Category Archives: muttering to myself

Low tactic

When you find yourself without a good argument, getting frustrated with the person you can’t convince without him bringing in disputed facts, don’t lower yourself to the ad hominem attack “you’re being a lawyer, this isn’t a trial, or a prosecution and don’t try to turn this into an inquisition, I won’t let you put me on trial, I’m not the one on trial here.”  Understandable though it may be to react this way when you feel cornered, it doesn’t help your case and it makes you look bad.

Especially when you deploy it against a reluctant and underpaid former lawyer who hated the idiotic adversarial system and was drawn to problem-solving and compromise every time over zero-sum trial by adversarial combat. 

Look at the parade of ever more marginal lying scumbags who continue to bring a flotilla of frivolous, legally incoherent, evidence-free claims on behalf of a vindictive, lying sociopath and his pernicious disinformation machine.  Those lawyers are behaving as we expect the accursed stereotype of the “anything for a dollar,” or an intoxicating whiff of power, lawyers to act. 

That the licenses of these lying mercenary dicks were not immediately yanked by the legal profession is another proof of the moral idiocy of an adversarial system in which a lawyer/client can use the courts strictly for delay, expense and vexation, with no consequence to themselves. They can justify anything he or his client can imagine might, in some world, not be, technically, an outright transactional lie fraudulently presented to the court in a way that would risk their law license. Satan is often depicted as a lawyer in a very expensive suit.

So when you are about to complain, when your side of argument loses sight of the agreed facts, take a breath instead of playing the lawyer card a lawyer to assert it’s unfair, and frustrating to argue with someone trained in the martial art of law. Stop and consider: isn’t this really a good time to take a breath and pause, let the hot emotion cool a bit? Isn’t that deep breath a much better alternative to possibly insulting a friend and making them antagonistic in return?  

Short answer:  yes.

Anger, anyone?

Anger is a common, dangerous emotion, a momentary draining of all goodwill and the ability to think.  It’s at the root of all violence, and it always makes the violent person feel completely justified while they are raging. 

At the same time anger is an important warning system that can tell us when to get out of a combustible situation. 

Complicating this complex emotion even more:  show anger and you are instantly seen as the aggressor, no matter how relentless the provocation may have been, no matter how reasonable and patient you may have been before getting angry. 

The most pernicious anger, in a certain way, is the anger that is always repressed, denied, justified as not being anger at all.

There are people, my mother was one, who fly into a rage if you mention their anger.  It’s not, in their mind, that they get mad, they are just outraged that you would unfairly accuse them of something that couldn’t be further from the truth.   My friend Mark Friedman was a great example of this angry denial of anger.  He would fold his arms across his chest and glare churlishly at any suggestion that his anger may have played any part in his most recent conflict.  In my experience, anger deniers often seethe quietly at the suggestion that they are experiencing anger and may not be seeing things clearly because they’re angry. They tend not to scream or punch you.

Hey, we call it getting mad.  “Don’t get mad, get even”.  Anger is, actually, an evolutionarily important form of temporary madness. It plays an important survival role, but it can also disable certain functions. There is the famous experiment where researchers wired the insula, the part of the brain that lights up when you fall in love, have a creative idea, are in a flow state, and when you get angry.  They have you answer some moderately nuanced questions and tally a baseline score.  Then they make you angry and watch your insula light up.  They ask similar questions and find that you are basically unable to answer or answering them “fuck you!”

This is the engine fueling the vast profitability of social media — keep the person angry, they keep clicking and the ad revenues keep cah-chinging. 

It is the mechanism at work in MAGA-world, in someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene’s brain.  She shows up at a meeting the other day, sits next to a Republican election expert who confirms that there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election.  She immediately, very pleasantly and confidently, tells him that thousands of dead people voted in Georgia in 2020, that there was widespread Democrat [sic] fraud, that Trump won Georgia by a huge margin, that this guy is no expert at all, basically that he can kiss her privileged white ass.  The clip of her owning this RINO probably goes viral (Marjorie leaves the meeting immediately after creating this contrarian content, according to the election expert) and Marjorie is back in the gym, having herself filmed heroically doing pullups and pushups, for another social media/fundraising post.

