Category Archives: personal

By the time posting a picture like this is “domestic terrorism” American will be great again (and I will be interned in Camp Schumer)

I’m going to take a break from thinking about my vexing personal situation, worries about a suddenly intermittent ability to pass bloody urine since an unnecessary urethral surgery done by a master salesman so confident he felt no need to do a single pre-surgical test, to muse a bit about another dangerous psychopath everyone in the world knows, and a good percentage of the world hates.

Those who hate him, or course, suffer from a special mental illness his handlers have cooked up (a regurgitated version of [Dubya] Bush Derangement Syndrome from the pre-Obama era), so we can, fairly and honestly, consider him universally loved, perhaps even intergalactically so.

(Why should I be required to show more courage than Columbia University, ABC, Disney, Chuck Schumer, bumbling numbskull John Fetterman, the Republican-led Congress, various law firms the president has threatened? Only one reason, actually: not to obey a wannabe American Hitler and his stinking horde in advance, fighting fascism fucking 101, brothers and sisters. I know well how many of the dead the original Hitler caused to be slaughtered (full disclosure, I may have an ax to grind, dozens in my family were killed by Elon’s and Don’s Herr H.), his one small fault now reduced by many to merely hating Jews a little bit (and who doesn’t? [1]), though the well-documented history of his impressive mass murder score is being erased, possibly by Musk employee Big Balls himself, as I tap this keyboard)

Anyway, sorry for the distraction. I was going to show you a picture, which I display under the for now robust protections of free expression provided by the First Amendment, which may soon be banned, even criminalized as “domestic terrorism” by Elon “Free Speech” Musk, enemy of unelected bureaucrats, and Pam “Too Corrupt to Serve in Trump’s first term” Bondi. Here you go:

Now these two photos of the same man are equally handsome, a fair minded person might say. One wears makeup, had painful scalp reduction surgery (which caused him to violently assault his first wife, who’d suggested the plastic surgeon who left him in agony) and spends twice the average worker’s annual income every year in hair dressing to make himself look tall and tan and young and lovely as the Girl From Ipanema. The other, non-cosmetically enhanced head merely reflects the results of 78, going on 79, years of life’s inevitable changes.

We live in a culture of illusion/deception by advertising, with a focus on youthful beauty, and Trumpie is touted as a genius because he has played to this illusion/deception “like nobody’s ever seen.” Leave aside the well-known fact that the man is a compulsive liar. There are other ways to refer to someone who constantly spouts falsehoods (see — NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times, CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX, Völkischer Beobachter). In the law there is a distinction between “puffery” — making exaggerated claims of one’s own power to intimidate an adversary that do not cross the line into outright lies — and making false statements under oath or as an officer of the court (all lawyers who appear before judges are considered officers of the court) which are punishable as perjury. I apologize, insincerely, for this perverse insistence on drawing logical and semantic lines in the sewage we are all ankle deep in during Musk/Trump 2.0 Triumph of Wanton Irrationality Crusade.

The entire billionaire funded reactionary right-wing project of the last several decades, now in full stinking flower, has been to destroy meaning, to nullify rationality itself. Our current age of irrationality makes actual dialogue or negotiation between political opponents impossible since an irrational argument, asserted loudly and repeatedly, is just as good, for purposes of swaying public opinion, as a detailed, fact-based one that logically and completely refutes the other based on a body of what was once called incontrovertible evidence. Today, these irrational monsters controvert and crowds cheer, it’s not a problem at all.

This “the only the reality is what we say it is” leaves only constant warfare between hated enemies, rather than the sometimes contentious policy debates integral to a functioning democracy. Nazis don’t want democracy, they want Nazism, duh. You are either a woke snowflake who hates everything the rightful oligarchs of America stand for, OR, a courageous and fearless patriot who wants to turn America back to the paradise it was before insane deep state regulations destroyed the ability of Robber Barons to make, and keep, unregulatable wealth and operate as they saw fit, for the benefit of themselves and their poorly paid virtual slaves alike.

