Category Archives: personal

Interpersonal politics

I should have been a fucking diplomat (or maybe an advice to the lovelorn columnist).

Dear C:

In answer to your question [“whatever happened to rachmunnis and forgiveness?”]: rachmunnis is mercy, empathy, decency, kindness.  Forgiveness is a close relative, in fact, rachmunnis is sometimes translated as forgiveness.   

This impulse to act with love, to move past hurt, to nurture someone else, after sitting with their uncomfortable feelings, is the heart of relations between humans who care about each other.  Rachmunnis is easier to recognize than to consistently practice.   

Humility and self-awareness are essential parts of being an empathetic person. You have to be willing (and able) to put yourself in someone else’s place in order to resolve problems, to forgive each other and show love instead of clinging to righteous anger that always escalates when conflicts are never resolved.  

When someone tells you that you’re hurting them, and you insist they’re being oversensitive, overthinking it, making unfair accusations, making you uncomfortable and so on, you are showing the opposite of rachmunnis.  If you do this once in a while it means you’re having a bad day, you weren’t yourself, and it’s not hard to overlook. 

If you reflexively get angry and intransigent when someone tells you that you’ve hurt them, you’re not capable of rachmunnis.  Forgiving a person who lacks rachmunnis is folly.   It’s not true forgiveness, for one thing; it’s an empty gracious gesture that guarantees ongoing future harm.  Forgiving without a real apology means you agree to swallow repeated spoonsful of shit every time the other person feels bad about anything.

What happened to rachmunnis and forgiveness in our case is that I’ve told you, over and over, and in writing several times — writing you tell me is clear, stylish and easy to understand — that it’s impossible to forgive someone who can’t acknowledge fault.  You continue to act like you can’t understand this.

Your son is a very neurotic person, he’s also very angry.   He can only express his anger passively, and he has never conceded any kind of fault to me — or anyone else — as far as I know.   He’s too insecure to admit he’s ever been wrong about anything.  He’s too neurotic to express regret for anything he’s ever done, no matter what the cost to himself might be for not being able to do so.   

In the end, for reasons you know well, I stopped trying to fix things with people who can’t even acknowledge anything is broken.   For your part, you once seemed to understand this — telling me I had enough aggravations with my medical challenges without worrying about trying to be friends with R.  Now you’re intent on forcing me to forgive a very aggravating person, because it pains you that I am such a fine person and your son only wants to be friends with me.   

Can you forgive someone who accuses you of something his angry wife made up, angrily confronts you about it, eye twitching, telling you, before he even informs you what he’s accusing you of, that he’s not sure you can continue to be friends because of the viciousness of what you’ve supposedly done? Instead of showing anger, you answer him like a friend and try to help him with his problem, instead of walking away after the aggressive, ridiculous accusation. He never has to thank you for being a good friend or express the slightest regret about falsely accusing you or threatening you with the loss of an old friendship?  

To be put on the defensive by a person like that, after years of asking him to stop passive aggressively provoking me, is intolerable.  Yet, as even R will probably admit, I acted like a friend, treated him as a friend, did my best to help, seeing him in such a painful position.  To be told years later, many Yom Kippurs [the day when Jews are traditionally required to make amends with those they’ve wronged] come and gone, that, for a series of frankly senseless reasons, I have to forgive him, even if his rabbi/therapist can’t make him see the need to honestly try to make amends with someone he claims to love and admire, is intolerable. Him lying to you about having apologized to me “a dozen times” – the disgusting icing on an excrement cake.  

If you still can’t understand whatever happened to rachmunnis and forgiveness, read the enclosed.  

(which is slightly less diplomatic, I add, diplomatically.)

The personal is political

In these bitterly divided times, the chasm intentionally created by far-right profiteers who blame the lunatic left, Antifa, unfair, ungrateful colored people, college students, lying, vote rigging, corrupt, crime supporting commies, “illegal aliens”, bloodthirsty baby murdering abortionists, city dwellers, godless feminists who want to castrate all white, Christian men while they’re innocently tanning their testicles, transexual pedophiles, etc. is widened and deepened 24/7 by the corporate media.

The Republican “Culture War” is a supremely cynical, lie-based, profit-driven corporate distraction, curated and promoted by the insanely greedy to divide people and turn us against each other, instead of the unthinkable — a united movement for fairness and government by consent of the governed. Such a movement would be … (shudder) … Class Warfare… so unfair to our best and wealthiest citizens! Many billions in tax breaks, government contracts and subsidies to the wealthiest individuals and our most important corporate “persons” would be lost if “inequality” was seriously addressed — talk about totally unfair!

The personal is political. You can either support injustice and inequality, based on a series of emotionally satisfying but rationally empty conceptions, or you believe in fairness, and do your best to act on that belief. That’s as personal as it gets. Nobody likes to be treated unfairly, although perhaps 250,000,000 of us routinely are in this pay-to-play democracy.

If you are OK with institutional injustice, the justification is generally either “well, I personally benefit from it” or, more commonly, for the masses, God wills it, Deus Vult! Who are we puny humans to question the unknowable will of almighty God and those vessels He fills with His spirit to carry out His divine impulses? That was the impetus for the Crusades, for every organized religious slaughter in history, faithfully serving an omniscient, all-loving, all-merciful god.

