Category Archives: writing

Story time

There are many ways to describe the same situation, multiple stories are possible for every set of events. The  moral of each story is wildly different as are the heroes, villains and innocent bystanders. This is common in our smash-mouth politics, as we see everyday. 

It’s not that anything wrong was done (note the beautifully passive voice) in accidentally removing sensitive, automatically declassified national defense documents from their secure location, not by us, though those evil, partisan zealots on the other side are totally out of control, weaponizing everything, including illegally using laws and so-called legal procedures, clumsily planting fake evidence and willing to lie and do all manner of evil in an attempt to embarrass, dominate and win, because they’re sick and dangerous traitors who need to be hanging from lamp posts.   

Clearly there are other, much different, ways to lay out the facts and details and explain the cause and effect in this story. The main thing, in our litigious culture, beyond even accuracy, is that the story is emotionally compelling.

Bill Barr was found by a judge to have lacked candor in his representations to the court about a DOJ memo written in response to the Mueller Report.  He was found the other day, by a panel of appellate judges, to have been untruthful in asserting that the memo (on how to communicate to the public that Mueller had exonerated Trump for a crime Mueller said he could neither charge Trump with nor exonerate him for) was privileged because it discussed deliberations over whether to charge the former president with a crime or not.  Mueller and Barr relied on the same OLC memo that said a sitting president may not be charged with a crime, so there was no deliberation over whether to charge him in that memo.  Barr was lying, as Mueller suggested in his strongly worded letter about Barr’s misleading spin on the report, complaining that Barr had mischaracterized his findings.  Barr kept Mueller’s immediately written letter to himself for months, while claiming under oath that he had no inkling of what Bob thought of his characterization of the report.   

In another way of telling the story Barr was himself simply telling a story, it was puffery, a lawyer’s poetic license to spin the story to best suit his client’s needs. Those who share Barr’s worldview feel that Barr had every right, in the face of such, vicious, relentless enemies, to do everything that he did to help the leader he was rightfully protecting.

This is the society we are currently living in.   We don’t need to look at politics for more examples of wildly divergent, irreconcilable accounts of an occurrence people lived through together.   A blow up between old friends that nobody understood the reasons for will be described in incompatibly different stories.  In one, the four all played parts in the escalating tensions, discomfort, eruptions of anger and the sickening aftermath.  In another, three were pretty much the victims of one, a dangerous, sadistic and unforgiving person who nobody could even speak to without fear of being tortured.  In another, the blame for the accidental horrors was fairly evenly spread between three, while the fourth was largely blameless.   Another way of telling it was that once their respective traumatic childhood wounds were reopened, all bets were off, it was a zero sum war of survival, each against all.   The story then became one of alliances, who believed what and, in the end, whose story would become the final narrative in their little social circle.

One story lets the narrator completely off the hook, in fact, makes them the sympathetic victim and defender of a fellow victim, and they themselves will tell it calmly, yet passionately, to persuade friends of the truth of it.  In another story, the worst injury described will be completely absent from the first account.  Things one person remembers being said, things that shocked her, are not recalled by another person, the one who allegedly said it, though a third person does recall it, although not exactly as the first one said.

In one story the only way out is through a process of reconciliation, involving a painful but necessary conversation conducted in the safety of old friendship and extending the benefit of the doubt all around.  In another story the only solution, the only way to avoid reliving the devilishly painful details, is agreeing to forget the regrettable things ever happened and carrying on as if they didn’t, even though it means, unfortunately, tacitly tolerating the intolerable sadism of the stubbornly unforgiving one who tortured everybody and demanded they comply with a twisted version of events.

And on and on.   If the goal is peace, and restoration of what was lost, and that goal is shared, there seemingly should be a way out.   There is not always a way out, because, while we all consistently do the best we can, sometimes the best we can do is not good enough for somebody else.  If judged not good enough someone’s best can become the seed of a new story, and that failure of character is the reason we can never fix this broken, once beautiful, rare and cherished thing. 

At least we now know who to blame.

“I don’t know how to do this…”

You know what my father said to me before he died? And I mean right before he died, it might have been the last thing he said. He goes “I don’t know how to do this” and I said “it’s okay, dad, nobody knows how to do it” and a short time later he was just quiet and I saw that he wasn’t breathing. I closed his eyes with two fingers of my right hand and took the oxygen tube out of his nostrils.

