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.
(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.
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.”
My father read two or three newspapers every day, starting with the New York Times. The bending of the moral arc of history concerned him greatly and he could speak spontaneously and intelligently on many philosophical subjects without the need for notes. He came across as something of a hipster, an ironic idealist with a dark, wicked sense of humor. 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 subtleties 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, WASP folk singer, Italian guy, Puerto Rican woman) my father led the rap sessions, I am 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 was born and raised in “grinding poverty”, a phrase he always spoke through gritted teeth, face like Clint Eastwood’s. “Grinding poverty” stood in for his unspeakably brutal childhood circumstances in Peekskill, New York during the Great Depression. My father had the good fortune after High School to be drafted into the Army Air Corps as America entered World War Two and 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 my father ever felt comfortable, not for a minute. He paid a high price, working two jobs, to give his children an infinitely better life in a nice little house on a tree-lined street in Queens. Naturally, his children, not knowing any different, never sufficiently appreciated the things they took for granted, the lawn, the great, small public school, the backyard with the cherry tree that gave big, black cherries.
My father had all the appearances of a cool guy, but the 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. It was a little bit insane.
Like anyone who rages and snarls, he justified his brutality as necessary to deal with his responsibilities, 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.
The brutal battlefield of our family dinner table was a regular feature of our childhood. It was as horrific as any war scene you can imagine. The strafing from planes, ominously rattling machine gun nests, the rolling clouds of poison gas, the stinking trenches, rusted barbed wire, the groans of dying horses were as common to us as the steak, salad and Rice-a-roni we found on our plates in front of us virtually every night. Eating steak was a sign of prosperity for a man who had been hungry during his entire childhood, my mother broiled steaks from Frank and Lenny’s almost every night. The steaks were barbecued during the spring and summer months, my father or I usually turning them on the grill. Ironically, and somewhat characteristically, my animal loving father joined PETA later in life and cut out a lot of his former meat diet.
I was an adult, well into in my late-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.
I’m realizing only now, as I write these words, since I am not a father, what most fathers would probably have realized 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 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 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 must have been at the roots of my lifelong compulsion to research and write.
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 week 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 drive 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 that 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.
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. My father’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 little 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 there, is the only reason any of us were ever born. Eli was Uncle Aren’s firstborn son, born in New York City, 1908.
My father’s first cousin 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 overwhelmed by this world, 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.
I sometimes brought friends with me to visit with him. I’d know in two minutes if the visit would be a fleeting ten hours of cheer, great stories and laughter or 150 endless minutes of grim, pointless discussion and occasional glaring. Eli either loved you or hated you, there was not much in between, though he was capable of pretending, mostly, for a couple of hours. 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.
He 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 my father seemed to be somewhat 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 that immediately changed the way I thought and felt about my father. The more I thought about it, the more it explained.
“You remember seeing those old electrical cords they used to make before the insulation was made out of plastic? They were thick and heavy, not very flexible, wrapped in layers of rough cloth for insulation. The ones you saw as a kid were frayed, like burlap — you remember those cords on the old toasters?”
I did.
“Well your grandmother, my beloved Tante Chava, had one of those cords for her steam iron that she kept in a drawer near where she sat at the head of the kitchen table.”
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.
“When your father was little, she used to reach into that drawer every time she got mad, and she had the Gleiberman temper, you know, and she’d grab that heavy cord and whip your father across the face with it.”
Across the face? What? I’d never met my paternal grandmother, who died before I was born, but… what the fuck?
“Yeah, she’d give him a couple of shots in the kisser with that heavy cord and he’d stand there cowering and crying. I saw it many times. After a while, all she had to do was rattle the drawer and your father would stand like this,” and Eli stood and did a remarkably moving imitation of a little kid staring down at the ground, cowering in terror.
“How old was he when she started whipping him in the face?” I asked.
“From the time he could stand,” Eli told me with infinite sorrow.
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.
“Jesus, Elie, you spend forty years trying to dig up enough clues to solve an insoluble existential puzzle and you put that giant piece on the table just like that? On page two? You don’t think that’s kind of a spoiler?”
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. 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.
I can feel this little intro slipping out of my hands, dad.
“Don’t mention it,” said the skeleton, with a nonchalant little flip of his boney hand.
High over the well-situated grave (there is a huge tree providing blessed shade) two Westchester turkey vultures made lazy circles in the air. The skeleton looked up and nodded.
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 the next bit of hilarity, 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 have 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 are constantly forced to fight being crushed by. Mind boggling, how hard it is to put that best side always forward.
“Well, some people are better at it than others. Some people, some of our most successful people, are all show, a thin candy shell over an inner life of squirming, festering horror. Look at this menace you have in the White House now. Unloved bully, raised by a demanding, overbearing. loveless father and whatever the hell his gold-digging mother was, look at the cruel monstrosity that produces. 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 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.
