The roots of my need for coherence

Growing up in a home where I was treated as a dangerous adversary from the day I came home as a newborn affected my wiring in fundamental ways.  Because my parents were always ready with anger and blame, and I was often regularly excoriated over trumped up offenses, sometimes things I was not remotely at fault for, I became painfully sensitive to the brutality of an incoherent, self-serving narrative.   

It was much easier for my parents, two overwhelmed abused children who grew up without essential tools to process their own frustrations, to unite in their blame of a kid who was, in their view, just an irrationally angry little bastard constantly fighting for no apparent reason.  In their story their own behavior had nothing to do with their child’s mysterious, unfortunate, completely innate bad feelings.  They insisted they were right, stuck together most of the time, and that was that.

My life’s work was set for me early on — to discover a truth deeper than the harmful bullshit that was being angrily forced on me and explaining to myself coherently the reasons for the insane arrangement I was expected to subscribe to as simply reality.  As I learn reasons that make sense to me I begin to calm myself. 

Understanding is my most important tool and I wield it with as much clarity as I can against the sometimes awesome incoherence of a world that requires little by way of reason or clarity to form huge enraged armies to inflict hell on their enemies.   Finally learning of the extreme abuse my father underwent, from infancy, (I was in my forties when I learned some key details) unlocked a door of empathy and understanding for me that my father was unable to approach, until hours before his death.

Whenever I am confronted with an incoherent reframing of actual upsetting events it gets my back up.   If someone treats me in a thoughtless way that hurts me and when I react with pain tells me I am wrong to be hurt in any way, that it wasn’t thoughtlessness at all, it was an innocent misunderstanding and I have to forget about it because they love me, because they wouldn’t have been hurt at all if I’d done the same to them, it never quite gets down the old craw.   

I literally can’t swallow an incoherent story, maybe because it makes no fucking sense.  Maybe it’s just me, I don’t know.  I think I am probably not alone in preferring a story that is understandable in the light of observation and experience to a senseless one designed to serve an emotional agenda to protect someone else against feeling bad.   

Friends, when they feel defensive, see my need for coherence, which requires an openness to accepting one’s part in things that actually happened, as a relentless need to be “right”.   I can understand why it could look that way to them, particularly in a competitive and violently adversarial culture like ours, but it is a need for honesty and mutual understanding on my part, more than anything else I can put my finger on.   I was forced to defend myself from before I could even speak, in adversarial proceedings brought daily by a father/prosecutor who was very good at prosecuting.  I developed skills in arguing way before I finally, misguidedly, went to law school.   People sometimes tell me they feel overmatched and it gets their backs up, because they need to feel “right” too and I’m a more skilled fighter with words than they are, so their disadvantage makes them fight harder.  There are many ways to fight against something that makes you feel defensive and many are familiar from my childhood.   

Reframing is a famous technique for avoiding any discussion of anything you don’t want to talk about and my father was a genius at constantly steering the conversation away from what his children needed to talk about to a much deeper thing that we were “really” talking about.   Any conversation about being hurt was constantly reframed until we were talking about the real, and only, issue:  what an irrationally angry little fuck I’d always been, and remain.   

If I behave toward you in a way that’s wrong, and keep defending it as a mistake, like all humans make, I am choosing a neutral, understandable synonym to let myself off the hook for hurting you.   I was wrong because I made a mistake and I made a mistake because I was wrong are fairly close, almost interchangeable.  Wrong carries a bit more moral weight than mistaken, since using it accepts responsibility for the harm the mistake caused, so to shift the ground from the moral idea that it is wrong to do something to you that I hate done to me, I can insist on calling it a mistake and put the onus on you, the person I wronged/mistaked to have the human compassion to forgive me without more.  It is a painful thing to be unforgiven and an ugly thing to be unforgiving, isn’t it?  About a simple mistake?  Come on.

Then there is the greatest weapon of all against responsibility or reconciliation — silence by way of response.

This is kryptonite to me, as it would be to you, if applied steadily and consistently over years to make sure there was no possibility of being heard, no chance for reconciliation of any kind.  After months of silence about my last attempt at reconciliation with my father (and, naturally, I’d chosen the infuriating medium of a letter, where I have the unfair advantage of not being interrupted, reframed, dismissed, or ignored while communicating as clearly as I am able) he spoke words that live with me to this day “oh, that letter (the one I’d sent twice before hand delivering a third copy).  Yeah, I read that.  You have to respect my right not to respond to that.”

A debatable proposition, but there you are.  As polite and crisp as my father’s sentence was “you have to respect my right not to respond to that” is, it’s a problematic, even incoherent, response to a loved one expressing a need for something better, even as it attempts to close a door forever, even as it succeeds, until the last night of the poor devil’s life when he admits, hours before he breathes his last and I close dead eyelids over eyes I never really noticed were the stormy grey green color of a troubled sea, that he had been wrong.   Wrong or mistaken, he blamed himself harshly, as he was dying, for things he understood that last night he should have had the sense and strength to work on in himself, instead of being content to blame a baby for being a deadly adversary.

