Senseless enmity

My father’s mother, a diminutive red haired religious woman with a brutal temper, used to snarl whenever my father and his little brother fought. “Seenas Cheenam!” she would say, Yiddish for “senseless enmity!” They lived in poverty impressive even by the desperate standards of the Depression, their mother openly hated their father, the larger older brother was regularly whipped in the face by his mother, the sickly younger brother was always pampered by that same mother. Add it up and you get “Seenas Cheenam!”

My father spoke very little of his deeply scarring childhood, except to point out from time to time that he grew up in “grinding poverty.” That was the phrase he always used when comparing his lot to my sister’s and mine. We also heard the phrase “Seenas Cheenam” often enough growing up that it sticks in my head. I later learned Hebrew and the word cheenam means “free,” or “gratuitous,” if you will, seenas being the Yiddishized version of the Hebrew seenat, hatred.

Psychological insight into human behavior is not necessarily a widespread human characteristic. Certainty, of course, is. We like to be sure before we whip somebody that we are doing the right thing. And so it was with my grandmother, an uneducated woman from a family soon to be murdered en masse, prone to fits of righteous rage, a woman who died young, of cancer, a few years before I was born. The irony of her dismissing any reason the boys might be at each other’s throats in that sadistic experiment they grew up in is not lost on me. Blaming her boys for being at each other’s throats for no reason was her way of being certain that she was always doing what was best, exactly what God wanted her to do. Certainty is the human genius.

Before my uncle died (in a rehab center) he told his son and me that he had framed photos of our great grandparents in the house his son was selling. We looked everywhere, didn’t find them, and, on a last pass through, before locking up the house for the last time after it was sold, I walked into the sun room. There behind the wicker couch my demented aunt had secreted the almost life-sized portrait heads of my grandmother’s parents, in beautiful oval frames. I could barely stand looking at them. These two had created a monster of their youngest child, my father’s violently unlucky mother.

I can only imagine the household that raises their youngest to whip her infant son in the face over and over. I look at the face of her mother, in a photo taken before 1914 when my grandmother arrived here in the US. I shudder. The father looks a bit more human, though as I look a moment longer I start to cringe. People who were being photographed for the only time in their lives tend to look stiff, and rigid, and perhaps not at their most natural in the photographer’s studio, but there is something about these two that gives me the creeps.

It is the knowledge that they raised a girl who grew up to viciously take out her misery on her first born son, a toddler who grew up to be my father. My father, though he did much better than his mother, also was unable to resist taking out his misery and his unslakable anger on his children. He was not one to hit, but his brutal words, as he eventually admitted, were as harmful as any regime of slaps, punches or kicks could have been.

We don’t want insight, we want to be right. Keep it fucking simple, you merciless asshole! I am right, as my gut is telling me, as my muscular tension tells me, as the surge of fight/flight/freeze chemicals urge me, as my every justification fucking tells me!

My sister and I had a terrible fight almost thirty years ago when my niece was a toddler. Frustrations from years of conflict flared up and I lost my temper. So did my sister who began screaming for me to get out of her fucking house. My niece said, from her highchair, “mom, stop screaming at Uncle Elie!” Sides clearly had to be drawn more decisively, as they were over the years, until my niece and nephew were convinced not to communicate with their crazy uncle any more. Right is right when it comes to seenas cheenam, you understand.

US Covid deaths back to a 9/11 body count weekly

Now that the brutal daily death tolls of Covid-19 are behind us, we are all relieved to act like Covid-19 is no longer a deadly threat. We now have vaccines, boosters and a drug that cures it in many cases. The number of people dying of the pandemic has gone way down from its horrific peak numbers around the 2020 elections, even here in America, the world leader in Covid deaths (thanks Jared, Pence and Donald). The sad fact this holiday season: Covid death in the US is on the rise again, a 40% rise over the last two weeks.

The tracker on the NY Times website shows that 466 Americans died of Covid yesterday. Multiply that number by 7 and you get 3,262. More than the 2,996 people who died in the horrific terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. The numbers are also up for the seasonal flu and a new threat called RSV.

