Category Archives: writing

Harder to sit with sorrow than with anger

Sorrow is draining and terrible, it forces you to feel the pain of loss in its pure form. Anger, while blinding, gives you energy, purpose and a bracing sense of righteousness.

If you are quick to anger, try sitting with sorrow sometime, feeling the loss of a soul you love. It is an illuminating exercise.

My father found it humiliating to feel vulnerable. His early hurt made him unable to risk giving anybody the power to hurt him, so he never let his guard down. His fists were always ready, his blows were struck with glares and harsh words. If he had begun to taste the pain of the ocean of pain he was thrashing in, he would have drowned.

But I couldn’t have understood any of that while I was still his adversary. I couldn’t break free from that endless, senseless vying until I learned about his traumatic infancy. Seeing him as a whipped two year-old flooded me with compassion, and opened a window, for the first time, into his valiantly defended, tortured soul.

The inviolable law of every cult

Homo sapiens, as Yuval Noah Harari points out in Sapiens, appears to be the only species capable of uniting behind an abstract myth, an animating principle that can unleash gigantic armies launched into ant-like coordinated action.  This ability enables humans to build inconceivably giant structures and to solve massive global problems.  We are, also, the only species capable of mass murder in the service of an abstract idea. 

The thought of an idea powerful enough to change the world is both thrilling and terrifying, depending on the idea.  The notion of Enlightenment, a world illuminated by Reason, where hereditary oppression would be replaced by agreement on reasonable principles, was a more noble one than making sure the faithful remain steadfast in their beliefs, no matter what.

Every cult, every nation, every family, has a story that explains the chaos and darkness of the world in simple terms everyone can understand.  Membership in every kind of tribe depends on members remaining loyal to a core idea.  In theory, Christians, for example, emulate the man of peace and teacher of love for whom their religion is named.  He was kind, patient, dedicated to feeding and clothing the poor Andy protecting the weak, he preached about love and not being slavishly devoted to earthly rulers.  Christians have, for millennia, taught each other that it is their Christian duty to practice in their lives what Jesus preached, to imitate Christ.   With certain exceptions, of course.  All bets are off when warring with Muslims and other infidels, punishing Jews for allegedly killing the Messiah, slaughtering other Christians who belong to churches hostile to your own in their worship of God, hating any of God’s creatures that offend your version of sanctity and righteousness.  Homo sapiens are not always consistent in how we behave, though we do believe!

One consistent thing among us all is a belief in the importance of loyalty.  This is the inviolable law of every cult, every nation, every family.  We share core beliefs, and if you betray those central principles you are disloyal and subject to the agreed on penalties. Taking an article of faith, examining it and deciding it is false is the ultimate threat to the community.  Excommunication is a time honored way of dealing with dissenters and heretics, you cast them out of the hive to die in the wilderness.

Members of a cult accept things as true that nonmembers see as clearly false.  The GOP, with their strict adherence to a defeated candidate’s insistence that he had victory stolen from him by massive, bipartisan fraud, is a glaring example that leaps to mind.  One of their lifetime appointees on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, told Americans the other day that they have to accept outcomes they don’t like — like the widespread banning of abortion for half the population.  This is often true, there are many things we cannot immediately do anything about in life and we must find some kind of acceptance of intolerable outcomes or go mad.   It is also the case that Thomas’s best friend, lover and life partner could not accept an outcome she didn’t like.  From her well-connected right-wing insider seat she frantically tried to overturn the results of an election whose outcome deeply offended her deepest beliefs.   The winner of that election, Joe Biden, and his wife, she wrote, were being taken by barge to the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay to be imprisoned with other terrorism suspects for their treasonous betrayal of America!  

But I am thinking more about families at the moment, my own and others.  To be a member of my family I am expected never to reveal anything embarrassing about a compulsive liar, serial embezzler, shoplifter, road raging bully who has done great damage to other family members.  Just the threat that I might say something that raises shame, like mention a secret bankruptcy sprung on everyone on the eve of buying their dream house, means I must be kept at arms length, anything I have to say viewed with suspicion, my character, and even my sanity, called into question.   To be a member of some families, you need to recognize that dad is never wrong, or mom is always right, or whatever the deepest binding principle of that group is.

