your mouth or in any other orifice you may or may not have.
 She promises she’ll call me tomorrow when she hears back from the Cable Maintenance Department.  She stops me as I begin again, she promises, gives me her word again, even though she tells me she understands why I’d be skeptical to hear her say that.  She will give me the details as to what they predict as far as resumed service to tens or hundreds of thousands in my neighborhood and she suggests I call the business office if I want to complain about being billed for services they will continue to bill me for until service is restored, if ever.  There is no direct number to her, but she promises again that she will call me by noon tomorrow, and reminds me that Verizon offered me a free second cell phone that I declined.
 
To her credit she neither thanks me for being a Verizon customer nor apologizes for her employers’ treachery.  After all, I realize, they’d lose maybe a hundred thousand customers at a shot if they told them the truth or kept them informed.  Fair is fair, you know what I’m saying?
I resist urging her to ‘have a nice day’ or making any of my obligatory references to corporate psychopathy, Hitler, or anything else illustrative of the corporate culture we must endure daily, as she tells me again that she’ll talk to me tomorrow.   Under the circumstances, which must be extremely trying for her, she sounds pleasant as a spring breeze.  No wonder they pay her ten dollars an hour to supervise the other, far less skilled, telephone operators Verizon employs in that cube farm where human misery is cultivated while Verizon fosters communication while tending assiduously to the corporate bottom line.

Chill Pill

Sekhnet recommends multitasking while listening to blaring corporate hold muzak and being thanked periodically for your business, which is so important to the modern corporation that they take the trouble to play a recording of their gratitude, at the expense of their on-hold captive audience advertising time.  

This multitasking usually involves something like paying bills on-line or doing some research on-line, or playing some mindless on-line game.   Since I am using my cell phone to call Verizon about my lack of phone and internet service, these options are not available.  I decide that while I’m on hold I will grill two processed fake meat hamburgers, probably as healthy for the vegetarian as a Big Mac is for everyone else.   They are almost as tasty, when prepared right, and probably slightly less toxic than the real thing.

After only a few minutes, upon being told the wait is longer than usual to speak to a human, I’m given the option to tap in my number and a representative will gladly call me back.   Nice touch, I think, feeling slightly pleased with myself, since today I am calling the “buy new service” line, rather than “trouble with my existing line” department.

Flipping my burgers when the phone in my shirt pocket rings about two minutes later.   Total time so far under ten minutes, I note.   Excitedly I pick up and am greeted by another robot, then several minutes of loud advertisements, then too loud muzak.  I put the phone on speaker and place it on my kitchen table, volume turned down as I continue to prepare my lunch, making a kind of slaw (finely chopped scallions, red cabbage, romaine lettuce) to put on my burgers.  I am trying to remain calm and friendly so I can get help, not take my understandable (going on 7 weeks with no service) frustration out on the pawn who is talking to hundreds of angry, powerless customers today.

I mix the bowl of slaw, flip my burgers, grill a flatbread in the pan next to it, then hear a human voice come on the line.  In my eagerness to speak to this human being I hit not “speaker” but “talk” and somehow this connects me to a robot at Verizon asking me for my account number.  By the time I link the calls so I can speak to the human, a maneuver that takes at most four seconds, the human is gone and the robot drones on about the longer than normal waiting time to speak to the next available representative.  I see that I’ve been on hold only four additional minutes since I picked up to speak to the representative, a total of slightly less than the fifteen minutes I usually wait.  The ads and the blaring muzak made it seem longer.

Why would anyone tolerate this kind of shit?   Why would anyone not shred the bill they sent yesterday, charges due for six weeks of service not provided?   A normal person would not stand for it, would not tolerate being powerless and fucked around by some company just because it happens to have a monopoly.  But these are not normal circumstances.  Normally a person like me would live in a nice house, like virtually every other adult he knows, with several options for internet service.  The neighborhood where my rent stabilized apartment is located does not have other options for internet service, unless I buy a TV and get a cable and internet bundle from Time Warner, another highly altruistic outfit.