I was hoping for something a bit more profound today, and frankly I’ve disappointed myself. It’s hard to get out of your own feelings about being injured, physically and psychically, by a master salesman psychopath by writing about another one we are all sickeningly familiar with, or in love with his carefully manufactured false image (those who do not suffer from the widespread plague of TDS). His image again, please:

This thin-skinned stable genius strongman was recently bitterly crying over an official portrait of his, hung somewhere in 2019, that shows him looking a bit fat, bloated, an unhealthy color more like the unretouched one above than the carefully beautiful John Boehner-toned one he projects every day (he bragged that he was prettier than Kamala Harris, you be the judge, carefully…). The portrait’s painter, according to the strongest, most secure man in the free world, is a hack who is losing her skills, a bitch, probably an abortionist, sick, dangerous, a deranged enemy lunatic pet-eating sickie who deliberately tried to humiliate the world’s most handsome man after making Obama look so much more handsome than she made him look. Or, perhaps she’s just a portraitist who faithfully painted what she saw.

What do I know? The best I can do is something like this self-pitying self portrait as a partially crucified Picasso with pissbag and stylish, crucifix-coordinated shorts.

[1] By the way, according to Hannah Arendt’s short, encyclopedic primer on the original Nazis, Eichmann in Jerusalem (Penguin edition, 2006, p. 133), Hitler himself had a list of 340 Jews on his personal “don’t touch Moishe” list.

Psychopaths do not all literally kill people with their own hands

The vast majority of psychopaths, like the current acting administrator of the Social Security Administration, a formerly mid-level SSA dude named Dudek, may never have committed any kind of physical violence against anyone.  He may display other marks of psychopathy, but, not to worry, the American Psychiatric Association does not even have a definition of this familiar personality type in DSM V.  Here’s what this one boasted of recently on social media:

Dudek was a mid-level staffer at SSA until he won his position atop the agency by secretly cooperating with DOGE’s demands to review sensitive records after SSA’s head, Michelle King, stood in the way. “I confess. I bullied agency executives, shared executive contact information, and circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done,” he wrote on LinkedIn. source

Another apparently non-violent psychopath, this one a billionaire cabinet member purportedly vetted and duly confirmed on a narrow party-line vote, added this bit of clarification about the kerfuffle at Social Security and who is actually to blame for the confusion and possibility that for the first time since the social safety net’s creation, checks for seniors and the disabled will not arrive on time (back to Heather):

SSA oversees Social Security benefits for nearly 70 million people and, according to the agency, was expected to distribute about $1.6 trillion in benefits in 2025. For many people, that check is vital to survival. But billionaire Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick suggested that concerns about a stoppage in checks were overblown. He told billionaire podcast host Chamath Palihapitiya: “Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t. She’d think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling, and complaining.”

source (for both quotes above)

Anyone with a problem with the behavior of a psychopath is just a whining, complaining bitch to be bitch slapped by the psychopath.   I am very sensitive at the moment to the issue of psychopathy, having been recently “treated” by a top urologist, charming, reassuring and a master salesman, who, truthfully told me (the only true statement I heard from him, with the knowledge of hindsight)  the “minimally invasive” surgery would tear tissue in my urethra, and it tore such tissue (as my pain and difficulty urinating, since the removal of a catheter and “leg bag” I wore for a week, confirmed). 

Hours after the surgery he told me he’d have to do a TURP, the one he’d sold the “dilation” as a way to avoid (knowing my concern that a TURP at this point would almost certainly end my sex life), since the dilation clearly wasn’t the surgery indicated, as he saw instantly the first time he actually looked into my bladder with a cystoscope (during the unnecessary, urinary tract lacerating surgery I’d just endured).  Psychopath and motherfucker both, this unaccountably unethical asshole (unless his procedure left me with a permanent, legally cognizable injury, the jury’s still out as my ability to urinate waxes and wanes).

The main hallmarks of a psychopath are steely determination, lack of regret, adeptness in gaining control over others, self promotion, acquisition, particularly of wealth and power over others, a driving need to be the un-contradictable final word on everything.   They are often charming, always persuasive, attuned to the needs of others in order to exploit them, they make great salesmen.   The bulk of the titans of corporate boardrooms, and most CEOs, are psychopaths.   They seem to make great leaders because they are bold, fearless risk-takers and they project a supernatural level of cool self-confidence, which is comforting to subordinates.  

Until their real nature is revealed.   They have no concern for the well-being of others, no regret for anything they’ve done, and they maintain a righteous, vindictive rage, unabated, over years, even decades.

It’s hard to read the signs sometimes, since psychopaths are generally adept manipulators who will tell you exactly what you need to hear. 