Speaking of God and his vessels, lately the president of the United States, an objectively crazy, criminally insane person, openly attacks the pope after launching a cynical, senseless, illegal war of aggression, a war that is already starting to cause great global suffering, to protect himself and his privileged “friends” from the evidence of their sexual predations being made public. How dare the pontiff contradict the will of the Leader?!!! Even the devout Catholics in the orbit of the Leader dare not speak up for the pope’s right to quote scripture to advance the cause of world peace and stability. They know the Leader will smite them, righteously, madly, humiliatingly.

I’m thinking about this fairness/unfairness business as my blood pressure has been surging lately with the aggravating news cycle (the Callais decision foremost among them– ruling, essentially, along “ideological” lines, that blacks are racists, not whites — and that equal protection of the law under the 14th amendment was meant to protect persecuted whites, not angry blacks and giving the persecuted majority emergency permission to immediately redraw all maps for maximum “partisan” advantage). My own health challenges walking, even standing, without pain, three years after an unsuccessful knee replacement, don’t make me any more cheerful or relaxed in the face of this KKK pleasing 6-3 fuck you to democracy. The former Confederacy has rushed to remove all “minority/majority” districts and end representation of Black voters. Makes me wanna holler.

Yesterday, by US Mail, I had a note from an ancient old friend of my long departed mother’s asking “whatever happened to rachmunnis (mercy, compassion) and forgiveness?”

This after I explained to her many times, on the phone and in writing, over the course of several years, why it is impossible to forgive someone who can’t acknowledge they’ve hurt you and continues to do it. Her neurotic son, a childhood friend, is an aggravating person, as she herself conceded a couple of years ago when I was recovering from the knee surgery, undergoing treatment for kidney disease and in the throes of a prostate emergency induced by a psychopathic urologist. “With all the aggravations in your life, you don’t need to deal with him,” she told me, in what seemed a very loving gesture. Since then she’s been on a relentless campaign to force to me to forgive her passive aggressive asshole of a son, no matter what my high horse might have to say about it.

It’s a question of basic fairness — If I give you the benefit of the doubt, over and over, and you, feeling comfortable, are increasingly aggressive in making unreasonable demands of me, how is that fair? If you can’t acknowledge fault, as her son can’t (and he learned it from the mother he hates, who learned it from her unbearable mother — I’ve known four generations of this family), then there is never a reason to do anything differently, let alone apologize. The status quo in that kind of nonmutual relationship is irremediably sick, no conflict can ever be resolved fairly and must continue to fester and escalate. I’ve finally learned the only healthy response in this situation is a quiet sayonara. Here is the old woman’s “final” (I’ve had a few more calls and two note cards since) attempt to make amends:

This is my very last call to you, but since I received your letter yesterday I’m just going to say you know that you write very well. Throughout that letter, which I understood not all of it, there was never the word forgiveness. You don’t forgive anybody anything. So, at any rate, I just wanted to make that last statement.

I’m about to say my prayers, you’ll always be in my prayers, for your operation and for the two of you, you’re both good kids. And this is the last call you’ll hear from me. All right, I won’t bother you anymore and I’m sorry that you can’t forgive me for whatever it is I said, or did, or thought, or whatever the hell it was. At any rate, whatever it is, I’m sorry that you can’t forgive me. Have a good Passover and take care.

This message is beautiful in so many ways, in addition to how succinct and reductive it is. Talk about getting the last word. Since I can’t forgive her son, who has never acknowledged doing anything hurtful to anyone, and now her, for insisting I have to forgive him, no matter what I may feel about it, I never forgive anybody anything. Case closed. Pretty categorical. I’m a monster because I can’t forgive, maybe crazy too, certainly terminally enraged. Also, her apology is a beautiful example of blame shifting, her sorrow perfectly calibrated for the occasion: I’m sorry that you are such an unforgiving asshole.

I gave the old lady the last word, as I have learned to do with this type.

Then more calls from her that I didn’t answer and two antique note cards, weeks and months later, challenging me again to be a human being, to stop being ‘uncourageous’, a hypocrite, to get off my high horse, stop overthinking everything, being oversensitive, taking everything as a personal insult, being petty, unforgiving, merciless and so on.

In hopes of ending this relentless cycle, and because writing focuses and relaxes me, I replied to her note card by highlighting sections of the last note I sent her. That last note made the same basic, simple points I’ve made every other time. If someone hurts you, angrily insists they didn’t, and keeps doing it, there can be no apology and no reason to forgive. You have to just get away from this type.

I printed my previous final note to her, including the two paragraphs about forgiveness. I put them in red so she couldn’t miss them. Having the words highlighted in red makes it harder for her to pretend I hadn’t given the subject she claimed I never mentioned careful consideration. I added a few explanatory notes, with just a couple of ugly details to illustrate what I’d already written to her, since she’d told me she hadn’t understood some of my previous letter.

The eternal stickiness of this type is exhausting. Hopefully she’ll be wounded enough by the clinical precision of my explanatory notes to finally stop fucking badgering me. If not, I’ve already promised her silence after this, and, as she knows, my word is my bond. For good measure, by way of a final kick in her almost hundred year-old ass, I ended by telling her she’ll be in my prayers.

Incoherence is perfect for assholes

Think of it from the asshole’s point of view.  If you need to win an argument (because losing, which includes any kind of compromise, is unbearably humiliating  to you) and the facts are not in your favor — FUCK THE FACTS.   Seriously, just keep a straight face, an aggressive stance, attack your opponent and make any noises you like, grunts and squawks are fine.  

