Category Archives: politics smells like meat

Writing, the last refuge of a scoundrel

It is, I suppose, the last refuge of a scoundrel, this sitting and writing out the things that vex you.   Writing on the internet gives carte blanche for every opinionated asshole to have a good purge with no editor to get in the way. [1]  

I had an editor once, I suppose he could be called that, he definitely did edit.   Since the company he worked for paid me $250 for a thousand words, he got the final say on what I really meant.   One of his improvements really fucking got to me, I can tell you for sure.   He took the line “It made no sense to me that a man with all the qualities he possessed could be such an intractable asshole” and rendered it “It made no sense to me that a man my mother absolutely adored could be such an intractable asshole.”  

It made perfect sense to me that my mother loved my father, and I understood the many reasons she did.  I shared many of them myself.   That was no mystery to me. The mystery was that someone with all the admirable qualities he had, and the humanistic ideals, could abuse his children, that was the point of the sentence, the rest of the paragraph.  It was why I had placed the line where I had in the complicated story I was trying to tell in a way too few 1,000 words.

The perfected sentence was clearly much closer to what the editor felt was true, he couldn’t believe, apparently, that his mother had loved his father, an intractable asshole he’d written about in a svelte 10,000 word essay also published on the site.   Fuck him and the knock-kneed, swaybacked turd he rode in on, the dick-fingered mediocrity.   His unsought refinement of  what I really meant made me want to slap him hard, back and forth, smartly, bip-bap!   We eventually had a series of misunderstandings [2]  and I saw that sending future work to him for his random editorial attentions  was not worth the $250 or the emails from friends congratulating me on having my tampered with prose published.  [3]  

Thus it is with the world, my invisible friends.   We constantly have to weigh what is most important to us.  To me, it is finding as much clarity as I can, wrestling things that don’t make sense, particularly maddening things, into some kind of coherence. I am, for better or worse, a life-long student.  I tend to brood and read, make notes, brood, read, stop while walking to make a note.

If you don’t know the people involved, you will probably find my piece about the terrible erosion of an old friendship an interesting read that might apply to your own life.   If you know the people, there will inevitably be a shudder of horror seeing the situation set out so starkly.  I have come to prefer seeing a thing clearly and deciding the best course of action based on my beliefs about the way to be in the world to passively waiting for the next arguably inexplicable assault and the sickening argument that sometimes follows about who was the bigger asshole.  There is nothing to compare to doing an emergency favor for someone and then, instead of thanks, having some shit thrown on you.   I can tell you this from recent personal experience.

I think of something like the president’s current policy of ripping babies out of the arms of asylum seekers, having government personnel lie to the parents that after a short interview they’ll see their kid again, while during the interview the kid is shipped to a prison for children, never to see the parents again.   The first thought that comes to mind, outside of the fact that the privatized prisons where these poor kids are warehoused have some kind of exemption under this supremely corrupt administration, where they get a huge break on the already lowered tax for corporations, is that this is exactly the kind of “feeling out public reaction” that Mr. Hitler’s people used to routinely do.  

Hitler didn’t come to power and immediately open up the now famous Death Camps.   It took years, step by step, to prepare everyone for this final, extreme, previously unthinkable step.  That final step only became necessary, you understand, once the nation was at war.  Step by step, always prepare the next step carefully.   First you gas ‘useless eaters’, people in insane asylums, the mad, the demented, the retarded.   You read the polling carefully.  Most Germans, it seems, had no problem with euthanasia, if it was pitched correctly.   Eventually you will be able to euthanize all enemies of the state, keeping it discreet and secretive and always, always justifying it as a mercy done for the greater good.

(added the next day)  Stop the presses.  The larger point about the incremental nature of the ascendence or evil practices remains, but my example is problematic. We learn from Hannah Arendt that the gassing of “mentally sick” Germans had to be stopped, due to public outcry, after a mere 50,000 souls were “granted a mercy death”.  No such protest was made a couple of years later when the “granting of mercy deaths” was liberally extended to millions of Eastern European Jews and many others who died in the gas (the Nazis preferred poison gas, Zyklon B, was originally developed as a pesticide, don’t you know?)  and by other methods.   

So the fact that Trump and his diminutive racist lapdog A.G. are forcibly, and deceptively, separating parents and children when the family comes seeking asylum, is just one of the many steps toward becoming a society where unspeakable cruelty is as common as America’s Top CEO’s bristling over-sensitivity to criticism.

Look, once something becomes routine, most people will stop questioning it.  It’s human nature, you can only be outraged for so long, particularly if there is nothing you can do about it.   A shame that thousands of children and their families will be scarred for life, fleeing violence in one country to experience cool, rationalized, perfectly legal government violence in the country you fled to.  But what is that next to the brutal scarring that men like the president and his Attorney General must have experienced to make them the vicious people they are today?

That is always the question, in this world so deftly described by the brilliant Mel Brooks in his explanation of the difference between comedy and tragedy.   “Tragedy is when I break a fingernail, comedy is when you fall down a manhole and die.”  If you are not personally the victim … well … you can understand … kind of … an abstraction like why it’s wrong to torture somebody who was turned in for a large reward … on the off chance that he is a terrorist … or wrong, OK, to take a baby from its mother’s arms and lie to the mother, as you lead her away … or wrong to lie, repeatedly, about everything … but on another level these things will never be absolutely, compellingly real to you.   

If an old friend is in a panic to see you, accuses you of malice, gives you the chance to say you were mistaken, or lying, then tells you that you’ve never been a true friend, are incapable of admitting wrongdoing or apologizing, and expresses deep anger for a good deed you did thinking you were sparing his feelings … well?  What is one to make of this?  I was confused as hell for a few days, then, as I digested the constituent parts of it, came to finally see it clearly.

The old friend is prone to anxiety, fears the worst, always, apparently.  This anxiety causes him to live a nervous life where he really can’t always give the feelings of others the same immediate attention he must give to his own feelings.   His friends must understand this characteristic distractedness, his true friends must see past it.   They must make an allowance for this personality trait, even if he can’t always reciprocate.  His life is, in a phrase Springsteen once sung, “one long emergency.”   He has many fine qualities, great intelligence, humor, warmth, but he also has needs that can sometimes obscure these qualities. 

I don’t have great insight into panic or anxiety.  I had to imagine and understand, as best I could, what life must be like for someone prone to that.   Depression I have lived, I get that, but what it must be like living with constant anxiety took some imagining.  I don’t understand being angry for reasons that are mysterious to myself.  It simply makes no fucking sense to have anger you don’t understand constantly simmering in the background.  I have to understand why I’m mad.   It can take time, but most of the time I can put my finger on it.  I get a certain relief when I understand what I’m mad about, I can often take some action that will help.  This old friend has no time for this exercise, and his anger comes out in odd ways.  Like lambasting someone who has just spent a couple of hours being as kind to him as he knows how to be.

This old friend’s oldest son is a mensch, a really admirable young man.  I don’t know him nearly as well as I know his father, but I know enough to hold him in high esteem.   It was the thought of him reading what I had originally posted, a more detailed, much angrier piece, that caused me to take the post down.   His father never reads anything I post here, the son periodically does.   After talking to Sekhnet, someone I’ve never known to pull a punch, telling me I might want to pull this punch, I realized how much the original version could have hurt the son.   It’s possible the revised post might too, but much less, I thought, and there was value to the post in the “larger conversation” I am always dreaming of.

Relationships, like all living creatures, have a life cycle.  It’s hard to see this when you are young and idealistic, but live long enough and you will come to see this life cycle over and over.   When a friendship is mutual everything is cool.  Over time certain patterns become ingrained, resentments can build up.   One guy crucifies the other guy’s priceless guitar.   Anger is stored up.  Distance is inserted between people to insulate themselves from further damage.   Mistrust accrues every time an untruth is uncovered, or an attack happens.  Enough of this shit happens for long enough, the warmth of friendship can cool to coldness.

I haven’t reached that point with this guy’s father, someone I’ve known for about fifty-five years, but I certainly am not confident that my old friend is capable of the kind of self-knowledge I need in those closest to me.  I have friends as neurotic as he is but they have never given me the same cause to doubt their basic good will.   I intend to give my old friend every benefit of the doubt, I’m just not optimistic about the long-term health of our long friendship.  I hate the idea of holding him at emotional arm’s length, for the sake of remaining friends, but that may be the only working compromise available to me.

Consider this, related, if seemingly unrelated, to the incremental way things die.  It would have been unthinkable a few years ago to imagine waking up in the USA every day and hearing the lede “the president attacked”.  This thin-skinned man with the massive inferiority complex attacks someone several times every day.  It’s what he does.   After a few hundred attacks we just take the words “the president attacked” for granted.  It’s tempting to fume about that for a moment, but I’ll rein in that impulse and give one last grunt here.  (You may laugh, or at least grimace, to see how well I rein in that impulse, I suppose).