If you are mad as hell, and believe Biden is a commie puppet on the payroll of his son’s laptop, you’ll receive a jolt of energy watching Marjorie angrily tell this RINO cuck so-called expert to suck it and then watching her powerfully work out in her crossfit outfit.  That’s how anger fuels anger and keeps the loop of denial of anything but your anger going.

Anger removes cause and effect thinking, you simply can’t track back to follow an argument that does not conform to what your anger is telling you is right.  Anger is an insistent bastard, if it is fed, and one of its main tricks is making all nuance disappear.

Here’s an aggravating example I‘ll try to describe dispassionately.  There has long been a hellish standoff between the Israeli government and the Palestinians.  You can call it many things, but none describe a good situation.  The far-right government in charge of Israel now, like the far right everywhere, is fueled by anger and fear.  The Israeli right is angry that the anti-semitic world is unfairly villainizing Israel for protecting herself and they fear that the countless enemies of Israel will destroy her if she is not strong, vigilant and aggressive in fighting all enemies. 

Anti-semitism is on the rise worldwide and there are millions who hate both Jews and Zionists, so they are not crazy to feature these things.  It is only their “solution” that is… well, that fuels the very things they fear and hate.

Many supporters of Israel, even ones who dislike this far-right cabal that has been in charge for a while, chafe at the word apartheid being used to describe things like the series of security checkpoints Palestinians must spend hours a day lining up at to enter and leave Israel, the two sets of roads, the inequitable distribution of water in the occupied territories and so on.

Without taking sides or a position, and refraining from calling the unholy Israeli coalition of ordinary authoritarians and religious extremists a bunch of fucking Nazis, I will describe a tactic used by supporters of Palestinian rights (and it is beyond denying that millions of otherwise innocent human beings live in atrocious poverty in crowded camps and cities).  It is the same tactic that brought down the apartheid government of South Africa:  Boycott, Divest, Sanction.  Many liberals call for this pressure to be placed on Israel and there is heated debate about this tactic. 

On the plus side it is nonviolent and it already worked to end brutal segregation in South Africa.  On the minus side, it stigmatizes a fellow democracy and doesn’t guarantee a just resolution of an intractable crisis.  Bernie Sanders, for example, has repeatedly stated that he does not support BDS against Israel.

Lobbyists for Israel have called for a law here in the US making it a felony for any company to support BDS.  Under this proposed law, if you are a corporation, business or wealthy individual and you endorse BDS — even if not practicing it yourself —  you are guilty of a felony punishable by a large fine and in some situations prison time.  Bernie Sanders, for one, is against this law and has stated his opposition publicly.  One obvious problem with the proposed anti-BDS law is that it criminalizes otherwise protected First Amendment expression.

But, Bernie Sanders, in the minds of many, because he opposes this extreme law, is an antisemite and self-hating Jew who supports BDS.

This math is so easy to do if you are angry.  Nuance is impossible to see when you’re mad.  There is no difference, when your insula is glowing from anger, between someone opposing a law that does violence to the First Amendment and someone who supports the worldwide strangulation of a great democracy and the end of protection of all Jews everywhere from annihilation.

Never Again.

Anger is a motherfucker and the most destructive emotional force we are up against.  It can be fanned into flames that will burn everything you love.  Any lie is good enough to support indignation and one lie builds on another.  The angry mind can’t make distinctions, which is why a constant “FUCK YOU!” is a perfectly valid response to anything you don’t want to hear.

The political is also gruellingly personal

It is not novel to observe that the personal and the political are closely related.  In my case, the present political situation is also a grim, constant magnification of my personal experience. For those of us who are personally susceptible, who find constant hideous echoes of our personal experience in the political landscape, following the news produces a form of PTSD.  

Gabor Maté made an interesting point about PTSD.  Apparently of 100 soldiers sent into a hellish war zone, like house to house fighting in cities in Iraq where it is impossible to even know who the enemy is, only a certain percentage will emerge with PTSD (I think it was something like 15%).  Every one of the soldiers who wind up with PTSD have childhood trauma that makes them susceptible to it.  Not to say that the other soldiers are happy about the hell they’ve been sent to, or don’t have the occasional nightmare about it, but the exact re-experiencing of the original pain and terror happens only to a select few.  So it is with the news.

