Boil it down to what you actually need to have a good life. I suspect even the most ardent Nazi or Klansman will have a list fairly similar to mine. For Nazism to flourish, the fact of our mortal commonality, that vast confluence of basic human/animal needs and desires, must be denied. Denial is a powerful force in human affairs and so it is not hard to prove to a racist that all his problems are imposed on him by the Other, powerful, pathetic, inhuman monsters who are vastly inferior to him. It’s not true, strictly speaking, but we have seen the limits of true and false in recent years, they are no barrier to anyfaithfulbelief.
What do we agree that we all need? All of us need love and understanding. Parents should be gentle with their children, firm when needed, and never abusive toward them. We need friends, people we can share our lives with, the good and the bad. Friends don’t always have to agree with us, but they always treat our feelings with care. We need to laugh once in a while. We need sex, and tenderness, from our partners. We need to feel productive, however we define that. We need food, clothing, shelter,health care, treatment of diseases that threaten us. We need a feeling of dignity. We all want to feel safe from attacks, safe from natural disasters, the destruction of our biosphere, safe from criminals, safe from killers of various kinds. We want to live in peace and be treated fairly by others. We want to control our own lives. We want to live in a world where justice rules, everyone’s basic needs are met and bad people are kept away from the restof us.
An insane criminal court judge I used to know coined the phrase “honor anemia” to describe a root cause of the epidemic of anger, despair, shame and violence that is convulsing our society. Most people feel they are treated as disposable by a profit-driven economic system that clearly favors only the rich and famous. The lack of respect the other 98% of us rightfully perceive is constantly burning us, like a draining physical disease that saps our better nature. The judge, who was greeted as “Your Honor” in all of his favorite restaurants, and who eventually convinced me that he was not just blowing smoke when he claimed he was insane, was certainly an example of the disease he diagnosed as a widespread cause of American misery.
Our better natures are challenged a hundred times a day in our corporate media-driven culture.Scroll through the headlines of your favorite newspaper and try to remember that you are a reflection of the divine. Read one headline too many and you find yourself snarling “fuck that, these Nazi motherfuckers have to pay!” The Nazi reader will have a similar reaction to the headine that finally sets him off “fuck that, these Jew motherfuckers have to pay!” The impulse, of course, is identical.
We go to the dark side when our ability to keep hoping is finally crushed. In many of us, this hopefulness is a tiny, often timorous flame, as fragile as the human soul itself. Take away hope and you destroy the impulse to strive to be better, to dream of anything better than despair and revenge. You wind up joining the Ku Klux Klan, and screaming in the torchlit night, with your equally enraged comrades, filled with the virile mass-murderer’s belief that at least you can go out taking some fucking inferior race mongrels with you. A dead-end dream that leads only to death, but a dream, at least.
There are many more things that unite us than divide us. We all need a home. We will all die. We all grieve and mourn the deaths of our loved ones. We all feel well-disposed toward people who treat us with kindness. We prefer to trust people than to assume that everyone is an irredeemable piece of shit. We all want a better world. We would all at least flinch to see a baby toddle into traffic, or into a river, many of us would leap to save the kid before thinking about it.
The “genius” of Nazi-types is in creating specific, infuriating wedges to drive us apart. Keep us divided, angry,afraid, insulted, ignored, ravaged by “honor anemia,” savaged daily by crushing examples of injustice, informed in a stilted status quo–confirming way by a corporate press owned by a small handful of billionaire sociopaths, and you have fertile soil for an ideology of hatred and revenge. Then the only trick is to keep that rage focused on anyone who denies that dictatorship/oligarchy is the best form of human society. Punish those who tell the truth under oath, criminalize dissent, incentivize partisan vigilantism and violent intimidationof hated, inhuman enemies worthy of only death.
Me, I’m trying to keep my eye on the ball. Someone, I think it was the Jewish sage Hillel, wrote “in a place where there are no mensches, strive to be mensch.” Strive, my dear unknown friends, to be a fucking mensch in your life. It is the best we can all hope for.
Individuals can always spin things any way they please, since many things are strictly matters of taste and preference. One is urged to accentuate the positive, be cheerful, not dwell on depressing or painful things! When times are tough, look forward to a fabulous holiday, a great meal at a fantastic new restaurant, a cool new car, the pleasures a life of hard work can provide.
