Category Archives: muttering to myself

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.

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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?

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.