I wrote this yesterday in the little book I carry in my shirt pocket, and I stand by it, especially now that the chill pill I took to end my cursing tirade before I started smashing up this place is kicking in:

If you choose not to avail yourself of the privilege of a hard-working middle class life, you would do well to cultivate stoicism in the face of the thousand small, vicious indignities that are the lot of society’s losers.

We live in a society where winners are now required to brag and losers medicate themselves, or become violent, hypertensive, inordinately sarcastic or completely inert.   Mass media shows it over and over again—winners do not tolerate losing, losers do not have any idea how to win.   The game is as unfair as it’s been since the eve of the famous stock market crash at the end of the Roaring Twenties.  This is not a problem to those who are not being gamed by the game.  The question for someone like me would be:  if you had every opportunity to align yourself with the rest of the middle class, why would you choose being a powerless person at the mercy of a merciless system rigged against those at the bottom?

$300 out of pocket to have my ears cleaned?  Not anyone’s problem that I know but mine.  $280 for a urologist to spend perhaps 40 seconds palpating my prostate?   The Affordable Care Act, after all, is not responsible for the fact that my primary care doctor doesn’t consider ear cleaning, even for a patient who needs it annually, or a digital prostate exam, for the son of a man with prostate cancer, part of their overall wellness.  There are specialists for that.   He didn’t decide that there would be a $50 copay for the insured under Obamacare, or a $1,750 out-of pocket deductible before any of the insurance premiums paid by the patient every month would begin to kick in in the form of covered medical service.  Or that dental services, or eye glasses, were not deemed to be part of the average person’s health needs.

A wealthy friend suggested that I get rid of the remaining money I have in the bank and apply for Medicaid, which would cover all these things.  I pointed out that it would mean giving up my apartment, of course, and, if things went as badly as they sometimes do in our winner take all society, spending some time in a homeless shelter, assuming I could find one to suit my tastes.   He agreed that I was probably better off paying for Obamacare than going on Medicaid, but allowed that it was atrocious, the poor, expensive medical service I am getting under the Affordable Care Act.

Is it better to be comfortable than uncomfortable?  I would definitely say comfortable.  I am not poor.  If I knew now that I had five years to live, I could probably have a more or less middle class life style.  The problem is, I could live twenty more years.   I would actually like that, living a long life.

For one thing, that might give me time to have a small impact in this merciless world.  Imagine for a moment that I could show that a talented kid born in a slum was just as creative, and worthy of human rights, as a slightly less talented kid born to wealthy parents.   Imagine, in spite of the ridiculously daunting odds against it, that I was able to get funding for a program I have already designed to do this.  Imagine that program producing a thousand animated films a year, shorts that won awards all over the place and actually changed the conversation about education and the lot of thousands of children our society now regards, if at all, as future criminals, profit generators for lucrative privatized prisons.  Imagine the book I could write about that program, illustrated and illuminated by the imaginations of dozens of brilliant future inmates.

You can write that book now, one might say.  True.  But to have it published and widely sold I would have to have made the dream real in the world, monetized it, skillfully marketed it.  The talk shows don’t waste time interviewing even well-spoken losers with nice dreams.  Even I know that.

In A Tight Spot

I am in a tight spot.  I put myself in this spot, without a doubt, I cannot pretend otherwise, but it is no less tight a spot.  In some ways, tighter.  “Who put you in this tight spot?” a friend will wonder, rhetorically.  

“I did,” you will be forced to admit.  And then it is time to talk about something else.  It is unbearably depressing, in a world of almost infinite tight spots, to talk to someone in a tight spot who put themselves there.

“Jesus, that’s a tight spot…” a friend will think, brow bent.  They brighten as the waiter hands over the wine list.

Image

Affordable Health Care Act (update)

I’m on hold with Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield, providers of the health insurance I bought on the New York State of Health Marketplace.  This second hold muzak features a piano and a jazzy guitar, but it is a very short loop.  It has played many times so far.

The first hold music, the one the robotic female voice kept interrupting to thank me for continuing to hold to, was obnoxious for the entire fifteen minute wait.  This music is better, but it’s starting to wear on me after ten minutes.

