Category Archives: muttering to myself

The Kind of Dog Dog Kickers Kick

People who kick dogs are cowards, let’s face it.   Unless the dog is attacking you or a loved one, or a helpless person nearby, in which case you are within your rights to kick the dog.

It is the kind of dogs people usually kick that shows best what such people are made of.   Do you think Mastiffs are often kicked?   The only people who kick large, powerful dogs are those cowards so filled with rage and hatred that they have a powerful, large caliber gun in the other hand as they kick the dog.  The same “equalizer” the overseer always had at hand when whipping slaves on the rich guy’s plantation.

The typical dog kicker’s dog?  A small, sad-eyed dog who cannot fight back.  A little terrier, a Chihuahua, a toy poodle.

 

Golfito (1)

I’ve taken a vow of nonviolence.  It is a hard vow to keep in a violent world filled with enraged acting-out cowards.  That worm who kicked me on the train the other day– if he did it out of clumsiness, why not say “sorry”?   If too oblivious or enraged to have second thoughts after solidly kicking a sleeping man’s ankle, the best remedy for such behavior is a quick tug on the kicker’s head and a sudden jerk of the face to the subway door.  Bam!

This will possibly deter the man the next time, make him think twice before booting a man thirty years his senior (perhaps I reminded him of the father he always hated).   More likely it will only cause him to seek smaller dogs to kick, maybe even blind ones.

The cycle of rage and violence cannot be corrected by violence, of course, though it is the only language spoken by many in a violent society like ours.  True mildness, coupled with unfailing directness, is a better corrective– though very fucking hard to practice.

Dog Kickers

Seething silently behind reflective spectacles

One must exercise care

around these mild-seeming creatures

 

One, after a day spent,

undoubtedly doing distasteful things

for too little pay,

wants the seat next to yours on the uptown A

and not finding as much room as he requires

to spread his legs the way he likes

rises, huffy, roosterish

crosses to perch on another too narrow seat

eyes slits burning at his newspaper

 

Then, as deep sleep returns to you

this well dressed person leaps

to change to the seat across from you

Your ankle the dog he kicks hard

as he lurches toward  it.

 

Rudely awake you glare, ankle aggrieved  

he resists by staring at his newspaper

face like an unsanitary knife, stinking

 

Ahimsa boy is left watching him exit

a stop before he could rise,

cross the car,

stand briefly and heavily on the instep

and raise one side of his face impassively to say

“pardon me.”

Legs Zoff

Until around 1997 I had never used email.   I didn’t really know much about the internet before I started law school.  The computer was a word processor to me, and a wonderful one.  I spent hours typing and mechanically cutting and pasting, rearranging, effortlessly murdering my darlings.   It was fantastic.  Later I found pictures of pretty women on the internet and thought how cool that was, but I wasn’t connected on-line yet.

Fast forward 17 years or so, the lifespan of those who grew up with electronic devices connecting them to each other, and, on discovering I have no internet service today, I feel like I’ve had me legs chopped off.

Among my emails is a possibly very important phone number, the direct line to a board member on the largest, best-funded, public school after-school program in the country, based in NYC.  This fellow found the promo I sent him very cool and invited me to call him when I got back in town.  But his number is inaccessible now from my internetless apartment.

As are the limitless informational possibilities that the internet represents.   Dag.

Can’t even call my internet provider, Verizon, a chickenshit outfit, because their number is… on line.   Unless I can dig up a paper bill and find a tech support number there.

My plan is to bring the iPad to a local coffee shop, connect over there, with a notebook by my side to jot down numbers in.  Damn it.  They do have good coffee though.

The Shoelace

My mother always preferred rhymed poetry that jumped to a meter like her and her little friends on Eastburn Avenue singing in cadence as they hopped Double Dutch.   I sent her a prose poem called The Shoelace by Charles Bukowski, which went nicely with the words she copied in all caps on an index card and years later found a huge hot pink button with the same words:  S-T-R-E-S-S:  that confusion created when one’s mind overrides the body’s desire to choke the living shit out of some asshole who desperately needs it.

My mother loved The Shoelace, which neither rhymed nor skipped like girls over a rope.  In that classic poem Bukowski correctly states that it’s not the large things that send a man to the madhouse, but a shoelace that snaps with no time left.  He refers to, and then riffs on, that swarm of trivialities that kills quicker than cancer, the death of a thousand unjust and arbitrary cuts, the accumulated little bumps, scrapes, itches, insults and bruises that can finally tip a man over into madness when his shoelace snaps, with no time left.  You can hear his inimitable reading of the poem my mother loved here.