Even if the signs are as clear as this one, in the lobby of my psychopathic former urologist’s office.  In fairness to him, his office is part of the nation’s largest network of corporately owned humane, caring, supportive, patient-centered urology practices in the United States.  The Supreme Court-created corporate person is a psychopath since it is only obliged to make the most money for shareholders and minimize liability for harm it does in pursuit of profit by any means necessary.  Though my sloppy former doctor is the top dog in his office, I guess the “boss” made him put the sign up, they probably have one in each of their hundreds, if not thousands, of compassionate healing centers nationwide.

Writing as pain relief

Make no mistake, and you certainly don’t need me to remind you of this, life provides each one of us with steady doses of various kinds of pain.  Today mine is mostly located in my urinary tract, aggravated by a coudé catheter placed after a surgery it seems unlikely I needed in the first place (with a second catheter inserted in an ER after 7 stressful hours straining to urinate the next evening after removing the first).   It is day four of the catheter and piss bag, and I must say, it is uncomfortable, occasionally painful and a fucking drag in many different ways. 

There are all kinds of pain.  Every kind of pain is made worse by enflamed emotions.   The realization that the pain we are suffering, the result of someone else’s thoughtlessness, is unnecessary, could have been easily prevented had we not misplaced our trust, is maybe the most tormenting thing we can learn about our pain.   In the hours after leaving the ER the other night I was in a rage against the negligent, confident, smiling surgeon who’d done no tests, relying on tests done by a prior sociopath who had done no tests either,  before forging ahead blindly with surgery under general anesthesia.  I sincerely wanted to punch his lights out.  This rage certainly made the physical pain I was experiencing much worse.  

I have found, and I confirmed this again the other day, that sitting in a quiet place and writing out a schematic of what is going on, explaining it to yourself as simply and directly as you can, as if you were talking to a sympathetic friend, can give substantial relief from the emotional part of pain. 

My initial angry writing was a torrent of what happened to me as a result of a ten minute surgery I spent 14 hours in the hospital for (4 of them in the ER correcting the painful condition I was left with), why it was all so gratuitous, and inexcusable, and disrespectful, and avoidable and sickening and fucked up.  That menu of gristly details went on for a few pages.  I then emailed my cousin, an expert in medical malpractice, and briefly laid out my case for a breach of the legal standard of care that a doctor, even in a soul-dead corporate medical culture like ours, owes to a patient.   These writings gave me slight relief, to have the ugly details set out on paper.

It was the following day, when my anger had cooled slightly, along with the inflammation of my abused urinary tract, which had been torn by the “non-invasive” procedure (first do no harm), that I was able to distill the pain down to the principle of trust.  Much of the pain I was feeling was about a violation of trust.  What is trust, how do we know when we can trust somebody, what do we do when someone proves they can’t be trusted?   Turning to these philosophical questions, illustrated with details of two lying, defensive, unethical doctors who blamed their patient for their own inattention to the patient’s best interest, reduced my anger by a substantial margin.  I felt much better after writing this.

Writing that gave me a better frame to look at my current frustrating situation through.  This same analysis can be applied to many things in our current world, where liars are frequently rewarded with great power and those who cling to the truth are seen as somehow weak and contemptible.  We don’t need to make an explicit connection to a corrupt and threatening new status quo to consider the basic question, an important one for everyday life: how do we know when we can trust somebody?

I have to say, in passing, that a new detail installed by WordPress on a page they no longer support (this particular design), the automatic, intermittently undefeatable “group blocks,” makes editing almost impossible once you’ve gone on to the next paragraph.  I will have to go over this again on my phone to make it more clear, and the thought of that extra step makes my irritated urethra clench a bit.   What is it with these fucking tech bro motherfuckers, who know better than any of us what features we want suddenly disabled, what new inconveniences coders like Big Balls will insert into formerly useful apps to make us appreciate their dull genius even more than we already do?  I see now that there are three dots that can be clicked on, in addition to the normal options for formatting, and one of the options in that second pulldown menu is “ungroup”, which allows editing, but it took me weeks to discover that fix of something that wasn’t broken before in any way (and the fix of their new ‘improvement’ doesn’t work every time, as it happens).  Nazi fucks.

Anyway, my point here is to underscore how helpful it can be to sit and sift through aggravations, with as few distractions as possible, and by writing and clarifying, readjust your perspective.  The expression of your point of view, and the knowledge that you have set it out plainly and understandably, provides that crucial feeling of being heard, if only by yourself.  If you need to explain it to someone else, you have a link you can send them, and the confidence that they will grasp what is eating you and why it is reasonable that you are feeling in the hands of cannibals.