The reason I am holding again (with no robot thanking me over and over for my patience, I note sourly) is that the number on the back of my card connected me, mistakenly, to Stacey, who, while sympathetic, had no details of my account.  She seemed mystified by my fairly straight-forward billing question and finally said “Oh!  You’re in New York…  I’ll get you a NY representative who can help you.”  

It was my turn to be mystified, and I told Stacey so.  She confirmed that I’d dialed the right number from the back of my card, and promised to stay on the line until the NY person picked up.  She readily sympathized with my problems with the ACA.  It sounded like she had her own, and has spent many a long day (for minimum wage, apparently) listening to the details of the problems of others with Obamacare.  I may have pushed her sympathy with a nonchalant, but acidly snide, reference to the insurance industry insider who was the primary author of the ACA and who’d made her past and current bosses at Aetna very happy while in the government.

Stacey didn’t hold the line until the NY person picked up, and though the muzak has changed to another equally annoying ten second pseudo-jazzy loop, I am starting to get the feeling I am in corporate hold purgatory and that nobody is going to pick up the line.  After all, it is now going on fifteen minutes, this second plague of blood-pressure raising muzak.  It actually turns out to have been reassuring, that female drone telling me how important my business is to them and thanking me for my patience.

Just as I am about to give up hope, Stacey herself comes back on the line, tells me the information is pretty much universal from one state to the next, and, from her swivel chair in a cubicle in Virginia, pulls up my account.  Unfortunately, until the doctor submits a bill and the insurance company reviews it and sends the patient an explanation of benefits form setting out what the patient is responsible to pay, there is no way of knowing whether the visit will cost only $50 to the insured party– that would be the nominal co-pay– or several hundred dollars.  It all depends what the doctor has agreed to charge Empire and what Empire will then inform the patient is owed to pay for service, until the $1,750 of the deductible is paid down by the insured party.  Stacey agrees that it’s a shame there’s no way to know the cost before you visit a doctor for the first time.  

Obama’s proper punishment should be to have his health care at the mercy of the ACA and to wait on hold, listening to this muzak loop, for the remainder of his term, as his blood pressure climbs and nobody is there thanking him for continuing to hold.  On the other hand, Stacey was quick to say, when I expressed disappointment in the president, that Obama had nothing to do with this, even though a public option would have, admittedly, been the most sensible way to resolve the crisis in the obscenely profit-driven business of treating American sickness.  USA!  USA!

We are number five worldwide in executions, by the way, after China, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia and squeaking in ahead of Sudan, Somalia and Yemen.  Not surprisingly, the Lone Star State accounted for 41% of U.S. executions last year.  Hang ’em high, boys.   USA!   USA!!!!

But there I go again, being snide and negative instead of looking on the bright side (as Stacey did, mentioning the $15/hr. minimum wage in Seattle, as we searched for a reason to be optimistic about our nation’s future) and realizing how lucky I am to be doing what I love, even if there is no payment involved, except, perhaps on the karmic account.  It’s true.  I’m going to be happy.  USA!  USA!!!!!

Happiness Research

In the new science of happiness, researchers have found that those driven by intrinsic motivations–  doing what they love, spending time with people they like, helping others, are much happier than those driven by extrinsic motivations– what we glibly call “success” here in the Free Market — wealth, status and fame.

Stated more directly, to paraphrase those interviewed by Roko Belic, director of Genghis Blues (a great documentary) and the 2011 Happy:  losers who hang out together, and value each other, are happier than winners driven to compete who have no good relationships.

Rocket science, yo.  Psychology 101, yo.  

But, of course, there’s no money to be made in happiness.  So it’s common sense that we who seek to maximize profit and drive the economy would present the world as a zero-sum competition where a few will win and everyone else LOSES.  The fear of losing?  BINGO!  Now we’re talking a trillion dollar industry.

Have a very nice day!

She asked me why the vets who died waiting were so docile

I have a feeling these 40 dead veterans are just the tip of the iceberg.  Doesn’t seem right that they could have been so docile, my only theory is depression over their powerlessness.
 
