Category Archives: personal

Filibuster, personal style

The filibuster, which is now virtually automatic under Mitch McConnell, was introduced in the Senate over two hundred years ago by the advocates of a free market that included slave labor, men like South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun (pictured below), spokesman for the Peculiar Institution and perfecter of the modern filibuster [1].   It is a parliamentary device designed to defeat any proposal by cutting off all debate in the Senate [2].  The filibuster doesn’t just stop a vote on a proposed law, it blocks public discussion of the proposal in the Senate.  

Think about that for a second, the tyrannical nature of that parliamentary move, an increasingly popular political ploy, with no constitutional support, that can presently be launched by any one senator in the minority party and requiring a super-majority to defeat.   It rests on the idea that if people heard the argument, heard the reasons the policy was desirable, our side would lose.  The only way to prevail, particularly if the act would be wildly popular, is to kill the idea before it can make its case.

So it is between people sometimes.  If I am afraid of something you have to say, for any reason, I can filibuster you simply by making clear my refusal to talk about it.  End of story.  Good night and have a very nice day.

[1]

Mitch McConnell’s claim that “the filibuster is the essence of the Senate” has been tossed aside by his opponents as bad history, violently inconsistent with how Jefferson, Hamilton or Madison aimed to structure the Senate, and perhaps even unconstitutional. All true. But what McConnell’s screed should remind us is that the filibuster has always been the essence of the politics of white supremacy — even as it now poses a broader threat to democracy itself.

McConnell draws on a playbook stretching back to John C. Calhoun, who as vice president in 1841 forged the filibuster into a conscious instrument to block majoritarian democracy as part of his project of creating a durable framework for slavery in a nation he knew would eventually vote against it. Calhoun, generations of Southern senators and now McConnell have shared a determination that majority votes should not be the last word in the United States. Privileged minorities should be able to override the will of the entire people — if their interests are endangered. Yes, Calhoun was focused on slavery and race, but his first filibuster was over national banking. The interest he sought to  protect from a national majority was that of the South as a region, extending beyond slavery to issues like tariffs. . .

. . . While  the filibuster — the essence of Mitch McConnell’s Senate — is the most powerful weapon the right-wing opponents of democracy have seized, Republicans in 2020 are deploying the full panoply of anti-democratic strategies devised over two and a quarter centuries by Calhoun’s followers. The most important campaigns being waged by conservatives at this moment emphasize the spread of gerrymandered districts, purged voter rolls, legalized bribery, a politicized judiciary, state pre-emption of local home rule and crippling the executive authority of majoritarian governors, even Republican ones.

source

[2]

Gardenier was one of the earliest champions of the filibuster, a term that refers to the use of obstructive tactics such as long, dilatory speeches and the repeated introduction of parliamentary motions to block or delay legislation. Today, filibustering is almost exclusively associated with the Senate, where individual Senators wield extraordinary power over debate. In the modern House, on the other hand, the majority party rules, and individual Members have little influence concerning the course of debate; over the years, the House, which is more than four times the size of the Senate, has developed rules which strictly control who can speak and for how long.  

https://history.house.gov/Blog/2020/June/6-11-Filibuster/

Book of Irv, anyone?

I struggle, more than most, against lifelong impediments installed in my childhood.  My parents were generally united in their theories, rationales and accusations, but most of the hostility I faced was generated by my brilliant father, a perplexing contradiction of a man to be raised by.  There is nothing more difficult for a child to make sense of than sentimental tenderness expressed with humor alternating with sudden rage, particularly when the anger is defended in a unified front by both parents. 

For example, it was beyond debate, according to them both, that I had been born a very angry baby.  After all, they’d say, I’d displayed red-faced rage and challenged my parents on everything from the time I was a few days old.  My father referred to the accusing way I stared at him from my crib, with huge, unblinking black eyes,  from the day I returned from the hospital, a newborn.  This creeped him out so much they moved my crib to my mother’s side of the bed after a couple of days.  

It always seemed crazy to me, this insistence that I was born angry, stared “accusingly” at my father from the second or third day of my life, and that there was no concievable explanation for my natural born intransigence as an infant, and my constant anger, but that was always their position, at least until the last night of my father’s life. 

I struggle against the damage done to me by insistent, unlikely theories about my character in several ways.   One is a determination to avoid any echoes of the unfair, opinionated, sometimes insane, beliefs about me that I was expected to accept as true.  I am attuned to the sometimes subtle machinations of angry self-defense and how it often becomes intent on blaming others for sudden outbursts of anger.   Such displaced anger is a common thing most people encounter and sometimes practice, the assigning of unfair blame for grievous acts a loved one never committed.  It is commonly done by people close to each other, because that is the safest place to prosecute such anger.  Or maybe not, most murders, we’re told, happen between people who know each other, often within families.