The same story can be told in many ways, even by readers of the same newspaper. In one story, we are facing the worldwide march of triumphalist fascism as our habitat is being quickly boiled into a toxic miasma. In that story, our moral obligation, if we are not fascists or those who profit from the destruction of our biosphere, is to do everything we can to avoid this awful fate for every living creature onthe planet.
The story can be told with a different emphasis: radical alarmists alarming people to advance their radical agenda. Sure there are some bad, dishonest politicians here and there, even evil ones, sure some countries execute drug addicts, and gays, force raped girls to give birth to their rapists’ baby, commit modest genocides, sell off the rain forests that are the lungs of the planet to corporations that will bulldoze the trees to graze animals for slaughter, but there arealso people doing wonderful thingsand life is beautiful. Actually, it’s the radical alarmists who are alarming everybody!
The attitude behind this second version of the story is that it’s better to believe that everything is going to be fine and what we are seeing all around us its not really as bad as it looks. I believe this myself, but not to the extent of denying we’ll have fascism shortly unless we prevent Republicans, who already have a nakedly partisan 6-3 Supreme Court (the last three chosen strictly for their extreme partisan cred) from capturing one or both houses of Congress. In fact, unless we pick up a Manchin-proof majority in the Senate, we’re heading straight over the filibuster waterfall to the fascismofa heavily armed one party theocracy.
Fascists don’t care about saving the environment or anything else that humanists, or humans, consider important. Fascists care about only triumph and dominating their hated enemies. Fascism is the harnessing of the human tic to go to war in a rage, making that lowest impulse the iron law of the land.
Calling Republican office holders and candidates fascists just because they promote what they all know is a destructive lie, in the interest of regaining absolute one-party control of everything, may seem hyperbolic to some. Consider: if you repeat a lie that makes people angry, and those angry people form a violent lynch mob that maims and kills people, and afterwards you defend that lynch mob’s right to try to kill people they believe betrayed them, and you are required not to break the party-line wall defending the lie and the mob,and you vote in a bloc to hurt your political opponents, who you vilify, and leave every problem to get worse so that you profit politically, is there a more accurate word than “fascist” to describe you?
Mel Brooks has a genius definition of comedy and tragedy that rings so true it hurts. “Tragedy is when I break a fingernail. Comedy is when you fall into a manhole and die.” A slapstick sight gag vs. actual personal suffering, no matter how minor.
How you viewand tell the story is determined by your personal experience and your emotional needs. Humans can always find an anodyne truth-lite way of spinning stories that would otherwise terrify them. Just ACC-cen-tuate the positive!
The positive, to me, is truth, honesty. If you are talking about what really happened, as opposed to what you want to believe happened, we can discuss anything you like. Nothing is out of bounds, nothing can’t be solved, if we agree on the facts of what we are talking about. If you insist on an anodyne version that lets culpable parties off the hook, that makes you feel better — at the expense of reality — that’s your wonderful belief and God bless. Just don’t try to insist on that bullshit to someone like me.
When I was in my late twenties, visiting the farm of my parents’ best friemd, Arlene, she laid a great truth on me. As we watched the sun set one evening shesaid:
“You feel like you disappointed your parents, like you’re responsible for their unhappiness. I love your parents to death, as you know, they’re my best friends, but they are both very unhappy people. They just are, they were that way long before you were born. Their unhappiness has nothing to do with you, there is nothing you can do to change it, the burden of it is not something you need to carry through life.”
Though what she said sounds obvious to me now, it was like she’d reached up and pulled a string to turn on a light in the universe.
That understanding was an immense help to me, comparable to my father’s older first cousin Eli, years later, describing how he witnessed his beloved Aunt Chava grab the thick, burlap covered cord for her steam iron, from a drawer behind her seat at the kitchen table, and whip little Irv across the face with it.
“In the face?”I said.
“Yep, over and over,” said Eli.
“Jesus,” I said, “how old was he?”
“However old you are when you can stand on your two feet without falling over,” he said, with limitless sorrow. He saw it many times after that, and he said that over time all she had to do was rattle the drawer where she kept thewhipping cord and young Irv would stand at rigid attention, staring at the ground, trembling, waiting for the whipping to start.