Professional football players respectfully protesting police violence against unarmed blacks are “sons of bitches” fumes this man who then screeches that they should be “fired!”  His campaign fundraiser crowd goes wild, applauding their hero who basks in their adoration.    One of the bitches tweets that she’s proud of her son, proud to be the bitch who raised him to be such a man of  integrity.   The president, of course, has no answer to this, he’s looking for someone else to attack, the main thing is to keep attacking.  

His daughter, a mannequin-looking woman he’s on record as wishing he could have sex with, busily promotes her many brands while a public servant, profiting handsomely, if corruptly, from her selfless service to the nation.  A comedian points out that she’s behaved with monstrous insensitivity regarding her father’s policy of ripping young children from their asylum-seeker parents’ arms.  The comedian calls her a “feckless cunt” for not confronting her father on this heartless policy, instead of  narcissistically, obliviously, posting pictures of herself hoisting one of her loving children.   The description seems to fit pretty well, feckless meaning “lacking initiative or strength of character, irresponsible” except that “cunt” is the c-word, like “nigger” is the n-word.  It is a word that simply may not be uttered, except at one’s peril.

Now the president gets to be righteously outraged, the thing he does best.  Picture how much restraint it must have taken him not to tweet that the offending comedian, Samantha Bee, is the cunt.  “She’s a cunt, not my daughter, her, she’s the fucking cunt, with a mouth like a fucking toilet bowl full of disgusting vegan shit!”   He could have tweeted that, but he’s the president and aware of his power as a role model, so he merely ranted a bit without profanity about no talent, loser Samantha Bee and her low-rated show and called for her to be fired.   The First Amendment is overrated, he thinks, even as the sacred Second Amendment is constantly under attack by liberal c-words and n-words who fucking hate our freedom.  Lock her up, lock her up!

USA!   USA!!!!!

 

 

[1] With WordPress you can even do it for free!

[2] A nice example is outlined here, along with a 1,000 word piece he actually solicited, one he rejected as “strangely unmoving”.

[3] WordPress bots helpfully provided a link to an earlier piece, which has more a bit more detail and nuance.  Vous pouvez clickez ICI,  mes amis.

a small army of creepy bot followers

I have noticed, during the last year or so, that any time I post something about Nazis, totalitarianism, authoritarianism, Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann, anything mentioning “the president” in a critical light or dwelling for more than a sentence on vexing current events, a small flurry of emails arrives, informing me of new “followers”.   These are not like the ordinary “followers” one may get, fellow bloggers whose “follow” comes with a short list of their posts that WordPress decides you might be interested in reading.  These arrive with no identifying information, no links to themselves, just a “follow” and a randomly generated name that ends @outlook.com.

 They have names like  Jigghitnaxlerd@outlook.com, snitpusscx@outlook.com, Obertfuhrnazdik@outlook.com, Fckyuparanojw@outlook.com.  These fanatical new followers are, from all appearances, some kind of bots.  I mentioned this to Sekhnet, and the fact that I now have a few dozen of these inhuman “followers”.  She agreed it was creepy, told me I should write a post about it.  Might as well, if for no better reason than to share the paranoia.

We live in times where you don’t have to be a paranoiac to be paranoid.  We are spied on by our own government, we have known since Edward Snowden’s revelations (five new followers) that secret American spy agencies have been intercepting and storing billions of private communications between average Americans, probably trillions.   The guy who revealed the massive scope of this secretive, illegal data collection is a wanted fugitive.  President Obama (of the self-proclaimed transparent administration) wanted to try him under the Espionage Act of 1917, a harsh rarely used law that does not allow intent as a defense and carries severe punishments including the death penalty.  Snowden (follower) would be toast under the draconian World War One statute designed to crush American dissent about entering the War to End All Wars, the War to Make the World Safe for Democracy and global Free Trade (follower).

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to spy on you, monitor your activities, if necessary persecute you, kill you, or at least discredit and cripple you (follower).  With Snowden, Obama never threatened him with the death penalty, just dared him to be a man, an American, come forward to face justice and accept a prison stretch of, say, thirty years or so, like the sentence Manning got, after many months of inhumane confinement and mistreatment international experts, like the UN’s Special Rapporteur (follower) on Torture (follower) called “torture” (there I go again, he called it merely “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment”, nothing to see here!) [1] (follower)  for releasing, among other things, a video of Americans gleefully committing war crimes in Iraq (six more bot followers).   You know, we are a nation of laws.  You do know that, right?

It is well to recall the current president’s 80,000 vote victory in the Electoral College, (follower) brilliantly engineered by swinging the necessary tiny margin of votes in a handful of crucial districts his way (follower),  which gave him every single elector in each state he needed to beat the opponent he kept threatening to lock up, had crowds chanting “Lock Her Up!” (ten more followers).  If he had his way, it would not be my way, that’s for sure.  

Which leaves the highway, I suppose, except for the roadblocks to check if I am a well-disguised non-Spanish speaking Mexican criminal, or a Mexican with an outstanding parking ticket, grounds enough for ICE (follower) to get on my case, detain me, or someone smuggling prescription drugs for sale to desperate drug addicts.  Or simply a jerk-off too vociferously speaking my political mind, as the First Amendment gives me the right to do, unless I am inciting violence, which I am not, bot.

We now know that the 2016 presidential candidate who made such brilliant use of Twitter was shrewdly aided in his outreach by troll farms for hire, virtual places full of tireless bots, retweeting, liking, loving, commenting, driving up the statistics and the influence of his tweets, to make America realize that literally tens of millions of loyal followers were hanging on this prolific twitterer’s every tweet, millions instantly loving the things this refreshingly candid candidate was shooting from the hip (four more followers).    

Brave new world, or cowardly new world, it’s not for me to say.  I am as opinionated as the next person, IMHO, but it is hard to opine about things that are hidden, seem creepy, seem to show the cold, dead hand of some ruthless, mechanized  digital motherfucker at work, tireless as a maliciously programmed Belorussian hate bot. For every “motherfucker” a new follower.  Oh, well.  God bless these United States!

 

[1]    I quote:

The UN special rapporteur on torture has formally accused the US government of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment towards Bradley Manning, the US soldier who was held in solitary confinement for almost a year on suspicion of being the WikiLeaks source.

Juan Mendez has completed a 14-month investigation into the treatment of Manning since the soldier’s arrest at a US military base in May 2010. He concludes that the US military was at least culpable of cruel and inhumane treatment in keeping Manning locked up alone for 23 hours a day over an 11-month period in conditions that he also found might have constituted torture.

“The special rapporteur concludes that imposing seriously punitive conditions of detention on someone who has not been found guilty of any crime is a violation of his right to physical and psychological integrity as well as of his presumption of innocence,” Mendez writes.

source

(three followers)

Did the Nazis actually win World War Two? (part two)

The following series of frustrating interactions with corporations involved in my medical care got me thinking how thoroughly the world now seems to run on the principles laid out, for corporations, by the famous Nazi party that ran one of the most powerful modern industrialized nations in the world for twelve of their planned thousand year rule.  These principles extend beyond lying, advertising falsely, assuming no responsibility for anything, blaming the victims, into how individual customers are cared for.  Nazi methods, once shocking, are now the routine way masses of people with any kind of problem are treated. 

Sounds overwrought, I know, to compare the now standard corporate runarounds  to techniques perfected in the Third Reich, but bear with me and you may yet be persuaded I am not merely talking through my tin foil yarmulke.  The amount of stamina and self-possession needed to have a corporation fix it’s own error, no matter how minor, is incredible.  We are often exhausted and resigned before we actually get to speak to a human.  This too is part of Nazi-inspired design.  Think about it.

The burden for correcting corporate mistakes always falls to the consumer.  Fair enough, why would a corporation care about a mistake, as long as it’s getting paid?   Profit is the bottom line, not worrying about the gripes of malcontents here and there.  A series of hurdles are erected to limit the number of complaints the lowest paid workers of any corporation will be forced to listen to on any given shift.  

It is fairly standard to have to navigate 3-5 minutes of robotic prompts and advertising, along with requests to stay on the line for a survey about the “service we are about to provide” before being placed on hold to wait for human representatives who are all busy helping other customers.  They urge you to handle your problem via their website, which enables each problem to be dealt with in a fraction of the time (if at all) and at a tiny percentage of the cost of having humans talking to other humans on the phone.