I understand the attraction of cults, they give a powerful sense of certainty in a dizzyingly uncertain world.  You belong to a community and are loved unconditionally in a cult, as long as you are loyal to its beliefs.  If belief in a demonstrable lie, or a story that distorts reality beyond recognition, is the condition of membership in a cult, or a family, you are pretty much going to have to count people like me out.  We are just goddamned iconoclasts, I suppose, like the father of monotheism, Abraham, who as a boy smashed the idols in his father’s shop and was not punished by false gods who didn’t exist.  He went on to form his own cult, with very strict laws, but that’s a story for another day.

If membership in your club requires taking an oath that I am a blameworthy, evil sinner, one who can never be fully forgiven, someone who must be eternally penitent… well, with respect, not for me, kids.

  

History versus Propaganda

History (well-researched and written with integrity) teaches us lessons from the past we can learn from, propaganda makes us believe things that are not necessarily true. Would-be dictators hate history that accurately reflects the facts of the past and portrays a reasonable cause and effect of events.   History often directly contradicts the strongman’s stilted message.  The only use dictators have for history is selectively highlighting some things that happened, and hiding others, to convince unsophisticated citizens of the righteousness of their grievances, the historical holiness of their cause.  

If you would rule a conformist state, where thought and belief are strictly regulated, you will obviously get rid of certain books, criminalize certain ideas, make a pious, public show of punishing dissent, and in the end destroy the ability to think critically in the masses who will chant your name.   False history, written to benefit a small, powerful group, can rule public perceptions for generations, as the Lost Cause myth of the Civil War did here during a century of racism at law and free reign for terrorist enforcement of the racist worldview.

This influential school of American history, the Dunning School, started at prestigious Columbia University in New York City, not in the former Confederacy.   The Lost Cause theory was based on racist assumptions (slavery actually was mostly benign and benefited the racially inferior Blacks by protecting them) and spread the false idea that the war waged by the states that seceded was not based on protecting The Peculiar Institution (a popular euphemism for American chattel slavery) but on the glorious cause of fighting encroachment of States’ Rights by a tyrannically overreaching federal government.  

In this telling, the viciously biased federal government broke a Constitutional guarantee, under which slavery, never named in the founding document itself, was protected in perpetuity via three or four discreet clauses crafted by fine lawyers who negotiated the compromise with the self-evident proposition that “all men are created equal”.  The glorioys Lost Cause history was taught in classrooms all over the country to several generations of young people, supported by many of America’s greatest historians.  My friends who grew up in Tennessee heard nothing but this story in relation to the Civil War — that it wasn’t fought over slavery at all, it was fought over local sovereignty, something everyone can get behind.  You want unaccountable federal bean-counters running your life, or your friends and neighbors?   The States’ Rights rationale is still pushed by right-wing ideologues to justify all kinds of racial and class warfare motivated mischief.

An obvious problem with this kind of distorted historical story is that it can’t withstand much scrutiny.  Each of the eleven states that seceded from the Union after Lincoln’s election (and Lincoln was not even on the presidential ballot in any of those states, mind you) promulgated Articles of Secession.  You can look them up.  Each list of irreparable grievances began with the federal government’s intended interference with the sacred constitutional right to hold “such persons as the states shall see fit” in servitude without limitation.  And the horrors of slavery, and a century of legally tolerated lynching after the Civil War, are also well-documented.   

I heard a great simple correction of the List Cause myth by a black woman who’d been one of the first in her small southern town to go to school with white kids after Brown v. Board of Education.   She said it was fine if you want to say the Civil War was fought over States’ Rights — it was fought over states’ rights to hold slaves.  

