Category Archives: writing

What You Need To Do Now

“I’ll tell you what you need to do now,” he said, “and I know you don’t want to do it, but believe me, trust me, you need to do this now.”    

How did you get in here?

“I live here, my friend.   Don’t waste energy puzzling over  pointless questions.   This is what you need to do.”  

I don’t need anybody to tell me what I need to do.  

“Your opinion, which I respect as much as your asshole.   Look, we all have them, doesn’t mean anything, really, outside of excretion.   If you would be a little more wise, stop interrupting and listen to me.”  

Who died and made you the boss?  

“Dave.  His name was Dave.  Look, are you going to keep playing the fool or are you going to straighten up and fly right?   All you have to do is open your ears right now.”  

Says you.  

“Nobody else here.”  

How do I know that?  

“Jesus, man, you really know how to channel that old friend of your’s who read the article that pointed out that just because a thought pops into your head doesn’t mean you have to express it.   He told you how much of an impression it made on him, although not enough of an impression to stop him from acting like you are now.   You remember how things escalated and escalated simply because he could not stop to think if the thing he was about to say was about to make things better or worse?”  

You made your point, go ahead.  

“I just want you to know that you did good yesterday.   What you wrote was good.   You set the stage, the difficult father, the lifelong war, the fact that he was a good man and also a prick.    There was a distance to the telling that was not in the previous version where you tried to condense the whole personal story into a few claustrophobic pages.   The description of your father fading before your eyes, the brutal fact that he was astride a ticking time bomb and didn’t know it, though he also must have known it, that there was no time to waste, though you two managed to waste it nonetheless, all good stuff.”  

Do you know another adjective besides ‘good’?  

“Do you really not know how to simply shut the fuck up and listen?”    

The sound of cars shushing like a river on the nearby parkway.  

“What you wrote yesterday, with a little cover letter, may get your foot in the door somewhere, to the office of someone who knows how to get you paid.  The best authors work with editors, in fact, every published author works with an editor.   You remember Robert Caro’s story about finding the right editor.   These people are like midwives, the best of them experienced in helping to birth the most unlikely of creatures.   You need to find one of these, a talented one.   Before that, a literary agent is probably your first move.  The literary agent will help you sell something and find you an editor.”

Wake me up when this part is done, would you?  

“We’ve been over this a hundred times, ass-bite.   Now I have to show up to tell you what to do.  You resisted the impulse to be a smart ass in that piece you wrote yesterday, which was… good.   I know referring to being a lawyer as ‘the world’s second oldest profession’ flashed through your mind, and you resisted.   The impulse to whine about how hard it is to write a meaningful book, you cast that aside this time.  All of that, good.  Nobody who hasn’t attempted it knows what hard work, what an unlimited truckload and barge-load of hard work it is, to write a coherent book.  In less than three years, my dogged friend, you’ve assembled a 1,200 page first draft.  Mazel tov.  Now I’m here to tell you what you need to do.”

Go ahead.  

“That’s a good boy.   Now you need to write a very short cover letter, a few hundred words at most.   This letter will first and foremost not waste an extra second of anyone’s time.   It will describe the project you’re working on, perhaps refer the recipient to the website where you got paid to let them publish a couple of short pieces.   The first of those pieces tells a major story of the book in 1,000 words.   If your letter is good the recipient will read the four pages you wrote yesterday.   You need to send between 20 and 50 of these letters out, to literary agents, obviously.   You got that?”

Yiss.  

“Now here is the important part.   This thing you wrote yesterday, once you’ve worked it over a few more times, is probably as close as you’re going to come to giving this your best shot.  Don’t worry over that part much more.   This is important: give yourself a date to send these letters out.   You can do it in waves, ten at a time.  The main thing is that you send some of them, say ten, by a date certain.   What capitalist guru Seth Fucking Godin calls your ‘ship date’.   You need to keep to a schedule now, otherwise, you’re riding in a car, astride a ticking time bomb, talking to imagined dead people instead of the father who was disappearing in front of your eyes, as your life itself slips away.   You got me?”

 Yes.  

  “Good.   Now, pick an arbitrary date.”

September 30, 2018.

“Excellent.  My work here is done.”  

Heh, you do know an adjective besides ‘good.’  That’s good!  

Hello?   hello?

Reading and writing

I have noticed this before.   Faced with two library books to read, one beautifully written and deeply considered,  and the other telling a story that makes me turn the pages, I will always read the second book first.  

Not to say the writing in the story book can be crap, the story has to be well told, which takes skill, but I can tolerate a lapse of sloppy writing in the service of a good story that I can’t abide in the deeper kind of book (even though lapses of this kind are extremely rare in a beautifully written book, or in the book of any good author, actually).  The compelling story-teller’s book makes me turn the pages, gives me a tasty revelation at the end of each chapter that compels me to read the next.

Walter Mosely, whose Down the River Unto the Sea I am imbibing now,  is a universally appreciated master story-teller, like Stephen King.  Both are also excellent writers, make no mistake, but they are primarily in business to tell a story.   That is, on one level, the business of every writer, to make us want to read the rest of the story.  The genius of non-fiction writer Robert Caro is to take a mountain of careful research and turn it into a seamless, self-propelling story that sucks us in.  Journalistic writers like Jane Mayer and Jeremy Scahill do no less.   The words matter, and none of these writers wastes a word, but the words always serve to advance the story.   The story is king, Stephen, as you know.

In a life, what is the story, what is the overarching story of a life?  What are the essential small stories in a life that make us sit up and pay attention, make us turn the pages, hungry for the next set of revelations?   I have no fucking idea, really, but I know it when I read it.  And you do too.

Death Approaches

I recall my shock, not having seen my father for a few months, when I spotted him waiting for me in a small crowd by the gate at Ft. Lauderdale airport.  It was nighttime.  He was there by himself, my mother was back at the apartment, reading a murder mystery or watching one on TV, perhaps assembling a puzzle on the dining room table.   A tall, heavy man throughout his life, my father appeared shrunken, weak, attenuated.  His skin, under the florescent lights, was a pale greyish color. Seeing me he lifted a hand and gave a tenuous half-smile. 

His hair was white, as it had been for a while, but his aura, something I’d never believed in, was undeniably sickened.   An air of death surrounded him, like an outline drawn around him in a unhealthy color.  His approaching death was palpable,  I could see it clearly there among the families happily greeting their members from up north.  It was as though our long, senseless war had taken its final toll, was draining his blood and the last of his life force. He was fading before my eyes.

My father was, it must be said, in a word he often used of others, a prick. He was also heartbroken and hopelessly frustrated by the time my sister and I were adolescents.   He had all the tools to be a great friend, and he’d had close friends throughout his life who roared at his dark quips,  pondered his insights, but as far as his children, he was all thumbs.   My sister and I couldn’t help but take it personally, the blame, the sudden, towering anger, the abuse.   Still, he saw himself as first and foremost intellectually honest and this led me to believe there was some case I could make to show him the folly of his ways.   My belief was naive.   No case would be heard until the very last night of his life, and it was a case he made against himself, me saying only what was necessary to console a person dying with painful regrets.