I’m not naive.  I get it.  Hire enough representatives to help everyone you are providing poor service to, without the long waits, and you cut directly into the corporate bottom line.  A ten minute hold, with blaring, nerve jangling muzak, to talk to customer service weeds out a good proportion of the whiners waiting helplessly in line to express how pissed off they are about some trifle or another.  It is simply the way it is done today in our era of global corporatism.   Corporations do what is best for corporate profits and that’s that, ask the U.S. Supreme Court if you don’t believe us.  You got something to say?  Please continue to hold, we thank you for your patience, your business is very important to us.

I was hit with a nice triple or quadruple whammy the other day just trying to get renewals for prescription drugs I’ve been taking daily for the last few years.   After weeks of looking for a physical therapist to help me with my stiff, painful knees who accepts my insurance, I took a break from leaving voicemails that were never returned and walked up to a nearby address provided by my insurance company and next week I’ll be evaluated for PT.  

“Evaluated?” I said, “I just gave you the doctor’s referral, detailing exactly what PT services I need and why.”

“We have to examine you first and submit a report to your insurance company and wait for approval before we can provide any services, that’s the law,” the pleasant receptionist told me.   Then she said that this approval ordinarily takes no more than two weeks.   Which will only make a total of five weeks since I was referred for physical therapy by the doctor who examined me.  

I vented a bit about American medical care, making sure my satirical, semi-humorous presentation was coming through as nonthreatening and ironic.  I was rewarded with a sympathetic smile from the receptionist who told me kindly that it might be less than two weeks, sometimes it’s much faster.

When I got home I followed up again on the status of getting my prescriptions renewed, a blood pressure drug, a statin and megadose Vitamin D, after hours of wasted calls with the corporation who dispenses them.  I’d had a long discussion with a rep named Don, at CVS Caremark, on May 25th.  Don assured me that he’d contact my doctor and get the prescriptions sent over to CVS Caremark, that I’d have the pills long before my dwindling supplies ran out.  

He then asked me to hold one more time, this was 48 minutes or so into our call.  I asked if he needed more information from me.  He told me he didn’t and agreed he could call me back if there was any problem processing the order.

The only problem is, reasonable as this may sound, that is not their corporate procedure.  If the customer does not stay on hold until the very end, the call is recorded as “customer disconnected” which was the notation Don made on my call, after assuring me everything was cool.  It was all cool for Don, why the hell wouldn’t it be?  The man has a job he loves, living the dream.  

Maybe Don wasn’t as amused as the receptionist pretended to be by my witty send-ups of our sickeningly broken profit-driven American health care system.  Maybe he was politely seething under his MAGA hat, imagining this demanding and ruthless prick he was dealing with, someone who expected to just be let off the line after only 48 minutes, at least five of them spent whining at tedious, didactic length, about the corporatocracy we all take for granted as simply the way the world is.

I learned my order was not being processed only by following up ten days later, when I hadn’t received the promised email confirmations of my order.   After only ten minutes on hold, and repeating all of my identifying info again, I was told the notes the corporation had for my May 25th call stated that the customer had prematurely disconnected from call, with the predictable result that no action could be taken on this jerk’s behalf.

An hour into my follow up call I conferenced in the doctor’s office where all the details were laid out by CVS Caremark rep Liz (only authorized to wait on hold for up to two minutes, exactly, she told me as she instructed me what to find out from the doctor’s office).  I put her on the line with the doctor’s receptionist, after a mere 35 second hold for Liz,  in a conference call and continued taking detailed notes.  Everything seemed to be straightened out, at last, and not a moment too soon.

This, sadly, didn’t result in the prompt resolution of my quest to have my prescriptions refilled.  One reason I prefer dealing with my local pharmacy, before they told me a few weeks back that my business was no good there.   I got an email from CVS in error, as it turned out, informing me that only one of my three prescriptions were listed on the order, which was pending.  

I followed the prompts and logged into the CVS Caremark website where I was able to confirm that only one of the three medications my doctor’s receptionist and the CVS Caremark rep had discussed was on order.  

I wrote a note to CVS Caremark in an attempt to fix this, have them update my prescription order, only to find myself in a permanent error loop “you have failed to update your email address” (which I had done by then two or three times).  Twenty five minutes of this was enough to convince me there was a technical problem with the ineptly written code for their website.  In order to get tech support with the website you must be able to send a message, after logging in.  Seamless and fucking brilliant, actually.

I thought of my former friend Andy and his ilk, mad fucking programmers and coders, well-paid guys on the Asperger’s Spectrum with no clue about humans, except as to erring like one.  The “Contact us” link on the website, of course, required you to be logged in.  You can’t contact anyone unless you update your email address in your profile, or even if you do.  Only option is to go through the standard four minutes of robot prompts and hold to wait to talk to a low paid human, who probably can’t help you anyway.  (Turns out she can’t).

Called the doctor’s office two days later to follow up on the status of the prescriptions.  The receptionist told me she’d left me a message.   My phone showed no messages or missed calls, then, when I went to renew the voice mail list, informed me again that it was unable to synchronize my messages because I  was not connected to a data network (I was).  

An hour call with T-Mobile tech support allowed me to hear the voicemail from the doctor’s office, a forty second tour de force of confusion and obtuseness.  I had Sekhnet leave me a voice mail to test it out, make sure the glitch with the voicemail was actually fixed.  “Error.  Unable to synchronize because you are not connected to the data network”.  

Another call to T-Mobile, another hour.  This time I got a $20 credit from the Nazi fucks (T-Mobile is a German corporation, originally) and delivered a few concise, impassioned but not overwrought, analyses of the inhuman treatment we are forced to take for granted in our corporate world that actually got great praise from the Indian kid I was talking to, the guy who granted me the $20 credit for the hassle I was in the middle of.   He “escalated” my complaint and I had a long pleasant chat with Leo, at the next level of tech support expertise, who couldn’t fix the problem either but promised to re-escalate my situation and get back to me ASAP with the fix (a mere 24 hours ago).  Leo sent me a text to this effect, with his identifying information.

 I am still unable to get voice mail, or log-in to CVS “Caremark” to update my prescriptions, but I am assured that everybody is working hard on my case(s) and I’m sincerely promised that everything will work out, as long as I’m as patient as…

By the way, remaining on the line the other day to the bitter end of a long chat with Liz (not to repeat the nonconsensual phone sex I’d had with untruthful Don), I  learned from the CVS Caremark rep that my pharmacy, who she contacted while I held one last time,  was not being paid by my insurance because they hadn’t updated my insurance information on their computer.  They had my old insurance policy listed, with a non-working customer ID number, and their bills submitted under that number were therefore rejected.

I dread to make the follow up call to CVS Caremark, now weeks after my original request to have the prescriptions renewed and filled by them, to find out why only my statin now seems to be on order.  (A few days ago only my blood pressure medication was on file).

In a country that was not obsessed with eternal, existential “competition” to separate God’s chosen winners (ubermenschen) from all the faceless fucking loser parasites (untermenschen, lebensunwertes leben, the “useless eaters”), masses of people with no rights a winner is bound to respect, it would not be quite so difficult to resolve simple fuck ups by the companies we deal with every day.   But that is the kind of dreamy sentiment only someone not sufficiently impressed with the importance of the corporate bottom line would express.  The dreamy Koombaya hallucination of a fucking born loser (note: most of us losers are born that way, as is the case for most winners).

“Please continue to hold, the Obersturmbannführer will be on the line shortly to facilitate your unrequested relocation eastward.  Meantime, try to control your fucking blood pressure without drugs, loser.  And dig this five second loop, played over and over at sudden wildly increased volume for the next ten minutes, by our house band, the Ultrasadistic Nervejanglers.  We think you’ll dig it, and if you don’t, oops.  Have a nice day and, please, for the love of all that is holy, continue to hold.”

The case for the Nazis having won World War Two (part one)

Mr. Hitler, one of a small, select group of abused children I love to hate, eventually came to believe it was the Jews, not his violent, enraged, authoritarian father, who had fucked him up.   Hitler blamed the Jews for betraying the glorious German army in November of 1918, the army that was never defeated on the battlefield but only by the “stab in the back”, Jews wielding their fiendish powers to force a victorious, superior army to surrender to their inferiors under humiliating terms.   There are klansmen who feel the same way about the end of the Civil War– that it was the goddamned Negroes… somehow… to blame, for all the horrific shit that followed the unjust loss in the South’s heroic war for control of their homeland, their genteel way of life.   Horrific shit that irrationally angry, out of control Blacks are still trying to blame the damn Whites for, according to the Klan.   These fanatical bigots blame the Blacks for forcing the bigots to intimidate and lynch them so they don’t run amok.   Animals!  Violent revenge is the only answer, scream those who dream only of violent revenge.