I was raised by parents who had been physically and psychologically abused as children. They grew to adulthood with little ability to restrain themselves when frustrated and, quick to anger, took out their unbearable feelings on their children. My sister and I were blamed for all kinds of things, some of them ridiculous. I trace my need to express myself to my childhood desperation to untie the knot of the incoherent story I was expected to accept about myself, about my sister. I started writing fairly young, and before that I drew, constantly.
“Why are your drawings so scary?” my mother would sometimes ask.
“Because I can’t write yet,” I might have told her.
I had a girlfriend and her baby visit me in New York decades ago, saved up, sent them plane tickets. The child, who I loved very much, is now in her thirties, maybe forty (damn!). I last saw her on her fourth or fifth birthday. Her mother was beautiful, talented, had a great sense of humor, we got along great, I loved her, but in the end things didn’t work out between us. During the week they were my guests, the two year-old had a few temper tantrums, as two year-olds do, and her mother tried to press me into moving to California and join the community she lived in with her Indian guru, Baba Hari Dass. I felt increasingly pressured as the week went on.
After they left I found a drawing I’d done while they were in NY. It was a shapely woman’s leg, standing firmly on its lovely foot, with a leash tied to the thigh, where a garter would be. The leash was taut and straining against it was a dog with a human face, and a huge boulder on his back.
“Fuck,” I thought when I saw that drawing afterwards, “that self-portrait says it all…”
I find this unexpected revelation of my deeper feelings with writing sometimes. I read something I wrote and a phrase jumps out to clarify a complicated quandary for me. Here’s a paragraph I wrote recently that made me realize something very important about a prolonged estrangement from two of my oldest, dearest friends.
Long, deep talk with old friends recently [different ones — ed.], reminding me of the healingpower of being heard and of forcing yourself to hear things you may not like to hear. These are crucial perspectives you can’t come to on your own when you are impaired by pain. Good friends don’t always have to agree with you, though they often do, but they always treat you with care when you need care.
Simple test: did my oldest friends always treat me with care when I needed care?
Well, not always, and lately, for the last nine months or so, no care at all. In fact, the opposite of care. They insisted I was wrong to feel the way I did after one jumped ugly with me, since in their story she was only reacting to my threatening attitude. They blamed me for ruining a wonderful vacation with a flash of anger the last day, denied there was any tension at all leading up to my outburst, just a simple misunderstanding I blew up over, until seven months later one of them admitted things had been very tense, because she had been micromanaging everything to make sure it was all perfect. The other one later threatened me that he’d walked away from friendships for less than what I’d done to him. The first one had a temper tantrum, then was so shocked later that I still needed to talk about it that she went incommunicado for months, then had another temper tantrum when I dared to bring up the troubling pass our long relationship has come to.
Understanding does not lead to a clean solution to your vexations, but it is better to see the thing clearly than to have it muddily painful in your head, waking you hours too early, like a toothache. I compare this depressing impasse with my dear, old friends to having a knife stuck in my side by one of them, unintentionally, let’s say. When I pointed to it, the other pushed it in a little further. Months later, when I gestured toward the still unhealed knife wound, the first one stuck her finger deep into it and wiggled it around. I didn’t bleed out, I didn’t lose consciousness, so what am I fucking blubbering about? That’s a tiny flesh wound, asshole, I’ll give you something to blubber about!
To forgive is divine, truly, and to be slow to anger is praiseworthy. I managed not to respond to either of them with anger, but their conditional apologies turn out to be hollow, empty, without form or substance, without any change in behavior. I don’t need apologies anyway, as I explained to them, I need to be heard and understood by loved ones when I’m hurt. You know, empathy, understanding, the benefit of the doubt — basic friendship. I expect to be treated with the same care I extend to them. But that turns out to be unreasonable when the only pain the other person can truly relate to is their own.
We are all capable of casting ourselves as the victims when things get ugly, and things are ugly enough for all of us right now on this imperiled little planet, at the doorstep of climate destruction and surging worldwide fascism. There are also not always two equally compelling sides to every story. Treating friends with care is the most basic duty of friendship. Dereliction of that duty, especially if repeated over and over, is an indication that the friendship you are clinging to may already be dead.