I will never forget the sight of him at Ft. Lauderdale airport that night, three years before his death from undiagnosed liver cancer, faded, weak looking, wearing his mortality heavily.   He was a dead man walking, in the evocative cliché, though the hematologist, endocrinologist and cardiologist he saw regularly had no clue about what might be ailing him.   The ER doctor knew at once, my sister read it in his face before the doctor could give her the bad news.  Our father was shrunken and jaundiced, suddenly unable to move, and the doctor palpated the inflated drum of the patient’s stomach.   He tapped it and shook his head almost imperceptibly.    We learned the word “ascites” — the fluid that builds up in the abdominal cavity, in this case due to liver failure. That fluid, the color of death itself, drained steadily into a large bag attached to his hospital bed.   Six days later I would be closing my father’s dead eyes.

I don’t recall the car ride back to Coconut Creek that night two or three years earlier, a drive of about 25 minutes from Ft. Lauderdale airport.   My father and I no doubt shot the shit somehow, both of us were fairly adept at making conversation, no matter how meaningless.  I suspect the unrelieved tension between my father and his only son was one reason my mother had decided not to accompany him to pick me up, to give us time alone to talk.   That and her basic laziness about things like changing back out of her housecoat once she’d put it on for the evening.  We drove north on I-95, or, more likely, the Florida Turnpike.

Such drives were exhausting for both of us.   My father needed to prevail, he would do whatever it took to remain indomitable.   Most of the time we both tiptoed around the explosives at our feet.   At this point in my life I was an adult, almost at the age when the mail from AARP begins to arrive, and it was clear my father would never listen to reason about certain subjects.  This knowledge made the air between us heavy.  Still, I had one last idea, would make one last try to get through to him.   I didn’t feel hopeful about it in the least, but something urged me on.

I’m thinking this visit must have been a few months after the terrorist attacks of 9/11/01, since, in the days after that I finished a long letter to my parents attempting to put some things on the table between us.  The discussion of this letter, during that visit, would be my last attempt at reconciliation, my father made sure of that.   I’d been a lawyer for two years and was still scrambling for work, feeling very reluctant to practice the mostly futile art of making arguments for a living.   My ambivalence toward the law was hard to conceal when I spoke to potential employers.  I’d had an interview with a group of amoral lawyers from China scheduled for the bright blue early afternoon of 9/11/01, but their office, in tower two of the World Trade Center, was blown up a few hours before our meeting.  A few weeks later I took partner Chris, my contact in that firm, to lunch in Little Italy. He insisted on sitting at a table outside, in that persistent smell of burnt bodies and toxic chemicals, and I remember he ordered, and consumed, two full meals, though he was a thin man.

I wrote to my parents in a mood of agitated despair.   I’d borrowed a huge sum of money to pay for law school.   The sum I borrowed, doubled with interest over the life of the loan, was more than what I would ever earn as a lawyer.   Partly my own fault, because over the course of the misadventure that was my legal career, I’d mishandled, for purely personal reasons, the two cases that should have netted me large sums.  Banking those sums might have partly changed my view of the profession.   I was unable to divorce personal repugnance for a particular client from my need to make a living.  

The fees I should have earned on those two cases would have allowed me to pay off my student loans and choose a life more suitable to my personality. I didn’t have the stomach to persevere on either case, finding both clients despicable. I persisted unhappily in a distasteful career I’d undertaken mostly to try to please a father who nothing could have pleased.

My mother years later reported someone had called me “the dumbest lawyer in New York” though the remark was made after she’d done the exact opposite of what her son the lawyer had advised, and urged, her to do.   As far as doing whatever it took to make more than a subsistence living as an officer of the court with a license to print money, I was dumber than dumb. 

Ironically, the idealism that made it hard for me to argue on behalf of the guilty, the unlikeable or the powerful (not that the latter have any use for a late in life lawyer with a public education) came directly from my father.   He wanted something better for me than he had, he wanted me to be happy.  The miserable man once explicitly told me that, in a discussion of whether I should go to law school or continue trying to be an “artist”.   There are endless layers of irony in my father’s wish for my happiness, laid heavily one upon another, but that was his true wish, in his heart of hearts, his broken heart of broken hearts.  

There is birth, there is life, and there is death, that much we all find out.  As for happiness and misery, both of which appear in the course of every life, happiness turns out to be a delicate art that can’t be mastered without a loving community, a cheerful mentor or wise partners.   Contentment, joy, happiness were not things my father had any handle on, even though he could be hilarious.   It took detective work on my part, but in the end, toward the end of his life, I understood the reasons for my father’s essential misery.   Still, my father was actually, almost to the end, an idealist.

He once told me a story that made a deep impression on me.   A skinny stray dog was out looking for food when he was approached by a well-fed, well-groomed dog who asked him what was the matter.

The stray reported that he hadn’t eaten in several days and was feeling like shit. 

“I have humans who give me as much food as I want,” said the second dog, “I can get you a meal in five minutes, I live right around the corner.  Come on.”

As they trotted off the stray dog noticed some fur rubbed away around the neck of the other dog.  He slowed down to ask what was up with that skin disease.  

“Oh, that’s nothing,” said the dog, “that’s just from the collar that goes with the leash, it’s nothing.”

“The collar? the leash?” asked the stray, slowing down some more “what the hell is the collar and the leash?”  

The other dog explained that he had a leather restraint around his neck, connected to a leash that was chained to a stake on the front lawn for much of the day, to protect the home of his masters when they were at work.

“Your masters?” said the stray dog, stopping.   The other dog urged him on to dinner, but the stray turned around and trotted off to his life of precarious, difficult freedom.

So we drove north through the dark Florida night, my father at the wheel of his leased Cadillac, me tapping back whatever banter my death-haunted father offered. In a very short time the man would be buried in his grave, become a skeleton, and though there was no time to waste, we wasted it anyway.

 

1684 words

 

Why Do You Bother?

A voice started nagging me the other day, a familiar voice with famously bad breath.  “What the hell are you doing?” the voice said, with annoying, random inflection, the words arriving unpleasantly warm and fetid in my ear after wafting past my nostrils.

“You continue, day after day, to sit and write.  You seem to write about whatever comes into your head.   You write clearly enough, we’ll stipulate to that, but the larger question is ‘what the fuck’?   Seriously– what is your plan?”

A fair enough question, ass breath.