The personal is political:  there is a progressive personality type and a repressive personality type, an authoritarian personality type (that can go either way politically) and a type that embraces differences.  There are inquisitive, talkative, collaborative types and close-minded, taciturn, competitive types. It’s easy enough to observe that some types are prone, by personality and life experience, to be liberal, others lean conservative.  Some believe in harsh punishment, support the death penalty and others abhor the thought of a possibly innocent, usually poor, person being executed (as happens frequently) and embrace policies like restorative justice initiatives.  

We have seen a deliberate, massively well-funded project (to be fair, engineered by the far right, guys like Charles Koch, Rupert Murdoch, and their highly effective network of morbidly wealthy fellow traveler influencers) to divide these types into uncompromising partisan camps that must fight the other side’s evil to the death.  Who does this simplistic, eternal, total war benefit?  The people who already enjoy every benefit.  It comes at the expense of everyone else.

On a grand scale we see the triumph of selfishness, greed, heartlessness, corruption and flagrant lawlessness among the powerful and the hypocritical application of harsh law, even spontaneous death sentences for powerless citizens suspected of minor crimes.  It can all be explained in an anodyne, New York Times style way that makes the status quo look less grotesque.  

For example, economists of capitalism have a neutral term for the human cost to making vast profits — like babies born deformed and clusters of cancer near runoff from a chemical plant — externalities.  You have to pay these poor people a certain amount in legal settlements, so your profit is slightly offset by the expense, but in the name of raising stock value to shareholders, externalities are an acceptable and unavoidable part of doing business, if the profit is otherwise high enough.   Some would say that decision makers who factor such “externalities” into the cost of doing business belong out of business and in prison, but that’s a political view, incompatible with the “freedom” we all enjoy here in the free market.

When millions marched, during a pandemic, to protest the intolerable injustice of ongoing police killing of unarmed civilians for minor offenses — or none — they were met with teargas, tanks, helicopters, horseback charges by police, batons, handcuffs.  The protesters were treated like an insurgent army, a force the right-wing administration claimed were a deadly, terroristic threat to national security that had to be neutralized with superior force.   What’s up with that?

“If you are angry about something you claim gives you the right to be angry, then FUCK YOU! You want to protest so-called state violence?  We’ll give you some violence you can take back home with you, when you get out of jail, asshole.”

This is the predictable reaction of a narcissistic psychopath.  They will unleash the full force of whatever they’ve got to defeat anyone who has a problem with how they need to do things.

I learned, only very recently, at 66 years-old, that I’ve been shaped by and fighting narcissists my entire life.   A few months ago I described the gruesome parade of many of my closest longtime friends as highly intelligent, darkly funny, prone to anger/angrily denying anger, deeply damaged, unable to compromise, determined to win no matter what the cost, etc.  I did not yet know that this constellation of traits also describes the narcissist.  I guess what made me finally understand what I was actually up against was suddenly being confronted by a series of outright lies, desperately, brazenly spat into my face in an attempt to make me submit.

Narcissism can be very subtle, as I also learned.  The fact that my narcissistic father never needed to outright lie to “win” our arguments early on hid the cardinal trait of all narcissists from me: falseness.  Without that lying piece I could see my father as disturbed, a jerk, an asshole, a tragic man, etc. but his overarching personality type, narcissist, was until very recently hidden from me.   

Now it is all I can see, when I doom-scroll the news, hear George Santos angrily rebut the true charges that he’s a lying sack of shit, the passionate calls to impeach Biden, (details of charges to follow), a strutting donkey of less than average donkey intelligence calling for a national divorce, a spineless political worm’s defense of the “transparent” move of handing all January 6th security footage to a propagandist for autocracy and on down the list.

Narcissists rule, yo, as they were born to do.  They always have the same answer to every concern you might raise “FUCK YOU.”  They may say this harshly, or politely as can be, but the answer will always be a close variation on that staunch proposition.   “You want to know why I have nothing but contempt for you, asshole? How about FUCK YOU, that fix the boo-boo?”

“And have a very nice day.”   

Facts are dry and don’t go down easy

Facts, no matter how persuasive and well marshaled, do not convince most people of anything.  Only compelling stories do that, and even the most artfully told story has an uphill climb against deeply held beliefs.  

A lie is a compelling, if crude, story that ignores what is actually happening to implant a false counter narrative.  It will always be good enough if it supports what you already want to believe.    A lie famously makes its way around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on.  The way of the world.  Lies have led to every war, every slaughter, every atrocity, every oppression of everyone ever oppressed.  Still, the lie serves the liar far better than the dry,  unsexy so-called facts of the matter ever will.   