One of Hitler’s more perceptive followers, it may have been the club-footed Poisonous Dwarf, master of the casting couch Dr. Josef Goebbels, commented that if the Nazis were victorious they would be seen by future generations as all-time great statesmen, while if they lost the war they started they’d be regarded as history’s greatest criminals.  A smart way to put it, I think.   The third possibility never occurred to the fanatical fuck: we can lose the war, and be regarded as history’s most despicable criminals, and win the peace by influencing the next hundred years of history in profound ways unimaginable now as I execute my children, our dog, my wife and prepare to shoot myself in the mouth following the Fuhrer’s final divinely inspired (or mad — it is not our place to question) order.

After the war, many prominent Nazis were secretly recruited by our country’s new secret intelligence agency, now heading into a long Cold War, for their expertise in dealing with Communists.   These Nazis exerted a certain influence in their adopted country, on the ruthless calculations of the organizations they worked in, but it is more the working methods pioneered by the Nazis in their own country that I am thinking of.  

I will get back to the many common daily experiences in our modern world that are proofs of how profoundly the lessons of the pioneering Nazi media machine have influenced all sorts of commercial, corporate, political and military behaviors that affect all of us every day.  I will argue, for example, that corporate customer service, where you almost never get to speak to the supervisor who can actually do something for you, owes a lot to the Nazi model.  In that model the expendable individual is an afterthought, unless he’s privileged, in which case, you know, he must be helped.  It is the corporate imperative, the needs of the leader, that must always be served.  How these common corporate policies translate into increasing rage, powerlessness, dehumanization, a hopeless willingness to blow everything up, even if it means authoritarianism, is worth having a look at.  I’ll return to this main point in part two.

I am listening to a spirited reading of Hannah Arendt’s contemporaneous account of Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, published in 1963.  The reader, Wanda McCaddon, reads it wonderfully.   It feels like I am hearing the voice of the author herself, who is also a gifted and expressive reader of her own work.  It is hard to stop listening, it is endlessly fascinating, I love it.   I am falling hard for Ms. Arendt (1906-1975), who, quite apparently, didn’t give a rat’s ass who she offended in her quest for the deeper truths of Eichmann’s show trial.  

She shot from the hip, she was hip, she was brilliant, arch and sincere by turns, deeply read in the historical matters she discussed (a native German speaker she devoured primary sources — including the 3,500 page transcript of Eichmann’s pre-trail interviews, in German, and understood every word and nuance Eichmann and the Court, three German-Jewish judges, exchanged), she wrote beautifully, saying clearly whatever was on her mind, managing to offend everybody, and clearly seemed fine with that.  

One example:  in passing she notes that the anti-Semitic Eichmann had been required to read, and been impressed by, Zionist icon Theodore Herzl’s manifesto Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”), the only book the mediocre, uncurious Eichmann had ever read, according to Arendt.  Google refers to the book as a pamphlet, which is even better.

She gives some credence to Eichmann’s claim that the “Final Solution” (kill all of them, especially the babies, the ghastly method arrived at and set forth at the top secret Wannsee Conference, once the previous solutions proved insufficient) was possibly not his preferred way of dealing with the Thousand Year Reich’s intractable Jewish problem.  Eichmann was personally very squeamish, had never killed anyone himself, couldn’t watch gassings or shootings when invited to by death camp commandants,  and hated the idea of mass murder, or so he insisted (Arendt seems to back him up on all but the last of these– he clearly had no problem with mass murder, whatever distaste to the contrary he might have expressed as his life hung in the balance).

The Nazi official initially tasked with getting all Jews to emigrate out of Germany, Eichmann spent a long time formulating various emigration plans.  His basic plan was to get all of the Jews out of Germany, out of German controlled territories, and send them to a Nazi-controlled Jewish State.  Madagascar was one place the Nazis  considered, just send 4-5 million fucking Jews there and let them fight it out with the 4 million fucking Africans already living there, all overseen by impartial Nazi overlords.  

Zionists were understandably outraged by Arendt’s tart suggestion (an ironic aside, clearly) that Eichmann had been, for all intents and purposes, a pragmatic Zionist. She had other unflattering things to say about Zionist leaders, some of whom made pragmatic deals with the Nazis during the war.  These leaders, naturally, preferred less conversation about those pragmatic deals.    Much of what people excoriated Arendt for (many of her most vocal detractors had apparently never read her book)  related to how cooly she seemed to approach the horrendous history she brilliantly outlined, how she used phrases like “grotesque silliness” to refer to some of Eichmann’s more asinine pronouncements, including the stream of cliches he spouted as the noose was placed on his neck.   Her book was not published in Israel, in Hebrew, until 35 years after it’s publication in the U.S.   

I can’t resist an Arendt-tinged thought:  Eichmann’s dream of a Nazi-controlled Jewish state… hmmm… tempting to opine about how, in an odd way, his dream may have come perversely true, at least as shown by the current state’s defense of its most controversial policies, policies that involve the indiscriminate murder of civilians and maintaining concentration camp conditions for many of the millions under their occupation.

What makes a Nazi type is blind obedience to power, a willingness to do whatever is required to show loyalty to your superiors, to advance the infallible leader’s program, and your own career. The Nazis had a word for it, fuhrerprinzip*,  the absolute duty to obey the orders of your supreme leader, orders that are always wise, just and beyond question.   If you are in the party inner circle, the SS, for example, you swear a blood oath of personal loyalty to the leader, loyalty to the death.  No national, moral or personal consideration is of higher value than serving your master with unwavering loyalty.  In fact, you’ve expressly agreed to die before putting anything above the Fuhrer’s commands.

There were, obviously, great rewards for those who climbed the Nazi hierarchy, distinguished themselves by their fanatical devotion to the Fuhrer.    There was not even a need for a highly enough placed Nazi to make any hard sacrifice of beloved things, even if those things were expressly forbidden by Nazi policy.  Hermann Goring, a bloated morphine addict, had a large collection of plundered, incredibly valuable “degenerate art,” art works explicitly banned from Germany.  Vice is fine, if you’re cool, and in a powerful enough post.  Fucking Eichmann had a Jewish mistress in Vienna, although “rassenschande” (“race disgrace”, an anti-miscegenation law like the ones here in the USA for decades) was a serious crime under Hitler.  Just because Nazi policy was at one point to execute homosexuals as degenerates doesn’t mean a high enough ranking Nazi with a taste for boys couldn’t have as many handsome, fit, willing young men as he could requisition.  It just had to be done discreetly.   The rules are always flexible at the top, in any hierarchy, particularly in a corrupt one.  The higher you go the fewer consequences you face, except, perhaps, if you lose the war and face trial for war crimes.  God, how much does that suck?

One looks in vain for a rational “ideology” in any totalitarian state.   The role of the citizen in an authoritarian regime is not to understand the changing whims of her superiors, or the ostensible reasons for them, in fact, the real reasons are rarely, if ever, revealed to citizens.  The citizen’s only duty is obedience to authority and for that reason commands are put in the simplest, most compelling terms.   The choice is obedience or severe punishment, often death. 

The roster of top Nazis, people with the arbitrary power of life and death over everybody under their authority,  is a Who’s Who of disturbingly mediocre and often disturbingly disturbed individuals.  Don’t look for consistency, or a coherent worldview in the Third Reich, outside of power and blind ambition.  Look for ambitious, morally flexible people twisted by a charismatic sociopath’s shabby revenge fantasy, thirstily chasing their dream of power and a chance to be a major player on the stage of world history.  How many followers would Mr. Hitler, the world’s most photographed man in his day, Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1938, a mega-celebrity in the pre-television age, eventually a super-villain to rival any,  have had on Twitter?   I shudder to think.  

Speaking of unwavering consistency in one’s iron-clad beliefs, we learn from Arendt that Hitler himself, history’s most virulent and prolifically mass murdering anti-Semite, had literally something like four hundred Jews (356, actually) he personally spared, for one reason or another.  I thought about this for a long time before coming to the obvious answer.   The reason Hitler exempted hundreds of Jews from his death sentence was the same reason he killed millions of other Jews– because he was insane.

Eichmann, when he was read into the “Final Solution” at the Wannsee Conference, where he acted as secretary, taking the minutes of the secret meeting (which were, of course, destroyed) became officially designated a “bearer of secrets.”  This designation meant he had to strictly abide by strict Language Regulations, use only the Nazi sanctioned euphemistic language to refer to the secret mass-murder, words like sonderbehandlung (special treatment) instead of “expedited trip to the death camp,” mild phrases like “resettlement in the east” (Auschwitz).   Lying this way was required of all “secrets bearers” and everybody else.  