I still have a hope that these two dear friends will have an unexpected change of heart the next time we meet, whenever that might be. I’m ready to be pleasantly surprised, delighted and relieved, by that change of heart, that deeper understanding. It’s a slim, wan, simpering hope, I know, but it is a hope and I appreciate it. Hope is always better than no hope, I believe, until the proof is irrefutable and the hope for something better is crushed by dull, heavy, merciless reality.
A big part of the practice of writing is sitting down to think something through. You write, then you read what you wrote, then you think, then you rewrite, then you readit all again. Why are you writing? For me it’s to understand and make my thoughts and feelings as clear as possible, to myself and to the reader.
We know what we are trying to say, most of the time, but the beauty of writing is that it allows us to keep rewriting, refining, fixing flaws in our presentation, focusing our intentions as sharply as possible, so that others can hopefully grasp them in all their nuance. The writer needs to give the reader enough background for meaning and context, while keeping in mind that background can swallow everything if too detailed.
Yesterday I posted an excerpt of a piece by Jennifer Rubin in which she quoted a governor named Hutchinson giving an ostensibly thoughtful answer in support of the Supreme Court forcing women and girls in his state to give birth to their rapists’ babies. Moments later another Hutchinson, a young woman named Cassidy, assistant to Trump’s final Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, gave live testimony at an emergency hearing before the J6 Select Committee. Today the nation is abuzz over her two hours under oath. I found her testimony electrifying.
She testified that Trump, Meadows, Stone (pardoned felon), Giuliani, Flynn (pardoned felon) and others planned the march to the Capitol on January 6th. Stone and Giuliani appear to have been the point men with the white supremacist militias involved in the siege of the Capitol. Meadows told his assistant a few days beforehand that things could get really bad on January 6th. Several of these Trump loyalists, Flynn, Giuliani (Bannon — pardoned before conviction for felony, Eastman, Kerik— pardoned felon) established a command center, or war room, in a hotel near the White House. Meadows wanted to go to the war room on January 5th, asked his young assistant to order a car for him, but she urged him not to go. He phoned in instead.
Trump became angry on January 6th that his crowd was being frisked and put through magnetometers (“mags”) because many were heavily armed. He is famously obsessed with crowd size and insisted the mags be removed so his followers could fill the Ellipse, for the cameras, and march on the Capitol from there. He didn’t care that they were armed, he was certain they intended him no harm.
We know his supporters had not obtained a permit to march to the Capitol on January 6th. Now we also know that the march was planned anyway. An illegal march, with insufficient police presence, to stage a show of force to “stiffen the spines” of men like Mike Pence. Good luck stiffening that guy’s spine, by the way. The illegal march to “Stop the Steal” culminated in a deadly riot. But why keep dwelling on it?
A small number of Trump’s defenders showed up today, two loyal Secret Service men in particular, to cast doubt on Cassidy Hutchinson’s account of a few moments of that stressful day. They claim theywant to testify under oath to dispute Ms. Hutchinson’s account of Trump’s temper tantrum when his driver would not drive him to the Capitol to lead the armed protest there. Ms. Hutchinson testified that Tony Ornato (promoted by Trump from lead agent to Deputy Chief of Staff) told her (with his Secret Service colleague Engel, the other agent involved, present), that Trump had tried to grab the steering wheel of his armored limo and lunged to grab Engel by the throat when he refused to yield to the president’s command to drive to the Capitol. Engel will presumablytestify that this claim about the admittedly enraged Trump grabbing himis bullshit.
In law there’s an old maxim falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus (“false in one thing, false in everything). Presumably if the Secret Service men swear under oath that what she said is not what they told her (sworn “he said, she said” — a draw), and certainly not what happened, they have established, to some, that she is a liar whose entire testimony should be seen in that light.
There is no law against a president, or anyone else, angrily throwing his lunch against the wall, as Hutchinson reported Trump did after Bill Barr betrayed him by telling AP the truth about the absence of widespread voter fraud. Even if he did throw it, there are probably witnesses willingto testify that no ketchup dripped down the wall, and even if it did, so what?
If warnings were given to witnesses to remain loyal, or have bad things happen, like what happened to former US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yavonovich, Colonel Alexander Vindman, Michael Cohen, so what? Loyalty is a good thing and it would be a shame if anything happened to a disloyal person who was confronted by a group of righteously angry people with guns or a noose, if you catch my drift.