We routinely say “thank you for your service” to people our great democracy has fucked over so many times in recent years. Redeployed over and over, deployments extended, sent into combat without combat armor against non-uniformed insurgent armies whose main weapon is the roadside bomb, criticized by the former Secretary of War (“we fight with the army we have, not necessarily the one we might like”), kept alive, due to advances in technology, with traumatic and disabling injuries that would have killed them even 15 years ago.  It’s hard to imagine who among them would NOT have PTSD, something the military resists diagnosing, since so many soldiers would rightfully use it as a reason to get sent home.   Let us not forget, hyper-masculine army culture prevents many soldiers from admitting they are depressed, anxious, in a panic whenever they hear noise.
 
Suicide has become the leading cause of death for our military lately.  I’m sure they feel hopeless, are promised over and over that they’ll get the life saving services they need and– uh, maybe next month.  Hang in there, buddy!  Have a nice day!
 
To me it’s a mindless extension of the selfish notion that everything, including schools, should be “privatized”, run with both eyes on the bottom line, with the attendant diminution of the value of human life (unless, of course, that human is wealthy).  The corporate mentality — hide inconvenient things, have robots answer phones so you don’t have to pay people to do it, screw the customer if they don’t like it, pay yourself first, maximize profits in every possible way, change the laws to keep more profit, and, above all, get your bonus.  Why the hell would you give pay incentives to VA administrators for properly running their hospitals in the first place?
 
This country may never have been the place it pretended to be, but it is worse now, in terms of the partisan hatred afoot, than at any time since the Civil War (or for the 100 years after that if you were what was nonchalantly called a ‘nigger’, especially if you didn’t know how to act).  I read about that June 21, 1964 lynching in Neshoba County, Mississippi the other day and shuddered to think I was alive and in 3rd grade when it happened, ten days after my 8th birthday.  This is not ancient history.
 
Around that time local racists sent my mother’s friend Mildred Rose an anonymous letter, on whose envelope some hate-twisted coward had scrawled COMMIE.  Mildred was a Commie (and my mother too, for that matter) because she supported busing to achieve racial integration TEN YEARS after Brown v. Bd. of Education.  Talk about incrementalism.  Schools are as segregated now, I’d wager, as they were in 1953.  All deliberate speed, yes indeed.  
 
Apparently when Senator Eastland pushed for the overtly racist William Cox (who first dismissed the indictments against most of the lynch mob who killed three young men, after burning down the black church they were using to organize a voting drive)  to be appointed to the federal bench in Mississippi he told Robert Kennedy “tell your brother to appoint him and I’ll let you have the nigger”.  The nigger was Thurgood Marshall, who got a seat on some appellate court without the dixiecrat’s opposition.
 
This country has traditionally been very bad for (apologies in advance to anyone offended)  homos, niggers, spics, Jews (I still like that we get that capital letter), Asians, Native Americans, socialists, intellectuals, a lot of other people.  I heard the other day that homosexuality was listed in the DSM until 1973, the year I graduated high school.  No wonder Ricky S____ was so coy about staying in the closet, light in the loafers and giggly though he also was (when not tearfully depressed).  Being gay was a shameful mental illness, the experts said so, don’t you know?  Many teenagers still kill themselves every day because of homophobia, in spite of a more nuanced understanding of homosexuality, and great social advances in attitudes toward it.
 
In certain ways we’re better as a nation now, in some ways much worse.  That profit drives everything and money equals speech may be the end of the game for democracy, no sense to even pretend otherwise.  I give $100 to some cause, everyone I know does the same.  Charles and David Koch kick in $1,000,000 and let’s just call that all Free Speech, how about it?  Can you say it with me, boys?  Free speech in the Free Market, Freedom on the damned march, get out of the way if you hate our freedom.
 
And the best part for those with the means to effectively exercise their free speech, you can buy your free speech anonymously, if your lawyers set up a 501(c)(4) nonprofit political action committee (PAC).  What Commies disparagingly call Dark Money is really a robust expression of freedom, in the opinion of those efficiently influencing elections and legislation.
 
