Department of Let’s Let Bygones be Bygones

Glenn Kirschner has been promoting the indisputable idea, with everything we’ve seen the last six years or so, where norms and all pretense of fair play are thrown into the shitter along with all other democratic values, that justice matters. “Justice matters” is Glenn’s mantra and coat of arms, and he’s been fighting a hard public fight to encourage his former employer, the US Department of Justice, to pursue accountability for crimes like Seditious Conspiracy for the conspirators who planned, funded and facilitated the January 6th MAGA riot.

Usually the man to turn to for encouragement after some really bad MAGA news, sometimes even Glenn Kirschner gets discouraged, which is heartbreaking to see, but at the same time, it shows that even the most dogged fighter for justice just gets frustrated and tired sometimes. Here he is asking a simple and basic question, and right back on the case the next day:

Here is the video the clip is from:

here is today’s:

A Prayer for My Mother

A friend sent me an interesting tale just now about being recruited, as a teenager in Israel, by some aggressive yeshiva types. After he caught a ride with a young, slightly hipsterish rabbi while hitchhiking back home, a carful of rabbis arrived at the kibbutz where he lived to try to convince him to join up with them.   There was a nice plot twist, when his communist father, also a traditional Jew in some sense, learned of the session in the car and got very worked up that his son would even give those bearded crackpots a hearing. He issued a stern warning about not letting them into his head.

Which reminded me of this story about my mother, and prayers.

My mother hated going to synagogue, which she found to be an empty exercise in conformity. Her funeral, which I conducted, was in a chapel at the Jewish Center in Peekskill, NY, the small town where my poor father was raised.   So it was natural to point out, to those assembled, (we were in that sanctuary because of my late father’s burial decisions [1]) the irony of ths memorial to my mother taking place in a setting she always avoided.   I told them about the last time my mother was in shul, a place I’d seen her maybe five times (if that) in my life, always for a bar mitzvah or wedding. 

There was a liberal firebrand rabbi in her area in Florida.   She was in a fairly liberal voting county but there were still plenty of jackasses who at that time supported Cheney and Bush, a “kinder gentler” (Bush’s father’s sales pitch for the new American Nazis) version of these outright klansman that run the Republican party now, and she was always pissed off about it and had no tolerance for her bigoted, shit-talking neighbors.   This rabbi wrote a column in the local paper that ripped Florida and national Republicans a couple of new assholes every week.  She loved the guy, he was witty and fierce and told it like it was, a clever, angry, intelligent breath of fresh air in a nation that was increasingly embracing jingoistic stupidity — and Florida seems to have a higher percentage of reactionary morons than most places she’d been.

A neighbor, a hateful old hag and fellow widow, knew of my mother’s admiration for this rabbi and showed her an item in the local paper that announced he was going to be speaking at the local synagogue at Friday night services.  So they went to the nearby synagogue on Friday night.  I hadn’t heard any follow up on her rabbi’s speech so I asked her about it.

“Oh, God, it was terrible!   They introduced him, he waved, and he just sat on the bima the whole time, never said a word.  There was no speech.  It was sickening, false advertising just to get people to go on Friday night, and, of course, they did every fucking prayer in that goddamned prayer book!”

At which point there was a loud collective guffaw from those assembled in the solemn First Hebrew Congregation of Peekskill chapel.  It was Evelyn to a tee.

[1]

My father, raised orthodox by a religious fanatic psychopath mother, gradually saw the religious aspect of his life fall away.  In the end he tasted pork in a Chinese restaurant (Szechuan shredded pork, a one time favorite of mine) and he liked it (though I think it was a one off) and as he was dying told me, when I asked him, that he didn’t care if I said kaddish for him or not.  I actually mumbled that solemn Aramaic poem for 30 days, though not in a minyan (the ten who constitute a quorum for traditional Jewish prayer), usually just standing around with Sekhnet who said it in unison with me.

Life ain’t nothing but a funny, funny riddle.  Thank God I’m a country boy!

Be very careful what you say when you’re hurt

“I don’t know what I did to make you treat me so unfairly and so disrespectfully,” while possibly accurate, is probably not the best line of approach when someone you love has treated you hurtfully.

If you have degenerative arthritis, say, and did not qualify, until a few weeks ago, for palliative injections that will allow you to exercise for six months without pain while building up surrounding muscle, why is that really anyone’s concern besides yours? Why would you expect automatic acknowledgment of your physical limitations and the empathy that follows from considering a loved one’s disability?