Nowadays we call the successful tellers of self-serving lies “transactional” — everything is a business deal, a negotiation to extract maximum advantage and profit from.  Every fact may be countered by an alternative fact.  Truth, in our culture, is now as malleable as “morality” when it comes to winning and losing.

When I arrived at the Florida hospital where my father was dying, an ugly liquid draining from his body into a bag attached to the side of his deathbed, I asked him if he was in pain.   “Only psychic pain,” he said.  

Psychic pain will kick your ass, I’ve noticed.  As I wait to see a surgeon in a few weeks, about replacing my painful, worn out left knee, my right knee has started wavering in its step, giving me more pain.  I have to postpone an appointment for the following day with the urologist who is pressing me to have an operation that will almost certainly cause my remaining sexual pleasure to be minimized, if not extinguished.   He urges me to have this procedure ASAP, doesn’t seem to know why the likelihood of diminished sexual function would cause me any hesitation.  

Those two unrelated medical matters are a source of psychic pain, as is my need to postpone the appointment with the eager urologist, hindered by my inability to call his office.   Add the return call from the Medicare resolution unit to straighten out a $510 overpayment I was strong-armed into making, scheduled for any day between 1 pm and 7 pm, that arrived this morning at 8:30 a.m.  The message invited me to call back if my issue hadn’t been resolved.   Here we go loop de loo.  Meanwhile, other psychic aches add their kvetching voices to the chorus that stirs the acid in my stomach.

A symposium: do the facts actually matter?

Did I do everything possible to save a doomed longtime friendship?   I can describe everything I did, the many examples of friendship and forgiveness I continued to extend to old, once dear friends who got furious that I needed to speak of things they refused to talk about.  

No, they will tell anyone I know (and they have), that’s not true.  Your longtime friend has always been a weird misfit, angry at the world, thinking he is too talented to have to compete for recognition, he refuses to do what we all must do and demands an absurd and unquestioning respect for his poor life choices.  He is lying, he’s gone off the deep end, he’s insane and possibly demented, not us.  We extended constant friendship to him.  We were eternally patient, waiting for him to stop making his antagonistic demand “to be heard”, pressing his ruthless emotional blackmail, trying to blame us for his rage at the world.       

The panel discusses.  Yes, there appear to be facts.  So what?  What is your fucking point?

Ladies and gentle worms of the panel, it’s like jazz.  If you got to ask, daddy-O, you ain’t never gonna know.

My father’s psychic pain was related to agonizing regrets, things he was now powerless to address, absent a miracle of some kind.  The minor miracle was that the son he felt suddenly guilty for having abused for decades was ready to hear his regrets, apparently without judgment, without anger.   To his relief the son kept telling him to forgive himself, that he’d done the best he could.  “No point whipping yourself about it now, dad.  If you could have done better, you would have” the son told him, whenever he lifted the whip over himself.

That psychic pain could have been relieved years before if he’d put in the work his kid had finally done with a therapist.  He’d have been able to acknowledge, before the last night of his life, the many attempts his son had made over the years to make peace with him.  He could have reached back any one of the times he felt his son reaching out to him.  He wouldn’t be lying in a hospital room with a toxic soup of dark body fluids draining into a bag hanging off his bed, trying to make amends, fighting shame, trying to explain why he hadn’t been able to act like the kind of person he wished he could have been.

There are days that start off with the weight of the indecent world sitting squarely on your chest.  That weight can’t be wished away. Just the facts, dry and unsatisfying as that.

People who are hurt hurt people

  • What is hateful to you, do not unto others. 

If I need to be heard, and when you need to talk I cover my ears and hum loudly, what am I?

Certainly no better than Marjorie Taylor Greene, the day her divorce from Perry Greene was finalized last December, absent from Congress, voting by proxy, after introducing a bill to ban proxy voting.

Hurt people hurt people.  

Marjorie, in a muscular fundraising tweet, is now calling for the Trump states to secede, a national divorce, presumably with generous alimony from the “blue states” that subsidize the former Confederacy.   If you ask her she’ll probably tell you that the Northern War of Aggression was never actually won by the bellicose Union, that the victorious Confederacy was stabbed in the back by traitorous you know whats, like the victorious German army was at the end of the World War.   No conflict is ever settled in a hurt heart.

