Not everyone is wired this way, but for me, I need to unearth clues that help me understand the tangled progress of my life. I learn many things way too late, and I wonder about these things, once the truth of them hits me like a wall. Some may find this process painful and do everything to avoid it.
I am not one of these people, I have left myself countless clues over the decades. The challenge is to assemble them to understand what they’re telling me about the progression of my experience.
I’m aware now, to an extent it was impossible to know before, for reasons I could explain at length, of a type that is truly incapable of emotional growth. They are also unable to be honest, which is a big factor in their inability to grow, mature, to evolve into better, wiser people as they go through life. They were brutally crushed at a young age and their entire personality is an exercise in never being hurt again. They can be charming, generous, funny, gracious, hospitable, helpful, sympathetic — until they can’t be any of these things.
The crux of their situation is that they were humiliated, early and often, their noses rubbed in their powerless to do anything about it but suffer. They grew up in frightening circumstances with no loving adult to look to for protection. They remain hypervigilant against anything that can embarrass them, make them look bad. If they are confronted with something hurtful they did, no matter how gently the point is raised, they react with fury. They are always one twitch away from a disorientingly familiar, bloody war to the death that they are bound to lose badly. They fight with childish desperation.
I’ve known a variety of this type over the 68 years of my life. They come in several variations. A common trait is an inability to see things from someone else’s point of view. They tend to be judgmental, too. They often have a reflex to piss on other people’s parades.
The adult daughter of one of these tragically deformed souls wrote recently online of always being amazed, as a little girl who grew up in the suburbs, by the thought that every giant apartment building in New York City had a thousand windows, with a unique life and universe behind every one. She eventually, around six, managed to express this to the adult driving the car. She referred to this person as “the adult” and later used the person’s pronoun, “she”. The response of the adult, a woman I know very well, is a perfect illustration of this kind of crabbed, damaged, damaging personality.
She told her six year-old, marveling at the variation of human experience, “that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.” Crushing the little girl in the back seat, as this type does in order to feel superior, and therefore not subject to the agony of their own emotional limitation.
I am not a man given to hatred or motivated by revenge. Revenge is in my heart lately, directed toward a small intimate lynch mob of my once good friends. I understand and forgive myself for the impulse, though revenge is not something I’m enthusiastic about in general. I’ve never been a hater. But, in a real sense, I hate this little girl’s soul crushing Nazi of a mother, eternally reserving her right to hurt anyone she feels like hurting, because she’s entitled to. And because she’s terrified in her stunted soul, as all such empty human shells are.
Thank the Lord we are all once again free to utter those beautiful words in the United States of America. There’s nothing woke, unwoke or deep asleep about uttering a traditional holiday greeting to our Christian neighbors. Feliz Navidad, y’all.
That said, Jesus, of course, is probably quite unhappy (and rightfully so) about what his most public megaphones are representing as his principles: fuck the poor, screw the meek, child poverty is God’s will, as is pediatric cancer, competition beats cooperation every time, obscene wealth and unslakable greed are the Divine’s way of rewarding the righteous, guns don’t kill people, burning toxic things doesn’t cause pollution, spit on and beat homosexuals, make raped girls give birth, as God intended, etc.
But let me not tar American Christians with the ugly sins of perhaps only a hundred million or so of them. One of the finest people I ever knew, smart, funny, irreverent, mischievous, died a few weeks ago at ninety. Rose was a religious Catholic and went to mass every Sunday, until she was unable to and began attending by video link. When I was overwhelmed, and she was out of ideas, she’d tell me to put my faith in God and let God take care of things that caused me anguish. I would gently remind her that prayer and faith had been ruined for me early on by the staggeringly idiotic hypocrisy of the Hebrew school/Jewish center I attended. She understood, but urged me to try it anyway. I’d deflect with a joke and she’d respond with one of her trademark wisecracks.
To be loved by someone who is religious can put the whole exercise of religion in a much more sympathetic light. Sure religion is an engine of control, enforced conformity and, sometimes, murderous intolerance of other faiths. Of course people who become very wealthy, influential and powerful promoting religion quickly become corrupt hypocrites, if they don’t start out that way. An old Jew I once knew used to say “the longer the beard, the bigger the thief”. No religion has a monopoly on evil in the name of God. It is good, in the face of such common ugliness in the name of religion, to remember the blessing of true belief in a moral system ruled by a just Creator.