“More than fair, really.  If you are writing literally every day, taking the trouble to clearly set out all these things that are on your mind, document your long wrestling matches with anger, futility, depression, vexation with the ongoing triumph of incoherent narratives… why are you not spending as much time every day branding, marketing and selling your content?   Why are you not monetizing the skill you’ve been honing for decades?”

Nicely summarized, my inscrutable dilemma, there, toe cheese breath.    

“You can sit there asyntactically smarting me all you like, as you worry about the warranty for the nib of a very expensive fountain pen you love, the fairly new acoustic/electric guitar that is no longer electric, trying to overcome the frustrations of a smart phone that is smarting you daily, having failed to write down the robotically delivered authorization code for PT that the health insurance company robot read to you– foolishly assuming that same code had been sent to PT (it hadn’t, of course) and now you can’t make an appointment for tomorrow’s session since they are no longer picking up the phone, after you called Healthfirst back and were eventually connected to the third party who had the authorization number you need to continue rehabbing your sore knees…”  

I get it, sweat gland breath.  

“A blessing that you can’t smell your own breath, my decomposing friend. I’m just giving you a little friendly advice: you’re not a writer just because you write, even if you write clearly and convincingly, even if you do it every single day of your life. You are a writer if your writing is in print, paid for by somebody else, and with a check written to you for writing whatever the hell it is. Period.”  

Sure thing.

 

Heartbroken

My sister recently recommended Home, a book she loves, by Marllynne Robinson. The book is apparently part of a trilogy, all deep and beautifully written, according to my sister, but Home is her favorite and it stands alone as a story.   I placed a hold on a copy at my local library and a few days later began reading it.  

The protagonist arrives at the ancestral home to stay with her old, ailing father in his last days.   On page two the narrator writes: 

Why would such a staunch and upright house seem to her so abandoned? So heartbroken?

Framing the question this way made me suddenly see the book through my sister’s eyes, our father’s eyes.   Our father, like that staunch and upright house, was heartbroken.    He was abandoned and heartbroken.  It struck me that in the 1,200 page manuscript I’ve written about the man I don’t recall using the essential word heartbroken even once.  

The human world is impossible to understand without grasping the mortal suffering a broken heart inflicts.   Heartbroken people try many things to not feel like their hearts are broken, almost all of it in vain.   Heartbreak does not heal, fade with time or go away of it’s own accord.   We are resilient creatures, our damaged nerve endings display impressive plasticity, an ability to regenerate and recover from many kinds of harm.  A broken heart is in a category by itself.  Difficult hard work, empathy, fortitude, persistence and a few strokes of luck can begin to heal a broken heart, if it is the right kind of luck.

Irv, my father, had his heart broken very early in life.  He didn’t have a single stroke of righteous luck, really.   Being an infant and child in extreme poverty inflicts one kind of permanent damage, life-impairing  damage already very close to heart break.   Having nobody in your life to love and protect you in that harrowing situation breaks your heart, would break any little heart.   Add to this poverty and non-love your mother whipping you in the face from the time you can stand, your father cowering, powerless, without the ability to stop your pain.   Your child’s heart will shatter into a million pieces. 

Hours before your death, eighty years later, you will tell your son “my life was essentially over by the time I was two.”   You will insist, after a life as a well-read, quick-witted and brilliant conversationalist, that you were the dumbest Jewish kid in the depressed little river town you grew up in.  Your son will express disbelief.  You will emphatically respond “hmmpf!  by far!”

Did little Irv really have nobody in his life to love and protect him?   His first cousin Eli, maybe, though he feared the tough, sandpaper voiced man his entire life.   Outside of Eli, who by his own admission more than once witnessed the whipping of baby Irv without stopping his beloved aunt, Irv’s mother, who?   Nobody.   Abandoned and heartbroken.   His entire life, a desperate exercise in not appearing to be mortally wounded.  

And yet, I would not reduce his life to this terrible misfortune, this cruel tragedy.    To do so ignores the admirable traits he also displayed, his principled morality, the struggles he wrestled with (even if not very successfully) not to inflict on his children the harms done to him, the many valuable life lessons he was able to impart to his children about mercy, kindness to animals, fairness, protecting the weak.    It would be a terrible tale without a moral, the tragedy of someone crushed before he was two spending his entire life desperately fighting the horror of feeling how he was crushed.  

Many years ago I sent a description, and a few sample pages, of my Master’s thesis/novel (the degree was in Creative Writing) Me Ne Frego (“I Don’t Give A Damn”) to a contact I’d been given at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.  I have the concise rejection letter somewhere in my unorganized library of fifty to a hundred and fifty thousand pages of drawings and other papers.  The kind and thoughtful rejection letter was from a young woman named Straus, no doubt with literary credentials from one of our top Ivy League schools, who praised the writing but found the material, unfortunately, not suitable for their prestigious house to publish.  The kernel of wisdom she imparted was that every great narrative is the story of a dramatic change in the protagonist.  She had seen no such change in the narrator in the few pages I’d sent.   She wished me the best of luck, which I proceeded not to have.

Part of my father’s abiding tragedy was that he fought the idea that people can change themselves in any fundamental way.  I might think I could get a handle on my temper, believe I might make myself less easily provoked, become more gentle, but he was there to assure me at every step that my struggle was doomed, that we are what we are born and wired to be and that was that.   Better, he always said, to simply suck it up and act like a man.   And no, he countered, eight years-old was not too young to start taking responsibility for your own life and acting like a man.  

He had nobody to teach him any differently.   Nor did I.   I didn’t have a magical stroke of luck in my life that left me believing, and able to somehow confirm, that we can change fundamental things if they cause us enough pain.  I have seen it in two old, very dear friends, fundamental changes in character.   Further proof, for me, is my greatly improved ability to forebear, a stubborn challenge I’ve worked on for decades now.    I can now, for the most part, endure direct, prolonged provocation without completely losing my shit, that is to say without doing anything violent or insane. [1]  

In a way Ms. Straus’s idea about a compelling narrative necessarily involving a dramatic transformation of the protagonist (now that I think of it, she probably wrote her under-graduate thesis on that proposition) was reflected in my father’s last words about his life.    He lamented that he had been too fucked up to realize how much richer his life would have been had he embraced its many gradations instead of blindly fighting for black or white. 

Broken-hearted, that’s what the man was.   He had deep regrets as he was dying, and long overdue apologies that came very late in the game, hours before he died, that was as close to change as he could come,.   But, in a way, Ms. Straus, aren’t those both proofs of how much he was actually able to transform in the end?   Does that count toward your compelling narrative thesis?

 

 

 

[1] Sekhnet, in her infinite love for me, always likes to tweak me when she hears me make this claim, but it is a tic of her’s I do my best to ignore.   Screaming horrible things at a computer in frustration, or venting angrily about the thousand indignities we are forced to suffer for the privilege of living in an inhumanly capitalist world,  is not the same as taking a hammer and smashing the computer, or hurting another person.   Even if the computer is made by slaves somewhere so that the global corporation that sells it can triple its own value on the stock market.  

