Irv’s dilemma

My father was a friend of the underdog, ally of the oppressed and broken-hearted idealist turned bitter cynic in the latter years of his life.   He truly wanted to instill in me a love of independence, unwavering honesty, fearlessness in advocating for what was right, and resoluteness opposing tyranny in all forms. 

His dilemma was that his own trauma compelled him to behave tyrannically whenever he felt confronted.  He was unable to control this impulse to dominate, by any means necessary, and so he constantly offered himself as the model of the tyranny I must reject, according to the principles he taught me, while wanting more than anything my respect for his authority and my independence from it.  Damn!  Talk about a no win dilemma.

He instilled in me a lifelong quest for justice, even as he insisted on the most unjust proposition imaginable — the child who is being made to suffer is the cause of everyone’s suffering.   

This intolerable proposition had been forced down his throat, from the time he could stand.  His mother, a diminutive redhead prone to fits of uncontrollable rage, used to whip him in the face.   How does a mother whip her toddler in the face?  She truly believes the kid is viciously defying her.  She has to beat this devil out of him.

The kid, in turn, grows up to hate a bully more than anything in the world.   The only problem is that nobody is more prone to bullying others than someone who has been bullied.  The anger toward the bully is there, along with a determination never to be bullied again.  If the only way to avoid being bullied by a challenging, defiant new born baby is to bully them, how is that anybody’s fault?

So my poor devil father had a dilemma that could only be solved by difficult work that was too painful for him to do, too excruciating to even consider doing.  Poor bastard!

Perception management

Sometimes somebody in a disagreement will insist that everything is simply a matter of perspective.  Everyone has their own perception, and different people can see the exact same thing from very different perspectives.   There is a certain universal truth to that.  Think of any work of art that shows the same event from multiple points of view, it appears like a completely different event, depending on whose version you accept.  

It is a small step from the undeniable truth of how our perceptions shape reality to the conviction that no two people can necessarily ever agree on anything that took place, if it aroused strong emotions, since we all see things from our own point of view based on our emotional histories.  The trouble with this view is that it removes the possibility of ever agreeing about anything based on actual events or evidence of any kind that can be agreed on.  It leads to the acceptance of “alternative fact” as well as a perfectly defensible difference of opinion about those ever pliable, transactional “facts”.  It fosters the idea that since everyone’s emotions are always true to them, everyone’s perspective is equally true to them and that persuasion, learning and improving are therefore also strictly subjective matters. 

An easy way to refute this kind of solipsism is the punch in the face.  If I punch you in the face, I may perceive that you made me do it, you may perceive it was a vicious, unprovoked attack, but we won’t be disputing the actual punch.  If you are susceptible to self-doubt, or if you can acknowledge that you provoked the violence, I may be able to convince you that it was your own goddamned fault I had to sock you, but the fact that I socked you is not a matter of perspective, it objectively took place.  Just look at your bloody nose if you have any doubt.

Take the case of an unappeasable parent. The child finds herself locked in a war she has no insight into, turned into a combatant from before she can even speak. Nothing the child can ever do, even as an adult, can appease someone who is unappeasable.  The parent will insist the kid is the source of all the hostility, tension, anger, misunderstanding, stubbornness, refusal to be reasonable or well-behaved, a plague on the family.  A family friend will likely have a different perspective, caring for both parties and wanting to help both.  Tell the kid their parent is unappeasable and make an enemy of the parent.  Tell the parent it’s not the kid’s fault and you will face the ire of the unappeasable parent now outraged that you are blaming them for the kid’s genetic predisposition to be a provocative, angry, mean, needy little asshole.

It is a tragedy of human history that many of the most angry people in the world are the most adept at blaming their victims.   It is the true genius of homo sapiens (the “wise ape”) to justify our actions, no matter how badly we act.   We can justify them intellectually, when we have facts in our favor, or emotionally, when the facts will not so easily support our hurtful actions.   We never, with no exception I can think of, act not believing that we are right, or at least justified, in doing what we do.  Every act of violence is committed in a moment where the angry person believes 100% that what they are doing is righteous.  After cooling down, many will have regrets about the damage they did, but in the moment of attack they believed in their righteousness absolutely.   That’s what it takes to hurt people, true belief that they fucking deserve it.