It is encouraging for me to think of examples like Rose Cuccaro, people who lose nothing of their great and unique personalities while being imbued with faith in a divine spirit, and committed to loving and serving those around them. Religion, at its best, does that. It also brings great comfort to the dying.
At Rose’s wake, her daughter told us that her mother dreamed (two nights before she died) that she was at a great dinner party with her nephew Frankie (great guy, he died a few years back) and so many other cherished loved ones, and she named them. “All dead,” said Adrienne. The next day she told her “Frankie’s here to take me home” and she went with her favorite nephew (anybody else at the party would have been just as happy to escort her) for the joyous reunion with the rest of them.
We all agreed that Frankie was the most likely guide to come down to bring her home. Whether they sent him because he was the most recent arrival (“you go for her, rookie, you’ll get a kick out of it”) or just out of Frank’s basic nature, which would’ve been “let me do this, it’s Aunt Rose, I got this one.” Not a bad way to end this dream, if you ask me, if you can believe it.
And with that, a merry Christmas to all. May the blessings of this holiday season, centered around the shortest day of the year, and faith in the coming of Spring, be upon you.
Contempt is the same thing every time anyone experiences it. Talk to as many people as you like about what it feels like, it always feels the same. Details leading up to it will vary, but contempt is unmistakable.
The only people who will fight you to the death about your right to be hurt by having your feelings disregarded, and insist on blaming you for deserving to be treated as they see fit, are the contemptuous.
As for those deeply damaged folks, seriously, fuck those putos. Contempt is their problem, you can’t fix ’em, help ’em, save ’em, make them feel any different. They are fucked, and rightfully so.
Contempt is the ugliest thing you can see in another person. It is a childish expression of vicious, outer-directed egotism: I am ultra important, you are a piece of shit, I can treat you however I want to and there’s nothing you can do about it. Once someone shows you contempt, there is no saving things, talking things out, reasoning, making peace. Contempt is the last corrosive word these assholes have to protect themselves against their own disabling insecurity.
It is always infuriating to be treated with contempt (also hurtful, unfair, despicable, indecent, etc.), but the best thing you can do, especially if one of these folks has any kind of power over you, is regard them calmly and get away from them as quickly as you can. Even a stranger showing contempt is worth not reacting to, there is never anything to be gained, even if you like fighting and enjoy bashing bullies in the face. There’s really nothing in it for you better than getting away from them for good.
Here’s a recent personal tale of facing contempt that I am actually grateful for. This asshole’s show of contempt kept me out of the hands of a lying, negligent maniac doctor who sent an entirely false report of tests he never performed to my other doctors. He works for Optum, by the way, which is part of United Healthcare — go figure! I guess the entirely fabricated report is one reason Optum never sent me a bill for the three hour session Medicare paid 80% for.
The doctor was friendly and reassuring the first time I met him. He scheduled tests and when I asked about anesthesia he assured me I’d be given conscious sedation before the tests, which was a great relief to me. Having things shoved into your penis, scopes, tubes, etc., while not as horrible as it sounds, is bad enough. I was glad I’d be conscious but sedated for the procedure, which involved putting a thin tube into my bladder by way of my urethra and then filling my bladder with water.
When I arrived for the test, the nurse who was going to put the tube in asked if I was ready. I said I would be, as soon as the conscious sedation was on board. She reacted with frustration toward the doctor “I don’t know why he tells patients they’re getting conscious sedation, we don’t give that for this test, we never give conscious sedation, we don’t even have it in the office. You have to be alert and answering questions. I guess he thinks it calms patients down when he says that, but I always tell him it doesn’t.”
I confirmed that it doesn’t. If I’d known, I told her, I would have taken a tranquilizer before I came for the test. She said that would have been her advice, if I’d been told to call her prior to the procedure and that she was sorry nobody had told me to call her. She had nothing she could give me. The catheter went into my penis and into the urethra before stopping at an obstacle somewhere on the way to my bladder. She retracted it. For the next ninety minutes this angelic woman held my penis, keeping it warm in the cold room, as various applications of lidocaine did their best to numb my urethra, and tried at least three more times to insert various catheters into my bladder. Finally she said the doctor would have to try it himself.