Keep doing this, never pause, never back down.   The other person will eventually grow frustrated, if you are arguing about something important — say human rights in a democracy (I just typoed demoncracy, which seems to fit our moment with the antichrist-in-chief).   When their frustration explodes, or they walk away, frustrated, you merely smile and make a mocking little dog sound as your friends applaud.

As long as you cater to the emotional cravings of those you control, people also desperate to be right, who, if in danger of being proved wrong, prefer killing you to admitting fault, incoherence is perfect.  

You can’t argue successfully against an incoherent assertion.   Incoherence is immune to persuasion of any kind.  It is self-contained, self-proving and self-reinforcing.  

When Donald Trump was an adolescent millionaire (his father paid him $200,000 a year from birth, his salary as president of various fake corporations dad set up to avoid taxes) his psychopath [1] father intercepted a carton of switchblades his son had delivered to the house.  Donald’s plan was to arm his schoolyard gang with these knives and rule the elite private school his parents sent him to.   His parents decided that a few years in a military academy would be good for the young bully’s discipline and “make him a man” of some kind.   We see how well that plan worked.  

Trump claims to have loved the hierarchical life at the military academy where he specialized in bullying the younger cadets.   There was a new crop of these young, pampered chumps every fall for Donald to torture with his winning personality.  Then, after graduation, proudly dressed in a splendid military uniform, bone spurs, unfortunately, kept him out of uniform for the rest of his life. 

More than sixty years later, the dude is unchanged.  He bullies everyone around him, except when someone stands up to him directly.  No mere box of switchblades this time, Tomahawk missiles, nuclear weapons, enraged toadies and lickspittles competing daily to prove their unquestioning loyalty to him, unlimited dark money to prosecute his thousands of lifelong grudges against every kind of enemy imaginable.  He now claims the legal right to illegally defund programs Congress funded, endangering and torturing millions and costing countless lives (poor people, disposable) and to have his underlings commit cold blooded murder and get away with it. 

He’s not crazy to believe these things since his 6-3 Leonard Leo majority granted him extraordinary criminal powers in the aptly named  Trump v. United States.  The party line ruling granted him the right to commit criminal acts, and pardon any criminal, if he can claim he did the crime as part of his core duty to advances his/their agenda.   He has replaced the Department of Justice with the Department of Retribution, his gigantic glaring face adorns its building. 

I think of my own father, a soul with many gifts and the most decent of impulses, helpless against the many traumas of his early life.   Whipped in the face by his mother from the time he could stand, growing up in what he always called grinding poverty, legally blind until the age of ten, when FDR’s program for the poor gave him his first pair of glasses to correct 20/400 vision, he considered himself the dumbest kid in his little town, even at the very end of a distinguished life. 

We argued many times over the years about whether people can change in any meaningful way.  I contend we can, and always made the case.   He insisted people cannot change in any fundamental way and that all forms of therapy only support a delusion.  I learned only recently that we were both right, and both wrong.  Many people can change, if their pain makes the need to change urgent enough.  Many people can never change, no matter how acute their pain becomes.  If you can’t be wrong, there is nothing to change.

Donald Trump is an example of the kind who can never change.   He is the perfect avatar for the interests he represents — entitled psychopaths [1] who created an ideology of “liberty” (which requires unreasoning faith to believe) and a massive propaganda machine to promote their right to own and control everything.

There is no good argument for why some should have 100,000,000 times what starving children and their struggling parents have, why children should go to bed hungry in the wealthiest country in human history.  There is no conceivable moral argument for that.  Even Charles Koch’s beloved Institute for Humane Studies never successfully made a moral case for starving poor children. 

And so, an incoherent, demonstrably false fable — makers vs. takers — the rich make the economy move for everybody, and what trickles from their pathologically greedy lips makes fine soup for the rest of us.  Booted and spurred, most of them from birth, to ride the backs of anyone less deserving than they are (in the fine image Jefferson stole from a Scottish rebel about to be hanged), these creatures found their avatar in a man willing to do anything, including bark like a pet dog pursued by hungry, imaginary Haitians, to never lose.

Are we tired of winning yet, America?

[1]

It’s the incoherence, stupid

Lying is one thing, and it’s a bad thing, most of the time. Without trust, there’s not much basis for dialogue or friendship. You can lie to spare someone’s feelings, but outside of that, it’s hard to think of a good lie. The truly corrosive thing in human relations is incoherence. If someone insists on an incoherent version of events, no communication is really possible with that person. The only healthy course of action is to understand you’re dealing with someone who is incoherent and disengage.

You can never persuade an incoherent person to listen to nuance or to compromise based on shared reality because their need to believe what they believe is impervious to reason. They are incoherent because they have no emotional choice but to believe what they believe, 100%. Doubt would crush them, because, in any dispute based on what is really going on, they have no ammunition, outside of a blind, angry insistence that they’re right. Being wrong in any detail of anything is an intolerable humiliation they will never submit to. In a war with such brutal stakes, incoherence is truly their only play.

I’ve had the misfortune to know many of these motherfuckers over the course of my long life. Some have been very good companions, everything is fine with them, as long as you’re conciliatory. You can laugh with them, enjoy a good meal, go on an adventure together, until any conflict arises. In the event of any kind of disagreement, unless you drop it immediately and pretend it never happened, you get a childish insistence that what happened never happened, they don’t remember, or understand, or that you’re a liar, or that they might have been lying when you quote them as saying they might have been lying, that they never called you a liar and certainly never said they might have been lying, etc. It can make your head spin when these creatures really get going.