“Jesus, Elie, you spend forty years trying to dig up enough clues to solve an insoluble existential puzzle and you put that giant piece on the table just like that? On page two? You don’t think that’s kind of a spoiler?”
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. 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 what 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.
I can feel this little intro slipping out of my hands, dad.
“Don’t mention it,” said the skeleton, with a nonchalant little flip of his hand.
High over the well-situated grave (there is a huge tree providing blessed shade) two Westchester turkey vultures made lazy circles in the air. The skeleton looked up and nodded.
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 the next bit of hilarity, 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 (something to this effect) 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 have 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 are constantly forced to fight being crushed by. Mind boggling, how hard it is to put that best side always forward.
“Well, some people are better at it than others. Some people, some of our most successful people, are all show, a thin candy shell over an inner life of squirming, festering horror. Look at this menace you have in the White House now. Unloved bully, raised by a demanding, overbearing. loveless father and whatever the hell his gold-digging mother was, look at the cruel monster that produces. 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.
Writing easily, and steady progress, only come, I think, by writing steadily, every day.
Don’t take a day off when you don’t write, edit and improve at least a couple of lines. Even if it’s just a text.
In my college gym class there was a sign in the apparatus room where the gymnasts worked out. It said: practice good hand stands everywhere.
My father read two or three newspapers every day, starting with the New York Times. The bending of the moral arc of history concerned him greatly and he could speak spontaneously and intelligently on many philosophical subjects without the need for notes. He came across as something of a hipster, an ironic idealist with a dark, wicked sense of humor. 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 subtleties 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, WASP folk singer, Italian guy, Puerto Rican woman) my father led the rap sessions, I am 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 was born and raised in “grinding poverty”, a phrase he always spoke through gritted teeth, face like Clint Eastwood’s. “Grinding poverty” stood in for his unspeakably brutal childhood circumstances in Peekskill, New York during the Great Depression. My father had the good fortune after High School to be drafted into the Army Air Corps as America entered World War Two and 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 my father ever felt comfortable, not for a minute. He paid a high price, working two jobs, to give his children an infinitely better life in a nice little house on a tree-lined street in Queens. Naturally, his children, not knowing any different, never sufficiently appreciated the things they took for granted, the lawn, the great, small public school, the backyard with the cherry tree that gave big, black cherries.
My father had all the appearances of a cool guy, but the 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. It was a little bit insane.
Like anyone who rages and snarls, he justified his brutality as necessary to deal with his responsibilities, 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.
The brutal battlefield of our family dinner table was a regular feature of our childhood. It was as horrific as any war scene you can imagine. The strafing from planes, ominously rattling machine gun nests, the rolling clouds of poison gas, the stinking trenches, rusted barbed wire, the groans of dying horses were as common to us as the steak, salad and Rice-a-roni we found on our plates in front of us virtually every night. Eating steak was a sign of prosperity for a man who had been hungry during his entire childhood, my mother broiled steaks from Frank and Lenny’s almost every night. The steaks were barbecued during the spring and summer months, my father or I usually turning them on the grill. Ironically, and somewhat characteristically, my animal loving father joined PETA later in life and cut out a lot of his former meat diet.
I was an adult, well into in my late-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.
I’m realizing only now, as I write these words, since I am not a father, what most fathers would probably have realized 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 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 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 must have been at the roots of my lifelong compulsion to research and write.
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 week 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 drive 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 that 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.
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. My father’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 little sister here a decade later, a few years before their hamlet was wiped off the face of the earth along with everyone they’d ever known there, is the only reason any of us were ever born. Eli was Uncle Aren’s firstborn son, born in New York City, 1908.
My father’s first cousin 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 overwhelmed by this world, 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.
I sometimes brought friends with me to visit with him. I’d know in two minutes if the visit would be a fleeting ten hours of cheer, great stories and laughter or 150 endless minutes of grim, pointless discussion and occasional glaring. Eli either loved you or hated you, there was not much in between, though he was capable of pretending, mostly, for a couple of hours. 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.
He 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 eight-five he was formidable when he was angry, and my father seemed to be somewhat 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 that immediately changed the way I thought and felt about my father. The more I thought about it, the more it explained.
“You remember seeing those old electrical cords they used to make before the insulation was made out of plastic? They were thick and heavy, not very flexible, wrapped in layers of rough cloth for insulation. The ones you saw as a kid were frayed, like burlap — you remember those cords on the old toasters?”
I did.
“Well your grandmother, my beloved Tante Chava, had one of those cords for her steam iron that she kept in a drawer near where she sat at the head of the kitchen table.”
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.
“When your father was little, she used to reach into that drawer every time she got mad, and she had the Gleiberman temper, you know, and she’d grab that heavy cord and whip your father across the face with it.”
Across the face? What? I’d never met my paternal grandmother, who died before I was born, but… what the fuck?