The “slippery” question of Trump’s intent is not very slippery in light of his consistent behavior, and the evidence presented so far in the January 6th Select Committee hearings. He has obstructed justice since he was a young man, suckling at the hideous tit of the evil Roy Cohn, who begat ratfucker Roger Stone. He was not exonerated by Mueller for at least ten specific instances of obstruction of justice related to shutting down or obstructing the Mueller “witch hunt”.
Trump cannot lose, will not tolerate it, each of his bankruptcies were actually genius uses of the legal system to keep his untold billions. Every loss in court, a strategic victory. He surrounds himself with people ready to do whatever is necessary to protect the Big Baby.
As we wait for the next explosive revelations from the J6 investigation, the Congressman and others who asked Trump for pardons after January 6th have been mostly quiet about that. After all, the real story is a planned COMMIE takeover of the US and the godless attempt to rob from the rich to feed the unworthy poor! Biden inflation, Biden mental unfitness, Biden lies, Biden weakness!
There are two sides, at least, to most stories, but the side that claims an armed riot to stop the ceremonial finalization of Trump’s election loss is perfectly legal and fine, and nothing to see, has a much weaker story, one they’d rather avoid going into. Instead they stick to praising a radicalized Supreme Court and gearing up for a sprint in the last leg of a marathon toward American fascism.
When retired three star general, convicted perjurer, QAnon and martial law promoter Mike “Lock Her UP!” Flynn was asked, under oath, what he thought about the peaceful transfer of power, his answer was one word “fifth.”
It’s going to take a while, may come too late, may involve a Supreme Court ruling on presidential pardons to criminal co-conspirators, but several of Trump’s capos are going to be tried, convicted and locked up, at least until another Republican president can spring them with an unappealable, totally non-corrupt, pardon.
Close friendship, that state of grace where we extend the benefit of the doubt to sympatico strangers who become friends by returning the kindness with reciprocal care, adds years to our lives, psychologists tell us. We feel this every time we are refreshed by a relaxed visit with old friends. We don’t need science to tell us that laughing, breaking bread together, catching up, retelling old stories is a great antidote to the many daily horrors we are powerless against.
The other side of the picture, a life without close connections to anyone, is about the most hopeless darkness imaginable for social creatures like us. Millions and millions are confronted by this terrible darkness, many of our relationships reduced to tapping out little notes to each other on the phones that surveil us and mine our quirks for dollars. Isolation, as so many of us felt much more acutely during the pandemic lock down, kills.
Deaths of despair multiply where there is no hope for relief, new records are set every year for overdose deaths, deliberate and accidental, here in the USA. Shooting by gun is now the number one cause of death for people ages one to twenty years old in this country! Mass murders of enraged despair become common as young men break under isolation, particularly when isolation itself is weaponized to further divide us, the “reasoning” of the killers being that since nobody will understand or care about me anyway, might as well go out as a “gunman”, in a hail of bullets, and make others feel the unbearable pain I fucking feel.
The New York Times periodically publishes a story like this one, 362 School Counselors on the Pandemic’s Effect on Children: ‘Anxiety Is Filling Our Kids’ Do you need to read the report to understand how shattered young people are absolutely right to feel today? It’s not as if we lived in a harmonious, universally fair nation of infinite promise and hope before the pandemic. Add a world-leading million pandemic deaths, at least half of them preventable, and the hot war over who is to blame for all those deaths, scientists or political absolutists, and you don’t need the New York Times to delve into the uniquely American reasons for more schoolyard fights than ever in our history as school mass murders reach record levels, adults clash angrily over whether any laws can change this grim exceptionally American reality, and a handful of Senators insist on the right of a minority to block all discussion of such laws in the Senate, should it come to that.
The question I wrestle with today is what to do when every direction you look in, public and private, leads to sorrow? There are only so many things we can do to distract ourselves from it, or numb ourselves to it, before the sorrow in every direction we look turns to despair, hopelessness, misdirected anger. Old friends deliberating over whether they can accept your immediate, sincere apology for momentarily losing your cool? A blow that lingers over the course of their ongoing deliberations, which can extend indefinitely through months of avoidance, denial and a pointless argument over who has the greater right to be hurt. A slowness to forgive becomes coupled with a new readiness to take offense? The self-preserving reflex is to walk away, the harder path of continually extending understanding for your old friends’ weakness is very fucking hard after feeling enough extended unresolved hurt. Keep the door open or finally close it, to keep the grave-scented chill out? Hard question, that one, with terrible consequences to loved ones beside yourself for a hasty choice.