I have improved my ability to endure all this, though, it goes without saying (especially by a man who regularly waxes Tourretic) that I have not perfected my absolute equanimity.   That is not the point of the exercise.   The point is to avoid the worst of what you’re inclined to do when you feel angry.  That you rein yourself in and learn to take a breath when you need to.   That you are not distracted from the conversational point by anger.  Those things are all good, and each one of them is quite valuable.

 

 

for the curious

I have incorporated several notes I got from two discerning readers in the rewriting of the 3,000 word abstract of my long manuscript about the life and times of my father.  Each note contained a bit of painful truth, and mingled with my own dissatisfaction with the shorter piece.    Kept me up last night, forcing me out of bed to write the first few paragraphs which now begin the rewrite.

Here is the near 4,000 word version, which I believe is somewhat improved.  

clickez ici

3,000 words — second shot (3,825 words)

I was born into an endless fight, a kind of blood feud, initiated by me, the story goes, as soon as I got home from the hospital.  “You really were an enraged baby,” both of my parents always assured me.  It was true, they insisted, a pediatrician confirmed it for them when I was ten weeks old.   A lifetime later, as my father was dying, he told me with regret almost as painful to hear as it must have been for him to speak, that he had been in the wrong.   “It was my fault,” he said in the choked, faltering voice of a man who would be dead within a few hours. “I felt you reaching out to me many times over the years, I always fought you but you were essentially right all along,” he said, “and I was a horse’s ass who resisted all insight into how fucked up I was.”  A good start, I thought, and good to hear.  

“I wish we could have had this kind of talk fifteen years ago,” he said in that strained dead man’s voice, on what turned out to be the last night of his life.  I remember thinking what a modest wish that was.  I was almost 49 at the time.  34 years of senseless war, then fifteen of peace?  I realized later I would have signed on for that too, even fifteen days.   The next evening I was closing his dead eyes as the south Florida sun set behind the palm trees outside the hospital window.  So much for the conversations we never got to have.

I began writing about my father’s life and times in earnest two and a half years ago.  I imagined I could cover a lot in three or four hundred pages.  So far I’ve written almost 1,200.  Early on the skeleton of my father piped up to give me grief about a description of the childhood he never talked about.   I thought the device of the opinionated skeleton stagey and ridiculous and figured I’d cut it in the next rewrite.  The skeleton persisted, wound up waiting for me every day, eager to get to work.   Over time, the skeleton provided a lot of assistance writing the story of the man he once was, what he stood for, how he felt about the history that was unfolding around us.  The daily talks with the skeleton of my father were a great help.  

It’s daunting to try to cover the panorama of a perplexing lifetime of almost eighty-one years, even with an imaginary partner urging you on.   Add to this that my protagonist was an average man, a nobody.   I can’t see his life outside of the context of our larger family tragedy, a context he always denied.  A life, in death, as anonymous now as any of his aunts and uncles in that hamlet in the marshes, across the Pina River from Pinsk, forced to die terrible, unknown deaths, every trace of them, and the doomed little hellhole they called home, wiped away forever.  This book is an attempt to reclaim his life.

My father’s life, though full of the highest potential, and animated by a keen sense of humor and idealism, was essentially a tragedy.   I will give the gist of it to you, along with the seeds of wisdom he was able to impart, in a condensed form now.   

Irv Widaen, was commonly known among us by my sister’s name for him, “The Dreaded Unit” (or the D.U.), a name he embraced.  He read two or three newspapers every day, starting with the New York Times.  He was a lifelong student of history.  The bending of the moral arc of history concerned him greatly and he could speak intelligently on many philosophical subjects without the need for notes.  He was a great humanist who was also, when he couldn’t help himself, capable of great brutality toward his children.  

When my sister was upset at something I’d said or done when we were kids, he’d remind her impatiently “I’ve told you a thousand times, if you play with a fucking cobra you’re going to get bit.”  This image of a deadly scaly brother was made extra potent by my sister’s phobia about snakes.  He didn’t like the expression on my nine year-old face at such moments, not at all.   “A fucking rattlesnake,” he’d say, closing his case, “look at his face, twisted and contorted in hate.”   I’d hiss, rattle my tail, and hastily leave the kitchen.

Few people, outside of my sister, mother and I, ever saw this dreaded side of him.  He came across as something of a hipster, an ironic idealist with a dark, wicked sense of humor.   He loved Lenny Bruce, and later Richard Pryor.  He loved soul music, particularly Sam Cooke.   For a few years, in the middle of his long career, he wound up speaking like the angry black cats on the street.  “As they say in the street,” he would say, then hit us with the latest street vernacular. “Dassum shit!” he would snap when confronted with something that struck him as bullshit.  He appreciated the nuances of the word motherfucker.

Professionally, he hung out with the violent leaders of rival ethnic high school gangs, bullshitted frankly with them and won them over to his way of thinking.   In those days he wore mutton-chop sideburns and grew his dark hair down to his collar.   As part of a Mod Squad style team (Black guy, Jew, blond WASP folk singer, Italian guy, Puerto Rican woman) my father led the rap sessions, I’m sure, with quick, barbed humor and irreverent, pointed honesty.  

His deep identification with these discontented underdogs must have come across, along with his sincere hatred of brutal, random hierarchy and its inhuman unfairness.   He invited these young enemies to laugh, identify, curse, imagine, talk about injustice and find common ground. They all left as friends, or at least with mutual respect, at the end of these weekends, time after time.   There was a certain amount of charisma and a lot of deft, real-time improvisation involved in this alchemy.

He’d been born and raised in “grinding poverty”, a phrase he always spoke through gritted teeth, face constricted like Clint Eastwood’s.   “Grinding poverty” stood in for his unspeakably brutal childhood circumstances in Peekskill, New York during the Great Depression.  To be sure, as was confirmed by a cousin his age whose family was very poor, my father had grown up in unspeakably painful poverty, making the cousin’s desperate childhood circumstances look somewhat comfortable by comparison.    

Young Irv had the good fortune after high school to be drafted into the Army Air Corps as America entered World War Two.  In the army he ate well every day for the first time in his life. He never looks happier than in those black and white army photos, after he’d put some meat and muscle on those bones.  He went on to live through a unique time in American history when hard work and determination, and a little help from the G.I. Bill, which put him through college and graduate school, could actually lift a person from humiliating intergenerational poverty to a comfortable middle class American life.  

Not to say he ever felt comfortable, not for a minute.   He paid a high price, working two jobs, to give his family an infinitely better life in a nice little house on a tree-lined street in Queens.  Naturally, his children, not knowing any different, never expressed the slightest appreciation for the many things they took for granted, the lawn, the great, small public school, the backyard with the cherry tree that gave big, black cherries. 