At the moment there’s no medication I can take for the discomfort and intermittent pain of having this  irritating catheter in my body, strapped to a piss bag I’m constantly having to drain.  There is a kind of self-healing in laying out the good reasons for my anger and considering how to protect myself from anything like this ever being done to me again, no matter how adept the smiling psychopath is in presenting it as my best and least invasive option for curing a medical ill.  

I recommend it to you, my invisible friend, as an exercise that can go a long way in self-soothing.  Once you get yourself into the habit, it becomes a fairly straightforward path to partial pain relief.  In the context of severe pain, I have learned, partial relief is nothing to sneeze at.  Whatever practice you can develop for calming the enflamed emotions that accompany all pain is helpful.   Try writing for a few minutes the next time you can’t get the thought of smashing someone’s smug face out of your mind.  If it reduces your pain by 30%, you can give yourself a gentle, loving pat on the back.

To trust or not to trust?

Once you realize a person is prone to lying, trust is often a self-destructive option.  Until you see this pattern of untruthfulness clearly, the question of trusting or not trusting can be tricky.   I think humans want to trust the people around them, this appears to be a default setting.  We homo sapiens are a communal, if also often communally irrational, species, after all, and community is based on trust.  

When you’re a helpless infant you have no choice but to trust the people taking care of you.  This trust is rewarded if you’re nurtured with care.  Trust can be shattered forever if you learn you’ve been continually pissed on by your caretakers and told to shut up and stop whining about a little rain falling on your head.   Most of us have upbringings that fall somewhere in between.  Knowing when to trust and when not to trust is often only learned by hard experience.   We put our trust in somebody, in their expertise, and sometimes that trust is revealed to have been misguided.  The question: how do we know in advance that we can trust someone?

We tend to trust people, I suppose I generalize from my own habit, who are relaxed, friendly, show a sense of humor, make the proper sympathetic facial expressions, and react reassuringly, when you express concerns.   The obvious problem is that these are all the behaviors of the best conmen and almost all manipulators and compulsive liars.

I’m thinking about this because I had a consultation with a friendly, reassuring, good humored and very likeable urologist back in August.  We left the office very impressed with him.   He assured me that during the tests I was going to have two weeks later I’d be under comfortable “conscious sedation”.  I was relieved to hear that since having devices shoved into your penis is not always comfortable, and is usually done without any palliative measures.  The standard line is that most patients tolerate it.  You wince a bit, maybe groan, at the insertion, and the rest is fairly tolerable.  But I was glad to know I’d be sedated, the better to wince less, and maybe not have to grunt.

When I arrived for the tests, and asked about the conscious sedation, his nurse expressed frustration that he always tells his patients they will receive conscious sedation when his office NEVER gives conscious sedation, does not even have tranquilizers they can give patients.  She said he probably thinks it makes his patients more relaxed.  I didn’t need to convince her that learning, at the moment of your test, that the doctor lied to you is the opposite of relaxing.  I endured a ninety minute ordeal with this gentle, determined nurse, as she tried, unsuccessfully to insert catheters into my urethra to drain my bladder for the test.

The doctor came in, sweaty and smiling, and asked how I was doing.  I told him I was wondering what happened to my conscious sedation.  He had a fit, denying he’d ever said that, essentially calling me a fucking liar.  In that moment I knew I was done with this asshole, and managed to remain the adult in the room.  I quickly calmed the angry baby down and got him back to business. He told me he wouldn’t do   further tests, telling me my urethra was already irritated enough for one day. 

Then he wrote a detailed report, which I got a copy of and which was sent to all of my doctors, not mentioning the unsuccessful catheterization, but stating “patient tolerated procedure well.”  It then gave detailed findings of two tests this motherfucker never did.  He billed Medicare for them, and I got bills and a statement from Medicare confirming the charges and what they paid.  Medicare did not seem concerned about the fraud, it was virtually impossible to report it, even as determined as I was to. 