The Nazis were cynical masters of euphemism, they seemed to get a kick out of it, a kind of Nazi puckishness at work.   This Nazi tic has been widely imitated by many of today’s leaders and industries, who speak reassuringly out of their asses while committing unspeakable secret evils.  Here in the USA the proposed Clear Skies Act [1], is as good an example as that famous Nazi sign over Auschwitz, Arbeit Macht Frei (work liberates).   Goldman-Sachs, major players in, and beneficiaries of, the massive systemic  financial frauds of  a decade ago, are sponsors of the great Terry Gross’s Fresh Air.  The Koch Brothers, now sponsors of the NY Yankees broadcasts, tout their commitment to a level playing field for the permanent underclass.

The Nazis were famous for the audacity of their lies.  Why tell the truth when a lie can immediately galvanize a nation, if it is told over and over and anyone who contradicts it can be given special treatment, or resettled in the east?  The “Big Lie” was a technique pioneered by Reichsminister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, lady’s man Dr. Josef Goebbels.  You repeat the most inflammatory lie you can think of, the one that will cause maximum fear and rage against the enemy, over and over.  The bigger the better, say it over and over in the mass media, hammer it every day, many times a day.  If people don’t actually believe it, the constant repetition of the lie wears down their ability to actively disbelieve it after enough repetitions.  The only thing that is needed for the Big Lie to become the practical truth is to silence all other voices when you broadcast the lie.

The Nazi state immediately Nazified one profession after another (gleichshaltung — “coordination”) and took complete control over the mass media.  Every newspaper article, magazine piece, radio broadcast and newsreel was prepared and supervised by Nazis.  Every news source told the same story.  Truthfulness and lying in the mass media become irrelevant if there is no way for a citizen to hear an opposing view or verify as fact anything claimed on the state run mass media.  Dictators appreciate the flexibility that kind of control of public opinion affords.

Tell an audacious lie, a shocking lie.  Your hated opponent is planning a vast betrayal!  Here is the fake proof, look!   Here is one of the conspirator’s full confession, with pictures of the guilty looking malefactor.   Dress some German political prisoners in Polish uniforms, shoot them at the German-Polish border et, voila, casus belli for invading Poland!   Doesn’t matter what the lie is, as long as it makes your followers’ blood boil, prepares them for the just, merciless retaliation of the State that will be done in their names.   Things like children being plucked from their mother’s arms, thrown on the ground as the wailing mother is shot…. nobody needs to know about something like that.  You know?  Cattle cars crammed full of doomed “enemies of the State” continuously running to massive death factories in the East, merely lies told by those who hate our Nazi freedom.

The first thing a dictator must do is destroy the credibility of his enemies.  Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?  Sheesh.   The mass murder of the fucking Jews?  Really?  Are you kidding me? Who would do something like that? Fucking Jew propaganda, don’t fall for it, son.  You know what they’re like, how treacherous they are.  They’ll stop at nothing to seduce or rape all our women, our daughters, our mothers, our sisters, our wives, dig up the corpses of our grandmothers, rape them, these fucking people…. obsessed with corrupting our DNA, you know what they’re like!  Why would you believe them when your Fuhrer is standing right here, telling you what you already know, that they’re fucking liars?

Can I get a nice “Heil Hitler!” mein friends?

 (to be continued)

 

[*]  The Führerprinzip [ˈfyːʀɐpʀɪnˌtsiːp]  (German for “leader principle”) prescribed the fundamental basis of political authority in the governmental structures of the Third Reich.

[1]    The beautifully named law Dubya Bush proposed would have allowed industrial polluters to spew toxins in the air if the cost of not doing so would be prohibitively expensive to the polluters:

 Environmentalists were already worried about a 2003 EPA rule that weakens the “New Source Review” provision (1977) of the Clean Air Act.  This means that when industrial facilities make upgrades to plants that increase air pollution, even by hundreds of thousands of tons, if the improvements cost less than 20% of the replacement value of the “process units,” the plant doesn’t have to install modern pollution controls. According to one study, the failure to install modern pollution controls at 51 plants (involved in enforcement cases) is responsible for 5,000 to 9,000 premature deaths and 80,000 to 120,000 asthma attacks every year.

 source

Grey Skank, on the case!

As much as I sometimes disparage the venerable journal of record, it is one of the most important and influential sources of news in our society.   Recently, because of some shenanigan by Sekhnet who subscribes to the Times for an elderly former neighbor who lives in an institutional hell, isolated, against her will, we both get NYT news clips sent to our phones.   The other day this one arrived.  

The story had been meticulously set out in a long New Yorker profile HERE, (and I wrote about it, more briefly, HERE)  but the NY Times had several more sickening details, gathered recently.

The NY Times headline: 

Origins of an Epidemic: Purdue Pharma Knew Its Opioids Were Widely Abused

the lede: 

A confidential Justice Department report found the company was aware early on that OxyContin was being crushed and snorted for its powerful narcotic, but continued to promote it as less addictive.

by Barry Meier

Purdue Pharma, the company that planted the seeds of the opioid epidemic through its aggressive marketing of OxyContin, has long claimed it was unaware of the powerful opioid painkiller’s growing abuse until years after it went on the market.

But a copy of a confidential Justice Department report shows that federal prosecutors investigating the company found that Purdue Pharma knew about “significant” abuse of OxyContin in the first years after the drug’s introduction in 1996 and concealed that information.

The rest of the article is HERE

Not to fear, a deal was made to keep those responsible out of legal jeopardy back in 2006 and Purdue Pharma’s paid lying fuck had this to say in response to the NYTimes recent fake news story, all evidence to the contrary (and there’s apparently a shitload from before the DOJ let the Sacklers and their company off the hook more than a decade ago):

A spokesman for Purdue Pharma, Robert Josephson, declined to comment on the allegations in the report but said the company was involved in efforts to address opioid abuse.

“Suggesting that activities that last occurred more than 16 years ago are responsible for today’s complex and multifaceted opioid crisis is deeply flawed,” he said in a statement.

Deeply flawed, yes, of course, good line, bitchface, no wonder they pay you the big bucks.  Like corporate cousin Exxon, first to research and find the connection between burning fossil fuel and catastrophic climate change, then funding decades of climate change skepticism.  Deeply flawed to blame a powerful, highly addictive multi-billion dollar profit center, relentlessly and falsely marketed as a safe alternative to the addictive forms of the same drug, for fueling the Opioid Crisis.  Even if, and I say IF (though there is absolutely no ‘if’, as the newly leaked evidence shows), Purdue and the Sacklers knew from the beginning that they were lying to sell a boatload of the highly addictive stuff in every possible way.  

I wonder if Josephson was the former FDA official, later hired by Purdue Pharma, who approved the false and misleading marketing/package insert for Oxycontin that launched the powerful opioid’s meteoric rise to the top of the lucrative opioid drug pyramid [1].  The marketing continued, we know now, long after Purdue and the Sacklers knew all about the widespread abuse of its miracle drug.

The Sackler family, owners of Purdue, always plead ignorance and hide behind a corporate veil, as their ilk always does.   They feel, no doubt, that they’ve already suffered more than enough, having paid an outrageous $653,000,000 in corporate profits back in 2006 in a deal to end the merciless federal witch hunt against them.   If there’s any doubt that these psychopaths are lying about what they knew and when, there’s this:

Then in 1998, as OxyContin’s marketing campaign was taking off, Purdue Pharma learned of a medical journal study that appeared to undercut its central message — that OxyContin, as a long-acting opioid, had less appeal to drug abusers.

In the study, which was published in The Journal of the Canadian Medical Association, researchers from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver interviewed local drug dealers and abusers to learn what legal drugs sold for on the black market. They found that MS Contin commanded the highest price of any prescription opioid with a 30-milligram tablet that cost $1 at a pharmacy bringing up to $40 on the street.

In an accompanying editorial, a Canadian physician, Dr. Brian Goldman, wrote that the findings turned thinking about the supposed safety of long-acting opioids like OxyContin on its head by showing that drug abusers “coveted” such drugs.

“This should ring alarm bells,” Dr. Goldman, who was then a paid speaker for Purdue Pharma, wrote in the editorial.

Purdue Pharma did not send the Canadian study to the F.D.A. or tell its sales representatives about it. Instead, one sales official testified later to a federal grand jury that the company gave him an older survey to show doctors that had concluded that drug abusers were not attracted to time-release opioids.

Mr. Josephson, the Purdue Pharma spokesman, said it was not required to tell the F.D.A. about the Canadian study or editorial. He added that the company did not consider the small study’s results significant because it was already known that morphine could be abused.