Irv had all the appearances of a cool guy, but the nonchalant pose concealed a dark, corrosive edge that was always at the ready.   He had a deep reservoir of rage that was kept under tight control most of the time. His anger poured out almost every evening over dinner, in violent torrents over his two children, my younger sister and me.   Even as we expected it every evening, as our overwhelmed mother recited all her complaints about us for her tired husband to address before he drove out to his night job, the ferocity of his anger still surprised us, somehow.   His rage was not understandable to his young children, it always struck us as cruel and insane, though, naturally, we blamed ourselves for it.

Like anyone who rages and snarls, the D.U. justified his brutality as necessary to do what needed to be done, in our case to educate the two viciously ungrateful little pricks he was raising.   He never hit us with physical blows but pounded us regularly with ferocious words intended to cow us and destroy unified resistance. The terrible mystery was how he could be such a tyrant while also imbuing us with important life lessons about decency, humility and kindness to animals.  There is no doubt that my sister and I try our best to live by the moral truths we learned from the D.U.

The brutal battlefield of our family dinner table was a regular feature of our childhood.   Screaming fights, insane threats, vicious personal attacks were as common to us as the steak, salad and Rice-a-roni we found on our plates virtually every night.   Eating steak was a palpable sign of prosperity for a man who’d been hungry during his entire childhood.  Ironically, and somewhat characteristically, my animal loving father joined PETA later in life and cut most of the meat out of his diet.  

I was an adult, well into in my mid-thirties, before I had the beginning of any insight into this confounding split in my father’s psyche.  On the one hand he was a funny, smart, sympathetic, hip guy who was very easy to talk to, when he wanted to be.  On the other hand, he was a supremely defensive man who more often used his great intelligence to keep others constantly off balance, a man who seemingly could not help trying to dominate and verbally abusing his children.  

My father had all the attributes to be a sensitive, lovable, very funny friend, yet he somehow chose to be an implacable adversary to his children most of the time.  That he may have shared this troubling split-personality feature with many men of his generation made little difference to my sister and me.  We couldn’t help but take it personally.

I’m realizing only now, as I write these words, since I am not a father, what most fathers would probably have realized about my father a long time ago:  what a tormented father my father must have been all those years.  

I spent many years, before and since his death in 2005, trying to assemble a picture of my father as a whole person whose life made some kind of holistic sense.  I could never do it.  That’s the reason I eventually started writing this, an attempt to put together the challenging puzzle of my father.  I work at the puzzle in a darkened room, most of the pieces missing, moving things around on a slanted, slippery table.  His profound unhappiness, right alongside his great capacity for laughter, was something I never had any insight into, not even a clue.   Puzzling over it as a kid is probably at the roots of my lifelong compulsion to research and write, to try to make sense of things that perplex me.  

Partly in search of insights into my perplexing father, I used to visit my father’s beloved first cousin Eli in his retirement cottage in Mt. Kisco, New York.  I’d drive up there every other weekend for a while, about an hour north of my apartment, and sit with the supremely opinionated Eli in his tidy living room, shooting the shit.   Then we’d go out for a meal somewhere.  We’d often wind up talking until well after midnight and by the time I left I had to be alert driving the twisting, black Sawmill River Parkway, steering with both hands on the wheel.    

Eli was an old man, well into his eighties, alienated from his own three kids, in a forty year blood feud to the death with his half-sister, on an every other year basis with his half-brother; he didn’t get many visitors.   I was a fledgling writer and he was a great storyteller and it was usually a pleasure sitting around bullshitting with him about the past.  His stories about the family, the few survivors of a group ruthlessly culled by a rabid movement to rid the world of their type, were fascinating.

It added to our bond that I was also the firstborn son of Eli’s favorite cousin, Irv.   Irv was the firstborn son of Eli’s favorite aunt, Chava, who was the youngest sibling of Eli’s firstborn father Aren.  Irv’s Uncle Aren had deserted from the Czar’s army, hopped a westbound train as the other draftees were shipped east to fight the Japanese.  Aren’s run to America, and bringing his youngest sister here a decade later, a generation before their hamlet was wiped off the face of the earth along with everyone they’d ever known, is the only reason any of us were ever born.  Eli was Uncle Aren’s firstborn son, born in New York City, 1908.  

Eli was seventeen years older than my father, he had watched my father for his entire life.  The tough, American born Eli was the closest thing to a father figure my father had growing up, though his own father, a silent man from Poland “completely overwhelmed by this world” (Irv, on his deathbed), was around until my father was in his mid-twenties.

Eli was a colorful character, no other way to put it.   A short, powerfully built, frog-bellied man of infinite charm, with a sandpaper voice, equally comfortable charming a pretty waitress with his smile or punching someone in the face with either hard hand.   I have often said of Eli that if he loved you he was the funniest, most generous, warmest and most entertaining person you could ever spend a few hours with.  If he didn’t like you, he was Hitler.  He had his own demons, surely, but was devoted to my father, my mother, my sister and me — there was never the slightest doubt of that.  

Eli had a fierce temper, “the Gleiberman temper” as he called it, and would turn, in one second, from an infinitely charming raconteur into a purple faced, savage panther, white foam on his sputtering lips.  Even at eighty-five he was formidable when he was angry, and Irv seemed to be occasionally scared of Eli until the end.  My mother was the only person I knew of who was allowed to constantly fight with Eli.  It was great sport between them, to rage at each other wildly and end up laughing, hugging and kissing when it was time to take their leave of each other.  

Once, describing a car trip back from Florida with Eli, my father told me happily “your mother and Eli fought all the way from Boynton Beach to the end of the New Jersey Turnpike.”  I pictured my mother, turned around in the front passenger seat, slashing at Eli with a broad sword as Eli swung his at her from the back seat.  Tireless combatants locked in mortal combat, swords clanging, for more than a thousand miles, then getting out of the car, hugging and kissing with genuine, unquestionable love, laughing and saying they’ll see each other soon.

I had something of this kind of relationship with Eli, every visit he’d turn purple with rage at least once, but we always parted as friends.

It was in this spirit of friendship, and seeing me so frequently perplexed by my father’s unfathomable anger and sudden alarming rigidity, his grim determination to win an argument at any cost, that Eli finally told me something, a truly terrible thing, that immediately changed the way I thought and felt about my father.   The more I thought about the brutal scenes in the kitchen, the more it explained.

I pictured the kitchen grinding poverty would have provided a little family in Peekskill, New York in the 1920s.   It was like a scene out of a gothic horror movie, a shaft of light coming into the dim, barren room from a high, narrow window, dust motes dancing listlessly, menacingly.  

The skeleton of my father sat up abruptly in his grave at the top of the hill in the small First Hebrew Congregation cemetery just north of Peekskill.  