My next urologist was also affable, smiling, quite chill, with a sense of humor and all the other indicators of a nice guy you could trust.  He was openly horrified by the doctor’s false report I presented to him and suggested I contact HR at the place his unethical colleague worked.  (No doctor is going to suggest a disciplinary complaint to the state licensing board).  He did no tests, described a non-invasive surgery that should correct my urinary problem, I postponed the procedure once to have a fuller discussion of it.  He gave me a detailed theory for why this procedure was better than the standard alternative, which I’d had years earlier, to great life changing effect.  I had the procedure Thursday and left the hospital with a catheter and piss bag on my leg, as is common after this kind of surgery.

There was a complication when I removed the catheter the next day as instructed.  I was unable to urinate at all.  After 4 hours with a full bladder, and the constant urge to urinate,  I wound up in the ER where I was “fast tracked” and it only took another 3 hours to have the painful urgency to piss out 600 ml of urine relieved by a new catheter.  

I was sore, irritated and in need of advice afterwards and called the number the urologist had smilingly touted as a 24/7 doctor on call, no worries.  I left increasingly agitated messages.  Five messages and five hours later, at 2:45 a.m., I got a call from a bot, instructing me to go to an ER and have the ER doctor contact their on-call doctor.

I called again when I woke up and got a fairly quick call back from the surgeon himself.  He sounded indignant to have been defamed the way I’d spoken of him in my increasingly agitated messages.  He told me I had a poor recollection of our detailed conversations prior to the surgery.  I was in a pissing contest with a skunk, only my piss was dribbling slowly into a leg bag.  I asked him why he hadn’t done any pre-surgical tests before doing what seems, at the moment, and in light of what he told me after an unnecessary surgery.  He was able to see with the scope that, contrary to his prior test-free opinion, there was no scarring from the previous procedure and that I’d likely need the original procedure repeated soon in any case.  ) He told me he had the notes of recent tests from my previous urologist, the tissue of lies he had attached to my file in the hospital.  He made numerous other excuses and told me how busy he was doing Saturday surgeries at another hospital.  I sensed there was not a trace of his winning smile on his face as he defended himself and his perfect recollection.

So, quite naturally, as an irritating drip of urine intermittently leaks through the painfully re-inserted catheter into the leg bag, I am musing about trust, when to trust, who to trust, if you can ever trust someone who is employed by a demanding bottom-line driven psychopath, which is what every corporation is.  After all, this guy is the director of his clinic, part of a chain across the US, the largest corporate provider of high quality, infallible, humane, patient-centered urologic care.   You can read all about it on their fucking website.

Or just listen to their compassionate on-call doctor, who phones you personally at 2:48 a.m., a mere five hours after your first of five distress calls.

Narcissistic Abuse MAGA style

Narcissistic abuse is a term I had to learn not long ago, after I discovered that two of my longtime closest friends, a husband and wife team, flew into a united, endless, implacable rage when they felt “defied” by my attempt to negotiate about something they wanted us all to do. Perceived defiance is an intolerably painful injury to someone, irreparably damaged by earlier trauma, who can never be wrong. It challenges them in a way that infuriates them, plunges them into an unbearable childish rage that makes them violent and irrational.

So they raise their voice, they go silent, they glare, they change what happened, reverse cause and effect, forget details that show them partially at fault, they blame, they threaten, they lie, inventing contradictory reasons that show they are completely in the right.  They will blame you for the entire, increasingly ugly conflict because it is 100% your fault for making them feel bad about themselves by defying their will.  Since they can’t be even a little bit wrong, you have to be completely wrong, and if you won’t admit your fault, and take all blame, then you are the enemy.  Here’s a little snapshot of this type:

We all have a breaking point for tolerating this kind of insane, abusive treatment. We can control our reactions, try to act with maturity, understand we are dealing with damaged people incapable of doing better, but at some point, provoked sharply enough, if we don’t get away in time, most of us will eventually roll our eyes or let a “shut the fuck up” slip out. In this moment, we become the aggressor, and have proved their point that we are the violent, enraged person, not them. The video of us snarling “shut the fuck up already” will be played to everyone over and over as proof of our abusiveness. This reaction is the desired outcome of narcissistic abuse, it proves they were right to treat us as a despicable, implacable enemy.