The doctor came in, sweaty and harried looking, by now it was getting toward closing time. He asked how I was doing. I told him I was wondering what happened to the conscious sedation. He lost his shit, raising his voice and snarling that it was impossible that he’d ever said that, essentially calling me, and his nurse, a couple of fucking liars. In that moment I knew this guy was not going to be my doctor. I managed him as one does an out of control five year-old flinging shit around the room. I made only one call to his office afterwards, to his nurse. She told me how to get the medical records for my new urologist.
Highlights of the report: results of the cystoscopy (a camera at the end of a wand inserted into the opening of the penis) he never performed. He found no tumors, normal this, slightly abnormal that, the report said. No mention of the unsuccessful attempts to insert the catheter to test the bladder, the test went fine, the bladder was normal. He discussed all this with the patient, also getting claimed legal waivers from the patient on about twenty different fronts, covering his ass front and back, and the ass of Optum, and insulated the $560B corporation from the aggressions of any plaintiff’s lawyer who might want to make a fuss about a fictional narrative detailing the results of tests the doctor and his nurse never did.
Think of this, though. If the guy hadn’t had a temper tantrum and started throwing his poop around the room, I’d have gone back to him. I’d have never read his scandalous report, never known he was a compulsive liar. I’d have been in the hands of a maniac working for psychopaths. So the fact that I no longer tolerate contempt saved me from a world of trouble.
When I was six or seven, and first learned about Switzerland’s neutrality in World War Two, I thought it was great that peaceful Switzerland didn’t get involved in the hideous carnage. It wasn’t long afterwards, once I learned a bit more about the Nazis, that I understood that Switzerland’s principled neutrality was actually an acceptance of the equal right of plundering Nazis and desperate, wealthy Jews, to safeguard their fortunes during this world catastrophe, to the great benefit of a banking nation who took no moral position on anything other than protecting, and enhancing their own, wealth. In other words, Swiss neutrality, when Nazis were going full ape shit in the world, was not a good thing but a rather evil thing.
Heather Cox Richardson, in a recent talk with Jon Stewart, made an excellent point about the feelings of most people. We want to get along, not have to fight, or be intimidated, or made to feel isolated or uncomfortable. In any group of ten, she pointed out, if two are intent on power and control, they will choose two, make them the source of all evil by vilifying them, often by lies, and turn the other six against them. You can see the short clip of her description here.
What I have come to realize is that it is only necessary for the two who want control of the group to recruit two others to their side. If they can convince two, the next four are almost automatic. The two they convince will be very credible advocates for the proposition that those two selected for exclusion are beyond redemption, sick, evil, disgusting, dirty, nasty, mean, ugly etc. They will be the best ambassadors for the position of the two they follow. It will be natural for the next two and then the last two to follow the group. In a tight-knit group, consensus always makes sense if the group intends to remain intact. It is, after all, a loving group that very much cherishes its closeness. Nothing brings people closer than shunning a common enemy.
Finding myself on the short end of this common equation, with a group of lifelong friends, I’ve had to ponder the dynamics of this in order to make some kind of peace with it. I’ve learned that those who can never be wrong, must be perfect, have no tools for resolving conflict, need to control others or they feel threatened themselves, live their lives on a war footing.
As you try to resolve a conflict with them they are already busy recruiting allies, spreading a stilted story to make you hateful, forming an iron coalition, first with two and then with everyone. It is impossible, then, after a good, righteous lynching, for a group to believe that they have done the wrong thing when they are unanimous in their moral position. In fact, the more wrong they are, the harder they will fight to make sure you’re good and dead and without any ability to make them feel like the credulous lynch mob they’ve become.
When you ask your old friends how they could believe such lies against you, they will insist that they are completely neutral, like Switzerland. Who are they to decide who is actually the Nazi in this scenario and who are those persecuted by Nazis? It’s a flawed metaphor. They are Switzerland, they will insist, taking no side, but, sadly, they will never see you or talk to you again.