I can write all the impossible letters I want.  The more persuasive, the more impossible.  Heck of a job, Brownie.

Still, if we do to others what we hate done to us, we are wrong.  Simple enough for even a Q-Anon believer to grasp, no?

Nothing is simple to a hurt heart that can’t find peace, except by hurting others.   After he lost the 2020 election Trumpie mashed the accelerator to make sure his killing spree of federal death row inmates went full speed ahead.  Barr was right there with him, executing more federal prisoners than the previous ten administrations combined, until he was among the first rabid rats to jump the sinking ship.  Now MAGA-man is promising to execute everyone he possibly can in his next term as president.  Why not kill them by firing squad, by public hanging?  Why stop there, the Elizabethans drew out the spectacle by eviscerating, hanging, but not until dead, reviving, dismembering, hanging again, and so on.  The master showman of MAGA knows how electrifying this kind of chilling spectacle, even just the titillating promise of it, is to people smarting from their own agonizing pain.  Plus, it’s great for fundraising!

Is everybody who loves this kind of thing stupid?  No, sad to say.   Is everybody who loves this kind of thing filled with hurt, fear and rage?   I don’t know, but I’d bet most of them are.    How much easier is it to get a legal assault weapon and take it out on a bunch of strangers than to sit with unbearable pain in your heart?   Apparently much easier for all mass shooters.  I love the mass media’s eternal search for the “gunman’s” motive.   So American.

In the corporate media there are two sides to every story, as long as there’s monetary profit in the conflict.  One side might be barking mad, but, now that the quaint “Fairness Doctrine” is a footnote in our history, both sides are given the same weight in public discussion by biased media companies catering to their “base”.  In one set of reports Anthony Fauci did everything possible to help curb deadly Covid-19 in a country that set world records for infections and deaths per capita.  To millions of others, who will never watch that kind of lying crap, Fauci is a fucking liar who deserves crucifixion, this Easter, nobody in the US died of the China flu!  Both sides make a legitimate point, you know, here in the land where fairness and justice reign, alongside equally compelling, always maddening, unfairness and injustice.  Get over it, asshole.

It is all in the way the story is told.  I can convince you, if you are inclined to believe me, that I’ve been the innocent victim of people who brutally hurt me every time I tried to make peace.  I can’t convince you, if you are inclined to believe others, who say that they are the innocent victims of my brutality and unforgiving heartlessness as I constantly spin the real facts like a scripture quoting Beelzebub.  

Hurt people hurt people, and the only way out of the cycle of hurt is through a certain kind of honesty and courage, which can also be construed as despicable dishonesty and cowardice, depending on who’s telling the story. 

To say that love is the only solution to conflict is a bit simplistic.  There are many versions of love and endless variations on each version, with a hundred conditions.  Hate, on the other hand, we know at once what we hate.  How much easier it is not to inflict hateful things on others than to be like Jesus, constantly turning the other cheek whenever struck, repaying scorn and cruelty with love and compassion?  I know what I hate, I try not to do it to other people.  Pretty straightforward, no?

Oh, well.  Time to get back to writing some more impossible letters. 

American Exceptionalism: Health care for seniors, episode 71

Medicare for all, baby.  

Just spent 45 minutes on the phone with a very nice receptionist at Medicare who reviewed my last few payments.  I’d made all of them, had not missed one.  I was calling to find out why they had threatened to cancel my Medicare health insurance with a delinquent premium notice and why I’d been billed an additional $510 (that I promptly paid, just to be safe) when the record showed I had paid it already, three months ago.   

The woman was very nice, but helpless.  She confirmed that I hadn’t missed a payment and that I shouldn’t have been sent a delinquent account notice, but, after placing me on hold several times, was unable to verify that the delinquent account notice had been sent in error, though from what she and I could tell, based on my payment record, it certainly had been.  Mistakes happen.  In 7-10 business days I’ll hear back from Medicare, if not, I should call again, and have a very nice day.