On the other hand, can anyone tell me why a PAC is tax exempt, just like a charitable nonprofit prohibited by law from engaging in political action of any kind on pain of losing its tax exempt status?  Can anyone tell me why a 501(c)(4) is not required to disclose who funds it?  
 
The answer, of course, is as self-evident as the proposition that all men are created equal.   It is the same reason a dog licks its privates. Because it can.  Since money equals speech, those with the most money get to lick, or be licked, wherever they want, since it’s a parliament of pandering prostitutes.   Freedom is a beautiful thing, to those free to enjoy it.
 
But enough ranting, time to shave and exercise some of my other inalienable rights.  Goddamned shame about the way this country treats those brave souls we send into hell and then thank for their service, as we tell them to have a very nice day and let them wait, on secret lists, to die.  A small percentage of the corporate taxes unpaid by GE, Exxon, Apple and their ilk could fund a first rate health care system for veterans, but that would be so damned unfair to corporate CEOs!

employee handbook

Why they play annoying, aggressive, repetitive music while you’re on hold to talk to a human at a large corporation, ten minutes into this latest wait, finally makes sense to me.  If annoying and aggressive enough, many of the callers will give up and go to the website where a human will not have to be paid to deal with a customer.  Logical, really, and good for the bottom line, if also frustrating for the customer.

In the old days the customer was always right– nowadays we are presumed to be powerless assholes, thanked for continuing to hold and told by cheerful robots that our business is very, very important to them.

As I continue to hold I am thinking about compiling a short employee handbook, perhaps an employee e-book.  This handbook would be illustrated by children’s drawings, cut-outs and claymation– if an e-book it could be animated.  Colors, flavors and sounds of creative play could be incorporated as we describe the philosophy of the organization: a place for children to make and share discoveries, creative and technical, supported by adults who listen carefully and encouragingly to their ideas.  It would outline and explain the three rules the adult must impart:  have fun, work together, be quiet and listen when asked to listen.

“Have fun” sounds simple for kids unleashed in a room full of art supplies, but it incorporates another key aspect: you can’t have fun if people are bothering or excluding you.  Which leads to rule two: work together, and its unspoken side rule– if you don’t want to work with someone, don’t bother them.   Without rule three it all falls apart– there are times when kids get out of control and have to simply be quiet and listen for a moment.  Sometimes a particularly out of control kid needs to be made an example of, given an immediate time out until the next time.

I will be asked: what are your credentials for writing an employee handbook?  Fortunately for me, that is not a question I will have to answer.

This world is a place of zooming competition where either we leverage, revamp, brand, rebrand and strategically partner or, my friends, we disappear, unable to compete with outfits who can do all these things, who never stop doing these things.  Outfits to whom a $20,000,000 federal grant is nothing more than a good start.  I spoke to a woman from an organization that got a $20,000,000 federal grant recently, and she was not snoozing as she generously gave me more than a half hour of her busy day.  Sympathetic sounding, and making a series of helpful-sounding suggestions, as well as a small promise she hasn’t yet kept a week later, I’m sure she wondered by the end how someone as ignorant of the language of marketing and sales could think total candor and frankness might be called for in a business conversation.  She’d thought she was getting a call from a man representing an innovative organization hers could partner with.

Turns out the guy was drowning, desperate, working alone from the Book Depository window, madly thinking, out of the blue, of an illustrated employee handbook he might one day write and finally turning dispiritedly away from a menu of distasteful and so far futile tasks he’d set himself for the day.  But not before he reminded callers that their business is very, very important to him and that he appreciated their patience as they continue to hold.

 

You’ve Got the Power

We hear all the time about positive thinking, visualizing the things we want, pushing through to our goals.  These are all good ideas, even if each one is often positioned on a greased, tilted incline. 

You work for someone who doesn’t pay you.  They tap dance when confronted.   If you become angry they will never pay you.  If you remain mild, they will never pay you.  If they intend never to pay you, they will never pay you.   You can visualize the amicable resolution of this vexing situation:  a check that doesn’t bounce and a post-it note apologizing for the delay and thanking you for your patience.  Outside of visualizing that, have a nice day.