The real question, of course, is what kind of fucking traitor leaked these “classified” reports, pages that show the guilty parties had full knowledge of the bad shit their lucrative, fraudulent, abuse-prone baby was causing years before Dubya and Cheney’s DOJ let them quietly off the hook with the corporation paying all fines?

This piquant passage should not pass by un-noted:

The head of the Justice Department’s criminal division at the time, Alice S. Fisher, did not respond to emails seeking comment about the decision not to pursue indictments. That decision followed meetings with a Purdue Pharma defense team whose advisers included Rudolph W. Giuliani, a onetime United States attorney and former New York mayor. Mr. Giuliani, who was then regarded as a potential Republican presidential candidate, is now a legal adviser to Mr. Trump.

Oh, how far the mighty have fallen.  What a fucking country!   God bless these fucking all-powerful, unaccountable winners we have here and God bless these United States of Exceptional Avarice, Death and Shamelessness.  Have a brilliant day!

 

[1] There would have been a neat symmetry to that, but, no, the former FDA weasel for hire was a scumbag named Dr. Curtis Wright:

The F.D.A. approved OxyContin in 1995, for use in treating moderate to severe pain. Purdue had conducted no clinical studies on how addictive or prone to abuse the drug might be. But the F.D.A., in an unusual step, approved a package insert for OxyContin which announced that the drug was safer than rival painkillers, because the patented delayed-absorption mechanism “is believed to reduce the abuse liability.” David Kessler, who ran the F.D.A. at the time, told me that he was “not involved in the approval.” The F.D.A. examiner who oversaw the process, Dr. Curtis Wright, left the agency shortly afterward. Within two years, he had taken a job at Purdue.

source

The War on Drugs

Like the War on Terror, the War on Drugs depends on breaking down doors in the middle of the night, dragging people off and putting all the bad guys out of commission.   The war metaphor underscores the idiocy of this massive program which has locked up tens of thousands of nonviolent drug offenders in American prisons. [1]  War is a violent reaction to a thing that can most often better be addressed in other ways.   Most war is waged, let us be frank here, for the profit of certain powerful parties who have others die for them in noble battle.  When war is not profitable anymore, the lion will lie down and let the lamb snuggle against it.   In the meantime, locking Americans up in privatized prisons is lucrative for the owners of those private prisons.   We need to keep the beds full, or the entire industry could collapse.

Speaking of war as the answer to all problems, at one time we had a War on Poverty here too, until, as Ronald Reagan cracked, “poverty won.”    It did indeed.

This is a somewhat random rant, as I have opined here several times about the moronic nature of this somewhat random War on selected criminalized drugs.   As a society America is very fond of drugs, we are dependent on a host of medicines.  If you have any medical condition whatsoever, we use drugs to cure it.  Ads for various drugs are ubiquitous on television: Ask your doctor if Asseffex is right for you.   If you are depressed: antidepressants.   Anxious: anti-anxiety drugs.   Can’t sleep: sleeping pills.  Need to unwind after a stressful day: alcohol or a tranquilizer. Do you fart?  take this.  Does your leg sometimes shake?  This drug cures RLS.  The list is endless.  

Let us be fair– which would you rather do, take a pill or delve into painful things and make hard choices about your life?   Chronic sleeplessness cured by a pill or by doing the unpleasant work involved in understanding what is actually keeping you sleepless and making needed changes in your life?   Go for the pill.   I’m no-one to talk, I’ve been convinced to take a daily blood pressure lowering pill and a statin to control borderline high cholesterol.  Would I need these if I lost the twenty pounds I need to lose?   Hard to say, and something I may never know.  A doctor friend convinced me to take these medications, she and her husband do.  She made some convincing arguments and I was convinced.   It’s very easy to take the two small pills every evening.

The War on Drugs is a war against certain mood-altering substances that the law chooses to criminalize.   The prevailing attitude among national lawmakers about drugs that only serve to get a person high is that folks should talk to their doctors, or bartenders.  Liquor stores are also a legal and readily available option.   Meanwhile, countless poor bastards have been locked up for the crime of procuring or selling illegal drugs, including marijuana.  The annual price tag for this lost War on Drugs was over $15 billion as of 2009.   When you’re preventing evil, the sky’s the limit, I suppose.    

Why do people become dependent on drugs?  Despair, difficulty with feelings of hopelessness, anger, worthlessness.  People take mood-altering drugs in an attempt to make themselves feel better.   The moment when the effect of the drug is felt is a moment of relief for the drug user, the only time in their day when they momentarily feel OK.   The moment when the effect wears off it’s back feeling shitty again for the user.   It is not hard to identify these impulses.   The hard thing is to be in the middle of a war on the thing that makes you feel a little better, in addition to all your other problems.    Not to say people who get addicted to drugs don’t need help managing their pain, they certainly do, but being hunted and locked up does nothing to help nonviolent people who take something everyday because they feel shitty.

In the case of the futile, destructive, perpetual American War on Drugs, the efforts of our government to use criminal laws and punishment as the only cure for a deep psychological problem only reinforces what right wing extremists have been saying for years: shrink the government and drown it in a bath tub.

We have a fairly shitty medical system here in the U.S., almost nothing as far as our medical records is standardized.  That’s because private enterprise is in charge. Our medical records are considered by these private corporations as proprietary information.   The company that provided the service owns them, may charge you for copies of your own medical records in some cases.  Here’s a hilarious, if also somewhat sour, note in our American medical records song and dance.  

I went for a pre-colonoscopy visit to a gastroenterologist’s office.    The first thing the person interviewing me asked was if I’m still taking oxycodone.   That prescription popped up immediately on the screen when she put my name in.

I’d had the side of my nose sliced open in December, by a surgeon removing a basal cell so tiny it could not be detected by the dermatologist.  I didn’t really understand why the eyebrow length incision was necessary, but I immediately understood, once the anesthetic wore off, that I was in considerable agony.   The surgeon called in a prescription for tylenol with codeine.   I took a pill and the pain quickly subsided.  I took another one four or six hours later, whatever it said on the label, and a third before I went to sleep.  I felt no appreciable high, but the pain was gone.  I felt fine the next day and put aside the bottle with the remaining tablets in it.

“Are you still taking oxycodone?” the pretty receptionist asked.

No, I said, and explained about the intensely painful incision on the left side of my nose.   The opioid prescription was the only medical information that popped up about me when she put my name into the medical database.   I didn’t think much about it at the time, but I am thinking of it now:  good old Jared Kushner!   The president had appointed him to cure the Opioid Crisis (which killed more Americans last year than military veteran suicides [2], homicide by firearm and many other common causes of American death) and, by God, Jared is on the case!  

God bless these United States!

 

[1]  Almost half of all federal prisoners are locked up for drug offenses.  

“Among sentenced prisoners under the jurisdiction of state correctional authorities on December 31, 2015, 15% (197,200 prisoners) had been convicted of a drug offense as their most serious crime.”

source

[2]  Check out the shockingly high number of suicides among female veterans, almost 600% the rate of female civilian suicides 2000-2010

 link 

Why so Pissed, El? (final)

There are many reasons to be angry, no doubt.  Many reasons to be grateful for the miracle of life, also, though those reasons seem not to be as compelling, as demanding of action, as the reasons to be mad.  I’m thinking about the myths we are fed here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.  Not that every nationstate does not have its myths, every culture its signature values, but… fuck.

I think about the record disparity in income we have here now in the land of the American Dream.  Men with $35,000 toilet bowls and others, homeless, arrested for shitting in an alley.   What kind of disgusting person do you have to be to shit in an alley?   Can you blame a cop for roughing up a despicable fucker like that?  

America is ruled by advertising, has long been, but now the ads come directly to our pockets, targeted by algorithms that single us out by expressed preferences.  We elect our public representives  based strictly on advertising, branding and marketing.   Everything we see or hear is “brought to you” by some corporation with the money to bring it.   Sponsors pull out, the show is over.  Ten million people used to watch that shit every week, then something that couldn’t be spun quickly enough is said by the host and, bye bye.   Corporations taking principled stands.  We will not support a celebrity who makes a stink when everybody else on TV supports the next war.  Fuck that, we are Americans!

As individuals, we are powerless in the face of what is done in our names.   The champions we are sometimes allowed to vote for, and I think of recent liberal icons who have been devoted, flexible servants of the status quo, Bill Clinton (the “best Republican president of the 20th century”, our “first black president”) and Barack Obama (“the first black president”), are also men who will make every necessary compromise without flinching.  Every president has to pass the psychopath test before being put on the ballot of one of the major parties.  Some are better than others, but each of them, in crunch time, will do what needs to be done.  Usually that involves dropping some massive fucking bombs and selling billions in the latest killing technology to despots.  Few of us get excited about it anymore.   “It’s just the president being presidential,” spoken in the way disgusted but resigned Red Sox players and fans used to say “that’s just Manny being Manny”, referring to the mercurial superstar’s self-centered childishness.