“Yeah, she’d give him a couple of shots in the kisser with that heavy cord and he’d stand there cowering and crying. I saw it many times. After a while, all she had to do was rattle the drawer and your father would stand like this,” and Eli stood and did a remarkably moving imitation of a little kid staring down at the ground, cowering in terror.
“How old was he when she started whipping him in the face?” I asked.
“From the time he could stand,” Eli told me with infinite sorrow.
(to be continued)
I spent the weekend, with ambitious plans, too distracted to do much, though I did do a mean version of Yer Blues for a while there downstairs. My fault, really, being distracted, still letting petty, personal vexations twist and constrict me that way. I am 62, it is past time to get much better at not being squeezed by extraneous emotions. I’m not responsible for the misery of enraged, terrified, provocative people, I’m responsible for my own thoughts and actions, keeping my focus on what I need to do, in spite of all the noise all around.
After all, the world is as the fox told Pearl in The Amazing Bone by the immortal William Steig (may he rest in peace).
Pearl, the pretty little pig, taken home by the smiling, courtly fox, is trussed and ready for the oven, flames already leaping inside the wood burning stove. She pleads with the fox who is cutting up vegetables with gusto and whistling happily thinking of the tender, succulent pig he is about to enjoy. Pearl pleads to the fox to spare her life.
“Why must you eat me, Mr. Fox? I am young, I want to live. Please!” The fox looks over at Pearl sympathetically.
“Why are you asking me?” says the fox, “how should I know? I didn’t make the world.” (This isn’t the actual Steig line, the correct quote is below [1]) The fox finishes preparing his salad. As he leads her to the door of the oven he offers further words of solace:
‘I regret having to do this to you’, said the fox. ‘It’s nothing personal’.
It is the bone, it turns out, who says to the fox:
“You must let this beautiful young creature go on living. Have you no shame, sir!”
The fox laughed. “Why should I be ashamed? I can’t help being the way I am. I didn’t make the world.” [2]
The wisdom of that “I didn’t make the world,” however cruel its particular use might be, has always stayed with me.
It’s an answer as illuminating as “because he can” to the question of why a dog licks his genitals or how a Supreme Court justice with a glaring appearance of impropriety can insist he has no legal or moral obligation to recuse himself from sitting to hear the case.
“I didn’t make the world.”
Truly. I had no hand whatsoever in the making of this world.
My only work here these days is coherently setting down what I’ve seen, heard, learned, discovered, read, in an effort to understand as much as I can. I don’t know what compels me, exactly, or why it seems so necessary to me to write down clearly as much as I can write down in whatever time remains.
I know it has something to do with this cosmic less than wink of an eye we each have to be alive in, this flickering miracle of consciousness we so briefly share. How intolerable is it, therefore, to be forced to march in a column, for an insane reason, life and death decided by the worst and most violent humans on earth at any given time? To wait a century or more for rights our Constitution provided for almost two hundred and thirty years ago? Is it just me? I don’t think so, my friend.
(placeholder)
ii
A great book is like a fascinating conversation. When you hear the voice of someone who reads a book with feeling, the author’s ideas coming out clearly in the spoken words, you’re having a conversation with those people. The conversation of reading is as real as, and often much more substantial than, many actual conversations you may have with other living people. Particularly conversations in these contentious, violent times, which can burst into flames quicker than you can say “wait…”.
I have been listening to two fantastic audio books that I cannot recommend highly enough. Eichmann in Jerusalem (Hannah Arendt) and Dark Money (Jane Mayer). I intend to post full reviews of both here at some future time, hopefully some time this summer. In fact, the NY Public Library is into me for two weeks of overdue fines already for the paper copy of Eichmann I have been making notes from. I have to buy a copy ASAP.
iii
I offer the following as an example of the kind of thing that, designed to eliminate stress, actually causes more stress, a kind of forgetful oversimplification that can lead to a fist fight. It is the lazy mind’s approach to thinking. Take a snapshot of the idea, and that’s the idea. The snapshot is the idea, get it? If you hold the snapshot, the still frame from the movie, you’re holding the actual idea. Nuance is for fucking eggheads, and, anyway, who can keep all that contradictory shit in their heads, you know what I’m sayin’? The snapshot, on the other hand, is clear as the nose on your face. Often the only possible response to a brilliant presentation of great nuance is “Fu-uh-uck YOU!” That response often carries the day in the debate between a snapshot and the actual person in the photograph.
That’s just the way it is right now, when so many are angry, fearful, desperate, riled up, not going to take it anymore. We didn’t make the world. Consider, though, how limited the essential truth, if any, is contained in a single snapshot of anything.
There is a book called Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl. I found it in the public library in Fresh Meadows back when I was in high school. I read it and recall being very impressed by it. An editor at Wikipedia did a wonderful job describing it:
Man’s Search for Meaning is a 1946 book by Viktor Frankl chronicling his experiences as an Auschwitz concentration camp inmate during World War II, and describing his psychotherapeutic method, which involved identifying a purpose in life to feel positively about, and then immersively imagining that outcome.