Look at this pile of shit, Lyin’ Ted, an intelligent, educated, morally bankrupt, Trump-smeared toady, making the case that Zelensky standing up for his country during a coordinated attack from his putative allies by stating the truth, while being angrily cut off and challenged by Trump, Vance and company, had “abused” and disrespected the Orange Pussy Grabber in Chief. Perfect snapshot of narcissistic abuse, on Ted’s and JD’s parts, as well as on their master’s, Putin’s BFF, part. Lyin’ Ted claims Trump was 100% correct to be infuriated by Zelensky trying to get a word in, Zelensky impertinently correcting a couple of Trump’s more outrageous lies. Shades of Bagpiper Bill Barr, identifying with Trump’s completely understandable “righteous anger” after the Mueller Report came out.

One of the hallmarks of narcissistic abuse is its utter irrationality. These morally paralyzed, reflexively childish dirty fighters engage in warfare to the death based entirely on their aggrieved will. They almost always need to lie, because “proving” their case is impossible, since their claims fly in the face of what people actually witnessed. If you can’t be wrong, and you are wrong, you will fight to the death, anybody, everybody. It is the nature of these stinking creatures. They can do nothing else.

Zelensky had a catastrophic meltdown in the Oval Office, according to MAGA. Note that this “meltdown” (something impossible to see in real time, except to the faithful, since there was no actual “meltdown”) gave Trump every right to say this, after becoming righteously, justifiably “infuriated”, according to Lyin’ Ted:

“Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia… Russia, Russia, Russia—you ever hear of that deal?—that was a phony Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, scam. Hillary Clinton, shifty Adam Schiff, it was a Democrat scam. And he had to go through that. And he did go through it, and we didn’t end up in a war. And he went through it. He was accused of all that stuff. He had nothing to do with it. It came out of Hunter Biden’s bathroom.”

All perfectly reasonable, if you’re an insane psychopath, I suppose. Of course it was all Hunter Fucking Biden’s fault, of course it was, sir, the fault of his disgusting bathroom with all those stolen classified documents in it (spoken with those proverbial tears of sincerity running down my face, sir). Also, I note your great restraint, sir, in not including Rosie O’Donnell, Lawrence O’Donnell, Mitch McConnell, Liz Cheney, the AP, PBS, NPR, Adam Kinsinger, Birdbrain Nikki Haley or any of your other sick, dangerous enemies, in your righteously infuriated closing statement, right before you kicked Zelensky out of the White House, as the greatest diplomats do when engaged in delicate negotiations.

By the way, Little Marco, who signed off on the three volume Senate Committee report detailing over 140 acts of coordination between the 2016 Trump campaign and Putin, including the sharing of sensitive polling data between Paul Manafort and a Russian agent named Konstantin Kilimnik, was never smaller or more humiliated and compromised than sitting passively near his boss, as Secretary of State, while an enraged Trump righteously snarled “Russia, Russia, Russia…” as he betrayed our ally and shared the true pain he’d gone through with his comrade/business partner/benefactor/blackmailer, Vladimir, at the hands of their mutual enemies, the nefarious agents of world democracy.

God bless these United Shayyysssshhh…

The psychopathic worldview

From the personal to the political, there are some people who cannot be wrong, no matter what they might have done. A mountain of evidence, a clear chain of cause and effect, the corroborating testimony of 250 eye witnesses, incriminating statements they themselves repeatedly make — angrily reduced to the satanic work of sick, evil haters determined to unfairly persecute them, out of pure, blind spite, malice, irrational hatred. The person who can never be wrong must remake the world into a place that always serves them without question or contradiction, in order to make themselves feel irrefutably right, no matter what.

It’s disorienting, especially at first, to realize the relatively small role rationality, common sense, plays in many lives, in mass politics and in history. In the name of an abstract higher cause, masses of people will reflexively reject the facts, cause and effect, all appeals to human empathy, if it suits their larger need to belong, to feel righteous and correct. The Capitol policeman crying out in pain as an enraged mob crushed him in the doorway he was defending during the January 6 riot? Bullshit, a paid crisis actor pretending to be in pain, a cynical play by evil commies to blame perfectly peaceful tourists they want to viciously paint as trespassing rioters! That eyeball gouged out of another officer’s head? His own fault for fighting true patriots in the name of a sick, insane cheater and traitor!

An infuriating lie is effective because it is short, conclusive, easy to repeat and impossible, once repeated over and over, to disabuse people of. “They’re eating the pets!” was a laugh line for Kamala and millions of us, but it was instantly memorable and damn good for fundraising, for turning up the already boiling pot of outrage against imagined hoards of disgusting vermin who are raping young white girls and poisoning our nation’s blood [1]. 