I knew an old lady, 98 now (same age my mother would be if she was alive), since I was her son’s best friend in fourth grade, who often insisted on things that were incoherent. She had to believe, for example, that the nightmarish marriage her son fought in for almost thirty years was completely the fault of his insane ex-wife. It was one of those conflicts, you know, where only one person is to blame for all the ugliness and the other, the innocent party, simply made the mistake of engaging with someone who was a violently enraged lunatic. There was no reason, in the old lady’s version, for the furious wife’s rage, outside of her own troubles. Her husband had absolutely nothing to do with it, even if he was passive aggressive, habitually untruthful, a provocative weasel, etc.

In the end I did the only thing possible in the face of an insistence on an insane worldview. After hearing the same insane insistence that I must forgive even people incapable of regret, empathy or apology, I stopped taking her calls and wrote her a note which I put in the mail. Her response was a classic, a close variation on the one you will always get from someone who insists incoherence by way of the last word is simply fine and dandy and there will be no further discussion of the matter. I put the perfectly polished turd of her last word in a frame, nobody I know ever phrased it more to the point:

Incoherence, when it comes from the most powerful man in the world’s most powerful country, is truly fucking horrific.

This morning, Trump’s social media account once again blamed U.S. allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) for not joining his war, although NATO is a defensive alliance, designed to respond to an attack. The account posted: “Without the U.S.A., NATO IS A PAPER TIGER! They didn’t want to join the fight to stop a Nuclear Powered Iran. Now that fight is Militarily WON, with very little danger for them, they complain about the high oil prices they are forced to pay, but don’t want to help open the Strait of Hormuz, a simple military maneuver that is the single reason for the high oil prices. So easy for them to do, with so little risk. COWARDS, and we will REMEMBER! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

This afternoon, Trump told reporters: “You know, we don’t use the strait…we don’t need it. Europe needs it, Korea, Japan, China, a lot of other people, so they’ll have to get involved a little bit on that one.” He also said: “I think we’ve won, we’ve knocked out their Navy, their Air Force. We’ve knocked out their anti-aircraft. We’ve knocked out everything. We’re roaming free. From a military standpoint, all they’re doing is clogging up the strait. But from a military standpoint, they’re finished.” . . .

. . . Aware that [Trump’s impulsive] war is historically unpopular, Republicans in Congress are refusing to exercise any oversight of the Pentagon and the White House. Megan Mineiro of the New York Times reported today that Republicans don’t want to expose disapproval of the war and so are simply cheering Trump on in public. Rather than holding public hearings that would allow the American people to hear the administration’s justification for the war and plans for its execution, as Democrats demand, Republicans are permitting the administration to inform Congress as it wishes, behind closed doors.

“You don’t want to show that kind of division to your enemy when you’re in the midst of a war,” Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) told Mineiro. “I don’t have a problem with the administration avoiding showing our enemy that they don’t have 100 percent support of the Congress.”

“They’re holding news conferences,” Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) told reporters last week, so there is no need for official hearings.  source

See, as long as FOX NEWS CHANNEL is covering the ongoing story, there’s no reason for debate in Congress. Unite behind the Commander-in-Chief or make yourself liable to the punishment for treason. Debate only aids our enemy, whoever that might be, and the Commander-in-Chief is the only one who determines who is an enemy and who deserves death, so stop being disloyal and just support our troops. So-called intellectuals, and so-called pragmatists, always insist that men of action have to explain themselves. That is the fatal liberal error of history, according to devotees of the incoherence of the will.

No More Impossible Letters

I have a category on my list to the right of this post called “Impossible Letters.” I wrote such letters for many years, each time making a case for kindness, consideration or decency, once all other appeals for these things failed.

I recognized, as I toiled over these pages, trying to get each phrase to ring just right, that the letters were impossible, that the most gently worded, generous, most persuasive, moving case I could present would change nothing. Nonetheless, I continued writing these impossible letters well into the start of old age. I almost never heard a peep in response to any of these letters, but of course, I was complaining, no matter how gently — and now in writing! — about not getting a human response, so the person I was writing to was too defensive to dignify my letter with an acknowledgement.

I’m done writing these letters. If you have to write a letter setting out why you require basic decency, you might as well stick a feather up your ass, dip the end in ink, and write your letter that way. It seems simple beyond needing an explanation, if a doctor, let’s say, treats you carelessly, dismisses your medical questions, claims to have answered them all already (even if you never discussed those concerns with him) NO LETTER IS GOING TO CHANGE THIS. In fact, the letter will make you an enemy to the vain doctor, and a threat, if the letter is written well. Plus, nobody is paying the doctor to read your whining prose.

Amazing that it took me so many years to understand this simple concept: if something is emotionally impossible for someone to give, it is emotionally impossible. That doesn’t mean you’re not raising entirely reasonable concerns, or expressing basic human things that virtually anyone would agree with. It means, if the person you’re writing the letter to has already demonstrated, over and over, that they will not cede any ground to make things better, the best letter anyone could compose will only make matters worse.