Toward the end of the book (a longtime international best-seller) Frankl writes, as I recall, that the highest form of personal purpose is one you’d be willing to die to defend. I remember thinking as a sixteen year-old what a beautiful thing it must be to love someone or some value so much you’d die to protect her. I also recall being a little troubled by the statement, even as a teenager.
Over the next few decades I’d come to see the danger of this statement, removed from the humanistic context of Frankl’s book. Frankl was talking about defending decency against indecency, not endorsing some crackpot’s idea of hate and violent revenge that other enraged imbeciles would willingly die for. But take that one statement by itself, present it as a snapshot of the book and you have the humanitarian Frankl advocating suicide bombing, killing abortion doctors, performing any of the many atrocities, undertaken for the sincerest of murderous beliefs, for which certain humans are rightfully abhorred. These atrocities reflect badly on all of us humans, when you think about it. Although we, none of us, made the world.
But dig how that works. Out with the filthy bathwater, fuck the baby! You read an entire book, enjoy and get engaging ideas from the author’s conversation, agree with virtually everything you read. Then you find a paragraph toward the end that causes your brow to furrow. You underline the sentence about being willing to die for your beliefs and put it next to a picture of fucking Mohammed Atta [3]. Then you take your snapshot: Frankl says Mohammed Atta is an example of the highest form of purpose and meaning in human life. Based on that, the rest of the book can be dismissed as an intolerable incitement to fanaticism and murder. You cast it on to the bonfire, along with Mein Kampf, The Art of the Deal, Atlas Shrugged and the rest of the worst of best-selling twentieth century dreck.
A stray thought: could this hateful principle, seemingly applauding fanaticism, have possibly come from the same book by the same Victor Frankl portrayed here? Remove nuance from any conversation and all that’s left is simplistic folly, or worse.
iv
When my weekend of agitated distraction was about to begin I had an ambitious, perfectly achievable, though challenging, plan. I was optimistic about making a good start on it, with two days to myself, before my concentration was shattered by an intolerably annoying personal sideshow I was unable to put out of my mind for long. My goal is a 3,000 word publishable abstract of my 1,200 page manuscript about my father’s life and times. This would be published somewhere and I would send the enticing published clip out to literary agents to try to hook one to sell the book proposal, to get me some money, an advance from a publisher. I will take the first step now:
[1] I went searching for the exact quote, as I am bad at exact quotes in spite of having a better than average overall memory and spending hours daily carefully weighing words. You’d think I’d be better at quotations, but I really am quite lousy at getting them perfectly correct. I get the sense, almost never remember the exact words.
My own copy of Steig’s masterpiece is buried somewhere in my apartment. I found nothing on-line to enable me to give you the exact, perfect Steig quote (he was a master of language in addition to being a great artist). I provide a link to a short animated clip, an advertisement of the copyright holders for the very best of perhaps six hideous video versions of this marvelous book read aloud on the internet. I am seriously considering plunking down my $1.99, this is a beautifully done animation and aloud reading of one of the great books of all time.
[2] Excellent description and review of the Steig masterpiece, complete with quotes (yay!) and selected illustrations: HERE.
[3] Mohammed Atta was one of the 9/11 suicide terrorists who flew two 747s into the World Trade Center. His face, in the single snapshot of him most people have seen, is a mask of hatred. The nervous Sekhnet and I were at JFK airport for a flight to Spain, around 2005. She had some anxiety about the flight, and time pressure (due to my habit of arriving at the last moment), and asked me to arrive with her three or four hours prior to our flight time, to avoid stress, and I had agreed. While she slept contentedly on a bench in the terminal I walked around aimlessly with our valuables, sullenly counting the wasted minutes. Over the PA there was an announcement asking Mohammed Atta to please come to such and such a desk. The announcement was repeated several times. I was glad Sekhnet was asleep, and figured the name they were calling over and over must be a common one in some parts of the world.
There are certain things that occupy the mind so clamorously that they crowd out all productive thought. If you’re worried about something all the time to the point of preoccupation it’s hard to focus on anything else. Your work suffers. Eventually the boss sends in the guy with the ax, your head rolls a few feet and is booted into a basket. If you have no boss, thoughts themselves can be your brutal master. Certain thoughts, once they have their hooks in you, will not let go until they have sucked you dry of creativity, even the impulse to try to be creative.
Being captured by one of these thought occupying conundrums is like being caught in a loop while on a treadmill with no off switch. Presented with a difficult, seemingly insoluble problem, one real possibility, once you’ve tried to solve the damned thing a few different ways and failed, is becoming caught in a recursive cycle. You will continue to turn the problem, view it again from several different angles, tend to go over the same poor solutions again and again, failing each time and never being able to “think outside the box”, the only place where any possible solution exists after all other options have exhausted themselves. In the end, incapable of the necessary leap of inspired imagination, you’ll become convinced the problem has no solution.