For Professor Dunning and his progeny it was a matter of de-emphasizing or omitting details like the incriminating Articles of Secession, the real atrocities of slavery and all other evidence that contradicted their preferred narrative of a glorious lost cause fought for righteous ideals.  Focus instead on the alleged post-war corruption of little over a decade of Reconstruction (the federal government again sticking their fingers in the glorious South’s eye by forcing them to allow thousands of ignorant Blacks to vote!).  Cite the way some slaves were loyal to their masters as proof that there was nothing so terrible about being owned like a cow, goat, horse and used similarly.  The only truly terrible thing, in the immensely influential Dunning version of history (supported by Supreme Court rulings, mind you) was the pious, hypocritical tyranny of the federal government.  This popular myth was indispensable for the white southern bigots who filibustered proposed federal anti-lynching and voting rights laws for decades.

What was one of Putin’s first moves after he attacked Ukraine?   Make it a crime to call his totally justified invasion an attack, a war or an invasion.   No!  It is peacekeeping police action, like the US did in Viet Nam and many other places!   Say otherwise and it’s fifteen years in the jailhouse for you, lying dissident criminal.

The impulse of fascists is always the same — manipulate public opinion, don’t hesitate to lie, lie big and lie constantly, promulgate your alternate “history”, attack so-called “fact” and vilify the superior elites that do things like write critical books and encourage intelligent debate based on known facts.  There will be no intelligent debate based on anything, only debate framed by our terms and conducted under our rules and laws.  If you are a young gay person, shut the fuck up.  If you are a victim of racism, shut the fuck up.  If you are Black or poor and want to vote, forget about it.   If you are raped and become pregnant there is no harm in being forced to carry the fetus to term, giving birth and putting the baby up for adoption.  You have an absolute right to carry a gun and if you kill somebody because you were really afraid of them, it is no crime.  If you teach history that embarrasses innocent white kids or makes them feel bad, you have violated a new zero tolerance law.

It is tempting to call a party that embraces these tactics of fascism Nazis.  Read the story of Adolf Eichmann set out by Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem.   He was an ambitious man of limited intellectual curiosity who blindly followed the current of history that swept Hitler into power.   He did what he was told to further the eventually murderous goals of his superiors.  How was he any different than any of Trump’s loyal enablers?  What is the difference between the mentality of Eichmann and Jeffrey Clarke, the DOJ appointee who eagerly stepped up to put Trump’s stolen election lie on DOJ letterhead to try to overturn the certified election results in states Trump lost?  A guy like Clark, with his fervent desire to serve a strong, unprincipled leader, is basically a Nazi.

Remember, the Nazis did not sweep into power and immediately build death camps and start mass murdering.   It took eight or nine years in power, a declaration of war and the blitzkrieg, before they took the gloves off and began secretly implementing their insane leader’s wildest dreams of extermination.   They did it one step at a time, preparing the population by feeding them false history and fake news (while coining the term fake news — die lugenpresse).   

It was more than a year before Hitler took care of political rivals by having a coordinated national killing spree history recalls as The Night of the Long Knives.   One famous general he had executed stood up in his office when the assassins entered, confirmed that he was von Schliecher, and was killed in a hail of bullets along with his wife.  At first Hitler told Germany the “treasonous” general had been shot while resisting arrest, a week or two later he nonchalantly referred to “when I had Schliecher shot.”    It was more than five years before the first organized nationwide pogrom against Jews in Germany, Kristallnacht.  It took a controversial gassing program that targeted “lives unworthy of life” (lebensunvertes leben) in mental hospitals, Hitler’s humane euthanasia program (they put a noble spin on everything with strict language laws), to prepare Germany for the gassing of millions of others.   In fact, the Fuhrer had to stop killing Germans in mental hospitals due to the increasing discomfort of other Germans.   Jews, Gypsies, Communists, Homosexuals, Poles?   Not a problem, just euthanize ’em somewhere else.