Today a Canadian, apparently, read my first post on this blahg which contained this paragraph:

I don’t mean to sound peevish, living in this moment in time when literally any idiot can wax philosophical over them internets, but I probably am peeved.   I have hard work to do, and I need a bit of luck.   Thomas Jefferson noted that his luck was multiplied many times over by his constant hard work.   I wonder, listlessly, if he really worked harder than most of his 300 slaves on the inherited plantation where the master worked so hard improving his luck, and the cause of human freedom.  It is beyond doubt that his luck was much better than their’s.

If you inherit a vast estate, and hundreds of slaves, it is much easier to become the Author of Liberty than if you are born a slave on a plantation by the Chesapeake Bay, as the brilliant and courageous Frederick Douglass was.  Though it can go either way, clearly, having no need to worry about survival, or beatings, or laws against your basic human rights, makes it easier to think positively, visualize (and buy) the things you want, push towards your goals.  Money, social prestige and power go a long way to making a lot of those hard work leads to luck type deals turn out luckier than no money, no social standing and only the power of one’s beliefs do.

That said: you’ve got the power.  It may be harder to launch a successful business with no money, no financial backers to speak of, no experience in business, but it is not impossible.  If you want it enough, believe in it enough, work hard enough, undaunted by the extreme difficulty of success, by setbacks, by the staunch disinterest of virtually everyone you know, you may succeed.  It cannot be denied that you are the only person who has the power.

We Americans learn early, and are reminded often, those of us not born booted and spurred to ride the backs of everybody else, that we are fungible drones, born to serve in fear of losing our health insurance, our pensions, our lives.  We are taught that we can only achieve the American Dream (being fantastically wealthy) by working harder, for more hours than the next fungible drone.  This next drone is not a colleague or comrade but a competitor.  There are only a few seats at the table, and most are already taken.  Ready, gladiators?  

Ah, but I am just being peevish.  I have no fear of losing my health insurance, pension or life.  I am blessed to live in comfortable circumstances.  I could have been born, like a billion or more others, without basic sanitation, without drinking water, in a toxic slum where the odds of even living to adulthood are ten million times worse than mine.  

The fact remains, difficult and problematic though it may also be, you’ve got the power.   The trick is figuring out how to harness that power and use it consistently and positively.  A tricky trick, no doubt, but we are ingenious bastards, those of us who would be the Authors of Liberty but are not born as Philosopher Princes.

A few patriotic thoughts on Memorial Day

What we are to remember on Memorial Day is sometimes hard to recall.  If I’m not mistaken, this holiday used to be called Decoration Day, a day when Sunnyland Slim tickled the black notes and sang the blues for his dear, departed Freddie Lee every year.  “I never will forget about my Freddie Lee, I sing the blues for her on Eh-eh-EV-ry Deh-CO-ray-ZHJUN Day” he sang off the DJ copy of the LP my father had in his collection.  You can hear a few bars of it, with great sax by King Curtis, here   (track 6).  Somebody my father knew in college, probably one of the college station’s DJs, laid it on young Irv, knowing he was passionate about the Human Rights of the Negro and other underdogs and a lover of race music.

My father attended college after World War II on the GI bill and for the first time in his life, I think, was widely recognized for his intelligence. He did well at Syracuse and enrolled in a doctoral program in history at Columbia University.  Somewhere along the way he picked up the Sunnyland Slim album and a couple of early King Curtis records, as well as some by John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy.  I never heard him listen to anything but Sam Cooke and cantorial music on the stereo at home, but these were definitely his records I listened to in the basement of that long-ago sold house in Queens.

Slim’s Shout, the album was called, probably the only LP recorded by the piano player.  (The internet shoots this theory to hell, the album was released in 1960– years after my father’s college days ended.  It is also one of several LPs Sunnyland Slim recorded during his long life.  The instant genius memory of the internet also informs us that the tune Slim sings with such conviction about his Freddie Lee was written by Sonny Boy Williamson II.   Presumably Freddie Lee was the other bluesman’s lost woman.)