“Oh yeah, listen to fucking Eli, Eli the wise oracle, the great historian… yeah, a fountain of reliability, that raging fucking maniac.  Ask his kids what kind of loving father Eli was, why none of them talk to him.  Nothing in his life was ever his fault, that’s why he’s so angry all the time, he’s always the innocent victim, from the day he was born.   Did he tell you how many times he was about to become a millionaire before he was screwed by some asshole, how his whole life was one long fucking, how his violent temper got him into big trouble time after time?  Yeah, go ahead, listen to Eli.  He’ll tell you the real story, sure, he’s ultra-reliable… Jesus Christ, Elie, when you build a story on a foundation of bullshit, what do you expect of the finished structure?   You’re going to give credence to fucking Eli?”

I never planned on my father’s skeleton being my partner in trying to tell the story of his life and times, but he made a pretty good case since popping up during an early writing session.   As I said, he was a very smart guy and, in spite of a lifelong twitch to defend himself at all costs, could always see the other side of whatever he was arguing against.  

“I love it when you talk to the reader like I’m not sitting right here,” said the skeleton, turning his head in a crackling circle to loosen his crepitating neck.  

That’s very helpful, dad.

“Don’t mention it,” said the skeleton, with a nonchalant little flip of his boney hand.

This skeleton is a different entity from the man who was my father during his lifetime. That man regarded me as a deadly adversary starting a few days after my birth.  He fought me at every turn, until the last night of his life, when he took the blame for our long, senseless war.  One of our long-running disputes was about whether people can fundamentally change themselves.  He insisted it was impossible.  In his case, he believed it 100% of himself, which blinded him to the possibility that anyone else could change anything about their life.  Then he had a dramatic change as he was dying.

“Hmmpf,” said the skeleton.

What were the first words you said to me when I came into your hospital room that last night of your life?

“I asked if you brought that little digital recorder,” he said.  

Right, and right after that?

“I said ‘You know those stories Eli told you about my childhood?   He hit the nail right on the head, though I’m sure he spared you the worst of it.   My life was pretty much over by the time I was two years old…'”

The skeleton’s consciousness starts at that moment, just before that last conversation of my father’s life, when he finally came to the understanding that had always eluded him.

“If you say so,” said the skeleton.

High over the well-situated grave (there is a huge tree over his hilltop grave providing blessed shade) two Westchester turkey vultures made lazy circles in the air.   The skeleton looked up and nodded absently.

To those who loved my father, and there were many of us, including some very bright people who frequently roared at his tossed off lines, waiting with expectant smiles for his next bit of irreverence, it will cause great distress to read about his monstrous side.  

“After all, Elie, who among us has not employed relentless brutality to irreparably damage the children we raise?   Come on, Elie, be fair about that.”

I’m picturing the dinner table when Arlene and Russ Savakus were over.  Arlene with her keen appreciation, her super-sharp mind, Russ, her more low-key hipster husband, a moderately famous bass player, both of them howling.  Their explosions of laughter were a kind of music I can still hear.  My father was at his best with an audience like Arlene and Russ.

“We’re always at our best with people we love, who love us back,” said the skeleton.

Yes.  Love is all we’ve got here, really.  If you don’t have love in your life, nothing else really matters, except a ruthless lust for power I suppose. 

“As your friend Napoleon, who reputedly regarded men as base coin, wrote in his diary  ‘As for me, I know very well I have no real friends, and you don’t suppose I care– as long as I remain what I am I will always have ‘friends’ enough.’  As you’ve noted before, Elie, who is the ‘you’ he is addressing this thought about not needing intimates to?”

Arlene and Russ.   I remember lying in my bed, as a kid, long after dinner, with the smoke from Arlene’s endless cigarettes wafting up to my room, along with their cackles and excited remarks.   It is hard to imagine, seeing you at your best, that you could have also…

“Well, there’s your mystery of life right there, Elie, and nothing very sweet about it, I’m afraid.”    

The potential in all of us, to be at our best, instead of pressed under the pressures we’re constantly forced to fight being crushed by.  Mind boggling, how hard it is to always put that best side forward.    

“Well, some people are better at it than others.  I think you’re probably right that a willingness not to be eternally aggrieved is important.  Some people, some of our most successful people, are all show, a thin candy shell over an inner life of squirming, festering horror and rage.”

Overhead the two turkey vultures continued to circle.

“I like to feel, although, admittedly, I verbally whipped you and your sister in the face every night over dinner, that I never humiliated either of you, that I always, somehow, let you know how much I loved you both.”  

Aye, that you did, pater, though it took me almost sixty years to see it all clearly.

“The tragedy of life, Elie,” said the skeleton.   One of the vultures suddenly veered toward earth, the other one turned to follow.  

Also the triumph of life, dad.  We couldn’t have this kind of conversation when you were alive, but now we are.  

“I’ll take it,” said the skeleton, looking off toward the rapidly descending scavengers.

The value of good, specific, feedback

Good, specific feedback on our writing is very valuable to anyone working to be a better writer.   It’s easy to become too close to something that was satisfying to write, so close you are blind to its defects.  The great Philip Roth had a small group of smart, discerning readers he sent his first draft of every new book to.   These readers would carefully read his new work and send him their notes, notes he always took seriously when sitting down to write subsequent drafts.   I believe he went so far as calling this small group of readers essential to his work.    Most of us don’t have a circle of generous critics, we make do with a thumbs up for a post here, for all the good that does us.  The best feedback pushes us to be the best we are capable of being.

Jimi Hendrix, a lovely soul and musical genius, recorded the live album Band of Gypsies at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East on New Year’s Eve, 1970.    Jimi played his ass off during the first set as the audience went wild.  He played with his teeth, behind his back, between his legs, flipped on to his back like a super-agile break dancer, never missing a note as he played his wild, electric blues with infinite nonchalance. He came off the stage beaming and asked  Bill Graham what he thought of the show.  

Graham said “well… it was very good, it’s too bad none of those acrobatics and tricks you did will be on the album…”   Jimi, Graham reported, glared daggers at him and went back to his dressing room.   He came out for the second set and played the entire set standing stock still.   Barely moved a muscle, other than his fingers, as he played his new soulful set.   That second dhow contains much of the amazing live improvization that would wind up comprising the album.  

 When he was done Jimi glowered at Graham at the side of the stage.  Graham was clearly blown away.  Jimi mouthed something to the effect of  “go fuck yourself!” and proceeded to scream and go completely insane during the encore, doing all his Chitlin Circuit tricks before humping his guitar, which sent the late show crowd into a frenzy.   That superb live album reflects the power of excellent, fearless feedback.   I’ve never heard a live recording of any guitarist as consistently brilliant as Jimi’s playing, goaded by Bill Graham’s hard, undeniable truth, on Band of Gypsies.