American Nazis, neo-Confederates, white supremacists, white nationalists, Trumpists, the RNC or whatever you want to call them, never sleep or take a day off.  They may yet gain control of this country, through insane state election integrity laws passed by partisans cynically exploiting the Big Lie, though they must be fought at every step if we have learned anything from the last time their ilk controlled a vast industrialized nation.  They constantly rail against things like the Child Tax Credit that briefly lifted millions of children out of life-scarring poverty as “communism”.   A plan to increase the budget for IRS enforcement of the tax laws, targeting wealthy “tax avoiders” — Communism!  Voting Rights — partisan commie bullshit to enable more massive commie fraud, Commies!   Ethical rules for the Supreme Court, Radical activist Leftist commie child blood drinking drivel!   

The debate we have here is not a debate in the classical sense of two sides presenting clashing ideas and the better idea prevailing, based on the respective arguments, it is Newt Gingrich’s total war.  One side scorches the earth and dares their enemies to do something about it.  The other side publishes thoughtful, morally upright things like this (while the architects of US torture ply their hideous trade and escape all accountability, fuck you, LIBS!):

There is history worth reading and there is propaganda.  Here’s some recent American propaganda commissioned by the dumb dictator-worshiping fuck who still insists he won a rigged election in a landslide. It begins by piously reciting the truth that nobody in our system is above the law, as the former president continued to lie about winning an election he lost and insist that he is above the law. I love the fact that immediately after his inauguration Biden had this bullshit taken down — I’ve preserved a few bits of it, for posterity. 

Read, but think.   Read, but verify facts that can be demonstrated with evidence and discard fiction.  There is a big difference between useful history and the propaganda spread by cravenly ambitious useful idiots.

Watchful Waiting

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

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

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

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

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

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

How bullies see the world

Bullies, because they have never felt safe, loved, or cherished, grow up supremely defensive, perpetually hurt, ashamed of their weakness and inconsolably angry. They were emotionally neglected, humiliated for ordinary human needs, bullied by someone they depended on when they were very young. These tiny victims grow up to see life through the eyes of a hurt child, a zero-sum game pitting the strong against the weak, a contest fated to end only in dominance or submission.

To berate and dismiss, or otherwise beat you, is to dominate you. To sincerely apologize to you when I see I have hurt you is to bend the knee in humiliated weakness. Bullies see a simplified black and white world, a series of grim transactions to be fought to victory or defeat. Victory feels fleetingly great, the agony of defeat is well-known and terrible to behold, particularly in a bully.

This inconsolable rage in the heart starts in the bully’s earliest life, continues year after year, making the young person harden himself against pain until finally he succumbs to sadism. The ability to dominate and bully people is not without its rewards in the world of business and politics, but it is a shit thing just the same. When a bully in control of others creates a culture of bullying, where only brutality in service to the bully is rewarded, it is a shit thing and often a deadly thing.

I just finished listening to the fascinating The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller. Though the book, in its first edition, was published in 1978, it ends with a seemingly prescient insight, though it addresses a perpetual human failing — the falling into angry mobs because the unbearable anguish of your life compels you to take out your rage on strangers, in the name of a belief system. Here is the very end of Alice Miller’s popular book:

A person who can honestly, and without self-deception, deal with his feelings has no need to disguise them with the help of ideologies. The basic similarity of the various nationalistic movements flourishing today reveals that their motives have nothing to do with the real interests of the people who are fighting and hating, but instead have very much to do with those people’s childhood histories.

The mistreatment, humiliation and exploitation of children is the same worldwide as is the means of avoiding the memory of it. Individuals who do not want to know their own truth collude in denial with society as a whole, looking for a common enemy on whom to act out their repressed rage. But as the inhabitants of this shrinking planet near the end of the twentieth century the danger inherent in self-deception is growing exponentially, and we can afford it less than ever. Fortunately, at the same time, we now have the tools we need to truly understand ourselves as we were and as we are.

For most bullies, the path away from sadism is too painful. What they have suffered as vulnerable children is too painful to seek insight into. They feel in control only when dominating others, as they were brutally dominated.