Another way I struggle is by researching and pondering, often while tapping these keys. It took me years to discover the source of my father’s frequent rage and how that rage shaped my view of the world.  I sat down finally, in 2016, at sixty, to write out everything I knew about my father’s life, to write his biography as best I could.  I found myself putting together a puzzle with thousands of missing pieces, working in almost total darkness.   I wrote daily for two years.  Much of it was like searching history for a trace of the muddy hamlet my father’s mother came from, a place wiped off the map in 1942 along with everyone in it, like literally thousands of other little Jewish hamlets and towns in those years.    

Initially I was looking for a scene to dramatically convey the severe damage my father inflicted on my sister and me.  This was devilishly hard work because his techniques were frequently very subtle, the withholding of an encouraging word, a glare, often just silence applied, by reflex, to strategically cruel effect.  I couldn’t point to a busted nose or a broken arm, a tearful midnight trip to the emergency room.   The damage that can be done with words alone, backed by an implacable will, is impressive.  It is also often fiendishly subtle.   We all get hurt by words sometimes, and we can all say, together “boo hoo!”, though the pain hurtful words can inflict is as sharp as the entry of an arrow into our flesh.  

I struggle against a ready temper, every day.   I overcompensate sometimes in my efforts to remain mild.  This has sometimes driven others to rage, that I try not to react with anger when provoked, goadingly clinging to the high road, like a superior fucking prig.  This is maddening to people who want a good fight.  I don’t want a good fight.  I never wanted a good fight, though I was forced to fight daily for the first few decades of my life.  Like most experienced fighters, I’m aware that facial expression, tone of voice and body language are potent weapons of war.   Part of my struggle against my temper is against an inability to keep these reflexes under control. A look on the old face, no more than a telltale micro-expression, a tone saying otherwise polite words just so, a tensing of the body are still fairly automatic when the heat is being turned up. Mastering that shit, my friends, may well be beyond my powers.

I’m aware that many people may view these struggles of mine as a kind of vanity, if not also folly.   My father, for one, put forth a lifelong argument that people cannot change anything fundamental about themselves.   He denounced as deluded the belief that a skilled psychiatrist or other therapist can help us gain insights and change anything about our innate natures.   As proof he’d point to the reflex to become angry.  Some are born with a hair trigger temper and some are born with a more placid disposition, no amount of work is going to change the reflex in a born-angry person to get mad easily.   As if in proof of this theory, as much as I consciously try to remain mild, I fly into a rage instantly when a computer or smart phone bends me over, even momentarily.  I wax Tourretic when forced into a corporate or bureaucratic cul du sac, or encounter idiocy built into their help line, like having to navigate five menus to learn the help line is currently closed (easy enough to post hours of operation next to the number, no?). I have also provoked a couple of people in recent years, at times by not showing I was hurt by getting angry, as any normal person would.

I can say this with certainty — had I not gone through a painful course of psychotherapy toward the end of my father’s life, I’d have never been able to be calm and supportive the last night of my father’s life as the poor devil was expressing his sincere regrets, and for the first and last time in his life, his apologies.   Without the twice weekly wrestling matches with my demons I’d have never realized that letting go of much of my anger toward my father, rightful as most of it undoubtedly was, was a necessity for my own life, growth, ability to evolve into a more insightful, hopefully kinder person than my father was.  If we can’t make 100% progress in such changes, I’d say, 50%, or 30%, is still pretty good. At the very end, even my father had to agree.  

I can also say this with certainty, virtually any of us is capable of acting like a fucking tyrant, given the right context.   And we almost always believe we acted that way with perfect justification.   

In the end, the story of the Book of Irv is about anger, insight and the power of repentance and forgiveness.  I believe the story of the long, senseless, ugly war between my father and me, and its unexpected peaceful conclusion on the last night of the old man’s life, could be useful to many readers.   It is a story of persistence, and the durability of love even under brutal conditions.   If I can tell it properly it will evoke the power of learning to forgive, ourselves and others, though the lesson came too late to do my father much good, though my own struggles are lifelong.  

My father’s life was an example of a very smart, funny, likeable man, a friend of the underdog and lover of animals, often trapped in the emotions of a two year-old viciously assaulted by an insane mother, a life he told me, hours before his death at 80, had been pretty much over by the time he was two. He said this, in the passive voice, after a lifetime of angrily denying that childhood has anything to do with the adult, that only whiners complain to shrinks about how mean their parents were and snivelingly try to blame their parents for their own problems.