We like to think that there are two sides to every story. Many times there are way more than two sides. The truth can be very slippery to get a grasp on, particularly when compelling stories that contradict each other are told. There are some stories, however, that almost anyone, weighing the events fairly, will relate to as true.
Some stories are not complicated in the least, if you look at them clearly. If you ask one or two people, or ten, likely they will all have exactly the same response that you did.
I think of the daughter who accused her father of wanting to fuck his son’s girlfriend, after he defended the girl as a good match for his son who made his son happy, in spite of what the daughter thought of the girl. The father was pissed off, felt disrespected, gave his twenty four year-old daughter a piece of his mind. Afterwards his wife told him he was out of line, that their daughter was just trying to be funny. I’ve yet to meet anyone who has agreed with the wife’s assessment that the girl was joking and believed the father had no reason to feel hurt by the remark.
There are some stories that simply don’t have two equally compelling sides or a lot of nuance. Sometimes a story has one demonstrable truth — for example, a three hour violent riot filmed and broadcast in real time, with more than a hundred injured police officers taken to the hospital. There is of course a counter story, in this case that the riot we all watched was, actually, “legitimate political discourse.”
The second story, to be remotely true, must discount the violence that injured outnumbered law enforcement, the breaking and entering, mass criminal trespass, vandalism, the necessity of heroic actions by a few policemen to allow lawmakers to flee the threats to their lives, the gas masks, the gallows and all the rest. One can’t believe the second story without dismissing a huge trove of evidence we all witnessed.
We can, of course, discuss which of these stories is closer to true, and millions will be compelled by one side or the other, but what actually happened is the deciding factor in which story is closer to true. You can spin a story, as the studiously both-sides New York Times has become so adept at doing, but that is not the same as presenting an intelligible story that doesn’t make both sides, no matter how ridiculous one side is, seem equally plausible. During legitimate political discourse, for example, people are rarely, if ever, injured en masse or taken to the hospital with grievous injuries.
Here are two nice headlines for illustrative purposes, from our beloved journal of record
Some stories are not complicated in the least, if you look at them clearly. If you ask one or two people, or ten, likely they will all have exactly the same response that you did.
A surgeon described to me a ten to twenty minute procedure that involves no cutting, merely the stretching of a constricted structure by a method called dilation. A little shaving of the place the structure inserts into may be required, he said, but he could only tell that once he was looking through a scope during the procedure. The procedure he described was much less invasive than the one I was expecting to have and without a side effect I was dreading. I was relieved.
A few weeks later when I got the presurgical papers, dilation was not included among the procedures I was scheduled to have. There was a surgical resection described (likely the shaving he’d referred to) and the possibility of something called a cold knife urethrotomy. As I’d never heard of this procedure, I looked it up. Here’s what the device looks like:
I was concerned about this unannounced change of plans. The risks associated with slicing with a urethrotome are not inconsiderable. The odds of success appear to be depressingly low. I needed to talk to my doctor. The corporation the doctor works for, a subsidiary of the the nation’s largest, and presumably most lucrative, corporate provider of such medical services, does not allow patients to directly speak to their doctor. My need for this procedure is close to an emergency level, but I had to finally cancel the fucking surgery today, as there is no way to give informed consent without knowing the risks and benefits of a surgical procedure I was never told about.
This outcome is what I mean by certain stories have only one response. Any patient, or friend of a patient, hearing surgery A proposed, getting notification of surgery B, would have questions of the surgeon. It is not the result of PTSD, trauma, the experience of abuse or being bullied that would make someone need an answer to this question. It is the nature of the questionable behavior that makes the question necessary.
It is like having to inform a loved one that they had no right to punch you in the face when they were drunk. There aren’t multiple sides to this story. If the loved one tells you to shut up, they were drunk, it only happened three times in fifty years, it doesn’t change the essential nature of the story. You are not wrong to either need this talked through to ensure it never happens again, to not see this person again, or whatever the solution you need is. It’s not like there are two equally compelling sides to the story, outside of the question of how you let it happen a second and third time.