We learn, to nobody’s surprise, that as children Donald Trump and Charles Koch (born 1946 and 1935 respectively), both had driven, largely absent fathers who were brutal, intolerant and demanding, people who might fairly be called unloving pieces of shit. They were raised to believe that only the ruthless pursuit of money and power made them worthy of love (which it is unlikely either of them ever found in later life.)

Fred Koch was an admirer of the Nazis, he was introduced to Hitler before the war and Koch Industries built the oil refineries that the Luftwaffe would need for their high octane fuel to lead Hitler’s blitzkreig. Fred Trump was arrested as a young man at a Ku Klux Klan rally in Queens. Fred Koch was one of the founders of the John Birch Society, the lunatic fascist fringe of the far-right in the years after Brown v. Board of Education made public school segregation illegal in the U.S., the Birchers responded by calling for the Chief Justice’s impeachment. Fred Trump took millions in tax subsidies to build post-war working class housing, passed most of it on to his children tax-free through various frauds (read the New York Times investigative story about Frederick Christ Trump’s elaborate tax fraud and tax evasion schemes, a factual article never challenged in court [1]) and kept his housing developments racially segregated (no Puerto Ricans either, thank you) until the Fair Housing Act and the federal court forced him to stop discriminating. Characteristically, Fred Trump, and his second choice protegée. Donald [2], admitted no wrongdoing and claimed victory in the case, although “minorities” were now able to rent Trump apartments.

Charles was the second oldest of four Koch brothers (he and David beat the other two in a bitter, decades-long court battle for the right to Koch Industries), Donald was the third of four Trump children. Fred Koch believed his sons should fight it out, to see who was fit to be the boss. When they were toddlers Fred Koch, who was rarely at home, hired a strict German nanny to make sure the boys all used the toilet at the same time every day, and she raised young Charles, his older brother Fred Jr. and the babies, until the Nazis took France and she returned to the homeland to celebrate with the Fuhrer. Fred Trump openly favored his older, brighter son, a golden boy named Fred Jr., beloved of everybody. Young Donald didn’t know what to do with himself until he got a little brother to bully. It beat the hell out of his life before he had a weak baby brother to practice sadism on.

Bullies see the world as a desperate fight not to be injured and their main weapon is attack. They find people weaker than themselves to prey on, if someone shows fear, they attack. The way not to be bullied is to stand up to a bully, though few of us consistently have this ability. In the case of Donald Trump, any time he has been forcefully opposed he has backed down. We saw this at several key moments during his time in office, even at the very end, while vehemently denying his electoral loss, when he backed down from replacing the Attorney General with a man who would lie to confirm Trump’s lie about a stolen election, after a three hour shouting match, in the face of a unified threat from leaders of the Department of Justice and his loyal White House Counsel.

The bully as an individual is one thing, and sickening enough. The bully as a mob, a thousand, or a million strong, gathered to take out their limitless hurt and rage on those who can’t defend themselves, an ongoing tragedy of human history. Insight might be extremely painful for a bully to attain, but it is probably less painful than being tortured, with your neck in a noose, at the mercy of your fellow enraged bullies.

[1]

In spite of this threat, a brilliant example of the fiercest legal puffery money can buy, inserted in a very droll matter by the Grey Lady, between two paragraphs detailing the fraud with great specificity:

[2]

Freddie, Fred Trump Jr., (Mary Trump’s father) had disappointed his father with a lack of ruthlessness, demonstrated dramatically when he replaced drafty windows in freezing Trump apartments in a complex he was managing without forcing the tenants to take their powerful landlord to court. It cost Frederick Christ Trump millions to replace the windows, (for no reason!} and was the decisive blow against his chosen son, Fred Jr. as his successor.

Fred Sr. realized he’d have to train the vain little juvenile delinquent to run the Trump empire, once the kid proved that, even though he had little business smarts, he was a ruthless killer who’d do whatever was necessary to increase the family fortune. Fred Jr. ended his days drinking himself to death as a custodian in one of the Trump buildings. His family would be cheated by the other Trumps when the patriarch finally died, naturally. Donald would finally be able to defy his father by selling off all his properties, in express violation of his stated wishes. He sold his father’s real estate empire for well under its appraised value, naturally.