Every serious problem ever faced by humans, the deadliest problem of the day, was solved by an inspired leap of creative imagination. These leaps are not conceivable to caged animals, pacing their confinement off in a track that rubs the fur off one of their flanks. Once the problem is solved, often by something ingeniously simple, the solution seems obvious, is eventually taken for granted. Before we harnessed fire, what?
Take any political stalemate you like as an example of the supremely distracting, mental energy sapping thing I’m trying to bring out. The killing on the Palestinian side of the Gaza fence. You can turn that one several ways, and it doesn’t ever come out good. The answer is not there, among terror advocates, human shields, political tools, protectors of democracy, dupes, zealots willing to die and snipers with orders to shoot to kill. In the end, your mind glazes over, you pick a side and glare, or turn your eyes away in despair. Even as you’re aware the human truth is not really there on either present merciless side: a terrorist outfit running Gaza, right wing nationalist extremists running Israel, and that no solution is possible as long as these merciless motherfuckers are running the horror show.
You get something stuck between your molars. It is lodged so firmly that it actually makes your teeth hurt a little bit, pain now traveling along your jaw. You can’t get it out with your fingers, your fingernails, with a toothpick, the thinnest blade of your pocket knife, the edge of your map, your tongue endlessly goes to it, you are talking, trying to do other things but distracted. Nobody has dental floss. You’re seven miles out on a hiking trail. Up shit’s creek, no paddle. If only…
There are many things like this in life, particularly in a fast-paced competitive society that believes “time is money,” and “chop, chop, we’re on the clock.” Time is obviously not money in the most basic sense. You can have a billion dollars, but when you run out of time, the worms begin licking their lips, dirt is thrown over you (the passive voice used) and your money is no good here, sir. Time is time, the only real possession we have while we’re here breathing, dreaming and being so often distracted. It is, of course, difficult to see that in a land where everyone keeps chanting “time is money, chop, chop, we’re on the clock!” The chant of a crowd is supremely distracting. A good chant can actually produce mass mindlessness. The examples in history and current events are so numerous and well-known that we can safely skip the example.
I’ve often railed against the lying, attention demanding false show called advertising, also known as Public Relations (and in the political context; propaganda) which has, of course, come to rule electoral politics in modern democracy, as well as in modern dictatorship, now that I think of it. During a brief stay in a PhD program in History (with the capital H, to be sure) I focused on the rise of the Nazis, masters of organized public lying on a mass level, the abusive fathers of the modern political advertising almost universally practiced today.
The rise of Nazism and the functioning of their infernal state were things I’d studied long and hard as an undergraduate. I even won a prize for my research paper The Nazis vs. Degenerate Art, which, like so many things, sounds more ominous in German: entartete kunst. In the decades since that Joan Kelly Prize-winning paper several books have come out about the infamous Nazi campaign against modern art. At the time, I was among the first Americans to explore the subject, with very little research material then available in English. I was basically following somebody’s footnote about entartete kunst. I somehow procured an original catalogue of the show that travelled through the Reich, the highest attended art show until the Metropolitan Museum put on King Tut (or maybe it was MoMA’s massive Picasso show) an art show that broke the record half a century later. Devilish shit, that black and white glossy catalogue, with a particularly ugly African mask on the cover, staring out with dead, hollow eyes.
Anyway, I noticed in my reading and watching that as mass media became the monolithic force it is today (and today, of course, our selected mass media is in our pocket, with a beep to notify us there is something urgently waiting for us to look at) corporations and governments took on more and more of the same tactics for influencing and dominating public opinion. The same experts who earned the most money in commercial advertising (masters of “psychological warfare” like Edward Bernays, who coined the phrase around 1920) sold things like war (Committee for Public Information in the build up to U.S entry into WWI, much extolled by Hitler in Mein Kampf) and political candidates. I’ve written a lot about this sickening subject over the years, there are many excellent books out there on the subject, (Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent comes to mind, there’s a great movie of that title on youtube, if I’m not mistaken; I’m not, here you go ) and the power of advertising in our current world is hard to overstate.
DISTRACTION, on a mass level, by design.
When I sat down to write yesterday I was unable to begin the important, challenging thing I have in mind to write (a 3,000 word version of the book about my father, to sell to some publication so as to procure a literary agent to sell the book, though it will be hard enough to sell the short piece to any impressive publication without a literary agent– Catchuh-22!) until I had written something else, cleansing the mental palette of what has been distracting me so much lately. A long friendship dating back to when I was seven or eight years old, on the ropes, bleeding from multiple cuts, both eyes swollen shut, head carbuncled with contusions, panting piteously as the onlookers gasp, referee nowhere in sight. I’m requested not to write anything about this, no matter how obliquely, even though writing clearly is the only way I know how to really process anything. The only way I can set the thing clearly in front of myself is to write it coherently for someone else. I am sternly requested not to write about it, chided with: I would certainly never publicly write about you, or any of your troubles. I could write it in my diary, I suppose, if I still kept one, but I don’t. I consider the discipline of writing for “publication” essential to my writing life.