A feeling can’t be right or wrong, it is what you truly feel.  The important thing is to analyze the feeling after you calm down, see what in it is reasonable, and to be heeded, and what part is purely your old pain kicking up and making you feel bad again. And if you keep reacting out of pain, and keep inflicting pain with your reactions, and learn nothing from it, you’re just an asshole I’m sorry to say.

What you can healthily accept — and what you must not

You can, and must, accept the imperfections and weaknesses of those you love.  It is easy enough to do.  We all have our faults and we all need to be accepted as the damaged souls we are.   We should also try to do better once we know that certain of our tics are hurtful to someone we love.  

Not everyone is capable of self-reflection and change, sadly, such things terrify some people.  But it’s important to the health and mutuality of intimate relationships to try to do both of those things, when needed.   Criticism from a loved one does not mean repudiation and rejection — it means you need to be aware of the hurtful effects of your actions on someone you care about.   You need to sometimes accept criticism from those you love, it may be fair or unfair, and it can be discussed, but it is brutal, and deadly, to angrily shut down any talk about it.

What you must not accept is blame for the imperfections, weaknesses and vices of those you love.  If the ultimatum below sounds familiar, and does not change no matter how calmly you manage to proceed, walk away:

“As long as you don’t ever criticize me, or show impatience, or raise your voice, or employ mean body language, as long as you accept everything I say as beyond dispute, we will remain dear friends forever.  Once you make me feel bad about myself, even one time, I will show you who the actual irredeemable asshole is in this equation.”

Rest assured that if they set those conditions, and insist on them, that they will make good on their threat, because, no matter how patient you might be able to remain most of the time, we all have our limits and will be pushed to them.  

Once you reach your limit, and start banging your head on the wall, as I found myself doing recently (actually, I picked up a small wooden stool and bopped myself in the forehead with it), the proof is now there for everyone to see — only an irredeemable asshole acts that way after only an hour or two of no-holds-barred conflict over who has a greater right to feel hurt for the last year and over what.

Somebody recently called me a saint because I’ve been trying to remain very patient with two, dear old friends in the face of this kind of ongoing ultimatum.  I told her “I am one very goddamned fucking angry saint, I can tell you for sure.”   While faintly amusing, it was also true.

If you can accept that you must remain eternally patient while those who feel criticized or challenged by you can show immediate anger whenever they feel desperate, I’m not sure what to tell you, except, perhaps, that you need to think it through again.  It is very, very hard, unthinkable, really, to leave people you love — there may be nothing harder to do.  Except, in my experience, it is even harder, and much more destructive, to cling to one-sided relationships where every conflict can only be stopped by assuming the entire fault for it and never again making the other person feel discomfort by talking about anything you need to resolve.  

The damage to yourself of accepting this kind of lack of mutuality is ongoing, and will never stop until you put a stop to it.  Once the cycle of blame, and who has a greater right to be aggrieved, sets in, you cannot change it on your end alone, no matter how sincerely you try to show love.  You must be blamed, and accept all fault, or be destroyed.  If you have friends in common, it will be necessary to destroy your good name among them as well.

It’s as hard as death itself to leave a long, loving relationship that has become corrosive, but harder still is living in a ruthless funhouse where honesty is discarded and angry desperation is turned relentlessly and implacably on you.  I grew up in a house like that, moved out when I was 17, many years ago.   The harm it did has been a long lifetime healing, as far as I have been able to heal.  The echoes of it, whenever I am made the focus of other people’s hurt and anger, extending to a tyrannical insistence that I simply stop fucking talking about what’s bothering me, have become impossible to bear.  

So I recognize now that I am in mourning, having finally, and with extreme reluctance, seen what a healthier person would probably have been able to observe a year ago, ten months ago, six months ago, last month.   It does nobody any kind of favor to carry the heavy cadaver of what was once a loving friendship around, hoping it will begin to breathe again, and smile, and thank you for having undying faith in resurrection.  

And just like physical death, or maybe even more so, the thought of a forever parting can feel unbearable, which is why we cling to things even after we’ve seen over and over they are not as they were.  Even after they have become intensely painful and impossible to stop pondering.

So, mourn I must, as I forgive my understandable slowness to take my leave from an unbearably painful situation.   The only alternative is pretending there is nothing to fix that can’t be fixed by simply not bringing up pain ever again and placidly accepting the entire fault for a deadly impasse I am at best 50% responsible for, and somehow accepting that doing those things will magically restore something, including trust, that is now irretrievably gone.