So we cultivate honesty in our dealings with others.  Sometimes that is more fruitful than at other times.  Not everyone is comfortable with everything being on the table.  Honesty, really, what is that shit actually?  How fucking honest do we want to really be, anyway?

Many people I know have stopped watching the news.  You have a famously rabid bullying (though obsequious to superiors, allegedly) war hawk from the Cheney-Bush administration, elevated to sit at the president’s right hand, foaming at the mouth about Libya-style regime change in Iran.  Everyone recalls how well that went.   The Koch brother’s personal former congressman, elevated to Secretary of State recently by the world’s greatest deal-making winner, vows the most severe sanctions in history if Iran does not stop pursuing nuclear deterrence against the U.S., does not stop meddling in the Middle East.  He announces this with a straight face:  Iran must get the fuck out of fucking Yemen or we will fucking fuck you up.   Says this as we are giving massive military support to our close democratic friends in the House of Saud as they pour the explosions and famine on impoverished Yemen.   So, to avoid massive aggravation, you tune out, turn off the news.  Go on a nice vacation, come back, feel a bit better that life is still good.

Not a bad move, my friends.   Take a nice trip, recharge your batteries.  Look after your health.  If there is nothing we can do about the kind of country we live in, the kind of world we leave to the future, at least grant us the serenity to accept that and try to live as well as we can.   Our lives here are only the wink of an eye, after all, and each of us is suspended by a strand of a spider’s web during that wink.   It behooves us to look within, find peace, be grateful for every beautiful thing in our lives, do a little good wherever we can.  It does. 

There is something perverse in me that cannot look away.  I am driven to gather the available facts, try to understand, to put the jagged puzzle pieces together in this dark, stinking room.  I am fucked up.  I get that.  But it is my life, and my world, and it burns me sometimes that, no matter how clear and convincing the truth is, that mere truth doesn’t mean shit against a nicely spun pile of steaming horse shit.  Hell, in our new post-factual world, you don’t even need to spin that shit– just keep it constantly coming.  Heh, you completely dizzy yet, motherfuckers?

Why so Pissed, El? (2)

We live in a culture ruled not by a desire to meet everyone’s basic human needs, or even recognize them, but by an unreasoning competitive lust to acquire more than we can possibly use.   We all need food, shelter, clothing, exercise, love, sex, companionship.   We get tasty, cheaply produced toxic foodstuffs, overpriced shelter that is a burden, (if also a major investment), for many citizens, clothing made in countries where labor is cheapest and health and safety regulations least intrusive.  Instead of walking, most of us drive everywhere in fossil-powered cars whose pollution is destroying the planet.  

There is sadly little love in our society, for most people, in part because advertising creates impossible dreams as divorce rates soar.  Sex is often a commodity in our pay to play culture, pornography is readily available to every adolescent with a phone.   Companionship, in the sense of mutually respecting friends spending time together, having a few laughs, exchanging views, is more and more rare.    Look at me right now, I’m typing these words into a void instead of chatting with a friend.   More and more of our communication, as a society, is via what is grotesquely known as Social Media.   It isn’t hard to see why people become internet trolls in this kind of inhuman environment.   Why not take out your frustrations by shitting on your countrymen when nobody can look into your pathetic eyes?

Why so mad, El?  This sick shit is the only game in town, unless you make herculean exertions to get off the grid.   If you choose not to participate in what is euphemistically called the Rat Race, the competition for wealth, you find yourself a sucker betting against the house.   When I was young banks paid a substantial interest rate to hold your money.  If you had a sum you were saving, you could put it into a long-term, federally insured, bank account that paid 10% interest.  This way you could live on a budget and keep up with inflation without putting your savings on a crooked roulette wheel.  Today banks have merged with investment houses and insurance companies, the whole game is a casino.   Rather than FDIC insurance for your life savings in the bank, you have the federal government turning a willfully blind eye to the massive Ponzi Scheme that is our financial industry-driven economy.

In fairness to the ass-dicking architects of this system [1], I have heard there is nothing like taking a dump into a $35,000 toilet bowl.   It may be nice to own as many homes as you want, I suppose, although you have to wonder about why that might be.  In order to allow these masters of the universe to live such lavish lifestyles there are certain sacrifices the rest of us must make.   Not long ago they came up with a brilliant fraud to ensure that this sacrifice by the 95% would be perpetual.   I refer you to Matt Taibbi’s The Divide, pages 38 and 39, for a clear, concise description of the details [2].

You create a system where large sums of money are continually flowing in.  This is necessary for any Ponzi Scheme.  You need a steady flow of money coming in, to pay off people, to pique their greed, to make them invest more, to keep the shell game profitable.   Some unprincipled geniuses realized there was a huge reservoir of money in the housing market and came up with a scheme to defraud unsuspecting losers of billions, perhaps trillions, of dollars.   For all of its intricateness, it is deceptively simple.  You package and sell misleadingly labeled debt.

You allow millions of people to take mortgages they can not possibly afford to keep paying.  Give them “liar’s loans”, it’s not a problem, the point is to create mountains of debt you can package and sell, the more the better.  Make the initial mortgage payments small, it doesn’t matter, you can always add a clause for balloon payments that nobody will read, or understand.   As long as housing prices are going up, these poor suckers can always sell or borrow more money against the rising price of their homes, to keep their nostrils above water.   Meantime, you package these debts into huge bundles you can sell as rock solid investments, sliced into tranches of collateralized debt obligations, or whatever you want to call them.  

To make these bad debts attractive to investors, you get the ratings agencies to assure buyers that the derivatives they are investing in are AAA-rated, nothing safer than a triple A-rated investment product.   You make the transfers and investment opportunities for these toxic assets insanely complicated for anyone outside of the financial sector to begin to understand.   It doesn’t matter as long as you keep paying high interest rates on these toxic investments in the short term.  You make this golden investment opportunities irresistible.  Then you sit back, skim off the vast profits, and wait for more foreclosures to bundle and sell.  

Since we live in a culture where winners are rewarded with obscene wealth, and losers can go fuck off and die, all this makes perfect sense.   Obama’s justice department, along with not holding John Yoo, Mitchell and Jessen, Cheney and the other creators of our torture program accountable (come on! you will say, that would have been politically impossible– and besides, Cheney would have killed everyone), prosecuted nobody for this massive systemic financial fraud against millions of Americans, a fraud that resulted in the loss of gazillions of dollars for pension funds, senior citizens’ life savings, etc.  Suckers walk, yo.

Why so fucking angry, El?  This has always been the way of the world.  You think the serfs had it any better under feudalism?   Why blame perfect presidential candidate Barack Obama for not seriously addressing the most horrific failures of the system? He was no bomb thrower, he was a pragmatist.  He joked about making some “serious Tubmans” when he was out of office.  I have confidence in his abilities, I’m certain he will be the first ex-president to monetize his talents and status to become a billionaire.  Why not dream huge in the land of the American Dream?  

While we have Obama on the waterboard, I understand that the deep hatred he inspired in much of the country, merely by being “biracial”, may have led him to be more cautious than he would have been in a more just, less racist, society.   He faced a racist lynch mob every day of his presidency.  The most vocal leaders of that lynch mob are literally running the Executive branch today.  OK, leave my man out of it, then.

Why am I so fucking mad?  Because of how little choice there is in how to live by merciful human values in a corrupt, morally bankrupt, insatiably appetitive society like ours.  It is nothing to turn children into charred chopped meat somewhere thousands of miles from here, if you spin it as done in the cause of freedom and democracy.  Collateral Damage.  Sanctions against Iraq over the years cost many thousands of Iraqi children their lives, long before “Shock and Awe”, a perpetual war of aggression for no moral or legal reason.  Nothing to see here.   Drones replace “boots on the ground”, American lives are saved.  It’s all good!  We torture… some folks… call us pisher, as my grandfather used to say.   The bottom line is the economy, stupid.  The Stock Market hums along, practices largely the same as they were right before the big transfer of wealth in 2008 that was disastrous to many millions of people worldwide.  

“Nothing to fucking see here, commie bastard.  You want humble people to be left alone?   Where does that ever fucking happen?  I thought you wanted everyone’s basic so-called human needs taken care of?   How does that happen if you want to be left alone?  Asshole.  Grow some balls, go compete, monetize something, instead of whining to nobody about the infernal unfairness of life among the wise apes.  Nobody cares, do you understand me, you stupid loser fuck?  More than that, nobody is even fucking listening.”