I am a fairly old man myself now. The clock is ticking on my time to put everything I learned in those two years of daily writing into a coherent book that others can read and consider.   Much of the first draft is a conversation with the skeleton of my father, the skeleton applying a dead man’s too late insights to much of the discussion, somehow providing me with details it was impossible for me to know from the scant record.  The skeleton showed up one day early on in my writing, seemingly of his own accord, and I came to look forward to sitting down each day to talk to the spirit of my dead father, much wiser than when he was alive and struggling in the world, between the beating he took as an infant and his deathbed realizations.   

Think about this too, just because serious damage can be inflicted in subtle, deniable ways doesn’t mean we have to accept it and move on.  My father’s life, and mine, demonstrate the impossibility of just accepting it and moving on. The price of accepting what is unacceptable, without understanding it and learning lessons from it, is a price nobody should have to pay.    To my mind, it is a merciless fucking price to demand someone pay.

The tragedy of my old man

My father, a bright, funny, friend of the underdog, was a pessimist who conceded the last night of his life that his life had been effectively over by the time he was two years old. He did not believe people could actually change anything meaningful about themselves and lived accordingly.

More and less acceptable ways to express hurt and anger

On a scale, from most obviously harmful to most subtle, we have violent murder to quiet, implacable disapproval.  In between we have, in random order, punching, kicking, slapping, shoving, handling roughly, verbally abusing, threatening, glaring at, mocking, humiliating, ignoring, demeaning, belittling, emotionally and physically withdrawing and many other techniques.  Sarcasm and silence can both be deployed effectively to express displeasure, as can an uncompromising refusal to engage with the other person’s feelings, including the ever popular dead fish expression in response to the other person’s attempts to be funny. Silence might be the king of all of them, with its wonderful feature of complete deniability (as compared to, say, bashing somebody in the face in public no matter how much they may have seemed to deserve it).

My father, in most ways a wonderful human being, had been repeatedly physically abused and emotionally brutalized as a young child, by his own mother.   He was a master at showing anger, employing numerous techniques from the in-your-face to the demonically subtle. As he was dying, literally on the last night of his life, he lamented, for the first time (after a lifetime of denying that childhood has anything to do with your adult life) that his life was effectively “over” by the time he was two years old.   The next seventy-eight years was a determined exercise never again to experience the trauma of being humiliated, powerless, viciously treated.   In his case a tiny, violent, ill-tempered religious fanatic mother had convinced herself, somehow, that whipping her first born in the face from the time he could stand was what God wanted.  We all know that the Old Testament God is a vengeful diety, He told us so Himself, but fuck…

Anything that awakens a childhood trauma hurts well beyond the event that activated it.  It is unsettling to find yourself, as an adult of many years’ experience, suddenly as vulnerable as a baby about to be mistreated again by an insane caretaker.  It makes us feel coldly abandoned, particularly if done to us by somebody we love and trust.   There is no end to the cycle of hurt and anger this provokes in us, unless we constantly strive to do the goddamned difficult work not to become enraged, intransigent, capable of doing things to others that we ourselves would suffer terribly if done to us.

On the other hand, of course, much easier to simply join an angry mob, under incoherent banners, to scream, pump your fist in unison, and let the fucking chips fucking fall where they may.

Easier is not always better, though. 

When the world crushes you

Some days the world will try to crush you, you may wake up with the weight of it solidly on your chest.  It’s nothing personal, the world does it to everyone sometimes.  Stay busy enough, I suppose, and you can often outrun thoughts that will otherwise stop you in your tracks: the senseless war over slowing or speeding up climate catastrophe, finally addressing racism head on, the war over public education, a propaganda machine effectively substituting grievance-stoked rage for discussion.   If you stay busy enough you may never think, “Jesus, all the evidence is out there in public, has been for years, why are these dangerous, powerful criminals not being indicted?”  Then, after a day of great exertion you collapse into bed, exhausted, ready for needed seep, but there is a small crew with jackhammers outside your bedroom window, waiting to energetically make sure you will make do with short sleep.  

The world will crush you sometimes, it always does.  What to do on those days?  Do something you love, even if only for a short time.  Remember, the world is a crushing machine on certain days and you are not wrong to feel squeezed by it.   Moods change, the people and things you most love remain.  Reminders of all the rest of this miraculous life can help lift the weight of the fucking world off of you. It won’t lift at once, or permanently, but, shoot, I’ll take less of an anvil on my heart any day.  It may be tough to dance with a million tons on your shoulders, but it’s easy enough to listen to the music that makes you want to dance.  