So there you go, let’s just close that annoying fucking loop and focus on the difficult work ahead. Here we go loop de loo. Fine. Eyes on the prize. Mind on spin cycle. There is no way out. I will not be distracted, I will not be distracted, I will not be distracted, I will… OK, I suppose I will.
A true artist, I was once convinced, learns to extirpate everything from his life that distracts from making art. Now I think this is a cynical formulation created by auto-mythologizing public relations monsters like genius and money-machine Pablo Picasso, who devoured whole women alive to obtain the raw materials for his masterworks. On the other hand, fuck. Some weeds just need to be rooted out, tossed into the sun to dry out, become airy puppets for the doomed feral kittens in the garden to bat around.
Outside, the world is raging. People are actually arguing about what to call the cages they are throwing confiscated children into. One wealthy country’s criminally misguided drug laws put neighboring countries’ drug cartels into overdrive, people are killed, tortured, threatened. Citizens flee the violence of their impoverished home countries. They are caught at a border, have their kids grabbed, or are told that their children will wait for them while they’re being processed as potential illegal terrorist types [1]. Then, as the adults go with authorities, their kids are secretly whisked hundreds of miles away, no receipt given, the kids can be anywhere. Whose fault is that?
Outside, on the Fourth of July, freedom is no doubt loudly, ponderously on the march. Is it still freedom if it wears jackboots? Back in Germany, between the world wars, as the violent revenge fantasies were gestating in vats of nationalist, racist steroids, militant German youth marched chanting “wir sheissen auf die freiheit!“. The NY Times translated this as “we spit on freedom!’ though, of course, the active verb in that sentence means “shit”. WE SHIT ON FREEDOM!
In my mind, it is much more quiet. Nobody shitting on freedom, no bureaucrats sending children hundreds of miles from their parents with no records kept, no world leader threatening to detonate nuclear bombs and annihilate millions if he doesn’t get universal adulation — and a Nobel Peace Prize.
“You pretentious asshole,” says an old friend.
“Yes?” I say.
“You seriously believe you can write your way out of a world of festering horrors?”
Mmmm, result is unclear.
“Did you read that off the little screen of your magic 8 ball?”
It is likely.
“Look, you seem to feel you can just write out your thoughts and feelings and put them up for your dozens of mindless followers to salute.”
Here is my bottom line. If you are my friend, I give you the benefit of the doubt. I exert myself not to judge the things you do to survive, even if they are things I myself am unable to do.
“Fuck you!” says my old friend.
Didn’t mean to sound judgmental, old bean. I only mean to point out that my first duty, as your friend, is to give you every benefit of every doubt. I was directed to an interesting opinion piece in the Grey Skank the other day about the corrosive shame so many men feel, and how it leads to the disrespect of women, which fuels more shame. This cycle culminates, of course, in toxic masculinity. That is the kind of macho bluster that puts violence at the top of the list of ways to get people who say uncomfortable things to shut the fuck up.
“Jesus, the torture never stops! Will you get to the fucking point?” says my old friend.
Of course. Giving the benefit of the doubt starts with recognizing the feelings of another person. He did this because he felt he was about to be killed. Fair enough. In his shoes I might well have done the same thing. I certainly would have felt the same way he did.
“You are maddening!” he says.
Yes. Anyway, I’ve learned that you cannot argue, or it is pointless to argue, aggravating and counterproductive to argue (unless your goal is a good argument), that you should not feel what you are feeling. The feeling must be acknowledged, its reality accepted. The feeling is what it is, the reasons for it cannot be understood or addressed without first acknowledging the feeling. No productive conversation into overcoming the bad feelings can be had if the other person’s strong feelings are denied.
“Feel this, motherfucker,” says my old friend clenching his fist and brandishing it uselessly.
“Oh, uselessly, eh?” says my old friend, swinging his fist an inch from my nose.
I smile without showing my teeth. “Doan wase yourself…” I say through my smile/smirk, like Bruce Lee on the deck of that boat in Enter the Dragon, not even turning my head to the bully, watching the waves lapping in the distance.
My friend punches me full force in the mouth.
Feel better, do we?
“You self-righteous fucking asshole,” says my friend.
Yes?
Look, I get that your feelings are hurt. I seem to be blaming you for acting badly, even though it wasn’t your fault. You were in a total panic, afraid I was secretly angry at you, maliciously sabotaging your shaky marriage. I get all that. It was important for you to point out, at that time, that I always feel I’m right, never admit the possibility I could be wrong, never apologize about anything. I apologized to you, for what it was worth. Then you told me how hurt and angry you are that I see you as an anxious person who needs to be protected. I get it, I get all that, truly.