I understand now that I said the right thing, what he needed to hear in that moment. “Nobody knows how” was a reassuring touch, but the words he needed to hear were “it’s okay, dad” they released him to go in peace. As he did a moment later, as gently as you can imagine.

The Espionage Act of 1917

The Espionage Act of 1917 (extended by the Sedition Act of 1918), mentioned on the FBI search warrant for Mar-a-lago, is one of the most hastily written and draconian laws in the American federal criminal code. Let’s concede that there are matters of vital national security that every nation keeps top secret and that laws need to be in place to protect deadly state secrets, to avoid nuclear war, for example.  The Espionage Act covers those things, but quite a bit more, and in its present form, is a nightmarish legal quagmire in many respects to anyone charged under it.  For one thing, there is virtually no defense available, the First Amendment, for example, is not a viable defense.

The Espionage Act, (full name: An Act to punish acts of interference with the foreign relations, and the foreign commerce of the United States, to punish espionage and better enforce the criminal laws of the United States, and for other purposes) was passed two months after the US entered World War One against Germany.  It was designed to criminalize dissent against a deliberately promoted war in Europe that over a hundred years later nobody can untangle the reasons for, except that a lot of money belonging to the richest men in the world (and loaned to Britain and France) was riding on the roulette wheel of the outcome of this war of colonial superpowers.  Woodrow Wilson unleashed a massive, modern advertising blitz to sell the “war to end war” and “the war to make the world safe for democracy”  to initially skeptical Americans, who eventually signed up for it in a fervor of calculatedly stirred patriotic passion.  Anyone with any influence who was publicly critical of Wilson’s drive to war became an internal enemy, subject to the harsh justice of the Espionage Act.

The law made it criminal to give “aid and comfort to the enemy” by, for example,  making public statements calling into question the government’s overriding national interest in prosecuting a war, for any reason imaginable. This broadness was included specifically for the purpose of making sure the United States entered and remained in this war on the side of the Allies (who owed the wealthiest Americans an untold fortune by the middle of the war, a fortune that would be lost if Germany won).  The Espionage Act made otherwise First Amendment protected free speech a criminal offense, akin to treason, in time of war.  It prohibits “any disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language about the form of government of the United States… or the flag.” 

The devilish genius of this statute is that intent is not an element of the crime under the Espionage Act, all you have to do is anything that prosecutors can argue gave aid and comfort to the enemy.  That’s why Julian Assange is on the verge of suicide, because he’s facing life imprisonment under this law where his intention in making public what he considered matters of grave public concern, such as video proof of at least one war crime, an aerial attack by a US helicopter crew against unarmed noncombatants in Iraq,  cannot be introduced as part of his defense.   Edward Snowden, same deal, no matter how strong a case he can make for the immense public importance of his disclosure of vast secret government surveillance of American citizens, under the Espionage Act his intentions, even the actual effects of his disclosure, are 100% irrelevant to his guilt or innocence. 

It is a unique and brutal law, which, in its day, put many critics of the “war to end war” in prison.  Popular American Socialist leader and presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs was convicted and sentenced to ten years during World War I for charges under the Espionage Act. It is used periodically (though very rarely) as a power move to chill dissent.  I personally don’t forgive Obama for deploying it many times (he set the post World War One record for Espionage Act prosecutions) against journalists and others who could fairly be called whistleblowers. It should be removed from the books, or dramatically improved, but while it is good law it is the perfect law to prosecute someone who keeps denying he has any intent to ever do anything except be perfect and a persecuted savior of the people who are under threat from so many sick and dangerous enemies, it’s unbelievable!

Life is more about emotion than logic sometimes

The sphere of human affairs that is influenced by facts, cause and effect, logic and well-argued, more or less persuasive positions, is like the visible part of an iceberg.

Invisible in the water is the far greater bulk of the iceberg, the visible part being only a small fraction of the iceberg. Emotion in human affairs is like all the stuff below the water line and plays a gigantic role in keeping the whole thing afloat and upright. We may not be able to see that vast bulk without an underwater camera, but without that giant underwater part, there’s no iceberg. No living, sentient head without the much larger, deeply feeling body to carry it.

It’s the same way with our emotions, they carry us. And when they’re inflamed, no amount of logic alone can touch them, let alone soothe them.