My family was brutally truncated by angry mobs mobilized by the fanatical followers of Adolf Hitler, an insane man of limited intellect and great apparent charisma. Of the many dozens of family members alive and struggling before Hitler invaded their insecure little corner of then Russia only five or six (all but one in the US) were alive after 1943. The letters just stopped coming, in my father’s chosen description of their slaughter.
The loss of all these close relatives, whose names I never even learned, these abstractions (“mere abstractions” as my father called them), haunts me as I watch the world gearing up for the next round of irrational mass killings in the name of hopeless, senseless rage that needs somewhere to go, an “ideology” to direct it. That sympathetic, funny youngest brother of my grandmother’s, her favorite, little Joey (the only one whose name I know), might have been my most beloved great uncle, had it not been for the gleeful, drunken mob that massacred them all in a ravine to the northwest of town thirteen years before I was born. It takes one particularly relatable loving family member, or stranger, like a great teacher, or sympathetic neighbor, or friend of your parents, to change the course of your young life. Or, as many beautiful ghosts as you can imagine, which is a poignant substitute for the touch of the living hands and expressive faces of those souls when they werecapable of showing you love.
My niece and nephew grew up without their playful, sympathetic uncle in their lives. They saw him regularly when they were kids, their mother’s only brother, their only uncle, recalled his visits with love, and then, after their grandmother was buried, never saw him again. They never learnedthereason — that the lies their parents tell to protect them, and themselves, those desperate attempts to shield themselves from shame they actually lived were impossible for him to play along with. To preserve his tenuous relationship with their mother, the uncle would never lay out explicitly to his now adult niece and nephew that the reason for their estrangement was the dishonesty required of him, the pretend smile, the erasing of shared, lived history, a strict adherence to a lifetime of lies he, his sister and his brother-in-law all know are lies. How to tell the truth without becoming the enemy their parents always feared stymied the uncle every time he contemplated how to explain to them why he hadn’t seen them in more than a decade. From their point of view, they can only take it as a personal abandonment, otherwise their strange, inconstant uncle would have found a way to spend time with them.
How many years of unresolved sorrow can we expect ourselves to endure before our life expectancy begins to take a hit?I am fairly sure my old former friend Friedman, a man who fought with and was eventually betrayed by everyone he ever cared for, literally died of a broken heart when he expired in his chair from no apparent cause a few years ago, at age 65.
Here is what I have worked out for myself, though I don’t know how coherently I can lay it out or how helpful it will be to you. I exert myself to remain mild in the face of aggravation, in ways I could not have imagined twenty years ago. That, by itself, it turns out,only helps a little. You will get no points for it. The heat can always be turned up and turned up until your old reflexes finally boil up and you must tell someone in no uncertain terms that it’s enough, they can feel free to fuck off now, for the following seven impossible to unhear reasons.
More important to facing sorrow is my sense of fairness, my determination not to treat others in a way I hate to be treated, nor to endlessly accept such treatment from others, no matter how ingeniously rationalized. The knowledge that we can all only tolerate a certain amount of unfairness is important to working through sorrow caused by friends who may, under great stress, need to blame you for the strains we all feel from time to time. I give myself permission to grieve, to feel hurt, to eventually stop extending the benefit of the doubt to people who continue to insist on denying me the same. Their insistence is usually based on a purely emotional appeal, a protestation of love that will be instantly withdrawn if you don’t relent and return their love without hesitation or need for further discussion. That far I know now I will never come in my long quest to be as unfailingly gentle as the Christian’s Jesus, as my imagined Hillel, or the Buddha.
Spend time every day doing something you love. Creativity for its own sake, if we are lucky enough to enjoy it, is a great balm, and an excellent tonic, though it is somewhat dependent on mood. You can become overwhelmed by the sorrow all around and even the act of making yourself feel better by taking your imagination out for a spin can seem futile.
Do not succumb to futility, action to improve your mood and situation, to exercise your liberating imagination, is always better than inaction, impossible as it may sometimes feel.