Thing is, though, strong feelings, stirred and unacknowledged by the people who are supposed to be your closest friends, lead to other strong feelings. This happens almost in direct proportion to the strength of the feeling that is left unacknowledged. If you deny my right to be angry, what am I to do with the feeling? You come to me in rage, I don’t acknowledge your right to be angry. Tell you you’re a fucking baby, advise you to “grow a pair”, man up, stop being a pussy(cat). What happens to the rage I tell you to fucking shut up about?
“One punch in the face wasn’t enough for you?” asks my friend.
Once is never enough, from a man like you. You remember that Captain and Tennille line, the pretty Tenille singing to the Captain: do that to me one more time, once is never enough, with a man like you. What the hell?
“I’m going to kill you,” says my friend.
No, you are not going to kill anyone. One thing I can assure you, I am not going to be killed by you today. You may feel like killing me, and we can talk about that, you toxic male you, but you ain’t going to kill me any more than I’m going to kill you.
Feel free, in the meantime, to punch me in the face as hard, and as many times, as you like. I’ve got to get back to my daydreaming on Independence Day, so forgive me if I don’t cry out. Rest assured, your punches are mighty, and terrible indeed.
[1] Not to make a gratuitous comparison between government lies told to helpless people, but when the Nazis forced the Jews at the killing centers to strip naked and line up, the Jews were told it was for a shower, not a gas chamber. Which would you rather step into? A nice hot shower, or a sealed room about to be pumped full of poison gas? Come on, is there even a choice?
It’s funny, sometimes, to notice how one thing leads to another. Events and thoughts can proceed in a way that makes you suddenly see something in a completely new light.
The other day, in the sudden extreme heat (the real feel temperature got over 100 in New York City the last few days), I found myself walking around in just shorts. It was too onerous to wear a shirt, or socks, and since I was inside, moving from fan to fan, I simply wore the minimum to remain decent while walking past the many ground floor windows at the farm.
At some point, standing at the sink of the upstairs bathroom, looking into the mirror, I suddenly saw my immense, oblong gut in a new light– sunlight. Sunlight may be the best disinfectant for certain things, but it is the harshest possible light in which to see something like a watermelon-sized stomach ballooning over a waist band. The slanting sunlight lit my stomach from a merciless angle, with a light that made the bulk fully three dimensional in a way my own dim bathroom mirror does not.
I was suddenly filled with horror, true horror, as I turned and saw it from all angles (it was particularly grievous from the side). I immediately vowed to limit my caloric intake (and have so far, going on my third day, though today for brunch I had toast and home fries) as I rehab my knees, toward the day I will also get back on my former exercise regime. It was a visceral thing, truly. Not as if, mind you, I was unaware of the twenty or so pounds I have to lose, but seeing it in this harsh new light there was no longer any way for me to rationalize wearing this thick, bulbous vest of adipose tissue. Not good for my health, nor for wearing a bathing suit next weekend at our friends’ house by a lake.
From this thought to Hannah Arendt’s illuminating insight that totalitarianism, as distinct from normal despotism, military dictatorship, brutal monarchy and other familiar time-honored forms of authoritarianism, requires mobilization of the masses in the complete service of the leader and his State. This new mass authoritarianism only became possible with the advent of truly mass media. Hitler or Stalin, no matter what their genius for manipulating their followers, could not have exerted the complete social control they did without full ownership of the press and those two nascent mass media technologies, motion pictures and live broadcasts over radio waves (plus telephones and a few other useful technologies for keeping tabs and issuing orders).
Totalitarian society is always organized as a strict hierarchic bureaucracy, with party loyalists running every one of its hundreds of branches. Bureaucracy had been around before totalitarians harnessed it, but with the advent of new technologies, it became a much more efficient machine for social control. Technology, as it was developed, became instantly part of the administration of these bureaucracies.
International Business Machines (IBM), for example, caused a little bit of a stink (though it didn’t seem to hurt their corporate bottom line) when it was learned, after World War Two, that IBM had made its new punchcard technology available to Nazi bureaucrats who used it to ensure the cattle cars heading East were full, and to keep track of who was left to ship East for “resettlement”. Just a business doing business, corporate bottom line and all, no moral stance whatsoever, just money making money. [1]
The word bureaucracy conjures hellish images out of a Kafkaesque nightmare. That is for good reason. Bureaucracies are pyramids, and the vast bulk of the workers in a bureacucracy are powerless, hopeless ants serving their individual bosses on each level, without the slightest autonomy, or even much enthusiasm for their small, mechanical jobs, jobs they usually do with almost total indifference.