Here’s the big discovery. There is a certain personality type that cannot be wrong, must blame others when they are wrong, and will fight to the death if the person they blame refuses to take all responsibility for conflict. This type is immune to persuasion since they are compelled to do these things, by a terror of humiliation based in childhood trauma and shame. Not every traumatized child winds up this way. In some people, being abused actually fosters empathy later in life, but people who cannot be wrong or ever admit hurting others are this way because they were damaged as young children. They can’t help themselves. As long as you are always agreeable, avoid anything that makes them uncomfortable, make them laugh when things get tense, are conciliatory at all times, you need never see the implacable side of these relentless motherfuckers. Once they sense you have some kind of issue or problem with them, the game is on and you must either submit to an irrational narrative (like a conflict is caused solely by one party — you) or it is a fight to the death.

Is there any universe where it makes sense to write letters to someone like this? None that I know of. The only use for a letter to one of them is to make the break complete, if needed. A final word to show you understand the unwinnable game you are now in, increase their defensiveness, fear, anger and make sure their brittle vanity ensures they will never contact you again. I take pleasure in doing this as politely as possible, on the rare occasion that I need to write one last impossible letter.

There is a certain sweetness in crafting a cold ending like this one, to a very old woman, a onetime friend of my mother’s, the mother of a childhood friend I haven’t seen in years, who angrily insists I have to forgive people who claim to love and admire me, no matter what I think they’ve done to me:

When you raised your voice to me a few months back, in response to something you didn’t want to hear about your son, and told me to “be quiet and listen! You’re not going to get the last word!” that should have been the last time I talked to you.   Like your son, you mistake my good will and calm manner answering questions about my health for some kind of deep friendship.

Then I took a red crayon and drew a small heart, in the matter of an angry Christian, wishing somebody a facetious “have a blessed day”, under which I wrote my name one last time. Her daily stream of indignant phone messages should finally stop, once the mailman delivers this kiss goodbye.

The personality type that can’t be negotiated with

I’m an old man, about to go into my seventh decade walking this brutal, miraculous earth. I only recently learned a truth so simple it seems embarrassing that it could have taken me 67 years to learn. I have well digested it the last few years, while writing hundreds of pages I hope to soon wrestle into a salable manuscript. Here is the condensed version of my belatedly learned lesson.

There are people, traumatized early in life, who develop a rigid personality that renders them unable to show vulnerability, see their role in conflict, change themselves for the better or acknowledge when they’ve hurt people. They live in terror of reliving the crippling humiliation they were subjected to in their earliest days. To protect their brittle egos they insist they cannot be wrong, always blame others for any conflict, escalate the conflict by silence, threats, lies, word salad, every means necessary. They are prepared to fight to the death, against their closest friends, to prove they are never wrong. My father was this way (minus the lying, he was too skilled to need to outright lie). It is a terrible way to go through life, but it is also a fairly common personality type.

They can be charming, funny, playful, sensitive, sometimes generous, they can see nuance, sometimes, but you can’t negotiate with them once there is any kind of disagreement or an expression of hurt that makes them feel imperfect. You can’t find compromise with someone who can never be wrong, they are always your victim — you are the merciless one, not them. They fight with the desperation of a hurt child terrified of further unbearable shame.

We have the grotesque living example of a movement of people guided by these principles: never wrong, blame others, lie, fight to the death over any conflict, no matter how small. Think of cherub-faced fake Christian extremist MAGA Mike Johnson and other creatures of blind ambition like him. They are convinced of their righteousness (or at least play the part), can’t see things from any other point of view (that would require empathy), have no hesitation to lie if confronted with wrongdoing (since they can’t be wrong, and therefore have a right to lie), have a harshly punitive stance toward perceived enemies while being super understanding and lenient to criminal friends, people who simply “made a mistake” but are otherwise loyal.

Politics is not my point here. I’m trying to point out the universal characteristics of this common, extremely harmful, and contagious, personality type. A personal example, then:

Our closest friends of many decades, a couple I’ll call Flack and Gina, planning to celebrate the younger one’s 65th birthday in Europe, were hit with bad news. Covid-19 canceled their fabulous birthday trip at the last minute. They made alternate plans, a week alone together in Vermont and then five days in a spacious cabin with their longtime closest friends, me and Seedj.

When we arrived something was hanging in the air, tension between them, which escalated day by day. Apparently the carefree week in Vermont had not left them feeling refreshed and carefree, they were clearly at odds, keeping their distance from each other, both expressing hurt the other had caused. The tension and passive aggression increased day by day, as I went about my normal business of trying to make them laugh and being conciliatory. I had no understanding that it was already too late for our friendship, I’d witnessed their shameful rage at each other and the sado-masochistic nature of that rage. By the time we left the rented house, after they ate a large breakfast and hadn’t prepared so much as a cup of coffee for me, we were no longer friends.

It had all been my fault, you see, in my irrational need to eventually express frustration with what I couldn’t simply accept like a loving friend, I’d finally resorted the fucking f-word, a blow that sent them both reeling toward the fainting couch. It was entirely my fault that the long weekend had ended badly. They’d been very hurt by my irrational anger. My frustration had nothing to do with one of my oldest friends glaring at me with silent hostility for long minutes after feeling “defied”, her husband trying feebly to explain why she had “her back up” followed by a humiliating forced apology from her the next morning, after I’d had a sleepless night, hyper-adrenalized and unable to keep my eyelids closed. She told me with great shame that she was sorry I’d been so aggressive and threatening toward her that I’d made her act that way, she could have done better but I got her back up. Not exactly the healing apology one might hope for from a loved one.