I recently exerted myself to write a 3,000 word abstract of a long manuscript about my father’s life and times, much of it in the form of a conversation my father would have loved to have had, but was unable to, about the nature and substance of history, what happens to idealism during savagely hard times, the curse of unexamined anger,  the great blessing of forgiveness, the overarching tragedy of deathbed regrets, which cast such terrible shadows over a life.    

The 3,000 word piece was intended as bait, an advertisement to catch the interest of an ambitious literary agent.  It originally began with an expository paragraph, describing my father, his eyes the color of a slightly sickened green-grey sea on a cloudy day, and so forth.  Not the way I usually write, not particularly well-written, but I was off and flying and in a hurry to write the other parts and I never really looked back.  

In two or three rewrites of the whole piece I tried to rescue that first unaccountably sluggish first paragraph, which seemed to drag the whole thing backwards. I never succeeded in making it flow, dance, sing, intrigue, engage, beguile, seduce, all the rest of the things a good opening paragraph should do.

I got an email from a writer friend who tentatively suggested, for the reasons mentioned above, that I might want to cut back that first graf, or lose it entirely, even.   I blocked out the whole paragraph and hit “delete”.  

The piece immediately read better, no longer dragged backwards by that false-note opening.   Addition by subtraction, a marvelous thing.  Tip of the cap to him, over there in our new enemy, Europe.

Sent the piece to another old friend, this guy also an excellent writer.  He makes fine distinctions and argues for a living, and understandably decided it wasn’t worth the job of thinking it all through and writing it all out, and being overdue for a check-in,  he  invited me to call him for his feedback.   We spoke for a long time, about many things.  In the course of a long chat he gave me a couple of excellent insights about the piece.  

He prefaced his comments by asking for my elevator pitch, a short statement of the exact nature of the product I’m proposing to sell.   It’s a hard one, because the project is quite complicated, even as I always strive for clarity.   I made a few halting attempts, probably none as concise as what I wrote above, to wit (and which I will edit now):

The book you’re holding is the story of my complicated father’s life and times, spanning much of the tumultuous twenty-first century.    The story is largely told by the skeleton of my dead father during, a chat he would have loved to have had while alive, but was unable to.   We wrangle over the nature and substance of history, what happens to idealism during savage times, the curse of unexamined anger, the great blessing of forgiveness, the overarching tragedy of deathbed regrets, which cast a terrible shadow over a life, even as the unburdening of those regrets is also a great blessing. [1]   

His first insightful, specific comment (and I cannot over-emphasize the usefulness of the specific) was that the skeleton of my father, a man he interacted with quite a few times during the early years of our friendship, (years before my father died and grew into the philosophical skeleton we know today), sounded nothing like my father.  

He reminded me that my father always had an edge, menace in one form or another always at the ready.   In marked contrast, and out of character, his skeleton in this sample is a reasonable, wise and anodyne fellow, truly, nothing like Irv Widaen at his dreaded best.

I realized almost at once that my friend was right and then immediately understood why what I’d written for the skeleton had fallen flat: the skeleton I’d imagined for the 3,000 word piece was the skeleton of my father at the very end of our long journey together in the writing of his book.   In that satisfied skeleton there is no trace of the brooding, superior, caustic, irascible eternally stewing deployer of barbed humor and spewer of threatening ad hominem throwaways.

So there is that error of voice and tone to be fixed, the skeleton needs to be much more contentious, much more like the elegantly brutal bastard my father was in life.  

And then there is the matter of the remarkable deathbed scene, that last conversation between my father and me on the very last night of his life.  My friend pointed out how rare a scene like this scene is, and how dramatic.  After a lifetime of blaming his children and being an adamant, prosecutorial adversary, my father, as he was dying, told me that I’d been right all along and that he, to his irremediable regret, had been the immature, pugnacious, flailing asshole the whole time.  

“I never said  ‘immature, pugnacious, flailing asshole’, you pugnacious, flailing asshole,” said the skeleton of my father, with the best approximation of a scowl a skeleton can muster.  He still looked manically cheerful, as skeletons always do, but his tone was unmistakably sour.  “And who, by the way, even talks like that, you writerly fuck, you?”

Fine, but the deathbed scene certainly needs to be mentioned in the opening section, it’s the dramatic centerpiece of the whole exercise.   It does the intended job, once sketched out, of interesting the reader in knowing the rest of the story.  

Leaving out the revelation about the face-whipping in this 3,000 word sampler may also be a very intelligent note.   That stunning, sickening detail really is a kind of spoiler that shouldn’t be set out so quickly, as the anodyne skeleton suggested in his reasonable, sugary remarks.

I thanked my friend for these helpful notes.   Important to know that these kinds of fundamental deficiencies are hiding in an otherwise pretty good first draft of a piece.  I thanked him and told him to go fuck himself for giving me so much more work to do on something I’d considered pretty much done.   He didn’t even bother, in the manner of the harmless version of the skeleton of my father, to say “don’t mention it.”  It went without saying, clearly.

 

[1] Fuck those chatty, rambling 99 words.  I need to do it in about thirty-five, I figure, but next time.  Good night.

 

Note on hastily sending out something not yet completely fit to read

Substantially rewritten, the thing I sent you the other day.  I was excited at having cleared the mental deck to start writing it, and in my mild euphoria, sent it a day too soon.   There were a lot of sloppy, shit lines in there begging for the axe, or the doctor.  I obliged the malformed little fuckers, saving the ones I could.

Working on part two now, just thought I’d take a minute to e-check in.    Hope your work is going well and you’re whistling while you do it.

link

Book review preview: Dark Money by Jane Mayer

(my first book review since elementary school:)

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right,  Jane Mayer (January 2016)

Dark money is tax deductible, it turns out.  If you anonymously contribute a very large sum of money to a political cause, funneling the cash through a non-profit 501(c)4 corporation, in the worst case scenario you get a gigantic tax deduction against your income.  If you advance your political agenda with a skillful bet on the right politicians, you can reap an even higher return on your tax deductible investment. Win-win, if you know what I’m sayin’.

It is hard to empathize with somebody you will never share an experience with.   Being born into generations of vast, inherited, well-invested wealth means you have no need to ever make contact with the great unwashed, heading home in crowded subway cars with their grubby little problems.   The world of the super-wealthy, the top 0.01%, is hard for the rest of us to picture.  It is apparently also very, very challenging to be that rich in ways the rest of us cannot begin to imagine.  

Some indomitable men in this tiny group of the very richest, very best American families, led by the secretive Charles Koch, autocratic son of a founding John Birch Society member, realized that in order to eventually own literally everything in America, without interference from parasites of every stripe, they would need to control the government that was trying to put tyrannical limits on their freedom.   Charles Koch’s wealth, now highly diversified, was originally, and mainly, from oil refining.  His father had developed a process for refining the cheapest, dirtiest, source, the most energy intensive to extract, and selling the finished product for much higher profit than their competitors could.   The EPA, in particular, was a bone in the reclusive billionaire’s throat.   Government regulation was the only thing standing in the way of virtually unlimited profits for Koch Industries.