I write, every day, to you. We have never met, you and I, but I imagine the reader of these words with the fond hope of making an intelligent connection. Those readers who know me, once in yer proverbial blue moon, will mention that they were moved by something I wrote, which always makes me feel good, but most of the time it’s just a “like” or a larger than usual number of readers clicking on a certain post that tells me I have made some kind of connection. I remind myself periodically that the clarifying act of sitting down to write, and making it as clear as possible to others and myself, is itself a net benefit and a good swing in the fight against felt debility.It is also indispensable to me beyond that, the quiet in your mind as you write is a kind of sacred space. Being able to hone your expression, in a way not possible in daily speaking, an infinite blessing.
This impulse to connect to others is important to nurture in the larger project of avoiding despair. The feedback we get is also very addictive. Lately the number of views of these posts has dropped dramatically and I feel disappointed when I don’t get the usual hit of dopamine I felt after posting something when I saw that several people had immediately clicked on it. That piece hit the mark, I think to myself lately, as the number of views stays at the same low count for hour after hour, as if rebuking me in my belief that I can connect with strangers.
This is the world young people were born into, likes, dislikes, friend, unfriend, LOL, WTF. Shoshana Zuboff laid out the dystopian world of social anxiety, conformity and future robbing this online feedback loop from peers real and virtual produces. A brilliant hermit I know, once a good friend, has zero in person social connections, but hundreds of friends and followers on “social media”. Going online to find missing connections, as I am doing right now when Sekhnet is sick of hearing me talk about things that make her sad, is like wearing those goggles that realistically put you in a three dimensional, totally realistic world that doesn’t exist. Girl of your dreams? She’s waiting for you when you put on the goggles and check out that smile of happiness to see you and thedream outfit she’s wearing for you! Why would you ever leave that conscious dream world? Predictions are that you would not, time would disappear, the illusion of fun, love and excitement infinitely preferable to a world where your best bet for coping with your sorrow is a strong anodyne (some of which will kill you if taken wrong) or a military assault rifle to give yourself a feeling of agency, importance and godlike power.
I’d like to end on a note of hopefulness. The forces that would make us all fight each other to the death so that they can own and control everything seem to have become bullyingly triumphant here in the US a few months too early to take the absolute power that has long been their dream. This tiny but powerful reactionary core appear to have overplayed their autocratic hand with time to organize against them before the crucial midterm elections.
After the Civil War (War of Northern Aggression to you, Yank) there was a brief period, called Reconstruction, during which our Constitution was amended to reflect a better understanding of democracy and a more perfect union. We created the Department of Justice to enforce laws required by this better understanding. Reconstruction, which proved we can do much better as a nation, was soon halted in a series of Supreme Court decisions and political compromises, after about ten years.
During the time Reconstruction was allowed to proceed it demonstrated that democracy can work to produce a better, more fair and inclusive society. Such a result was intolerable to thosefew with the most power, north and south, and the most to lose by “equality” and “justice”. In the defeated Confederacy it was not long until a form of race-based American fascism took over. Elite, wealthy local white men, backed by a secret army of terrorists and like-minded police, lawmakers and judges, and empowered by a block of similar white men in the state and federal legislatures, ruled unchallenged in every area of the South, with a firm, autocratic hand, until LBJ betrayed his former buddies by signing both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and, even more importantly, the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Hope? The American oligarchs and their paid apologists seem to have overplayed their hand in a way that if mobilized around correctly will jar millions out of their apathy to vote for candidates who do not insist that the 75% who support gun control, the right of a pregnant woman or girl — particularly one who was raped, or in danger of death from the pregnancy — to end an unwanted pregnancy, who support fair taxes on the wealthiest to fund desperately needed public programs, a living wage for all workers, affordable health care, real measures to slow the gathering climate catastrophe and all the rest of the “kitchen table” issues simply stop acting like spoiled “woke” babies and socialists and shut the fuck up.