I think of that poem now as my printer runs out of ink (cyan, which I am not using to print black and white, but smart business majors found a way to force you to buy cyan anyway) as I try to assemble tax documents, a favor done for me in haste results in a frustrating forty minutes of futile work trying to fix a mistake, I’m looking for tax papers in a haystack of papers only an insane person would have saved to begin with, trying to assemble two short films I need for Monday, find out my assistant will not be available after all on my day off and I’ll have to fill in for her, for a fraction of what I’m paying her colleague who will be there.  

It’s not these little things that send a man like myself to the madhouse, nor the even need to feign great optimism and remain an upbeat salesman of a product that suddenly looks fatally defective to me.  It’s the fact that although I am wearing no shirt, and only boxer shorts, my apartment is so hot that sweat is creating a slime on my brow, in my underarms.  I can feel bands of heat radiating off my naked back.

“Hah, that’s a good one, a NYC tenant complaining about getting too much heat!”

It is a good one, the place is a sauna, and I have windows open.  It must be at least 90 degrees in here, I feel like I’m about to faint.   The ‘super’ is a cheerful, manic, chattering rat in human form, I mean no disrespect to him, just describing him for you.  You can hear him outside at random times banging garbage cans and yelling in a variety of languages, sometimes repeating the same phrase over and over, like a demented parrot.  He shrugs about the heat, you know, the landlord has it programmed, nothing he can do.  He shrugs about the faucets he broke while fixing a leak– they trumpet like enraged elephants, particularly late at night when I brush my teeth or try to run cold water over my sweltering face.  “You gotta have the sink replaced, my man,” he tells me philosophically.  Until he fixed the leak a short time ago there was no problem with the sink. “You got to call the office, tell ’em you need a new sink.”  

So many things one has gotta do, endlessly remind oneself, for example, that nobody can help anybody on the deepest level.  Hard work is hard, sometimes, because it is amorphous, hard to prioritize, hard to even conceptualize sometimes.  It requires stumbles that can be embarrassing and worse.  A readiness to take a smiling step forward, slip, fall and break your nose and the arm that tried to break the fall.  Next time, hopefully, you will remember to let go of the kid’s drawing you were holding carefully aloft as you pitched forward, the better to catch yourself.

“You lost control because you were frightened of failing,” consoles a friend, “you will do better next time.  I’m pretty sure you won’t break your nose again protecting a drawing!”  There’s always a bright side, you dig.   Always an enlightening bright side, if you do not suffocate at your desk from the oven-like conditions in your apartment before enlightenment can strike.

 

 

 

 

Just One Question for the President

There are very rich, cynical people who, because speech has now been equated with money by the Supreme Court, can speak ten or a hundred million times more articulately than the average struggling mutt.    It is now common knowledge that the extremely privileged have unfettered access to lawmakers, who, dependent on their wealthy benefactors’ generous campaign support, will move mountains to privilege the advantages of the already privileged at the expense of everyone else.  

There are two brothers, the Koch brothers (pronounced “Coke”) who are only recently becoming well-known for their tireless, well-funded and influential speech against sustainable environmental policy, universal health care, collective bargaining, a living wage and many other things an unbiased person might consider basic rights of citizenship in a wealthy democracy.   The Koch brothers combined “worth” of about 100 billion dollars, puts them close to the richest twosome in the world today.  As anyone who has been following the news recently knows, it will never be enough to be among the richest people in the world today without making every effort to become richer still.

 

The Koch brothers stand to double their money when Obama quietly signs off on the other half of the Keystone pipeline (he’s already opened the southern half).  This pipeline will pump oil sludge, tar sand, the dirtiest form of nonrenewable fossil fuel, from Koch-owned lands in Canada to refineries and shipping points in the American south.   It will enable the profitable extraction of a very dirty and unsustainable fuel source that climate scientists (but, in fairness to science-deniers, only about 99% of them) say will put immense amounts of additional carbon into the biosphere.   It will accelerate climate change at a time when we need to slow it down, for the survival of life on the planet.  The extraction leaves behind a ravaged strip mined landscape and the toxic consequences are frighteningly far reaching; on the other hand, the Koch Brothers stand to make as much as $100,000,000,000 when the president quietly signs off.

 

My question is a purely rhetorical one that I will never have access to actually ask:  do you work directly for the Koch Brothers, my man?

 

I mean no disrespect to our president.    I love a Nobel Peace Prize winner with a sense of humor.  I’m just frustrated because he speaks so well and people want so badly to believe pronouncements that let them cling to the ghost of idealism rather than accept the evidence of even more eloquent and entirely consistent actions.  It’s depressing to judge this good man on the damning evidence of what he actually does, rather than on the strength of the uplifting things he has the talent to say.

