Category Archives: personal

The terror of inchoate rage defended incoherently

Long, deep talk with old friends the other day, reminding me of the healing power of being heard and of forcing yourself to hear things you may not like to hear because these are crucial perspectives you can’t come to on your own when you are impaired by pain. Good friends don’t always have to agree with you, though they often do, but they always treat you with care when you need care.   A walk through the experiences they share sheds light that can reveal important, difficult things impossible to see on your own.   

I forgot, in all the emotion of a long, complex talk about heartbreak and forgiveness, to make a point about my personal, visceral terror of an incoherent argument insisted on to the death.   

In worldwide politics this kind of incoherent argument is made every day, insisted on by partisans and, spreading via “social media” able to gain millions of enthusiastic adherents almost instantly.   

What is the argument against continuing to fund a program that very recently took millions of vulnerable little children, our fellow Americans, out of the living hell of poverty?   The program seems to have done a great deal of good, cost a tiny fraction of the world’s highest military budget. What is the argument against helping the neediest and weakest to avoid a life that nobody, particularly a tender young child, should ever be forced to experience?

The arguments are all variations on Democrats “tax and spend”, liberty means no government “coercion” (unless you’re planning to murder a zygote or embroyo), Makers versus Takers, the president is a doddering dotard puppet, the Democrats are communists, socialists, liberals, it’s a slippery slope from a Child Tax Credit to forcibly closing all the Christian churches and confiscating all firearms, we are under attack by powerful Jews with a plan to dilute our vote by brainwashing millions of imported brown idiots to vote Democrat, the most powerful Democrats, and smiling, false-faced liberal monsters like Tom Hanks, are pedophiles, and child murderers, who drink the blood of the helpless kids they kidnap and rape, when they are not out aborting nine month old fetuses, looking them in their tiny eyes and sadistically slaughtering them in cold blood to prevent their baptisms.

The horror of such arguments, aside from the “argument” itself, is that they prevent agreement about anything you can actually talk about, let alone resolve, they preempt all reasonable discussion.  No compromise is possible between fervent followers of the Prince of Peace and Love and Satan.   Why Satan advocates for a program to take two year-olds out of poverty is a separate and complicated theological argument that no secular humanist could possibly understand.  God is infinitely mysterious in His infinite love and mercy.   Heathens, heretics and “humanists” simply lack any understanding of the higher realms of faith and divine justice. End of chat, have a blessed day.

It makes me sound old, I know, but there was a time, not long ago, when a president who was caught lying many times every day, and openly, angrily, disrespecting all law and democratic tradition, would be a villain who’d be turned out of office.   He would lose reelection not by 8,000,000 votes but many times that, and after he lost he would not be able to convince millions that he’d won in a landslide, his victory stolen by LGBTQ, hoards of angry, cheating urban Blacks and woke college students, Muslims, anti-fascist terrorists, dirty recent immigrants, disloyal Jews, etc.   

My biggest terror about the world today is that our lowest human impulse, to fight to the death for an insane cause when locked in righteous rage, has been monetized by people of infinite wealth and privilege who decide, strictly on the basis of how much more money they can make, that they will automate the process of spreading incoherent hatred that cannot be corrected by reasonable discussion.   The “invisible hand” of the Free Market, you understand, protects their absolute right to do this.

If you remove the ability of people to argue about issues of mutual and public interest, on the merits, weigh the advantages and disadvantages of a government policy, and replace it with legally sanctioned partisan incoherence (unlimited spending by billionaires and legally created “persons” to influence elections is guaranteed by the First Amendment now), we are close to done as a free society.  It’s a coin toss whether we will soon stick a fork in our long, overcooked experiment in democracy, to protect, in perpetuity, the privileges our most privileged are entitled to.

That’s the piece I forgot to mention to my old friends the other day, not that it changes anything — how much it freaks me out trying to make a point to someone in my personal life who has closed their mind, insists I accept an incoherent narrative and stands on their demand to have me respect their right never to have the issue brought up again.   In a world with so much anger, shapeless, formless and deadly, loaded gun anger that can be pointed anywhere, the only small comfort I can take is in carefully taking in and analyzing what’s raging all around us, understanding it as clearly as I can and finding small signs of hope in the details that point toward decency, fairness and Lincoln’s better angels of our nature.  

With politics there is a widespread feeling of debility among those not in a rage toward authorianism, a learned, media-enforced helplessness and fatalism on the part of the great majority of our cynically, deliberately divided nation.  We have seen over and over that corrupt officials and powerful criminals are not punished, except once a decade or so when a particular powerful person is ceremonially held accountable for some particularly heinous crime and sent to prison, to prove that not every such person is above the law. 

In my personal life I have almost no tolerance for a senseless argument that I am expected to swallow without protest, an unappealable verdict I must never smart from the unfairness of or even refer to again. 