An ant seems undeterrably enthusiastic about moving crumbs back to the queen at the top of the anthill hierarchy because it is programmed to do so, not because that individual ant has a sense of agency or any kind of autonomy. A chemical impulse makes the ant behave as it does, and it is not the ant’s place to question anything. The human member of a bureaucracy, however, is by nature somewhat resigned, depressed and embittered. It is a job that can make you cynical and mean. You have responsibility for a limited set of mechanical tasks, a limitless amount of drudgery to get through each shift, a very small amount of power (if any at all) and, the best you can hope for, if you do the shit little job well, is upward promotion.
Reminds me of a great remark I once heard about the Rat Race. Even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.
To be human is to expect more, if only because we have powerful myths about our unlimited power as individuals to determine the course of our own lives. It is undeniable that human progress, and individual progress, is made by those who tirelessly work to make this potential real. But for the vast masses of individuals, it’s off to work, to a job that usually sucks, for less money than they need or feel they deserve.
As a low level bureaucrat, you tell the disgruntled member of the public you are forced to deal with that they must do such and such. When they complain you defensively tell them you didn’t make the rules, and that if they don’t want to give up their place on the long line they have already waited on, they’d better do what you’re telling them. In modern corporate and government bureaucracy your chance of being given correct information is about 50/50, at best [2]. Things are much simpler under totalitarian bureaucracy: you simply do what they say or they send someone to get you and they kill you.
Adding current digital, algorithm-driven technology to bureaucracy brings us into a whole new world of shit. Use your phone to look for a product, you get all the related ads almost instantly. When Hitler was pioneering the use of radio, he could get on the air and make a persuasive, lying pitch to millions of Germans at once. This ability to sell “on the air” helped make him a celebrity, a star, a man with seemingly superhuman powers. He was the first to address a nation from the air, as his plane flew over a disputed corridor, under Polish control, that he claimed should by right be part of the German Reich. This was something only a god could do back in 1932, thunder from the air to millions of people. In 2018, a three year-old on the toilet, tweeting incoherently from his celebrity mommy’s phone, is as godlike as a flying, thundering Hitler over the Polish corridor. OK, extreme example, maybe, and not the best. A public official with 20,000,000 twitter followers can reach them all instantly, 24/7, from wherever he/she/it is. How’s that for a god?
I don’t know where else to go at the moment with these thoughts. It’s not as if, thank God, we actually have a public official with 20,000,000 followers who can instantly send them ranting real-time temper tantrums at 5 a.m. while straining over his stools.
(More fiber, you imaginary costive motherfucker.)
[1] In our own time, recently Bill Gates had a tiny bit of dung flung his way when it was revealed that Microsoft facial recognition software had been sold (or perhaps given) to the current U.S. government to help I.C.E. recognize and root out the many potentially dangerous foreign rapists, murderers, terrorists and just plain undocumented “illegal aliens” and their so-tempting-to-cage children.
[2] Trying to log-in the other day to pay my $375 biennial fee to keep my law license intact, I encountered a series of technological cul de sacs that prevented me from completing my registration (or even starting it, really). Frustrating. I sent an email to the help desk and got a helpful reply instructing me on exactly what I needed to do to complete my registration. I did those things, got no further than the day before, wound up in the same cul de sac.
Fortunately, the email reply came with a phone number, which I then called. Unfortunately, the phone was eventually answered by an imbecile. The imbecile told me that I had to log-in with a computer, that I couldn’t use a Mac or an iPad to register. I told the imbecile that I’d logged in and registered successfully two years ago with a Mac, which is also, by the way, a computer. He soon grew impatient with my attitude.
I asked him for the number for tech support, which he said was located in Albany. He didn’t have the number. Connected me to somebody who told me what was going on: the site had been down the other day when I tried to log-in, there had also been many problems with the site’s functionality on Google chrome. He assured me that, of course, it had nothing to do with Mac or PC format. While I had this guy on the phone I logged in with another browser and found myself in the same cul de sac. The problem was not Google chrome.
He agreed that an email about the website being down the other day, or known problems with Google, would have been preferable to constant ambiguous error messages, incorrect instructions, or the idiotic invention about the Macs. I mentioned my former friend the computer programer who is on the Asperger’s scale, suggesting that many automated replies, such as the ones I kept getting were programmed by folks like him and were neither intuitive nor helpful. We agreed that often machine logic is simply not the same as human logic, much as we might wish it to be so. We talked for a while and found a work-around
He had more useful information for me, I could forego the $375 fee if I did such and such (I may do it next cycle, if I can confirm it’s true). We spoke for a while, I made notes, he verified everything I read back to him. Great guy. Asked his name. It was Joe. “Thank you, Joe,” I told him. The odds of talking to a person like that, in any bureaucracy, are about 10 to 1 against it.
In any bureaucracy, you have a more than 50/50 chance of talking to a peevish moron talking through his or her ass than to someone who actually knows how to help. Luck of the draw, really.
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