The seemingly logical question needed to solve a conflict “what do you need from me? how can I heip?” cannot be asked or answered by someone whose emotions are clenched in childhood terror. They’re simply impossible questions to form when we are upset that somebody seems angry at us.

How do I make it stop?

When you are in a brutal conflict that will not stop, when every move anybody makes (or doesn’t make) to try to solve it twists the knot tighter and tighter, and the standoff seems increasingly hopeless, how do you begin to resolve a mutually painful and desperate impasse?

Fuck if I know, though one thing I’ve learned is that no solution to any painful interpersonal battle comes from the application of logic. I’ve also learned that Reason, once everybody’s pain is inflamed, is sometimes entirely irrelevant.

Paradoxically, the more reason is on your side, sometimes, the harder the other party, now accused of being unreasonable on top of everything else, will have to resist and the worse it will go for you, for everyone.

Sometimes you will turn an emotional corner for reasons you can’t completely understand in that moment but your emotions will tell you something true and important that you need to do immediately and you can do that, and sometimes that may help.

It will certainly help more than being stuck on the senselessness of placing all blame on one person, alone responsible for putting a world of trauma on loved ones. The exact reason for your emotional pivot may be revealed to you afterwards, if you puzzle over it long enough, though that reason also doesn’t matter.

Fucking humans, man, no wonder this planet is always at war.

I hope this doesn’t sound judgmental

You deserve friends who make you laugh, feel loved, comfort you when you need comforting, accept your limitations and quickly work out any problems with you when they see you are unhappy.   

You deserve friends who always give you the benefit of the doubt, who accept when they’ve hurt you and always do their best to make amends and not let you sit in pain. 

You deserve friends who return your best efforts at kindness and friendship with their own best efforts.   We all deserve that. 

We are lucky when we find real friendship and should remember to be grateful for every day of it.  Friendship should never be taken for granted, it is mortal, just like us.

Complainer

My best advice to you when times are tough for you — and what I’m going to say might seem like very, very tough love — never, ever lose your patience with people who hurt you, no matter what.

Once you lose patience, and the ability to hold pain inside, forever, if necessary, you become the problem and the focus of everyone else’s defensiveness. How can you be worthy of friendship when you make people who hurt you feel so defensive?

Think about it like this, my constantly complaining friend, giving in to frustration is like inconsolably protesting that it’s wrong for the corpse you loved so much in life to keep lying there like it’s dead and not getting up to hug you.

I may not be able to take this advice about endless, limitless patience myself, you understand, but if you don’t, you are going to have big problems. Trust me on that one.

Why it is better to write than to bang your head against the wall

Sometimes the quiet focused conversation you need to address vexations is best done on a page, between yourself and an imagined reader.  In a tense real-time conversation about things that trouble us, tempers can quickly become inflamed.  As soon as people feel defensive it becomes a tit for tat pissing contest between righteously offended parties instead of a productive conversation.   People will sometimes expect much more from you than they do from themselves.   

“You made them feel defensive!  No wonder they attacked you!” a crying loved one will conclude afterwards, when anger erupts and all attempts at peacemaking have been angrily batted away.  Your loved one will be too upset to help you much at that point and you will strain things between you by continuing to try to puzzle through it aloud.

So, a blank page.  And the opportunity to finish the thoughts angry, upset people won’t let you finish, a time to puzzle through, find and state a difficult thing clearly without static, interruption, endless challenges before you complete a sentence.   

Look, right here I can pause (with no pause showing), in a way that’s impossible to do when someone is indignant at something you are saying, will not hear it, glares and angrily points to your inability to control your emotions.

Anger happens between people when there is hurt.   In my experience, when you are upset, the best thing to do is start with a thought and a blank page.   Look how many times you can stop, read, reflect, remove a distracting word, add a sentence that clarifies what you need to express, to make your thoughts and feelings understood.  The primary benefit of this exercise, this struggle toward clarity, is for yourself, I have learned.

Others will not often be persuaded, by even the most gentle statement of something they don’t want to hear, are incapable of hearing.  It is hard to read something intended to make you question your own certainty, the rightness of your own behavior.  We live in a defensive, competitive society, a litigious culture.   In this place, if you have a problem, be prepared for a battle, even if (or especially if, perhaps) you write with the dispassionate  mildness of a sage.

“See, you’re using your talent and training, and fifty years of daily practice, to get an advantage over me because you don’t have the courage to confront me to my face!”