But there are other ways of looking at occasional insistent incoherence among close friends, and they must be looked at with love and a patience that may at times seem superhuman.    It is not superhuman if you are lucky enough to have kind, honest friends to help you understand the burden you are carrying and offer a way you can’t see in your hurt to take the impossibly heavy load off of your shoulders, off your heart.

when a friend shows you what they are incapable of, believe it

Sometimes, sadly, we hurt people we care about by our actions or inactions.   When we become aware we’ve caused pain to someone we love, the only thing I’ve figured out to do is acknowledge causing the pain, take responsibility for acting badly and sincerely ask for forgiveness.  I don’t know of any other way, though some people buy gifts, take special care of the person they hurt as a way of making it up to them.  Not everybody is capable of taking responsibility for cruel things they do in anger.

Anger itself is partly to blame, it is a famously terrible emotion and as difficult to sit with as grief.  When you’re angry you can only see the thing that makes you angry, in vivid black and white — no gradations of any kind.  When you’re mad you can’t see the harm your anger may be making you inflict.  You let the arrow loose from the bow in an act of righteous anger and it finds its mark, and even if it doesn’t inflict a fatal wound, it can still kill.

If somebody shows you their shock and anger when you ask to discuss something they did that hurt you, believe what they are showing you.  They are not capable of anything beyond that.  Believe them.

Harder to sit with sorrow than with anger

Sorrow is draining and terrible, it forces you to feel the pain of loss in its pure form. Anger, while blinding, gives you energy, purpose and a bracing sense of righteousness.

If you are quick to anger, try sitting with sorrow sometime, feeling the loss of a soul you love. It is an illuminating exercise.

My father found it humiliating to feel vulnerable. His early hurt made him unable to risk giving anybody the power to hurt him, so he never let his guard down. His fists were always ready, his blows were struck with glares and harsh words. If he had begun to taste the pain of the ocean of pain he was thrashing in, he would have drowned.

But I couldn’t have understood any of that while I was still his adversary. I couldn’t break free from that endless, senseless vying until I learned about his traumatic infancy. Seeing him as a whipped two year-old flooded me with compassion, and opened a window, for the first time, into his valiantly defended, tortured soul.

The inviolable law of every cult

Homo sapiens, as Yuval Noah Harari points out in Sapiens, appears to be the only species capable of uniting behind an abstract myth, an animating principle that can unleash gigantic armies launched into ant-like coordinated action.  This ability enables humans to build inconceivably giant structures and to solve massive global problems.  We are, also, the only species capable of mass murder in the service of an abstract idea. 

The thought of an idea powerful enough to change the world is both thrilling and terrifying, depending on the idea.  The notion of Enlightenment, a world illuminated by Reason, where hereditary oppression would be replaced by agreement on reasonable principles, was a more noble one than making sure the faithful remain steadfast in their beliefs, no matter what.

Every cult, every nation, every family, has a story that explains the chaos and darkness of the world in simple terms everyone can understand.  Membership in every kind of tribe depends on members remaining loyal to a core idea.  In theory, Christians, for example, emulate the man of peace and teacher of love for whom their religion is named.  He was kind, patient, dedicated to feeding and clothing the poor Andy protecting the weak, he preached about love and not being slavishly devoted to earthly rulers.  Christians have, for millennia, taught each other that it is their Christian duty to practice in their lives what Jesus preached, to imitate Christ.   With certain exceptions, of course.  All bets are off when warring with Muslims and other infidels, punishing Jews for allegedly killing the Messiah, slaughtering other Christians who belong to churches hostile to your own in their worship of God, hating any of God’s creatures that offend your version of sanctity and righteousness.  Homo sapiens are not always consistent in how we behave, though we do believe!

One consistent thing among us all is a belief in the importance of loyalty.  This is the inviolable law of every cult, every nation, every family.  We share core beliefs, and if you betray those central principles you are disloyal and subject to the agreed on penalties. Taking an article of faith, examining it and deciding it is false is the ultimate threat to the community.  Excommunication is a time honored way of dealing with dissenters and heretics, you cast them out of the hive to die in the wilderness.

Members of a cult accept things as true that nonmembers see as clearly false.  The GOP, with their strict adherence to a defeated candidate’s insistence that he had victory stolen from him by massive, bipartisan fraud, is a glaring example that leaps to mind.  One of their lifetime appointees on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, told Americans the other day that they have to accept outcomes they don’t like — like the widespread banning of abortion for half the population.  This is often true, there are many things we cannot immediately do anything about in life and we must find some kind of acceptance of intolerable outcomes or go mad.   It is also the case that Thomas’s best friend, lover and life partner could not accept an outcome she didn’t like.  From her well-connected right-wing insider seat she frantically tried to overturn the results of an election whose outcome deeply offended her deepest beliefs.   The winner of that election, Joe Biden, and his wife, she wrote, were being taken by barge to the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay to be imprisoned with other terrorism suspects for their treasonous betrayal of America!  

But I am thinking more about families at the moment, my own and others.  To be a member of my family I am expected never to reveal anything embarrassing about a compulsive liar, serial embezzler, shoplifter, road raging bully who has done great damage to other family members.  Just the threat that I might say something that raises shame, like mention a secret bankruptcy sprung on everyone on the eve of buying their dream house, means I must be kept at arms length, anything I have to say viewed with suspicion, my character, and even my sanity, called into question.   To be a member of some families, you need to recognize that dad is never wrong, or mom is always right, or whatever the deepest binding principle of that group is.