They had to completely rewrite history to avoid shame. What I had seen and experienced never happened at all. I’d never witnessed cruelty, silence, distance and raging passive aggression between my two closest friends, that never happened, it existed only in my sick, judgmental, unloving brain. They had a new story, that blamed me for everything, put things in persepective. I could accept their story, and remain their friend, or insist I hadn’t been the cause of all the conflict and take a flying fuck at a rolling donut. The weekend had been wonderful, with no tension at all, they demanded I acknowledge, until I’d exploded with a curse word for no reason at all, thus ruining what had been a perfect five days.

You can apply this same “reasoning” to many things happening in our society today. It’s called reframing. Take something as undeniably ugly and traumatizing as hundreds of years of American chattel slavery. Not all bad, say the re-framers, slaves learned skills while being raped, whipped and degraded — and talking about slavery unfairly makes innocent white Christian kids feel bad about their ancestors, which is the real harm of slavery. The January 6th riot that sent 140 injured police to the hospital? Biden’s fault, Pelosi never called the National Guard, FBI provocateurs, CIA goons, the crowd that broke into the Capitol were innocent, meek, patriotic tourists, not violent rioters, “woke mind” virus, a stolen election, treason, sick, dangerous maniacs on the far left trying to bend the nation to their evil will. Government shutdown, the second one orchestrated by Trump and his allies? Not the Republicans’ fault, we promised the billionaires and corporations a huge increase in their wealth, too bad selfish poor people are so irrationally angry about other people’s success!

Once you notice an inability to compromise, a constant need to escalate conflict, to blame others for their own actions, a refusal to ever acknowledge being wrong, or see anything from another person’s point of view — game over. No compromise is possible with someone who can never be wrong, and blames you for making an unfair issue about being supposedly hurt by them.

You can’t go to mediation with someone, as Flack and Gina demanded we do, if there is no agreement about anything that happened to create the conflict. To me, I’d been attacked savagely and blamed for merely trying to help ease the tensions between my tormented friends. To them, I’d unfairly maligned the perfection of their deep, loving, human relationship, refused to acknowledge that Gina had simply made a “mistake” after I made her feel attacked– and she had apologized! — I was the problem, due to the unhealable damage done to me as a child and my unforgiving nature. A mediator would surely help me see that, they insisted.

Of course, a mediator only has the facts and feelings the parties bring to mediation. Successful mediation depends on a mutual desire, and ability, to be honest, compromise and move toward the other person’s needs to solve a conflict. The most brilliant mediator in the world is helpless if the parties don’t agree on anything that caused the conflict. Nonetheless, desperate people who can never be wrong will weaponize everything available in order to prove that the other person was wrong.

The application of this observation to our current political impasse is hard to avoid. In the individual case it is crucial to understand that when you’re dealing with someone who can never be wrong, there is no way to solve problems with them, outside of uncritically accepting their stilted view of reality. You will eventually learn that even if you do, the past conflict will inevitably continue to escalate until the relationship is finally destroyed. You have to get away from them, uproot them from your life. Not a political solution to the creepy billionaire-financed division between Americans, but a good starting point in knowing who you can reason with, work things out with, and who rigidly demands absolute obedience to whatever they need.

To this type, an appeal to empathy is an intolerable challenge to their projected perfection. Appealing to their empathy is a direct statement that they lack empathy, a mortal insult that must be avenged. If you love the person, you will tend to overlook the early signs of this personality. You do so at your peril, because every bit of mistreatment you tolerate in the name of friendship sets the baseline for what they are allowed to do to you. Once you complain, you break that sacred compact, blindside them with new demands and become an enemy who must be destroyed.

Friendship, loss and Yom Kippur

A good friend is a precious thing. It is painful and difficult to live without friendship. Sadly, sometimes friendships die, like every one of us must in the end. There are various reasons why this happens, some are the fault of circumstances and have little to do with the friendship itself. We hope to keep our most important relationships to the end. This is not always possible.

Sometimes a friendship depends on pretending that things your friend does that hurt you are not really a big deal. We justify this forbearance because of the value of the friendship to us, because of our fond memories of the friend. Tolerating these things requires us to accept the unacceptable by pretending not to feel what we feel. This kind of pretend, with someone who takes no responsibility for inflicting pain on you, always ends badly.

You can either remain unhealthily bound to someone who mistreats you, or, if you stop pretending, you will be angrily blamed for heartlessly killing a beautiful friendship. There is no winning in a scenario where someone reserves the right to hurt you (outside of escaping it); everybody always loses in the end.

Tonight at sundown the holiest day of the Jewish Year, Yom Kippur, begins. This is the spiritual deadline every year for Jews to make peace with people they’ve hurt and to forgive those who come to them to make amends. In light of recent Yom Kippurs, and the eternal silence of friends I loved for decades without reservation, people who did objectively unfriendly things with no remorse, I’ve come to see this day the way Frederick Douglass regarded the celebration of July 4th, in his famous 1852 speech, a hollow sham that would disgrace a nation of savages:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour. Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the every day practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival . . . [1]

I think of the ugliness of the recent endings of lifelong friendships with those who will insist to the death that they are actually my victims because I can’t forgive them for things they did that I claim hurt me, things they are incapable of admitting they did. I picture these moral paragons dressed in white, fasting and praying tomorrow, rising and being seated, having “productive” “meaningful” fasts and experiencing the glory of God’s forgiveness, even if they are not capable of asking for forgiveness from trusting friends they’ve treated badly. One of these old friends, a rabbi/fundraiser I’ve known since high school, told me two Yom Kippurs ago that God has the right to tell a person who lays his heart bare to his friend on Yom Kippur to go fuck himself. Why not?