Confederate flag in the Capitol

They had Trump flags and flags that said “Fuck Biden” but it was the Confederate battle flag paraded inside the breached Capitol, as incendiary and hateful to Black people as the fucking black and white swastika on a blood red field is to me as a Jew, that said it all. The symbolism of those kind of symbols is hard to miss.

The mob’s message was clear, as their leader expressed love toward his flag waving followers: the world is better without you parasites and getting our way by violence is a party for us.

It’s like what Ted Cruz snarled at Merrick Garland a few months later while excoriating him about DOJ overreach, feds running to the aid of threatened school board members. “Jeez, it was only a Nazi salute,” he sneered “which you admit is protected by the First Amendment,” he didn’t even have to add “Jew”, it so naturally suggested itself as the Texan lambasted the mild-mannered Garland. Cruz is that fucking good. Many of them are, and all very fine people. Waving a Confederate battle flag, as you do, when you’re a patriot.

Snapshot of how a top criminal uses noncriminals

“Oh, the honor system, of course, of course, we’re on the honor system, on my honor. I’m on my honor, absolutely. You have my word, 100%. I swear to you on the grave of my sainted mother, on my sacred honor.”

On September 29, Trump went to his scheduled debate with Democratic candidate Joe Biden, arriving too late for testing. Chris Wallace of the Fox News Channel, who was the moderator at the debate, later said the event was relying on the “honor system.” Trump railed and snarled at Biden, who was close enough to him to have been in danger. Trump’s contingent refused to wear masks despite rules at the venue to do so. At least 11 people tested positive after the debate.

source

This honorable gentleman’s assurance was given after a man famous for his punctuality contrived to arrive at a live debate hosted by a FOX moderator too late for mandatory testing, three days after the first (undisclosed) positive test for the strongman who thought wearing a mask made him look vulnerable, weak, who’d made a strong branding decision to be the tough guy, like Bolsonaro in Brazil, as opposed to the wimpy and unmanly mask-wearing Pence, who he’d soon blame for betraying him and send a mob down to threaten, chase, perhaps rough up, or maybe actually hang. The strong contrast to weak, old Biden with his comically gigantic mask.

The tough guy assuring the others “on his honor” that this time he was actually not lying, that he’d never tested positive for Covid in recent weeks (let alone three days earlier) must have been thinking what easy marks, what pathetic losers noncriminals are… as he concealed his recent positive test for a disease that was ravaging the world, one he’d dismissed as a hoax as America led the world in Covid deaths, one he swore on his honor that he’d tested negative for (still his story).

That massive Covid disruption was not his fault in any way, whatever those exaggerated, fake death tolls supposedly were, he’d totally delegated that, to his dimwit alter-ego, his son-in-law the Covid Czar (rewarding his glorious work making historic peace in the Middle East, fixing the federal bureaucracy and ending the Oxycodone overdose crisis). Pence was also assigned Covid Czar, with equal responsibility for the outcome, but with less power than Kushner and a much better guy to send an angry mob after than the husband of his cherished daughter.

Of course, by refusing to wear a mask while bellowing at Biden he was probably hoping to spew enough active Covid to infect and kill the old man he hated and had vowed he could only lose to in a rigged election. He gave the people who prepped him for the “honor system” debate Covid. Loyal Chris Christie got a serious enough case of the deadly disease to need heroic, very expensive emergency treatment at a hospital, and hospitalization, extraordinary measures necessary to save his life. Measures unavailable to virtually any of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who died of the pandemic and continue to die of it.

But really, when you’re at the top of the food chain, the apex predator, the only question is, how many more times with this stupid “honor system” bullshit? Isn’t it enough, already, with the make believe about honor systems, not lying, even if it helps you, being nice just so somebody else can fuck you? Nobody has honor, let’s face it, why insult people’s intelligence? You’re a mark that’s going to get strongly played if you believe in that honor bullshit, take my word for that, loser.

Now, did you take care of that little thing we talked about?