I understand the attraction of cults, they give a powerful sense of certainty in a dizzyingly uncertain world.  You belong to a community and are loved unconditionally in a cult, as long as you are loyal to its beliefs.  If belief in a demonstrable lie, or a story that distorts reality beyond recognition, is the condition of membership in a cult, or a family, you are pretty much going to have to count people like me out.  We are just goddamned iconoclasts, I suppose, like the father of monotheism, Abraham, who as a boy smashed the idols in his father’s shop and was not punished by false gods who didn’t exist.  He went on to form his own cult, with very strict laws, but that’s a story for another day.

If membership in your club requires taking an oath that I am a blameworthy, evil sinner, one who can never be fully forgiven, someone who must be eternally penitent… well, with respect, not for me, kids.

  

Beware the silently raging

The quietly enraged are dangerous adversaries. Because they’re quiet and seemingly calm, their rage, when it gets a chance to express itself, is perhaps the most chilling kind of rage of all, because it’s so stealthily hides in seemingly unruffled quiet and seems to explode out of nowhere. This kind of rage waits for the perfect moment to quietly and inexorably express itself, rendering a final opinion that cannot be appealed. You cannot come back from the conclusions a quietly angry person imposes when they finally make their disapproval clear.

Silence itself is perhaps the single greatest weapon for expressing rage.

The beauty of silence as a weapon is that it is infinitely deniable, you cannot prove the intent of silence, it could have no intent at all. It could certainly have nothing to do with you, why is everything about you? Isn’t your interpretation of my silence just your perverse gloss on it? I said nothing, nothing, how can I have expressed any opinion on what you asked me about, you demanding dick? 

How about we put you on the defensive by not answering, by maintaining complete and total silence, and when you cry out we will point to the proof, you are a goddamn, whining hot head.   

The beautiful part about expressing rage with silence is that any unbiased observer can plainly see that the person getting upset seems to be working themselves up about nothing. 

Picture a ten year old black kid, going to bed every night scared, in the sudden violence of the projects, gunshots outside,  in the stairwells, no-knock warrant, undercover police, housing authority security,  gangs. Picture answering that kid’s question about the segregated poverty all around him saying, with the smug assurance of Bagpiper Bill Barr, that there’s no systemic racism in America, and its debatable that there ever was race-based slavery here, let alone a Supreme Court ruling [1] that people like you had no rights a white man was bound to respect that you were bought and sold like property because that’s what you were, nothing racist about it.

And then, silence. 

The problem of scary, inherited poverty is yours, boy, and nobody else’s.

We can go down a long list of examples of this despicable technique, but consider the quietly enraged reactionary Samuel Alito and his enraging rationale for why Jesus Christ must have the final say in US Constitutional matters, establishment clause be goddamned. You have Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz, the other day, squealing like stuck pigs about the nefarious malefactor who leaked the Alito draft ruling that women have no rights a white man is bound to respect, the partisan far-left criminal leaker (someone like Ginni Thomas is a much likelier culprit, since the draft must now stand as it is, with no retreat!) who silently stole and leaked a confidential Supreme Court draft decision, in an effort to politicize the fairest court an emissary of Jesus Christ Himself could appoint, to defend the unborn, the rights of good people not to be exposed to perverts, to lies about good, white Christian children, etc.

Makes me wanna holler.

Into the silence of a prosecutorial judge’s quick deliberation, sentence already in hand, not making eye contact as he listens impatiently to your version of events. Lots of cases, nothing personal, I have a lot of hate in my heart, I’m not giving you eye contact as you make your case because, as you know, I am not listening, too enraged. 

Silence, the verdict and punishment already in the mail. 

[1]

Obvious Commie twaddle:

Chief Justice Roger Taney (above) bluntly and maliciously described the status of persons of African origin in the 1857 Dred Scott decision:

“[Black people] had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it.”

The silent death of Little Girl

Reminding us again that the real sting of death is that eternal silence where a beloved life once was.

two young kittens 2018

Little Girl (foreground, her sister White Back behind her, as always), who greatly resembled her beautiful mother Mama Kitten, her constant companion and ally, left us as gracefully as she came into this short, precious life four years ago. 

Her absence hangs heavily over the turf she bravely defended and enjoyed the many roosts of, and where we touched base late almost every night.   She was an agile, athletic hunter who could grab a bird out of the air, a gold glover who could catch a tossed treat and pop it into her mouth. She always showed up in the driveway to shake us down every time we approached the door. She carried on the tradition her mother started. They were known as the Driveway Bitches, two natural beauties, demanding their due, and they always happily collected their toll.

An ordinary event, the natural death of a sometimes affectionate feral cat we loved, filling our mortal hearts with sorrow, threatening to burst them, until the sorrow overflows.

Reminding us again that what takes your breath away at death is that eternal silence where a soul we loved once was.