The professional liar has a transactional, self-serving view of other people. It is a transgressive thrill for fans of the liar that reality itself must conform to the liar’s framing and the so-called truth, that a lie can instantly render what did or didn’t actually happen impotently irrelevant. The liar “owns” his hated enemies with his infinite ability to change the facts on demand. The power of a venerated liar’s reframing is that it blurs then obliterates every other narrative. Truth and lies are transactional commodities just like anything else employed in the art of the deal. To millions among us, increasingly, objective truth is whatever we most fervently believe to be true. That belief does not make things that actually happened disappear, but the belief that they disappear is good enough for most people.

The psychopathic personality, with its insatiable need to dominate and feel superior to others, can never be satisfied in the way most people are satisfied. If it has $10,000,000,000, it must have $100,000,000,000, $1,000,000,000,000, because it is intolerable that some other greedy bastard can have more billions than they do. What will they do to achieve their endlessly out of reach goal? Everything you can think of and many things you can’t imagine. No price is too high for others to pay for the realization of the powerful psychopath’s blind desire.

We have a front row seat now to watch these sick fucks in action as they take positions of power in the new government. The incoming president will have a cabinet full of them, and there are hundreds more waiting in the wings when he starts firing this first batch. For every George Soros, a wealthy man with a social conscience, there are a hundred billionaires who will embrace any Nazi, klansman or Putinist who promises them even more wealth and power. Robert Reich published this clip from the 1930s NY Times as an illustration of what we are seeing right now among our “greatest citizens” and their corporate avatars:

I recently got an email containing the perfect encapsulation of the absolutist worldview of someone who can never be wrong. I’d written in detail to a cousin about a lifelong conflict with my father, a man with many great qualities, and an uncontrollable need to never be wrong. I provided many examples of the senselessness of this long war, of my many attempts at reconciliation. I included quotes of my father’s genuine regret, right before he died, sadly acknowledging my many unrequited attempts to make peace over the years. He harshly berated himself for his inability to reciprocate, and expressed terrible self-loathing for having turned our relationship into a battle to the death instead of being an empathetic father capable of a loving, mutual relationship. He explained what I already understood, that he acted this way because he was crushed in his soul, finished for life at age two, as he put it, by a furious, violent mother who beat all hope out of him.

The response I received from this cousin struck me as a textbook illustration of the psychotic worldview. In short, clipped sentences it stated a series of irrefutable facts, the world as he understood it. Conspicuously absent was any reference to anything I’d written, any question I’d posed. Statement: the father I’d portrayed, Irv #1, was essentially my unrecognizably distorted creation, the product of my angry, conflict-prone personality, divorced from lived reality and entirely my burden. 

The person this cousin had experienced, who he dubbed Irv #2, had absolutely nothing in common with my Irv #1. Irv #1 and Irv #2 were irreconcilable entities and no matter how much information I provided him, how many quotes of Irv’s actual deathbed regrets and self-recriminations, he would never see anything but his pure, loving view of the very best of the man. I would never get any acknowledgment of anything I ever said or wrote to this person, no conversation was possible — in describing my father truthfully, and with nuance, I had crossed into the dark side. I was now a betrayer of a loving memory and entitled only to a series of icy statements of fact.

This cousin is highly intelligent, has a scientific turn of mind, an engineering background, yet he couldn’t acknowledge that every person contains multiple aspects, strengths, weaknesses, conflicting desires, contradictory behaviors. We show different sides of ourselves to different people, at different times. Picture a Venn diagram showing aspects of the personalities of his two opposing, irreconcilable Irvs, there is always an overlap of desirable and undesirable traits, unless the person is that exceedingly rare outlier who is somehow purely one or the other. The response I got stated, essentially — I see black, you see white. There can be no ambiguity, no discussion, no room for compromise in this world, no nuance, nor any color. The very things Irv #1 bitterly lamented never experiencing as he voiced regrets the last night of his life. 

“I imagine how much richer my life would have been,” my father, Irv #1/Irv #2, said in a dying man’s voice, “if I had been able to see all the nuance, gradation and color in the world instead of seeing everything in harsh, childish black and white. The world’s not black and white, Elie.”

Human affairs is black and white only if you are damaged in your soul beyond the ability to perceive the human complexities and colorful, sometimes terrible, contradictions we all contain. Absurd as it sounds, this crabbed logic (A or B, never both) leads to propositions like — a philanthropist cannot also be a cold hearted criminal, even if there is ample proof that the person is, in fact, both of these things. 