 

And so it is with Obamacare, written by a lobbyist for the health insurance industry who has since gone back to work for that industry.   There are corrupt scumbags on both sides of the aisle, and in the aisle, and sliding slimily through the revolving door between lobbyists and legislators, everything oiled by the money, er… speech, of the legally created persons known as Corporations, entities whose only consideration, like the Koch Brothers, is maximizing profits.  If the corporation was actually a person it would be a psychopath.  And so it goes.

 

I received no invoice this month from Obamacare — which does not allow me to keep any of the doctors I’ve seen for years–  so I called on February 20th to find out how to pay.  Can’t do it on-line or by phone, it emerges, so the nice woman at the insurance company emailed me an electronic copy of their invoice, prepared 2/14 and not received by most consumers yet, with this maddening sub-punchline:

 

IMPORTANT MESSAGE: Our records show that you have not paid your premium for this month.   This premium is now overdue.  This bill includes your overdue premium in addition to the premium you owe for next month.  If we do not receive both of these premium payments by the due date set out on this bill, your coverage will be suspended.  Any charges for services (claims) will not be paid.

 

 So the consumer, not billed until the last week in February, deemed late and threatened with cancellation unless the “overdue” (payable by 2/28 at 5 pm. after all) premium and the preemptive March premium payments (payable by 3/31 at 5pm) are both mailed and received by the due date.

Punchline: there is no New York State agency, known to the operators and supervisors of the New York State of Health Marketplace, that monitors or oversees the business practices of the corporations that do business in that so-called marketplace.  

 

Nor is the hundred million dollar website easily navigable, or even updated, there is no on-line support to be accessed, nor any way to email anything to anyone at the Marketplace.   You can theoretically initiate a web chat, but that feature is not currently working.  The FAQ section, last updated in December 2013,  has nothing about complaints, grievances, appeals or getting help, outside of calling their overwhelmed help line.  

 

On the plus side, waiting times to speak to operators have gone down impressively, from over an hour to about ten minutes.  The operators are helpful, and overwhelmed and their hands are tied.  The consumers, well, can you spell SCAMMED, good citizens?  LOL!   Have a very nice day!

It all depends on whose ox is gored

This is so self-evident it seems silly to point it out:  that we are concerned mainly with what concerns us directly, everything that doesn’t touch us directly is an abstraction we are often too busy to ponder.   I offer this example, just because it goads me not to, and there is nobody to express it to who can be expected to have much sympathy.

If we are in an existential, eternal war with violent enemies who are hell-bent on killing as many of us as possible, it is necessary to protect ourselves by any means we have. Wars that leave Americans dead and maimed are understandably unpopular, yet we are constantly reminded how important it is to world peace and our security to continue killing our terrorist enemies and their families.  Luckily we have the technology to kill by remote control.  This requires large, loud killing machines constantly circling in the skies our enemies live under.  If you have never woken in the night, in terror, your children screaming and scarred for life, it’s probably hard to get too exercised about President Obama’s extensive killing by drone program.  He was so eloquent in accepting his Nobel Peace Prize, you know?

Similarly, the president’s oft-expressed commitment to do what he can to slow Climate Change must be seen in context.  The oil companies, which have made record profits under his watch, where off-shore drilling has been greatly increased, previously sacred lands have been opened to drilling, America finally producing more oil and gasoline than it imports, are rightfully concerned about these oft-expressed commitments to slow the carbon poisoning of the earth, directly at the expense of the non-renewable energy sector.   With billions and billions of dollars hanging in the balance, it would be unwise for the president not to reassure the oil companies, which, after all, wield tremendous political power and influence.   So he makes a speech touting how much more oil we are producing and how important it is that we continue to drill, baby, drill.   Does that make him a hypocrite or a liar?  Not necessarily, the world is complex.

But here’s one I can’t seem to get out of my head.  I am one of thousands, or tens of thousands, or maybe hundreds of thousands, who has been directly effected by the president’s little white lie about his health insurance plan: “if you like the health care you currently have, you can keep it.”  As I’ve previously reported, he apologized for lying, and as his lie statistically effects only a tiny proportion of the people he lied to, you know, small harm, tiny foul.  De minimis non curat lex– the law does not concern itself with trifles.

And in the general scheme of things, not being able to keep my doctors, including the ones following me for cancers I’m likely to get, and the one who was monitoring my possible hypertension recently to decide on the best path to keep me from having a stroke, and shit like that, well… pretty much trifles.  That my copays have tripled?  Another trifle.  I am a whiner and it behooves me to stop whining and find some new doctors, get my medical records transferred and shut the hell up, you know what I’m saying?