May their foul fasting breath (they are too religious on Yom Kippur to brush their teeth before they head off to synagogue) continue throughout 5786, and may it be so inscribed in the Book of Life. Amen.

[1] Right now this speech can be accessed at Constitutioncenter.org. I suspect that will not be the case once Big Balls gets back to work.

How sensitive is over-sensitive?

My father, who had many wonderful qualities, was also locked in a lifelong war never to be wrong. He never escaped the prison of his terror of being humiliated, of feeling again like the helpless victim of vicious abuse he was as an infant, child, teenager. He said as much the night he died. “My life was basically over by the time I was two,” he rasped sadly, in that dying man’s voice that comes at the very end of a losing battle with cancer.

My father was very sensitive, in many cases he was super compassionate and caring. When it came to taking responsibility for his actions that hurt others, he would not. His anger was always righteous, his analysis of who was actually at fault was always flawless (to him), and he had a great ability to turn every conversation to his advantage, to deflect all responsibility by constantly reframing what you were actually talking about. This inability to admit that he was ever wrong caused him to distort reality whenever he felt trapped. He also quickly wrote off people who hurt him, one perceived strike was enough, and he never apologized to or forgave anyone that I can recall.

This distortion, blame and inability to forgive put great emotional obstacles in front of me and my little sister. “Life’s hard enough, Elie,” he said that last night of his life, “without your father placing obstacles in your way, like I did for you and your sister, and I am truly sorry for that.”

Good to hear, finally, and that first and last apology was gratifying, but, sadly, he was dead by the next evening.

I’ve finally come to understand, in the last chapter of my life, that if something hurts you, and you tell the person who’s hurting you that it hurts you, and they continue to do it, you have to get away from them. 

People who continually hurt others have a problem they will always blame you for.  Their problem only becomes yours if you tolerate being blamed for it. It turns out you can’t negotiate with someone who insists on their right to do what you have told them hurts you.  They will immediately become the victim of your unprovoked attack, you are persecuting them, they’ll cry, tears of betrayal in their eyes. This insistence that you are victimizing them is pure contempt for you and your feelings.

Once you have seen contempt on the face of someone close to you, you cannot unsee it.  When you learn a person will never change their insistence that you are solely to blame for every conflict, will never compromise or concede anything, ever, there is only one move: you need to get away from them.

I fondly believed all of my life — to my detriment in the end, when I was metaphorically lynched by a group of my oldest, closest friends during one of the most vulnerable times in my life — that every disagreement or hurtful pattern with people I cared about would yield to goodwill, humor, a gentle, reasonable presentation of facts, an exchange of views, an accommodation of everyone’s feelings.

Displays of genuine friendship can mend a painful situation with someone who cares deeply for your feelings. Someone who loves you yields to what you need. They don’t need to be persuaded that you’re hurt. They can acknowledge when they’ve hurt you, and try not to do it anymore.   

All of the goodwill, friendship and benefit of the doubt in the world will not move someone who, damaged enough early in life, can never, ever, admit they are wrong or ever did anything, even unintentionally, that could possibly hurt you.

You will hear from these types that you are one who has the problem.  Strictly speaking, this is true, the problem you have is that you are locked in a relationship and still trying to reason with someone like them.  They will tell you that you are over-sensitive, self-pitying, ruled by childhood trauma you never overcame, blaming them unfairly, that you frighten them, that your expectations of others are too high, that you can’t control your emotions, you’re too analytical, blind to how much they love and respect you, that you don’t realize how hurtful you’re being to them by unfairly accusing them of hurting you. 

To put it bluntly, these fucks will say absolutely anything to avoid conceding anything to you about the reasonable, foreseeable effects of their hurtful behavior.  When you see this behavior is a pattern, and it doesn’t stop, weed these folks out of your life, there is no other healthy option. There is really no middle course with someone who insists on their right to treat you as they see fit, even if you tell them many times that you can’t stand the way they treat you.

I don’t really mind being called over-sensitive anymore, not as much as I used to, anyway. I am sensitive, exactly as sensitive as I need to be. I would like to become ever more sensitive, because sensitivity is where all the beautiful things, as well as the painful ones, live.  I am sensitive because I am sentient.  I will not deliberately hurt somebody in my life, I try not to hurt strangers either most of the time.  If I find out I’ve hurt someone I know, I’m quick to make amends.  If I am over-sensitive, I greatly prefer it to being insensitive, under-sensitive, whatever the opposite of over-sensitive is.

Being sensitive, and knowing exactly what causes us the most pain, we need to learn to protect ourselves from repeating familiar harm.  I have found, over and over, that once I see contempt in a friend or family member, or anyone else, and contempt becomes their final answer, that I always feel immediate relief when I get away from that person.  Contempt as a final statement doesn’t heal, doesn’t change, is not amenable to negotiation. 

A show of contempt draws a life and death battle line, humiliating to the person who shows contempt, who can then never back down for fear of more humiliation. Their agitated implacability makes finding peace impossible.  Contempt is a relationship breaker, walk away from it and you will always feel tremendous relief. It is one horrible thing you no longer have to try to accommodate your sensitive feelings to.