Be under no illusions about anyone else being influenced or moved by what you write, no matter how carefully you try to treat their injured feelings.  I had a tremendously long email correspondence with an argumentative old friend who had exploded at me several times, angrily hanging up on me the last time we spoke, after firing off a string of curses.  Some, perhaps many, would have pronounced the friendship dead at that point, but. realizing he’d been at the end of his rope, I tried to patiently lay out the tensions between us, trace what had led to his anger, point to ways we could repair our frayed friendship and become better friends to each other.   

He wrote back thanking me for my patience, and for showing him understanding instead of anger or blame, but told me he still didn’t grasp what I was actually trying to say and therefore was unable to respond to any of it.  He asked me to try to make it clear for him. I clarified each thought I’d sent him, in detail.  He thanked me for my efforts, but indicated he was still at such a loss that he was unable to respond to any point I’d raised.  Perhaps if I dropped the mildness mask, he suggested, and just honestly and directly told him why I’d been upset with him (I had, but not in a way this longtime lawyer could understand, apparently).   When I did, he was outraged and claimed to have read all of my long emails again “searching in vain for the slightest clue” about why’d I’d been so upset, though I was certainly making my anger at him clear.  Case closed.  I gave him the last word.

You may write something so clear that in the writing of it you finally understand a thing that has been too painful to confront.  The beloved child you have been carrying on your back for so long, the kid who hasn’t been responding when you talk to her, is actually dead.  The most beautiful poem ever written will not bring her back.

You deserve love

You deserve friends who make you laugh, feel loved, comfort you when you need comforting, accept your limitations and quickly work out any problems with you when they see you are unhappy.   You deserve friends who always give you the benefit of the doubt, who accept when they’ve hurt you and always do their best to make amends and not let you sit in pain.  You deserve friends who return your best efforts at kindness and friendship with their own best efforts.   We all deserve that.  We are lucky when we find real friendship and should remember to be grateful for every day of it.  Friendship should never be taken for granted, it is mortal, just like us.

The hard part of friendship is when you are deeply hurt by a friend who then feels defensive and needs to feel understood themself about why they hurt you, tells you why you shouldn’t have been so hurt, why they couldn’t respond to you any differently, why what you needed by way of honest acknowledgment of what happened was impossible for them for a list of perfectly valid reasons — and, perhaps most importantly, how hurt they were by you saying they hurt you.  Your emotional emergency, they might explain, does not make it their emotional emergency, since they are very busy with many responsibilities and loved ones to take care of.   It can sit, until there’s time, until people are not under stress, until everyone is nice and calm.  That period of silence will give the hurt party time to heal, presumably, and then cooler heads will prevail and everything that is bothering everybody can be left in the past as the simple human mistake that it was.

The hardest part about friendship is the expectation that, no matter what, you need to take our undying love as beyond question or doubt, to understand things we can never explain, acknowledge or stop justifying.  We all have reasons for our actions and inaction, we all believe we are justified in what we do or don’t do, that we are not emotionally volatile assholes who hold in a lifetime of painful feelings and simply lash out in frustration and misplaced anger sometimes.   

“OK, fine, you want to blame us for your pain, your childish need to be the eternal victim?  Yes, we could have behaved better, we could have listened, we could have responded, we could have reached out after you reached out to us, but we didn’t, so just get over it, either accept our understandable human limitations, and our love (which you obviously don’t know how to return) or be on your miserable way.   Our life is good, and full, and fulfilling and we can’t really help you with your immense reservoir of pain, anger and need to blame others for your own problems.” 

If we are filled with infinite love, patience, wisdom and compassion we may be able to understand that position as a somewhat defensive expression of true, deep friendship, in spite of its seemingly harsh nature.  If not, we remain hurt, locked in a childish feeling of being unloved and ready to lash out even when our old friend drives hours after a day of work to prove his friendship by being there, even if unable to offer any actual comfort, to absorb a final, typical, angry outburst or two.  Push an asshole far enough emotionally, et, voila, they revert to their sickeningly aggressive, threatening, childish type.   

“Nobody wants to hear your justifications for why you felt entitled not to continue to hold your pain and frustration in, after way less than a year of simply not being heard.  It’s just sad that you need to weaponize a few months of innocent, perfectly understandable silence.  Friends don’t make you sad, friends help you.”