What we remember on Memorial Day– the lives men and women in uniform gave up fighting in wars.  We remember their sacrifice, the ‘ultimate sacrifice’, as it is usually styled.  Some of these soldiers, sailors, fliers, fought to keep our nation safe and secure.   Many were heroes.   Many were not, nor did they die fighting to keep The Home of the Brave free to those able to fully enjoy the pursuit of happiness; they fought in human terror, trying to stay alive and not managing it.

Image

What we do not remember on Memorial Day– the hellish hideousness of war.   That few wars make any sense, except in the cruel calculus of those intent on remaining in power.  That most of the men and women who die in wars do not go into harm’s way voluntarily.  Many over the centuries were conscripted, others, for lack of a better choice, join an army they could be shot for deserting.  Heroism and cowardice, and patriotism, and keeping the world safe for democracy, or opposing a series of modern day Hitlers large and small, have very little to do with most war or most of the people killed in war.  

Decoration Day, Wikipedia informs us, began after the Civil War when families would go to cemeteries all over the country to decorate the graves of the fallen.   The Civil War, our simplified history teaches us, was fought to keep this great nation whole and to free the slaves.   It is only in an advanced placement high school course that students may learn about the Draft Riots in New York City, a pogrom during which blacks were hung from lamp posts and the national guard fought the enraged white citizens driven mad by the fact that the rich could buy their way out of this bloodbath while the poor were conscripted to fight for the rights of southern blacks held as property, who, once freed, would be competitors for the scarce work these poor whites were looking for.

Memorial Day is also not the day to remember that the wealthy men who began the Civil War, those aristocrats romanticized history sometimes calls “The Planters”, who painted the destroyed landscape of the American south with the blood of Americans, were deemed to have suffered enough by the loss of their slaves.  The forty acres and a mule that idealistic Americans thought were the least the freed slaves should be given, well, would you settle for Black Codes, you special favorites of the law?

I recently found a paper which had somehow worked its way to the top of a table, a page I photocopied more than a decade and a half ago, when I was a law student trying to make sense of the history of American racism at law.  The unknown author wrote of the debate in Congress after the Civil War, men like Thaddeus Stevens advocated seizing the millions of acres owned by the Planters, a few hundred people, and distributing it to the millions of freed slaves and poor whites, to make them self-sufficient and to ensure that the sacrifices of the war would not have been made in vain.

The wealthiest hundred families in the former Confederacy moved swiftly to make sure only their wartime sacrifices would not be in vain.  A few decades later history would be written to show that the South had been betrayed by vicious Northerners, a partial excuse for the many blacks burnt and/or hanging from trees in those years.  One of the things those vicious Northerners did not manage to do was to give the freed slaves a fighting chance in the former confederacy, or at law, the laudable intentions of the Thirteenth (ended slavery), Fourteenth (US Citizens have guaranteed civil rights) and Fifteenth (Black men may vote– unless not allowed to) Amendments notwithstanding.   A series of infuriating and irrefutable Supreme Court decisions ensured that a century of Black Codes, racism at law and lynching would not be hampered by Constitutional Amendments ratified by the former Confederacy (in exchange for federal aid to rebuild their infrastructure) virtually at gun point.

It is a shameful history, and in one important sense not very different from the history we are living today, when the richest few families in the country own more than the vast majority of the rest of the citizens combined, where they purchase the legislation necessary to keep their privileges and advantages in place, thank you.  Where wars are fought by the poor for the benefit of those who used to be called War Profiteers.

Let us not forget: you can get a good deal on a mattress on Memorial Day.  The malls are packed.  Beaches open for business tomorrow.  The summer begins.  Take a moment, as you are enjoying your freedom, to remember the men and women who gave their lives so that you could barbecue, watch TV, pursue happiness, go to the beach, and live proudly in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

And remember, while thanking the war dead, to thank those wise politicians who abolished conscription and moved this nation to an all-volunteer army. That went a long way toward our nation being able to whole-heartedly support our troops by cheering any war these brave, hapless soldiers are sent to fight and die in.  