There is enough of that horror in the world we can do nothing about, without having it inflicted by those close to us who insist, irrationally, counter-factually, that they love and admire us and that we have to love them no matter what because of that. Love is sensitivity to the feelings of the person you love.  It is nothing else.

The tyrannical style

The tyrannical style is sickening to observe, exhausting to read about and stains the history of the world with the suffering and blood of the meek, but it is something essential to recognize, mobilize against, defeat or get away from.    The tyrant is concerned only with power over others and there is no consideration for them outside of being the one in charge of everyone around them.   This personality type sees life as a brutal competition that inevitably involves combat to the death.   They never back down, not to reason, appeals to decency or anything but superior force.   If you can’t safely get away from them, you literally have to club them unconscious to end the senseless war, and then get away from them.

Being a tyrant is not a healthy or helpful way to go through life, of course, human evolution and all progress has been based on cooperation, increased understanding developed by groups working toward common goals.  There is nothing healthy or useful about a tyrant, except to others as monstrously disposed to domination and selfishness as the tyrant himself.   One tyrant is always useful to another tyrant, if they can find mutual benefit in an alliance.

These motherfuckers appear in every walk of life.  They are domineering colleagues, abusive parents, faithless partners, treacherous playmates.  They appear as corrupt public servants, mobsters, executives, bosses who take pleasure in demoralizing and humiliating employees, surgeons who blame their patients for not asking for the proper tests prior to harmful surgery. 

There is, sadly, no shortage of these twisted creatures in our toxic society where everything is for sale, every interaction monetized for maximum profit,   They are, many are duped into believing, the “winners” among us, because they “rule.”

You eventually learn that such creatures are always created by tremendous damage done to them before they had anything to say about it.  There is a genetic component, to be sure, you can see the brain scans of a certain type, drowned in certain hormones in the womb, emerging devoid of empathy, connection or the capacity for regret.  If you add to this genetic code mistreatment by caretakers, particularly traumatic violence, or continual fear and humiliation, you get your adult tyrant, or serial killer, or simply someone who cannot stop themselves from raging whenever they feel defied.  Disagreement of any kind is seen as defiance to them, and will not be tolerated.

You may never discuss what happened, they don’t care what happened, it never happened.  They live in a present where if they are not 100% in control, and acknowledged as your superior, there will be rage until you comply.  The irrationality of these formidably insane fuckers makes any kind of meaningful conversation impossible.  You will hear them angrily insist on plainly ridiculous things.  If you produce evidence that what they are saying is not based on anything real they will forcefully counter that the lack of evidence for proof of their position PROVES that evidence has been hidden and that you are lying.  It is sickening to be locked in a dispute with one of these sick fucks.

My advice is avoid them at the first sign of irrational insistence.  It never gets better, it only intensifies until you finally react with anger.  When you do: trial by combat, usually against  at least 10 to one odds.  Violence, of one kind or another, is the only thing these twisted souls are capable of when their claim to perfection is not accepted.

A few words about real friendship

There are some people who reveal an ugly side of themselves, often at the worst time for you. You cannot unsee the ugliness of contempt once it reveals itself to you. It’s human nature to make excuses for that person, if we love them, but once an ugly pattern emerges, with the insistence that only you are to blame for any bad feelings, wishful hoping will not change the person you are making excuses for or your relationship with them.

Just because you love dogs, and dream of having an affectionate lapdog, that love doesn’t turn the fish struggling in your lap into a dog.  The fish will always die, no matter how many beautiful, friendly fish you try this with.

I had a childhood friend I haven’t seen for many years at this point. He called periodically and we spoke calmly about things in our lives. The reason we don’t see each other anymore is that in spite of provoking me to anger every time we met, for years, he refused to acknowledge this, instead insisting that I have a problem with my temper.

We all have a problem when we lose our temper, but that is another story. We do not all provoke our closest friends every time we get together with them. We also don’t all reflexively fight to deny that we are doing anything bad to anybody, ever.

I urged him several times over the years, if you see me start to get upset, hear my voice tighten, see my muscles tense and my face redden, pump the brakes and let’s change the subject for a while. He doesn’t know how to do this. It’s not his problem. It is mine, as he always reminded me. So, in the end I finally did what I needed to do not to be provoked by someone who can’t help himself. I stopped pretending this handsome fish was a cuddly lapdog.

He is, sadly, unable to view his actions, and the actions of others, with the same clarity. To him we were still friends, somehow, because I took his calls and we talked on the phone once in a while. I always like talking to people, it is one of my favorite things to do.

I like comparing notes on what we’ve learned over our aging lives. He listened as I recited hard lessons I’ve had to learn. This made him feel close to me, that I was always honest with him, and talked in a relaxed, nonjudgmental way. I didn’t mind talking to him, but that’s a much different thing than us being friends.

Friends comfort each other during painful times. Friends ask good questions when they don’t understand something. Friends extend the benefit of the doubt when the other one is off kilter, gently find out what’s wrong, how they can help. Friends accept responsibility when they hurt their friend. Friends make sure that ill-feelings do not fester in their dear ones. Friends are responsive, and honest, when a friend expresses unhappiness with the way things are.

Not all friendships can always be saved, though some can. No friendship can be saved if one friend is always blamed for any conflict, unless the blamed person is a masochist.

If I tell you a sad story of death, with a terrible lesson I reluctantly had to learn, and you reply that it was a beautiful story of life, with an inspiring lesson that is the opposite of the lesson I described, what can I possibly say, without being dishonest, that will make us friends again?