What is the official current GOP platform? The guy who repeatedly lies about losing by 8,000,000 votes is himself the victim of LIES!!! By a bipartisan cabal of powerful pedophiles, queers, anti-fascists, Black racists, dirty immigrants, Muslims and Jews!!! After enough frustration, that kind of transparent bullshit wears thinwith all but a diehard 39%, particularly in the face of a premature, in-your-face celebration of minority triumph in defeating what the powerless 75% strongly prefers. We are told 110,000,000 eligible American voters didn’t bother casting a vote in 2020, thirty million more than voted for either presidential candidate. Those are the sorry, demoralized citizens we have to reach, instill with minimal hope, get them to cast a vote for the minimum of what the majority of us needs andwants.
That may not be direct, personal hope for a lonely world where all we can personally see is sorrow in every direction we look, but any steps we take, with others, away from the march toward worldwide oligarchy and fascism, are steps in the right direction, steps toward hope rather than despair.
As a personal matter, treat your friends and family with as much care as you can, but know also that agreeing to a demand that you somehow overcome prolonged, unresolved suffering has its limits and a time may sadly come when the best course is to step away, that very few things last a lifetime. I’m going to compose a long letter to my niece and nephew, setting out the harm done to our ability to know each other by years of insistence that lies be accepted as the real truth, no matter what some disturbed, childless uncle in NY might think. If I can set out the issues clearly and non-judgmentally enough, one or both of them may actually be able to hear me. If so, I’ll chalk one up to the power of love speaking truth without blame.
Above all, and however difficult it might be at a given moment, be of good cheer!
Emotions move us through life, or stop us in our tracks, but, when trapped, only thinking, and learningfrom our mistakes, can lead us out of a deadly maze. Start with a reasonable idea, test it out, if it doesn’t help, think about what was wrong with the first idea. Make it better, test it again.
This is how we learn, by profiting from our failures, and to many it feels much harder than just slugging our way through an emotional challenge. There is no guarantee that you’ll be able to think your way out of a given problem, but thinking about a difficulty as deeply and fairly as you can, understanding your predicament as clearly as you can, drawing on past experience, only helps. If nothing else, actively thinking restores a feeling of agency and hope as you work to extricate yourself from something that makes you feel awful. Hope is no small thing. Without it, you are finished.
The hardest part is listening to the perspectives of people close to you when they go against everything your adrenaline and cortisol are telling you is true. The difficulty of sitting long enough to let something you don’t want to hear sink in, make an impression, inform your thoughts, means that many people don’t do it. You must do it, sometimes, if your goal is to become a wiser, better person, or to live without clenched fists.
There are traps you cannot think your way out of, but even a trap you can spring is impossible to escape while all you can think about is the agony of your ankle in the metal jaws of the trap that is keeping you stuck until the hunter arrives to administer the coup de grace. One day we all find ourselves powerless against some variation of that scene, but not yet.
I’m not sleeping well these days, I wake up with some details of an upsetting, unresolved conflict with old friends going through my head. Sometimes, like Monday, I wake up and am able to succinctly state the exact, specific issue to Sekhnet. “You should tell them that!” she says, but since it is not always possible to convey things directly, or in a timely way, I go into the other room and write.
I can’t stress enough how important writing has always been for me. You draw a picture and nobody really knows what to say about it. “Why did you put a Chihuahua’s head on that buxom nude woman’s body?” a friend’s father once asked me, with genuine confusion and a bit of concern on his face, like he was too dense to get an obvious joke but at the same time wondering why anyone would think such a joke was funny. I smiled, having no answer, nor any idea why I’d combined those two elements in a realistic pencil drawing I’d shaded as three dimensionally as possible It is rare that I have any idea why I draw a particular thing on the page, I just follow my hand and we work quietly together and I don’t ask questions or have answers. It is the same with music, if I come up with a musical idea, I generally don’t put lyrics to it and it can convey virtually anything to anyone. If you like it you will find a groove there, otherwise, what can one really say about such things?
Writing is altogether different. You sit down with a feeling and an idea and as you set it down you picture the readertaking it in. What is essential comes into focus. As you read what you wrote you can see what you left out, what muddles what you’re trying to say, what you’ve phrased poorly, with insufficient background or in a way that obscures your intended meaning.
In the end you have, if you aim for it consistently, something coherent. A point of view another person can take in, understand, agree or disagree with, react to, discuss, dispute. Now, all on thesame page, a knowing dialogue, in light of the things you set out, things you weren’t able to shoo away from your consciousness as you tried, pointlessly, to get back to sleep after waking up thinking about them.
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