Next year we will remember those additional brave men and women who fall at the hands of those pretending to be our allies, the many soldiers who fall by their own hands, as well as those killed in unwinnable combat with a hazy and implacable enemy who hates our freedom.

 

What You Will Be Asked to Do 

If you are patient, they will ask you to be even more patient.  Generous?  They will always demand more generosity, they can never have enough of that in this greedy world.  If you have a sense of humor, make us laugh.  You’re a clever guy, why won’t you make us laugh?  

Nine year-old today came into the last animation workshop toward the end, crying.  I asked her what was wrong, she couldn’t say.  I gave her a sheet of photos of herself, face exploding into mischievousness.  “This will cheer you up,” I told her, going through the box of supplies I was trying to divide between two heavy duffel bags to take out of the classroom and carry back to my crowded apartment.

“I know what I want to say,” she said a moment later.   She meant she wanted me to shoot a little video of her.  I was happy to oblige.

“What I like best about….” she said, then searched for the word, flustered.

“Take two,” I said, and she tried it again.  Same thing.

“Take three,” I said and she said “what I like best about…” there was another long pause then she said “stop motion” and I nodded and said “animation.”  

“Animation,” she said.

“Take four,” I said.  And she recorded her bit.  I shook her hand and thanked her, told her it was a pleasure working with her.

And it was, even under the worst circumstances so far for the endangered animation workshop.  A good group of kids, a poorly run after-school program.   The kids are given the choice of doing their homework, or animation.  Right after animation they can go outside into the springtime to run around, if they are done with their homework.  Today three kids animated while the other seven did their homework.

I’ve been paying an assistant to run the workshop.  I pay him the full fee I was paid at the last place.  He is a nice guy who has little experience teaching.  He runs a watered down version of the workshop, he edits fairly good versions of the kids’ animations, though he doesn’t take the time I often did to massage a few frames into an interesting animation nobody watches.  I realize now that there is a training component needed, and trainee rates while candidates get up to speed, but a deal’s a deal, and so I grossly overpaid this guy while I attended every session and actually ran the workshop, for no pay.

My invoice for the ten sessions was never paid.  I got a kind of apology when I first raised this with the controller back in March.  He told me the invoice had never been forwarded to him.  He asked me to send him the invoice and assured me he’d pay it by the end of the month.  He did not.  On my follow up call in April he apologized, described a hectic move to a new office and asked me to re-send the invoice and said he’d pay it on receipt.  Again, no check.  On my third follow up, after he didn’t return my call, he took out the cane and the hat and did the old soft shoe.

“You know how it is, Eliot,” he told me, beginning to dance like a young Buddy Ebsen. 

“Niggers get paid last, sir, if at all,” was one thing I might have said to him, though we don’t use that kind of language anymore.  My point would have been, if you are meek and lack the power to make anyone listen to you, shut the fuck up and take what you get, if anything.

There is every indication that this small after-school program that hired us for the ten sessions is going out of business after the death, at 34, of the woman who created and ran it.  When this happens my program will be stiffed for the fee for services we provided under the worst of circumstances so far.

Today I get back on the horse and pretend the program is flourishing, though the taste in my mouth is not of something delicious.  I will try to persuade myself and a woman at a large after-school nonprofit, recipient of a $20,000,000 federal grant (if and when she returns my call), that wehearyou.net is a vibrant and innovative program her outfit would do well to partner with.  She would be able to put the program in a dozen public schools in very short order, if we come to terms.  

I’ve got to hope the almost eight hours of sleep I got last night will be the tonic I need.  Maybe there is no tonic powerful enough to pull of the confident sales job I will need to do, feeling as deflated as I do at the moment.

Be of good cheer, though.  However hard you may think you have it, literally everybody else has it harder.  Be assured, whenever your leg gets cut off, the paper cuts of those around you will be held up as reminders that your crying is of no use.

Crying is of no use.  Think of Mel Brooks’ definition of tragedy and comedy.  Tragedy is when I cut my finger.  Comedy is when you fall into a manhole and die.  Funny, isn’t it?