Sometimes there are swamps we walk into without knowing where we are, and clarity is essential here in order to avoid wading into danger for everyone.  We can mistakenly believe that people we love can show us an intimate side, a dark side, make themselves exceptionally vulnerable, and then not act desperately to make painful things disappear.   The private lives of a couple, how they treat each other, show anger to each other, accept or reject each other, is a swamp we must exit as quickly as possible once we see we’ve stepped into it.  Any attempt to protect one against the other will go as badly as reaching into the muddy depths of a swamp to pull at something you can’t see.   

This last piece is recently acquired wisdom, thanks to friends who shared experiences to illuminate the truth of this.  If you doubt the truth of it, try it yourself sometime, spend a few days alone with a couple and begin trying to protect the wife against the open hostility of the husband and tell me you are not suddenly neck deep in a hot, humid, mosquito rich paradise for dangerous reptiles.  Live and learn, my friend, and take the lessons you learn to heart.   Only by doing that can we get out of a dangerous swamp that can easily swallow everything we love.

The terror of inchoate rage defended incoherently

Long, deep talk with old friends the other day, reminding me of the healing power of being heard and of forcing yourself to hear things you may not like to hear because these are crucial perspectives you can’t come to on your own when you are impaired by pain. Good friends don’t always have to agree with you, though they often do, but they always treat you with care when you need care.   A walk through the experiences they share sheds light that can reveal important, difficult things impossible to see on your own.   

I forgot, in all the emotion of a long, complex talk about heartbreak and forgiveness, to make a point about my personal, visceral terror of an incoherent argument insisted on to the death.   

In worldwide politics this kind of incoherent argument is made every day, insisted on by partisans and, spreading via “social media” able to gain millions of enthusiastic adherents almost instantly.   

What is the argument against continuing to fund a program that very recently took millions of vulnerable little children, our fellow Americans, out of the living hell of poverty?   The program seems to have done a great deal of good, cost a tiny fraction of the world’s highest military budget. What is the argument against helping the neediest and weakest to avoid a life that nobody, particularly a tender young child, should ever be forced to experience?

The arguments are all variations on Democrats “tax and spend”, liberty means no government “coercion” (unless you’re planning to murder a zygote or embroyo), Makers versus Takers, the president is a doddering dotard puppet, the Democrats are communists, socialists, liberals, it’s a slippery slope from a Child Tax Credit to forcibly closing all the Christian churches and confiscating all firearms, we are under attack by powerful Jews with a plan to dilute our vote by brainwashing millions of imported brown idiots to vote Democrat, the most powerful Democrats, and smiling, false-faced liberal monsters like Tom Hanks, are pedophiles, and child murderers, who drink the blood of the helpless kids they kidnap and rape, when they are not out aborting nine month old fetuses, looking them in their tiny eyes and sadistically slaughtering them in cold blood to prevent their baptisms.

The horror of such arguments, aside from the “argument” itself, is that they prevent agreement about anything you can actually talk about, let alone resolve, they preempt all reasonable discussion.  No compromise is possible between fervent followers of the Prince of Peace and Love and Satan.   Why Satan advocates for a program to take two year-olds out of poverty is a separate and complicated theological argument that no secular humanist could possibly understand.  God is infinitely mysterious in His infinite love and mercy.   Heathens, heretics and “humanists” simply lack any understanding of the higher realms of faith and divine justice. End of chat, have a blessed day.

It makes me sound old, I know, but there was a time, not long ago, when a president who was caught lying many times every day, and openly, angrily, disrespecting all law and democratic tradition, would be a villain who’d be turned out of office.   He would lose reelection not by 8,000,000 votes but many times that, and after he lost he would not be able to convince millions that he’d won in a landslide, his victory stolen by LGBTQ, hoards of angry, cheating urban Blacks and woke college students, Muslims, anti-fascist terrorists, dirty recent immigrants, disloyal Jews, etc.   

My biggest terror about the world today is that our lowest human impulse, to fight to the death for an insane cause when locked in righteous rage, has been monetized by people of infinite wealth and privilege who decide, strictly on the basis of how much more money they can make, that they will automate the process of spreading incoherent hatred that cannot be corrected by reasonable discussion.   The “invisible hand” of the Free Market, you understand, protects their absolute right to do this.

If you remove the ability of people to argue about issues of mutual and public interest, on the merits, weigh the advantages and disadvantages of a government policy, and replace it with legally sanctioned partisan incoherence (unlimited spending by billionaires and legally created “persons” to influence elections is guaranteed by the First Amendment now), we are close to done as a free society.  It’s a coin toss whether we will soon stick a fork in our long, overcooked experiment in democracy, to protect, in perpetuity, the privileges our most privileged are entitled to.