Need a colonoscopy, old man?    The Medicare.gov website tells you everything you need to know, or need to find out, or need ask your doctor, or research with a competent financial advisor who is schooled in the intricacies of the gold standard of American health insurance (not healthcare, that’s for godless commies and people in less exceptional nations) for old people who don’t have better health insurance.  Here you go, from Medicare.gov:

Medicare covers screening colonoscopies once every 24 months if you’re at high risk for colorectal cancer. If you aren’t at high risk, Medicare covers the test once every 120 months, or 48 months after a previous flexible sigmoidoscopy. There’s a minimum age requirement of 45.  (note, Medicare does not cover anyone under 65, does it?)

If your doctor or other qualified health care provider accepts assignment, you pay nothing for this test. However, if your doctor finds and removes a polyp or other tissue during the colonoscopy, you pay 15% of the Medicare-Approved Amount for your doctors’ services. In a hospital outpatient setting, you also pay the hospital a 15% coinsurance. The Part B deductible doesn’t apply. If you initially have a non-invasive stool-based screening test (fecal occult blood tests or multi-target stool DNA test) and receive a positive result, Medicare also covers a follow-up colonoscopy as a screening test

Note: To find out how much your test, item, or service will cost, talk to your doctor or health care provider. The specific amount you’ll owe may depend on several things, like:

Other insurance you may have

How much your doctor charges

If your doctor accepts assignment

The type of facility where you get your test, item, or service

Note: Your doctor or other health care provider may recommend you get services more often than Medicare covers. Or, they may recommend services that Medicare doesn’t cover. If this happens, you may have to pay some or all of the costs.

Ask questions so you understand why your doctor is recommending certain services and if, or how much, Medicare will pay for them.

Truth is hard, sometimes

I recently got a note from somebody telling me he wasn’t interested in taking sides, or even forming an opinion, but in learning the truth about a conflict we are mutually interested in.   The comment reminded me of an essential thing about truth.   It looks different depending on our point of view, how much information we have, our tolerance for cognitive discomfort, our level of self-awareness and honesty, while at the same time, things are objectively more or less true when viewed in light of the facts, and in the context of the situation. Truth can get famously foggy during a moral battle.

There is an eternal debate, among eggheads (old term for intellectuals) about the nature of truth and morality, the nature of reality.   These brainy types like the structure and rigor of science, even when talking about matters of the spirit and the soul.   Two prominent schools of thought are moral relativism and moral absolutism, both terms also used as pejoratives.  Most people simply believe in the truth that confirms their view of things and call it a day.  Academics write books, teach courses and defend their school of thought in the debate over the true nature of cherished, elusive truth.  Some views are closer to the truth than others, alternative facts are not the same as actual facts.   The academic stand-off goes something like this:

Moral relativists believe that truth, and its close cousin morality, are not absolute but change according to culture, social condition and historical epoch.  An example of this lack of universal morality/truth would be leaving a new born baby on a hill top to die.   Many, perhaps most, would recoil from this practice, condemn it as immoral.   But what if the baby’s mother, and the entire community, were starving to death during a drought?   People living in this harsh environment would not judge a mother for exposing her child for a quick death rather than struggling to keep the doomed baby alive, using valuable resources that others with a real chance of survival need.  In fact, in that case, she’s doing the right thing. Sadly, this rare example, though hard to refute, muddies the discussion of universal right and wrong.  If all morality is relative, who’s to say who is moral and who is acting immorally — how do any of us know the best way to act? 

Moral absolutists believe there is a universal morality, an immutable set of truths that apply across all cultures, times and places.   Murder, for example, the willful taking of an innocent life in a malicious or depraved manner — universally evil.   If there are universal truths, and it’s hard to imagine that something like refraining from murder is not a universally valued trait (but, see example above) then laws can be made based on these principles, to combat evil impulses.  Sadly, moral absolutists are often religious hardliners with no tolerance for the viewpoints of those who don’t embrace their religious views.  Their moral absolutism allows them to believe  morally problematic things, like the abortion doctor who was killed outside the clinic is burning in Hell, while the one who shot him gets a wink from Jesus Christ.

Truth can be elusive, though only in academia (and politics) are there only two ways to see it.  Truth is compatible with both of the warring views above, it is not always one thing or the other.   

Facts exist — I punched you in the nose, your nose bled, you called the cops, the cops arrived and told us both to sober up and fuck off.  The truth is that we had a conflict that turned violent, you were threatened enough to call the cops.  We will tell different stories about the facts.  