I sit here, sucking my teeth, petulant.  I’m mad, yo.  Get me to a laughing academy, eh?  

And, smartly on cue, the spotty but expensive internet service provided by a duopoly headed by the highest paid CEO in the world, winks out.   God bless.

 

 

[1] Apologies to any loving, consensual practitioners of anal intercourse out there.  I don’t mean to disparage anyone’s sexual preference, I just get tired of using “motherfucker” to describe these ruthless motherfuckers.  “Cocksucker” is subject to the same offensive limitations as ass-dicker.  What a fucked up world… I suppose men who behave like the genteel “Planters” of old who raped their slaves for fun and profit are best described as what they are, motherfuckers.  Keep it simple.

[2] On the second of those pages, Taibbi writes:

It was a modern take on the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale.  Big banks took great masses of straw (i.e., the risky home loans of the poor, undocumented and unemployed) and spun it, factory style, into gold (i.e., AAA-rated securities).   They used a technique called securitization that allowed banks and mortgage lenders to take vast pools of home loans belonging to underemployed janitors and immigrants and magically convert them into investments that were ostensibly as safe as Microsoft corporate bonds or the sovereign debt of Luxembourg, but more lucrative than either.

Then we have this “fun fact” about the robust federal investigation into the causes of this great fraud, from page 407.  Try to read it without clenching your jaws after the punchline:

Fun fact:  When the economy crashed in 2008, the federal government formed an investigatory group to look into the causes.  The Financial Crisis Inquiry Committee was given a budget of $9.8.  Committee chairman Phil Angelides acidly noted that this was “roughly one-seventh of the budget of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.”

Meanwhile, that same year the federal drug enforcement budget leaped from $13.275 billion to $15.278 billion.  That meant that just the increase in the national drug enforcement budget for the year of the biggest financial crisis since the Depression was roughly two hundred times the size of the budget for the sole executive branch effort at formally investigating the causes of financial corruption.

The Seven Deadly Sins

Last night I was making a bookmark for a friend I promised months ago I’d send some bookmarks to.  I’d made them months back.  A few were nice, but I’ve mislaid them here in the quivering paper quicksand in this house of constantly shifting stacks of paper.   Most had gibberish writing on them, among the colors and drawings.  I decided to use my fancy Namiki Falcon to inscribe more meaningful words on the new bookmarks.  I made one with the Seven Deadly Sins on it, for handy reference. [1]    

Pride
Greed (avarice)
Lust
Envy (jealousy, covetousness)
Gluttony
Wrath (anger)
Sloth (laziness)

Reading the list I had a minor revelation.  Below the sins I wrote “7 for 7, impressive!”

I don’t have to say any more than that, I think.  Except perhaps to state the obvious, what is lacking in someone who exhibits all seven of these bad traits.

Pride keeps a person thinking they are more important than everybody else, removes empathy.

Lust turns other people into mere vessels for gratification, removes mutuality, makes the objects of lust disposable.

Greed speaks for itself, it places the desires of the self about all else.

Envy, as corrosive an emotion as there is, is an enemy of peace and driver of malice, it keeps bitterness and ill-will simmering.

Gluttony means you will covet and steal someone else’s portion to overfeed yourself.

Wrath is the same as just being mad, fucking nuts — it is the opposite of prudence, if you think about it, since an angry person literally cannot think straight.

Sloth may be the slipperiest sin.   It means you are perpetually too lazy to do the hard work that needs to be done.

Seven for seven! You’ve got to hand it to the motherfucker.   Every cardinal sin on the list and the pious Christian right loves him.  Now that is a unique species of fucking genius!

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[1]   The seven deadly sins, also known as the capital vices or cardinal sins, is a grouping and classification of vices within Christian teachings. … These sins are often thought to be abuses or excessive versions of one’s natural faculties or passions (for example, gluttony abuses one’s desire to eat).   source

A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Medicine Go Down

As we walk through this world of darkness certain things become clear if we live long enough.  It is better to be mild with upset people whenever possible.   Particularly when confronted by someone who is angry, it is best to remain calm, keep your eye on defusing rather than escalating anger.   It’s not easy, and not always possible, but is generally a better way to walk through a violent place than flipping the bird at every one of the many angry, deserving jerks you will encounter here.

Then there is the calculated use of strategically applied reasonableness to attain a desired goal.  Not exactly the same thing as described above, but it’s a smart play. Interim CIA director Gina Haspel, who repeatedly denied the incendiary charge that stripping prisoners naked, freezing or overheating their cages, slamming them against walls, depriving them of sleep for days on end, blasting deafening music, making them engage in forced mock sex (for the cameras), using electrodes, stress positions, hanging with feet barely touching the ground, other fear and terror inducing techniques, amount to torture, backed off ever so slightly in her denials of government wrongdoing.  

These things were all perfectly legal when the CIA did them, Gina Haspel insisted repeatedly, if not 100% uncontroversially, during her confirmation hearing.  “Bloody Gina,” by all reports, was pretty gung-ho about the new freedom to roughly interrogate granted by the top secret Torture Memo[1]  and the $80,000,000 manual of best arguably non-torture practices painstakingly laid out by two patriotic American psychologist/torture tutors, Jessen and Mitchell.  To my knowledge she did not deny that she destroyed evidence of torture conducted under her watch at a “black site” in Thailand.

It was going to be a tight vote for the president’s nominee for CIA director, Ms. Haspel and her allies realized.  So she wrote a heartfelt letter to the top ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner.  The magic words:

While I won’t condemn those that made these hard calls, and I have noted the valuable intelligence collected, the program ultimately did damage to our officers and our standing in the world. With the benefit of hindsight and my experience as a senior agency leader, the enhanced interrogation program is not one the C.I.A. should have undertaken.

source

It seems to have done the trick, precatory (non-legally binding — she promises nothing, , admits nada) language and all.   She should now, with Mark Warner’s vote and a couple of others, have enough votes today to become America’s Next Top Spook.   It is petty, I know, to parse such sincere words as though they were crafted with the help of a lawyer and other partisan hacks, but I can’t help but note just a couple of things.   After-the-fact snideness is about all we get to exercise, much of the time, here in our great, participatory democracy.

I won’t condemn those that made these hard calls

It’s a nitpick, but I love use use of the word “that” to refer to those who insisted torture was legal.  “That,” while acceptable as a reference to a person, is also exclusively used to refer to animals and inanimate objects; “who” is exclusively used for people.   A telltale slip.  Nothing to see here.  Yes, OK, Dick Cheney was a bit of an inanimate object, as were the steely men who made “these hard calls”.   Kind of like a corporate “person”, not something you’d want watching your back in a fox hole, or babysitting for your kids, or meeting in a dark alley.

I also love the principled refusal to condemn the architects of the recent American torture program.  You go!

and I have noted the valuable intelligence collected

So Gina Haspel is sticking to her guns, a woman of principle!  In contrast to the reasoned opinion of every intelligence expert I’ve ever heard on the subject, she is suggesting that torture works.   She will not say it’s not a damned good way to get evil fucks to give up valuable intelligence.   Nope.  The regrettable part, to Haspel and her higher morality, is that it makes us look bad to be secretly doing things that, when leaked, make us look like monsters no better than the people we are torturing, er, interrogating in an enhanced, perfectly legal, or at the very least arguably legal, manner.

Since we are good, and evil people, or people we suspect may be evil, are evil, or quite possibly evil in the case of mere suspects, well, our American secret agents hold themselves to a much higher moral standard than standard morality requires. You see, we only secretly torture us some folks to preserve our higher moral values.  

It is important to grasp this distinction.  Only then can you understand why our highly principled UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, walks out when the Palestinian delegation complains about the fog of tear gas rained from Israeli drones and the dozens of demonstrators killed and many hundreds wounded on the Gaza border with Israel. The NY Times headline today refers to “scores” of Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers in the last two days.  Typical liberal crap– “scores,” while technically accurate, suggests way more than a mere sixty or so, eh, Nikki?

US ambassador Haley defended Israel’s amazing “restraint” in killing and maiming so few of the people who publicly massed to openly hate their freedom.  No other country, she insisted, could have behaved with more restraint.  Then she got up and left as the Palestinian representative began to speak.   The perfect way to show the world how much America cares, how willing we always are to listen.  How much more moral we are than those who self-righteously, hypocritically, attack our higher morality.

“Just a spoon full of sugar
makes the medicine go down,
the medicine go dow-own,
the medicine go down,
just a spoon full of sugar
makes the medicine go down
in the most delightful way!”

 

[1]    Torture, according to that memo, “must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” Yoo also advised that for mental pain or suffering to amount to torture, “it must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years.”     source