Sekhnet, vaxxed and triple boosted, is often the only person wearing a mask outside. I was the only person I saw on the E train last night wearing a mask. Everyone is so relieved not to have that invasion on our personal autonomy, the slight difficulty drawing a breath, that every subway car, supermarket and restaurant is now a superspreader site. Since the radical right weaponized reasonable health precautions and equated wearing masks with intolerable tyranny (totally different from forcing ten year-old rape victims to give birth!), many now see wearing or refusing to wear a mask as a political statement.

If so, think of the statement this way: if I have asymptomatic Covid-19 and could give it to you, there is less chance of transmission if I submit to the tyranny of wearing a fucking face mask, for your sake, and the sake of everyone else who might be susceptiple to dying of this deadly disease, you ignorant, racist, misogynistic, kool-aid drinking, MAGA hat wearing, USA! USA!!!–chanting asshole.

Blindsided

nice snack

American Exceptionalism #43

You’re goddamned right we’re exceptional, this is the only wealthy country in the world where every old person is guaranteed the right to have no teeth. Every American knows that teeth and dental care are no more a part of a person’s health than the ability to see, no matter what the so-called scientific community might have to say. Insurance carriers have the last word here and even government insurance, unless you’re dirt poor and qualified for Medicaid, does not cover so-called dental and so-called vision.

Two things that rarely afflict seniors anyway, losing teeth and failing eyesight. We salute you here, from the land of the toothless and the home of the blind.

If you live long enough, in the land of freedom loving mass shootings.

Bezos newspaper describes Elon Musk

From last week’s Washington Post, in an article about Twitter suspending the account of swastika posting genius Ye. Note the pathologically greedy Jeff Bezos’s generous framing of his fellow suremely entitled psychopath

Musk purchased the site for $44 billion in late October, and has moved rapidly to shift the company in the direction of his free speech ideals.

Free thinking idealists, one and all. Democracy dies in darkness, y’all.

A nice understated invitation to exchange fisticuffs

The guy from Procol Harum who wrote the Bach-like intro to A Whiter Shade of Pale sued the other members of the group, all of whom had made millions from royalties on this universally played wedding tune, for writing credit. A British journalist interviewed him on the eve of his lawsuit. The guy explained how he’d written the iconic opening and had not been given songwriting credit with the others. No credit, no royalties, on a song that is apparently among the most played tunes in history by wedding bands and other party bands.

The reporter said: “so, you’re saying they could have been more generous with you?”

The British musician answered with beautiful British understatement “they could hardly have been less generous.”

An old friend, after fighting me for many months to establish that I’d hurt him much worse than he and his wife had ever hurt me, eventually conceded that telling me “you have to understand that I am too upset by what you did to listen to your explanation about why you were upset” was wrong, and not an act of friendship. Though it took a long time for him to be able to admit it, I felt like an anvil had been taken off my chest when I heard that. It was a phantom anvil removed from a phantom chest, as things turned out.

Months later, after a second ugly attempt for the four of us to discuss the original upsetting events, the long ongoing silence and discomfort, anger, denial, cover-up, blame, constant reframing and so forth, I realized the problem underlying all this hideous, insoluble tension is beyond my ability to even try to help solve. I am, after all, in the eyes of my old friends, their threatening common enemy, therefore my insights, such as they are, can only make things more dangerous for everybody. I told my old friend I was not encouraged by the second angry session, even as I had largely refrained from showing anger of my own, instead literally banging my head against the wall by the end of another senseless argument over who had a right to feel more hurt.

He wrote to tell me that the second session had been difficult, but important for our friendships and a step forward. I answered that it felt like a big step backwards to me. He responded that he was sorry I felt that way and then offered me this marvelous bit of understatement:

Yes it’s important to have people there for you as you deal with trauma. To use his dog bite example [parents immediately comforting a child just bitten by a dog, preventing lifelong trauma], I could have done better [when I told you I was too upset by what you did to hear why you were upset] on our walk or soon thereafter.

I could have done better.

Done better than being wrong and not showing a trace of empathy and righteously, angrily clinging to that view for eight or nine months? You don’t say! How petty of me to overlook how difficult it must have been for you to avoid kicking, punching or even stabbing me, in addition to not showing a hint of our long friendship, or even a casual one!

Jeez, what an unforgiving cunt I am!

American Exceptionalism

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.