Accept all the blame and simply act like everything is fine again?   No can do.  Neither should you. 

Party of the Big Lie

Because a narcissist like Trumpie can only be the greatest winner in the world or its most humiliated loser, he continues to insist (with all evidence showing he’s lying, he lost by 7,000,000 votes) that he never lost the 2020 election.  He has no proof, but he doesn’t need it.  He just lies, over and over, and those who love and admire him love him for it.  “He’s stronger than the so-called truth, facts, evidence, rules, laws, norms, Constitution, what have you!  That’s our boy!”

His latest maniacal move is to call for the abolition of all laws, norms, rules, the Constitution itself, in order to overturn the stolen election that he lost by the same Electoral College margin he called a landslide when it went in his favor in 2016. His party, which rode him to fabulous far right fever dream success, is so far sticking with their man, the leader of their party and its most likely candidate in 2024. Presumably cooler heads within the party are waiting for an indictment and conviction to remove him from the political playing field, although history shows they shouldn’t hold their breath. Here’s a link to Heather with an excellent piece about the latest shamelessness from the shamefully obsequious Grand Old Party. The party of Law and Order.

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/december-3-2022?r=74gv9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

“When you catch somebody in a fraud you’re allowed to go by a different set of rules”

Heather Cox Richardson:

Today, one of former president Trump’s messages on the struggling right-wing social media platform Truth Social went viral. 

In the message, Trump again insisted that the 2020 presidential election had been characterized by “MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION,” and suggested the country should “throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or…have a NEW ELECTION.” 

Then he added: “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!” 

In other words, Trump is calling for the overthrow of the Constitution that established this nation. He advocates the establishment of a dictator. 

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/december-3-2022?r=74gv9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

As anyone in his position would. As he told his crowd at the Ellipse, from behind bullet proof glass, after urging his crew to take away the magnetometers so his angry supporters could attack the Capitol fully armed to kill Pence, Pelosi and others “When you catch somebody in a fraud you’re allowed to go by a different set of rules.”

Is it a surprise that the same guy fell in love with a misogynistic 24 year-old Nazi at a recent Mar-a-Lago dinner with a deranged superstar of rap and self-hatred?

Eleventh Circuit smacks down MAGA judge Aileen “toward my benefactor” Cannon

Every lawyer who discussed this novel case of the target of a legal search warrant bringing a civil suit against the United States of America, to get as much delay as possible in the US criminal investigation into his theft of classified documents, knew Judge Aileen Cannon had no jurisdiction to hear the case.  In Trump v. US she claimed equitable (fairness) jurisdiction which is only available when there is no adequate remedy at law and the result would be grossly unfair without a court stepping in.  In this case, of course, Trump had an adequate remedy at law — to contest the legality of the search warrant.  A case he never brought because there was no chance of success.   The search warrant was not only legal, it turned up the evidence described in the warrant, found in the specific places described in the warrant.

So Trump did an end-run to prevent the evidence being used against him by the Department of Justice.  Ran his shabby Hail Mary lawsuit 70 miles up the coast to a courthouse where the supremely loyal Cannon was the only federal judge there.  He managed to buy about four months of delay.   Now his incoherent lawsuit against the US government has been dismissed and the government can review the thousands of papers seized pursuant to the legal search warrant.   He’ll probably go to the Supreme Court, because, why the fuck not?   They will make a 9-0 one sentence ruling upholding the Eleventh circuit’s decision overruling Cannon’s absurd, although highly loyal, order.  The Eleventh circuit appeals panel (two Trump appointees and a Dubya Bush appointee) sent the case back to Cannon to dismiss it herself for lack of jurisdiction, which is the most humiliating way they could have ended the case.

It was a major smackdown.  If they’d upheld Cannon’s order they’d be giving permission to every subject of a search warrant to sue the government in civil court to prevent the review of criminal evidence legally seized by the government.

“The law is clear. We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so. Either approach would be a radical reordering of our caselaw limiting the federal courts’ involvement in criminal investigations. And both would violate bedrock separation-of-powers limitations.”

Next move — make a grim example of brand new, lawless federal MAGA judge Aileen Mercedes Canon by bringing her in front of a judicial ethics panel and disciplining her publicly. Or better still, remove her from the federal bench.