Corporations were ruled to be people by a corporatist United States Supreme Court. The kind of person a corporation is has all of the characteristics of a psychopath. Here’s a checklist from the excellent 2003 documentary The Corporation, which lays out the case in a manner so irrefutable it will make your spine tingle.
You can see the entire movie here, on YouTube, for only the cost of having to skip the infernal corporate ads inserted every ten minutes.
Your spine will tingle at the recognition that we are all prey and the corporate person, an eating machine without any other consideration, has virtually no constraints on its appetite.
Say your sleep is robbed by the daily aching in your prosthetic knee after it hasn’t moved for a few hours. The surgery went perfectly, every surgeon who looks at the beautiful x-ray agrees. You are apparently one of the unlucky tiny percentage who suffer from Highly Successful Surgery Suboptimal Outcome Syndrome and chronic pain and limited ability to walk is something you will have to get used to, asshole. It’s not the surgeon’s problem if you’re unable to heal properly.
On waking you agitatedly consider the nonresponse to the concise, urgent letter you wrote to your urologist seeking clarification on an upcoming surgery that is different, on the presurgical consent form, than the one you discussed and agreed to in his office. You hand delivered the short letter to his office Monday. It is now Thursday, 6 pm. On Monday morning you must get up early and have a battery of presurgical tests, for a surgery you were never informed of, can’t weigh the risks of and certainly never consented to. The internet is a Christmas tree of blinking red lights about the many risks of this changed procedure, one with an alarmingly low success rate that involves shaving the inside of your urethra, lifelong urinary incontinence being but one of its unwanted outcomes (that’s why they make adult diapers, pant load).
Your new urologist is, like most other doctors in America today, an employee of a medical corporation run by vulture capitalists to extract maximum profit from the lucrative sector of human medical anxiety. The name should have been a give away: Psychopath Urology, PLLC. They talk a good game, I do have to give them that. These fuckers are nothing if not adept marketers:
A forwarded text I had from my beloved that I saw as soon as I looked at my phone made me immediately shift my focus. A ninety year-old woman we both love and cherish is in bad shape, hooked up to machines fighting to save her from congestive heart failure. This sharp, funny woman is apparently confused (yet still somehow feisty) and very close to death. Her daughter wanted us to know, because we are close to her mom and left her a couple of unanswered messages the last few days. Devastating news. Sekhnet sent me an agonized proposed text to the daughter, I suggested adding this:
Your mother’s feistiness is one of her enduring qualities, along with her great sense of humor, her wisdom, compassion and her deep faith. She does not fear death and has a humble confidence in where she’s going afterwards. Of course we hope she recovers, so we can have more of the love and joy she brings to us. If she does not recover she will soon be in heaven, a beautiful, blessed soul, reunited with those she loved and lost. It’s heartbreaking to us, who love her, but we must take consolation that she knows where she is headed if this is her time to go, the place for all such wonderful souls.
There is always a lot to beware of in a world where psychopaths, more focused on power over others than most, hold a lot of power over the rest of us. Beware of those who repeatedly lie to win arguments, elections, discussions of who needs to be ostracized, rounded up, roughed up and why. Beware of smug certainty, inchoate anger, apathy, depression. Beware of anyone who shows you they’re incapable of ever being wrong, who blame you and always fight you to the death.
On the other hand, take care to appreciate the things in your life you are grateful for. If you have a talent that allows you to spend time in a special zone — be thankful as you enjoy it. If you gain an insight that helps free you from a painful cycle you’ve been trapped in, gratefulness is the proper feeling to have about it. If you have one person in your life who you can share your deepest feelings with, you are very lucky and Thanksgiving is the right day, as is every other day, to consciously feel appreciation for that great blessing.
I surprised myself a few weeks ago, during a discussion of my numerous, interlocking medical problems, any one of which can find me in an emergency room if not treated skillfully and soon, by expressing gratefulness. An overwhelming appreciation of good fortune, particularly amid hard luck and trouble, itself is something to be grateful for.
I’m grateful to find myself grateful.
It’s always worth a few moments to take a short inventory of the blessings in your life, no matter what horrors you are facing — particularly when you’re facing monsters, actually. The miraculous, precious, fleeting nature of life is worth considering from time to time, and being very grateful for.
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