That’s the piece I forgot to mention to my old friends the other day, not that it changes anything — how much it freaks me out trying to make a point to someone in my personal life who has closed their mind, insists I accept an incoherent narrative and stands on their demand to have me respect their right never to have the issue brought up again.   In a world with so much anger, shapeless, formless and deadly, loaded gun anger that can be pointed anywhere, the only small comfort I can take is in carefully taking in and analyzing what’s raging all around us, understanding it as clearly as I can and finding small signs of hope in the details that point toward decency, fairness and Lincoln’s better angels of our nature.  

With politics there is a widespread feeling of debility among those not in a rage toward authorianism, a learned, media-enforced helplessness and fatalism on the part of the great majority of our cynically, deliberately divided nation.  We have seen over and over that corrupt officials and powerful criminals are not punished, except once a decade or so when a particular powerful person is ceremonially held accountable for some particularly heinous crime and sent to prison, to prove that not every such person is above the law. 

In my personal life I have almost no tolerance for a senseless argument that I am expected to swallow without protest, an unappealable verdict I must never smart from the unfairness of or even refer to again. 

But there are other ways of looking at occasional insistent incoherence among close friends, and they must be looked at with love and a patience that may at times seem superhuman.    It is not superhuman if you are lucky enough to have kind, honest friends to help you understand the burden you are carrying and offer a way you can’t see in your hurt to take the impossibly heavy load off of your shoulders, off your heart.

In other news of corrupt lawyers

John Eastman’s lawyers argued that their client disagreed with the judge about the 2020 election, and that everything Eastman wants to be hidden from scrutiny should remain hidden from scrutiny, to protect Eastman and his “client”, the corrupt former president.

In their filing, Mr. Eastman’s lawyers wrote that their client disagreed with Judge Carter’s conclusion that he had undermined democracy, arguing that Mr. Eastman truly believed the election was stolen. The filing cited the work of conservative media figures — including the new film “2000 Mules” by Dinesh D’Souza, which fact checkers have described as misleading — as evidence that widespread fraud occurred in the election.

“If, as seemed clear to Dr. Eastman and his client at the time, there was illegality and fraud in the election of sufficient magnitude to have altered the outcome of the election, then far from ‘undermining’ democracy, Dr. Eastman’s actions and advice must be seen for what they were — a legitimate attempt to prevent a stolen election,” Mr. Eastman’s lawyers wrote. “Perhaps Dr. Eastman was wrong about that. But even if he was, being wrong about factual claims is not and never has been criminal.”

link below

If they believed this in spite of Trump’s former gunsel Bill Barr telling Trump on December 1st that the claims of electoral fraud had been investigated by DOJ and determined to have been “bullshit,” then the judge must, arguably rule for the rabid Doctor Eastman, Doctor Eastman’s lawyers argue.

Lawyer Says He Dealt Directly With Trump Over Jan. 6 Plans https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/us/politics/john-eastman-trump-jan-6.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqYhkTVUZAybIRp8_qRmHmfnE2_s-gX_4aSWcUipHxuJQH5Kd_l-IZ6NlIoV13yieQJUJFo4Tc8FI770VOV1xGU7vq4GYmZ8BLmI_893pAD89h9eTB-w2tGKzMmP8eLYjlfjm7kjfPjXpUPPa1iExNU0y98seAFKg3HICwq_AE_ckmYUtmKd8We0pAGsIdyKIvPL3ChlhO93gbx3U6Ac-WegxSiiE1JfHqOpGKFMOfAqAGHBv4m8868deP8cVOcv9Kx0hfsn_gdYBGxjgHn1jaf9jybCatGEEGVU

The LEAK was the problem, according to Clarence Thomas

New York Times:

Ginni Thomas Urged Arizona Lawmakers to Overturn Election

Ms. Thomas, known as Ginni, a right-wing political activist who became a close ally of Mr. Trump during his presidency, made the entreaties in emails to Russell Bowers, the Republican speaker, and Shawnna Bolick, a Republican state representative. Ms. Bolick’s husband, Clint, once worked with Justice Thomas and now sits on the Arizona Supreme Court.

Sam Alito would be furious!

Just take a look at this “woke” pro-witch brochure for the Salem Witch Museum that claims to have evidence that the witches legally executed by the pious Pilgrims who founded our Christian Nation were innocent! Alito would be furious to see this kind of leftist secular propaganda and historical revisionism disseminated to innocent tourists, presumably also to impressionable young children who would read things like “19 innocent people were hanged in Salem in 1692″

The Puritans were a famously severe fundamentalist Protestant cult that fled from England because they were being persecuted and risked death sailing to the New World in search of religious freedom, the story goes. They were so strict and devout that they carefully rooted out any signs of devilry, dissent, heresy or Independence in their midst. Religious fundamentalists do not allow devilry, independence of thought or disobedience to God’s patriarchal will, all sinful.

So think about it, were these goddamn witches really so goddamned innocent? Sam Alito sure would give you an angry argument about it, based on the teachings of 17th century scholar of devilry, witches and jurisprudence Lord Hale (see repeated citations to this expert in the Alito draft opinion leaked the other day).

Devils and darkness!