The first thing is to breathe.   Breathing is the best thing to do, the first, most essential and naturally calming thing you can do.  Remember to breathe, slowly, deeply, appreciating with each inhale and each exhale how much more beautiful this life giving process is than the inevitable alternative which always comes in its time.   If you wake up feeling crushed, focus on breathing, first.  My two cents.

Insight vs. a punch in the face

Gaining insight is hard, delivering a punch in the face, when provoked, is pretty straightforward.   Not to say you might not pay a price for the punch, you can break your thumb, bruise your knuckles, have the shit beat out of you, even get shot or stabbed, but the reflex to lash out when angry is pretty basic.  It’s simple, primitive, sometimes effective in dealing with a real or imagined threat.   Those who train to deliver a punch effectively learn to harden their hands, protect their fingers from damage, turn the fist just so right before impact for maximum effect. Everybody else is free to let fly, with real or metaphorical fists, like a hurtful series of words you can never take back.

Insight, on the other hand, is hard to come by, often painful.   You need to learn to see things from a perspective not your own, feel things that may never have happened to you directly, learn to study the broken pieces calmly, detached from your ingrained reactions.  Insight allows you to make connections on a more thoughtful level than our world consistently operates on.   

The level our world operates on is a well-deserved punch in the face.   More specifically, a punch in the smug, fucking face.  Insight allows you to understand the operation of life on a less reflexive level.  Gain enough insight and almost everybody may want to punch you in the face, if you’re not insightful enough to be cool about your path toward insight.

I give the example of my own attempts to not replicate what I experienced from my parents in my youth.  That is, I try to follow Hillel’s formulation of the Golden Rule.  I try not to do things to others that I hate being done to me.   All we can do is try, but trying is a step in the right direction, every time.  I hated being unfairly accused of things I hadn’t done, painted in an ugly light, I still do, as does everybody else, of course.  In my parents’ house I was constantly confronted, always portrayed as coming home from the hospital two days old angry and ready to fight, usually blamed for the anger that was always exploding all around me, and always required to fight.   I fought, and got pretty good at it, even as I understood how tragically ridiculous the nonsensical war I was drafted into was.

I have made it a long project to make myself less susceptible to my anger, less ready to react with rage.  Reading about Gandhi’s philosophy of satyagraha (not in detail, mind you) I began trying to practice ahimsa, non-harm, as a first principle.  A difficult stance, in our violent world, particularly without a religious framework and a community of fellow non-harmers, but I have found the goal very worthwhile. Trying to keep the principle of non-harm in mind has made my life better, even if I am far from serene.

If you come from a mindset of not harming others, of being straight in expressing what you need, being direct and patient, it seems to me your life will improve, particularly if you were raised in a senseless war where everybody had to fight all the time for no real reason. 

It turns out even a straightforward insight like this is very shaky in the real world.  Certain old friends will insist that you’re deluding yourself, that you may have become a tiny bit better at DELAYING the arrival of your famous fucking anger, but you are actually just kidding yourself, propped on a flimsy moral pedestal that with only a few hours of determined kicking I can topple, proving that your rage is very real and present, you fucking superior fucking asshole.  In the end, I will make you want to punch me in the face, Ahimsa-boy, proving that I and the brutal real world are right and your ahimsa pose is just gas, self-righteous fumes, no matter how much you may think you’ve improved in overcoming your reflex to respond with anger.

To me, resisting the impulse to react with anger is a net good, no matter how incremental the improvement. If in the past you would have been angry a minute into an aggravating situation, you now find you are able to go for an hour before the anger starts sapping your will to remain peaceful.   In one sense it is a huge step forward, you will find yourself doing better in many situations that would have turned to shit instantly in the past.   It is a useful skill in our world, to refrain from striking others with words or fists. 

On the other hand, to someone intent on proving that you, like them, are a piece of shit beyond redemption, beyond the possibility of meaningful change of any kind, well, in the end they will be able to grind you down.   You are not a bodhisattva, you are just trying to do better, and in the end you will reach your limit and get that look on your face that will prove their triumphant point.

Been there, done that, showing great patience with people who demonstrated that insight was not for them, that a punch in the fucking face was much more to their taste (even if beyond the limits of their physical courage), and that I, actually, rather than being less angry and provocative with my so-called insight and ahimsa was even more of a piece of shit for trying to be better than them.  Of course, and I say this just between us, I was already better than them, in terms of treating people the way I would like to be treated myself, but my goal was to be better than myself, not anybody else.  I’m not in competition, in any field you can name, except to make myself better.