The final appeal of the psychopath’s worldview is that, if you can accept it, all ambiguity and complication is removed from this complex, challengingly nuanced world. That this freedom from uncertainty comes at the cost it does is of little concern to people desperate for the righteous relief provided by knowing who to love and who to hate, without ever having to meet them.

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I’m the bad guy

I keep forgetting this essential fact in a corporate society — the person with the complaint is always the problem. 

Who would you rather be, a wealthy, philanthropic, problem-solving job creator or a sniveling, powerless loser trying to lodge some niggling complaint?   Not much to choose there, really, in our either/or, winner/loser, black/white, powerful/helpless culture.   Then, among us puny earthlings, there is the personal sphere, the only thing we can sometimes control — how we act in response to stress.

If it weren’t for whiners like me who need to make a “complaint” any time they feel slighted, cheated, over-billed, underserved, physically or emotionally injured and all the other annoying signs of personal self-pity, corporations would never be troubled by the odd customer with a gripe of some kind.   Life is unfair, everybody, even the most powerful among us, has gripes.  De minimis non curat lex.  “The law does not concern itself with your trifle, asshole.”  Sounds more majestic in Latin.

Somehow, I take the fact that I am now a cripple personally.  When I use that ugly term to refer to myself (we prefer to be known as ‘person with a disability’ or something more respectful than ‘cripple’ or ‘gimp'[1]) I am describing a person who cannot walk a few steps without pain.  It is not uncommon for a medical limitation such as not being able to walk, after a knee replacement, with no available medical cure, to eventually make a person bitter.   I am now officially fucking bitter.

I obliged the wife yesterday by sending my dermatologist photos of two new skin growths.  I went on the MyChart of the corporation my doctor works for and sent a message.  My question was if either of these look suspicious enough to merit expediting my appointment, currently set for April.

After a night of interrupted, low quality sleep (ongoing pain, swelling and stiffness in my impeccably installed prosthetic left knee) that left me without REM, deep sleep, or any real rest, I woke today, Friday, to a text from the dermatologist’s office with a Monday morning appointment (90 minutes from here at that hour).

I hadn’t heard from my doctor. It generally takes a few days, and she always gets back to me. There was a notation on the portal, when I logged in, that my doctor had not yet seen my note. Somehow, somebody (a fucking bot driven by AI is my best guess) scanned my note, saw the words “expedited appointment” and put me on the calendar for Monday morning.

Annoying, but easily remedied by calling to cancel the appointment.  In hindsight I should have just texted “N” to “not confirm” and been done with it.  I was already cranky from another shit night’s sleep, the inability of the medical profession to fix the new problem they had caused for me, and everything related to the pain, physical and emotional, of being unable to walk.  I made the mistake of not texting “N”, instead calling to find out if there was some reason for this sudden emergency appointment.

As is the case whenever trying to talk to anyone in a corporate medical office, it was a gauntlet of ads, unsolicited advice about their convenient website and hold music.  I hung up angrily after a few minutes of a five second loop of hold muzak played over and over and over.  The wife, seeing me upset, moved in to help me out.  At one point, when she had someone on the line, she began to cry in frustration and overflowing sympathy for my aggravation.  I took the phone, explained the situation, canceled the appointment, handed the phone back to the wife.  Ten minutes later she was still making nice with the very nice clerk at the appointment desk.  The doctor was seeing other patients, but would personally call me at her earliest opportunity, she let me know.

I didn’t need a call from the doctor.  I’d make an earlier appointment if needed to after I got her response on the portal.  There was no need to trouble the doctor, there was no need to trouble myself, and yet, the call went on and on until I finally lost my shit and began screaming, as I do in the shower sometimes when I’m alone in the house and my knee is screaming along with me. 

The wife is now hurt, and I am a brutal fucking bitter asshole, in addition to an ungrateful one who snarls and yells at someone who is only trying to help me. 

Have a blessed day, y’all.  May this cautionary tale remind you to be the best person you can be, and remember to make nice after you lose control of your frustrations.

[1] Across the board, people with disabilities generally agree that words implying the person is a victim of their disability should be avoided. For example, it is recommended that people choose phrases like “they had a stroke” instead of “they are a stroke victim” or “they suffered a stroke.” These negative phrases can imply that the person is passive to their condition.         

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