Symptom of Terminal Capitalism

After a young man named David Karp sold his internet creation Tumblr for something around a billion dollars the questions began.   Forbes asked how Karp would face the challenge of monetizing his somewhat idealistic invention, you know, because selling something for a billion dollars is only the first step in the insane dream that is today’s runaway capitalism.

I suppose Forbes was correct to ask that question, it’s a burning question its readers want to ponder– how do you turn one billion into two and then a hundred billion?

It may just be me, but living in a society that values and honors only the accumulation of vast unneeded profits, and wilfully ignores the misery the system creates, dismissing as externalities people poisoned, children starved, homes destroyed, the world made uninhabitable, hope effectively removed from millions and millions of lives, it grinds me down sometimes.

Evil is not only the deliberate bad things done to torture others, it is also the blind focus on acquiring more than can be spent in a thousand lifetimes and the vicious damage it casually causes out here where only the fittest are fit to survive.

On the other hand, I have to be thankful that runaway capitalism doesn’t give a rat’s ass about me and leaves me to live my life, as much as I can, by my ideals.   

The Corporate State

I have been fond, in an involuntary, Tourretic kind of way, of stating that the Nazis won World War Two.    There is a convincing argument to be made, the Nazis were, after all, on the forefront of many of the innovations now routinely used by those who rule the world today.   I would back this up in a scholarly paper, if there was time, if there wasn’t so much else to do.   (Similarly, there’s a scholarly paper on the shameful history of not only American slavery, and genocide, but the more than century long continuation of these things, under different names, during a reign of violence and mayhem slyly winked at by the Supreme Court.)

Please stop me if I told you this already.    Adolf Hitler, one of the most famous mad men in history, wrote a seldom read (but often purchased) manifesto called My Seven Year Struggle Against the Lying Race Poisoning Traitor Jews and Acchhhh! the Burning Slaver on my Rabid Dog Tongue! Fuck You, I’ll Kill you all, You Fucking Niggers… shortened, by a savvy editor, to “My Struggle” or Mein Kampf.

I tried to read it once.  Each sentence is a page long, with the verb at the very end.  Some sentences are longer and more convoluted.  If a dog with rabies could dictate its thoughts to an idiot with pen in hand (a loyal believer named Rudolf Hess, imprisoned with the future Fuhrer in Landsberg Prison after an unsuccessful putsch in 1923), the book that it produced might be Mein Kampf.  Hitler is reputed to have written a short crystal clear primer on propaganda, included in Mein Kampf, and I began combing through the lice and maggot infested prose to find it.

Et, voila.  The Fuhrer wipes the foam off his lips, takes a breath, and proceeds, in ten or fifteen cogent pages, to tell exactly how it should be done.   Frighten people, appeal to their desire to be protected, tell whatever lies are needed to make them hate, enrage them, focus their rage on enemies they can then be sent to destroy.   His right hand in propaganda, Josef Goebbels, Reich Minister of  Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, was very much down with the program, and an innovator in his own right.

First thing: control every organ of mass media.  Newspapers, radio, film, literature, theatre, put a Nazi sympathizer in  control every where, to root out all non-Nazis.

Second thing:  repeat the bullshit over and over and over.  Where there is no other voice, your explanations, no matter how lame or demonstrably false, will generally carry the day.

Third thing:  find and root out anyone who does not buy the stinking tissue of lies you are selling.  Take these people and make grotesque examples of them.  Nothing like a little dramatic public violence against them to get the attention of other would-be heroes.

I know, you are thinking it is a big, simplistic leap from a group of madmen with a murderous agenda to the super-wealthy leaders of our modern global corporate world.  Certainly the leaders of the oil industry, the financial sector, the global corporations that drive the world economy are not comparable to Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, Goring.  Certainly.  Only a hyperperbolist would compare Dick Cheney, let’s say, to Hermann Goring.  If thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, are killed and millions displaced violently advancing the goals of corporations, it’s not as if they PLANNED to murder all these people or did it deliberately.  Big difference, no?

But here’s the thing:  you have a society that values only one thing, they call it “free enterprise” or the “free market”.  The only thing free about it is the freedom of those on top to keep most of the profit it produces.  So instead of a vision of a pure world polluted by those who must be destroyed– Jews, Communists, Freemasons, Homosexuals, Gypsies, People named Dave, you have a vision of a world of abundant but limited resources where the few are entitled to own everything they can acquire, and it is nobody’s problem if most of the world is dispossessed, if children die of hunger, if preventable disease kills millions, if the world itself is destroyed by pollution.