You will insist the punch was completely unprovoked, that I blindsided you, fooled you into relaxing just before bashing you.  That will be your “truth” and those sympathetic to you will accept it.  My story will have a detailed set-up, the context that came before the blow, the reason you needed to be hit right at that moment, and those who relate to my telling will be certain I was well provoked before I busted you in the head.   

The reflex of many people is to believe that the real truth exists somewhere between those two stories.  Somebody standing close by while the conflict escalated will be better situated to evaluate the stories, we’d think, but they have biases too.   Plus they won’t necessarily know the history, the smug look, repetition of the most hated phrases, and how they predictably ratcheted up the tension.   Context is important, though not always easily discernible. 

You have the classic “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”  In the case of the more than a thousand angry people who stormed the Capitol after sending 140 cops to the hospital, we can call them insurrectionists, waving a Confederate flag as their belligerently rebellious forebears would have, after sacking the Capitol.   Others call them “patriots” who were engaged in “legitimate political discourse” and are now being held, totally unfairly, as “political prisoners” and martyrs.   Those who blow themselves up for their beliefs are called martyrs, or insane, murderous assholes, depending.

So too in personal life.  Your deepest needs will dictate the truths you believe.   Truth can’t be divorced from opinion, since what we believe to be true forms the basis of our opinions. An opinion based on truth is more legitimate than one based on spin, color, a persuasive, selective  retelling of events that leaves out important facts.   Events and the sequence of how things unfolded, the cause and effect,  how one thing led to another, are the building blocks of truth.  Not everyone is prepared to deal with a truth that is upsetting and potentially destabilizing, like: the peacemaker on his moral high horse has also deployed irritating gas, which had nothing to do with his mission to make peace, in the name of making peace.

Reality vs. Angering Spin

You can argue, as authoritarians like Ron DeSantis do, that teaching current events in light of the actual past stigmatizes innocent young white children with the sins of their grandfathers, but that is only a transactional argument in the service of increasing your side’s power.

It is harder to argue persuasively about a simple fact like this:

Which is why wealthy fascists will always focus on the terrible burden to the “job creators” a living wage for unskilled workers would impose on the wealthy. They focus on why we must pity the poor super wealthy, who grace us all with their generosity and create a beautiful and just society for us all.

Believe that, you know, the myth of the generous, selfless billionaire philanthropist — or stay focused on the so-called grotesque injustice of one person having more than 10 million others, while children starve in the wealthiest country in human history.

And, of course, people like me completely ignore the fact that people who inherit a mountain of money deserve every penny of it, free of DEATH TAX, while poor people, even if willing to work very hard, only deserve a minimum beyond the bare legal minimum. Period.

US Covid deaths back to a 9/11 body count weekly

Now that the brutal daily death tolls of Covid-19 are behind us, we are all relieved to act like Covid-19 is no longer a deadly threat.   We now have vaccines, boosters and a drug that cures it in many cases.  The number of people dying of the pandemic has gone way down from its horrific peak numbers around the 2020 elections, even here in America, the world leader in Covid deaths (thanks Jared, Pence and Donald).  The sad fact this holiday season: Covid death in the US is on the rise again, a 40% rise over the last two weeks.   

The tracker on the NY Times website shows that 466 Americans died of Covid yesterday.  Multiply that number by 7 and you get 3,262.   More than the 2,996 people who died in the horrific terrorist attack on September 11, 2001.   The numbers are also up for the seasonal flu and a new threat called RSV.

Sekhnet, vaxxed and triple boosted, is often the only person wearing a mask outside.   I was the only person I saw on the E train last night wearing a mask.  Everyone is so relieved not to have that invasion on our personal autonomy, the slight difficulty drawing a breath, that every subway car, supermarket and restaurant is now a superspreader site.  Since the radical right weaponized reasonable health precautions and equated wearing masks with intolerable tyranny (totally different from forcing ten year-old rape victims to give birth!), many now see wearing or refusing to wear a mask as a political statement.  

If so, think of the statement this way: if I have asymptomatic Covid-19 and could give it to you, there is less chance of transmission if I submit to the tyranny of wearing a fucking face mask, for your sake, and the sake of everyone else who might be susceptiple to dying of this deadly disease, you ignorant, racist, misogynistic, kool-aid drinking, MAGA hat wearing, USA! USA!!!–chanting asshole.