Say you feel wrongly accused of a flaw you try not to have, say in addition to an unreasonable expectation of sympathy, there’s the perception of your habitual comfort inconveniencing everyone around you. You like to sleep all day, so nobody can even be on the road for a vacation workout by a reasonable 10 a.m.

All these feelings, after someone shows you an implacable face, must be put to the side as you figure out the best way to restore trust and mutuality. It may take more patience than you have, particularly when you feel hurt, but that’s a separate question.

The real question is how to convey to them how hurt they would feel, placed in the unfair situation they’ve placed you in. That is not the work of a few minutes or a few hours, of simply choosing the right words. It requires a supremely patient telling of the right story, framed sympathetically, to keep everyone calm and help them understand.

It may take more patience than you feel you have. It becomes easy to think up past wrongs echoing the latest and be hurt by the confirmation of callousness, but making this list carries the risk of making you sound petty and prosecutorial. Best to focus on understanding, clarity and directness, toward a more loving future.

Otherwise, speaking out of pain, you are much more likely to do harm than to say anything that will contribute to healing or empathy.

Try writing the situation out first, it may help you grasp things better, to be more clear and better able to stay out of the many deadly traps hurt will steer you towards.

Best of luck, there is no harder work I know than remaining mild when you feel deeply hurt. It is worth the price to master this supremely difficult skill. In the meantime, be very judicious in what you say while still smarting.

Corporate Media finally not mincing words, eight months later…

I don’t know why this sort of straightforward piece of reporting was not done in January, or February, when it was well known that Trump and his surrogates had made numerous public and private attempts to coerce state officials to change vote tallies, before finally inciting a deadly riot to try to #Stop the Steal. It is now clear, from Barr and his successor as AG, that Trump knew he was lying about the rigged, stolen election, as Barr had been when he claimed, over and over, without any evidence at all (the evidence points to the extreme, statistically insignificant rarity of US voter fraud) that it was “obvious’ mail-in voting was open to “massive” fraud, as Trump mega-donor Postmaster Looey DeJoy slowed the mail to a crawl by dismantling mail sorting machines ahead of the pandemic election of 2020. Can you say Seditious Conspiracy?

I know it’s a cardinal rule of corporate media to avoid conflict that could lead to alienating sponsors. A supremely unfortunate bottom-line rule when it comes to news reporting, because instead of real-time action against outrages against us all, we have a sort of long, polite, deliberative, institutional pause (as right wing radicals continue to scheme and act), followed by a historical recap that, nine months or a year later, might as well pertain to the Byzantine Empire as far as the average American is concerned. But the other day we finally had this:

Former President Trump and his inner circle were using all the powers of the presidential office to wage a high-pressure campaign, CNN’s Drew Griffin reports — not to stop the steal but to start it.

you can see and hear the well-known details here, which includes the rare editorial use of “lying” for “knowingly false” “misleading” “incorrect” and all the other euphemisms that corporate media employs to avoid ascribing intent to the actions of allegedly criminal pieces of shit:

Reasonable questions for Greg Abbott

The balls to the wall anti-democratic governor of the Hang ’em High state of Texas, Gregg Abbott, apparently has spent 24 years in high office in Texas. Seven years as governor, five years on the Texas Supreme Court and twelve as the state’s Attorney General for this powerful extreme conservative Texan. The other day, in defending the radical reach-around bounty law deputizing citizens to sue their neighbors for helping each other get a constitutionally protected medical procedure, a law that makes no exceptions for victims of rape, he vowed to get all Texas rapists off the streets (and presumably also out of all family picnics, school sports programs, churches, etc.). The Lincoln Project had a good question for him, at the end of this thirty second ad:

Here is another excellent question for the Trumpist governor:

Greed, intolerance and endless rage

Of course the Trump RNC is threatening to sue Biden for using his power to try to stop surging COVID-19 by getting more of the 80,000,000 reluctant Americans vaccinated (hello Sidney Powell). Vaccines, masks and other health precautions have been weaponized by the malignant Orange Polyp in the course of his ordinary duties as the 45th president.

Recall that the RNC had a single plank in their 2020 party platform: support whatever Trump says. They,’ve kept that promise, big time.

The Trump RNC represents the lowest impulses of humanity: greed, intolerance and limitless rage (also smug entitlement to privilege). And they’re doing a heck of a job, Brownie!

Lying in the service of truth is no vice when your enemies rape children and drink their blood, to paraphrase Barry Goldwater.