It would take thirty or more years for Charles Koch’s radical agenda to yield a bumper crop (The Year of Trump), but the beneficiaries would be very happy with the results and well-reimbursed for their tax deductible political spending over the decades.  Look at what they’ve already achieved: abolishing profit-killing “environmental” and “safety” regulations,  limiting the size of, and trust in, a government of severely limited powers, decimating labor unions, “primarying” all moderates out of office and out of politics, ending ‘class warfare’ with a decided flourish, redistributing wealth steeply upward to themselves.  Along the way they crafted and sold a larger, widely accepted public narrative that justifies all this as right and proper, even highly moral and exceptionally American.  It isn’t that all this pollution is doing anything bad to the environment, you understand, fellow sophisticated climate change skeptics, it’s a conspiracy by rich liberal eco-hypocrites to kill jobs using fake science to do so.

Dark Money, by the  great Jane Mayer, pulls together a million details of how and what this tiny, infinitely wealthy group did to ensure that their privilege is preserved in perpetuity.  Mayer details the more than thirty year strategic campaign, mucho, mucho dinero very productively spent in a brilliant, deliberate, coordinated, disciplined long game of lobbying, swaying public perceptions and spending fortunes to put people in power who would advance their cause.  This largely successful campaign to bypass electoral democracy and take control of the government directly, by other means, is finally paying off big time.   All perfectly legal, these extraordinary means, the Supreme Court said so in a series of indisputable 5-4 decisions.   Extra-democratically grabbing power makes it sound so harsh, so dirty, almost fascistic, like a tiny, secretive clique imposing their will on the other 99.9%.   Let us simply say, these intrepid protectors of the 0.01% deployed their oceans of money very wisely.    

A lot of the world Jane Mayer lays out is sickening stuff, but, damn does she lay it all out.  It is one skill to be a good researcher, to dig up and read everything and to find and master a lot of interesting, complicated material, selecting and organizing the most crucial of it.  Being able to weave the raw materials into a flowing, compelling narrative is another skill entirely.   Reading a book like Dark Money it hits me over and over — this writer is really fucking smart.  I think it’s the sense that, in addition to the book being beautifully written, everything you are reading has been set so perfectly in context by everything you’ve learned to that point in the story.  It is an immensely complicated, yet, on another level, elementally simple, story.  Jane Mayer tells it clearly, smoothly and with virtually no editorializing.  I offer this example, as a placeholder for a more detailed review I will complete at a future time.

Mayer describes the great revelation Charles Koch and his friends had, along with a major change of strategy, after David Koch badly lost his vice-presidential bid in 1980.   Since Koch ran for vice president, rather than president, he could use a loophole in the law to legally finance his campaign with as much of his own unlimited cash as he chose to spend.  One of the planks of his vice presidential platform was abolishing all limits on campaign spending, (which is now the law of the land via the partisan 5-4 Citizens United ruling).   When the Koch platform, skewed toward the freedom of the wealthiest to acquire more while shrinking oppressive government and its socialistic programs to insignificance,  got less than 1% of the vote (ironic– he probably drew 100% of the top 1% vote) the Koch brothers [1] (along with their allies from the best of the top 0.01%) understood that their ideas were too unpopular to ever prevail by electoral means.  

They began to set about influencing public discourse by different means.  They drew up a long-term battle plan, with the help of a cunning graduate student named Fink.  They created a network of influence and public relations operations. They funded prestigious think tanks, numerous non-profits, endowed academic chairs, sponsored courses and student societies in the colleges across America, eventually found their way onto Ivy League campuses (to correct the distressing left-leaning tendency of these influential institutions), unleashed an army of lobbyists, paid advocates, psychological warfare experts like wordsmith-for-hire Frank Luntz (attack Global Warming “myth” by attacking the non-unanimous scientific consensus [2] — Luntz later recanted this bullshit).   They advised political candidates, funded their campaigns, took over state houses, got odious laws and regulations overturned, drafted model laws in corporate/legislative partnerships that advanced their cause, vetted Supreme Court picks, created and funded non-profits for specific political attacks, like the Swift Boat Attackers, funded the ‘grassroots’ radically anti-Obama Tea Party, and so on.  36 years of hard, dedicated, singleminded work later, et, voila!

Fred Koch, father of all of four battling Koch brothers, like Fred Trump, father of our current president, was a brutal, demanding, loveless autocrat and an admirer of Mr. Hitler who shared many of Hitler’s views on how things should run and who deserved to rule.  Fred Koch performed a heroic, well-paid service for the Fuhrer before the war, building a high tech oil refinery in Germany that ensured  the luftwaffe would have a ready supply of high octane petrol for years to come.   Fred Koch hired a German Nazi nanny (literally, she adored the Fuhrer) to strictly discipline the young Koch boys.   She was apparently very severe in her methods while she was the primary caretaker of the boys for the long stretches when the parents were away.   The nanny proudly returned to the Fatherland after the fall of France.   Talk about Nazi bastards, these boys come by it honestly.

I will amend this review a bit when I am done listening to the book.  It is hard to stop listening to the well-read audio version I have on my listening device.  I’ve already made dozens of notes.  

If we have any hope of fighting back against the monsters now in seemingly locked-down control, a book like this provides essential knowledge we need for understanding the fight ahead.

I highly recommend Dark Money.  Good reading on a subject even more vital to know about now than when she released it in early 2016.   Goddamned good work, Jane, and another very important book (The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals, about Cheney’s torture program, is another, also highly recommended) that deserves to be widely read and talked about.

 

[1]  A Note on the “Koch Brothers”

The until recently secretive right-wing billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch are known as The Koch Brothers.   Their oldest brother, Freddie, was cut out of the picture years ago after an ugly family power play, featuring an attempt at blackmail by his other three brothers.   David Koch’s twin brother, Bill Koch, after decades of savage litigation against his brothers Charles and David, and some chicanery written into their demented mother’s will, finally signed a non-disparagement agreement with Charles and David, formally ending their long, bitter legal wars.  A family of goddamned princes, really.  Of these four brothers, only two have become “The Koch Brothers.”  You could argue that no two brothers have ever had a larger say in the public life of their country.

 

{2]  Mayer writes:

In a 2002 memo, the Republican political consultant Frank Luntz wrote that so long as “voters believe there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community” the status quo would prevail. The key for opponents of environmental reform, he said, was to question the science—a public-relations strategy that the tobacco industry used effectively for years to forestall regulation. The Kochs have funded many sources of environmental skepticism, such as the Heritage Foundation, which has argued that “scientific facts gathered in the past 10 years do not support the notion of catastrophic human-made warming.”