What does the mass media show?  When it presents the issue at all — freedom vs. tyranny and our American Exceptionalism.    Our mass media features distraction, stylized zero-sum competition and advertisements.  The news features stories that excite passion and resist reasonable discussion.    Every view, no matter how idiotic, is presented as being of equal value, thus real debate is stymied in the name of an absurd version of “fairness.”  And then, in case you are actually thinking about any of this,  a loud, attention grabbing word from our sponsor.  While you are watching one show there is an animated crawl on the bottom of the screen, an ad for another show you should watch, but there is no time to squeeze it in with paid advertising, so you cram it into the bottom of the show other sponsors are already paying for.  Lack of campaign finance laws?  No problem, political ads are a boon to television stations that are supposed to serve a public interest function for the privilege of having a broadcast license.  A quaint notion nobody gets excited about any more.  There’s too much money to be made!!!

What happens to those insiders who, at great personal risk, expose the details of and decry the unjust, illegal state of things?  These are no longer considered whistle blowers performing a valuable service to democracy.   We try them as traitors under a 1917 statute created to smash dissent as Woodrow Wilson was gearing up for America’s entry into World War One.  A statute that carries the death penalty.   Nothing gets the attention, or chills the blood, like the possibility that if you lose in court, you will be killed by the state.

I believe it was Dr. Goebbels who stated that the man of the future would be the ‘corporate man.’   A kid in the animation workshop, seeing a picture of Woody Guthrie playing a guitar with the words “This Machine Kills Fascists” painted across it, asked me what a fascist was.   “A facist is someone who wants to control everything that you do,” I told him.  I think that’s right.  Fascists know Best, as the sitcom of the fifties made clear.

I am clearly in a foul mood, otherwise why would I be sputtering this way?   Still, there is something to ponder in this:  we are living in a corporate state with all that entails.   President Obama has said from the beginning that it will require millions pushing him to enact any kind of progressive agenda.  What he didn’t say, because he is a smart man and a skilled politician, is that it will require many, many millions to push back against the prerogatives and privileges of those very wealthy persons and entities who funded his insanely expensive election campaigns.  How much say does your $20 contribution buy, compared to a plate that cost someone $5,000?

As every citizen of a corporate state knows: you get what you pay for.  Sometimes.

We Get the Government We Deserve

Democracy, when it’s bought and paid for by very wealthy people and corporations, does not concern itself with the trifles faced by isolated individuals.  It rightfully concerns itself with taking care of the customer, who is always right.

For example, if you are an individual with newly diagnosed hypertension, and have a follow-up appointment with your long-time doctor scheduled for January, you should not worry that he is not on any of the new insurance plans offered by Obamacare.  After all, you can drop dead of a heart attack, or have a stroke, any time and with or without a doctor’s supervision.

None of my long-time doctors seem to be participating in any of the insurance programs being offered on the NY State Health Exchange.  So I could enroll and pay for insurance today, and look for new doctors in the next few weeks.  Or I could not sign up today and just pay the fee of my long-time doctor for a visit in January.

The NY Times reported today that the deadline for enrolling in a health insurance plan has been quietly extended by 24 hours, in light of how screwed up the enrollment process is, how poor the buggy $600,000,000 website still is.  Of course, the government did not announce this extension officially, since they don’t want people to wait for the new last moment to crash the website.  One notes (though the NY Times did not)  that the NY State of Health website was shut down last night at midnight, until 8 a.m. this morning, for “routine maintenance”.

There is no doubt that Barack Obama is a brilliant man and a skilled self-promoter.  He ran two winning national ad campaigns:  YES WE CAN (you’ll find out who WE is)  and CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN (if you’re gullible and/or desperate).  A black friend snorted when I reflected on the man’s seeming lack of discernible moral or political convictions– “who did you expect the first black president to be?  Malcolm X?” and she laughed a bitter little laugh.  

Plus, it must be admitted, the man has, through no fault of his own, stirred up an unprecedented degree of violent opposition just by being a black man in a nation built by black slaves.  The unexpurgated “n-word” is still in wide use, and very often in the air when opponents speak of Mr. Obama.

So, maybe I should not be so harsh on the president, even though he lied when he said “if you like the health care you have, you can keep it.”  After all, when pressed, he apologized for lying– doesn’t that make it much better?  How often does any politician or person in power actually apologize?  It takes a big person to admit he lied, does it not?

In fact, I’m sorry now that I am not more grateful for the great job our Nobel Peace Laureate President is doing (murder of civilians and widespread PTSD from drones notwithstanding).  Just wish I could make an appointment to see my doctor, after seven years of paying up to 25% of my income for health insurance that no longer is offered.