Insight is the only way out of pain, outside of the usual painkillers.  It is not a magic door you can walk through, of course, it is a path you take, a goal you aspire to.  Much easier than pausing to gather yourself and trying to develop understanding is staying on the treadmill, running until your heart gives out.  Hard to blame people who recoil from introspection.  People don’t like things that cause them pain, unless they are masochists. 

Think of it this way, though — you can repeat the same tragedy over and over in your life, with minor variations, or you can learn from the way you play your part in the tragedy and do it a little bit less tragically next time.  Or, you know, you can just punch me in the fucking face, it’ll probably feel better, at least until the adrenaline and cortisol rush wears off.

Watchful Waiting

When my father was diagnosed with prostate cancer, late in his life, his doctor told him that most men who live to be eighty will develop prostate cancer but that it grows very slowly at that age and they will generally die of causes other than prostate cancer.  His doctor recommended “watchful waiting”, keeping an eye on the slow, inexorable advance of this common cancer in older men.  Sure enough, something else killed my father, undiagnosed liver cancer, though saying it that way is a bit unfair to the several highly regarded specialists he saw regularly in the last two years of his life, it actually was diagnosed, in the ER, six days before he died.   

A few decades later, I myself watchfully waiting, in this case for the results of an MRI on my prostate, an MRI done because my prostate specific antigen levels were quite high.   The test results were quickly emailed to me, along with a bill for $162 (thank you, Medicare… the US Gold Standard…) for the short visit with my urologist to set up the MRI (bill for that to follow).  I have learned that reading medical test results without knowledge can be needlessly stressful, so I am watchfully waiting for the call from my doctor to tell me what the MRI results mean for my immediate futire.

In this waiting mode you can invent stories, more or less likely, that may or may not explain the delay in hearing from the doctor — though we have no idea about any of these theories.   If it was good news, the MRI showed everything nice and benign on the old prostate, the doctor would have immediately called to tell me, no?   Since it’s not good news, next step biopsy to confirm cancer suspicion from MRI, he’s waiting to have a few minutes to talk to me since the discussion is longer than “good news, it was benign”.   If it was bad news, another theory goes, he’d have called right away.   No, wait, he’d give me a day or two in my preferred fool’s paradise before dropping the bad news that I need to have a long needle repeatedly inserted up my ass and jammed into my prostate, likely followed by cancer treatment of some kind.  Or any other story I can imagine, including a list of stories involving complications in the doctor’s own life that have caused him to fall behind in updating anxious patients.   Since each theory is equally plausible, and equally implausible, I put the whole theorizing out of mind now that I’ve emailed my doctor telling him I have my fingers crossed until he tells me what the MRI results mean.  Figure of speech, “fingers crossed”, since I am clearly typing with uncrossed fingers.

I think, philosophically, that everybody has to die of something.   I also recall the foamy urine I was seeing five years ago, foam that got so thick it looked like the head on a well-pulled pint of Guinness, foam you could piss deep holes in as you went.  Ending with a smiley face in the foam was always fun.   That foamy urine, with the swelling of the legs, turned out to be symptoms of a rare kidney disease that taught me a new word — “idiopathic”.   What does idiopathic mean?   It means we don’t know what causes it, as to the pathology of this disease we are, as they say, idiots.  As to the cure?  33% of the time a short course of chemotherapy (at around $25,000 a bag) knocks it out, and I was in that lucky 33%, and lucky too that Obamacare hadn’t been repealed.

That constant itch on the inside of my left scapula?   A dermatologist told me the name several years ago but I never retained it.  It’s neurological, not topical, I recall that — put what you like on the skin, the itch is caused by a signal sent from a nerve, so nothing will really help with the itch, outside of a good scratch, which I was advised only makes it worse.  In the Age of Surveillance Capitalism we live in, I was discussing this itch with Sekhnet, as she scratched it, and soon had videos about Notalgia Paresthetica sent to me, for my edification, or shopping pleasure.

Fucked though so much of this world is, designed by the greediest for the benefit of the greediest, with applause and hero worship for the most successfully greedy, the mass of humanity not only viciously screwed but driven mad by deliberate lies that benefit the worst people alive at any given time, spread with increasingly ridiculous ease by those paid to do it, for the enormous profits of selected far-sighted tech billionaires … we don’t want to leave it.  This miraculous world is not the problem, the problem is that we must all leave it one day.  The only consistently useful practice available to most of us is taking care of ourselves and our loved ones as well as we can, and watchful waiting.